Not Just Hot Air

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In the first three months after his Inauguration, Bill Clinton managed to do what the Republicans couldn't accomplish in a full year of campaigning: make George Bush's environmental record almost look respectable. First the new Administration let operations begin at an Ohio hazardous-waste incinerator -- the world's largest -- that both Clinton and Vice President Al Gore had opposed during campaign swings through the state. Then the White House backed away from a plan to help preserve vast stretches of public land in Western states by raising fees and tightening rules for ranchers, miners and loggers who use federal resources. It even cut the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency below what was requested by the previous Administration. "EPA would have been better off if Bush had been re- elected!" said a chagrined Ralph De Gennaro, senior budget analyst for Friends of the Earth.

So when Clinton stood up among the palms and ferns at the U.S. Botanical Gardens to deliver his Earth Day speech last week, his toughest critics were those green activists who had supported him so wholeheartedly during the presidential campaign. When the speech was over, you could almost hear the environmentalists heave a communal sign of relief: their new President showed he really does have a green streak. Reversing a stand that Bush took at last year's Earth Summit in Rio, Clinton declared that the U.S. would sign an international treaty to protect the diversity of living species. And the President followed through on a pledge that briefly seemed in jeopardy: he committed the U.S. to a specific timetable for curbing the release of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases believed to be causing a long- term rise in temperatures around the globe.

Of the two initiatives, the global-warming plan will be much more controversial and tougher to carry out. It calls for a rollback of greenhouse- gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. The announcement represents a major victory for Gore, whose support for the measure met resistance at the last minute from Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. They argued that the effects of emissions controls on U.S. industry had not been studied sufficiently, a position reminiscent of the one the Bush Administration took last year when it torpedoed a similar plan at the Earth Summit.

Though Gore has prevailed for now, the debates within the Administration may be just beginning. As with health-care reform, the President put forward the bold outline of a plan and ordered his staff to figure out how to accomplish it -- in this case, by August. We'll give you the details, he was saying, when we work them out.

That will not be easy. America was built on cheap and seemingly unlimited supplies of carbon-based fuels -- wood, coal, oil and natural gas. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. today produces nearly 25% of global carbon emissions. If nothing is done, the country will be pouring 100 million more tons into the atmosphere by the turn of the century.