The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Tuesday, Moscow ordered cuts in natural gas supplies to Lithuania, Pres. Bush said the U.S. will take appropriate action if the Soviets carry out the threat, and inflation reached an eight year high in the first quarter. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Jim.

MR.LEHRER: After the News Summary, we look at Moscow's first economic step against Lithuania with Lithuanian official [FOCUS - LITHUANIA - TURNING THE SCREWS] Stasys Lozoraitis and Soviet lawyer Victor Danilenko. Then comes [FOCUS - STEEL CITY] a BBC report about a Soviet city ruined by a steel mill's pollution, the U.S. argument over global warming [FOCUS - HOT AIR] and our Tuesday night essay about a print maker [ESSAY - ARTISTIC INSPIRATION] named Grossman.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: A Soviet official has announced a cut in natural gas supplies to Lithuania. It was the first sign that the Kremlin was beginning to carry out its threat to cut off the flow of vital supplies to turn the Baltic Republic away from its declaration of independence. The announcement came yesterday from an official of the Soviet Gas Supply Network in neighboring Bila Russia. He said that starting today it could sharply reduce natural gas supplies to the breakaway republic, but today the official told Reuters that it was intended as a warning and that gas was still flowing. Lithuanian officials said the Soviets also plan to begin tomorrow to cut oil and gasoline shipments. We have a report by Bill Neely of Independent Television News.

MR. NEELY: The decision to cut back Lithuania's gas supply was announced to the republic's parliament and was immediately condemned. Pres. Landsbergis had just offered Moscow talks. Any economic blockade, he said, would cause untold damage. Lithuania's 200 major factories and 1 million homes will be hit if the threat to sharply reduce supplies is carried out. There's been no cut so far. Gas and electricity lines to Lithuania also supply parts of other republics. Any reduction would affect them too. Fears that petrol might be cut off caused cues in the capital, Vilnius. The Lithuanians see this as a rather crude display of Kremlin power, the real effect of which won't be known for some time.

MR. MacNeil: Pres. Bush was asked about the Soviet action during a picture taking session at the White House.

PRES. BUSH: Clearly those announcements are contrary to the approach that we have urged and that others have urged upon the Soviet Union and we are considering appropriate responses if these threats are implemented, and I'm going to leave it right there, but I would simply repeat that what we need is dialogue, discussion and the peaceful resolution of this great difficulty there.

MR. MacNeil: We'll have more on the Lithuanian story after the News Summary. Also in the Soviet Union today about 10,000 people demonstrated outside the Kremlin and another 25,000 turned out in Leningrad, all in defense of two men who'd led an investigation into corruption in Soviet government and society. They were recently fired for allegedly abusing their power. The demonstrators accused the Soviet leadership of trying to silence the two men. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: An international conference on global warming opened today in Washington. Pres. Bush told those attending the White House sponsored event there was a need for more study of the causes of climate change and the economic impact of the remedies. Some European delegates were critical. West Germany's environmental minister said gaps in knowledge must not be used as an excuse for worldwide inaction. White House Science Adviser Allan Bromley told the group why the administration called the meeting.

ALLAN BROMLEY, Presidential Science Adviser: Now we are not here for the next two days to make a global warming policy. That will emerge from the broad array of research and policy reviews that are now ongoing around the world. Rather, I would submit that we are here to try to determine what will be required in order that such policies be based on some scientific understanding and that they be both technologically and economically feasible.

MR. LEHRER: We will have more on this conference later in the program. The United States is not rejoining UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The Reagan administration ended U.S. participation six years ago, saying it was poorly managed and politically biased against the West. In a report to Congress today, Sec. of State Baker said little has changed. He said the time is not yet ripe to reconsider U.S. membership.

MR. MacNeil: There was bad inflation news today. The government said consumer prices rose by .5 percent last month, pushing inflation thus far this year to an annual rate of 8 1/2 percent, the largest increase in nearly 8 years. The jump in March was caused primarily by increased housing costs. Higher housing costs and high interest rates helped reduce the number of new homes and apartments being built last month. Housing starts went down by more than 9 percent.

MR. LEHRER: The Justice Department today launched a new campaign against drug traffickers. It ordered 173 banks to hand over records for hundreds of accounts. It is believed nearly $400 million in illegal Colombian drug profits were deposited in those accounts. Most of the banks were located in Florida and New York. Attorney Gen. Dick Thornburgh explained the new effort.

DICK THORNBURGH, Attorney General: It's designed to recoup to the extent that we can the profits that were run through a variety of banks and financial institutions from the drug cartels, and our hope is that by having access, breaking down the veil of bank secrecy, that we'll be able to analyze further these records and trace these profits and recoup and recover many of them.

MR. LEHRER: Illegal drugs cannot be used even if they are part of a religious ceremony, so ruled the U.S. Supreme Court today. It was in a case involving the drug peyote. Two drug counselors in Oregon were denied unemployment benefits because they took the drug in an Indian religious ceremony. In today's 6 to 3 ruling, the court said religion did not take precedence over the law.

