2007

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.

In the UK, Conservative Party spokesmen are claiming that their demands for rapid, drastic action to cut carbon emissions are congrent with Mrs`Thatcher's views. This is a shaky claim at best.

In her latest book, Statecraft (2002, 449-58), Thatcher devotes ten pages to the subject of "Hot Air and Global Warming." Thatcher is quite clear that she feels things have gone in the wrong direction since she warned, "it is possible . . . we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself." She notes that global warming alarmism today "provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism" (Statecraft, p.449).

In other words, Mrs T concedes there might be a problem, but rejects the economy-destroying solutions of emissions taxes and targets that have entranced so many. She recognized this back in 1990, when she said, "Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment". In fact, Thatcher makes it clear that she regards global warming less as an "environmental" threat and more as a challenge to human ingenuity that should be grouped with challenges such as AIDS, animal health, and genetically modified foods. In her estimation, "All require first-rate research, mature evaluation and then the appropriate response. But no more than these does climate change mean the end of the world; and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism." (Statecraft, p.457).

I wrote more on Mrs Thatcher's environmental record for the free-market environmental group PERC a couple of years ago.

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

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDI2NVTYRXU 285 234]

In response to the global warming consensus, political momentum is building to cap greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs), subdivide the cap into smaller parts (or emissions allowances similar to rationing coupons), and distribute the emissions allowances, either by auction or on a no-cost basis to businesses that emit greenhouse gases.

Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.