Finally, impacts on international competitiveness must be considered by the government in any debate on national policy options. The National Action Plan has appropriately focused its attention on the policies and measures already under way in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The reductions that will result from implementation of the Energy Policy Act and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, as well as voluntary actions and other measures based on market conditions, should lead to economic efficiency and lower levels of emissions.

What the National Action Plan does not include is a detailed evaluation of the costs of these policies and measures and their impacts on the economy against the worst case-excuse me, against the base case. Such analyses are important to the American public. The costs will have very real economic impacts. According to several recent studies, restricting greenhouse gas emissions to 1988 levels could by the year 2010 reduce Gross Domestic Product by 1.5 to 2 percent, cause the loss of half a million jobs, and increase the fuel prices of electricity by 50 to 60 percent in the industrial sector of the U.S. economy.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement. Thank you.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Barrody appears in the appendix.]

Mr. Mintzer.

STATEMENT OF DR. IRVING M. MINTZER, CENTER FOR GLOBAL CHANGE, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AND STOCKHOLM ENVIRONMENT INSTITUTE

Mr. MINTZER. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Irving Mintzer, and I am a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland. I currently sit-participate as a member of Working Group I of the IPCC on Science and Working Group III on Cross-cutting Issues, and have been participating for the last 2 years and was an invited observer in the deliberations of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Climate Change.

I fully agree with Mr. Barrody that consideration of the issue of global climate change of the National Action Plan needs to be framed in the context of considering its effects on the U.S. economy and, especially, on its effects on global competitiveness. But as I look at the data that is available to us now and the options that are open to us in the country, I draw a somewhat different conclu sion. In my remarks to you today, I would like to focus on five specific issues.

First, do we know enough today to act wisely with respect to the risks of rapid climate change? Secondly, what are the implications of the remaining uncertainties, the nonlinearities in the climate system and the potential for surprises? Third, do we have the opportunity to buy any insurance against the potential damages associated with these risks? Fourth, can we revise the current original Bush administration National Action Plan and use it as a tool for planning for a stronger America? And finally, can we use the climate issue as a foundation for building new partnerships that will strengthen American business, that will return America to a posi

tion of leadership internationally and that will help to promote a sound environment for ourselves and our children?

To return to the first point, do we know enough to act wisely, as I am sure you have heard, during the last 5 years the risks of rapid climate change have received increasing attention among scientists, policymakers, responsible leaders in the business community, among members of the general public and nongovernmental organizations. Research on global environmental change, and on climate change in particular, has increased dramatically both in the United States and abroad. We now spend more than $1 billion on this research in global change and it has led to many important insights. We know a lot about what is happening to the atmosphere and about what the implications of those changes are likely to be. The money we have invested in research here has produced models that are both complex, sophisticated and computationally intensive. Running on the largest supercomputers currently available, they give us a good idea of the main outlines of global climate change that could occur if the current trend of greenhouse gas buildup continues unchecked.

The Scientific Working Group of the IPPC has suggested that if current trends continue, we may see by the end of the next century a rise in temperature of as much as 2 to 5 degrees centigrade. That may not sound like much, but 1 degree centigrade is all that separates today's climate on average from the climate of the Little Ice Age when our friends in Scandinavia could walk on a cold day from Sweden to the continent; and 2 degrees centigrade, a warming of 2 degrees centigrade, takes us outside the range of anything that has been experienced in the last 10,000 years. A warming of 5 degrees centigrade from today's level takes us outside the range of anything experienced in the last million years.

That doesn't mean that human beings couldn't survive the change. Of course, some us would. It just means that we have no historical, cultural, or other written record that we could go back to and ask, OK, what did people do last time, what made the problem worse, what eased the transition, what reduced the dislocations?

