FROM RIO TO RUIN?

By EUGENE LINDEN

President Bill Clinton and scores of other world leaders met last week at United Nations headquarters in New York City to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the 1992 environmental be-in known as the Rio Earth Summit. The heads of state were supposed to decide what further steps should be taken to halt the decline of Earth's life-support systems. In fact, this meeting had much the flavor of the original Earth Summit. To wit: empty promises, hollow rhetoric, hypocritical posturing, bickering between rich and poor, and irrelevant initiatives. Think Congress in slow motion.

Almost obscured by this torpor is the fact that there has been some remarkable progress over the past five years--real changes in the attitude of ordinary people in the Third World toward family size and a dawning realization that environmental degradation and their own well-being are intimately, and inversely, linked. Almost none of this, however, has anything to do with what the bureaucrats accomplished in Rio.

Or didn't accomplish. One item on the agenda at Rio, for example, was a renewed effort to save tropical forests. (A previous U.N.-sponsored initiative had fallen apart when it became clear that it actually hastened deforestation.) After Rio, a U.N. working group came up with more than 100 recommendations that have so far gone nowhere. One proposed forestry pact would do little more than immunize wood-exporting nations against trade sanctions.

An effort to draft an agreement on what to do about the climate changes caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has fared even worse. Blocked by the Bush Administration from setting mandatory limits, the U.N. in 1992 called on nations to voluntarily reduce emissions to 1990 levels. Five years later, it's as if Rio had never happened. A new climate treaty is scheduled to be signed this December in Kyoto, Japan, but governments still cannot agree on limits. Meanwhile, the U.S. produces 7% more CO2 than it did in 1990, and emissions in the developing world have risen even more sharply. No one would confuse the "Rio process" with progress.

While governments have dithered at a pace that could make drifting continents impatient, people have acted. Birthrates are dropping faster than expected, not because of Rio but because poor people are deciding on their own to limit family size. Another positive development has been a growing environmental consciousness among the poor. From slum dwellers in Karachi, Pakistan, to colonists in Rondonia, Brazil, urban poor and rural peasants alike seem to realize that they pay the biggest price for pollution and deforestation. There is cause for hope as well in the growing recognition among businesspeople that it is not in their long-term interest to fight environmental reforms. John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum, boldly asserted in a major speech in May that the threat of climate change could no longer be ignored.

It would be nice if President Clinton would speak out at least as forcefully as an oil baron on the subject of climate change. Instead, in his closing speech at the U.N., Clinton almost plaintively said he could not do anything until Americans and the Congress were convinced that climate change was "real and imminent." To that end, he has promised to hold a conference later this year to highlight the problem. Perhaps then we will see whether he is willing to be as forceful on the issue of greenhouse gases as he was last week on the issue of smog.