MR. MacNeil: One of the founders of the Civil Rights movement, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, died today of heart failure. He was 64. Abernathy worked closely with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the time the two men launched the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955 to King's assassination in 1968. Abernathy went on to lead the civil rights organization called the Southern Christian Leadership Council through much of the 1970s. His ties with other civil rights leaders were strained last year when he claimed in his autobiography that Martin Luther King had had extramarital affairs. But today King's son called Abernathy's death "a very tragic loss to our nation". That's our News Summary. Just ahead on the Newshour, the Lithuanian crisis, Soviet pollution, global warming and our Tuesday essay. FOCUS - HOT AIR

MR. MacNeil: First tonight the dispute over global warming. Is it a problem What should be done about it. And what happens if we do nothing at all. President Bush and his Administration grappled with global warming questions today at an International Conference in Washington. The President came out in favor of more research a position that will be debated by two scientists in a moment. But first correspondent Tom Bearden explains the greenhouse effect, a term many people began hearing about 2 years ago.

MR. BEARDEN: June 1988 the weather was brutally hot. Global temperatures for the first five months of the year were the warmest eve recorded. Severe drought conditions caused nearly half of the nations agricultural counties to be declared disaster areas.

FARMER: Well it is the worst that I have seen it. It is the worst that my father has seen it and he is 76 years old.

MR. BEARDEN: Forest fires raged out of control and the Mississippi River fell to a record low halting river traffic and leaving barges stranded.

SPOKESMAN: The River is closed as of two days ago for us.

SPOKESMAN: We are able ship nothing via the River.

MR. BEARDEN: Washington was having unusually hot weather too. All of that seemed to focus attention on a hearing here on Capitol Hill where a NASA scientist was warning that all the scorching weather might be just a taste of things to come. The Scientist was Dr. James Hansen Direct for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. He told a Senate Committee the warming trend of the 1980s which included the five hottest years on record was not normal, not a natural climate variation.

JAMES HANSEN, NASA: [June 1988] The global warming is now large enough where we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.

MR. BEARDEN: Up to that moment global warming due to the so called greenhouse effect seemed a remote possibility, something for future generations to worry about. The theory of how the effect works is undisputed. Sunlight strikes the earth, the earth radiates heat back to the atmosphere and part of that heat is then trapped in the atmosphere by carbon dioxide and other gases.

DR. HANSEN: The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

MR. BEARDEN: Hansen's testimony based on this computer climate model touched off a storm of controversy. Most climatologists felt that he had jumped the gun. They argued that climate naturally varies so much that it would take several decades before any one could determine whether the greenhouse effect had really set in. Certain gases are at the core of the greenhouse problem. Carbon dioxide and other gases have began increasing at a rapid rate. Power plants and automobiles are burning more and more fossil fuels. Tropical forests which absorb CO2 are being burned down adding even more CO2 to the air. CFCs from aerosol sprays and refrigerants have increased. So to have the less important greenhouse gases such as methane which comes from rice paddies and other sources. Climatologists generally agree that as the gases increase so too will the heat trapped in the atmosphere.

MR. MacNeil: The Bush Administration has resisted calls from the environmental movement to take action to curb global warming. Today President Bush urged scientists to determine the scope of the greenhouse problem.

PRESIDENT BUSH: What we need are facts, the stuff that science is made of. A better understanding of the basic processes at work in our whole world. Better earth science models that allow us to calculate better interaction between man and environment. And that is why I am asking Congress to approve a 60 percent increase in our budget for the global change research program, an aggressive research program for which we have budgeted more than 1 billion dollars in 1991 to reduce the uncertainties surrounding global change. To advance the scientific understanding that we need if we are going to make decisions to maximize benefits and minimize the unintended consequences. We know that cleaning up our environment costs money, a lot of money, and we know that it needs changes in the way that we work and live and yet as we move forward all of us must make certain that we preserve our environmental well being and our economic welfare. We know that these are not separate concerns. They are two sides of the same coin. Recognizing this fact is in the interest of every nation here today. It is in the interest of the developed world and the developing world alike.

MR. MacNeil: The scientific community is divided about global warning as we hear now. Dr. Michael Oppenheimer is a Senior Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and Co Author of the book Dead Heat, The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect. Dr. Richard Lindzen is a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is in Washington tonight. Dr. Oppenheimer you say that the scientific evidence now available calls for immediate action. What is that evidence briefly?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: There is no debate about the proposition that the World will warm if we keep pumping these gases in to the atmosphere. The only question is how much and how soon. We have four types of evidence. First of all we have four types of evidence. First of all the Planets Earth, Mars and Venus have four different climates and by and large those are determined by the different levels of greenhouse gases. For instance there is a lot of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus and it is 850 degrees. Hot enough to melt tin and lead. Secondly we have evidence from ice cores. We look in ice cores and we find bubbles of the atmosphere from a 160 thousand years ago. We can study those ice cores and we know that as temperature went up during that 160 year period so did the carbon dioxide. Strong confirming evidence that if raise carbon dioxide in the future temperature will also go up. Third we have computer simulations which have been going on for 25 years now which substantiate that evidence and show that if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to be emitted the world will warn. And finally recently we have satellite observations which can actually measure the greenhouse effect of the earth.

