Sooner or later, the world's nations must agree on how they will cooperate to reduce the blanket of greenhouse gases that is warming the planet. Sooner is better than later, of course. But there is something to be said for rejecting, as France's environment minister put it, "a bad agreement, an agreement on the cheap."

The U.S. proposals voted down Saturday morning in the Hague were not without merit. Indeed, they had improved considerably in two weeks. But each improvement resulted more from European objections than U.S. initiative, and in the end the Europeans simply ran out of patience with efforts to minimize the Americans' pain of reform.

Considerable reform is in order. The United States now produces perhaps one-quarter of the carbon that is the chief cause of global warming. In 1997, when targets for emissions reductions were set, the U.S. goal was put at a 7 percent reduction from the benchmark levels of 1990. But we Americans are already putting 10 percent more carbon into the air than we did a decade ago -- which means that meeting the 2008 target will require an emissions cut of perhaps one-third. And still the Senate is lined up against any agreement that would require major changes in U.S. energy use.

Thus, U.S. negotiators at the Hague insisted on a global system of "emissions trading," which lets American polluters pay for offsets while they keep pumping out the carbon.

Some offsets make sense, such as construction of clean power plants in the developing world. Some don't, such as purchase of "hot air" credits from Russian factories that were shuttered years ago by economic collapse. Some are in the undetermined middle, and it was one of these -- reliance on forests, farms and other "sinks" to absorb atmospheric carbon -- that caused the most trouble in the Hague.

Capturing a ton of carbon in a tree can help the atmosphere just as much as cutting a ton from a power plant's smokestack. But there are differences. Reductions at the stack are easily measurable, readily verifiable and permanent. Sequestration of carbon in forests or other sinks is none of those -- at least not yet.

U.S. negotiators deserve credit for backing far off their initial insistence that sequestration be allowed to contribute as much as half of the nation's carbon-reduction commitment. But they must also take responsibility for going to the Hague with a plan so half-baked that as of early Saturday morning, experts were still penciling away on calculations of how much carbon a forest could absorb.

That's just one question worth settling before the next round of talks gets underway in Bonn next May. In the meantime, the U.S. delegation has learned an important lesson about the limits of European patience with Americans' preference for getting creative, rather than getting serious, about doing their share to reduce global warming.

© Copyright 2000 Star Tribune

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