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Timothy E. Wirth, Under Secretary for Global Affairs Address before the De Lange Woodlands Conference Houston, Texas, March 4, 1997

Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here this evening. My special thanks to George and Cynthia Mitchell for inviting me to join you tonight. I was honored to work with another George Mitchell in the United States Senate, and I have always been an admirer of your remarkable talents. Thank you very much George for your leadership and vision in the energy industry and on the critical questions for which this meeting has been convened.

I am especially pleased to be here tonight on the heels of Secretary Albright's visit to Rice University, her first official trip as Secretary of State. At that time, and throughout the highly successful round-the-world trip she just completed, Secretary Albright promised in Texas fashion to "tell it like it is." Picking up on this theme, I want to talk with you tonight in a very frank manner about the challenge of making the transition to sustainable development. Specifically, I want to talk about perhaps one of the greatest economic, environmental and political challenges we face -- protection of the global climate.

Human ingenuity and endeavor has improved the worldwide standard of living to an immeasurable degree. Unwittingly, however, we have placed our future on a collision course with the natural forces that make life on Earth possible.

If we are to prepare for the 21st century and continue improving the quality of life around the world, we are going to have to be mindful of the need to protect the ecological systems upon which our economic past and future is based. We must reconcile our economic aspirations with environmental imperatives.

No issue encapsulates this challenge as comprehensively as global climate change. Climate change demonstrates not only the importance and power of scientific investigation, of knowing the world in which we live, but also of harnessing the power of our creativity, the hope of technology and the uniquely American faith that hard, good work is the better of any challenge.

If we are to understand climate change, or any other facet of sustainability, our essential building block must be the scientific process. And it is the science of climate change that underlies our concern and is the foundation for the Clinton Administration's approach to the issue.

The consensus on the science is a legacy of another Houston native -- President Bush. At the behest of the Bush Administration, the international community established a far-reaching, inclusive and distinguished international scientific body to examine concerns about global climate change. The resulting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a partnership of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. Over the past decade, the IPCC has emerged as the world's preeminent scientific and technical body concerned with the threat of global climate change, involving more than 2000 scientists from more than 100 countries and uses recognized standards of peer-review in its scientific method.

Last year, the IPCC issued its Second Assessment Report -- representing the most recent, authoritative and comprehensive scientific analysis available on this issue. The Second Assessment was the result of years of effort, extensive peer review and exhaustive analysis and consultation. The most important of the IPCC's scientific findings are as follows:

• The chemical composition of the atmosphere is being altered by the buildup of heat-trapping, greenhouse gases. Abundances of these gases now exceed any known in the last 150,000 years.
• The continued buildup of these gases will enhance the natural greenhouse effect and cause the global climate to change.
• Global average surface temperatures are changing -- the last few decades have been the warmest of the past century, and the past decade is host to most of the warmest years in the past 100.
• Based on these facts and additional underlying science, the second assessment concluded, "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate."

This last finding represents the first time that a clear and compelling consensus has emerged among the world's leading climate scientists that the world's changing climatic conditions are more than the natural variability of weather.

This is not to say that there are no uncertainties. The science cannot yet tell us precisely how much, when, or at what rate the Earth's climate will change in response to a given level of greenhouse gas buildup. However, the scientific community's best estimate is that current emissions trends (resulting over the next several decades in the effective doubling from pre-industrial concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) will lead to global temperatures which, on average, are 2 to 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, increasing at a rate greater than any known for the past 10,000 years.

Based on these estimates, the best evidence indicates that human-induced climate change, if allowed to continue unabated, could have profound consequences for the economy and the quality of life for future generations:

Coastal areas -- where a large percentage of the global population lives -- are at risk from sea level rise;

Human health -- is at risk from a projected rise in heat related deaths and illnesses and from the increased spread of some diseases;

Food security is threatened in certain regions of the world;

Water resources are expected to be increasingly stressed, with substantial economic, social and environmental costs in arid regions, and perhaps even political costs where there is already conflict over limited resources.

Here in Texas, projected temperature increases on the order to 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of next century would put additional stress on Texas' already tight water supply by intensifying demands for irrigation, electric-power generation and municipal and industrial systems. Simulations of future crop yields show significant reductions for dryland wheat in Texas under these scenarios. Studies on the impact of climate change in Texas project that an increase in temperature could be accompanied by a decrease in precipitation. This would mean more than an unfathomable complication of water law -- it would complicate immeasurably the drawing down of the Ogalla and other underground water resources.

The vulnerability of Texas to the impacts of climate change speaks to the vulnerability of the world -- from the far reaches of the Earth's poles, to low-lying, small island states in oceans everywhere.

And if climate change demonstrates the importance of science, it also demonstrates the importance of cooperation among sectors and nations, as well as the need for integration across disciplines. Mark Twain is oft quoted for remarking that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Over the past five years, the international community has attempted to prove Mr. Twain wrong.

More than 150 countries signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, and more than 160 have since ratified it, including the United States. One of its key provisions was the establishment of a goal for developed countries to return their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. While vague and non-binding, this agreement represented an important first step toward developing a comprehensive international solution to this challenge.

Unfortunately, few countries, including the United States, will succeed in meeting the Framework Convention's goal. Early on, the Clinton Administration developed an ambitious plan to meet the Rio objective -- in the near-term through the development of an action plan for limiting emissions in the year 2000, and in the longer-term, through our participation in international efforts to define a course for the 21st century. Today, we are in the process of negotiating an agreement to cover emissions in the post-2000 period. The negotiations are scheduled to be completed in December of this year at the Convention's Third Conference of the Parties in Kyoto, Japan.

To jump start these negotiations, the Clinton Administration outlined last July in Geneva a number of major elements to guide the negotiations. Our proposals rest on three basic principles. First, the Kyoto agreement must include realistic, achievable, and binding emissions targets for developed countries. The non-binding approach has not worked and its continued reliance will make a mockery of not only the treaty, but also the effort to reduce future emissions. And, if the targets are to be binding, they must be realistic and achievable. False promises and soaring rhetoric will not advance our objectives. We cannot afford another agreement that fails to lead to real and substantive progress in addressing the climate change problem.

Second, prospective solutions must be flexible and cost-effective. We support an approach which sets common goals for developed countries but allows flexibility in how each country meets those goals. We oppose forcing countries to implement identical policies in order to reach those goals. Many of these proposals are thinly veiled attempts to gain competitive advantage. They must and they will be rejected.

Third, any new agreement should lay the foundation for continuing progress by all nations in dealing with climate change. International cooperation on this challenge remains critical to any effective response, and all nations -- developed and developing -- will have to play a part.

Based on these principles, the United States presented to the Convention's Secretariat an extensive draft text for consideration in the international negotiations in the weeks and months ahead. I want to describe in greater detail the essential components of our submission.

With respect to binding, realistic emissions goals, our proposal calls on all developed countries to take on binding emissions targets or "budgets" that will allow nations to meet aims based on cumulative or averaged emissions. This concept enables us to account for annual anomalies, such as an unusually cold winter. Moreover, by making it clear that subsequent budgets must be equal to or less than the initial period, we hope to ensure that steady progress can be made toward stabilizing atmospheric concentrations in the future. We have not proposed specific numbers for the budgets, since our analysis of economic and environmental impacts of various options is not yet complete. The Administration's analysis, under the direction of Commerce Undersecretary Ev Ehrlich, is aimed at identifying an emissions path that is consistent with our aggressive ambitions for the economy and the environment.

Our draft text elaborates on our principle of flexibility by making it clear that each country must have maximum latitude to implement its emissions budget in ways that are most cost-effective for that country. We do not agree with proposals by some nations that the negotiations move toward consideration of mandatory, internationally standardized policies and measures. The significant differences in national circumstances suggest that few, if any, individual measures are likely to be applicable to all countries.

A key feature of our drive for flexibility is the creation of an international emissions trading system. We already have experience in this country with emissions trading in the fight against air pollution, notably in the case of sulfur dioxide. We have seen that it can substantially reduce the overall cost of compliance with emissions standards. We believe that such market-based solutions are essential in the long-term effort to address climate change.

Finally, our proposed protocol requires the participation of all parties, including appropriate action by developing countries. Developed countries are today responsible for the bulk of global emissions and, therefore, must take the lead in addressing the problem. Yet emissions of greenhouse gases in the developing world are growing extremely rapidly. China is now the second largest emitter and India the sixth, largely due to their enormous populations. As a result, our proposal requires developing countries to identify and adopt cost-effective "no regrets" measures to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to prepare annual emissions inventories. In addition, we have called for agreement on a date at which negotiations to establish quantified emissions obligations for all Parties would begin.

Taken together, we believe these various elements will set the community of nations on course toward addressing this critical issue. Successfully done, this approach will send a signal to the marketplace and help to unlock its genius to bring to bear the creative power of the entrepreneurs and technologies that will prevent harmful climate changes, and more broadly, to make the transition to sustainability across the board.

In this way, climate change is representative of the challenge that is being taken on by the Global Commons project and in similar efforts in the United States and around the world.

Let me close with a story that demonstrates the value and the values that must be associated with this undertaking.

In 1948, when the notion of space exploration was still science fiction, the Astronomer Fred Hoyle said: "Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available...a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose."

Twenty years later, when space travel became a reality, the travelers themselves provided powerful testimony to Hoyle's sense of the unity of the world. Let me read to you from our own astronaut, James Irwin:

"That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart."

And now from a Russian cosmonaut: "After an orange cloud -- formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara -- reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat."

In this last decade of the millennium, we can and must captain that boat carefully. We have the ability to shape change for the benefit of the United States and the entire world. The interests and intellectual capacity reflected in this room tonight bears a special burden in this regard. Working together, your talents, your energy and your power can match the challenges and the institutions involved. I thank each of you for engaging in this effort. Our future certainly depends on it.

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