African Energy Fund To Be Launched At Development Summit

Climate change gets a hearing

Firms, countries clamor for action

By Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent.

1 September 2002

Chicago Tribune

Copyright 2002, Chicago Tribune. All Rights Reserved.
JOHANNESBURG -- The World Summit has produced some odd moments, but none stranger than the joint news conference by a top Greenpeace director and a senior adviser for British Petroleum representing the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Joking that they had shared a platform before--during Greenpeace's occupation of a North Sea oil rig--the two men and top corporate leaders last week called for united government action to counter global warming.
"Given the seriousness of the risk of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we are shelving our differences on other issues," the two organizations said in a joint statement. "We call on governments to be responsible and to build an international framework to tackle climate change."
It's not often one hears multinational businessmen calling for new international regulation, but that's some indication of the serious consideration being given to climate change at the 10-day World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Officially, global warming is nowhere near the top of the summit's development-oriented agenda, and it is barely mentioned in the official resolution being negotiated at the meeting. But strong evidence that the world's climate is changing, coupled with growing worries that the international framework to halt it may collapse, has led businesses, environmental groups and governments to clamor for action at Johannesburg.
"New scientific evidence of the planetary dimensions of global environmental change has raised the need for a quantum increase in our efforts," Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, told delegates at the start of the summit.
Whether that will happen is increasingly doubtful. Russia's delegation stunned summit officials Friday by hinting it may back away from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gases by 2010 to 5 percent below 1990 levels.
Russia's OK needed
Russia had been expected to ratify the treaty by the end of the year, joining the European Union and Japan and becoming the final large nation needed to put the measure into effect. Instead, Moscow could bury the treaty, which could not pass with Russia and the United States holding out.
Such a collapse would likely dissuade poorer nations from making commitments to reducing greenhouse gases and set the world on a path toward growing pollution and faster-than-expected climate change, analysts warned.
"The United States and Europe got rich exploiting cheap energy. China won't listen to being told it can't do the same thing unless the industrialized world shows a lead," said Robert Watson, chief scientist with the World Bank and former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It's in the self-interest of industrialized countries to take the first step."
President Bush last year said he would abandon efforts to ratify the Kyoto treaty, which his father signed at the 1992 Earth Summit, arguing that the measure would prove too costly to implement and that it unfairly excluded developing nations from emissions reductions.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents 30 developed countries, including the U.S., has estimated that beginning in 2010, the Kyoto treaty will cost its member states a total of $56 billion a year.
The Bush administration announced in February that it would instead work toward reducing the overall increase in greenhouse gases as the U.S. economy grows, aiming for greater efficiency but not necessarily an overall reduction in U.S. emissions, which have ballooned 18 percent in the past decade.
Administration officials admitted that "the science justifies" the need to cut emissions. But they argue for a voluntary approach driven by government investment in cleaner technology and tax credits for businesses that use solar and wind power, fuel cells and other renewable energy sources.
"It's an efficiency approach," said James Connaughton of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
As the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, though, the United States has taken plenty of heat at Johannesburg for Bush's decision to back away from his father's promises.
Litigation a possibility
Small island nations, threatened by rising sea levels, want to sue the United States and Australia for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. A coalition of Americans who say they have been harmed by climate change, including a Northeast maple syrup farmer facing dying maples and a coral reef researcher watching his life's work destroyed by heated ocean water, have filed suit against the U.S. government.
At Johannesburg, the Bush administration, seen as closely allied to big oil companies, has been widely criticized for failing to tighten mileage standards for sport-utility vehicles, for doing little to cut the heavy U.S. dependence on coal plants for electricity and for failing to propose an alternative global vision for halting climate change that would be credible among Kyoto proponents.
"What has outraged the world is not just that the U.S. has changed its mind and refused to participate, but that it has made no counterproposal," said Jonathan Lash, head of the World Resources Institute. The Bush administration "has just said, `We're not talking about this.'"
That's not to say the U.S. is making no progress toward cutting greenhouse gases. More than 30 major multinational companies, including Shell, DuPont, Dow, IBM and Toyota, have set their own targets to reduce emissions by 2010, and some have already met them while saving money, Watson said.
Most have acted out of a competitive desire to create new pollution-cutting technology, which they then hope to sell to the rest of the world, or in anticipation of eventual regulation, which they say is easier to adapt to over time. Most say they would prefer to have national and international regulation on cutting emissions announced now, to give them time to adjust.
"Not everyone is doing the right thing," said Richard Holme, a spokesman for Business Action for Sustainable Development. But "our proactive members are definitely walking the talk."
Action at state level
U.S. states also have begun acting on their own, with California in July becoming the first to set timetables and regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
More could be done by taking advantage of existing technology to improve SUV mileage, by investing in new technology to scrub the carbon out of coal-burning plant emissions and by scrapping subsidies for fossil fuels, scientists say.
"There are two Americas," said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, one of tens of thousands of activists and delegates at the summit. "There is the America of George Bush, of isolation and retreating from cooperation with the nations of the world. Then there is the America of cities and states who are aggressively pursuing efforts to meet our responsibilities."
Since the Industrial Revolution, world temperatures have risen a couple of degrees, and sea level is up an average of about 7 inches, scientists say. Summer heat waves are on the rise, mosquito-borne illnesses are expanding their range, and extreme weather--from record droughts and forest fires in Colorado to severe flooding in Europe--appears to be getting more common.
Because greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere for centuries, those trends will continue for decades to come, scientists say, even if the world moves now to cut emissions. But cuts could reduce the scope and the pace of climate change.
"What we do now will profoundly affect the environment for our children and grandchildren," Watson said. "If we do nothing, they'll look back and ask why we didn't act."