Alex, I picked up IBD yesterday and noticed this article. Just had to share it. :-)
E D I T O R I A L Soak The Rich, Cool The Planet?
Date: 9/15/97
The global warming treaty now in the works may not keep the Earth cool. But it would make China and India a lot richer -at Americans' expense. Whatever it might do to the climate, it's a recipe for redistribution on a vast scale.
The treaty now under negotiation is supposed to be signed at a world conference in Kyoto, Japan, in the first week of December.
The main feature of the pact is a cap on the emissions of carbon dioxide. Produced by the burning of fossil fuels (and by breathing), CO
in the atmosphere acts to hold heat. So the more CO , the warmer the globe - or so say the doomsayers.
In fact, the relationship between so-called ''greenhouse gases'' such as CO and temperature is far more complex than that.
CO has risen during the industrial era, but it's not clear how much temperatures have gone up, or why. By one measure - satellite readings -they've been unchanged over the last 18 years.
But environmental activists (unlike the scientists) long ago made up their minds on this issue. And they have strong allies in the developing world, where an anti-CO treaty is a golden opportunity to advance at the developed world's expense.
Although negotiators have been tight-lipped about details, the basic thrust of the Kyoto treaty is that the developed countries will have to adopt strict curbs on CO emissions - and developing countries won't.
Current forms of the treaty call for countries such as the U.S. to bring their CO emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2010. But caps and deadlines are still being negotiated for countries such as India, China and Malaysia.
These nations argue that it's unfair for the West to impose emission controls on them now. They note that tight CO limits would stifle their economies, just as these countries are starting to lift their people out of poverty with more pro-free-market policies.
And so they would. By the same logic, the treaty also would harm the U.S. and other rich nations, but the poorer nations seem to see this double standard as perfectly fair.
Economists disagree on specific numbers, but almost every analysis shows the impact on the U.S. would be huge. Utilities would have to spend billions of dollars to modify their plants further. Carmakers would have to spend billions to retool plants to meet tougher exhaust standards. So, too, would other manufacturers. And consumers would pick up the bill. And the costs wouldn't stop there. Consumers would also face regulation of their daily lives. Green-friendly gas-powered engines - for lawn mowers and leaf blowers, for jet skis and power boats -would be so costly that they might just disappear from the mass marketplace.
With these drastic curbs, manufacturers will take a long hard look at staying (or even selling) in the U.S., especially since developing countries may be able to build as many smoke-belching plants, polluting cars and dirty-coal utilities as they want. And think about where all that smoke goes - that's right, into the same atmosphere shared by all. Unless the treaty puts the same limits on all countries, it will just transfer CO production to new places. The net effect, at best, will be no decrease at all.
The U.S. now accounts for about 22% of man-made CO emissions worldwide, says the International Energy Agency. And developing countries and the former Eastern bloc make up about half of such emissions.
By 2100, though, these countries are expected to account for three-fourths of CO output.
So developing nations want the right to pollute at will. But there's more. They also want foreign aid - from you-know-who - if they do have to take any costly steps to reduce their emissions.
With impacts like these on the horizon, you'd think the U.S. would be urging a go- slow approach. Quite the contrary. The head of the U.S. delegation is former Colorado Democratic Sen. Tim Wirth, who has argued passionately for ''legally binding'' emission targets.
And of course, Vice President Al Gore is a true-blue green on the subject of global warming. He and the Environmental Protection Agency have already concluded that global warming is a threat.
President Clinton has not formally endorsed legally binding emission targets, but he has also not pulled Wirth off the negotiating team.
The green groups continue to predict disaster if the treaty's not passed, and they have persuaded much of the Clinton administration. What they're not telling us is what we'd face if their wishes came true - economic deprivation.
(C) Copyright 1997 Investors Business Daily, Inc.
Metadata: E/IBD E/SN1 E/EDIT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hmmmm, and someone once called me a Galt for my views??
Michael |
