GLOBAL WARMING FEVER SUBSIDES

April 17, 1995
From here, this month's follow-on to the Earth Summit of 1992 looked like a yawner in comparison with its high-fever predecessor. It's not that 11 days of planet-saving diplomacy in Berlin failed to produce anything in the way of principled objectives. Most significantly, developing countries sought to toughen the targets set 3 years ago in Rio de Janeiro for carbon dioxide emissions: from containment to 1990 levels by 2000 to a 20% cut by 2005. And there was a last-minute grope for a

From here, this month's follow-on to the Earth Summit of 1992 looked like a yawner in comparison with its high-fever predecessor.

It's not that 11 days of planet-saving diplomacy in Berlin failed to produce anything in the way of principled objectives. Most significantly, developing countries sought to toughen the targets set 3 years ago in Rio de Janeiro for carbon dioxide emissions: from containment to 1990 levels by 2000 to a 20% cut by 2005. And there was a last-minute grope for a way to give developed countries meaningful credit for paying for developing countries' CO2 reductions.

Yet no one seemed to care. Can science be getting through to people?

U.S. PERSPECTIVE

Or might this observation be a product of the quaint American perspective? The U.S., where this is written, brims with distractions: the O.J. Simpson trial, a makeshift baseball season, a new Hillary Clinton, the same old Newt Gingrich. Then there's MTBE, which few Americans know stands for methyl tertiary butyl ether but from which growing numbers of Americans claim to be growing ill.

The developing controversy over MTBE may help explain why there's less panic now than there was 3 years ago over global warming. But the connection may require some explanation outside the U.S.

In 1990, Congress, in amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1970, mandated new chemistry for gasoline. In fact, it required two new types of gasoline. One is oxygenated gasoline - oxyfuel for short - which must be sold in places with serious carbon monoxide pollution. The other new fuel is reformulated gasoline, which also happens to be oxygenated, although not as much as oxyfuel is. Reformulated gasoline is supposed to cut ozone pollution.

Relatively few Americans know this much about oxyfuel and reformulated gasoline. What most Americans know, now that the reformulated fuel program has taken effect, is that fuels manufactured to congressional specification cost more than those made in traditional ways. Some also suspect Congress specified more cure than U.S. air really needed. So it's little wonder that Americans feel sick. And it's only natural that some of them should blame a code-named chemical not attributable to Midwestern agriculture. Whether MTBE's role is pathological or psychological, these are not people anxious to sacrifice more of their living standards to environmental overkill.

These are, however, people who will demand close attention to science the next time their government sets out to rescue nature from humanity. So what does science say about global warming?

TIME FOR RESEARCH

"Sufficient evidence has accumulated on the small size of the manmade greenhouse effect to make it plain that no scientific justification now exists for economically punishing policies aimed at global reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide," says a new report by the George C. Marshall Institute, a group of scientists that receives no funding from government or industry. "If decisions on carbon dioxide emission limits are postponed for 10 years, the penalty paid will be an increase in global warming of at most 0.2 C. in the next century, compared to the warming that would occur without the 10 year delay. There is time for climatological research in the coming years to provide a firmer basis for the consideration of global strategies."

As experience grows with governments' environmental excesses, economics will help science pull the global warming issue into the realm of reasoned debate. That will be a good thing. Somewhere, obscured so far by fear-mongering and self-righteousness, a real problem may lurk.

Copyright 1995 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.