MR. MacNeil: Dr. Lindzen you say that this evidence is not good enough or conclusive enough yet to leap in to action. Am and right and would you explain why?

DR. LINDZEN: Certainly I would be glad to explain. I think Dr. Oppenheimer misstated a number of things that he suggests constitute evidence but I would begin with your introductory statement as to what the greenhouse effect is. I mean if that were true it would be unassailable. The trouble with that picture is that picture is not strictly true. It shows the sun light reaching the earth and the earth trying to cool by radiation and the air trapping some. What in fact happens is if that were the case the earth today would not only be warmer it would be a 170 degrees Fahrenheit. It would be uninhabitable. In fact the earth cools by evaporation, by transporting heat from one region which has a lot of greenhouse gas and remember the most important greenhouse gas by orders of magnitude let us say 100 is water vapor and not CO2 and carries the heat to high altitude and high latitudes where there is less water vapor and it is easier for the heat to radiate to space. And given this process we have to know how the heat, the cooling of the earth how it is apportioned between this transport and radiation and the models are not good enough to apportion it correctly to be used to estimate what are really the effects predicted. When you get to the discussion of past climates, yes, on very long time scales there is a very good correlation of carbon dioxide and temperature. On short time scales there is a poor correlation. People investigating this are not sure whether the temperature came first or the carbon dioxide came first. That hardly constitutes evidence. As far as Mars, Venus and the Earth go. Venus it isn't simply that it has more CO2 it is the fact that is has a cloud deck that is very thick. On Mars it has much more CO2 than we have but of course it doesn't have water vapor. There is no question that will leave it cooler. The question we are asking is how much and when Dr. Oppenheimer says there is no doubt about it there is only doubt of how much and when there is a peculiar rhetorical point. If the doubt is how much and how much can be virtually nothing and when could be a very long time. That is saying we don't understand.

MR. MacNeil: Dr. Oppenheimer.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: There is a way to resolve these differences. We have these very fine compasses for refining scientific consensus and when you use those compasses you find that Dr. Lindzen's opinions are not only on the scientific fringe but according to the recent satellite date probably wrong. The National Academy of Science for instance has looked at this problem three times in the last 12 years and they are in the middle of a fourth assessment and each time the result comes back the same. The likely global warming over the next 60 to 70 years is going to be in the range of 3 to 8 degree Fahrenheit. We have other compasses. The U.S. Government anxious to challenge that opinion set up something called the inter governmental panel on climate change bring together 100s of scientists from all over the world. Their report is now out in draft form is says the same thing. When we have those differences uncertainties in sciences should not be used to cause paralysis at the policy level. It is the job of politicians to make policy in the face of scientific uncertainty.

MR. MacNeil: Well I think that is a curious statement. As a member of the Academy myself I would like to point out that first of all the major report thus far in 83 laid out uncertainties. The Editor of that Report Bill Nurenberg who is former Director of the Scripts Oceanographic Institution openly questions the present situation. Academy reports should be understood are not research reports nor are they written by members of the Academy. The are assembled commission reports.

MR. MacNeil: Can I ask you both a lay mans kind of question. That is this we heard the NASA scientist give testimony almost two years ago. In terms that every one of can understand is it getting hotter or is it not getting hotter. Dr. Lindzen first.

DR. LINDZEN: Okay it might be puzzling to realize that this is a real question. Why was there an argument as to whether it is getting hotter. The answer is that we are not very good at measuring the temperature of the Earth. We are talking about the whole Earth. We have thermometers on land that are not uniformly distributed. We have no instruments over the ocean or very few. Recent satellite data suggests that the sample that we have for the globe is an inadequate sample to measure the temperature of the Earth. Even this sample suggests there may be a 1/2 degree change in the last century. That is considerably less than models that would predict, I am talking about centigrade I should mention. There is less than models predict that we shouldhave seen. It has been argued that the ocean is delaying it. In fact if the ocean is delaying what is happening enough to see a 1/2 degree it would delay the finally warning another 200 or 300 years. So we are not talking about immediate problems.

MR. MacNeil: Is the planet getting warmer?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Dr. Lindzen just told us that the Planet is about a 1/2 degree celsius or a degree warmer Fahrenheit than it was a 100 years ago. As it turns out the 1980s decade has been the hottest decade on record. Some fraction of that warming is due to the enhanced greenhouse effect due to the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases. We are not sure how much.

