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TODAY Wednesday 25 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Wednesday 25 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: The World at 42nd Street
It is fun these days in this town, for us normally obscure enviros. The UN holds a big meeting on the Fifth Anniversary of the Rio Summit: it's in the papers, it's on TV, Clinton's coming tomorrow. Global warming, that paradigmatically obscure threat, makes it on to the public agenda (thanks in no small measure to the bad cop/good cop ads being run in profusion by the oil and coal companies).
Mother Nature is cooperating. Today is New York at its steamy worst, and tomorrow promises the same. Ninety degrees, overcast, muggy beyond belief. Men in suits attempt to walk down the street fully clothed, then lose the jackets, then trudge along dispiritedly as great oval perspiration stains spread along their backs. [It's not just Houston and Phoenix and other Sunbelt monsters that aren't imaginable without air conditioning. This city, which once managed to function on fans and open windows, now does almost all of its paper-shuffling and button-pressing in tall post-1950 boxes that depend on central air as much as buildings anywhere else.]
The UN-ness of the big meeting is also a tonic to enviros who tend to go on about "global" this or that. At last an opportunity to talk on an international scale, to break free, albeit momentarily, from the tyranny of the pollsters who tell us to keep things local if you can and national if you have to. Next week we can go back to conspicuous worrying about the effects of climate change on the health of American citizens; today and tomorrow we feel licensed to talk about the more significant, more immediate threats that new weather patterns will bring to people in the tropics. Today and tomorrow we can say that the great environmental perils honor no frontiers, but that a rich person in the North will surely escape their wrath more easily than a poor person in the South. And that the South will try to be rich, will try to close the economic gap with the North, and will watch what we do rather than listen to what we say. And that Japan and Europe, despite protestations, will not get too far out in front of the Americans. And that therefore, in the end, the highest obligation of an internationally-minded American is to work in America with Americans. Sooner or later, you realize that the best climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto this December will still have to be ratified by the United States senate in 1998.Back to the focus groups.
The focus groups are already telling the oil and coal people that their best hopes for persuading American public opinion are to warn against the economic downturn that would accompany "rigid rules and timetables" and to point out the inherent unfairness of proposed arrangements by which developed nations would be obliged to make cuts in greenhouse gas emissions well ahead of the developing countries ("our competitors in the global marketplace").
So the opponents of strict reductions are talking about international dimensions in robust American patriotic language that appeals to the nation's sense of a) fairness; and b) entitlement. The proponents of strict reductions (us) have to take these issues on in an equally emphatic patriotic tone saying a) every country will have to do something, it's just that we and the Japanese and the Europeans are getting a head start; and b) that with American ingenuity we can make a buck and save the earth at the same time. Plus: c) it's the right thing to do and Americans do the right thing.
By 2010, says the conventional wisdom, developing nations will be emitting half of the planet's greenhouse gases. While the talks are underway at the UN, China is developing 75 new power plants -- all to be built by private concerns -- for 82,000 megawatts of power. India is developing 84 private plants for 59,000 megawatts. No one is waiting for a nicely-negotiated protocol.
TODAY ON THE SITE
For an excellent guide to Website resources on one of the most economically important of the developing countries, check out our High Fives section for Ruben Kraiem's authoritative tour of Mexico.
This week's "Today" columns:
6/24: Il Faut Que Get a Grip
6/23: The Emily Dickinson Parking Garage
To access "Today" columns from previous weeks, click "Archives" below.