'Junk science' delays plan on global warming

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The 'White House effect' has finally been applied to the greenhouse effect. If you're planning to be alive much past 2010, or have children who will be, this is very good news.

George Bush first promised to use the White House's power to cut carbon dioxide emissions during the 1988 election campaign, but he ran for cover when U.S. industries complained that it might cost them profits. For the past eight years, official U.S. policy has been that there should be only 'voluntary' controls (i.e. none).

Now, however, it is Bill Clinton's re-election campaign, and there just might be some votes in trying to save the world. So on July 17, at the International Climate Change Conference in Geneva, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth announced a dramatic reversal of American policy.

"Our approach here is to have a straight target that everybody has to sign up to," said Wirth. "What we want is a binding target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that is agreed internationally." Though it will not produce any immediate results, this is probably the most important event of the year.

The International Climate Change Conference has just wound up without agreeing on what the target should be. Ten percent cuts by 2005? Twenty percent cuts? That will be decided in the next eight months, on the basis of how much emissions must be cut to hold the global temperature rise to two degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

That target then gets approved by the next conference in Japan a year from now, but it will be several more years before the major industrial countries ratify the accord and work out policies for applying it on their own territory. Nothing new is really going to start happening much before the turn of the century -- and even a 2-degree rise in global temperature would mean drought and starvation to millions of people.

Dancing in the streets would therefore be a bit premature, but a major corner has been turned: the principle of universal, mandatory cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions has been accepted by the international community. The forces of darkness have been defeated.

'Forces of darkness'? Isn't that a bit strong? Surely those who doubt the reality of global warming are also entitled to try to make their case. Well, yes -- but it's all too obvious that the doubters are precisely those who fear they will lose money if greenhouse-gas emissions are restricted.

Eileen Clausson, who led the American delegation at the climate conference, was quite blunt about who they are and how they operate: "They are a very strong group of people who muddy the science. We call them the Naysayers."

The Naysayer with the highest profile is Don Pearlman, an American lawyer. At every international political conference and scientific meeting on climate change for the past several years, his lobbyists have been present to challenge the wording of documents and obscure the clarity of the scientists' conclusions. Pearlman will not say whom he works for, but he is usually seen in the company of Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti delegates.

Those countries oppose greenhouse-gas restrictions because the market for fossil fuels will go into a steep decline if the industrial countries start cutting carbon-dioxide emissions, and then who will buy their oil? (Australia, a major coal exporter, was also allied with the Naysayers at Geneva).

But Pearlman and the fossil-fuel exporters were not nearly as effective as the misleadingly named Global Climate Coalition. It sounds like an environment-friendly group, but its membership includes the 'Seven Sisters' (oil giants Shell, Texaco, Exxon, British Petroleum, Amoco, Chevron and Mobil), plus Ford and General Motors, Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide, the Air Transport Association, and other big energy users like the aluminum industry.

With apparently limitless funds at its disposal, the GCC has worked to convince the world's media and the U.S. Congress that global warning is an "open question" about which it would be premature to actually do anything. It publicizes the findings of any scientists who deny the validity of the evidence for global warming -- what the World Wide Fund for Nature calls "junk science paid for by the oil and coal lobbies". Its strategy is sabotage, confusion and delay.

So what has finally defeated the best efforts of these powerful, well-funded lobbyists? One word: fear.

Fear that more severe storms caused by global warming may gut the insurance industry. Pay-outs for storm damage in 1990-1995 already total US$48 billion, three times the figure for all of the 1980s, and 58 international insurance companies went to Geneva to demand "early substantial reductions" in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Fear that melting polar ice and rising sea levels may drown some entire small countries that are made up of low-lying islands, like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Maldives and Tonga, and swamp big chunks of densely populated countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands.

Fear, above all, that it's already too late to stop global temperatures from going up a couple of degrees, and that only urgent action will forestall even more drastic changes. Two weeks before the Geneva conference, British Environment Secretary John Gummer announced the results of a study predicting that in 30 years southern England will be warm enough for malaria-bearing mosquitoes, Paris will have the climate of the south of France -- and Spain will be mostly a desert.

So the 150 countries at Geneva have bulldozed the Naysayers aside and started down the long, hard road to controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. The economic and social implications will ultimately be huge, though some years will pass before people begin to feel a direct impact on their lifestyles. And of course, nobody can guarantee that it's not already too late.

But at last we have agreement in principle to try. That is worth a lot.