MR. MacNeil: How do we know that is not due to one of the huge cycles that occurs. I mean there was an ice age 12,000 years ago. There is predicted there could be another ice age I know how many thousands of years from now. Is this a part of the natural order of things?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: There are natural variations. The variations that we have seen over the last 100 years is close to the limit of what could be ascribed to a natural variation. We are about to break out of that limit if we keep pumping these gases in to the atmosphere. That is why I say there is a shadow of a doubt and we are not sure how much of that change is due to the greenhouse effect.

MR. MacNeil: We heard what President Bush said. If there is so much doubt the White House said today that to do really substantive measures on the CO2 would cost on the order of 200 billion dollars a year. Whether that figure is accurate or not everybody agrees that it would cost a lot of money. Why leap in to spend huge amount of money in a tight budgetary situation and cost people jobs and dislocate the economy when it is so uncertain. Why not do what the President said, study it more?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: There are lots of reasons. First of all no reputable scientist thinks the uncertainties will be vastly reduced in the next 20 years. As we increase emissions we are building irreversible --

MR. MacNeil: No one thinks, in other words you are saying we won't know any better 20 years from now?

DR. OPPENHEIMER: You will know a little better. You won't know a lot better -- I'm not saying 20 years from now -- I'm saying short of 20 years or so, we will not know a lot better, we will not have a lot of additional information.

MR. MacNeil: My question then why go into enormous expense now?

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER, Environmental Defense Fund: Second point there are irreversible consequences which are built in because the consequences of the emissions is that warming occurs decades after the gases have been emitted. Third, this business of horrendous expense is extremely exaggerated. For example the Europeans at this conference are starting on their own to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Germany plans to reduce their emissions 25 percent over the next 15 years, Holland, the Netherlands 8 percent by the year 2000. Other countries are already more energy efficient than us and energy efficiency is a major way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. For instance, the economies of Japan and Germany are twice as energy efficient as ours. The Germans have recently bought our biggest most efficient solar cell manufacturing company. If the Europeans see economic opportunity in reducing the greenhouse gases, why does the United States only see obstacles? There's something wrong with this equation.

MR. MacNeil: Let me ask Dr. Lindzen that. What's your answer to the same question?

RICHARD LINDZEN, M.I.T.: First I'm glad to know that I'm not a reputable scientist, but I think that's sort of silly in a way. There is a great deal of feeling among research scientists that we can, indeed, know much more within the next decade. We'll never know anything perfectly, but to say that we will not significantly know more I think is a rather questionable thing for Dr. Oppenheimer to say because I don't think he's involved in research on the subject. There's been rapid advance.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Neither are you, Dick.

DR. LINDZEN: That's not true. I have 40 papers in the area of climate research.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: Where is your last computer model?

DR. LINDZEN: Computer models are not the only way to do research.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: You're not at the cutting edge.

DR. LINDZEN: You don't know.

DR. OPPENHEIMER: I know as well as you do. I publish papers in this area too.

MR. MacNeil: Gentlemen --

DR. LINDZEN: But --

MR. MacNeil: Just complete your answer, Dr. Lindzen. We've got to go.

DR. LINDZEN: Getting back to your question, research is action. It isn't inaction. And one thing I would ask of any proposed action is that in the context of any model that it state how much it would be expected to reduce warming because although energy efficiency is a worthwhile goal in its own right, if one is tieing it to warming, we should at least ask how much will it cut warming.

MR. MacNeil: Okay. We have to leave it there. I'm sure it won't be the last time we discuss it. Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Lindzen, thank you. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the Newshour tonight, Soviet industrial pollution, the crisis in Lithuania, and an essay on American lithographs. FOCUS - STEEL CITY

MR. MacNeil: Now another ecological story. Industrial pollution isn't something new to the Soviet Union. What is new, is hearing about it, and that's our next focus tonight. Recently the BBC program "Panorama" went to the Magnitogorsk, home of the world's largest steel works located in the Ural Mountains. Correspondent Jane Corbin reports on this city of steel that has jeopardized the health of the people who live and work there.

MS. CORBIN: Stalin's city of steel, Magnitogorsk. Hundreds of chimneys spew out waste from 10 massive blast furnaces, 35 smelting workshops, the largest metal works in the world. Once a proud monument to Communist ambitions, now the plant is a dinosaur, poisoning a town that has no future without it. Magnitogorsk was built from nothing a thousand miles East of Moscow on a barren steppe in the Ural Mountains. On Stalin's orders, hundreds labored and died to build a steel works on this rich seam of iron ore. It was a feat of mass heroism, proof the worker's will could overcome the obstacles of nature. But pride in the past is today overshadowed by anxiety about the town's future. The Combinat, as the steel plant is known, produced the metal for every second tank and every third shell used by Russia in World War II. Today this one plant produces 10 percent of Soviet steel, 160 million tons a year, but the technology's hardly changed since the war. The steel is no longer of a high enough quality for weapons. It's used for car bodies and basic nuts and bolts, and the obsolete open hearth system produces 865,000 tons of air pollutants every year. The filtration system is almost non-existent. In producing this steel, the Combinat's chimneys poison the air with nine times the legal limit of benzene, five times the legal limit of sulfur compounds. Last year, the local newspaper, the Magnitogorsk Worker, shocked its readers by publishing statistics on air pollution and the increase in disease. Glasnost was forced on this conservative town by a group of young journalists. As with Chernobyl and the Aral, the newly emboldened media played an accusive role in arousing public awareness of environmental dangers.

