Mr. Gorbachev’s Global Utopia
On Earth Day, Green meets Red.

By Henry Payne, editorial cartoonist and writer for The Detroit News
April 20, 2001 9:10 a.m.

dding its voice to the Washington media's outrage over President Bush's Kyoto Treaty withdrawal, Time magazine warned in its April 9 cover story of global Armageddon if climate change is not addressed — now. "Climbing temperatures. Melting glaciers. Rising seas. All over the earth we're feeling the heat. Why isn't Washington?" Time heatedly declared.

But a signed letter to President Bush, appearing on the back page of the same issue, should give every American pause to consider what organized environmentalism — and its Earth Day celebration — has really come to represent. Topping the list of "power signatures" (mostly reliable liberal gasbags like George Soros, Walter Cronkite, and Harrison Ford) — demanding that the president "develop a plan to reduce U.S. production of greenhouse gases" — is the world's most famous communist, Mikhail Gorbachev. While media outlets like Time have spent the last decade lionizing Mr. Gorbachev for ending the Cold War, the Kremlin veteran has moved on to other passions. Like many of the world's socialists — most prominently the Green Party, which currently holds power in Germany — Mr. Gorbachev has found in the international global-warming movement the instrument to pursue his global utopia. As founding president of Green Cross International in Geneva, an environmental umbrella group with 21 affiliates worldwide, Mr. Gorbachev's green rhetoric still sounds decidedly red: "We need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between mankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility."

Global warming, in short, has become the new Cold War — but without the guns. It's Bush vs. Gorbachev. It's free markets vs. government control. It's a fundamental debate about whether industrial capitalism has failed and a revolutionary, government-ordered system is necessary to take its place. Standing in the way of this revolution is a familiar enemy: the United States. In an article for World Watch this March, Gorbachev claims, "the failure of leadership at the climate change talks in The Hague last November are disturbing. This failure lays at the hands of our political leaders, particularly the United States."

"When you go to Community of Party meetings (where nations and special-interest groups hash out the details of Kyoto), the conferees all hate Americans," says Frank Maisano of the industry-funded Global Cimate Coalition. The U.S., he says, is commonly referred to as a "carbon criminal" by activists.

Environmentalists have long called for radical change — in transportation, birth rates, and energy production — to fight global warming, and now the call for revolution is coming from European governments as well. "We have to change the way we live," proclaimed Energy Minister Peter Hain on April 5, as his government unveiled a $70-million government alternate-fuels program to build "wind farms" off the coast of England. The ministry's goal is a "ten-year plan" to ensure that 10 percent of the U.K.'s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2010 as part of its obligations under the Kyoto agreement.

Indeed, while most American politicians speak of the Kyoto Treaty as a warm and fuzzy commitment to the "environment," the reality is a document with sharp regulatory teeth. If implemented, Kyoto would require a vast global regulatory apparatus that would essentially put all industrial decision-making in the hands of U.N. bureaucrats. The "Soviet five-year plan for industrial production" meets the "Kyoto five-year plan for industrial emissions."

If the world is to meet Kyoto's deep carbon-dioxide reductions (to seven percent below 1990 levels), massive and coordinated international government interference in industry will be necessary. The process is already underway. For example, in Gorbachev's Swiss backyard last August, the United Nations quietly assumed sweeping new powers to institute global automotive regulations. The international body's "Agreement Concerning Technical Regulations Of Wheeled Vehicles, Equipment And Parts Which Can Be Fitted and/or Used on Wheeled Vehicles" (bureaucrats of the world, unite!) commits the United States to negotiate with Russia, Japan, Germany and a host of other nations on auto-performance standards relating to environmental protection, energy efficiency, and safety — and, most significantly, takes the first step toward global regulations necessary to implement the treaty's draconian emissions cuts. Though the U.S. Senate has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the Clinton administration approved the U.N. measures as a backdoor approach to treaty implementation. As EPA's Margo T. Oge told a Geneva audience: "This agreement offers an unprecedented opportunity for the cooperative development of environmental and safety regulations. The challenge of global warming is an excellent example of the principle that the nations of the world are all in this together."

The Bush administration has divorced itself from this process none too soon. The scope of change needed to satisfy Kyoto's emissions targets makes clear why environmentalists advocate economic revolution. Compliance with Kyoto would require that the United States slash its greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2012 to seven percent below 1990 levels. Including continued emission increases since 1990, this would require CO2 levels be reduced by a whopping 41 percent by 2012 in order to comply with the Kyoto Treaty, according to a 1997 Department of Energy analysis.

To put such cuts in perspective, CO2 emissions in the U.S. have declined only twice since World War II: during the economic recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91. The 1981-82 recession, the deepest since the Great Depression, reduced CO2 emissions by 8 percent. Carbon-dioxide emissions, in other words, are tied to economic growth. A 40-plus percent reduction over 11 years would require a major government redirection of the U.S. economy. (Environmentalists concede that even Kyoto's targets wouldn't do the job. David Rind, an atmospheric scientist with NASA, and one of Gore's key science advisors, says that CO2 emissions must be cut 50 percent — not seven percent — below 1990 levels. Such a reordering, however, would bring economic dislocations so severe that no American politician would ever try it.) Even the green Clinton/Gore administration abandoned its 1993 promise to cut CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 (in fact, CO2 emissions from 1992-2000 grew by 12 percent). The economic cost would have been too severe.

But what if it were required by international law, that is, the Kyoto Treaty?

Despite claims that "Florida would be history" thanks to melting polar ice caps (according to the Environmental Defense Fund) and that weather changes will be "truly catastrophic" (Time), many environmentalists are curiously tentative about recommending action that matches their rhetoric. After all, if we're on the verge of an environmental "Kristallnacht" (Gore) shouldn't the government be mobilizing for war? Mary Luevano, an officer for Global Green USA — the U.S. arm of Gorbachev's Green Cross International — disputes the idea that government is needed to induce the revolution. "We want to work with industry to create a value shift," she says.

But even on small items — such as Global Green's campaign for solar-powered homes in California — she concedes that government subsidies are necessary (California is offering a 10-percent tax credit) to interest homeowners. The government subsidies needed to reduce emissions 41 percent would be unprecedented. Given the obvious threat to the United States' economic future, it is likely that global-warming talks will mirror their Cold War cousin, arms-control talks. The opposing sides — i.e., Bush vs. Gorbachev, Capitalist vs. Green, U.S. vs. Europe — will come to the table because public opinion demands as much. But since polls also show no public stomach for even mild solutions (a Time/CNN poll found not even majority support for a mere 25-cent gas-price increase), negotiators will hash out largely meaningless — if mildly harmful — agreements until such time as the Left collapses under the weight of its own ideology.

In the meantime, there's one more disturbing Cold War parallel to ponder: Jimmy Carter was one of the signatories to Gorbachev's "economic-disarmament" letter to Bush.