But part of the reason that public attention is focused on the issue of rapid climate change is not so much concern about the effects of these gradual shifts in average global surface temperatures, for no one really lives in the average global climate. What has brought the concerns of the problems of the atmosphere has been an unusual sequence of extreme weather events, of instabilities, of the 100-year storm occurring twice in a decade in the Caribbean and again in Europe, of hurricanes in Florida, wind storms in the United Kingdom that ripped up trees many centuries old, of flooding in Arizona and storm surges in Bangladesh.

These extreme weather events and others like them have occurred without warning and on no particular schedule, as they have for millennia past, but the rapidly changing balance of upper atmospheric winds and ocean currents that is likely to result from a continued increase in greenhouse gases is probably going to lead to a period of continued instability and a change in the frequency and the distribution of these extreme weather events.

What our recent experience with Hurricane Andrew and the experience of others in both industrial and developing countries have taught us about these experiences is that, currently the institutions currently available to us are not well-positioned to respond to rapid changes in environmental conditions. Hurricane Andrew taught us that traditional American building practices, as sophisticated as they are, and traditional practices of building inspections, are not really sufficient to deal with extreme weather events like the 100year hurricane. While the loss of human life was limited, Hurricane Andrew introduced over $5 billion of economic losses stressing school systems, water treatment facilities, and insurance companies across southern Florida.

Rapid climate change due to the enhanced greenhouse effect could increase the probability of these extreme weather events, adding significantly to the pressures on human societies and natural ecosystems that are likely to be under severe stress from other factors in the decades to come. No one can say with certainty that any of the specific weather anomalies we have observed recently have been caused by steadily increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, but as the climate system moves toward a new, warmer equilibrium, we can expect that the turmoil caused by unsettled weather patterns will continue and even increase. Current scientific knowledge is insufficient to determine how, where, or when the effects of climate change will provoke additional experiences of extreme weather events in the future.

There are other uncertainties, as well, with which we must contest. We know that the climate that we experience is the result of a set of complex interactions from a set of coupled nonlinear systems, fluid dynamic systems of the ocean, the atmosphere, and their direction with the biota. We don't really understand the relationships with these systems, but we know by introducing greenhouse gases at the rates we are doing today, we are changing the driving force, the energy balance that links them together. We can only expect that, as a result, we will experience surprises in the way these systems respond.

Feedback mechanisms that we are only now beginning to understand indicate that we are likely to face thresholds of nonlinearity in the response of these systems, situations in which a small additional increment may provoke a much-larger-than-expected response in return.

But what can we do about these risks? Our position is similar to that of many parents in America with young children. They know that they and their children will be exposed to stress and disease in the environments in which they must live and work. They expect that at some unscheduled point, one or another member of the family will fall ill, but they cannot now know the timing or the severity of that future illness. They can ignore the possibility, since they don't know for sure that one or another of them will become sick, or they can take a few simple steps in advance to limit the risk. They can choose to strengthen the family with a healthy diet, abstinence from smoking, avoiding drugs, foregoing excessive use of alcohol and getting regular exercise; and to address the risks that cannot be avoided or minimized, they can invest in some basic in

surance. A similar opportunity is available for our economy and for our country.

Although we cannot know what the effects of climate change due to the greenhouse effect will be on our economy or people, we can take steps to minimize the risk. We can increase the resilience of American society against the kinds of weather events we have seen in the past and may see in the future and we can strengthen our economy so that it is more robust and more capable and more competitive in dealing with a changing situation worldwide.

In order to do that, the first thing we have to do is to revise the National Inaction Plan for Climate Change and begin planning for a stronger America. The National Action Plan submitted by the Bush administration will not create new highways, jobs at home, and it will not demonstrate international leadership abroad. Although it does not violate the letter of the U.S. commitment under the Framework Commission on Climate Change, it clearly contravenes the intent of the treaty.

