There is nothing remotely new in anything Hudson reports, but the article is astonishing for what it reveals about the changing grounds of the debate.  Hudson concludes:  “One thing is for sure.  It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over.  Indeed some would say it is hotting up.”

Naturally, the alarmists are not amused.  Nor will they be amused by Debra Saunders’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle or the fact that the Drudge Report featured the BBC story

Of course, in many ways the developing nations are right to object to the imposition of emissions restrictions.  Emissions represent the fastest way out of poverty for their peoples.  That's why, as I argue here, we need to think again and move away from the emissions reduction paradigm as the only solution to the global warming risk. Nevertheless, Rep. Sensenbrenner is to be congratulated for calling attention to at least one reason why the current approach is doomed to failure.

Letter follows.

 +++++

The Honorable Barack Obama

President-Elect of the United States

451 6^th St., N.W.

Washington, D.C.  20002

Dear Mr. President-Elect:

On November 18, speaking by videotape to the Bi-Partisan Governors’ Global Climate Summit, you invited Members of Congress who would be attending the 14^th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland to report back to you on what they learned there.   I have just returned from serving as the only Member of the U.S. House of Representatives to observe the negotiations and the only Member of Congress to observe the entire final week.  I am happy to accept your invitation. 

By way of background, I currently serve as the Ranking Republican Member of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, a committee created by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 110^th Congress to study policies, strategies and technologies to substantially and permanently reduce emissions that contribute to global warming.   I have attended three prior UNFCCC Conferences of Parties and led the U.S. House delegation to Japan, which observed the 1997 negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol.  

I am deeply concerned that the current negotiations, which are intended to lead to a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol next year in Copenhagen, are recreating Kyoto’s fatal flaws.  Specifically, any treaty that does not include legally binding and verifiable greenhouse gas emissions reductions from developing countries will not be ratified by the U.S. Senate because it will not accomplish the fundamental goal of reducing global emissions.

You are aware of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which the U.S. Senate adopted by a 95-to-0 vote on July 25, 1997, expressing the sense of the Senate that the U.S. should not be a signatory to an agreement that does not include specific scheduled commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions for developing countries or will result in serious harm to the U.S. economy.  Because the Kyoto Protocol failed to satisfy these requirements, neither President Clinton nor President Bush submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.  At a meeting in Poznań, Senator John Kerry and Vice President Al Gore agreed that an international treaty must include mandatory emissions reductions from developing countries. 

The current negotiations seem to be leading toward a similarly flawed outcome.  At another meeting in Poznań, I met with negotiators from foreign countries, including China and India.  These countries, the first and third largest CO2 emitters in the world, clearly stated that they would not accept legally binding emissions reductions. 

The impasse that international negotiators have reached indicates that a new strategy is necessary.  I am eager to assist you in emphasizing that, without legally-binding,  verifiable commitments from all nations, global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are neither scientifically nor politically achievable.

I look forward to scheduling a more detailed briefing. 

My best wishes to you and your family during this holiday season.

Sincerely,

F. James Sensenbrenner         

"Prioritization is an integral part of life. We budget, money, and time because they are limited. In the hospital's emergency room, doctors use prioritization or triage to save lives, but we do not use prioritization when we grapple with the world's biggest problems. We know that carbon emissions cause climate change. So, activists urge us to make drastic cuts in the CO2 we pump out, yet climate change is not the only problem facing the planet, malaria, malnutrition, and HIV/AIDS claiming millions of lives right now. In an ideal world, we would have the money and the time to solve all these problems at a stroke. In real life, we do not. Pretending that we can do everything often just means that our money and attention goes to the problems with the loudest cheerleaders or the most media attention. We need to consider how far we should push a particular solution, making drastic cuts to carbon emissions, similar to making drastic cuts to the speed limits on our roads. Slowing traffic to a crawl would save millions of lives. We could wipe out almost all road deaths overnight, yet we reject such a drastic step as nonsensical because we accept that it would make modern life impossible. That does not mean we let cars go as fast as they want. As societies, we have decided on an appropriate speed limit for our highways after weighing up the benefits we get from the efficient transport of people and goods and then considering the number of accidents. Now, we need to have a discussion about carbon emission reductions. Likewise, we should be talking about what we are willing to sacrifice and what we hope to gain. I believe this discussion should not be left just to climate scientists. We all need to look at the wider picture and remember that global warming is not the only problem facing the planet. We should be asking what policies will best help the world overall. The answers might sometimes be surprising, as an example, we often hear that rising temperatures will mean more malaria. This is true. But are CO2 cuts the best way to help people? For every person saved from malaria through the curative protocol the same resource is spent on mosquito nets and medication could save 36,000 people. Just as there are many problems facing the planet there are many possible solutions to those challenges. My belief is that immediate carbon emission cuts are not the best way to respond to climate change, instead I believe we should invest heavily in the research and development of non-carbon emitting energy technologies which will give our kids and grandkids and China and India inexpensive tools to fix climate change by mid century while allowing for the continued development of human welfare."

