A Climate Of Despair

By Jeffrey Kluger

The ambassadors from the 15-nation European Union got more than they bargained for when they invited National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to lunch two weeks ago. The gathering, a regular ritual in Washington, was held at the Swedish ambassador's residence, and as often happens, a representative of the White House was invited. This time Rice agreed to attend--good news for the Europeans, who had something they wanted to discuss.

With the U.S. still skeptical about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to cut carbon dioxide emissions and curb global warming and the 83 other signatory nations still wrestling over the details, the E.U. was growing concerned that the pact might fall apart. In February, Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman reassured E.U. leaders that global warming remained high on the new Administration's worry list. But in March, President George W. Bush announced he was abandoning his campaign pledge to curb CO2 emissions from power plants, having concluded that the gas shouldn't be regulated as a pollutant, particularly during a burgeoning energy crisis. If the President also backed away from Kyoto, as he threatened to do during the campaign, the accord could die.

"We wanted to pass on the message that we take this issue seriously," one of the officials told Rice over lunch.

The NSA chief responded directly. "Kyoto," she said, "is not acceptable to the Administration or Congress."

Did the White House agree that global warming was a looming crisis, the ambassadors wanted to know. Yes, Rice answered. But, she explained, "we will have to find new ways to deal with the problem. Kyoto is dead."

The reaction to Rice's private message at the ambassador's house was subdued, but when Whitman publicly confirmed that position last week, the global reaction was swift and furious. Governments condemned the President's stance as uninformed and even reckless, noting with outrage that the U.S. is home to 4% of the world's population but produces 25% of its greenhouse gases. French President Jacques Chirac called on all countries to implement Kyoto--never mind Washington. China's Foreign Ministry called U.S. actions "irresponsible."

Even the E.U., which is just starting to feel out its relationship with the President, hit Bush hard, firing off a letter to the White House warning that new talks were "urgently needed." E.U. Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom went further, rattling the sword of global sanctions. "I don't think this is the time to threaten," she said, "but we must be clear about the political implications."

Bush got another earful from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder at the White House last Thursday. But the President stood firm. "Our economy has slowed down," he said. "We also have an energy crisis, and the idea of placing caps on CO2 does not make economic sense."

Schroder and other critics who seem shocked by the President's moves either are easily surprised or simply weren't listening. Bush's decision on CO2 caps was indeed a reversal of campaign promises, but he was always a foe of Kyoto. What's more, since the stock market started to stumble and California and possibly other states began facing power shortages, the Administration has been reluctant to do anything that would raise the price of fossil fuels and discourage their use. "I was straightforward with the European ambassadors in the way that the President has been straightforward on the Kyoto Protocol," Rice told TIME. "The notion that everybody was taken aback or surprised took us as a little odd."

If Bush gauged the heat he'd take from the rest of the world wrong, he read the American people more or less right. A new TIME/CNN poll showed that 75% of those surveyed consider global warming a "very serious" or "fairly serious" problem, and 67% said the President should develop a program to address it. But only 48% said they would be willing to pay 25[cents] more for a gallon of gasoline. And while they are concerned about climate change, they are more fearful of seeing their electric bills soar or of losing their jobs.

Members of both major parties realize that global warming is a long-term problem that carries little short-term political risk. By the time their inaction causes big trouble--maybe decades from now--they'll be long gone. But if they foul up the economy, they'll be sent home next Election Day.

When it comes to the environment in general, the President must answer charges that his campaign sales pitch was little more than bait and switch. Almost immediately upon taking office, the soothing candidate who made it a point to sound so many green themes on the stump began to govern much more like the oil-patch President conservatives hoped he would be. The Administration announced it was suspending rules to reduce arsenic in drinking water, reconsidering Bill Clinton's decision to protect 58 million acres of federal land from logging, and pursuing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (though Bush downplayed that last week in the face of opposition).

