WASHINGTON - Pressure is mounting on President Bush at home and abroad, even from inside his own party and within his own administration, to do more to fight global warming.

Bush's go-slow policy has been widely dismissed as inadequate over the past few weeks. Japan and the European Union endorsed instead the Kyoto Protocol, which would coordinate international efforts to restrain global warming. Bush rejects it.

Several U.S. state governments took steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions on their own. The Senate repeatedly pressed Bush to take more aggressive action. And an inter-agency report from the Bush administration itself acknowledged for the first time that global warming is a real, largely manmade and very serious problem.

A showdown looms later this month in the Senate, where the Environment Committee will vote on a bill sponsored by its chairman, Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., to curb power plant emissions of four pollutants, including carbon dioxide. The bill would turn into law a Bush campaign pledge that he abandoned shortly after taking office in 2001.

Then in late August world leaders will meet in South Africa at an Earth Summit. If Russia and a few East Europe nations endorse the Kyoto Protocol to constrain global warming before then, as expected, the summit will include a ceremony putting the treaty into effect.

Mother Nature is turning up the heat on Bush, too. Two of the first four months of 2002 set global records for heat, while the other two months were the second-hottest on record for those months. Meanwhile, a new United Nations study found that the famous Himalayan glacier that explorers Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed 49 years ago has melted so much that it has retreated three miles.

Independent experts say such signs of serious change cannot be ignored.

"You may not like what the science is telling you, especially on the issue of climate change, but sooner or later it's going to rear its head and you can't repress it," said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "Nature will do what it has to, regardless of what politicians want."

"The pressure is building," said Paul Joskow, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. "I think the federal government will eventually adopt a comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions control policy, but I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow."

So far Bush shows no inclination to rethink his policy. He opted out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, saying it would wreck the U.S. economy. It called on the United States to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels, but made no such demands on developing giants, including China and India. Cutting back emissions so severely would require expensive economic adjustments.

In February 2002 Bush proposed an alternative to Kyoto, setting voluntary emission targets pegged to economic growth. His plan would let emissions increase, but at a reduced rate. He also proposed to spend more on global-warming technology and research - $4.5 billion next year.

Voluntary efforts have been tried for 12 years, however, and failed to relieve the problem. Independent scientists say that Bush's plan requires little action.

"I don't think we have a serious greenhouse gas emissions control policy," MIT's Joskow said.

Many efforts are under way to produce a more aggressive U.S. global warming policy.

At the state level, New Hampshire's Republican-led legislature and Republican governor mandated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Next week a New York task force set up by Republican Gov. George Pataki is expected to recommend dramatic cuts in the Empire State's greenhouse gas emissions. And California's legislature will vote soon on a measure, the first of its kind, to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

The U.S. Senate in late April passed an energy bill including terms from Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that would push companies to report voluntarily about how much greenhouse gas they spew. If they refuse to report after five years, the bill would mandate that they do so. Another measure in the bill would push the White House to develop a new anti-global warming plan.

By far the most galling prod to the White House came from within, when on May 31 six agencies led by the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report warning of dire consequences from global warming, which it said was very real and largely man-made. Previously the Bush administration had hedged on both questions.

The EPA-led "U.S. Climate Action Report" concedes that temperatures in the United States probably will rise 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in this century because of global warming. It also predicts more frequent heat waves, reductions in snow pack and water supplies, and loss of wetlands and delicate ecosystems.

Balancing those ill effects somewhat, the report also predicts that warming will lead to increased food production and forest growth.

The inter-agency report's conclusions are "very different than the attitude on the issue that we saw in the first few months" of the Bush administration, said Jeremy Symons. He was a global warming policy adviser at EPA in early 2001and now oversees the National Wildlife Federation's program on the issue.

On Tuesday, Bush called the EPA-led report a document "put out by bureaucrats" and dismissed questions of whether he might change his policy.

The next day White House spokesman Scott McClellan said "the suggestion that this report says we need to change our policy is just not the case." He said that the administration thinks global warming "is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, but there's a lot of uncertainties."

Economic conservatives who have resisted measures to reduce global warming for years like Bush's stand, but they're angry that the administration issued the EPA report.

"The pressure is so much on the president, I think that this report has really weakened the president's position," said the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell, chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an industry group that tries to debunk global warming. "The administration has basically just handed (Senate Majority Leader Tom) Daschle and (Senate Environment Committee Chairman James) Jeffords an awful lot of ammunition. It's now up to the White House to clean up the mess they created."

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(c) 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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