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TODAY Thursday 12 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Stuart Eizenstat's Smart Bomb

I am in Washington this morning -- to devise a courtroom strategy for the President's attorneys and review target selection with Pentagon brass -- and I noticed that there was nothing in the breakfast Washington Post about Stuart Eizenstat's appearance before a Senate comittee yesterday.

Stuart Eizenstat is the Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and Agriculture, and he was testifying before a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his capacity as head of the US delegation to the Kyoto conference last December. I know this by watching C-SPAN last night (nothing good on ESPN).

This is not to criticize the Post. It was a banner news day. The Russians were said ("according to sources" in American spy agencies) to have sold to Iraq a "5,000 liter fermentation vessel," purportedly useful in the creation of biological weapons. Marcia Lewis was getting the third degree from Kenneth Starr. Janet Reno asked for a special prosecutor to investigate Interior Secretary Babbitt. Picabo Street won a gold medal, and a US Magistrate ordered the PGA to let Casey Martin use a motorized golf cart. And that was just the front page. Inside there was the Senate on human cloning, the Vice President on tobacco indemnities, Oprah Winfrey on the 36-year-old teacher reinarcerated for meeting with her 14-year-old lover, and the President on the desirability of quick Senate ratification of a treaty to expand NATO. I read them all start to finish, except for tobacco.

But it may be that Undersecretary Eizenstat's appearance matters more I the long run. He told the Senators very clearly that the Administration was not going to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification until developing countries had obliged themselves to undertake "meaningful" reductions in the "rate of growth" of their greenhouse gas emissions. He named China and India by name. He said that the president -- who is bound to sign the Protocol before March 1999 -- will indeed sign, but will time the signature "in view of all the circumstances, including diplomatic considerations." He forcefully denied that the Protocol affected military capabilities, established a global bureaucracy, hamstrung industry, or prefigured a carbon tax for Americans (if only!).

The Undersecretary said he did not underestimate the difficulty of securing "meaningful" commitments from the Third World. If it only took a few months to secure such commitments, he said, then the President would sign the Protocol and the treaty-with-side-agreements would be submitted for ratification forthwith. But he doubted that would happen. Instead, he said, he "would be surprised" if agreement could be reached within a year. It might take "years," he said, but the Senators could be assured that no treaty would be submitted that flouted the 95-0 pre-Kyoto Byrd Resolution demanding participation by developed and developing countries alike.

Well. So much for the great Senate debate of the Spring of '98. As Hibernicus and others have been telling us for a while, the Administration would lose big if a vote on Kyoto were held anytime soon. It will be interesting to see what kinds of commitments our government will be able to wring out of the Chinese and the Indians (and Nigerians and Indonesians and Brazilians), and when. Will this fall's meeting in Buenos Aires provide the occasion for a grand compact or the opening round of a diplomatic/economic brouhaha? And that question, in its turn, is not unrelated to what happens in the next thirty days in the waters off Mesopotamia.

One final thought. The overall tenor of Eizenstat's presenation was robust and patriotic. This is a great opportunity for America; we got most of what we wanted in negotiations; the solutions are market solutions; and we're going to insist that all our international competitors get on board. The one significant bit of softness was the Underecretary's talk of slowing the "rate of growth" of greenhouse gas emissions. If reductions are relative rather than absolute, then there's ample wiggle room on this question, and the Administration just may pull the rabbit out of the Stetson. But, apparently, not anytime soon.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Nobody covers climate change better than Leonie Haimson of our In The Trenches section. Today we're posting the latest revision of her excellent "New in the Literature" feature. Please give it a look.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

2/11: Alligator in the Coal Mine
2/10: Inconvenient Public Opinion
2/9: Remember Penn Station
2/6: Adam Smith and Automobile Efficiency
2/5: Clean Water, Naturally
2/4: Roll, Storms, Roll
2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish

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