KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WHO'S IN CHARGE ON CLEAN AIR?

This past winter, in a huge, front-page, Sunday edition story, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noticed some folks out in the southern Missouri Ozarks who are mightily upset about alleged plans to turn their lands, along with American sovereignty, over to the United Nations. The whole tone of the piece was derisive -- almost contemptuous, even -- as the big-city daily looked down its nose at what it regarded as the fevered imagination of poor, benighted Ozark hillbillies. Between the lines, the Post version was to dismiss the whole thing as the stuff of fever swamps, propagated by nuts and lunatics obsessed with sightings of black helicopters.

Choppers aside, when one looks at the mounting evidence, there exists on the public record plenty of reason for rational people to wonder where the Clinton administration is taking this country. The Clintons have placed in power, at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, a group of true-believing environmental zealots. Add to this don't-confuse-us-with-the-facts zealotry a positive enthusiasm for the U.N. and you have a witches' brew of crackpot liberal nuttiness that does indeed threaten traditional American liberty. Consider:

* Safely past last November's elections, Clinton EPA chief Carol Browner announced unbelievably tough new clean-air standards to be imposed on all Americans. Ignoring the recommendations of its own scientific advisory committee, which concluded adequate scientific basis for the new standards doesn't exist, the Clinton EPA began tightening the thumb screws on cities such as St. Louis. Along with dozens of other urban areas, St. Louis fails to meet the current clean-air standards a few days a year.

The new EPA standards for soot and particulate matter will mean St. Louis and other cities will never [UNITAL] be in compliance. This is, of course, exactly where EPA wants us: Continually at their mercy. Make no mistake: These new standards will effectively transform the EPA into a giant dictator, deciding whether new plants can locate in the place of their choice, whether and where new roads and bridges can be built, airports located, and on and on. EPA's cold-eyed zealotry in seeking to ban soot particles so tiny they are 1/28th the size of a human hair lays bare the ugly truth about modern liberalism: It isn't about science, it isn't about human health, every index of which has been improving for decades -- it's about power.

The elected representatives of the people -- Democrat, Republican and Independent -- happen to have different ideas. This writer introduced a Senate resolution disapproving the proposed clean-air standards as totally lacking in scientific basis, harmful to economic development and wholly unwarranted. It passed a Democratic-majority Senate by a vote of 24-6, while a companion measure, sponsored by a St. Louis Democrat, passed the House by 138-11. Neither had the slightest effect. Question: Do we remain a self-governing people?

* Now it transpires that much of this is indeed driven by pending U.N treaties to which the Clintons are determined to commit America. "In December," writes Jack Kemp in The Wall Street Journal, "representatives of 150 nations will gather in Kyoto, Japan, to sign a successor treaty to the U.N.'s 1992 Framework convention on Climate Change. ... The international negotiations focus on global warming, the theory that greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are steadily and dangerously warming the planet. Some of our leaders ... have bought into the theory even though scientists have reached no reliable conclusions on global warming." The proposed treaty would, says Kemp, "wreak havoc on the U.S. economy and ironically, on our environment. U.S. negotiators appear to be asking American workers and families to foot the bill for massive reductions in greenhouse gases. ..."

There's more, lots more. Like the tough new air standards, the U.N. treaty is way out in front of any scientific basis, a neo-socialist giveaway of American liberty by unelected bureaucrats. There is some hope: In the U.S. Senate, 65 senators have signed onto the Byrd-Hagel resolution, a nonbinding measure that will put that body on record against any treaty that would cause serious economic harm to the U.S. To really face down the neo-socialist environmental zealots who populate the Clinton administration, though, more than nonbinding resolutions will be required. Consensus won't work on this one.

Somehow, somewhere, leaders must emerge with the stomach to confront the environmental zealots and tell the truth to the American people, to say just exactly where the Green radicals are taking us. Much of the Republican leadership quakes in fear of the accusation of being insufficiently green. If the GOP decides it can do without this unavoidable confrontation, these Republicans may just find, come November of next year, that the folks who've put them in charge of Congress these last two elections can do without them, too.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.