Word: kyoto
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...going to spend an election year warning voters that they?re going to have to cut back on their consumption of gasoline," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. Even the limited cutbacks ? when measured against the scale of the crisis ? in greenhouse gas emissions envisaged in the landmark Kyoto accord signed in 1997 was rejected 95-0 by the Senate. After all, no legislator wants to tell his or her voters to get rid of their SUVs. "So instead of handling environmental problems, the White House is forced to spend its time figuring out how to handle Congress, where...
...warming as little more than "liberal claptrap," as California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher puts it. Others interpret the climate moves as a sly attempt by the Administration to enact by bits and pieces what the Senate declared it would not do when it voted 95-0 to oppose the Kyoto treaty, an international pact to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that is strongly supported by Vice President Al Gore. Moreover, some politicians fall back on the uncertainty argument, asserting that the enactment of costly preventive measures now, before all the evidence is in, would invite economic disaster. Still others...
...there is pressure on Congress to confront the issue, and it is coming from an unexpected quarter: the business community. While commercial interests joined forces to block the Kyoto treaty in the Senate two years ago, the opposition has since splintered. Even such big oil companies as BP Amoco concede that global warming demands a serious response. Just two weeks ago, a subgroup of FORTUNE 500 companies known as the Business Roundtable called on government to encourage the development of advanced technologies to "address concerns about climate change." And when he visited Washington recently, Ford Motor chairman Bill Ford said...
Such an environmental disconnect may not be much of a mystery. Environmentalists complain that over the past two years industry groups have launched a coordinated advertising campaign to torpedo the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which requires industrial nations to reduce greenhouse emissions. More than $13 million has been spent on ads to block ratification of the treaty by the U.S. Senate. "The purpose of the ads was to convince most Americans that there isn't a problem or that it's too expensive to fix," says National Environmental Trust spokesman Peter Kelly...
Environmentalists also criticize President Clinton for what they believe is his failure to press the issue. Only last week, Clinton moved for Kyoto treaty changes that environmental groups see as industry-pleasing loopholes. Says Daniel Weiss, the Sierra Club's political director: "Timid leaders communicate hopelessness." And hopelessness breeds indifference...