Posted on 10/27/2004 4:34:49 PM PDT by TFine80
The Boston Globe
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April 9, 1989, Sunday, City Edition Correction Appended
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 3123 words
HEADLINE: Nations fiddle as the Earth warms
SERIES: SAVING OUR PLANET / A GLOBAL RESPONSE First of three parts. NEXT: Saving the rain forests.
BYLINE: By Larry Tye, Globe Staff
BODY: World leaders are taking their cues from the Wizard of Oz in tackling global warming and other pollution perils: They loudly proclaim their resolve to act, reassure a nervous public with dramatic displays in huge halls and wait for the problems to go away.
President Bush followed the script by crowning himself the environment president, yet doing nothing so far to stop US coal and oil plants from belching 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year - twice the per capita rate of most industrial nations and a major factor in global warming.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev talks about shifting spending from the arms race to the environment, yet the Soviet Union continues to spend $ 300 billion a year on arms and nothing on saving the world's rain forests that absorb carbon dioxide and are falling at the rate of 50 acres a minute.
And when world leaders finally met about the environment last month in Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, their calls for action were quickly drowned out by a war of words between the Eastern bloc and the West, and between the Third World and the First, over how bad the problems are and who will pay for solutions.
A two-month study by The Boston Globe found a growing consensus among scientists on how to slow global warming - but it also found that world leaders have done little to apply those proposals at home, and even less to promote the global cooperation needed to ensure global survival.
"We have lost our innocence, we now know the planet is deteriorating. The question is, do we have the lemming instinct? Are we going to rush like lemmings madly over the cliff?" asked Maurice Strong, the first chief of; the United Nations Environment Programme.
"If you take a look at the hard, cold evidence you could become pessimistic. But if you look at the other side - can we do it - the answer is yes.
"There is no future for any of us on this planet unless we rise to levels of cooperation that are unprecedented."
Proof that pollution does not recognize national boundaries has been building for a decade, Strong and others say. First, scientists confirmed that acid emissions from US and Canadian power plants were drifting over the border. Then radioactive rays from the Soviet Union's Chernobyl reactor spread as far as the United States, industrial chemicals pierced the ozone layer of the atmosphere, oceans began spitting back sewage and syringes and, most recently, an oil spill fouled miles of ocean off the coast of Alaska.
The most alarming evidence of global interdependence has come within the last year, as searing droughts and record high temperatures lent new credibility to warnings the earth is warming. The pollutants responsible come from Western nations, the Soviet bloc and, increasingly, from the Third World. The impact will be felt everywhere: Researchers predict Cairo and Shanghai could be flooded as warming expands the oceans and melts the glaciers, the American Farm Belt could be transformed into a wasteland and Massachusetts could lose 10,000 acres to the encroaching sea.
On an individual level, scientists say, global warming means that burning coal to power television sets in Quincy may affect how much rain falls on a Guatemalan farmer's fields. And cutting trees for firewood on that farm in Guatemala could raise tidal levels in Quincy Bay.
"All of us are hostages to everyone else," concluded William Reilly, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Opinion polls suggest people are catching on and are even willing to work with traditional adversaries. In a poll of 1,006 registered voters nationwide last summer by The Daniel Yankelovich Group, 85 percent said the United States and Soviet Union should collaborate in cleaning the environment. Other responses led survey sponsors to conclude that, in the minds of most Americans, the Cold War is ending.
Environmental activist Barry Commoner says a similar awareness is building in other countries and will show itself next year when millions of people around the world celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, which was only observed here. "We're heading toward a situation in which global environmental problems will be the major geopolitical issue," he predicted.
World leaders apparently have detected that interest and are talking more and more about the environment. Five weeks ago, senior officials from 112 nations met in London to discuss ozone depletion, later that week leaders from 24 countries met in the Hague on global warming, and three weeks ago representatives of 117 nations met in Basil, Switzerland, to consider curbing shipments of toxic wastes to the Third World.
Mikhail Gorbachev, in his maiden address to the United Nations in December, urged international cooperation on the environment: "The scientific and technological revolution has turned many economic, food, energy, environmental, information and population problems, which only recently we treated as national or regional ones, into global problems. . . . The preservation of any kind of 'closed' societies is hardly possible."
Even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claims to be a true believer. Last month she ordered a phaseout of noxious leaded gasoline and enthusiastically hosted the ozone meeting, a dramatic turnaround from four years ago, when she rejected calls from European Community colleagues to cut acid emissions and branded environmentalists "the enemy within."
