The Clinton administration's new climate treaty has no chance of passing the U.S. Senate next year, and maybe even this decade. But the thing to keep in mind is that its backers don't care. Their cause is as much about religion as about normal politics.
Most politicians will settle for passing a reform or two. Vice President Al Gore has bigger ambitions. He's out to save the Earth from the ravages of humanity. When your goal is that grand, the U.S. Senate is just a speed bump on the road to salvation.
That's the only way to appreciate what Mr. Gore and his band of negotiators were willing to concede this week in Kyoto. To mollify Europe, they bound the U.S. to greater reductions in carbon emissions than even President Clinton proposed. Then they let poor countries off the hook from similar obligations--flying in the face of a bipartisan Senate warning. Their only goal was a deal, on any terms.
This makes a kind of strange sense to anyone who's read Mr. Gore's speeches over the years. His talk in Kyoto this week was a classic of his genre and deserves more attention. No one else in politics speaks in his language of cosmic certitude. He's Jack Kemp on capital gains without the nuance.
"We have reached a fundamentally new stage in the development of human civilization," Mr. Gore told the delegates, dispensing with a few thousand years of history. This is now the age of Eco-Man, in which curbing greenhouse gases is humanity's new highest purpose.
Not that this will be easy. "To do so requires humility," Mr. Gore also said, "because the spiritual roots of our crisis are pridefulness and a failure to understand and respect our connections to God's Earth and to each other." In Mr. Gore's vision, humankind is the despoiler of earthly Eden and the internal combustion engine is the fruit of original sin.
Alas, the veep's "humility" doesn't extend to the accuracy of the computer climate models that churn out the warming alarums. About these guesses he is certain. So certain that in Kyoto he compared doubters to "the tobacco company spokesmen who insisted for so long that smoking did no harm."
Maybe Mr. Gore has in mind the "many climate experts" cited in the May 16, 1997, issue of highly respected Science magazine, hardly a business shill. Many scientists, the article said, "caution that it is not at all clear yet that human activities have begun to warm the planet--or how bad greenhouse warming will be when it arrives."
Yet the same politician who once defended tobacco subsidies and took tobacco campaign cash now says these scientists are the moral equivalent of Joe Camel.
Another tactic of the true believer is to warn about the coming Apocalypse. Thus Mr. Gore now tells us that if his treaty isn't passed, the world will see "more record floods and droughts. Diseases and pests spreading to new areas. Crop failures and famines." (And you thought it was just El Niño.)
Yet Mr. Gore says his critics are the alarmists. A second article in Science (Nov. 7) reports that "predictions that global warming will spark epidemics have little basis, say infectious-disease specialists." Affluence and public hygiene have more to do with disease than climate.
But these are facts, and Kyoto is more about faith. It's about showing that Mr. Gore is willing to stand up for his beliefs, a way of separating his own persona from Mr. Clinton's image of serial sincerity. Even if the treaty doesn't pass while the veep runs for president, a fight for it will show his tenacity.
Mr. Gore figures, and with justification, that he can wait out the Republican Senate. The treaty doesn't need to pass this Congress but can wait while a public campaign is waged for it. He knows public opinion is unformed and will depend on how the issue is framed and debated.
Meanwhile, Kyoto is a way of bringing the moral pressure of the world, such as it is, to bear on American politicians. It's a strategy that worked to pass the chemical-weapons treaty just this year, several years after it was signed.
Mr. Gore also knows he'll win eventually if his opponents stick to their current line that the treaty will cost too much. The veep can invoke the cause of children and the planet's future, while his opponents sound like mercenaries.
"Exxon's profits vs. Mother Teresa is not a debate you want to be having," says Jonathan Adler of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Especially in good economic times, and because Mr. Gore will stay purposely vague about just how these "binding targets" will be met and paid for.
The real threat to Mr. Gore's Kyoto dreams is if Americans begin to doubt there's any real threat. If no one can be sure that humans are causing the Earth to warm, or even how much of a problem it is if it does warm, what's the point of breaking a political sweat? This is why Mr. Gore and his aides are so dismissive and caustic toward anyone who doubts their claims or disputes their evidence.
Al Gore will run in 2000 as Bill Clinton's successor, but Kyoto shows he will also advertise a difference. He wants to run as a man of greater vision and conviction.
The risk is that voters may also detect, in his fervor and demagoguery, the voice of a zealot.
Copyright © 1997 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved. Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.