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 elegations
from 180 nations began gathering Monday in this defunct European
capital to mull over what now appears to be a dead treaty — the
Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Officially,
this two-week meeting is advertised as a continuation of the effort
to implement that accord — an effort that foundered last fall at
the United Nations Sixth Conference of the Parties on Climate Change
(COP-6) at The Hague. But the real purpose is plain. It is to pressure
the Bush administration to change its position on Kyoto and, if
that fails, to make the U.S. the scapegoat for the treaty's collapse.
The big question
here — and later this week at the G-8 meeting of heads of state
in Genoa, Italy — is whether the U.S. will hold firm on its rejection
of Kyoto or make overtures to appease angry Europeans. Paula Dobriansky,
the State Department official responsible for global environmental
issues, will be the top White House representative here, and earlier
this week she left little doubt: "We very much appreciate that
others are reaching out to the United States and are thinking of
ways of engaging us, but we do truly believe the protocol is fundamentally
flawed. … We will not be coming back to the protocol."
But Dobriansky
will be a lonely opponent. Congressional opponents of the treaty
— including stalwarts who appeared at Bonn, including Sens. Chuck
Hagel (R., Neb.), and Larry Craig (R., Idaho), and Rep. Joanne Emerson
(R., Mo.), are not scheduled to attend since Congress is in session
and key appropriations votes are on tap. Nor will Rep. Billy Tauzin
(R., La.), who heads the key Energy and Commerce Committee, be in
Bonn, according to his office.
When President
Bush said he was abandoning support of the treaty in March, Europe's
politicians branded him the "Toxic Texan," an environmental
outlaw. The indication by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that
Japan would not ratify the agreement if the U.S. rejected it, made
opponents even more frantic. The protocol was negotiated in 1997
in Japan's ancient capital.
"We can
see," European Union Environmental Minister Margot Wallstrom
says, "that the Americans are clearly putting heavy pressure
on their partners … kill Kyoto." But the pressure seems
to be running more powerfully in the other direction. German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder warned, "Any attempt to prevent this internationally
crucial agreement from getting underway in Bonn and making it ratifiable
for everyone would be a serious political mistake."
Koizumi has
not closed the door entirely. "We will not be able to reach
an agreement in Bonn, but there will be another meeting in Morocco
in October," he said on television Sunday, referring to the
planning COP 7 meeting in Marrakech. "Japan will do its utmost
so that the protocol can be enacted in 2002. The United States,
Europe, and Japan are still in discussions, seeking ways in which
we can cooperate, and no conclusion has been reached yet. This will
take until late October."
Japan's ultimate
decision is crucial. The Kyoto agreement cannot go into effect without
the support of 55 nations and, among those nations, there must be
ratifiers that account for at least 55 percent of carbon-dioxide
emissions, the leading greenhouse gas, emitted by developed nations
in the base year, 1990. The U.S. was responsible for 34% of the
developed-nation CO2 emissions in 1990; Japan, 8%.
Under the treaty,
total greenhouse gases would have to be reduced 5.2 %t below 1990
levels, but different countries were assigned different targets
— for the U.S., 7%t below 1990 (or 20% below current levels); for
Japan, 6% below 1990 (or 16% below current levels).
Last November,
the same group of representatives met at the Hague to address alternative
methods of meeting the targets, including emissions trading (one
country, in effect, paying another to reduce emissions), using carbon
sinks (forests and farmland that suck carbon dioxide out of the
air), and bringing developing nations, exempt from the strictures
of Kyoto, under the treaty's limits. But those talks broke down,
and a resumption of COP 6 was set for Bonn in May. The date was
moved back to July, but in the meantime, the new president, George
W. Bush, said he would reject the treaty.
The Kyoto Protocol
was never popular in the United States. In August 1997, the Senate,
by a vote of 95-0, put the Clinton administration on notice that
it would not ratify any treaty that: a) excluded developing countries
such as China and India, the world's number-two and number-two greenhouse-gas
emitters, or b) did serious economic harm to the United States.