But that revolution in attitudes has not spawned bold new national cleanup efforts, and it has not led to the creation of global institutions capable of attacking global warming and other perils.
Even more important, world leaders are not putting their money where their mouths are. The United States, the Soviet Union and other rich countries have been unwilling to come up with anywhere near the extra $ 150 billion a year experts say is needed to wage a worldwide war against pollution.
The United States - which produces a fifth of the gases that cause global warming, more than any other nation - should launch that war by spending $ 40 billion more a year on cleaner-burning energy sources and other environmental solutions here and abroad, according to Harvard economics professor Robert Reich, journalist Hodding Carter 3d and 11 other policy makers who participated in a recent review by the World Policy Institute of New York.
The EPA, in a 900-page report to Congress last month, offered a more detailed battle plan for weaning the country of the fossil fuels that are the primary source of global warming - by displacing coal and oil through conservation, developing cars that are twice as efficient and solar or nuclear plants that are safer and cheaper, and by weighing the ecological cost of each new refrigerant, chemical additive and other products. Initiatives such as those are "the major priority for my time here," EPA administrator Reilly pledged in an interview.
Developing nations face even more imposing challenges: saving their forests, growing without relying on coal and oil, and curbing the spiraling population that drives destruction of the forests and threatens economic growth, explained Alvaro Umana, minister of natural resources in Costa Rica, which has been a model for the Third World in curbing pollution.
For these efforts to succeed, a powerful new international body is needed to steer, police and finance them, Umana and Reilly agreed.
One approach would be to create a United Nations charter council involving chief ambassadors of selected countries, said Richard Gardner, a professor of international law at Columbia University and top adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Carter. The UN has created such councils just three times in 44 years - to oversee the breakup of colonial empires and to deliberate on world peace and the world economy. "Now the environmental issue is as important as the others and needs a comparable body," argued Gardner, who has joined Strong in urging that an environmental unit replace the Trusteeship Council on colonies.
The UN's Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development and other groups have suggested how a global antipollution agency might work: It would carefully monitor how carbon dioxide and other gases collect in the air, trap heat radiated from the earth and alter the earth's temperature, sea levels and storm systems. Then it would set national targets for emissions, requiring everyone to cut carbon dioxide by an equal percentage or making big polluters, such as the United States and Soviet Union, reduce more.
Similar goals would be set for other pollutants and for saving the forests, with decisions on how to meet them left to individual countries. The agency could penalize those nations falling short of the goals by imposing a global boycott of national wares, tariffs or any other sanction that would get their attention.
Finally, rich countries would have to help poor ones pay for cleanups, as Liu Ming, China's environment minister, made clear at the recent meeting on ozone depletion in London: "The developing world's accumulation of a great amount of wealth was accompanied by the pollution and destruction of the environment. Now these countries can use that accumulated wealth to manage the environment."
Worldwide, spending must rise by $ 150 billion a year to save forests, conserve soil, replace fossil fuels and attack other pollution problems, according to the Worldwatch Institute, one of the few research groups to assess global needs. That would mean shifting one-sixth of the nearly $ 1 trillion the world spends each year on the military and treating environmental perils with the same urgency as military ones, said Lester Brown, president of the institute.
"The only period of social change I can think of that comes anywhere near what is needed is when the Allies mobilized for World War II," Brown said.
"People were in uniform the next day. We rationed gas and sugar. Women suited up as riveters. Chrysler shifted from making cars to weapons. There was a unilateral change overnight. That's the kind of change we need, only this time it has got to last."
Past attempts at international cooperation on the environment produced mixed results.
On acid rain, the Reagan administration stonewalled for eight years, refusing to accept scientific evidence that our emissions were killing lakes and forests here and in Canada. But when Western Europe saw its forests withering, it launched an aggressive cleanup, and President Bush has promised to do the same.
On ocean pollution, Boston Harbor shows how slow progress has been: 70 dry tons of untreated sludge and 450 million gallons of partly treated sewage are dumped there every day. But in the Middle East, a 1975 pact united the Israelis and Arabs - as well as antagonists in the Persian Gulf - to clean shared waterways.
The most compelling model for international action is the 1987 Montreal Protocol, where 31 nations agreed to cut in half their emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals that erode the earth's ozone shield and add to global warming. "The international community showed it was capable of taking complicated, cooperative actions even though back then there was not total scientific certainty," said Richard Benedick, who led the US negotiating team.
Yet winning agreement has been vexing even with ozone depletion, which is relatively easy to stop. Twenty more nations pledged support for the Montreal pact in London last month, and Europe and the United States pressed for a total ban on CFCs, which, stopping the warming means worrying about pollution when they cannot afford to feed people. For the industrial world, it means finding ways for the Soviet bloc, the Western alliance and other traditional enemies to work together.
