Trying to predict
what President Bill Clinton will do on any given topic is a risky business.
In June, for example, at a fund-raiser for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.),
the president told me the scientific evidence for the EPA's proposed clean-air
standards was not as clear-cut as environmentalists and the agency were
arguing. I thought he was undecided on the issue.
But on June 25 Clinton endorsed the standards, which dramatically
reduce allowable levels of soot and smog in the air we breathe. Although
he had been intensely lobbied by the Sierra Club, physicians, and Vice
President Gore, his decision came as a surprise, especially to the coalition
assembled against it by the National Association of Manufacturers. Even
though Clinton had based his re-election campaign on protecting children's
health, many did not expect him to actually make good on that promise.
At the same San Francisco fund-raiser, the president made
an eloquent plea for strong action on global warming. "We must set
firm standards and timetables," he said. "We must fundamentally
remake America's transportation sector. Detroit's either got to stop making
cars that burn oil, or start making very different cars that burn far less
oil."
But, speaking in New York on the fifth anniversary of
the Rio Earth Summit the day after his clean-air announcement, Clinton
stiffed the rest of the developed world: he refused to commit the United
States to firm timetables and the major technological changes it will take
to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
There is more at work here than Clinton's inconsistency.
As the United States blunders toward a green, sustainable economy, some
decisions will be harder to make than others, especially as the potential
losers in that new economy do everything they can to put off their day
of reckoning.
American industries fall into three broad categories:
Learners, Sluggards, and Dinosaurs. Learner industries have no intrinsic
reason to fear a rapid transition to higher environmental standards, and
can be coaxed along by social pressure and economic incentives. Among such
industries are finance, electronics and computers, appliances, publishing
and communications, specialty chemicals, biotech, and apparel. The loudly
touted success of the 3M Corporation at saving money by treating pollution
as economic "waste" shows an industry learning that it has nothing
to fear and much to gain from sustainable practices. High-tech companies
now realize that the pollution of Silicon Valley drinking water, while
enormously expensive to clean up, would have been trivially cheap to prevent.
These are the industries that speak the language of sustainable development,
and with whom Clinton and Gore love to make common ground.
Sluggards are those industries that know better but find
it hard to change. They have made good money plundering natural resources
and making wasteful products, like the giant sport utility vehicles now
lumbering out of Detroit. Like the Learners, the Sluggards have environmentally
preferable--and maybe even economically attractive--technological options,
but they've made huge investments in the wrong areas. They fear that moving
to a sustainable economy could "strand" their capital, as has
happened to many utilities saddled with moribund nuclear power plants.
Examples of Sluggards are agribusiness, pulp and paper,
utilities, and bulk-chemical and automobile manufacturers. They say they're
willing to accept a transition to greener technologies, but only on their
own schedule, and without government regulation or elimination of subsidies.
General Motors doesn't want to retool assembly lines that make popular
fuel-hogs; DuPont doesn't want to stop producing old, toxic but profitable
(and proprietary) pesticides; International Paper doesn't want to shut
down mills dependent on chlorine bleaching.
The Sluggards' problem with sustainable development is
that it conflicts with sustainable stock values. The EPA's new air standards,
for example, accelerate the rate at which corporations must swap existing
factories and technologies for new ones. The more technologically nimble
among these industries--the Japanese automakers, for example, or Monsanto--are
somewhat less hysterical about change, but many just can't bear to write
off expensive physical plants and wasteful processes that keep making money--at
the expense of the environment and public health.
Finally, there are the Dinosaurs, industries for whom
environmental destruction is an intrinsic part of doing business. Oil-industry
profits are measured in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions; coal companies
dish out CO2 with a side of heavy
metals; the smelting and refining industry releases highly toxic metals
from inert ore into the environment; construction firms try to pave as
much of the earth as they can.
In a sustainable economy there will still be fossil-fuel,
mining, and paving companies; they'll just play a smaller role. They will
be bit players in an economy dominated by solar power, tree-free paper,
and companies producing cars and other consumer goods from reused and recycled
material. For the Dinosaurs, a clean, green future is a death sentence--hence
their resistance.
Forced to choose between Sluggard industries and public
health, Clinton opted for health, although granting polluters more time
to meet the new air standards. They aren't happy, but Clinton knows they
can adapt.
But dealing with global warming means taking on the Dinosaurs.
That fight is too big for the president alone, but not for the nation's
citizen activists, who know that their children's future will remain in
doubt as long as Dinosaurs dominate the earth.
Carl Pope is the executive director of the Sierra Club. He can be reached
by e-mail at carl.pope@sierraclub.org.