SERGEI KACHANOV, Editor, "Magnitogorsk Worker": [Speaking through Interpreter] Our paper has chosen to speak the truth. It was very difficult to start with. When we published complete statistics about the ecological situation in our town, it had a bombshell effect. Now we and the whole town have the problem of what to do with this information. How can we live with the facts which have been presented?

MS. CORBIN: The paper confirmed what doctors knew already but had been afraid to say openly. The hospital's cancer wards are overflowing despite the extra beds they've squeezed in. Many of the patients we saw had worked for the Combinat. Lung cancer rates have doubled in Magnitogorsk in the last decade. The majority of children have chronic bronchial diseases. Still births are a third higher in the town than in the area around.

DR. ALEXANDER KONOVALOV, Cancer Specialist: [Speaking through Interpreter] The extremely high incidence of lung cancer and other chest diseases is the result of pollutants produced by the Combinat. For a long time, our system has talked about caring for the health of people, but it hasn't done anything. There is a need for metal, above all, metal, and people haven't been taken care of.

MS. CORBIN: Magnitogorsk is a company town. All streets lead to the steel works. The Lenin Metallurgical Combinat dominates the city. The livelihood of virtually every family depends on this industry. Of a total population of 450,000 men, women, and children, 63,000 people work for the Combinat. Magnitogorsk can ill afford pollution control. The plant is obsolescent and the seam of iron ore that gave birth to the town has been exhausted. Every day 700 wagonloads of ore have to be brought in from up to 1500 miles away. Magnitogorsk can only operate because the state pays for raw transport and raw materials. One new converter workshop is being built. It's a cleaner way of making steel. But this one modern facility will only reduce pollution overall by 20 percent. Local scientists recommended a more radical solution. It required more investment, though it could have produced cheaper steel in the long-term, but the ministry decided on a converter, which many believe is no solution.

YURI LEVIN, Combinat Deputy Director: [Speaking through Interpreter] The economic problem is that the new equipment we're installing is ten or even fifty times as expensive as the current plant and reconstructing the manufacturing process as such doesn't bring in any profit. It only becomes profitable when the steel is turned into actual products. We won't be doing that until the second stage of our reconstruction. In fact, the converter will reduce our economic efficiency for the first year.

MS. CORBIN: Vladimir Kulpin has worked for the Combinat since he left school, so did his father and his wife's father too. This generation is aware of the dangers of pollution in a way their parents never were, but they also know there's a tradeoff between the cost of cleaner air and economic performance. Valdimir's job provides security and a reasonable salary by Soviet standards. Modernizing the plant would improve the town's health but it could also reduce employment. That would hit every family. Magnitogorsk represents perestroika's dilemma.

MARINA KULPIN: [Speaking through Interpreter] When my husband left school, he trained to be a steel worker and I suppose he's not at the age when he can change to something else. His work is hard and the air he breathes isn't good, but we try to make sure he rests and goes fishing when he has a day off.

VLADIMIR KULPIN: The workers know about the air pollution caused by the Combinat, but we aren't working for some ideal, but for money, and so we have to carry on as the central plan and all those do. After all, we've got to live. We know the dangers but we have to work.

JANE CORBIN, BBC: Vladimir Kulpin and the other workers can't believe there's little future for Magnitogorsk. They're pinning their hopes on perestroika giving them financial independence, an incentive to improve production. At present, the ministry of metals takes 83 percent of the steel works' turnover. The Combinat reports directly to Moscow and the local management has few incentives to safeguard the town's health. Not only does the central ministry take most of the steel works' profit. It also pays any fines levied on the plant for polluting the air or water. So this industry can afford to and often does ignore the law. People here say that often at night such filters as exist are often illegally switched off so making it almost impossible to breathe. Financial independence would not only earn the steel works money, it would also force them to pay their own fines, a powerful incentive to improving the environment.

YURI LEVIN, Combinat Deputy Director: [Speaking through Interpreter] If only we get support from on high, not just ministerial but government approval, we can extend perestroika and improve our plant. We'll be able to earn money for our own capital investment. We don't want to ask anybody for anything. We want to earn funds for modernization ourselves so we can raise pay and solve social problems.

MS. CORBIN: Magnitogorsk has made its contribution to the nation and its defense. Now the young generation born in the shadow of the Combinat believes the nation should repay its debt to Magnitogorsk. It may be part of a system they now reject as they reject their poisoned environment, but to abandon Magnitogorsk is unthinkable.

