Oil and coal lobby feel the heat as greenhouse gas debate warms up

IT could have been a non event. Instead, the second Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change produced a strong ministerial declaration committing industrialised countries to negotiating a legally binding international protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Although Saudi Arabia scored a technical victory at yesterday's concluding session with the deletion of a reference in the report to the urgent need to act on compelling scientific evidence that atmospheric pollution is causing a rise in global temperatures, this crucial link survives in what has become known as the Geneva Declaration.

Over the next 18 months, the 54 countries which have ratified the Climate Change Convention will continue the negotiations with a view to reaching agreement on quantified and binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, notably carbon dioxide, at the third Conference of the Parties in Kyoto at the end of next year.

The fact that the US is now prepared to put its considerable weight behind this process, as the world's only superpower, means that it has a real chance of success. In Geneva, for the first time, it strongly committed itself to negotiating "realistic, verifiable and binding" targets to reverse global warming.

What this means, in effect, is that the obstructionist efforts of Saudi Arabia and other countries with a clear vested interest in the status quo are unlikely to be permitted to prevent an international agreement on the issue. There is also a widespread consensus that firm action needs to be taken.

President Clinton has obviously calculated that there are more votes in being seen to be "green" than by continuing to heed the pleadings of the fossil fuel lobby.

The US Vice President, Mr Al Gore, no doubt played a role in his conversion as he has described climate change as "the greatest threat to our civilisation".

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Climate Action Coalition and the World Wide Fund for Nature are unanimous in their view that significant progress was made at the Geneva talks, which were held in the vast 1930s neo classical League of Nations building, reputedly the largest palais in Europe after Versailles.

Delegates were reminded by the British Environment Secretary, Mr John Gummer, that the old League had "failed the world" by giving in to power and special interest groups.

Britain is on course to fulfil its commitment under the Climate Change Convention to return its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. It has done so by taking such "no regrets" measures as switching electricity generation from coal to natural gas and putting more emphasis on energy efficiency.

Like Germany, which will also meet the target, it believes that cuts of up to 10 per cent can be made after 2000 without people feeling the pinch. Only then would it become necessary to tackle the transport sector, which has become the fastest growing contributor to the phenomenon of global warming.

Ireland, as a small and less developed country within the EU, is protected by the "European bubble", as the Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, put it. Assuming that the larger EU member states manage to cut their greenhouse gas emissions Ireland's projected 5 per cent increase will have only a marginal impact.

By 2000, however, the UN's intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of some 2,500 scientists from around the world, will have produced its third assessment report. This is expected to "harden up the science", leaving no room for doubt that measures must be taken to counter global warming.

The insurance industry came to Geneva, as it did to Berlin last year, to demand concerted international action on the issue. Already suffering a series of major losses from natural disasters, its spokesmen insisted that the negotiations "must achieve early and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."

However, it is unclear at this stage if the insurance companies will put resources into the relentless lobbing required to counter the activities of the "carbon club", Greenpeace's nickname for the coalition of oil, coal and motor manufacturing industries which monitors the talks continuously.

Its chief lobbyist, Mr Donald Pearlman, a Washington corporate lawyer, has read every single line of the thousands of documents generated by the Climate Change Convention. He has been a constant, if shadowy, presence at every round of talks on global warming since the whole process got under way in 1988.

Dubbed "king of the carbon club" by environmental groups, he was in Geneva for the full two weeks of negotiations at the second Conference of the Parties. Last Thursday, before its ministerial declaration was adopted, he was observed by reporters giving guidance to the Saudi delegates on what they should say.

Saudi Arabia, as the world's richest oil producer, has a lot to lose if the major industrialised countries make legally binding commitments to cut their carbon dioxide emissions. So do the other OPEC states and Australia, with its huge coal reserves.

The Global Climate Coalition, which represents the fossil fuel lobby, claimed last week that a selective use of carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would destabilise the US economy, cutting its GDP by up to 2.3 per cent and leading to the loss of as many as one million jobs per year.

Increasingly, however, the fossil fuel lobby's claims are being seen as so shrill as to lack credibility. There is already enough hard scientific evidence on the ground, including a progressive "meltdown" of Switzerland's glaciers, to persuade the world's politicians that action can no longer be delayed.