Summit Goals

Kyoto conference: a curtain-raiser

November 27, 1997

(CNN) -- The challenge is immense: Get leaders from more than 150 countries with competing interests to agree on possibly painful solutions to a problem that may not have a tangible effect on their peoples for 75 or 100 years.

But that's the task facing delegates to the conference on global warming that opened December 1 in Kyoto, Japan.

A majority of scientists agree that global warming, caused by higher levels of gases that trap heat in Earth's atmosphere, could lead to catastrophic consequences. Among them: flooding of low-lying areas, droughts and more severe weather that could cause food shortages and the displacement of millions of people.

But nobody yet knows how soon the detrimental effects might come to affect human beings. And a minority of scientific skeptics think the whole idea is overblown and unnecessarily alarmist.

Trying to draft a treaty in Kyoto, then, won't be easy. Industrialized leaders such as the United States, Japan and the members of the European Union have proposed setting definite targets for reduction of greenhouse gases. And they want major developing countries, such as China, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, to cut their greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Background

In the fall of 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a consensus document from 2,500 international climate scientists, economists, and risk-analysis experts. They declared that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." They projected that melting polar ice caps would raise sea levels by between two and two and a half feet by the mid 21st century, suggesting major storm and erosion impacts on coastal areas and islands. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

But many of those developing countries believe the initial round of targets should not apply to them. Such limits, they say, would require them to rein in their industrial development. And they argue that their economic futures should not be limited now to fix a problem that is, in large part, a legacy of the past policies of the industrialized countries.

Greenhouse gasses are caused by burning fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas. Limits would require countries to reduce consumption of those fuels by their industries, in the generation of their electricity -- and also the direct use of those fuels by their people, such as in automobiles. Energy, in turn, could become more expensive, and people may be forced to change their energy-using lifestyles.

The big question is how willing people will be to make sacrifices now to prevent a problem they may not see in their lifetimes.

Limiting the use of fossil fuels would also affect the economies of major oil producing countries, such as those in the Middle East, and large coal exporters, such as Australia. It would require countries with antiquated industrial technologies to spend substantial sums of money to upgrade them.

The 10-ton gorilla at the Kyoto summit, of course, is the United States, the world's largest energy consumer that alone produces nearly a quarter of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide.

U.S. President Bill Clinton has committed his country to reducing levels of greenhouse emissions in the United States to 1990 levels by 2012. But U.S. officials are emphasizing that this can be done largely through widespread adoption of more energy-efficient technologies -- and that major sacrifices by American consumers won't be necessary.

Domestic critics are skeptical that this so-called "win-win" strategy is feasible, and they are warning American consumers about job losses and significant increases in the price of gasoline and electricity. Before the Kyoto treaty is even drafted, a multi-million dollar advertising campaign has been launched on American television to build opposition to it.

Clinton has called on developing countries to agree to limits as well. Indeed, the U.S. Congress has to approve the agreement, and congressional leaders have made it clear that they may reject it if the developing world is exempt. And without U.S. participation, any treaty would be something of a paper tiger.

But despite the difficulty of the task facing the delegates at Kyoto, those sounding the alarm about global warming insist that somehow, some way, the significant hurdles must be overcome -- because the very future of Earth itself is what's hanging in the balance.

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