Rich and poor nations also cherish their autonomy and have been reluctant to cede power to the United Nations, even on matters of war and peace. And most national leaders hate to ask citizens to sacrifice, even when they can see and feel the threats.
Those obstacles were apparent two weeks ago in Holland, when leaders from 24 small nations considered - but then rejected - a new international body called Globe to set strategies for battling global warming that would be enforced by the International Court of Justice. The United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and other world powers also have been meeting on global warming, but no concrete actions have yet resulted.
World leaders are not likely to do much until warming becomes much worse, predicted Robert Heilbroner, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research in New York: "We simply are not going to take actions to better the world for our great-great-grandchildren. We will take some action to make things better for our children and a lot for ourselves, but environmental issues tend to lie just beyond our children's coming."
Noam Chomsky, a Nobel laureate and professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed and said that when the world finally reacts, it could be in a "very frightening" way. "As soon as there's the most minimal indication that the dominant US role in the world may be threatened," he said, "in a society like ours, which is very barbaric, there will be a call for the use of violence to salvage our position.
"That could lead to kinds of social conflict never imagined in the past."
Reilly is more hopeful, saying people are beginning to understand that the actions needed to slow global warming will yield other benefits - from reducing acid rain, urban smog and ozone depletion, which come from the same pollution sources, to making the United States and other nations more efficient in using energy and other resources.
More important, he added, the public increasingly recognizes that failure to act now could be "calamitous." EPA researchers say the average temperature of the earth could rise 6 degrees by the year 2100 - more than it has since the peak of the last ice age 18,000 years ago, and enough to make Boston as hot as Richmond, Va., or Greensboro, N.C.
Faced with such prospects, the Soviet Union is ready to cooperate in a global cleanup, Vladimir Petrovsky, deputy foreign minister and senior environmental negotiator, said during a telephone interview from Moscow. "Pollution," he added, "does not know national or ideological frontiers."
Strong, the former UN environment chief, said the campaign against global pollution is not the first time the world has faced seemingly insurmountable social and political hurdles: "With the movement to abolish the slave trade and child labor in England, the conventional wisdom of the time was that it was impractical, it would ruin the economy. And when basic sanitation was introduced to dispose of wastes and clean drinking water, many looked on it as an intrusion into private rights. Today, those things are just integrated into our lives.
"World leaders don't have to cooperate on everything - only on issues that affect our survival."
MOST PEOPLE'S EYES GLAZE OVER WHEN THE CONVERSATION TURNS TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES.
THEY CAN DO SOMETHING TO PROTECT THEIR DRINKING WATER, REDUCE RADON AND OTHER INDOOR EMISSIONS AND MAYBE EVEN CLEAN A TOXIC DUMP. BUT PROBLEMS SUCH AS GLOBAL WARMING AND OZONE DEPLETION SEEM TOO REMOVED, TOO OVERWHELMING. SO THEY WAIT FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO ACT.
THAT, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WARN, IS A HUGE MISTAKE.
"IT WILL BE ACTION AT THE GRASS ROOTS THAT MOVES CONGRESS," SAID REP. CLAUDINE SCHNEIDER (R-R.I.), WHO HAS BEEN STYMIED IN HER BID FOR COMPREHENSIVE LEGISLATION TO COMBAT GLOBAL WARMING.
SEN. JOHN KERRY AGREED, AND VOWED TO LAUNCH A GRASS-ROOTS MOVEMENT TO PROMOTE ACTION ON THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT SIMILAR TO THE GROUP, VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR, HE HEADED IN THE 1970S. "THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS DEFIES PEOPLE'S ABILITY TO RELATE TO IT," THE MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRAT SAID, ADDING, "MY JOB IS TO . . . HELP CREATE THE JUMP START."
THAT KIND OF PUBLIC PRESSURE IS WHAT DROVE WORLD LEADERS TO APPROVE A 50 PERCENT REDUCTION IN OZONE-DEPLETING CHLORFLUOROCARBON CHEMICALS IN MONTREAL TWO YEARS AGO, SAID RICHARD BENEDICK, CHIEF US NEGOTIATOR AT THE CANADIAN MEETING.
"PUBLICITY ON THE CFC-OZONE LINK IN THE 1970S MADE AMERICAN CONSUMERS STOP BUYING AEROSOLS WELL IN ADVANCE OF GOVERNMENT ACTION," HE RECALLED. "TENS OF MILLIONS OF INDIVIDUAL CONSUMER DECISIONS ADDED UP TO THE COLLAPSE OF THE MARKETS.
