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TODAY Thursday 19 March 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: About This Global Economy Business...

Three reports yesterday from Reuters (sent along to us by Planet Ark) highlight some of the complicated problems in trying to protect the environment and stoke a global economy at the same time. These subjects are treated in depth in the trade sites recommended by Mark Ritchie, but yesterday's news from Europe provides some timely points of departure.

It might help to proceed from the national to the global. Report Number One comes from Oslo, where Norwegian manufacturers and unions protested a proposed national tax on carbon dioxide emissions. If Norway imposed such a tax unilaterally, they said, energy-intensive industries like paper, metals, and chemicals would have no choice but to take their plants and jobs overseas.

Report Number Two, filed by Gillian Handyside from Brussels, tells of an announcement by the European Commission that grants the logic of the Norwegian protests. The Commission said that European Union member states are creating a crazy quilt of incentives for renewable energy sources (and disincentives for non-renewable sources), with the inevitable result that big energy consumers will shop around for the nation with the smallest penalty for using fossil fuels. There must be a uniform EU approach, said the Commission, for there to be any reasonable hope of complying with the Kyoto Treaty targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Europe as a whole.

Report Number Three, by Robert Evans in Geneva, kicks the problem to the ultimate global level. The head of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, gave a speech in which he deplored the tendency of certain governments and pressure groups to want to encumber WTO with responsibilities for enforcing international environmental standards. For two years a WTO committee has labored fruitlessly to come up with a world consensus on how green concerns could be incorporated into the rules of international trade. Poor countries suspect that environmental rules are a protectionist device to shield rich economies from competition. Environmentalist NGOs worry that some of their big weapons -- trade sanctions and boycotts against countries whose exporters are doing nature dirty (using too-fine fishing nets, for example) -- will be removed from their quiver by free-trade zealots. Enviro nervousness was not relieved yesterday by Mr. Ruggiero's remarks. "Asking the WTO to solve issues which are not central to its work... is not just a recipe for failure," he said. "It could do untold harm to the trading system itself, with all the collateral effects this would have for a sustainable global economy."

The truth is, no one yet knows how to run this big economic machine of ours. Certainly not for conservation purposes.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Liberty Tree, despite the impression often made by its robustly patriotic name, likes to think of itself as an American enterprise with a cosmopolitan point of view. Counting all 121 contributors, we have completed many of the novels of Henry James (McKibben made it through The Golden Bowl), and deport ourselves capably with menus in most of the major Indo-European tongues. We have vacationed widely. But just to make sure we stayed in the current, as the French say, we called upon two experts on the environmental scene in Europe -- Marianne Ginsburg and Jennifer Mitchell -- to tell you and us where to go on the Internet for the best websites on green activities in what Irish imperialists like to call An tAontas Eorpach (Euroopan Unioni to their Finnish allies).

 

Recent "Today" columns:

3/18: Toilet Heresy
3/17: St Patrick and Your Asteroid Insurance
3/16: Rebellion in Tennessee
3/13: Good News from the Senate
3/12: Children and Cancer
3/11: Save Our Beaches!
3/10: Die Gruenen und der SDP
3/9: In Search for the Holy Grail of the Forests
3/6: My Doom, Your Gloom
3/5: The Great D. P. Moynihan
3/4: "An Earthquake in Insurance"
3/3: Salmon Farming
3/2: Our Friends the Duck Killers
2/27: Trust El Nino
2/26: That Darn Triple-A
2/25: Cutting a Deal on Endangered Species
2/24: Fire? Again?
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.