Gore Puts Environmental Credentials On Line Vice President Budges On Global Warming - Not Enough For Some, Too Much For Others

It was a high-stakes gamble: Vice President Al Gore makes a one-day visit to jump-start the stalled international talks on global warming and signals he has not caved in to pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists.

His message seemed carefully crafted to placate negotiating partners and domestic environmentalists without baiting powerful business interests and congressional rivals.

But if the Kyoto conference does not produce an aggreement that can pass the Senate - a distinct possibility at this point - Gore could end up saddled with the failure as he prepares to run for president in 2000.

White House aides and Democratic congressmen portrayed the vice president’s 17-hour visit to Kyoto for the United Nations convention on climate change as a breakthrough. But despite signs the United States would soften its position, a treaty was still a distant possibility less than 48 hours before the scheduled end of the conference. To date, most other countries have been irritated by the United States for its inflexible dominance at the bargaining table.

Gore’s last-minute decision to visit Kyoto had raised hopes the United States would toughen its proposal for cuts in greenhouse gases, which are believed to cause a rise in temperature linked to flooding, drought and disease. If so, he would draw praise. Instead, he has been attacked from almost every front.

For starters, Gore’s assertion that the U.S. plan - which offers a return to 1990 levels of gas emissions by 2012 - was at least as strong as others because it includes more gases miffed members of the European Union, who have called for 15 percent reductions below 1990 levels.

John Gummer, Britain’s former environment minister and a Conservative Party legislator on the United Kingdom negotiating team, claimed that Gore was doctoring the truth.

“It’s like saying to your bank manager, “I would have spent $500,000 more than I’ve got, but I only spent $100,000 more than I’ve got,’ when what your bank manager wants is for you to spend nothing more than you’ve got,” Gummer said in disgust. “The European Union will not agree to stabilization (at 1990 levels). I am less hopeful after hearing him today than I was Monday.”

Despite talk of some flexibility in the U.S. position, the biggest obstacle last night remained the gap between the U.S. demand that developing nations agree to reduction commitments and their refusal to do so. U.S. officials have singled out China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia as large developing countries whose emissions will rise rapidly if unchecked, and which must make “meaningful” commitments.

Poor countries note, in turn, that the document signed in 1995 paving the way for Kyoto calls for industrialized nations to reduce emissions first. They say that since rich countries created the carbon dioxide problem through 150 years of industrialization, they should clean up their own mess. It is unfair, they argue, to ask poor countries that are trying to follow the West’s path to development pay for a problem they did not create.

“It’s as if there was a dinner and we were invited after dinner to have a cup of coffee, and then they asked us to pay the bill,” snapped Jose Israel Vargas, Brazil’s Minister for Science and Technology.

Vargas, like negotiators interviewed from India and Indonesia, said that developing countries would not heed Gore’s calls when most industrial nations have not yet fulfilled their promises made five years ago. He said it was particularly galling for the United States to tell the Third World to act when the United States is by far the largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet.

“We want to see first their meaningful contribution,” Vargas said. He added that after “considerable implementation” - perhaps a decade - developing countries would adopt targets too. What is being overlooked, he noted, is that developing nations are already measuring emissions and creating programs to control them.

There has been a pall in Kyoto among small island states, which are threatened with extinction if predictions of rises in sea levels as a result of global warming are accurate. Terry Coe, Minister of Climate Change for the South Pacific island of Niue, said island states have tried to convince developing nations to relax their stance but that it is hard when the United States is “not conceding a damn thing.”

Gore is also being attacked on his other flank by Republicans who charge he is being too soft on the Third World. “Instead of asking for binding commitments … he offered grand rhetoric,” complained Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., co-sponsor of a Senate resolution to reject any treaty that does not include mandatory commitments from developing nations. Hagel is convinced that this omission would cost American jobs. “This administration cannot ignore … the U.S. Senate,” he warned.

Yet recent surveys show plenty of voters disagree. A poll in four cities by the Mellman Group Inc. found that 65 percent of self-proclaimed conservative Republicans polled favored a 20 percent cut in emissions by 2002, far beyond any plan on the table.

Gore was asked in a discussion with reporters what would happen if the U.S. negotiating team took home a proposal that the Senate refused to ratify. “It’ll be a real knock-down, drag-out fight that would be good for the country,” he said.

Gore was upbeat last night and claimed to have generated “momentum in the talks by letting it be known … we’d have more flexibility.” He was vague, though, when asked to define what acceptable Third World participation in a plan would be. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he answered.

Regardless of the outcome here, he vowed that the United States is “prepared to take unilateral action” to control emissions.

Yet when the vice president finished his press conference last night, environmental activists distributed fliers attacking him and shouted, “Al, read your book!”, a reference to his best-selling tract “Earth in the Balance.”

“I find it extraordinarily sad that a man who believes very deeply in this issue came here and reiterated a position that does nothing more than protect the oil and coal industry,” said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based group.

Still, there were others who praised Gore and were excited by rumors last night that the United States might agree to a 5 percent emission reduction. “Things are moving,” said EU spokesman Leo Karapiperis.

Howard Ris, executive director of Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists, also was optimistic. “Elements of a deal are plausible … and we don’t have to ratify it next week,” he said. “Sen. Hagel will never agree to ratify anything, so let’s do the right thing here and then go back and wage the good fight.”