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Kyoto’s Bill

December 13, 2005

 

…[Former President] Clinton also failed to note [in Montreal] that so great was his faith in the need for Kyoto that he never submitted the treaty for ratification after signing it in 1998. He knew then what he won’t acknowledge now: that Kyoto couldn’t be ratified because it was all pain and no gain.

 

On July 25, 1997 -- Clinton’s watch -- the U.S. Senate voted 95 to 0 for a resolution saying the U.S. should not be a signatory to Kyoto. The main reason was that the treaty exempted developing countries and major polluters like China and India.

 

The resolution stated that “the Senate strongly believes that the proposals under negotiation, because of the disparity in treatment” between industrialized and developing nations “and the level of required emission reductions, could result in serious harm to the United States economy, including significant job loss, trade disadvantages, increased energy and consumer costs.”

 

In July 1998, Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research calculated that Kyoto, if implemented on a consistent basis by all industrial countries, would avert only 0.07 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050, an amount too small to matter or even verify.

 

In October 1998, the U.S. Energy Information Agency estimated that for this imperceptible reduction, the U.S. gross domestic product would be reduced by as much as $397 billion annually. …

 

Rather than chasing phantom and temporary reductions in what many consider to be a natural and cyclical phenomenon, money wasted on Kyoto enforcement could be better spent.

 

Bjorn Lomborg, Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” once said: “For less than one year of (the cost of) meeting Kyoto, we could provide clean water and sanitation for all of the developing world forever.”

 

We’ll drink to that.

 

Click here for the full text of the editorial.

 

