Carbon Dioxide

The Bush administration yesterday issued a policy paper acknowledging, for the first time, that global warming caused by man-made pollution is indeed a serious problem. But the paper, released at the opening day of a global climate conference in suburban Washington, stopped short of calling for cuts in carbon dioxide emissions - the key global warming pollutant. At past international meetings, the administration has opposed proposals for comprehensive global warming programs, arguing that scientific understanding of the warming phenomenon was incomplete.

Concerned that carbon dioxide from power-plant smokestacks is causing global warming, scientists are studying an upside-down kind of solution: Pumping the gas deep underground. In the shadow of the towering Mountaineer plant here, workers last month finished drilling a hole nearly two miles deep into West Virginia sandstone. Elsewhere, researchers are looking at storing the problematic gas in the deep ocean, in unminable coal seams, and even in prairie grass. So in a sort of environmental symmetry, waste from burning coal, oil and other fuels would be sent back to the earth from which it came.

After 10 days of meetings, an international effort to forge a treaty on global warming has resulted in only an agreement on the number of committees to work on the issue and on the need for another session. The conference, which was attended by 100 nations, got off to a shaky start as the United States dickered with the Europeans over procedure and with the Third World delegates over money. Environmentalists expressed disappointment over the pace of the United Nations proceedings, the first negotiating steps toward approving a treaty to limit emissions of the so-called "greenhouse" gases.

President Bush made it clear yesterday that the United States will fight worldwide efforts to set limits on the pollution thought to cause global warming. United Nations and Third World diplomats have said that without U.S. cooperation on this issue, the environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro next June - the most ambitious conference of its kind ever held - could end in failure. U.N. negotiators from 148 countries have been trying to draft a global- warming treaty that embraces specific limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important of the so-called "greenhouse gases" linked to global warming.

Reliance on coal dangerous to all The editorial "Coal comfort" (Inquirer, May 7) failed to communicate that the most serious threat posed by continuing to rely on coal is global warming. The smog, soot, acid rain and mercury released by coal-fired power plants increase the risks to public health, but the number of people seriously affected involves a small percentage of the total population. By contrast, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is certain to increase the severity of the effects that global warming will have on everyone, everywhere on earth, within the lifetimes of our children.

It took President Bush little more than two weeks to go from being ready to crack down on carbon dioxide emissions to junking the idea altogether. His abrupt about-face is the latest in a series of conflicting signals from the administration after his presidency's smooth first six weeks. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell differed with Bush on administration policy toward Iraq and North Korea. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill sparked brief turmoil in global financial markets by suggesting he was not committed to supporting a strong dollar.

They say don't throw out your old suits because they'll come back into style. And, by-jiminy, it's beginning to look like the advice holds true on the environmental front: Ocean dumping is back - this time as a solution. For us care-worn campaigners against eutrophification, as well as the barbaric (and now greatly reduced) practice of dumping raw sewage off New Jersey, the news comes as a bit of a shock. But there it was yesterday on the front page: Genuine scientists are kicking around the idea of dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of iron into the oceans in a desperate attempt to turn around the Greenhouse Effect.

If at some point the government requires power plants to capture their emissions of carbon dioxide, a key challenge will be what to do with the stuff. Some have advocated storing the heat-trapping greenhouse gas deep underground. Engineers at Pennsylvania State University have come up with a clever alternative: Turn it back into fuel. They combine the carbon dioxide with water vapor to make methane, the primary component of natural gas, which can be burned in a generator. The concept is not new, but the chemical reaction, which also yields oxygen, requires a lot of energy.

Global-warming negotiations at the United Nations remain stalled as the U.S. delegation and the world await a White House shift in policy. Last week's session provided President Bush with one last chance to become a global environmental leader instead of a spoiler. The administration's recent decision to support measures that will speed up the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons, the main ozone-depleting chemicals, was welcome and necessary, but it doesn't redeem Bush's 1988 campaign promise to be an environmental president.

The greenhouse effect will cause major changes in American agriculture during the next 45 years, shifting croplands northward and substantially increasing the demand for irrigation, according to a study being published today in Nature. The study in the prestigious British science journal found that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be economically beneficial to many American farmers because it increases the yields of crops such as soybeans, wheat and corn. But Cynthia Rosenzweig, one of the paper's 10 authors and an agronomist at Columbia University, said the public should not "wax optimistic" about this study.