Environmental Apocalypse Or Chicken Little?, March 11, 2001
Scientists Now Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change
Ford Drives In Right Direction
Energy Policy Should Be Refocused In New Year
The First Horseman: Environmental Disaster
Al Gore: 'Eco-Realist'
Welcome Policy Shift

Environmental forecasts are increasingly sounding a drumbeat of disaster: The earth is warming up faster than predicted, drinking water is becoming scarce in much of the world, deserts are expanding and there are fewer fish to eat in the boundless oceans.

"U.N. Scientists Warn of Climate Armageddon," screamed The Scotsman, a leading Edinburgh newspaper, after a United Nations report last month forecast dramatic and potentially disastrous climate changes before the end of the century.

The report, by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said temperatures may increase by 2.5 to 10.5 degrees in this century — much faster than previously estimated. Possible consequences include the mass death of forests, widespread coastal flooding as a result of sea level rises and more severe storms, the disappearance of countless animal and plant species, farmland turned into desert, the destruction of coral reefs and Pacific and Caribbean islands sinking beneath the sea.

The 1,000-page report was especially noteworthy because of the authority behind it — 700 of the world's leading scientists participated in its production.

Some critics say most of the dire trends, particularly climate change, have been exaggerated by environmentalists. Other problems, they say, can be fixed by eliminating government subsidies that encourage waste and replacing them with market incentives that encourage protection of valuable resources such as fish stocks and fresh water.

But climate change is just one of a number of global environmental trends that are ringing alarms:

A report endorsed by 150 of the world's top marine scientists and released at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco last month called for the creation of a worldwide network of no-fishing zones, saying it may be the last, best hope of replenishing the Earth's depleted fish stocks and saving species.

The International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Resources Institute, two prominent environmental think tanks, reported last month that the planet may be unable to feed the 1.5 billion people expected to be added to the globe over the next 20 years because farming practices have degraded soils, parched aquifers, polluted waters and caused the loss of animal and plant species.

The Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., in its "State of the World 2001" report in January, said that the world has reached a "dangerous crossroads." "Signs of accelerated ecological decline have coincided with a loss of political momentum on environmental issues as evidenced by the recent breakdown in international climate talks," Worldwatch said.

A report from the Population Information Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, also in January, was similarly dire: "In the past decade in every environmental sector conditions have either failed to improve or they are worsening ... Without practicing sustainable development, humanity faces a deteriorating environment and may even invite ecological disaster."

Even the CIA has joined the chorus. In an evaluation of national security threats released in December, the intelligence agency forecast that within 15 years nearly half the world's population — 3 billion people — will live in "water stressed" regions, heightening the possibility of regional conflict over water. The situation will be especially severe in the Middle East, parts of Africa, northern China, and South Asia. China experienced water riots last summer and some experts believe the situation could eventually lead to internal instability and political chaos if allowed to continue unchecked.

Exacerbating most of these trends is population growth. The U.N. Population Program last week increased its forecast for 2050 to 9.3 billion people. The world passed the 6 billion milestone in 1999 and is gaining 78 million people annually, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Philadelphia every week.

"There is kind of a momentum built into this," said Don Hinrichsen, author of the Johns Hopkins study and a consultant to the U.N. "It's like trying to stop a moving freight train."

Is this an environmental apocalypse that will happen soon or mere alarmism on the part of Chicken Little scientists? Some world leaders are taking the forecasts very seriously.

"We would be irresponsible to treat these predictions as scare mongering," British Prime Minister Tony Blair told a World Wildlife Fund conference in London on Tuesday. "They represent the considered opinions of some of the world's best scientists. We cannot afford to ignore them."

Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji unveiled China's first "green" five-year plan this week. Among other things, the plan calls for Chinese industries to recycle 60 percent of the water they use by 2005 and the planting of a 2,800-mile belt of trees to hold back the rapidly encroaching Gobi Desert.

But there has also been a lack of progress in many areas. International climate change negotiations were suspended in November after the United States and European countries could not resolve key issues on implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, a global warming reduction treaty signed by the United States and dozens of other nations in Japan in 1997 but never ratified by Congress. Negotiations are scheduled to resume in Bonn, Germany, in July.

Not everyone thinks the world is in such peril.