Fact of the Day: Monday, December 12, 2005 MOPping Up Kyoto Proponents Grasping At Straws In Wake of Montreal “Non-result” Montreal… Through Rose-colored Glasses A story in Greenwire today, “U.N. conference sets process for further emission cuts, global dialogue,” focused exclusively on the perspective of officials still promoting the failed Kyoto Protocol and their special interest allies, but failed to make clear that the final agreement coming out of last week’s meeting in Montreal was only an agreement to hold more meetings: “After two weeks of negotiations, including two consecutive all-night sessions, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol say the landmark agreement is alive and well as most nations agreed here to set new targets after 2012 and others agreed to start talking about long-term action to curb climate change. ‘Many naysayers going into these negotiations said Kyoto is dead, but what we discovered is that both industrialized and developing countries want its framework continued and expanded,’ Phil Clapp, president of National Environmental Trust, said in an interview. … As the talks ended around 6 a.m. Saturday, Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, declared, ‘This has been one of the most productive U.N. Climate Change Conferences ever.’” Fact: Kinley’s statement is overly optimistic. Perhaps the greatest success coming out of the Montreal COP 11/MOP 1 was that the United States held its position against engaging in the Kyoto Protocol and committing to mandatory targets under its scheme, thereby by protecting the U.S. economy and American jobs. Despite what Phil Clapp says, Kyoto has failed because the overwhelming majority of nations that signed on to it nearly a decade ago are not meeting their targets, a point driven home time and again throughout the two weeks of deliberations. Kyoto’s proponents, at best, are trying to make lemonade out of lemons and avoid the embarrassment of not having delivered anything of substance in Montreal. Beats MOPing around until Nairobi next year. What Others Are Saying About Montreal… and Beyond - Peter Kammerer, “It’s all global yawning to me,” South China Morning Post, December 9, 2005: Excuse my glazed eyes and bored expression, but I have just been reading about the United Nations’ climate change conference in Canada. My conclusion is that although no one knows why we yawn, there is a good probability that it has something to do with global warming. I am no scientist, so whatever I am about to say should be taken with a pinch of sarcasm. Nonetheless, try this test: look at the person sitting nearest to you, stare into their eyes and say, clearly and succinctly, “Global warming”. Then yawn. The yawn is guaranteed to be returned - proving my point. … The two-week meeting in Montreal was the first annual UN climate conference since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming took effect last February. The talks in Canada featured the usual unsuccessful efforts to get the same two nations, the US and Australia, to sign up. They claim that industrial growth would be stifled by promising to reduce emissions of gases, like carbon dioxide, to an average of 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Instead, they have embarked on their own series of conferences, starting with the inaugural meeting of the six-nation Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate in Sydney, next month. US President George W. Bush’s administration says that when it comes to cutting back on pollution, it prefers to deal with other governments on a one-to-one and regional basis, through voluntary approaches and in financing new energy-saving technologies. There will be talks and more talks to iron out the details, it says. The thought of two rival sets of meetings, summits and conferences on climate change gives me this twitching feeling at the back of my throat. I don’t know what is causing it, but I suspect a yawn is coming on. - Bronwen Maddox, “Trail goes cold in search for climate deal,” The Times [London], December 9, 2005: The Montreal conference on global warming looks like ending tonight with no big agreement: nothing approaching the status of the Kyoto Protocol, and possibly nothing at all. That is not a tragedy. It is more like a success. One of the fortnight’s achievements is to have drawn attention to the difficulty of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol itself, never mind drafting a successor, given that so many countries are on course to breach it by an extravagant margin. It has also been useful to have spent time discussing other, less restrictive kinds of regional treaty and industrial targets which might be tolerable to the United States, India, China and Brazil. The pity is that this may be drowned out by the storm of righteous accusations directed, inevitably, at the US above all. - “Don’t despair - Don’t despair; Global warming,” The Economist, December 10, 2005: …But the holes in the [Kyoto] treaty are so huge—America didn’t sign up, and developing countries do not have targets—that even with Kyoto in place, at their current rate of increase, global emissions look like increasing by 50% between now and 2030. In consequence, the global environment ministers’ meeting in Montreal this week to discuss better ways of implementing Kyoto was a rather cheerless affair. As The Economist went to press, there was some discussion of whether America would deliver a last-minute concession; but nobody expected much of real substance to come out of the meeting. … . - “Changing science; Climatology,” The Economist, December 10, 2005: As delegates from around the world meet in Montreal to discuss climate change, what science should inform their deliberations? The climate changes. It always has done and it always will. In the past 2m years the temperature has gone up and down like a yo-yo as ice ages have alternated with warmer interglacial periods. Reflecting this on a smaller scale, the 10,000 years or so since the glaciers last went into full-scale retreat have seen periods of relative cooling and warmth lasting from decades to centuries. Against such a noisy background, it is hard to detect the signal from any changes caused by humanity’s increased economic activity, and consequent release of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.…[T]here are still a number of uncertainties. For instance, the solar hypothesis is not yet dead. A few researchers who agree the data show a warming trend nevertheless argue that this may be caused not by man but by nature, in the form of minute increases in the sun’s heat output. That output is known to vary during the course of the 11-year sunspot cycle, as well as over the longer term, and although such changes have not been matched to temperature changes in the way that rises in the level of greenhouse gases have been, they may still be making a contribution. Another issue is that a second type of pollutant, aerosols such as the minute sulphate particles that form when sulphurous fuel is burned, promote the formation of clouds. These reflect sunlight away from Earth and thus oppose the effect of greenhouse gases. Some have seen this as a possible counterbalance and, indeed, such “dimming” has been noticed in several parts of the world. However, yet another study published this year suggests the dimming is going away as anti-sulphur pollution-control measures kick in. Perhaps the most important uncertainty, though, is that caused by a lack of enough good-quality, long-term, internally consistent data. Even the industrialised parts of the world, Europe and North America and their adjacent seas, have been studied properly for only a century and a half. Too much climate science relies on drawing conclusions from patchy information. It is therefore a nice irony that only under the presidency of George Bush, the bête-noire-in-chief of many environmentalists, has a unified Earth Observation System of satellites, ocean buoys, terrestrial weather stations, balloons and aircraft started to take shape. Though the system involves some 60 countries, the moving spirit is America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Political COP-Out No “Friends,” But FOE In a heated editorial from Canada’s Western region over the weekend, the Calgary Herald took the United Nations to task for limiting invitations for participation in this week’s 11th Conference of Parties / 1st Meeting of Parties to those individuals and organizations that have embraced positions supportive only of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the single-track minds of Kyoto Protocol proponents. Friends of Science, because they disagree with the science global warming alarmists continuously – and selectively – tout, was denied attendance to the COP/MOP, underscoring “how politically charged the UN conference has become.” The Herald continues: “That there is no appetite among the various policy-makers, intellectuals and pro-Kyoto advocates in attendance to even acknowledge the active scientific debate over the causes of global warming is a sad spectacle.” Friends of the Earth (FOE), however, was permitted to distribute press releases in the Palais de Congres Media Center, calling on the United Kingdom to “show stronger leadership in climate talks” because the UK, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, has virtually abandoned the Kyoto approach and the potential for similar agreements in the future. The UK, like the United States under President Bush, has recently embraced an innovation- and technology-based approach toward reducing emissions – one that would encourage economic growth instead of impeding it. “More unfortunate,” according to the Herald, “is that some subversive failed to stuff a copy of Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear in every delegate’s conference satchel. The novelist’s critique of environmental dogma on the issue of global warming is a striking case of art mirroring reality.” Four days left. Copies are available at all fine Montreal booksellers. A “Wall of Blame” The hour-long wait for registration and credentials in the Palais de Congres allowed COP/MOP attendees a taste of some of the emotional rhetoric emitted from global warming alarmists. One panel of a hallway exhibit in the corridor outside the registration office was dedicated to climate change and human rights, prominently displaying a quote from former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson: Climate change is a subtle form of human rights violation. There is no direct persecution or threat, but combustion of fossil fuels in industrialised nations has jeopardised the ability of certain societies to maintain their traditional practices, diminishing their cultural identity and their connection with their natural environment. While the science and impacts of climate change are uncertain, what is certain is that environmental special interests in Montreal are ignoring real human rights violations by essentially condemning more than a million people to death from malaria each year. How? Under strong pressure from special interests, DDT was banned 35 years ago on the premise that it causes cancer despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s internal review conclusions that it did not. As a result, malaria, which had been nearly extinguished, has surged to at least a million deaths a year (conservatively). A child in Africa – usually under the age of five – dies of malaria every 30 seconds. In Uganda, for example, malaria kills roughly the same number of people as AIDS in that AIDS-ravaged country. For malaria, we have a cure, yet we don’t have the political will to take action. Even Greenpeace now – finally – concedes that in certain countries where the death toll is so high, it makes sense to use DDT. Shouldn’t a million deaths be taken more seriously than speculation from well-heeled advocacy groups about the potential alteration of traditional practices for countries like Uganda? re pies available at all fine Montreal booksellers.onnection with thewir natural environment.hreat, but compbustion of fossil f