VLADIMIR MOZGOVOI, Journalist, "Magnitogorsk Worker": [Speaking through Interpreter] The Combinat is a museum, a monster devouring itself, producing for the sake of production, not for people. But now we demand above everything else the right to lead a normal human life.

NIKOLAI VORONTSOV, Environment Minister: [Speaking through Interpreter] I'm convinced that clean air also costs money and it'll cost more and more, but is it necessary to have more and more energy? What limits are there? Do we need more and more industry. I don't want to stop progress, but maybe it's time to think again.

MS. CORBIN: Across the Soviet Union, people are looking at the results of half a century of industrial progress and deciding the human and ecological costs are too great, but setting limits on progress to save the environment and at the same time satisfying the workers' aspirations for a better life is the colossal task facing perestroika and Mr. Gorbachev. FOCUS - LITHUANIA - TURNING THE SCREWS

MR. LEHRER: We go next tonight to the dropping of the first shoe on Lithuania. The Soviet Union announced it was cutting supplies of natural gas to Lithuania today and of gasoline and oil tomorrow. It followed weeks of escalating threats from Moscow in response to Lithuania's declaration of independence March 11th. In Washington, Pres. Bush said he was considering what the United States could do once the energy cuts actually happen. We take up the story now with Lithuania's diplomatic representative to the United States, Stasys Lozoraitis, and from the Soviet Union, Victor Danilenko, professor of law the Moscow Institute for International Relations. First, has the natural gas order been implemented in Lithuania as far as you know?

STASYS LOZORAITIS, Legation of Lithuania: Well, we don't know yet because it's very difficult to establish whether the quantity of gas which is being furnished to Lithuania has been completely stopped or just diminished. I think in a few hours time we will know exactly what has happened.

MR. LEHRER: You're taking the announcement seriously though?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm very disappointed. We thought that Mr. Gorbachev will be ready at least to try and negotiate something, to get in touch with us. It seems that he doesn't want, he wants confrontation, he doesn't know the Lithuanian people. The Lithuanian people will not get violent, will not do anything that is unrealistic, but certainly our feelings towards Moscow are hardening.

MR. LEHRER: How dependent are you on natural gas?

MR. LOZORAITIS: 100 percent, absolutely 100 percent.

MR. LEHRER: You mean every home is heated with natural gas?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Every.

MR. LEHRER: Every factory is --

MR. LOZORAITIS: Our natural gas comes from the Soviet Union and of course, as an independent country, we would have the possibility of choosing, even getting the Algerian natural gas or Dutch natural gas, why not? But today we don't have this possibility and it's very unpleasant because this measure will in the first place hit the children, the old women, the old people, and all those who are in a way weak and those, for instance, who are in the hospital.

MR. LEHRER: Same with oil and gasoline if that's followed up on tomorrow?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Yes, more or less. The only thing is as far as gasoline is concerned, we are buying a lot of crude oil and then transforming it to high octane gas and re-exporting it to Eastern Europe. And we have about 500 million rubles of export. Of these, at least 350 million rubles are gas product, I mean, crude oil products.

MR. LEHRER: What's that mean?

MR. LOZORAITIS: That does mean that it's transformed in high octane gas at Mazurka, in a factory in Mazurka, in a refinery in Mazurka, and it's re-exported.

MR. LEHRER: But you have some available, you have a stockpile, in other words, of gas?

MR. LOZORAITIS: We have a stockpile. It won't last very much and for long, but the interesting thing is that if we don't export this high octane gas, the Soviet Union will not a certain amount of hard currency, so usually we were giving away a lot of hard currency we were receiving for our product.

MR. LEHRER: Now you will keep it yourself, is that what you're saying, you will continue to export it but you will keep the money, yourself?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Well, if we will be able to export, we will keep it for ourselves, yes, at least partly.

MR. LEHRER: You said that Mr. Gorbachev miscalculated the will of the Lithuanian people. Did the Lithuanian government, did you all miscalculate the will of Mr. Gorbachev?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Well, in a way, yes, we've miscalculated him. I don't think that he is the same Gorbachev we knew two or three months ago. Something has happened and I think that it might be very possible that he is under pressure from the military, from the hardliners, I don't know, but what he has done in Lithuania is just not intelligent. And I thought that Mr. Gorbachev was a very intelligent man and that he was the man who might introduce democracy into the Soviet Union.

MR. LEHRER: You said that Mr. Gorbachev won't talk. What is there to talk about as long as your government says that what he is demanding will never be given, which is to put the clock back to what it was on March the 11th, when you all declared your independence?

MR. LOZORAITIS: Yes. Well, we are ready to negotiate on everything, absolutely everything, except the declaration of independence. I think that never in history before has any people revoked the declaration of independence. We want to be independent, but if we sit and negotiate with Mr. Gorbachev then we are able to extend these negotiations from two days to two weeks or two months and there are a lot of possibilities to solve problems which we have with the Soviet Union. After all, 50 years are 50 years. We have ties. We have economical ties. We have political ties. There is a question of ownership by the Soviet Union so they say and so let's talk about it. That's the only way. But I must say that 19th century mentality is still there in Moscow, at least partly, at least in the Kremlin.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Danilenko, is that it, a 19th century mentality in the Kremlin, in Moscow?