The Kyoto treaty
did both — studies by the Clinton administration's own Energy Department
showed that gross domestic product would decline 3% to 4% annually
under a Kyoto regime, reducing U.S. output by at least $300 billion
a year — but, in December 1997, Vice President Gore signed it anyway.
The treaty, however, was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.
Nor have the
complaining European countries approved it. The only developed country
that has ratified the treaty is Romania, which, because its economy
has collapsed, faces no reductions at all.
Here in Bonn,
which was the post-World II capital of West Germany and has been
replaced by Berlin since the reunification of the country, a big
question is whether Europe has anything to offer to lure either
the U.S. or Japan back to the fold — other than massive protest
and harsh language. Wallstrom said that the E.U. would have to consider
any proposals that might bring the U.S. back into the process, but
she does not want to "open up a Pandora's box by saying all
the targets and timetables are open."
Another question
is whether Europe's leaders really want to salvage Kyoto.
It didn't seem
so when I was at The Hague. There, the Europeans were dealing with
an administration that had a political stake in Kyoto, but when
Frank Loy, President Clinton's negotiator, tried to soften the economic
blow by pursuing alternative methods for reaching targets, Europe
rejected his proposals. The fact they closed those options in late
November 2000, knowing at the time that a Bush administration would
be less friendly to sharp emissions, cuts raises the suspicion that
many in Europe don't want to implement Kyoto either. Politicians
instead are pandering to the important Green minorities in their
governments.
At the heart
of the debate over global warming is the state of the science, and
a report issued by the highly regarded National Academy of Sciences
last month showed clearly that uncertainty dominates the climate-change
field. While the surface temperature of the Earth has increased
by one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, it remains unclear
whether that rise will continue, whether it is caused by human intervention
and whether humans can do anything to mitigate higher temperatures.
Catastrophic
global warming is implied by computer models of the climate, but
those models are badly flawed. As the NAS report stated: "Climate
models are imperfect. Their simulation skill is limited by uncertainties
in their formulation, the limited size of their calculations, and
the difficulty in interpreting their answers that exhibit almost
as much complexity as nature."
Bush's position
is that substantially more research is required before the U.S.
commits itself to an onerous regime of high taxes and regulatory
mandates. But, of course, European countries and others could go
it alone. So far, they have not. In fact, research by Princeton
scientists shows that forests and farmland in the U.S. have served
pull more carbon dioxide out of the air that the U.S. pumps into
it. The same cannot be said for Europe, which is a net emitter of
CO2.
Europe's hypocrisy
on the global warming issue is hard to understate. The European
Union, while opposing emissions trading for the U.S., has essentially
its own trading regime. Britain's full conversion from coal to natural
gas, as much for economic reasons as for environmental, and the
cleanup of old East German utilities and factories following German
reunification, count against a continental European cap rather than
simply against Britain's and Germany's cap.
Still, Europe
is unlikely to meet its goals. So, behind the scenes in some capitals
— Rome and Madrid in particular, because of their pollution problems
— Bush's Kyoto rejection had to be greeted with a sigh of relief.
It provides a "two-fer" by both killing Kyoto and providing
a fall guy for Europe's extreme environmentalists, who are out in
force here in Bonn.
Even those
scientists who are convinced of the accuracy of models that show
temperatures increasing 2.8 to 10.4 degrees F over the next century
admit that meeting Kyoto's targets won't do much. At best, Kyoto
would cut temperature increases by less than 0.3 degrees F by the
end of the century. Weigh that against the high economic price tag,
and, as Peter Wilcoxen, a University of Texas economist, told USA
Today, "A prudent, reasonable Senate could never agree to something
like that, committing the country to do something that we don't
know can be done, and agreeing to it at any cost." Yet, even
if Bush's rejection of Kyoto merely provided a benediction for a
deal that would do almost no good, U.N. and European bureaucrats
can be expected to press for its resuscitation.
"The importance
of Kyoto, at least in my mind, is the psychological aspect, not
the quantitative one." Narasimhan Sundararaman, secretary of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has done so much
to stir worry about the issue, explained to Reuters.
In short, Kyoto
is something like a pacifier, giving no real nourishment, but providing
advocates of global warming something to chew on.
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