Posted on: Wednesday, July 25, 2001

Editorial
Global warming: U.S. going it alone

While it may eventually become known as the means by which the world succeeds in reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, at the moment the new international global warming accord signed Monday in Bonn, Germany, stands for nothing so much as the Bush administration's preference — if not penchant — for unilateral action.

When the 1997 Kyoto Protocol proved too ambitious to make a practical difference — only 37 mostly poor nations have ratified it — the signers were willing to take a second look at producing something more workable. The United States could and should have been an active participant.

In practical terms, Bush was right that the original protocol was "fatally flawed." What good is a treaty never implemented? Even before Bush became president, the Democrat-controlled Senate had unanimously refused to ratify it.

But with the European Union in the vanguard, 178 countries — that is, almost everybody in the world except the United States — agreed on a deal Monday that salvages the Kyoto document and commits the rest of the industrialized world to orderly, mandatory reductions in the gases that are believed to contribute to global warming.

Cementing the deal required softening some of Kyoto's emissions targets as well as making concessions to Japan, which got extra credits for protecting its forests, which act as a "sink" for carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

Ironically, the original agreement already contained similar sweeteners to attract American participation. There was no doubt room for more bargaining.

As it stands now, Bush refuses to truck with the rest of the world on global warming because, he says, it would hurt the American economy. Well, yes. But the rest of the industrialized world has committed to a limited degree of economic sacrifice. Bush thus gives the United States the aura of an extremely selfish world citizen.

Of course, as the world's biggest air polluter, responsible for one-fourth of the world's total, the United States would have been expected to make the biggest sacrifice.

Bush's argument that the world must wait for better scientific evidence of global warming is beginning to appear self-serving, even fatuous. Tell that, for instance, to the denizens of tiny Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation that has asked New Zealand and Australia to provide shelter for its 11,000 people as rising sea levels threaten to engulf their homes.

The onus now is on the Bush administration either to develop a plausible alternative course for the United States to contribute to the world effort, or belatedly to climb aboard. And it should do one or the other in time for the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Summit on global warming in Johannesburg next year.

Rio was where Bush's father first committed the United States to a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases. The elder Bush's strong point was consensus-building in international politics, not going it alone.