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.

Obviously this isn't a coherent argument to reshuffle the lineup.  What changed?  Nothing, except Russia made clear what others have known and predicted for years: they had no intention of being in the agreement should it require them to do anything other than receive wealth transfers.  What a lovely, face-saving way to preemptively deal with that: naturally, being among the 155 recipient nations is precisely where they belong.  But consider the thinking behind this step-down by the UNFCCC.  Apparently the agreement, whose original aim was to slowly include all countries (or certainly most) is really just for a rotating bunch of about 34. 

That'll teach you to grow.

Although that specific assertion begs the question, no mention was made of actual emissions (sidebar: this story was written by Juliet Eilperin, who has this beat and is by no means new to the story. Putting aside that the administration has only once uttered something that can be called a robust comparison of US and EU performance, it remains baffling that she and her peers can continue writing as if what it is now well understood were never in fact revealed.)

givne that the European Environment Agency may play rhetorical games but it makes no secret of the fact that Europe is not lowering but increasing their emissions, which are up since Kyoto was agreed not down, this struck me as possibly clever groundwork-laying for that which ultimately must publicly come to pass: Europe explaining away the gaping chasm between global warming “world leader!” rhetoric and actual emissions performance. We would’ve cut them but we’re waiting on the US to do something. Don’t laugh, that wouldn’t be all that aberrant for Brussels, Berlin or Paris.

Regardless, yesterday’s vulgar display prompted me to tally the comparative, real emission increases in US and EU, given I have heard the counter “well, in percentage terms, but…” when I point out that EU emissions are increasing faster than the US’s under any modern baseline (that is, since Kyoto was agreed and the EU commenced its breast-beating).

We know that the US CO2 emissions are going up at a much slower rate than the EU-15 ("Europe" per Kyoto). We know that, as a result of the EU-15's obvious failure to reduce emissions, even Cf. 1990 (with the gift that that baseline was to them, for reasons of unrelated UK and DE political decisions), the EU-likes to redefine Europe. They do this to boast on the EU-25 doing this or that — usually, being on target to meet its [sic] Kyoto promise…there not being an EU-25 Kyoto promise, but one collective promise for the EU-15 and 10 different other individual promises, plus 2 countries that are exempt from Kyoto. They do this now as a way to ride the economic collapse of Eastern Europe, reclaiming the hoped-for benefits of the 1990 baseline that slipped away for the more developed EU countries.

However, having a higher percentage increase for even an economy smaller than the US's (EU-15) means that one might actually produce a larger real emission increase as great or greater than the US. One cost of redefining one's self as is convenient is that it allows others to do so, possibly guaranteeing that a larger real emission increase is the case.

It turns out that a quick review indicates that real EU-25 CO2 emissions have increased more than the US since, say, 2000, by a third as much (133.1%) in fact. If my numbers are right, that means +177.7 MMT for the EU-25 in 2005 Cf. 2000, as compared to the US's +133.5 MMT 2005 over 2000, per the Energy Information Administration numbers (I have only just done this and do not know how it holds for older baselines, e.g., 1997 being the only potentially relevant year).

And oh, dear, even without the EU-10, the EU-15, "Old Europe" – a smaller economy than the US's – increased emissions by 161.67 MMT to the US's 133.5 over the same period; that is our climate hectors have increased real emissions more than the US’s, in real terms, by 21%.

So there is no need to rely on the "in percentage terms" qualifier when noting that Europe's emissions have risen faster than the US's (as Kyoto defines Europe). Instead, it appears that Europe's emissions (as Kyoto defines Europe, and certainly as Europe defines Europe, including for these purposes) have not only increased much faster than the US's but also that the EU has increased CO2 emissions much more than the US.

It seems the only thing standing between Europe and a reality check is a White House calling them on their bluster.