Kyoto's faded dream
Editorial
Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times
September 5, 1998
When the Clinton administration agreed to reduce U.S. fossil fuel emissions at
a summit on
global warming in Kyoto, Japan, last December, there was a lot of lofty talk about the need
to save the planet from future floods, hurricanes and other calamities. Now
even the last
smidgen of reform is unraveling.
Congressional Republicans, suspecting among other things that Vice President Al
Gore would use a treaty to advantage in his expected presidential campaign, are
trying to prohibit the Clinton administration from even studying
global warming reduction until developing nations like China and
India commit to binding reductions. The cynicism of this position lies in
lawmakers' full knowledge that developing nations won't make such a commitment
until the United States does: Why should they be required to buy expensive
low-polluting energy technology from developed countries like the United
States, they ask, to correct a
problem the developed countries created in the first place?
Right now, prospects for reducing
global warming look bleaker than they did before the Kyoto treaty. But a glimmer of
compromise has come from a very pragmatic group--the CEOs of Boeing, Toyota,
Enron and other large companies, under the umbrella of the Pew Center on Global
Climate Change. The
business leaders, made believers by the mounting weight of science on
global warming, are also motivated by enlightened self-interest. They want some assurance from
Washington that if they choose to spend billions of dollars investing in
low-polluting technologies, they will be rewarded with incentives like tax
breaks or
credits toward emissions reductions required in a future
global warming treaty.
Many skeptics of
global warming had based their argument largely on data from U.S. satellites showing that
parts of the upper atmosphere were not warming but cooling. Last month,
however, that argument was invalidated when it was
found that the
"cooling" was a distortion caused by the gradual slippage of the satellites from their
orbits over time. And this week the journal Geophysical Research Letters
published a study offering more evidence that El Nino phenomena like droughts
and wet spells result
"partly from the greenhouse gas-induced
climate changes."
The Pew Center group is starting a small lobbying effort to defeat House and
Senate appropriations bills that would terminate funding for federal research
into low-polluting energy sources, research begun during the Bush
administration. The Pew group also rightly urges Congress to approve $
6.3 billion in tax credits that the Clinton administration has proposed to
reward businesses and individuals that invest in renewable energy. It's true
that the $ 6.3 billion would at best only slightly slow the rise in
global warming. But Congress' failure to even acknowledge the problem is no
solution either.
Congress should recall the success of other landmark environmental
legislation--the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Water Pollution Control Act of
1972. Like the Kyoto treaty, they proposed unrealistic goals, many of which
have still not been met. But they did usher in a more enlightened national
attitude, an environmentally responsible spirit that Congress should be working
to renew, not squelch.
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