Environmentalists and others who hailed the 1997 Kyoto accord as a promising first step toward averting catastrophic global warming, and have been disappointed since by the lack of progress toward implementation, took heart from the results of a two-week conference in Buenos Aires last November. Negotiators from more than 150 countries agreed to set operational rules for enforcing the Kyoto pact by late 2000, and Argentina and Kazakhstan became the first developing countries to announce they would voluntarily adopt restrictions on their emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yet while the Clinton administration formally signed the accord in November, the pact still faces intense opposition in Congress. The administration no longer expects even to submit it to the Senate for ratification before a new president is elected in 2000. Without U.S. approval, the Kyoto treaty will not go into effect.

But how serious a step toward controlling the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would the Kyoto agreement really be? And is a first step, big or small, even necessary? Is there, as President Bill Clinton has asserted, "virtually unanimous opinion among scientists that the globe is warming at an unacceptably rapid rate"?

In the accord reached at Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the United States and other industrialized nations pledged to slash their greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012 by certain percentages (seven percent in the U.S. case) below 1990 levels. The agreement permits international trading of emissions "credits"— countries that emit less than their quota of gases can sell to other countries the rights to the balance. No restrictions are placed by the accord on developing nations.

Harvard University economist Richard N. Cooper, writing in Foreign Affairs (Mar.–Apr. 1998), contends that this approach is bound to fail. Global warming could not be subdued without the participation of the developing countries, which by 2010 are expected to contribute 45 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. But China, India, and almost all other developing nations are unwilling to sacrifice their economic development and could not afford to buy emissions credits. A better way to bring manmade climate change under control, in Cooper’s view, would be for nations to tax private-sector greenhouse gas emissions.

Responding in Foreign Affairs (May–June 1998), Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, the chief American negotiator at Kyoto and Buenos Aires, dismisses the tax idea as impractical. "Energy taxes are anathema

in the United States," he points out. While agreeing that Kyoto pact "cannot succeed... unless key developing countries participate," he says that Cooper is "overly pessimistic" about the chances pp. 154–155]. Writing in the same issue of Issues in Science and Technology, he points out that even under the Kyoto accord, "the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will double by the end of the 21st century." The resulting climate changes will be manageable, Coppock believes. It’s what happens after that point that poses the biggest challenge, he says. Rather than being required to spend "excessive amounts of money for costly short-lived retrofits to meet an arbitrary deadline of 2010," he argues, companies should be allowed to achieve low emissions later, by investing now in research and development, and phasing more efficient (and more expensive) technology in as existing equipment reaches the end of its useful life.

But are scientists really sure there is a problem? Writing in SAIS Review (Summer-Fall 1998), Brett Orlando, climate change program officer at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, cites a 1996 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a "mainstream" UNaffiliated group of some 2,000 scientists from around the world. The IPCC reached the "land

of that happening. The subsequent developments at Buenos Aires seemed to lend some credence to Eizenstat’s optimism.

Byron Swift, director of the Technology Center at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, also is optimistic. Emissions trading "could be attractive" to a developing country, he maintains in Issues in Science and Technology (Spring 1998), "because its sale of allowances could generate capital for projects that help it shift to a more prosperous but less carbon-intensive economy." Still, he acknowledges, "most developing countries, led by China and India, are opposed to trading."

The Kyoto agreement’s "crash program" approach is too short-term in orientation, argues Rob Coppock, who was staff director for the National Academy of Sciences’ 1991 report, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming [see WQ, Winter 1992,

mark judgment," he says, that "‘the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the global climate.’" The previous scientific consensus, he says, was that the observed warming— about one degree F. over the last century— could just reflect natural climatic variability.

When the IPCC report was issued, however, Frederick Seitz, chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute and a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, charged in the Wall Street Journal (June 12, 1996) that it had been skewed to produce that "landmark judgment." After the scientists involved had reviewed and accepted the apparently final text, Seitz asserted, changes were made "to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular."

In short, despite all the environmental al warming—and therefore the political alarums and international conferences, it debate about what, if anything, should be appears that the scientific debate about glob-done—is far from over.