There was no way that President Clinton could satisfy everyone in his address last week to the United Nations on climate change, and he did not. By embracing the scientific community's assessment that global warming is a real threat with potentially appalling consequences, he annoyed powerful industries who have been challenging that science because they will bear many of the costs of dealing with the problem. By refusing to embrace a specific timetable for reducing the greenhouse gases that help cause global warming, he disappointed many environmentalists who had hoped for a less ambiguous commitment and faster action.

But none of that should have been surprising. What was surprising was the impressive challenge Bill Clinton set for himself. The U.N. session was merely the first in a series of international meetings that will culminate in Kyoto, Japan, in December, where both industrialized and developing nations are expected to sign a treaty binding them to a detailed plan of action. In the interim, Mr. Clinton says he will try to educate the American people about the nature of the problem and give them some straight talk about the costs they will bear and the sacrifices they will have to make. Without such a campaign, he implied, he cannot possibly sell Congress on a program that would impose real costs on individuals and on major producers and users of fossil fuels like the big utilities, the oil companies and the automobile and petrochemical industries.

This will be a huge task, and the most important question, now and after Kyoto, is whether Mr. Clinton is up to it. He must first educate a country that is in the midst of an energy binge to the idea that it will have to break its addiction to the fossil fuels that cause greenhouse gases and, meanwhile, invest heavily in new technologies. He must then sell those same ideas to a Congress that is already complaining that the more modest measures he announced last week to attack ground-level smog and soot are too expensive.

Mr. Clinton has other tricky tasks that extend beyond America's borders. He and his negotiators must join with the industrialized nations on a plan to spread the costs fairly among nations, as well as a scheme to bring the developing countries into the effort. Some climate experts believe that the developing countries deserve more time to build their economies with even greater use of fossil fuels, as the industrialized countries have done for 150 years. Others believe they should be assigned specific emissions limits right away. What everyone agrees on is that without the participation of big polluters like China and India, any scheme to limit greenhouse gases will be a farce.

Mr. Clinton has asked for six months to do all this. The measure of his success will be whether he has a credible plan ready in time for Kyoto.

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