"These are examples of economic mismanagement," said Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource programs at the libertarian Cato Institute. "They are not examples of some underlying apocalypse that we can't escape from."

Environmentalists, Taylor said, also ignore positive global trends, such as improved living standards, greater longevity, and advances in technology.

"Ever since the '60s and the '70s we've been warned about population bombs and food running out and ecological apocalypse ... and it never happened," Taylor said.

One reason some earlier forecasts failed to come true is that governments and the public took action first, environmentalists said. And the data and knowledge available to scientists has increased exponentially in recent years.

Some scientists worry that they have done the public a disservice by being too quiet about their findings.

In a speech to the American Meteorological Society in Albuquerque, N.M., in January, paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck, who studies ancient weather patterns for clues to the future, said research underway now appears to show that effects of climate change can occur abruptly, in a matter of a handful of years, rather than the gradual increase anticipated in the U.N. report.

Further, there is reason to believe that even a small amount of warming could lead to potentially catastrophic increases in sea level, said Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona.

"These problems that humankind is causing could be unprecedented in their impacts on society," Overpeck said. "Because the stakes are so high, we have to work harder to make sure society understands what is going on."

The environmental future in the U.S.

A snapshot of U.S. environmental trends as seen by the United Nations' Population Program, the Worldwatch Institute and some environmentalists:

Climate Change: The impact of an estimated rise of 5 to 10 degrees over the next 100 years will vary by region. In the Southeast, frequent storm surges may threaten coastal development, while barrier islands and beaches disappear. Woodlands and grasslands may replace forests. The skiing season is likely to be shorter and summer heat waves in cities more severe in the Northeast. But Great Plains states may see longer growing seasons and higher crop yields. The arid Southwest may see more rain and alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains may disappear. Warmer water temperatures may accelerate destruction of coral reefs off Florida and Hawaii.

Species: The Nature Conservancy estimated in 1997 that 16 percent of mammals, 14 percent of birds and 37 percent of freshwater fish species in the United States are either extinct, imperiled or vulnerable. The number of ocean fish stocks in jeopardy jumped from 98 to a record high 107, including such popular commercial and sport fish as red snapper, summer flounder and Atlantic swordfish, the Commerce Department reported last month.

Greenhouse Gases: The United States, with only 5 percent of the world's population, produces one-fourth of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly half the 4.5 percent worldwide increase in such emissions over the past decade is attributable to Americans. The United States uses more than a third of the world's transportation energy.

Population: The U.S. population, now at 283 million, is forecast to rise to nearly 400 million by 2050. The United States has the highest birth rate among industrial nations and is the only industrial nation forecast for population growth. An influx of 1 million immigrants a year accounts for a significant share of the increase.

Groundwater Pollution: Nearly 60 percent of wells sampled in U.S. agricultural areas in the 1990s contained synthetic pesticides. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 100,000 underground storage tanks in the United States are leaking. Sixty percent of the nation's most hazardous liquid waste — solvents, heavy metals and radioactive material - is injected into deep aquifers via thousands of injection wells.

Greenhouse gases produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels are altering the atmosphere in ways that affect earth's climate, and it is likely that they have "contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last 50 years," an international panel of climate scientists has concluded. The panel said temperatures could go higher than previously predicted if emissions are not curtailed.

This represents a significant shift in tone — from couched to relatively confident — for the panel of hundreds of scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued two previous assessments of the research into global warming theory, in 1995 and 1990.

The conclusions are likely to resonate loudly next month when negotiators from most of the world's nations gather in The Hague to work out details of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty intended to cut releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The 1997 treaty has been signed by more than 150 countries but has not yet been ratified by any industrialized country.

The panel, which operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, is spelling out its new findings in a climate assessment it began working on three years ago and which fills 1,000 pages. A summary of its findings was sent this week to governments around the world for a last round of comments before the assessment is completed at a meeting in January in Shanghai. Given the significance of issue and the disagreements over how to deal with it, there are likely to be changes before the summary and the 14 chapters of research underlying it go to print sometime next year, several scientists involved in the project said.

A copy of the summary was obtained by The New York Times from someone who was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in The Hague.

Many panel members said that the summary represents the closest thing to a consensus possible in science, which is generally driven more by questioning and challenges than by esprit de corps.

