Dirty Climate

WHEN the 1992 UN Climate Treaty was signed in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. Government refused to endorse a policy of mandating activities that would lead to reduced emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the major anthropogenic greenhouse gas. Partly, this was because the goals of such activities were unclear: while the Treaty mentions stabilization of the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at “non-dangerous levels” as a goal, what constitutes safe and dangerous levels is left unspecified. More importantly, there is a distinct lack of scientific consensus that global warming is in fact occurring.

However, at the July 1996 negotiations in Geneva, the State Department dramatically altered its position and called for legally binding targets and time-frames for reducing emissions of CO2. A Department of Energy official, Dirk Forrister, insisted the Administration’s policy switch does not call for any of the things rejected in 1992: new taxes, command-and-control regulations, fuel-economy targets for automobiles. The Senate Energy Committee held hearings this fall to learn just how, in that case, the Administration did plan to control energy consumption. It was unable to discover what schemes are afoot. But logically, since CO2 comes mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, emission limits would have to restrict energy consumption—cutting the use of electric power, transportation, and heating, either by rationing or by taxes.

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S. Fred Singer

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WHEN the 1992 UN Climate Treaty was signed in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. Government refused to endorse a policy of mandating activities that would lead to reduced emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the major anthropogenic greenhouse gas. Partly, this was because the goals of such activities were unclear: while the Treaty mentions stabilization of the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at “non-dangerous levels” as a goal, what constitutes safe and dangerous levels is left unspecified. More importantly, there is a distinct lack of scientific consensus that global warming is in fact occurring.

However, at the July 1996 negotiations in Geneva, the State Department dramatically altered its position and called for legally binding targets and time-frames for reducing emissions of CO2. A Department of Energy official, Dirk Forrister, insisted the Administration’s policy switch does not call for any of the things rejected in 1992: new taxes, command-and-control regulations, fuel-economy targets for automobiles. The Senate Energy Committee held hearings this fall to learn just how, in that case, the Administration did plan to control energy consumption. It was unable to discover what schemes are afoot. But logically, since CO2 comes mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, emission limits would have to restrict energy consumption—cutting the use of electric power, transportation, and heating, either by rationing or by taxes.