"TO REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING WE NEED TO DO AN EVEN GREATER SELLING JOB ON ENERGY EFFICIENCY, FUEL EFFICIENCY AND ENDING GAS-GUZZLING CARS. THE POLITICIANS WILL GET THE COURAGE WHEN THEY SENSE PEOPLE ARE BUILDING A FIRE UNDER THEM."
INDIVIDUALS ALSO CAN SHAPE THE ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR OF BUSINESSES AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS, SAID DONELLA MEADOWS, WHO TEACHES ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE.
THE DEBATE IN THE 1970S OVER AUTO-EFFICIENCY STANDARDS SHOWED HOW THE BOTTOM-UP APPROACH WORKS, SHE SAID. "ALL THE TIME GOVERNMENT MILEAGE STANDARDS WERE IN EFFECT CONSUMERS WERE DEMANDING EVEN HIGHER EFFICIENCY. THE CAR COMPANIES HAD TO COMPLY, AND ACTUAL MILEAGE PERFORMANCE ALWAYS WAS ABOVE GOVERNMENT STANDARDS."
BUT MEADOWS CAUTIONED THAT INDIVIDUAL INITIATIVE IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR GOVERNMENT ACTION. "PEOPLE ABSOLUTELY CAN LEAD THE WAY. HOWEVER, IF THAT'S IT, AND GOVERNMENTS DON'T DO ANYTHING, IT WON'T BE ENOUGH. WE NEED THE KINDS OF INCENTIVES AND POLICE POWERS ONLY GOVERNMENTS HAVE."
PEOPLE ALSO CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE SIMPLY BY CHANGING THE WAY THEY TREAT THEIR ENVIRONMENT, SCIENTISTS SAY. THAT MEANS SCREWING IN ENERGY-SAVING LIGHT BULBS AND CLOSING SPACES WHERE WINTER WINDS LEAK INDOORS; IT MEANS BUYING PRODUCTS THAT ENCOURAGE FARMERS TO HARVEST RATHER THAN CUT RAIN FORESTS; AND IT MEANS THINKING ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT WHEN YOU DECIDE HOW TO GET TO WORK, WHICH CHEMICALS TO USE IN THE GARDEN AND WHERE TO TAKE A VACATION.
THAT ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND SENSE OF GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE ARE ALREADY SEEPING INTO POPULAR CULTURE, WITH RINGO STAR, PINK FLOYD, FLEETWOOD MAC AND OTHER ROCK STARS DECRYING THE DESTRUCTION OF RAIN FORESTS, AND SCHOOLCHILDREN LEARNING HOW THEIR FATE IS TIED TO THAT OF FARMERS IN THE JUNGLES OF BRAZIL AND INDUSTRIALISTS IN KIEV.
"THERE IS A SEEMING DICHOTOMY BETWEEN THE GLOBALIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES ON THE ONE HAND AND THE PERSONALIZATION ON THE OTHER," SAID MICHAEL DELAND, HEAD OF THE US ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY'S NEW ENGLAND OFFICE.
"BUT THE CIRCLE IS CLOSED WITH LOCAL AGENCIES AND INDIVIDUALS ACTING TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT KNOWING THAT, IN THE AGGREGATE, THEY HAVE A GLOBAL IMPACT. PEOPLE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THAT WHAT THEY ARE DOING IS OF GLOBAL IMPACT."
CORRECTION-DATE: April 11, 1989, Tuesday, City Edition
CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, a story on Page One Sunday incorrectly stated that Noam Chomsky, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a Nobel Prize recipient.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, On the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, Chino Duarte and his 11 brothers and sisters help their parents burn trees to make charcoal. Traffic heads for downtown Los Angeles, which is blanketed by smog that adds to global warming. A child helps his parents mine for gold, a quest that is destroying nearby forests on the Osa Peninsula. Globe staff photo / Suzanne Kreiter
ONLY CITIZEN CAN FORCE REAL ACTION
Next Tuesday just can't get here soon enough. I don't want to have to see this man, hear this man or read about him ever again.
Kerry is so dangerous to America.
I cant wait to send this socialist hippy packing
and yet the UAW supports Kerry.
that makes sense.good luck to keeping their jobs if sKerry
gets in.
Aw. not this sheeet again!
I just wonder what this movement would be like... Would he sell our CO2 credits to Communist Vietnam?
BTTT!!!!!!!!
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