In interviews, several members of the panel declined to discuss details of the report or the summary, saying they were not yet in their final form. But they said recent advances in the study of climate change led them to see with greater clarity the role of people in climate change.

For example, they pointed to additional temperature data gathered in the last few years, which have been substantially warmer than any similar string of years in many centuries; to improvements in computer models designed to project future trends; and to better understanding of the influence of other climate- influencing emissions, like particles of sulfates that can cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Meanwhile, they said in interviews and in the summary, evidence of increasing warming has shown up in retreating glaciers, thinning polar sea ice, retreating snow packs, warmer nights, and elsewhere.

"More and more people working in atmospheric science or on climate or ecology have had to come to grips with the fact that climate change is affecting what they're looking at," said Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and a lead author of the panel's summary. "There is increasing evidence from many sources that the signal of human influence on climate has emerged from natural variability, sometime around 1980."

The report's language is far more constrained than that, reflecting a delicate consensus that was reached only after months of debate and several rounds of comments by hundreds of scientists and government climate experts, Dr. Trenberth said.

One of its most striking findings is its conclusion that the upper range of warming over the next 100 years could be even higher than it estimated in 1995, in a worst case raising the average global temperature 11 degrees Fahrenheit from where it was in 1990. By comparison, average temperatures today are only 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were at the end of the last Ice Age.

In its 1995 analysis, the panel concluded that a worst case would raise temperatures 6.3 degrees. The worsening of the picture, ironically, is due to a projected cleansing of the atmosphere in coming decades of other emissions from fuel burning that have a cooling influence on climate — specifically the veil of tiny particles of sulfates from unfiltered burning of coal and oil that contribute to smog and acid rain.

In the last century, these sun- blocking particles probably masked substantial warming, scientists say. If they are increasingly removed as more smokestacks and tailpipes are filtered around the world, the warming from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would not be counteracted, the report concludes.

Not everyone is satisfied with the document or the process that produced it. Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, a climate expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been a prominent dissenter from the view that human activity is altering climate, helped write one chapter of the assessment but is skeptical about the importance of the human contribution to any future warming.

He described the summary as "waffle words designed for one thing, to ensure that the issue remains important enough that it not be put on a back burner."

Over all, he said, there is little solid evidence that any climate change would have harmful effects.

Still, even Dr. Lindzen said that he felt that the human influence on the earth's climate is now established.

"There has to be a human component to the change that's under way," he said.

The summary itself acknowledged the need for much more research, but also laid out many potentially dire consequences if the warming even takes a middle course. Even if emissions of carbon dioxide and the other gases are sharply reduced, it said, "sea level will continue to rise due to thermal expansion for hundreds of years."

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Environmental Defense, a private environmental group and one of the authors of the summary, said it represented a balanced, sober assessment of the risks ahead.

Other scientists involved in the assessment pointed out that the authors of the summary also included Dr. Mack McFarland, an atmospheric scientist at a division of DuPont, and several other experts approaching the question from the point of view of industry.

Together, they concluded that the nuanced language of 1995, which said "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," was clearly out of date.

William Clay Ford Jr., chairman of the auto maker bearing his name, announced that he is pulling his company out of the Global Climate Coalition. Though the announcement came quietly in a letter sent Monday, it may well be the kind of strong and clear statement that can end the debate over global warming.

The GCC is a group of fossil fuel producers, energy providers, car companies and trade associations whose singular goal is to spread confusion about global warming. When 2,500 scientists agreed on a statement that global warming is a real and urgent phenomenon caused by humans, the GCC drummed up a small handful of dissenters.

Spending millions on advertising, lobbying and other efforts to discredit the best science, the group's small clique has had a huge presence. They've allowed political leaders to hide behind the false notion that there is disagreement about global warming in the scientific community. They've provided ready sources for journalists who, under the guise of objectivity, lazily assume that "another side" to the science should be presented in each story on the topic.

The Ford Motor Co.'s withdrawal exposes this deception. Ford is tacitly admitting that it is folly to continue clouding the debate and that discussions instead should focus on policies and products that can stop or slow the warming trend. In walking away from the GCC, the auto giant has pulled back the curtain to show that science has never clouded this debate. It was the sophisticated advocacy and self-interest of panicked industrialists that did so.

The decision, of course, does not make Ford a green enterprise. Quite the contrary. The company's current offering of sport utility vehicles, for example, includes the category's two worst polluters. And they have yet to embrace immediate-term steps that can address the climate crisis.

Still, the company has embarked on a promising path. Next year, its entire SUV fleet--the one currently on assembly lines--will meet the low emissions vehicle standards for selling cars in California. And it has invested heavily in fuel cells--nonpolluting components that produce energy from hydrogen, a renewable substance. The fuel cells are many years from showing up on assembly lines, but Ford's plan for them is good news.

Perhaps more interesting than the changes at Ford, the company, are the inclinations of Ford, the person. Bill Ford's letter, coming less than a year after he assumed control of the company, took no small amount of personal courage to write. It is part and parcel of Michigan politics that all must rally round the auto industry. The industry's powerful congressional champion, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), has on countless occasions stymied efforts to raise corporate auto fuel efficiency standards and has fought improvements in the Clean Air Act. Now, supported by the GCC, he claims the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that calls for the U.S. to significantly reduce its fossil fuel emissions in the next decade, will bust the American economy. With his standing in Congress and legendary presence, Dingell commands loyalty. One can be certain he will not take this challenge from Ford lightly.

Bill Ford appears to have the kind of steady compass and personal stamina to withstand such a face-off. At 42, he has both the energy and time to transform a company as massive as Ford. If he sticks to his conservationist tendencies, he may find new and capable allies.

The timing of Ford's letter is propitious, though, given recent weather patterns, this statement would be true at almost any time in recent years. The BBC has reported that a document to be issued next year by the International Panel on Climate Change--the lead scientific body focusing on this issue--states that the global-warming crisis may be far more immediate than was thought only five years ago.

Earlier this year, Ford noted his grandfather's role as "a leader in the first industrial revolution." Borrowing a phrase many use to describe the steps toward a sustainable economy, he said, "I want Ford Motor Co. to be a leader in the second industrial revolution--the clean revolution." With his letter, he took a quiet, but important, step along that path. From a once-clouded debate emerges a potential silver lining.

Today's national energy policy stands in stark contrast to the comprehensive policies enacted 20 years ago. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, our national energy policy debate sparked the furor and passion of every American to the same extent as today's debate on health care reforms.

However, the days of waiting in long lines for gas, shortages of heating oil and a darkened Washington Monument are gone. In their place are lower crude oil prices, the popularity of gas guzzling sports utility vehicles and the explosion of polluting personal recreation vehicles from snowmobiles to jet skis.

Today, our energy policy is driven by personal convenience, not conservation. Profit, cheap gas and the bottom line are the major factors that are considered. The drive to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels has dissipated and been replaced by a drive to get the government out of energy policy.

The effects of this shortsighted policy are all too evident on our lands, air and water, to our health and potentially, in our pocketbook. We are importing more oil than ever before - nearly 50 percent of all oil that we consume. Our health is at risk and our natural resources are being plundered.

The impact of fossil fuels on the environment and on the public's health gives ample evidence that the industrialized world should wean itself from over-reliance on fossil fuels. Although some argue that we lack the "sound science" to irrefutably quantify global warming trends, the fossil fuel-environment connection is apparent and global warming and pollution are increasing.

This century alone, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases have increased 30 percent. The glaciers at Glacier National Park will be nothing but till in 30 years, and this spring we had the report that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.

The health effects are also evident. We have all heard the summer warnings for asthmatic children and the elderly to stay inside because of excess air pollutants. One study estimated that 64,000 people in the United States die prematurely from heart and lung disease each year because of particulate air pollution. Among children, air pollutants are associated with an increase in acute respiratory illness. Unfortunately, the momentum of the early 1980s is being squandered. Both Congress and utilities have reduced spending for electricity research and development.

Congress has done so in its quest to reduce the federal budget, or, some may argue, to stymie "backdoor" attempts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, while utilities streamline for a deregulated environment. If this trend continues, air quality will continue to decline because there is no incentive to upgrade old, operationally cheap coal-fired power plants that are exempt from clean air standards.

The Clean Air Act, although effective in specific areas, has failed to force the nation's oldest, most polluting power plants to conform with modern clean air technology. As a result, 10 percent of the plants burning fossil fuels today release upwards of 50 percent of the pollutants released by power plants.

Nuclear power, once touted as the "clean" energy solution for our nation, has been exposed as a flawed technology leaving a waste legacy that will last millennia. If action is not taken now to store our nation's growing stockpile of nuclear waste, we will face a national crisis in 10 short years when 78 of the nuclear power plants operating in the United States will have no room left to store their nuclear waste.

It is time to refocus our energy policy. This policy should be about more than cheap gas. It should be about the long-term viability of our natural resources and the physical and economic health of the American public. When we look to the past to develop policies for the future, what has become clear is that Congress has spent too much time addressing the short-term energy needs at the expense of a long-term energy policy that would be less reliant on fossil fuels.

Although industrialized society's reliance on energy will not decrease, Congress has the ability to mitigate its effects by pledging to protect the people and the land in the short-term, and by investing in alternative energy solutions to meet future energy needs for the long- term. To accomplish those goals, Congress should:

End the exploitation of our public lands and natural resources as a quick energy fix. Upholding the primacy of the Clean Water Act over strip mining practices that dump tons of waste in our streams and rivers is a first step. Congress can demonstrate its commitment to reducing this nation's reliance on fossil fuels by permanently protecting a fragment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain as wilderness.

At best, this area would provide a 51-day supply of oil. But at what cost? The destruction of the last remaining five percent of fragile arctic tundra, the splintering of the 130,000-strong Porcupine River caribou herd and the loss of a 1,000-generation-old Gwich'in Indian culture.

Cut emissions. Air pollution knows no boundaries. It is a global problem that requires international cooperation and a national commitment to protecting the global community. The first step toward making that commitment a reality occurred in 1997 when the United States and more than 160 other nations signed the Kyoto Protocol. As one of the leading producers of greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent of all emissions), the United States should be a leader in ratifying and implementing this agreement. It's time for Congress to force the utilities to clean up their act by forcing old power plants to comply with the Clean Air Act.

Develop alternative energy sources. The stranglehold of foreign oil can only be broken through conservation and the development of alternative sources. Green power, including biomass, solar and wind, increasingly offer a cost-efficient, clean and viable alternative to fossil fuels. The solar silicon cells manufactured from one ton of sand could produce as much electricity as burning 500,000 tons of coal.

Encourage energy conservation. Energy conservation efforts offer the best hope for businesses and individuals. A simple step of replacing an incandescent light bulb with a compact florescent bulb reduces electric bills by $67 over the life of the bulb and will save 400 pounds of coal from being burned. Holding SUVs, minivans and pickups to the same fuel efficiency standards as cars would save one million barrels of oil every day and would cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 240 million tons once the standards are fully phased in.

Although Congress cannot foresee the stability of the energy market, it can and should prepare to develop a clean and efficient energy sector that, if thoughtfully planned, can improve our environment with little harmful effect to the consumer.

Investment in clean air technology, the development of alternative energy sources, the revitalization of our national conservation efforts and a resolution to the nuclear waste storage problem now will lay the foundation for a sound energy policy in the new millennium.

Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) is a member of the Resources Committee.

In part one of a special series of reports for the BBC's Newsnight the award winning world affairs editor John Simpson gives a modern perspective on the four evils that have plagued the planet this century. The four horsemen of the biblical apocalypse were war, civil unrest, disease, and hunger. Two thousand years later these are all still with us, but we have added new terrors. The horsemen of the 20th century apocalypse are environmental catastrophe and

El Nino stuns the world
The year of 1998 was the hottest on earth since records began; 1999 may be worse. This has affected the natural phenomenon we call El Nino, which together with its less-understood sister phenomenon, La Nina, causes complex fluctuations in atmospheric pressure and surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific. This changes weather patterns across the globe. Thanks to global warming, El Nino is occurring more and more often. In 1998 it brought the western hemisphere's worst storm for two hundred years: Hurricane Mitch. An entire year's rainfall hit Central America in a few hours. Ten thousand were killed.