VICTOR DANILENKO, Soviet Law Professor: I'd rather disagree, you see. Mr. Gorbachev is very patient. He is proposing to settle up all the problem in the frame work of the democracy and this is the main purpose of perestroika.

MR. LEHRER: But why then has he taken the step that he has announced today, the natural gas step, and then the additional announcement of cutting or cutting off, in fact, the supply of oil and gasoline to Lithuania, what drove him to this?

MR. DANILENKO: Well, the question is that Mr. Gorbachev was trying to settle up all these problems in the frame work of a democracy but democracy is not only the right to demand, but also the right to respect other interests. You see, if we are going to settle up the conflict, you should negotiate and you should respect the interest of all the participants, of how they conflict, and the present day leadership of Lithuania is trying to push Mr. Gorbachev practically to a dead end.

MR. LEHRER: To push him to a dead end, up against the wall?

MR. DANILENKO: Right. Just a minute. Let's take the preservation into account. Now the present day situation which is being described in American news media, all the news media is emphasizing such a thing. All the participants are wrong and I cannot understand this particular point, you see. Mr. Gorbachev is wrong, Mr. Bush is wrong, and a comment of Philip Talbot, from Time Magazine, is that Mr. Landsbergis is also wrong, that this practically is the problem which is impossible to be settled up.

MR. LEHRER: Let me ask you a follow-up question. You in an article in the New York Times said that the Lithuanian government was using blackmail against Gorbachev.

MR. DANILENKO: Yes.

MR. LEHRER: Explain that.

MR. DANILENKO: The question is that right now the Lithuanian government do understand that Mr. Gorbachev is committed to non-use of force. That's the point, you see. And there's a summit to be organized quite recently and they're trying to push him --

MR. LEHRER: You mean the U.S. summit with Pres. Bush at the end of May, the first part of June.

MR. DANILENKO: Yes, sure. I'm pretty well aware that actually your United States administration is keeping an eye on the situation and so Mr. Gorbachev will be forced to realize all the demands putting forward by the Lithuanian government, but let me finish my idea. My idea is as follows. Let's turn the situation upsidedown. Let's consider that every participant is right. Let's consider that Mr. Landsbergis is right, he is, since he is eager to assure --

MR. LEHRER: That's the president of Lithuania.

MR. DANILENKO: That's right. Since he is eager to assure the independence for his people, he is right, I do agree, but let's consider that Mr. Gorbachev is also right since Mr. Gorbachev is taking into consideration the interests of the whole union and it should be taken into consideration. And to my understanding, Mr. Bush is also right, since he is defending the national interest of the United States. Under such circumstances, the situation will be, you will see the situation in quite a different way, because under such circumstances, you'll be allowed to sit down, just to come down, to negotiate, and to find a solution, to find a compromise. This is the most important problem -- let me finish -- since to my mind a conflict can be considered to be settled up forever if there is no one to lose, is there is no loser in the conflict. That's my position.

MR. LEHRER: But Mr. Lozoraitis says and the president also of Lithuania says that Lithuania is ready to sit down and talk and negotiate on all these points, the only thing they're not willing to negotiate is the piece of paper, the declaration of independence. You don't see that as a willingness to talk, exactly what you're talking about?

MR. DANILENKO: If it's so, I do agree to this position, but it's necessary just to sit down and to talk and to negotiate because to my mind, the main problem of this as it's right now, as you were speaking, this is the problem of democracy. You see, to my mind, democracy is not just the right to demand. Democracy means also the necessity to respect the interests of other participants and democracy also means the art to negotiate and to make compromise, but I'm not going to deliver a lecture over here on the democracy sense. American people are well aware what does democracy mean, they say, yeah, American Constitution begins with the words, "We the people of the United States". I do respect this way of emphasizing the meaning of the democracy.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Lozoraitis, back to you. What do you say to his point that your people, your government, are pushing Gorbachev against the wall, you're in effect using blackmail on him because he has committed to not using force and you know that, and he's also committed to a good relationship with the United States and a summit meeting the first part of June, you know that, so you're pushing and pushing beyond what you should be?

MR. LOZORAITIS: We are not pushing anything. This is a Marxist way, 19th century mentality, I mentioned before, of arguing and trying to explain democracy. What is democracy? Democracy is to send paratroopers to Lithuania, is to send tanks to go up and down our streets, democracy is to throw out American journalists, democracy is to isolate the country and democracy is for 50 years to keep a country absolutely in the colonial state. We are poor today, we are exhausted, we are ecologically in a catastrophic situation. We pushed Mr. Gorbachev, but we've discussed the independence issue for months and months openly. We have a democratically elected parliament which had a mandate to declare independence. If Mr. Gorbachev would have given us a signal and said, let's sit down, I need a little bit of time, I need this and that, we would have listened to him. When Mr. Shevardnadze was in Washington, and said so nicely on his dialogue, Idon't understand what it means on his dialogue. I think dialogue is a dialogue, that's all, period. But we said dialogue. I immediately telephoned through certain channels, to the Department of State, and said, we are ready for the dialogue. Just pick up the telephone and we will be in Moscow, in Vilnius or even in Washington, but no.

