Filthy machines live on

NO ONE ever said curbing greenhouse gases globally was going to be easy. But an article in Sunday's Globe showed just how thorny the issue can be. Reporter Beth Daley detailed how outdated and polluting US industrial equipment and vehicles are being recycled for use in developing countries. Companies and governments in such countries see the secondhand power plants, buses, and trucks as a bargain and have little if any incentive to worry about their carbon dioxide emissions.

Daley described a small coal-fired electricity plant being dismantled in Turners Falls in western Massachusetts and rebuilt in Guatemala, where it will power a textile mill. Such reuse of US equipment is disappointing to advocates for action against global warming. Their hope is that developing countries will leapfrog this level of technology in favor of cleaner vehicles and equipment.

But the international community could tip the cost-benefit balance in favor of new technology by agreeing on a successor to the Kyoto climate-change protocol that includes a strengthened cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. Under such a system, a polluter in the industrialized world can offset its emissions by funding new and efficient technology or reforestation in a developing country. With such aid, a textile mill in Guatemala might be able to afford a renewable source of electricity, such as biomass -- or at least a generator using a fuel, such as natural gas, that emits less carbon dioxide than coal.

Administering a cap-and-trade system will be tricky. In theory, an industrial firm in a developing country could seek generous offset assistance by claiming that it can only afford the most polluting equipment -- when it really intends to adopt a somewhat more advanced technology no matter what. Monitors of cap-and-trade offsets will have to develop mechanisms to minimize any abuses.

Short of a new Kyoto cap-and-trade agreement, the World Bank and other international lending institutions could play a more aggressive role in fostering development of low-emission technology. Before his ouster as World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz, a former Bush administration official, had worked to keep the bank's focus away from climate change, according to documents released last week by the Government Accountability Project. With Wolfowitz gone, that organization should do more to measure the impact of its projects on climate change. The US Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. have both also come under fire recently -- and rightly so -- for funding oil refineries and other projects overseas whose eventual greenhouse gas emissions will equal those of California.

The challenge for the international community is to help developing countries modernize, without adding to the emissions that are dangerously changing the planet's climate.