Greenhouse Gas Plan Punctured

Stopped 'em at the pass. Temporarily, at least. That's what happened last week when the alert and no-nonsense Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., assembled a bipartisan coalition of 61 U.S. senators to sign on to a resolution to block a scheme by Vice President Al Gore, Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth and other environmental crusaders to impose a new layer of regulations on the U.S. economy. Purpose of the new red tape: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help prevent so-called global climate change.

Here's the background. The agreement from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on global climate change called on all signatory parties -- not just the developed nations -- to adopt policies and programs aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Progress has been slow, in part because there is wide disagreement in the global scientific community about the extent of the warming problem and how many jobs, how much prosperity and how much economic growth should be sacrificed to a theory espoused by scientists, many of whom in the 1970s were predicting global cooling and spreading ice caps, and to evidence which comes primarily from computer simulations.

Some of the main international foot-draggers are China, Mexico, India, South Korea and other less-developed countries. It's their view (properly so, I think) that greenhouse gas reductions are a huge new tax and thus a damper on their policies and programs to improve domestic living standards. So, in April 1995, at a U.N. meeting in Berlin, Gore and Wirth teed up a scheme for a U.N. meeting scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, this December to get the greenhouse gas agenda moving again. Later called the "Berlin Mandate," this scheme "solved" the political problem simply by exempting the 129 less-developed countries that view these reductions as folly, while requiring the U.S. and other developed nations to adopt strict mandatory reductions that would, for example, cap CO2 emissions at 1990 levels.

Yet greenhouse gas emissions from the less-developed countries are increasing rapidly, will surpass those of the U.S. by 2015 and will constitute 80% of the new greenhouse gas emissions a century from now. Accordingly, Byrd, joined by 60 other senators, warned the Gore-Wirth crowd that the less-developed countries exemption is inconsistent with the global approach called for in the 1992 agreement and could result in "serious harm to the U.S. economy, including significant job loss, trade disadvantages (and) increased energy and consumer costs." Therefore, they said, the U.S. should not be a signatory to any agreement in Kyoto unless it also applies to the less-developed countries. According to Byrd, "What is good for the developed goose, should be good for the developing gander (and) both should be responsible for their actions...to clean up the global barnyard." What Gore-Wirth would do, however, is open the door for massive government involvement in managing America's energy and energy-intensive industries, such as transportation.

The Gore-Wirth strategy is more than a cynical power grab by the executive branch. It's an anti-democratic connivance hatched by mandarins who think they have the right to pick and choose their scientific evidence, to use the coercive power of government mandates, legitimated by international agencies, to restructure the American economy and to lead a government take over of the energy and transportation industries.

Gore-Wirth thought they could deliver the mail to environmental special interests and others in their core constituency by flying under the radar. But thanks to Byrd and his Senate colleagues, Gore-Wirth and their immoderate and overzealous agenda are now a growing blip on the congressional radar screen. With their maneuvers in the sunshine, there is hope that reason will prevail. That's good for the rest of us.