Next month, world leaders will convene in Kyoto, Japan, to address the issue of global warming. The European Union (EU) has proposed that the developed countries commit themselves to dramatically reducing emissions of those gases thought to be responsible for trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. The Clinton administration favors a more “flexible approach,” but it too has insisted that a massive response is urgently needed, and in an elaborately staged campaign to mobilize public opinion, it has made common cause with militant environmentalists and advocacy groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists to trumpet the imminent threat to life on earth. In an alarmist speech on July 24, President Clinton warned:

[I]f we fail to act, scientists expect that our seas will rise one to three feet, and thousands of square miles . . . will be flooded. Infectious diseases will spread to new regions. Severe heat waves will claim lives. Agriculture will suffer. Severe droughts and floods will be more common.

This international mobilization presents a real paradox. Five years ago, when similarly loud alarms were sounded at the much-publicized “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, the assembled statesmen did little more than note the putative hazard without committing any country to undertake any particular action. Nor, in the years since Rio, has the problem of global warming been thought to have grown worse—quite the contrary. What, then, accounts for the newfound determination to act now?

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The theory behind global warming holds that emissions from automobiles and industrial activity will reduce the rate at which heat from the sun is reflected back into space from the earth’s surface. Acting like the glass panes in a greenhouse roof, these accumulating “greenhouse gases” will produce a gradual rise in average global temperatures.

By the mid-1980’s, scientists had developed computer models suggesting that a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, would increase the mean global temperature by nearly 6 degrees Celsius by the year 2050, with an increase perhaps three times greater at polar latitudes. Warming on this scale might induce melting of the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise and the consequent flooding of low-lying regions. There was also speculation about major disruptions in weather patterns, leading to terrible droughts in some areas and devastating storms elsewhere.

Relying on such forecasts, the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere warned that increasing emissions might have consequences “second only to global nuclear war.” In the wake of this gathering, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program organized a new body of scientists and governmental representatives, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to clarify the sources of the peril and to propose ways to mitigate it.

Given its origins and composition, the IPCC was under considerable pressure to dramatize the problem. And so, for a while, it did, providing, for example, many of the scary data behind the 1992 Rio summit.¹ All the more impressive, then, that in the intervening years the IPCC has reported the doubts that have been cast on these findings and has revised its projections accordingly.

Data obtained from satellites, for example, demonstrate that while the troposphere—the layer of air extending from the earth’s surface to a height of seven kilometers—has shown a good deal of temperature variability over the past eighteen years, there has been no net warming; if anything, there may have been a slight cooling of the atmosphere in this period. The variations themselves, moreover, may be attributable as much to natural occurrences, including volcanic eruptions and solar flares, as to man-made emissions. The fact is that the earth’s average temperature tends to fluctuate not only over decades but over centuries, while our own century as a whole has been warmer than the last, the shift is not out of line with previous fluctuations. Finally, most of the 20th-century increase took place in the years before World War II—before, that is, the unprecedented upward spurt in worldwide industrial activity from whose effects we are allegedly suffering.

In light of these data, the IPCC has begun to scale back prior estimates, sometimes starkly. Where, for example, the Toronto Conference predicted that sea levels might rise 5 feet by the year 2030, the IPCC now puts the figure at 1.25 feet; where the Toronto Conference looked for warming of 6 degrees Celsius by the middle of the 21st century, the IPCC’s 1995 report forecast a warming of only 1 to 3.5 degrees.

A number of scientists maintain that even these revised projections overestimate the danger and contain an exaggerated view of “climate sensitivity” to the build-up of carbon dioxide. There remains, in fact, vigorous debate over whether human activity has had any substantial effect on climatic change. Cautiously, the IPCC’s 1995 assessment concludes only that “the balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”—a far cry from its own earlier pronouncements, let alone from predictions of damage on a scale “second only to global nuclear war.”

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But receding concern among those in a position to know the facts is only one part of the puzzle in the current push for far-reaching reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Equally curious is that the push continues in the face of mounting evidence that the proposed program has no realistic chance of attaining its objectives.

Carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, is an inevitable by-product of burning fossil fuel, in turn the principal source of energy for industrial activity. Some economists insist that we in the United States could achieve relatively painless reductions in energy consumption by improving efficiency; but theirs is hardly the mainstream view. The most plausible studies predict that adhering to the EU’s emission-reduction proposals would shear two or three percentage points from our GNP. In other words, the U.S. would suffer an economic shock on a par with what we endured at the hands of the OPEC oil cartel in the 1970’s. Even if we were foolish enough to embark on such a course, it seems improbable we would stay with it.

But our own future conduct is hardly the only question mark. Two billion people, more than a third of the earth’s population, currently live without access to electric power. Simply to bring the most basic of modern amenities to this enormous population will entail a huge increase in energy consumption and therefore in carbon-dioxide emissions. To restrict this development is inevitably to freeze the standard of living of billions of people at wretched levels—a morally questionable proposition to say the least.

