The climate change debate

"The American people expect and deserve a fair, honest, and informed debate on the issue of climate change," said U.S. President Bill Clinton after the House of Representatives killed an effort to block administration seminars on the subject. "Unfortunately, some in Congress would have stifled that debate by effectively imposing a gag order on federal agencies."

Yet Clinton himself has shown precious little interest in "informed debate" on climate change. What he and his administration have shown is an intense urge to manipulate individuals by propounding the worst imaginable fears about a questionable threat. The administration's record is one of accelerating retreat away from a reasonable U.S. position taken by its predecessor at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The Clinton record

Under former President George Bush, the U.S. agreed to seek voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and to study the issue of global warming to determine, among other things, whether observed warming is anything more than natural variation in measured temperature. It also insisted on participation by developing countries, which will account for most future growth in emissions.

That didn't suit Clinton. By 1994, his administration was proclaiming failure of the voluntary efforts agreed in Rio. In 1995, the Clinton team seized on the most alarming part of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-that human effects might be evident in climate data. It dismissed scientific doubt about that finding and ignored the bulk of the report, which diminished the possible extent of whatever warming threat may exist.

In rapid succession, the administration accepted the concept of internationally binding targets for greenhouse-gas emissions then agreed to exemption of developing countries. In Kyoto, Japan, last December, it acquiesced to an agreement that hits the U.S. harder than other industrial nations and, by exempting developing countries, ensures that mandated efforts, however costly, will go for naught.

To meet its Kyoto goal-greenhouse-gas emissions in 2010 not exceeding 93% of their 1990 level-the U.S. would have to cut output by at least 30% from baseline forecasts for the target year. Members of the European Union would have to reduce emissions by only 16% from business-as-usual projections.

To cut emissions by the necessary amount, the U.S. would have to replace much fossil energy with more-costly alternatives. A study by WEFA Inc. predicts that the Kyoto prescriptions would nearly double energy and electricity prices, raise gasoline prices by 65¢/gal, and cut average household income nearly $2,700/year.

Because of the costs and lack of convincing need, the Senate won't ratify the Kyoto treaty. Kyoto opponents think the administration will try to impose the remedies administratively. The Department of Energy's proposed energy strategy, with its heavy preference for nonpetroleum energy, supports their suspicion. The "education efforts" that lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to ban would have been mere propaganda.

Compliant audience

Clinton doesn't want debate. He wants a compliant audience to which to pitch unwarranted sacrifice of money and personal freedom. He wants no one to laugh when his minions claim that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 30% in a dozen years will cost families only $100/year. He wants no questions when he and others in his administration exaggerate the threat of climate change and misrepresent scientific thought on the subject. He wants Americans to take seriously a vice-president who calls contemporaneous weather evidence of a changing climate.

The lawmakers who wanted to ban federal seminars on the Kyoto protocol weren't trying to gag federal agencies. They were properly declaring that taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize any more lies from an administration that has squandered its credibility on the issue.