President Clinton is scheduled to leave early today for a one-day trip to Idaho, where he is expected to offer words of praise and encouragement to exhausted firefighters trying to control the worst fire season seen in the United States in the past half century. Firefighting operations are costing the federal government some $15 million a day.
Fires have smouldered in wilderness areas of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Montana has been the hardest-hit of several states fighting wildfires, with 54 separate blazes raging across the state. One particularly intense blaze has destroyed 54,000 acres (21,000 hectares) of the Bitterroot National Forest.
"The Northern Rockies area is the hottest place in the country at the moment, and it's mostly Montana," Ms Lynn Pisano-Pedigo of the National Interagency Fire Centre (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, said.
The NIFC is the agency that is co-ordinating the firefighting effort with the help of state and federal officials.
"August and September are still ahead of us," said Mr Dennis
Pendleton, the top US Forest Service representative at the NIFC, noting that late summer usually brings the most destructive fires.
"This has the potential to be one of the worst fire seasons on record," Mr Pendleton added.
In an editorial yesterday, the Washington Post said that "a link between forests and global cooling may not be immediately apparent. But limiting the emission of carbon dioxide into the air from fuel-burning sources such as power plants and automobiles isn't the only way to control global warming; trees and crops can have an effect by pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.
"The 1997 Kyoto protocol, an international agreement aimed at slowing global warming, envisioned nations getting credit for the carbon-cutting effects of properly managed forestry and agriculture. It left for later discussions of exactly how that would work and how much it would count toward the agreed targets for reducing carbon emissions. In the next round of negotiations, the Clinton administration will seek an agreement that allows substantial credit for US forest management and agricultural practices.
"The administration estimates that US forests and agriculture can store more than 300 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. That's roughly equivalent to half the amount of carbon that must be cut from annual US emissions to meet its first Kyoto target, which kicks in between 2008 and 2012. If the United States got credit for all of that carbon - which officials say they do not expect - the country wouldn't have to limit its emissions so sharply, making compliance with the accord easier and cheaper.
"That's exactly what worries some environmentalists, who fear that carbon `sinks', as farms and forests are known, will become a giant loophole, allowing countries to claim credit for activities that would have gone on anyway rather than making real changes in practices that are heating up the planet. The approach also will face opposition from countries that don't have the land space to benefit much from sinks credits.
The editorial spoke of "language that would help ensure that the agreement doesn't encourage practices such as cutting old-growth forests in order to get credit for replanting." "Negotiators should make sure that such protections against environmentally damaging practices have real teeth. The United States also is willing to phase in the credits, which would limit the amount initially counted against its Kyoto targets. "Negotiators ought to be able to find a way to give farms and forests their due without removing incentives to channel economic growth into cleaner - and cooler - paths," the Washington Post concluded.