William Yeatman

A strange, almost funny thing recently happened at the State Department.  This was unusual not solely because proceedings at Foggy Bottom generally prompt fits of sobbing rather than bemusement.  At a gathering for his “Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change”, President Bush stood before the media, representatives of more than a dozen European and other nations, plus antagonists from Capitol Hill and, buried in his speech, offered long-overdue if curiously lukewarm defense of U.S. performance on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). 

All eyes are on Greenland's melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

This was some good work. Pretty convincing.

This is even better. Kid's got impressive range. Maybe he could pick up a Nobel.

Of course, cavemen have much smaller carbon footprints.

There are many serious objections to LOST, but one of the chief is that it provides a backdoor route to implementing UN environmental treaties, including the Kyoto protocol.  

Here's how I think it would work. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the acidity of the oceans as some of the added CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. Some biological scientists have predicted dire consequences from increasing acidification. (These effects, by the way, are a direct effect of more CO2 and are unrelated to whether or not CO2 causes any global warming.)

Complaints could be filed with one of the international tribunals created by LOST. If the tribunal decided that CO2 emissions were damaging the oceans, then the tribunal could decide that those emissions must be reduced. While most countries would probably just give lip service to this edict, such a response is not possible in the U. S.

According to the Constitution, ratified treaties have the same force as the Constitution. Under our citizen lawsuit provisions, a private citizen, such as an environmental pressure group, could then go to federal court and force the federal government to enforce the ruling of the LOST tribunal. The ruling could go far beyond the emissions reduction targets and timetables in the Kyoto Protocol.

Congress's apparent lack of activity since coming back from the August recess threatens to be replaced by a feverish amount of activity. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has released his plan for a carbon tax. It would put a 50 cents a gallon tax on gasoline and a tax of 50 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide on coal, oil, and natural gas. As my more expert colleague, Marlo Lewis, reads the proposal, the gasoline tax and the carbon tax would both be levied on gasoline, so this adds up to roughly one dollar per gallon of gas.

Dingell and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Chairman of the Air Quality Subcommittee, have also released a white paper on cap-and-trade schemes to reduce greenhouse emissions. They state that their goal is to enact a cap-and-trade that would reduce emissions by 60 to 80 per cent by 2050. Dingell at least supports both his carbon tax and cap-and-trade.

Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he hopes to be able this week to appoint conferees to negotiate a deal on the Senate and House anti-energy bills passed this summer.

The big question facing international climate negotiators is what will replace or follow the Kyoto Protocol when its emission reduction targets expire at the end of 2012. It can take years to negotiate a climate treaty and additional years for the requisite number of countries to ratify it. Realistically, negotiators have until late 2009 to resolve all substantive disagreements if there is to be no gap between the 2008-2012 Kyoto compliance period and the start of a new treaty.

To help shape the successor treaty to Kyoto, President Bush last week hosted a meeting of the world’s 16 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Bush said the major emitters’ “guiding principle is clear: We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”

Well, yes and no. Few countries are willing to undermine their own economic growth to reduce emissions, but some relish the prospect of using climate treaties to undermine U.S. economic growth. Kyoto, for example, was set up to impose greater relative burdens on U.S. firms than on their European Union (EU) counterparts.

Several factors give European firms a competitive advantage under Kyoto, which measures emission reductions against a 1990 baseline. First, the UK and Germany each achieved huge one-time emission reductions in the 1990s through actions largely unrelated to environmental concern. The UK electric sector switched from subsidized coal to lower-carbon free-market natural gas. Germany shut down obsolete, inefficient Stalin-era power plants and factories in the former East Germany. Kyoto allows these one-time reductions to count against Europe’s total. Other factors operating in Europe’s favor include low-to-negative population growth and lackluster economic performance during the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

Thus, it is not surprising that Yale University economist William Nordhaus calculated that Kyoto would impose higher compliance costs on the United States than on all other industrialized countries—Europe, Canada, Japan, and Russia—combined. Given Kyoto’s impotence as climate policy—it would avert a hypothetical and unverifiable 0.07C of warming by 2050—Kyoto is largely an EU trade strategy masquerading as an environmental treaty.

At last week’s major emitters conference, Bush once again declined to Europeanize U.S. climate policy. The Europeans want a treaty that toughens Kyoto’s emission reduction targets and extends Kyoto’s cap-and-traded system to more countries. Bush, in contrast, called for an agreement that defines a long-term emission reduction “goal” and then lets each country “design its own separate strategies” for moving “towards” the goal based on “each country's different energy resources, different stages of development, and different economic needs.”

Predictably, Bush’s stance drew fire from EU officials and green groups. John Ashton, the UK special representative on climate change, commented: “There was very strong support [from other countries] that the effort needs to be led by a system of mandatory targets by all industrialized countries, including the US. Their proposition that you can have national targets is like saying that we will make promises to ourselves but not to anyone else.”

This is silly. Nations make promises to themselves all the time without making promises to anybody else. It’s called lawmaking! The history of U.S. environmental legislation proves that we do not need to make promises to Europe to make binding promises to ourselves.

The problem with a treaty like Kyoto is that if you later discover the promises you made are foolish, unrealistic, or harmful, you cannot undo them without renegotiating the treaty with 160 other countries. Since some of those countries hope to profit from our self-inflicted wounds, they would have little reason to let us off the hook no matter how detrimental the treaty proves to be to our national interest.

Bush’s approach would not lock America into mistakes that cannot be undone. That’s a smarter way to go.

Demand for renewable energy is outstripping supply, pushing up prices and raising the specter that some states may not meet clean-energy mandates.

The Cooler Heads Coalition invites you to a congressional staff and media briefing on "European Progress on Reducing Global Warming Emissions: A View from Italy of the Kyoto Protocol," with Benedetto Della Vedova, member of the Italian Parliament and president of the Liberal Reform Party.

Tuesday, October 9th

Noon-1:30 PM

Room 406, Senate Dirksen Office Building

Please RSVP by e-mail to Julie Walsh at jwalsh@cei.org

For more information, please call Myron Ebell at (202) 331-2256

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