COURTING DISASTER

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The whole world had been waiting impatiently to hear what Bill Clinton would say last Wednesday--because the whole world would be affected. The President had promised four months ago at the United Nations that the U.S. would at last make a stand against global warming, the ominous trend that threatens the planet with climatic upheaval: melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more frequent and vicious storms. In December, 160 nations will meet in Kyoto, Japan, to forge a treaty to combat climate change, but until last week the U.S. refused to put its cards on the negotiating table. And without the forceful leadership of the U.S.--the most prolific producer of the "greenhouse" gases that are raising the earth's temperature--any agreement designed to beat the heat would be futile.

That's why, when Clinton finally laid out his plan from a podium at the National Geographic Society in Washington, so many people recoiled in dismay. The proposal Clinton described as "far-reaching" and "meaningful" would supposedly roll back U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to where they were in 1990, but would not do so until sometime between 11 and 16 years from now. Yet back in 1992 the U.S., along with most other countries, had signed a treaty committing industrial nations to such a rollback by the year 2000--a point not lost on delegates attending a pre-Kyoto planning conference last week in Bonn. "Disappointing and insufficient," is how Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, head of the German delegation, characterized Clinton's proposals. And the European Union issued a statement saying in part, "The U.S. proposal is for an even lower target than that proposed by Japan, which we already considered inadequate to tackle the problem of climate change."

The Europeans had previously come out for a stricter standard that would cut emissions by industrial nations to 15% less than 1990 levels by the year 2010. And in Bonn last week, the so-called G77 group of 77 developing nations, along with China, signed on to the European plan (which doesn't require developing countries to make any cuts at all, even though their rapid industrialization and inefficient technology could eventually make them the world's leading polluters).

If any country needs to take stronger action, it's the U.S. While Europe has managed to reduce its emissions, American smokestacks and tailpipes are spewing greenhouse gases 8% faster than they were in 1990. A Department of Energy study released last week showed that emissions jumped 3.4% in 1996 alone. At the same time, evidence of global warming's dangers has continued to mount. When politicians started talking seriously about the problem in the late 1980s, the relationship between the proliferation of carbon dioxide and a warming world was largely theoretical. Scientists knew that CO2 and other gases trap the sun's energy; in fact, without any CO2 at all in the atmosphere, the planet would be frozen solid. The notion that extra, human-generated CO2 might drive temperatures too far the other way was convincing. But if warming was on the way, it was too gradual to be detected.

That's no longer true. While the globe has warmed just 1[degree]F on average over the past 100 years, a little temperature rise goes a long way, and the trend is accelerating. The three hottest years in the past century have come in the past decade, and 1995 was the sultriest on record. Spring arrives a week earlier in the northern hemisphere than it did a decade ago. Mountain glaciers are melting all over the world, and the permanent sea ice surrounding Antarctica has receded dramatically. Unusually severe weather has been more frequent in the past few years, quite plausibly a consequence of both higher temperatures and the increased evaporation and precipitation they'd be likely to cause.

Flora and fauna are showing the impact of a hotter planet too. Animals that thrive in warmer climates, like the Edith's checkerspot butterfly in the American West, have begun to extend their range northward, while cold-loving creatures such as brook trout have vanished in some areas. Plants are pushing to higher latitudes and higher altitudes. Tropical diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, have begun to move into regions that were once too cold for their insect carriers.

The fact that the world is warming, in short, is unmistakable, and the argument made by some scientists that it's just a natural phenomenon has been dashed by new evidence. The pattern of warming, according to the latest climate research, is just what you'd expect if human activity were responsible. Thus, these effects will almost certainly speed up as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Many scientists have predicted that average temperatures will go up from 2[degrees]F to 9[degrees]F by the end of the next century. An increase at the higher end of that range could be disastrous for some countries. The seas could rise several feet, inundating coastal areas and submerging low-lying countries like the Maldives almost entirely.

It was against this backdrop, with the Kyoto meeting fast approaching, that the President decided he had to get behind mandatory restrictions of greenhouse emissions, not just voluntary targets as set out in the 1992 treaty. Says White House spokesman Mike McCurry: "He wanted to have a negotiating position that would at least get him a seat at the table." Figuring out how to do it, though, has been one of Clinton's toughest policy decisions, partly because there was such a deep split among his advisers. Environmental advocates clearly favored more drastic action, but economic aides warned that forcing companies to spend money on trimming emissions might slow the robust economy, which has been the best news of the Clinton presidency.

Clinton also knew that whatever proposal he made would not only have to pass muster in Kyoto but would also have to please a hostile Congress. The lawmakers have already made his life hard enough on this issue. Last summer the Senate passed a unanimous resolution demanding that any climate treaty oblige developing countries to cut their own emissions--a requirement reflected in last week's proposal and, predictably, a provision that infuriated the less advanced nations. Said the Marshall Islands' delegate Espen Ronneberg: "If the biggest emitter of pollutants doesn't accept its responsibility, how can we expect anybody else to?"

