Interview with Rep. Ron Klink (D-PA)
Interview with Congressman Ron Klink (D-PA), during the UN Climate Change Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 11, 1998
What is your impression of the reception that your delegation has received here in Buenos Aires from the NGOs and delegates attending this conference?
I think it has been a very good reception. We’ve had great dialogue, we met with the NGOs today, we’re going to meet with some of the environmentalists in a few moments from now. We have a series of meetings planned with some of the developing nations, with the EU (European Union), and we are looking forward to continuing the dialogue. I was in Kyoto a year ago, so I’m really kind of renewing some working relationships.
Let’s cut straight to the chase. I heard the delegation press briefing yesterday, and a point that you made really stuck out in my mind. When you were talking about the impact of environmental regulations on the industry in southwest Pennsylvania. How do you relate that to what might be the possible consequences of this Kyoto Protocol?
Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, everybody wanted clean air. We clearly had a problem with dirty air in Pittsburgh. Once, in the early part of this century, one of our great American writers referred to Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off”. We had clouds of smoke coming up from the steel mills, they would blot out the sun at mid day. It was not healthy. There were groups like GASP (Group Against Smog and Pollution), that were formed there, they did a lot of good work. The problem was that as we continued to push, farther and farther toward clean air, we made demands on the steel industry, on the glass industry, and they were making investments in clean air technology. But that was instead of modernizing the plants. Instead of staying competitive in a world wide market place. So now we come to a period of time in the late 70’s and early 80’s where we’ve got clean air but we’ve got no jobs. Steel mills have virtually shut down throughout the Pittsburgh region. We lost, over a two-decade period, 155,000 manufacturing jobs. That’s in one small section of southwestern Pennsylvania, 155,000 jobs.
We’re clearly looking at a situation where we have to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol, and the developing nations don’t. As a former newscaster, I did that for 24 years, I covered a lot of our industries which simply moved out of western Pennsylvania, moved out of the United States. They moved to South America, and to South East Asia, taking the dirty technology with them. If what we are concerned about is global warming, we all have the same address, in this great universe, this planet earth. We have to come up with a system where all of the countries are doing their part, not a system that allows you, number one, to get credit for plants that have already shut down decades ago, which is what the Kyoto Protocol does for the EU. They get credit for North Sea oil that was found during Margaret Thatcher’s term. They shut down their coal-powered power plants then, and went to the gas-fueled power plants, natural gas fueled power plants. They get credit for all the factories that shut down in eastern Germany. If this was a real, serious effort, we would be looking at ways to say alright, all of these things have occurred, where do we go from here?
We’re not losing all of those jobs; we’re creating economic opportunity.
I will tell you this: the worst, and I said this yesterday, and I’ll say this as often as people will listen, the worst environmental degradation occurs when you have severe poverty. If you double those communities in southwestern Pennsylvania where we lost the 155,000 jobs, tax base goes down, school districts go down, kids aren’t as smart, families are falling apart, we have no tax base to support building new sewage lines, the water lines, we don’t take care of our storm water runoff, the community falls apart, houses are abandoned, factories are abandoned, we have these huge brownfield sites we can’t cleanup. That is environmental degradation at its worst.
You may have seen earlier in the week, there was a lot of attention drawn to the situation in Central America and the great tragedy there. Here in this hall there was a universal cry, pointing to America as the great emitter of luxury emissions, saying that we’re somehow responsible for the situation in Central America. Did you see any of that?
I heard about some of it, and I will tell you that it is the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard. In Kyoto, not one person, I was there in Kyoto, not one person in the environmentalist community, the NGO community, and any government community, suggested that the emission of carbon dioxide into the air by human kind, was responsible for hurricanes. I would suggest that exactly the opposite is true. If you had a decent economic base, like we have in the United States, those people would not have the problem with storm water runoff that was destroying these homes. Why do we not have the same damage from hurricane Milton in southern Florida that we have in Central America? Because our homes are built more secure. We have storm water runoff. This comes through affluence. Affluence that we gain through building up our nation and using carbon-based fuels to be able to that.