MR. LEHRER: But you don't see it that way? You don't see that the Lithuanians pleaded democracy. You say that they should be adhering to the rules of democracy. He says that's exactly what they're doing.

MR. DANILENKO: Let's be reasonable. Let's be serious. What does it mean, democracy? We do have already adopted law on the secession. We do have article 72 in our constitution emphasizing that any republic has a right to secession, so what's a way to settle our problem, just to sit down and negotiation and try to find a solution according to the present day law regulations.

MR. LEHRER: The regulations of the Soviet Union rather than of the Lithuanian parliament?

MR. DANILENKO: Just a minute. Lithuania for the time being is a part of the Soviet Union.

MR. LEHRER: I understand the --

MR. LOZORAITIS: That's what you say.

MR. LEHRER: I understand the disagreement and I think our audience does, and we have to leave it there. Thank you.

MR. LOZORAITIS: Thank you.

MR. DANILENKO: Thank you very much. ESSAY - ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight our Tuesday night essay. Amei Wallach, New York Newsday art critic, pays tribute to Tonya Grossman, a woman whose passion helped revive the art of print making in America.

MS. WALLACH: Some three decades ago in this Victorian cottage in West Eyeslip, Long Island, Taviana Grossman began producing limited edition lithographs on a second hand press she bought for $15. It was an eccentric thing to do in those days. The art of print making in America had fallen on hard times. Hip young artists called it corny, but Tonya, as everyone called her, lavished such care and inventiveness upon her prints that she helped revive the art of print making in America. This house became her print workshop, UALE, and Tonya became one of the art legends of our century as written in a new book celebrating Tonya and UALE. It's in part because of Tonya that so many ordinary people own an original work of art exactly like one that's on a museum wall. A print is as original a work of art as a painting. It is not a reproduction. Print making is an art of accumulation. In lithography, an artist, here it's Terry Winters, draws on a stone or a plate with a crayon or an oily substance. When the printer inks the dampened stone and runs it through the press with a piece of paper, the ink adheres to the paper. A new color or a new permutation demands a second stone on up to 30 or 70, with endless complex possibilities that painting is simply incapable of. Tonya was born in 1904 in Ekatarimburg in Siberia. When she was 14, Czar Nicholas II was executed there and soon the family fled, first to Japan, then Bimar, Germany, Left Bank Paris, escaping the Nazis across the Pyrenees and finally to America. Tonya was already 51 years old in 1955, when her artist husband, Maurice, had a debilitating heart attack. She determined to dedicate, as she put it, "everything that I am, my heritage, what I know, what I love, to print making". Poets working with artist were her ideal. She started with stones, a collaboration between Larry Rivers and the poet Frank Ohara. The artists that were enticed to her workshop were mostly young and hardly known. Today they sound like a who's who of American art, including Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombley, and Robert Rauschenberg.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: What she did is bring back the original integrity of print making. Now what she did to keep it growing way beyond her expectations was I think a kind of flirtation with the artist and the press and the art work. She would disappear for an hour or an hour and a half and she'd get some sense that ah ha, she was needed. So she would put on a bright colored scarf, turn on the Russian music, which depressed me, and come in swirling into the studio just as everybody was about to fall asleep.

MS. WALLACH: Tonya gave art and her artists a fervent dedication. At UALE, Motherwell said it was simply assumed that the world of the spirit exists as concretely as lemon yellow or women's hair. She also gave them license to live dangerously with a new tool.

MR. RAUSCHENBERG: Once I found out that these rocks, their thickness, and their weight, probably is part of their memory, that their surface, even though they were stone, was like skin, and then I got well, almost erotically attached to doing lithography.

MS. WALLACH: There was Tolstoy and ambition in her insistence on the best, the best paper, artist, and printer to make the best print, and the best collector or museum to buy it. New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired No. 1 of every UALE edition. After Tonya's husband, Maurice, died in 1976, she sold 700 prints and her entire archives to the Art Institute of Chicago. The young printers she had encouraged fought to keep the workshop alive. "The cathedral will be built by men who know they will never see the finale of it," Tonya said. "So I think about the work I'm doing the same way, that it will go further and beyond me." Taviana Grossman died in 1982. The work is going further and beyond her. I'm Amei Wallach. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main story this Tuesday, the Soviet Union began its economic blockade of Lithuania by ordering a sharp reduction of natural gas supplies to the breakaway republic, Pres. Bush warned Moscow that the U.S. will take appropriate measures if the Kremlin carries out the ban. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. Thank you and good night.