Indeed, many delegates to the Bonn meeting are offended that the U.S. is making any demands at all, considering how little it has done to fight the greenhouse effect. In fairness, while the European Union has taken the problem more seriously, some of its success was due to political accident. The collapse of the Soviet bloc, for example, allowed Germany to shut the former East Germany's most antiquated factories. And in England, the declining power of coal miners' unions enabled factories to switch to cheaper but less polluting fuels they'd long favored anyway.

In the U.S., by contrast, politics has worked against greenhouse-gas reductions. A Clinton proposal for a new energy levy--the so-called BTU tax--was scuttled by Congress in 1993. And the Republican takeover in 1994 made it essentially impossible for the President to impose any serious measures that could be seen as antibusiness, such as energy taxes, harsher emissions limits on factories or stricter auto-mileage standards. At the same time, the economy began to grow faster than anyone expected, boosting the release of greenhouse gases as factories churned out more goods.

The Administration's only recourse was to issue a set of voluntary standards for energy efficiency. Surprisingly enough, they did some good. "We failed miserably to meet the goals of the 1992 treaty," says Environmental Defense Fund senior scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "but it's also true that our emissions grew significantly less than they would have without the standards."

Navigating carefully through what amounted to a political minefield, Clinton finally settled on a program that would start as painlessly as possible, with a five-year, $5 billion program of tax credits for companies that invest in energy-saving technology, and government spending on energy research. He pointed out that many fuel-saving technologies, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, already exist, and other breakthroughs, like practical fuel cells that generate clean energy by combining hydrogen and oxygen, are being put to greater use all the time. The government has already begun to jump start the alternative-energy industry by purchasing products like solar cells in bulk.

In 2008, the Administration proposes, the world should embark on a program to use the power of the marketplace to reduce greenhouse emissions. Though the exact details are far from worked out, permits to produce certain levels of gas could be issued to companies. Such permits could be sold, giving firms an incentive to cut emissions and then be able to profit from selling pollution rights. Moreover, the permits could be traded across national borders. If a company in Germany, for example, built an energy-efficient factory in China, it could avoid having to squeeze extra efficiency out of a factory back home. Such a scheme is in place within the U.S. to reduce sulfur-dioxide releases from power plants, and it has slashed that type of pollution 30%.

With all the competing interests Clinton had to take into account, his proposal is probably as politically astute is it could be. "It buys off corporate opposition up front by throwing subsidies at companies to adopt 'green' energy practices," observes Jerry Taylor, director of natural-resources studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington research organization. And while he would have preferred a stronger plan, the EDF's Oppenheimer likes the fact that Clinton wants immediate tax credits for energy efficiency.

Plenty of domestic opposition remains, however. Despite the President's self-congratulatory language, most environmentalists didn't think the proposal was especially meaningful or far-reaching. "A Band-Aid on a problem that requires a tourniquet," Robert Musil, executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, called it. And many conservative politicians and business leaders ridiculed Clinton's claims that his plan will cause no harm to the economy. It will, insists Republican Representative Bill Paxon of New York, "wind up costing the taxpayers billions of dollars and millions of jobs."

Paxon and other conservatives may like the climate treaty that emerges from Kyoto even less. The U.S. has staked out an extreme position, and it will undoubtedly have to compromise with those who advocate a much tougher stance against greenhouse gases. With that in mind, the Administration has held back a few of its cards. While the plan is silent on what would happen after 2012, for instance, White House officials concede privately that they are willing to offer an additional 5% reduction. But that won't do much to allay other nations' established hostility toward Clinton's emissions-trading scheme and his insistence that developing countries agree to their own cutbacks.

Still, the anti-U.S. sentiment in Bonn last week wasn't universal. Declared Meg McDonald, Australian Ambassador for the Environment: "We think it's better to do what's realistic... than have unrealistic targets which are never reached." And although Raul Estrada-Oyuela of Argentina, chairman of the Bonn session, criticized the U.S. position as "very modest," he was "impressed by the fact that Clinton chose to make the offer himself. That is encouraging." Estrada-Oyuela warned other representatives against reacting impulsively and said the measures proposed by the U.S. would have to be analyzed carefully before action could be taken. Diplomatic words, certainly, but also an admission that without U.S. help, nothing can prevent the temperature from spiraling upward unchecked.

--Reported by Ursula Sautter/Bonn and Dick Thompson and Karen Tumulty/Washington

With reporting by URSULA SAUTTER/BONN AND DICK THOMPSON AND KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON