Copyright 1999 The Boston Herald
"There's a big pork in global warming"
Editorial: January 31, 1999

The Clinton administration is nothing if not bull-headed. The president is coming back to try again for a huge pot of money to make a lot of people feel better about what may be a fairy-tale threat: global warming.

With any luck, Congress will give the back of its hand to $4 billion worth of proposals in the budget to be submitted next month.

It is still not clear that in the long term the entire Earth is warming at all, or if it is that humans are doing anything to cause it, despite the hoopla proclaiming 1998 the "warmest year in history." Balloon and satellite measurements show no increase in global average temperatures in the past 20 years.

Nor is it clear that any future warming produced by the "greenhouse gases," notably carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, will be big enough to worry about. Every new computer projection of future average temperature is lower than the one before it.

The administration seems determined to try to carry out - or appear to be carrying out - the Kyoto Treaty of 1997 calling for a reduction in U.S. greenhouse gases back to the level of 1979, a sure recipe for economic disaster if taken seriously, even though the president has not dared to submit the treaty to the Senate.

The treaty is almost a bad joke. It leaves out so many big fuel-users like China, India and Mexico that even if every participating country complied fully, warming in 2100 would be reduced by an immeasurably small amount, one estimate puts the reduction at 0.07 degree.

The way to look at the administration's proposals is as sheer pork to favored groups like the solar energy lobby and the miners' unions (there's $122 million for "clean coal" research, a technological dead end for 15 years now), none of which makes any sense until science can say what is happening to our climate. Congress should disregard any request for money that isn't devoted to basic research.