Fact of the Day: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 Oh, Lord… Britain’s Lord May Launches Embarrassing Tirade Against Bush Climate Policy… and His Own Government’s Strategy Last week, in an obvious attempt to fire a parting shot at scientists and officials who oppose his personal views, outgoing Royal Society president Lord Robert May of Oxford criticized the Bush Administration’s approach to global climate change, outlandishly going as far as calling one of President Bush’s advisers “loony,” and claiming he and the Administration official “live on different planets.” (“‘Loony’ jibe at US policy over climate,” The Observer, November 27, 2005) Fact: May’s claim regarding his extraterrestrial domicile could very well be true when one considers that all of the G8 leaders, including British PM Tony Blair who lately has been quite vocal in dismissing the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon dioxide caps, have embraced the United States’ innovation and technology approach toward reducing greenhouse emissions. Clearly May is in denial or not even aware of what’s actually occurring on this planet in terms of climate policy and the reality of his own government’s embrace of the U.S. approach and apparent rejection of mandatory emissions caps. At the very least, his public name-calling is not of a civilized world. The Politics Behind “The Joint Statement” Political considerations fuel Lord May’s outspokenness. Consider May’s comment on June 7, 2005 upon releasing an 11-nation joint science academies statement: “The current US policy on climate change is misguided. The Bush administration has consistently refused to accept the advice of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).” But recently departed NAS president Bruce Alberts noted in a letter to Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) that NAS had not seen the Royal Society statement prior to its release and expressed his dismay, stating that it did “not represent the views of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.” More importantly, Alberts, in a letter to Lord May, directly criticized the use and misinterpretation of the NAS’ views and the intended false implication that the organization actually supported May’s own views: As you may appreciate, having your own interpretation of US Academy work widely quoted in our press has caused considerable confusion, both at my academy and in our Government. By advertising our work in this way, you have, in fact, vitiated much of the careful effort that went into preparing the actual G8 statement. Despite May’s Claim, U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are Decreasing Administration assertions that U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are decreasing helped prompt Lord May’s recent attack on the Administration. But according to the 2005 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) national GHG inventory trends below, U.S. emissions have indeed declined – more than British emissions. Only four nations – Lithuania, Iceland, Ireland and the Czech Republic – were ahead of the United States in emissions reductions from 2000-2003. Sticks and stones, Lord May. Sticks and stones.