Reflecting what the country was already doing, absent concerns about climate change or our new obligations under the Framework Convention, the program proposed at the 11th hour by the Bush administration is indeed a plan for national inaction on climate. The Bush plan was a clear attempt to limit the options of the incoming Clinton administration and to preempt the role of the new administration in future negotiations on climate change. Introduced without congressional review and prior to public comment, it is but an unorganized collage of stale ideas and old programs, coddled together at the last minute without any underlying strategic direction or plan. It will not serve the country or the planet well.

The Bush plan precludes the United States from making a just and adequate contribution to the achievements of the objectives of the Convention as they are outlined in Article I of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It does not assist the world in stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level which will avoid significant anthropogenic disruption of climate change.

Nevertheless, the National Action Plan is not wholly without merit nor should it be discard en bloc. It is a useful foundation, an indicator of what a business' usual strategy might look like if we had no concerns about the risks of rapid climate change. It ought well to be treated as an annex to a real National Action Plan, developed jointly by Congress and the administration and designed to strengthen the American economy while reinforcing traditional American values of commitment to market mechanisms of thrift, stewardship, and smart business sense.

To achieve the complementary goals of strengthening the economy and protecting the environment, the new Action Plan must embrace the spirit as well as the letter of the Convention signed at the Earth Summit. The United States must first make a firm commitment to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at their 1990 level and then begin to reduce them from this level before the beginning of the new century.

To achieve these goals, making U.S. industry more competitive and the economy more energy efficient will take a dramatic assertion of U.S. leadership. The United States should reenter the cli

mate negotiations prepared to move aggressively toward reducing domestic emissions while building the basis for new partnerships between U.S. firms and their counterparts in the private sector of developing countries, where the greatest new market opportunities are likely to exist.

Building on the basis of the President's economic plan, the United States must use market mechanisms to increase the economic efficiency of energy use at home. But to demonstrate the leadership that our friends and allies are now looking for from Washington, we must go further still. We must start here in this building and in the White House and the Pentagon by making a commitment to introduce a set of energy efficiency measures that would be designated by the Secretary of Energy on an annual basis as cost effective today and at the time of their designation, that these measures be required in all new leased or constructed space operated by and for the Federal Government.

We must reaffirm our faith in the American people by giving them true and complete information about the real price of energy. Ending the systematic deception of the American public about the price of energy, we must raise the price of gasoline to reflect the full economic and environmental costs of petroleum supply and use. I suggest, in addition to the President's plan, an additional gasoline tax starting at 4 cents per gallon and increasing 2 cents per gallon per month for the next 4 years. This should be complemented by a program to pay Americans to retire old, polluting vehicles in exchange for a cash payment from the government raised from the gasoline tax.

In addition, the program should institute an excise tax on cars and light trucks that achieve less than the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard in the year of their manufacture. One approach would be to charge the purchaser a tax of $1,000-a user fee of $1,000 per mile per gallon below the standard of the first 10 miles per gallon; $2,000 per mile per gallon per vehicle for vehicles that fall between 11 and 20 miles per gallon below the standard; and $5,000 per mile per gallon for vehicles that fall between 21 and 40 miles below the CAFE standard. The money raised by this excise tax would be divided between the old-car bounty described above and a set of rebates for cars that achieve efficiency levels above the CAFE standard.

For example, vehicles that are 1 to 10 miles per gallon above the standard could receive $250 per mile per gallon, and those at 11 to 25 miles above the standard might receive $500 per mile per gallon. This type of "feebate" program was proposed by the Center for Global Change and adopted by the Maryland legislature, but struck down by the courts because it violated Federal laws.

We should change those Federal laws and use the market to encourage Americans to make good choices about the vehicles they use. You could still buy a 5-mile-per-gallon Lamborghini, but you would have to pay an extra $100,000 to do it. The gasoline tax should be supplemented

Mr. GEJDENSON. What is the original price of the car?

Mr. MINTZER. You could probably pick one up for about 125. The gasoline-and it would hardly throw any American automobile worker out of work. The gasoline tax should be supple