Lay Kyoto Protocol to rest, finally, in Milan
By SALLY C. PIPES - Houston Chronicle
Pipes is president and chief executive officer of Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank based in San Francisco.
Exactly six years ago, delegates from more than 150 nations converged on Kyoto, Japan, to subject the world to a draconian and now-discredited program to control global warming, the Kyoto Protocol. This week, the same fear-mongering cast is back, this time in Milan, Italy. And the goal is to resurrect the worst enviro-treaty ever conceived.
Let us hope they don't succeed.
In this Ninth Annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, bureaucrats from 116 nations will enjoy Milan cuisine and push to ratify the Kyoto Protocol despite U.S. opposition.
Kyoto is based on the presumption that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are significantly heating our atmosphere. Never mind that industrial activity generates less than 5 percent of these carbon gases.
In the face of reputable scientific evidence, these panic-stricken pessimists believe that without drastic action, ice caps will melt, oceans will rise and apocalyptic storms sweep the planet. They would force developed nations to replace cheap fuels such as coal with quixotic solutions like windmills and solar panels.
The fact that their program would devastate the world economy carries no weight. It is simply a price we must all pay to prevent the end of the world as we know it.
In recent years, however, it has became increasingly clear that global warming is a huge false alarm based on exaggeration, misrepresentation and fear, rather than solid science or even common sense.
For example, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a key proponent of Kyoto, has predicted the cost of global warming could be as high as $18 quadrillion. That's more than 562 times the gross domestic product of the planet. Give me a break. That even makes their salaries appear cheap.
The theory itself has fallen off its foundation. Global warming advocates now base much of their case on a 1998 study by scientist Michael Mann purporting to show that Earth's temperatures were stable for a millennium, and then suddenly spiked in the late 1900s.
Mann's study has been repeatedly contradicted by geologists who have since discovered a warm period and mini ice age over the course of the past 1,000 years.
Most recently, however, an October paper in the prestigious British journal Energy & Environment shows that Mann's original study is rife with collation errors ... obsolete data, incorrect calculation ... and other quality-control defects. Upon correcting these errors, researchers found that the late 20th century was not particularly warm after all.
In other words, global warming is scientific bunk. And Kyoto should be abandoned. But the do-well delegates in Milan this week are unlikely to let it drop. And they could do untold damage to world economies.
There is a reason the United States turned its back on Kyoto in 2001. By imposing the strictest emission limits on the most fuel-efficient countries, Kyoto would effectively reward the worst polluters. By making America's economy less competitive, for example, it would have accelerated our loss of manufacturing to countries like China, which uses five times the energy and emits eight times the carbon dioxide per unit of GDP.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Kyoto Protocol would have raised the price of electricity in America by more than 86 percent. And it would have lowered the U.S. gross domestic product by nearly $400 billion.
Yet even without U.S. backing, Kyoto can still be implemented if ratified by some combination of countries that emitted 55 percent of greenhouse gases in 1990. If revived, the protocol would probably go into effect in 2008.
Thankfully, Russia, whose support is vital, is also now poised to abandon the treaty.
Back when Chernobyl was hot, the Kyoto agreement sounded like a great idea. Soviet apparatchiks were dancing the mazurka in anticipation of the carbon credits they would receive for having such an inefficient communist economy. And best of all, they could use these billion of dollars in credits to buy more weapons.
But now that Russia's economy is booming and the country is producing a lot more than nuclear missiles, Kyoto doesn't seem like such a good idea any more. In fact, to meet Kyoto standards, Russia's leaders would now have to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 36 percent over the next five years. They might as well shut down the Russian economy altogether.
President Vladimir Putin's chief economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, recently said that Kyoto's benefits are illusory and far too costly. The United States decided that these expenses were excessive. I am not convinced that Russia can afford expenses that the world's richest country could not afford.
Ironically, if Russia snubs the treaty, it could be a good thing for the environment. After all, since walking away from Kyoto, the United States has shown dramatic improvements in air quality. Our national emissions of greenhouse gases declined by 1.2 percent in 2002, the largest drop in a decade.
So if Kyoto dies this week in Milan, it doesn't mean that planet Earth is about to turn into a microwave oven. Rather, it signifies that the apocalyptic vision of global warming has finally been laid to rest. And world leaders can get back to promoting smart, growth-friendly, common-sense environmentalism.
This article is: chron.com |