Hurricanes, droughts and fires
From Africa to Australia there were droughts, and in Indonesia forests burned and smog blotted out the sun for weeks. In the Asian sub- continent, by contrast, there was severe flooding. Shortly before Mitch struck, there were four hurricanes in the Atlantic at once, for the first time this century. These and other findings - for instance that the Antarctic ice cap is melting, and could eventually raise sea levels by 70 metres - are coming in all the time.

Smaller cars, brighter future
Already the restrictions on greenhouse gases which were discussed at the Kyoto conference on climate change seem outdated; and yet the United States, in particular, can't meet them. While petrol costs Americans $1 a gallon, there is no incentive to cut back; and yet one leading scientist has estimated that if every American drove a smaller car, it would have a startling effect on global warming. European consumption, and the largely uncontrolled factories of Russia, India and China are to blame too; but the US is at the heart of the problem. For our first Newsnight report in the series we visited the idyllic Maldives, a thousand tiny islands in the Indian Ocean which live off fishing and tourism.

Desert under the sea
Now global warming is threatening the Maldives' very existence. None of the islands is more than 1.5 metres above sea-level, and if nothing is done they will be drowned within decades. I dived onto one of the coral reefs for which the Maldives are famous, and found it almost entirely dead - bleached like a desert thanks to an increase of 1 degree Celsius during the last El Nino. Many reefs are not affected, and there are a few signs of regrowth; but the Maldives are in serious danger. The First Horseman of the new Apocalypse is doing his work here. The islanders lead a gentle, subsistence life; but the greedy, the careless and the selfish of the earth are threatening them, all the same.

In his Nov. 18 op-ed column, George Will derided Vice President Al Gore as an "eco-pessimist" for statements made in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance" about the dangers of global warming. But the concerns noted by Mr. Gore in 1992 are strongly supported by evidence of the past seven years. Records confirm that 1998 was the warmest year in 1,000 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, the five warmest years since reliable instrument records began 120 years ago all occurred in the 1990s.

In 1990, as the vice president wrote in his book, an intergovernmental panel of scientists' best estimate of global surface temperature change was 2.5 degrees Celsius. Today the best estimate is 2 degrees Celsius-- hardly a "near revolution," as Mr. Will's column claims; closer to a confirmation.

Any benefits of climate change will be more than offset by other likely effects of an accelerated hydrological cycle--e.g., more storms, floods and droughts; changes in the incidence and distribution of agricultural pests and pathogens; increased fatalities from heat stress; expansion of the geographic ranges for diseases such as malaria and dengue fever; a six- to 37-inch sea level rise; and ecosystems unable to adapt quickly enough to substantial climate shifts. Mr. Will conceded that global warming is occurring and that human activities are at least partly to blame. It is unfortunate, however, that he ignored the substantial risks to our environment, public health and future generations.

D. JAMES BAKER, Administrator
National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration
U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington

Ottawa is signalling an important shift in its approach to air quality and climate change. The federal government, which made little headway in persuading the provinces to get tough with industrial polluters, is trying a new approach. It is offering to help industries that want to cut greenhouse gases.

Municipal governments will also get more attention - and money - to reduce emissions from landfill, incinerators and waste water plants. An estimated $1.3 billion is involved. The largest chunk - $955 million - will go directly to reducing harmful emissions. The rest will be used to identify vulnerable regions and industries and to finance research into climate change.

The full Cabinet has yet to approve the initiative and it has several hurdles to clear before Finance Minister Paul Martin's next budget. But it has cleared the key committees of Cabinet. And it squares with Martin's commitment to spend more on the environment. In addition, Ottawa intends to intensify its study of so-called tradable emission credits to sort out where they reduce pollution, and where they're counter-productive.

Such study is long overdue. Frankly, so is the shift of focus. Since Canada pledged to cut greenhouse gases to 6 per cent below 1990 levels, emissions have gone up by 14 per cent - a swing of 20 per cent in the wrong direction. This fall was the 11th consecutive season with above- average temperatures, the end of the hottest decade on record. The Arctic ice is so thin that animals which depend on the ice for survival - such as polar bears - are at risk.

While this problem grew, Ottawa wasted years trying to achieve federal- provincial harmony rather on acting to improve air quality and meet Canada's global commitments. The new focus puts the priority - and the cash - where it should be.

Page: 1 , 1 cont. , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10