The United States alone will be sending an official delegation of around 300, expected to be headed by Environmental Protection Administrator William Reilly. That counts the congressional “observers,” led by Gore and Rep. Dante Fascell, Democrat of Florida, but not the visit by President Bush himself, plus however many aides it takes to push him on the airplane and make him go. For a long time the Environment President seemed unable to make himself attend the environmental summit. His director of the Office of Management and Budget, Richard Darman, treated the invitation to Rio the way people react to a postcard urging them to call a 900 number and find out which of three prizes they’ve already won. Almost alone among major nations, the United States retains a substantial constituency that is indifferent if not hostile toward environmental regulation -an attitude oddly shared by the GOP right wing and the leaders of the former communist bloc. But this is increasingly a fringe position even among many of the business executives it is supposed to benefit. The Business Council for Sustainable Development, which will play a prominent role in Rio, includes the heads of global corporations like Dow Chemical, Du Pont, Chevron and 3M, and is chaired by Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny, heir to a substantial fortune made in the asbestos trade. Dow CEO Frank Popoff ’s rallying cry–“There can be no economic development without environmental responsibility”–wouldn’t fit on a T shirt, but it expresses the view of many economists. In the end, Bush sided with EPA chief William Reilly and national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who argued that it would be a major embarrassment for the leader of a new world order to skip the meeting at which that very thing will actually be shaped.
As Gore observed, the Earth Summit is imbued with a powerful sense of destiny. The leaders of more than 120 nations are not gathering merely to codify regulations about air pollution and toxic dumps. You don’t need a summit conference for that; the Montreal treaty of 1987, which phased out the future production of chlorofluorocarbons, set a model for efficient international cooperation in this area. There is one substantive regulatory treaty on the table at Rio, dealing with action to head off global warming (page 24), but delegates are still tinkering with some of the details. Many feel that to have much effect, the treaty should incorporate specific targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, but the United States, which leads the world in the production of carbon dioxide, is opposed. The outlook is bleaker for proposed treaties on preserving forests and “biodiversity”–a wide range of species-which are hung up on issues of national sovereignty. Countries without much industry don’t like outsiders telling them what to do with their own trees, or, for that matter, fungi. At the same time, though, they want to share in the profits that come from exploiting these resources. Should Madagascar, say, get royalties on a drug made from a plant that is found only in its forests? What if the drug is then synthesized abroad?
But this doesn’t mean that nothing important will go on in Rio. It just will go on at a higher plane of generality. The overlooked word in the conference title is “Development.” The Third World has its own agenda for the Earth Summit, which is contained in part in a document called the Rio Declaration. This began as a visionary statement about stewardship and environmental responsibility. Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the conference, wanted a short and inspirational document, something that could be hung in a child’s bedroom. A Third World delegate responded that most of the children in his part of the world didn’t have bedrooms. So the declaration evolved into a lengthy charter spelling out the “rights” of poor countries to develop in responsible ways. This, of course, is one of the things Darman warned Bush about: it’s ecospeak for “foreign aid.”
Essentially, the Third World wants the West to save it from the consequences of industrialization. The corollary is that otherwise the trees of Peru and Indonesia will go the way of the ones of Woodside, Queens. Nobody was thinking about these questions when the West had its Industrial Revolution-that’s how it got so rich. Now it wants the rest of the world to follow different, more stringent, rules. This is the global application of the well-known phenomenon that one’s willingness to make “sacrifices” for the environment goes up in proportion to the number of Volvos one already owns. Rio, says American environmentalist Lester Brown of WorldWatch Institute, will demonstrate that “we can no longer separate the future habitability of the planet from the current distribution of wealth.”
Speaking for many poor countries, “the Chinese have made the choice that if there is a decision to be made between development and environment, they’ll go for development,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing. “If the West wants a better environment, they’ll have to pay.” If the West doesn’t want China to burn its coal, the West can pay for the alternatives. If the alternatives involve technology that the Chinese don’t have-more efficient electrical generating plants, say-the West should provide it. That is the proposal at the heart of “Agenda 21,” the other substantive document that may (or may not) be adopted at Rio. It calls, in 800 sober pages, for an ambitious program of aid intended to fix the Third World’s sewers, clean its dumps and replant its forests–all well within the reach of current technology . The lives of millions of children who now die of simple intestinal infections would be spared. From the environmental point of view this may seem at first like a mixed blessing, but the experience in developed countries is that once people assume that their babies will grow up, they don’t have so many of them. And the world will enjoy the presumed benefits of higher standards of living: the people of developing countries might someday look at a tree the way people do in Marin County, as the handiwork of God, rather than a big piece of firewood stuck in the ground.
Can we afford to do it? The estimated cost is $125 billion a year, which is three times the combined foreign-aid budgets of the Group of Seven. But, to look at it another way, it is only 1 percent of the same countries’ gross national products. To ask the question is to hear Al Gore respond, well, Bryant, can we afford not to do it? There are all sorts of sound, common-sense reasons for investing in the environment. “Efficiency [in using natural resources] keeps companies competitive,” says the Business Council. “There are substantial [economic] costs to ignoring the environment,” chimes in EPA chief Reilly. But there are sound, common-sense reasons for doing a lot of things that the country never gets around to doing. So we should set above them the other reason for doing everything we can to preserve the global ecosystem, which is that the lives of billions of people, our own included, may depend on it.
Global warming: A treaty intended to curb emissions of “greenhouse gases”–principally carbon dioxide–but without specific targets or timetables.
Agenda 21: A plan for the industrial nations to help poor countries develop their economies without ruining their environments–or the planet’s. Estimated cost: $125 billion a year.
Biodiversity: A treaty to slow the loss of endangered species. One approach: give countries royalties for products (such as drugs) that are developed from indigenous plants and animals.
By holding out, he will probably get what he wanted: a treaty on greenhouse gases without any specific targets for reducing them.
The prime minister of Pakistan speaks for the developing nations, which are demanding help from the West as the price of conservation.
India’s prime minister will seek advanced technology, but resist “arm-twisting” from the West, which has yet to clean its own house.
The organizer of the Earth Summit, a Canadian-born oil millionaire, says Rio will show whether the world is “ready to make the tough choices.”
Japan’s former prime minister believes industrial countries have an obligation to help the Third World develop in responsible ways.
The Swiss industrialist, who heads the business delegation at Rio, believes that economic and environmental concerns “cannot be separated.”
