Rhetoric Heats Up as Summit on Global Warming Nears

Last month, scientists and oil and gas industry leaders, seeking to influence an international summit on global warming, launched dueling “public education” campaigns. Both were full of hot air. First, the industry leaders asserted in a $13-million TV ad campaign that any U.S. efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions would do little to stem the environmental problems related to global warming. Then 1,500 scientists (including 102 Nobel laureates) publicly urged the Clinton administration to commit to fossil fuel emissions reductions that could “save consumers $58 billion” by preventing future environmental disasters like hurricanes and coastal flooding.

However, there is far more consensus on global warming than is apparent in the two campaigns. No credible scientists deny that warming caused by fossil fuel emissions from coal plants, automobiles and other sources is contributing to diverse bad effects. These include a rise in malaria and yellow fever in Rwanda and Kenya as mosquitoes migrate, rising sea levels that are flooding some island nations and a sharp decline in Antarctic krill, shrimp-like creatures on which penguins depend.

The real disagreement is not over whether fossil fuel emissions need reducing but rather over how it can be done fairly. Debate in the United States is intense. The Senate, for instance, recently passed a resolution declaring its opposition to a European Union proposal that would require the United States and 35 other developed countries (but not 129 developing countries) to reduce their fossil fuel emissions 15% by 2010.

Clearly, the Clinton administration, which will hold a national summit Monday in preparation for an international summit on global warming in Kyoto, Japan, in December, should work to improve on the EU proposal. But it must also commit to binding reductions. The United States is responsible for nearly one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Without a U.S. commitment, all observers agree, no meaningful agreement can emerge at Kyoto.

The most sensible solution is one being considered by the administration to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 10% by 2010, mainly through stronger market incentives for clean energy production. Such a target would actually be a step back from a 1992 voluntary agreement signed by President George Bush and ratified by the Senate in which the United States promised to reduce fossil fuel emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. That piece of paper must have hit the wastebasket before the year was out. U.S. emissions have risen sharply, while Britain and Germany have already met their 2000 targets.

Those who say the United States should not make any commitments at Kyoto argue that not all of the science is in on the complex problem. Scientists do disagree on how much fossil fuel emissions contribute to global warming. But experts across the world know enough about the effects of these emissions to recognize the urgency of reducing them.

The Nobel scientists recently declared this in their typically impenetrable prose, concluding, “When rapidly forced, nonlinear systems are especially subject to unexpected behavior.” In plain English, what they are saying makes a lot of sense: By reducing the pressure we humans put on nature, we can buy ourselves an insurance policy against nasty surprises.