With the U.S. essentially sidelining itself in the global-warming fight, it is possible that the battle may never be effectively engaged. What's causing the most distress among environmentalists is that all this comes at a time when many other pieces of the global-warming solution seemed to be falling into place. In the U.S., state and local governments have been increasingly active in implementing greenhouse programs of their own, clamping down on emissions within their borders, stepping up mass-transit initiatives and enforcing conservation laws. Corporations in such sooty industries as oil and autos have been climbing on board too, imposing on themselves the very restrictions Washington won't. Outside the U.S., green-leaning developed nations like the E.U. members and emerging polluters like China and Mexico have seemed to be getting the message, implementing new programs and testing new technologies to control global warming, even without the cudgel of Kyoto.

What was needed to complete the picture was a vigorously engaged U.S. to control its own titanic greenhouse output and help get Kyoto enacted. The developments of the past few weeks cast doubt on whether that will happen, and for now, other nations may have to go it alone. "The science is so much more solid that humans are not going to sit by and foul their own nests," says Fred Krupp, executive director of the advocacy group Environmental Defense. "We have to do something now."

For all the storm Kyoto has caused, its original provisions seem modest: a 5% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels for most industrialized nations, with the U.S.--as the world's worst CO2 offender--getting slapped with an incrementally tougher 7% cut. Developing countries that signed the treaty would get a pass for a while.

Simple atmospheric arithmetic suggests that this kind of sliding scale for emissions makes sense, but a closer look explains the Administration's objections. The category of developing countries, for the purposes of the accord, included China and India, major powers by almost any measure. Giving two such heavyweights a CO2 waiver while the U.S. had to carry its share struck a lot of people as galling. "A protocol that excepts China and India and...penalizes American industry...wouldn't be ratifiable," says Rice.

What's more, the cuts the protocol requires are deeper than they seem. The Kyoto terms were drafted four years ago, but they would not go into effect until 2008. The CO2-reduction goals would not have to be met until 2012. U.S. greenhouse emissions are projected to grow more than 20% by then, which means that getting 7% below 1990 levels could actually require a 30% cut in output. Even then, the difference might not be enough to have any real impact. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a Kyoto booster, believes that in order to put the brakes on warming, a reduction of 60% may be needed. So sobering are these numbers that even nations that still support the pact have had trouble apportioning the burden, and the most recent talks, at the Hague last November, collapsed. The next meeting is scheduled for July in Bonn.

No matter how the talks turn out, the kind of bitter medicine the protocol prescribes, with the U.S. taking the biggest slug, did not go down well in Washington even before Bush arrived. In 1997 the Senate, which must ratify treaties, voted 95 to 0 that no global-warming pact that came before it would be okayed unless it treated developed and developing countries equally. Such a repudiation is one more argument the Administration is using to pull the plug on Kyoto--though it was more than mere conscience that was probably driving the Senate. One of the resolution's sponsors was Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, from the coal-producing state of West Virginia.

But even as recently as January, with the Bush-Cheney team in and the Clinton-Gore team out, there was reason for environmentalists to hope. Whitman, who had built a respectable environmental record as New Jersey Governor, was a pleasant surprise as EPA chief, and Bush had sometimes belied expectations, besting the bright green Al Gore during the campaign with his call for mandatory caps on power-plant emissions. What's more, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill--former Alcoa chairman--turned out to be a Kyoto backer, drafting a memo for the new President arguing that the only problem with the pact was that it didn't go far enough.

On March 6, after her February meeting with European leaders, Whitman too wrote Bush a memo in which she argued that the U.S. had a credibility problem when it came to climate change. "The world community...are all convinced of the seriousness of this issue," she wrote. "It is also an issue that is resonating here, at home. We need to appear engaged."

