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TODAY Tuesday 5 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Necessary Vulgarization

To the Old Hands, it is deeply gratifying and a little annoying when what had been a cult enthusiasm becomes a staple of mainstream culture. The tribes of climate change zealots have the pleasure of seeing their passion covered on the front page of today's New York Times, but the more successfully they attract public attention to the issue the less successfully can they determine its outcome in the mess of world history. We are like the teenagers who crowded the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1962 to hear the Silver Beetles: excited and flattered when the boys storm the world two years later, but feeling the loss of a homegrown intimacy.

For the policy wonks of carbon dioxide, this summer has been the analog of January 1964, when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" went number one in Billboard. The President of the United States makes speeches, convenes symposiums, and shapes consensus. The oil and coal lobbies throw around millions of dollars for think-tank reports, private briefings, and newspaper ads. The European Union comes out for strict greenhousae gas reductions, the Australians cry foul, the Japanese express anxiety, and the Chinese hold their cards close. The US Senate passes a resolution that enjoins the Administration not to make any climate deal that lets developing countries get off too easy. Environmental organizations raise money, hire new staff, and re-deploy some others. And, at last, the negotiations begin: the governments of the world send delegates to Bonn to begin the hardball talks that are supposed to culminate in an international treaty signed in Kyoto in mid-December. Climate change moves from the category of background noise to above-the-fold news analysis.

William K. Stevens reports today from Bonn that this growth in public salience has led to a proliferation of interested parties trying to monitor and influence the talks at the Maritim Hotel. He quotes a representative of the National Mining Association as saying that industry lobbyists on climate change had grown from a homogeneous club of four or five pros to an unwieldy band of scores of people representing an interesting variety of views. As noted earlier ("Petroleum Heresy"), British Petroleum has broken ranks and said that well, maybe something should be done about global warming after all, and most Big Oil companies have intelligently hedged their carbon bets with massive new holdings in natural gas ("Smart Exxon"). The more-or-less enlightened oil and gas interests need the coal and mineral interests just like Bill Clinton needs the Senate, the Europeans needs the Mauritians, and the Environmental Defense Fund needs the Sierra Club: people ready to make a deal need other people on their side more extreme than they are.

And everybody needs the Chinese. Talk about dealbreakers. Indians and Brazilians and Nigerians and Malaysians won't sign on to anything that the Chinese won't sign on to. And the Chinese have huge coal reserves and a reasonable skepticism about preachments from the North on limits to growth. But American domestic politics won't allow the industrialized countries to cut a deal that doesn't make the Chinese agree to some specific greenhouse gas reductions at some specific date. In the conference rooms and corridors and coffee shops of the Maritim Hotel, a dull establishment in the dullest of cities, a great historical process is underway, but don't forget you knew us when nobody cared.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

There's some good new stuff In The Trenches. Carolyn Strange, our ace reporter on the endocrine disrupters beat, has just added some useful information on how the abstract-sounding problem of chemically-induced hormone change actually plays itself out in everyday life. Check out what you can do and with whom you can learn and work.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/04: More Crime, Please
8/01: Wise Use, Smart Use
7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf
7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening
7/24: Top and Bottom
7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess

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