What we have to do is to develop Central America. We have to develop these nations, build decent houses for the people, give them the opportunity to have decent jobs. We cannot preclude that by chasing our worst polluters out of the United States, sending them to Mexico, letting them continue to operate right across our border with the worst kind of pollution in a nation that, first of all, is not participating in anything that is taking place in Kyoto or here in Buenos Aires. Mexico is also not enforcing any of its own environmental laws. Let’s just go on down through Central America, and say, “what have these countries done to up lift the lives of the common ordinary working people?” Take a look at the American pattern for allowing people to get ahead. A lot of it was done because we were able to use our coal resources, we were able to use our oil resources. And still at the same time, without having a gun to our head, we tried to find the cleanest way of doing it, and we continue to do that today. Regardless of what happened in Kyoto and what happens here in Buenos Aires, industries are going to continue to search for the cleanest ways of producing their product because if you have emissions, that means fuel that is not being burned. It’s a waste of energy, and it just makes common sense to burn fuel efficiently.
Lets talk a little bit about the political realities in the States. There has been a lot of rumor at this conference about the President or Vice President signing this protocol possibly today, or tomorrow. What are the implications of signing this protocol in view of the Senate resolution?
What you are doing is agreeing beforehand, to something that you don’t know what the rules are going to be. All of the rules as to how this is going to be enforced and how these trading mechanisms are going to take place, and how countries are going to be given credit for what they do and don’t do, are going to be established sometime way off into the future. Two years from now, three years from now, four years, but we have to agree today. I likened it yesterday to the fact that number one, you don’t get involved in a card game when you know it’s fixed. And then when you get into the card game and it’s fixed, you play your hand the best you can, and the last thing, the dumbest mistake you can make is to give all your money away. We are doing all three. We got involved in this whole thing in Kyoto, we knew it was a rigged card game. It’s rigged here because of what we agreed to in Kyoto. We know it is not going to be beneficial to our nation. So we come down here and we misplay our hand. Which is exactly what we’ve done, and now we want to either give our money or our technologies to all of these developing nations in order to buy them off, to make them come into this rigged card game. There is a lot of foolishness taking place, and I think we need to step back and take a long hard look, and make sure that it is not, in fact, the process which is driving the policy.
We have some fear that the administration may move toward implementation of the provisions of the treaty without ever even intending to send it to the Senate for ratification.
We have had the same fear. Let me just tell you that. And as a result of that, in the budget which the President just signed two weeks ago, we addressed that, and we cut off funds. He can’t do that. And by signing that law, he apparently agreed to the fact that there is no back door implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Let’s get on to a serious methodology for determining what we as the nations of the world are really going to do. I am sick and tired of looking at workers across my region and around our nation who are denied the opportunity for employment, based on decisions that our government makes, whether we have a democratic or republican congress, or we have a democratic or republican President. Both parties have made the mistakes in developing trade policies, and policies relating to clean air, and concern for the environment, that do not take into consideration the ability of workers around our country and around this world to be able to lift themselves out of poverty and to create products, to create some new methodology.
I think what happened in Kyoto, when it was kicked up to the ministers’ level in the final twelfth hour, was disgraceful. You can’t get through this thing. You’ve got to agree to the protocol before you have the opportunity to change it. How does that make any sense; to agree to something, before you can change it to make it work? Well, it doesn’t make any sense at all. So we are going to watch the administration.
One of the members of your bipartisan delegation is not with you. Why?
George Dingell from Michigan. Mr. Dingle decided that he was supposed to be here with me, but he decided not to come because he was so angry that the administration announced that they were going to sign this protocol. He said, well, if they are going to sign it, why in the world do I even need to go down there? They have already made up their mind before this whole thing has been negotiated. So, he saw no purpose in coming, and thought he would stay back in Washington DC and communicate to the American public from there. Well, I came on down to Buenos Aires and represented both him and the Democrats who agree with us here in Buenos Aires.
In the remaining minute or so that we have, what can we as average Americans, do to see to it that we take correct action in regards to this treaty. What can the average American do about what’s going on in Buenos Aires?
I think the average American needs to understand that you don’t want to see your gasoline going up 60 cents to a dollar a gallon, which is exactly what will happen. You don’t want to see your utility bills going through the roof. This would be a dramatic impact that would cost each family across our country one to two thousand dollars on average each year. The meeting that we had in Kyoto with the environmentalists, I thought, was very interesting. They opened the meeting by telling us the science of global warming is ill-defined. If it is ill-defined, why do we want to sign an agreement, which would, in essence, begin to de-industrialize the United States, to move the industrial base of our nation off our shores, to the developing nations that don’t have to apply the same standards of conduct. So you can pollute if you are in China, you can pollute if you are in India, but if you are in the United States you have a different set of rules. That doesn’t make sense.
Thank you, Congressman Klink.