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CIAO DATE: 8/01
Forget Kyoto
On The Issues
January 2001
The November UN conference on climate change was a triumph of European posturing at the expense of serious discussion of the issue. The proceedings confirmed U.S. doubts about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which should cease to be the basis of further negotiation.
It was no surprise that negotiations broke down at the conclusion of the son-of-Kyoto conference on climate change in The Hague in late November, and it is just as well that they did. In the first place, the evidence that the global warming recorded since the mid-1970s is anything more than cyclical and natural (rather than worsening and human-caused) remains inconclusive. In the second, if the United States decides it is good policy to reduce greenhouse gases, why be bound by a global treaty that exempts many of the worst polluters and that is shaped by Europeans with their own agenda? We can go it alone.
I arrived November 18 at The Hague—whose charm is limited to the two great Vermeers in the Maritshuis museum—and discovered quickly that the real objective of the Europeans was not reducing greenhouse emissions worldwide but inflicting economic pain on Americans, currying favor with greenish constituents, and emerging with a halo. Like most United Nations conferences, this was a festival for global bureaucrats and interest groups—a morality play (and a silly one at that) more than a serious negotiation. Around the convention hall, protesters had piled sandbags six feet high to demonstrate how rising temperatures would cause rising flood waters (another unproven contention); others carried signs with weird slogans like "Don't Melt the Penguins"; and, on Thanksgiving Day, a woman threw a whipped-cream-and-berry pie in the face of Frank Loy, the hapless U.S. negotiator. Meanwhile, 225 accredited Greenpeace lobbyists—who were the single largest presence at The Hague—roamed the hall, heaping scorn on the Americans, especially on the handful of senators and House members who had come to observe.
The reason for the gathering was to flesh out the details of the Kyoto Protocol, drafted by representatives of 170 countries three years earlier. Kyoto required thirty-seven leading industrial countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. None of these developed nations has ratified the treaty so far, and the meeting at The Hague—called COP 6 (for Sixth Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)—was supposed to provide the details so that they could. The big issue was whether countries like the United States, Australia, Japan, and Canada could meet their treaty obligations, not just through reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases at home but through other means that are less expensive but achieve the same result: mainly "carbon sinks" and emissions trading.
Sinks are forests and farms, whose plants suck up carbon dioxide from the air and "sequester" it, or keep it from getting back into the atmosphere, where it can act like a greenhouse, trapping solar heat. Emissions trading lets countries buy emissions credits from other countries that have reduced their gases below stipulated levels. For example, in the United States, which has already significantly reduced pollution, cutting emissions is far more costly than in Russia, with its stagnant economy and inefficient dirty heating plants.
The Kyoto Protocol included provisions for sinks and emissions trading—as well as credits for nations that invested in clean-energy projects in poorer countries—but it did not specify the extent to which each country could use them. The meeting at The Hague was supposed to spell out the limits.
Seeking an Economic Edge
But why should there be any limits at all? As Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) wrote in a letter to President Clinton just before the conference: "Those who call for limitations on sinks are pursuing agendas whose primary goal is contrary to dealing with climate change, since a ton of greenhouse gases that is sequestered is equal to a ton that is emitted." Exactly.
The Europeans, however, were after something more—an economic edge over the United States and an opportunity to paint Americans as greedy, sloppy villains. Without sinks and trading, the United States could meet the Kyoto targets only by sharply increasing the price of fossil fuels. Gasoline, by reliable estimates, would rise by fifty cents or more per gallon, and the cost of running industrial plants, not to mention energy-hungry computers, would soar. According to a consensus of projections, the growth of Gross Domestic Product in the United States would be cut by more than half as businesses move offshore to escape the high tax, either in dollars or in regulation. The Department of Energy estimated that GDP could drop by four percentage points, plunging the United States into a recession.
The Europeans, meanwhile, managed to rig the Kyoto Protocol, including their entire continent within a "bubble," so that the French, for instance, can meet their emissions targets with the help of the Germans, whose carbon emissions actually dropped 25 percent between 1990 and 1995 as inefficient coal plants and wasteful central heating operations were shut down.
Since the Europeans had no intention of allowing extensive use of sinks and trading, COP 6 was doomed from the start. But if there was a glimmer of a chance for a deal, it vanished when Jacques Chirac, the French president, delivered a condescending and provocative speech. "The countries concerned must channel the bulk of their efforts to curb emissions through national or regional measures," he said. In other words, sinks and trading should be limited. Then he called the treaty "a genuine instrument of global governance"—a phrase that had Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the House Science Committee chairman, boiling when I ran into him at a fish restaurant that night.
Chirac also chided Americans for emitting three times as much carbon dioxide, per capita, as the French. But one of the main reasons for the disparity is that France generates 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power—about which Europeans are having second thoughts (for other people, that is). At the Hague conference, they argued strenuously against Americans funding nuclear plants in developing countries as a way to reduce greenhouse gases. Emissions of carbon dioxide from nuclear plants: zero.
Shaky Evidence
Around the time of Kyoto, the U.S. Senate unanimously resolved that it would not approve a climate treaty that: (1) did not force developing countries to cut emissions, too, and (2) "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States." On the first point, there was no serious discussion at all at Kyoto—even though nine of the top twenty emitters of carbon dioxide (including number-two China and number-six India) are exempt from the treaty. On the second, there was a lot of talk but, in the end, no result.
"If you look at the resolution that passed in 1997, this protocol isn't even close to being ratified," Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebr.), the resolution's coauthor, with Byrd, told me. True, but so what?
If the Europeans are as fiercely committed to reducing emissions as they say they are, they can do it themselves. Meanwhile, the United States can plant more forests, continue to reduce pollution, as we have been doing for the past quarter-century, and put in place more "no-regrets" policies of conservation and, as Jonathan Adler of the Competitive Enterprise Institute laid out in a paper last summer, deregulation. It is government rules and subsidies, Adler says, that often produce wasteful uses of energy. Also, as countries get richer, they want to use their wealth to buy cleaner air and water, and the marketplace pressures companies to clean up their environmental act.
But drastic steps that imperil the world economy make no sense—especially with so much doubt about global warming climate change. That doubt centers not so much on whether the temperatures are rising—though S. Fred Singer, at a sparsely attended press conference at The Hague, brought together a half-dozen climatologists who made a good claim that the jury is still out (satellite and balloon monitoring, for example, show no rise in worldwide temperatures, and ground stations show an increase only since the mid-1970s while for the thirty years prior to that temperatures were falling)—but rather on where the world is warming, by how much, and for how much longer.
Then, there's the big question of whether the warming is a function of human activity. Of the 160 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, only about 7 billion tons are anthropogenic, or human-caused, according to the latest (1995) report of the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That group concluded: "These global mean results . . . cannot be considered as compelling evidence of a clear cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in the Earth's surface."
It makes little sense to risk the world's economy on such shaky evidence—and even less for the United States to be bound by a "global governance" treaty like the one debated at The Hague in November. The Europeans want to give Kyoto another try next May. We should restrain ourselves from Chirac-like condescension, but firmly tell them "no." We should take the threat of global warming seriously, keep studying, and even take reasonable mitigating steps, but we shouldn't waste our time on another pie-throwing global-governance circus.
James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI. A version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 28, 2000.
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