Other interests--notably the oil and coal industries, both heavy contributors to Bush's campaign--also had the President's ear. Only a week after Bush received Whitman's memo, he wrote a letter of his own to four industry-friendly Republican Senators, announcing the reversal of his CO2 pledge and declaring his opposition to Kyoto. Whitman was sandbagged--forced to explain Bush's position and defend her credibility. "My job," she said, "is to provide the President with my best take. He needs to make a decision based on all the factors. I am fully comfortable with his decision."

Not everyone in Congress--including some Republicans--feels the same way. Three Republican Representatives had been planning to join with Democrats to introduce a bill in the House mandating precisely the CO2 power-plant caps Bush no longer wants. The gesture, however, is mostly symbolic. Even if the bill should pass the House, it could be torn apart in the ferociously partisan Senate. Whatever scraps of it that reached the President's desk would face a near certain veto.

Nonetheless the Administration continues to insist that the President will produce a coherent--if unspecified--global-warming policy soon. Environmentalists are fearing the worst. Before Bush's CO2 reversal, the White House created a so-called carbon rump group to reassess the U.S. position on emissions. An Administration official insists that the work the panel is doing is "a high-level, intense review," and while that may be true, it's also a fact that in-house study teams such as this are often simply places where orphan ideas are sent to die. More substantively, Vice President Cheney has been heading up an energy task force that is due to issue recommendations in May. Along with calling for increased oil exploration in Alaska and new oil and gas pipelines, the panel's recommendations may include research into cleaner ways to burn coal. Significantly, the team is also expected to suggest renewed construction of nuclear power plants, which put out no carbon but generate extremely radioactive waste.

While all this might be good news to what environmentalists see as the iron triangle of the coal, oil and nuclear industry, it falls far short of the comprehensive vision for emission controls that Kyoto once seemed to offer. "I'm very pessimistic that our government can do anything about [greenhouse gases]," says William Merrell, president of the Heinz Center, which provides funding to environment projects.

But an effective program to fight climate change need not involve huge increases in energy prices or draconian rules that choke industries at the smokestacks. The emphasis could be on introducing new technologies that would make conservation not only easier but also economical, if not profitable. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends a range of new devices, including hybrid gas-electric cars that run half the time on a traditional internal-combustion engine and the rest of the time on batteries, boosting gas mileage considerably. (This technology could even be put into SUVs.) Also promising is the combined cycle gas turbine that can be used in place of traditional turbines to generate electricity. The new hardware operates at up to 60% efficiency, nearly twice that of any other turbine. Add a device that captures escaping heat and use that to warm buildings, and the efficiency jumps to 90%.

The IPCC was particularly keen on wind power. In the U.S., wind turbines have generally been limited to the environmental fringes. In Europe, however, they mean business. The E.U. produces 70% of the world's wind-generated energy, with Germany, Spain and Denmark leading the way. Worldwide, wind turbines account for about 15 gigawatts of energy, which is the equivalent of 15 coal-fired power plants. The Netherlands will soon be getting into the game in a big way, building one of the world's largest wind farms five miles offshore, a remote location that can take advantage of brisk sea breezes while keeping the sometimes noisy mills out of human earshot. Similar wind farms built in a place like North Dakota could generate not just energy but profits. Farmers earn $50 an acre from wheat, but could reap $2,000 an acre selling wind-generated power.

Outside the E.U., other countries are unexpectedly taking a leadership role in curbing global warming. Mexico, which for decades has been choking on its own exhaust, is planning to double its output of geothermal power--energy generated by natural underground heating--which would place it third in the world in geothermal production, behind the U.S. and the Philippines. President Vicente Fox is also promising a bill that would open the national power grid to electricity produced by all manner of alternative sources.

China, with 11% of the world's CO2 output--second to the U.S.--has cracked down on emissions and reduced its greenhouse output 17% between 1997 and 1999, eliminating more than the entire CO2 production of Southeast Asia. Beijing's goal was less to curb global warming than to clean the air and protect the health of its population. But whatever its motivations, the policy is paying environmental dividends. "When China takes action," says climate expert Kevin Baumert of World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, "it has global implications."

