39th: U.S. green ranking not to be envied

WASHINGTON — A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.

European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse-gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.

The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland and the northern European countries of Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities.

"We are putting more weight on climate change," said Daniel Esty, the report's lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "Switzerland is the most greenhouse-gas-efficient economy in the developed world," he said, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks.

The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, "is slipping down," both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse-gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country's performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, "is at the bottom of the world right now."

He added, "The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse-gas emissions."

The list, which is to be released today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the fourth, and most refined, of a series of rankings first issued in 2002. Because of methodological changes, the list this year is not directly comparable with the last one, issued in 2006, in which the United States was ranked 28th.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, said the problem with ozone, which is formed by chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen, volatile organic compounds and sunlight, was being addressed by the Bush administration in new rules to curb emissions from power plants and the burning of diesel fuels.

India, China and Australia ranked among the bottom 25 nations in the indicator that combined all the climate change scores.