Green days

Part 2

by Michael Crowley

The clearest evidence that environmental politics are at the center of the political radar screen is the way Washington is bracing this fall for two of the most important environmental debates of the decade.

The first concerns a set of new EPA clean-air regulations approved by President Clinton; some 170 members of Congress are already lined up to challenge it.

The issue at stake is no less fundamental than the very air we breathe. Seven years after the landmark Clean Air Act of 1990, American factories and power plants still pump out pollutants that drift across the country, shrouding us in smog that kills tens of thousands of people every year. We pay with lives for our industrial society.

Clinton is trying to reduce that human cost. In June he approved EPA standards that impose tighter limits on the belching of ozone and microscopic soot particles into the air. Scientists blame ozone and microparticles alone for 15,000 premature deaths a year.

The new rules would require power plants and factories to install pollution-control equipment or start using fuels that burn more cleanly.

Clinton made the right decision, but it wasn't an easy one. After a long struggle within his administration, he sided with EPA chief Carol Browner against his economic advisers. They had warned him of a harsh political backlash from the business community -- particularly most fossil-fuel producers, who say that the regulations are based on bad science and that their costs outweigh even those benefits that might save lives.

Political opponents of the regulations -- including conservative Republicans and many Democrats from the industrial Midwest -- are still deciding whether to force a battle on behalf of their business allies, at the risk of looking like enemies of clean air. But even if the new rules are overturned this fall or next year, environmentalists believe they have enough votes to sustain a Clinton veto.

In the meantime, Clinton and members of Congress will have to deal with a far more complex and threatening problem. Washington is now preparing for a December international summit in Kyoto, Japan, where world leaders will seek a remedy for what former Boston Globe reporter and author Ross Gelbspan calls "the most profound and far reaching challenge ever facing humanity": global warming.

For years the global-warming issue has been debated in abstract and often contradictory terms, at a remove from our daily lives. But now it has clearly reached a new urgency, both scientifically and politically. Scientists are fast nearing consensus that man-made gases trapped beneath the ozone layer are creating a "greenhouse effect." That means the Earth's temperature is rising, causing severe weather and raising world sea levels as glacial ice caps melt.

"The science is clear and compelling," Bill Clinton said before the United Nations in June. "We humans are changing the global climate. Climate changes will disrupt agriculture, cause severe droughts and floods and the spread of infectious diseases."

Explaining that scientists envision a two-foot rise in sea levels over the next century, Clinton said 9000 square miles in the US would be lost to the oceans. The consequences for a port city like Boston, or a peninsula like Cape Cod, would be catastrophic.

Consider these facts: the 10 hottest years in recorded history have occurred since 1980, and 1995 was the hottest ever. Sea levels worldwide have risen by as much as 10 inches in the past 100 years. And violent weather has become more common -- in the 1980s property insurers lost $2 billion annually due to weather damages; in the 1990s the annual average has been $12 billion.

Now the political stakes in the global-warming debate are rocketing. Last week a group calling itself the Global Climate Information Project launched TV and newspaper ad campaigns warning that "Americans will pay the price," economically speaking, for any international agreement cutting greenhouse gases. The group is actually a coalition of some of America's biggest business interests, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Mining Association; it may shell out $13 million on advertising between now and December to oppose an international accord.

What worries American industry is its role in global warming: the United States is by far the world's biggest culprit. With just 4 percent of Earth's population, America the beautiful pumps out 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Almost any serious remedy of the problem will mean dramatic costs for American industry, including considerable job losses. The oil industry, for instance, warns that the costs of a 15 percent cut in US emissions could put a 3 percent dent in America's gross domestic product.

On the other side of the debate is an international environmental community that includes America's European allies, and an increasingly panicky cohort of island nations that are beginning to grapple with the prospect of being literally submerged.

Yet despite his dramatic rhetoric, Clinton has resisted committing to an effective international treaty limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. Polls show the public largely unconcerned with or unaware of the severity of the warming trend. Without active public support, it will be politically impossible for Clinton or Congress to resist the fossil-fuel lobby.

Clinton has been trying to rally that support through public appeals like his UN speech; and next month he'll host a White House conference on global warming.

But a fundamental and torturous truth about global warming is that it is not a battle between Earth and Evil Corporations. It's a question of your lifestyle, your standard of living. Ultimately, the average American must be willing to sacrifice.

Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate (which Clinton has cited), contends that the debate as it's currently framed -- pitting economic health against environmental protection -- misses the point. The only solution, Gelbspan contends, lies in an entirely new way of thinking.

"What needs to happen is a worldwide energy transition," says Gelbspan, who calls for "a Manhattan Project to rewire the world in 10 years to replace all our coal and oil-fired energy sources with climate-friendly, non-polluting technologies."

Gelbspan, a 30-year veteran reporter, is no starry-eyed idealist. But months of research have convinced him that we must choose between economic activity as we know it, and unknown atmospheric horrors of the future.

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Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.