Nor is this an issue that the industrialized countries are in a position to decide on their own. No matter what restrictions they may agree to at Kyoto, there is simply no way to ensure compliance in the industrializing world.

Take, for example, China, a country whose tremendous economic growth has been fueled largely by coal, the dirtiest of all energy sources and the one that releases the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. China today faces a whole host of environmental problems: a quarter of the country’s population does not have access to safe drinking water; air pollution is at appalling levels; huge areas of the countryside are ecological disaster zones. A government that is doing next to nothing to ameliorate these problems is not likely to agree to a stiff price for combating global warming, a problem that may—or may not—begin to materialize 100 years hence.

China, in fact, has taken the lead in forging a coalition of states bent on opposing any international regime of emission controls for developing countries. These countries reject the idea that they should be required to forgo industrialization while the rich nations of the world reap the benefits of their own past despoliation of the environment. So far, the developed countries have agreed to take the lead, while expressing the hope that the less-developed will join them later on. But any reductions undertaken by the former will be more than offset by increasing industrial activity among the latter.

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Why, then, to ask the question again, are the Europeans and the Clinton administration so insistent on moving ahead? The answer is partly the same in the two cases and partly different.

The part that is the same has to do with the enormous political pressure exerted by the environmentalist movement, which is actually stronger in Europe than in the U.S. But in Europe other factors intervene as well. There, the most vociferous advocates of emission cutbacks are Britain and Germany, and the plain truth is that both these countries have something to gain from a strict environmentalist regime—particularly if the reduction of greenhouse gases is set, as the EU proposes, at 15 percent below 1990 levels.

In Britain, 1990 was a crucial year, marking the culmination of Margaret Thatcher’s war against coal—a war undertaken not for environmentalist reasons but to tame the radical miners’ union and to take advantage of Great Britain’s newly developed fields of natural gas in the North Sea. In 1990, Thatcher’s government privatized electricity production and encouraged the new private utilities to switch from coal to natural gas. Having thus already made changes that reduce overall carbon-dioxide emissions, Britain would enjoy a considerable advantage over countries only now required to bring levels down to below the 1990 baseline. No wonder that Margaret Thatcher’s successors, John Major and now Tony Blair, have been promoting a policy that promises to work to their country’s economic benefit, while earning as well the universal applause of environmentalists.

Germany presents a similar story of environmentalism (in the form of the influential Green party) working hand in hand with self-interest. There, too, the year 1990 marked a sharp turning point. German reunification in that year led to radical transformations in the economic life of what had been the Communist-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Entire industries were shut down, creating vast unemployment but also leading to an abrupt fall-off in energy consumption. In those industries that survived, Bonn encouraged a transition from the filthy brown coal favored by the GDR to cleaner and more efficient fuels. The transition was economically painful, but now a payoff looms ahead: if its competitors are forced to undertake substitutions and cut-backs on the scale it has already absorbed, Germany stands to benefit.

And the United States? Here, alas, we see the operation not so much of economic self-interest, enlightened or otherwise, as of ideological zeal mixed with crass politics. A Vice President, Al Gore, who has declared that automobiles pose a threat “more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront,” and a President who enthusiastically endorsed the goals of the Rio conference five years ago and remains eager to court the “green” constituency, are the perfect candidates for an international agreement that, evidence or no evidence, sounds all the right environmentalist notes.

But there are surely other calculations in the administration’s thinking as well. An agreement may offer international cover for controversial new regulations being proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency that aim further to reduce air pollution. Similarly, a global-warming scare may make it easier to pass additional energy taxes, and perhaps to curb the enthusiasm of Americans for private commuting and big cars. And then there is the administration’s predilection for large-scale multilateral projects that generate lots of media attention and create an impression of serious statesmanship on the world stage.

The U.S. Senate has already voted 95-0 to oppose any agreement that does “substantial harm to the U.S. economy” and that does not bring the developing countries under its terms. The administration may hope that once restrictions are presented as a measure to which all the advanced nations are fully committed—and to which other nations have offered some token endorsement—it will be possible to portray skeptics as troglodytes bent on protecting profits at the expense of life on earth, and thus to override congressional resistance. But, in a familiar enough pattern, the White House may also be perfectly content in the end to coopt the arguments of its opponents, taking credit both for the sincerity of its environmentalist convictions and for its attentiveness to the needs of the American economy.

The leaders of the European Union have substantial, venal reasons for going to Kyoto. American policy-makers also have their reasons, a stew of Utopian rhetoric and partisan calculation. Thus does the political problem of global warming intensify even as the climatic danger itself evanesces.

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¹ For an account, see Jeffrey Salmon, “Greenhouse Anxiety,” COMMENTARY, July 1993.

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