Not Just Hot Air

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

In the first three months after his Inauguration, Bill Clinton managed to do what the Republicans couldn't accomplish in a full year of campaigning: make George Bush's environmental record almost look respectable. First the new Administration let operations begin at an Ohio hazardous-waste incinerator -- the world's largest -- that both Clinton and Vice President Al Gore had opposed during campaign swings through the state. Then the White House backed away from a plan to help preserve vast stretches of public land in Western states by raising fees and tightening rules for ranchers, miners and loggers who use federal resources. It even cut the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency below what was requested by the previous Administration. "EPA would have been better off if Bush had been re- elected!" said a chagrined Ralph De Gennaro, senior budget analyst for Friends of the Earth.

So when Clinton stood up among the palms and ferns at the U.S. Botanical Gardens to deliver his Earth Day speech last week, his toughest critics were those green activists who had supported him so wholeheartedly during the presidential campaign. When the speech was over, you could almost hear the environmentalists heave a communal sign of relief: their new President showed he really does have a green streak. Reversing a stand that Bush took at last year's Earth Summit in Rio, Clinton declared that the U.S. would sign an international treaty to protect the diversity of living species. And the President followed through on a pledge that briefly seemed in jeopardy: he committed the U.S. to a specific timetable for curbing the release of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases believed to be causing a long- term rise in temperatures around the globe.

Of the two initiatives, the global-warming plan will be much more controversial and tougher to carry out. It calls for a rollback of greenhouse- gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. The announcement represents a major victory for Gore, whose support for the measure met resistance at the last minute from Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. They argued that the effects of emissions controls on U.S. industry had not been studied sufficiently, a position reminiscent of the one the Bush Administration took last year when it torpedoed a similar plan at the Earth Summit.

Though Gore has prevailed for now, the debates within the Administration may be just beginning. As with health-care reform, the President put forward the bold outline of a plan and ordered his staff to figure out how to accomplish it -- in this case, by August. We'll give you the details, he was saying, when we work them out.

That will not be easy. America was built on cheap and seemingly unlimited supplies of carbon-based fuels -- wood, coal, oil and natural gas. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. today produces nearly 25% of global carbon emissions. If nothing is done, the country will be pouring 100 million more tons into the atmosphere by the turn of the century.

One way to reverse that trend is to discourage the use of fossil fuels by raising energy taxes. Clinton has already proposed a tax on various forms of energy that would take the country about a quarter of the way to the target for carbon dioxide reduction. But even this modest proposal is running into opposition, and it is hard to imagine a more ambitious tax getting anywhere on Capitol Hill.

Combining higher taxes with other strategies is the only way to meet the goal. "There's no doubt it can be done," says Alden Meyer, a climate-change expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Meyer suggests a host of | conservation measures, including tougher auto-fuel-economy standards, increased use of nonfossil energy sources (such as solar and wind power) and investment in energy-efficient technologies. This recalls a theme that Gore struck again and again on the campaign trail and that Clinton echoed in his speech last week: sound environmental policies can be good business. "These investments ((in energy-efficient technologies)) will create tens of thousands of new jobs," Clinton promised. "And they will save tens of thousands more."

They had better. Global greenhouse-gas production will be increasingly difficult to control as more and more people in developing countries begin to enjoy the energy-consuming pleasures of cars, air conditioners and central heating. Even in the U.S., emissions could start climbing sharply again in the next century. That is why some environmental leaders, while praising last week's announcement, were calling on the President to take it one step further. Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, urged the Administration to set the U.S. on a course of action that would keep emissions below 1990 levels well beyond the year 2000. That could be the real test of the President's commitment. "Is he going to keep the downward trend going?" asks Oppenheimer. "Or is he going to tweak emissions for seven years and then let them rip?"

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CAPTION: WAYS TO HIT THE TARGET

With reporting by Ted Gup, Dick Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington