Hagel touts plan to preserve climate

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BY DON WALTON/Lincoln Journal Star

Sen. Chuck Hagel unveiled Wednesday his initiative to combat global climate change, urging financial support for new technology and assistance to developing countries.

Hagel, who led Senate opposition to the Kyoto global warming accord eight years ago, said the United States has a responsibility to help develop an alternative course.

"Achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is one of the important challenges of our time," Nebraska's Republican senator declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a prestigious Washington think tank.

"Human society has contributed to pollution and, evidence suggests, a global warming trend," Hagel said.

Hagel's address one week before the Kyoto accord is scheduled to take effect and his forthcoming legislative package place the senator out front in proposing an alternative policy. He exchanged ideas with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a meeting in London last December.

Key elements of Hagel's legislative agenda:

* Assistance to developing countries for projects and technologies that reduce greenhouse gas intensity.

* Establishment of domestic public-private partnerships for development of such technologies with federal financial assistance.

* Tax incentives for investment in climate change technology.

"Bringing in the private sector, and creating incentives for technological innovation, will be critical to real progress on global climate policy," Hagel said.

Assistance to developing countries would allow them to advance economically with cleaner technology rather than magnify the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

In the next 20 years, developing countries — which are exempt from  Kyoto mandates for reduced greenhouse gas emissions — are expected to account for two-thirds of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions, Hagel said.

China soon will be the world's largest emitter of man-made greenhouse gases, he said.

But developing nations lack clean-energy technology, Hagel said, and "they cannot absorb the economic impact of the changes necessary for emissions reductions."

By sharing cleaner technology, the United States can help developing countries "leapfrog over the highly polluting stages of development" that industrialized countries already have been through, he said.

Kyoto's lack of emission controls for developing nations, including China and India, was one of the reasons for Senate approval of the 1997 resolution co-sponsored by Hagel.

The other impediment to Senate ratification of the accord was concern that the emission reduction mandate "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States."

Any climate policy initiative must "recognize the links between energy, the economy and the environment," Hagel said.

In a telephone interview, Hagel said he also views climate change as a foreign policy issue for the United States that can help determine "our standing in the world and how we are perceived."

Hagel and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, addressed the Brookings policy briefing in the wake of novelist Michael Crichton's best-selling book dismissing scientific evidence of global warming.

Crichton argues in "State of Fear" that concern about global warming is best understood as a fad.

Those arguments may be "interesting and provocative" but ultimately are not persuasive, said David Sandalow, environment scholar in foreign policy studies at Brookings.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.