In the U.S., municipal governments are working to duplicate such successes. In 1993, Portland, Ore., became the first U.S. city to implement its own CO2-reduction plan, joining a global partnership of municipal governments that eventually included Denver; Minneapolis, Minn.; Copenhagen; and Helsinki. The goal was to slash CO2 emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2010. Portland's strategy involved a six-point program that included synchronizing traffic lights, planting 75,000 acres of trees (which absorb carbon dioxide) and buying low-CO2 vehicles for the city's fleet.

By some measures, the program is working spectacularly, with mass-transit ridership increasing 30%, auto commutes to downtown falling 15%, and solid-waste disposal from homes shrinking 13%. But the city's CO2 output has actually risen, mostly because of an unanticipated population boom in the Pacific Northwest. Portland is undeterred, however--pointing out that its European partners, which were spared such demographic shifts, have had success with similar strategies. The city is taking a second look at its own program and revising it as necessary. Efforts are also under way in other U.S. localities, including Miami-Dade County, which eliminated 900 tons of greenhouse emissions a year simply by establishing exclusive bus lanes.

What makes the burden on cities lighter is a sudden burst of environmental awareness from a surprising source: industry. In recent years, more and more multinationals have been turning unexpectedly green, and one example is British Petroleum. Shortly after Kyoto was signed, BP CEO Sir John Browne set his company's goal of cutting CO2 output 10% below its 1990 levels; four years later, he is halfway there. BP has achieved this in part by reducing the amount of greenhouse emissions that flare away in oil fields and refineries. The company is also looking into cutting carbon content in fuel and boosting the efficiency with which it burns. The oil giant and Ford Motor Co. are providing a $15 million grant to Princeton University, partly to study "sequestering" carbon--stripping the greenhouse element from hydrocarbons, burying it underground and burning the hydrogen that remains as clean fuel. "You can run a company on the basis that you only do what the law demands," says Browne. "We use compliance with the law as a minimum and then go beyond that."

Last October, BP, Alcan, DuPont and others joined with Environmental Defense to launch the Partnership for Climate Action, pledging to reduce their greenhouse emissions to levels meeting or exceeding Kyoto's requirements. Ford, Daimler-Benz and Texaco have not yet joined, but last year they did quit the misleadingly named Global Climate Coalition, an industry group opposed to emissions controls. Honda and Toyota have introduced hybrid cars with emissions 40% lower than standard models of the same size.

Where this burst of public and private activity leaves the Administration is anyone's guess. The E.U. and the other Kyoto signatories may continue to proceed as if the protocol is still alive, hammering out such complicated details as emissions trading, which would permit countries that exceed their required cuts to sell credits to other countries, allowing them to fall short of their own. The U.S. has not said it won't attend the July meeting, though things could get awkward if Washington has pulled out of the pact and sends its representatives simply for appearances. So far the White House has not shown any sign that it can be shamed back into the Kyoto fold, though when international outrage grows strong enough, it is possible that even the most intractable government can compromise.

It was only a dozen years ago that the first President Bush was sitting where his son is now, promising to battle the greenhouse effect with what he called the "White House effect." At that time, the science of global warming was a black art, and strategies to combat it seemed more visionary than practical. But the passage of more than half a generation has done a lot to change all that. Science appears to have cracked much of the greenhouse riddle, and both government and business are learning to use that hard-won information in ways that could eventually put the brakes on warming. If Washington wants a role in that effort, the climate-change crisis stands a greater chance of being averted. If not, a far warmer world may one day want to know why.

--Reported by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman and William Dowell/New York, Ronald Buchanan/Mexico City, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Dick Thompson/Washington, Wendy Kan/Hong Kong, Joe Kirwin/Brussels and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman and William Dowell/New York, Ronald Buchanan/Mexico City, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Dick Thompson/ Washington, Wendy Kan/Hong Kong, Joe Kirwin/Brussels and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles