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TODAY Tuesday 13 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Johnny Mobil Appleseed

Friends, 1997 was the warmest year since they invented thermometers. Bad for biodiversity, good for propaganda. Once the Kyoto conference wrapped up, in fact, almost all the news has been pretty positive.

There were some predictable fulminations on the subject of Kyoto as national sell-out and economic suicide and what have you. But the only well-known figure to make a big deal of it was Jack Kemp, who vowed to take the anti-treaty lead on behalf of the toiling millions of honest Americans. There is a merciful God if Jack Kemp is allowed to become the leading spokesman of the anti-treaty forces.

Senate ratification is not assured -- far from it -- but post-Kyoto opinionizing has been rather tame. Conservative statements run from Nate Gingrich, who says he hates the Kyoto text (which he must say to damp down fires on his right), to George Will, who frets about the ambiguity of the scientific data, to William F. Buckley, who thinks that the clause on emissions trading makes the whole business worthwhile.

Meanwhile, at the Detroit Auto Show, the Big Three carmakers turned environment-lovers in public. General Motors rolled out fuel cell concept cars and its CEO talked glowingly about a future beyond the internal combustion engine. Chrysler showed off a nifty lightweight hybrid-engine Intrepid. And Ford announced, at the Auto Show and in full-page newspaper ads, that its humongous sports utility vehicles would henceforth produce "...emissions at a level below those of our regular automobiles." It turns out, of course, that "emissions" don't include carbon dioxide emissions, but still, it's a nice sign that they're scared.

The latest bit of welcome-but-wary news comes from the Mobil Corporation, home of smart and expensive quarter page ads in the OpEd sections of major newspapers. Last week the oil giant announced a donation of $500,000 to the Global ReLeaf program of American Forests, the non-profit arm of the timber industry. The goal of Global ReLeaf (such a name!) is to plant 20 million new trees around the world before the end of 2000. Mobil's grant will buy some half-million plantings in four US forests. Anticipating the criticism that planting hundreds of thousands of trees of just one species doesn't help biodiversity all that much, the Mobil money is supposed to be spent on a variety of species in patterns that try to mimic natural ecosystems. These guys are getting sophisticated.

But that's only part of it. "We are pleased to participate in a program that has so many environmental benefits," said the Mobil spokesman, "and also begins to address the climate change issue." Rewind. Begins to address the climate change issue. Mobil recognizes climate change as an "issue" (if not yet a "challenge," much less a "problem") and thinks it needs to play a role in addressing it. Whether lots of new trees in temperate-zone forests will actually retard global warming is a contentious issue in the scientific literature these days, but there's little doubt that on the front of popular politics and public relations, Mobil feels compelled to adopt some greenish coloration. In the republic of the soundbite and focus group, this is interesting, and maybe important.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Great new stuff just posted today from Leonie Haimson, Lib Tree Klimatmeister. All the latest post-Kyoto news can be found in her Climate Change section of In The Trenches.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

1/9: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore
1/9: Goodbye, Delaware
1/8: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict
1/7: The Great Improvement That Didn't
1/6: Proactive, Shmoactive
1/5: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31/97: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997

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