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Home Front Economy
On Climate Change, a Change of Thinking
2005-12-05
IN December 1997, representatives of most of the world's nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a binding agreement to cut emissions of "greenhouse" gases. They succeeded. The Kyoto Protocol was ultimately ratified by 156 countries. It was the first agreement of its kind. But it may also prove to be the last.

Today, in the middle of new global warming talks in Montreal, there is a sense that the whole idea of global agreements to cut greenhouse gases won't work.

A major reason the optimism over Kyoto has eroded so rapidly is that its major requirement - that 38 participating industrialized countries cut their greenhouse emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2012 - was seen as just a first step toward increasingly aggressive cuts.

But in the years after the protocol was announced, developing countries, including the fast-growing giants China and India, have held firm on their insistence that they would accept no emissions cuts, even though they are likely to be the world's dominant source of greenhouse gases in coming years. Their refusal helped fuel strong opposition to the treaty in the United States Senate and its eventual rejection by President Bush.

But the current stalemate is not just because of the inadequacies of the protocol. It is also a response to the world's ballooning energy appetite, which, largely because of economic growth in China, has exceeded almost everyone's expectations. And there are still no viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases.
Steven Den Beste explains why in considerable detail.
Then, too, there is a growing recognition of the economic costs incurred by signing on to the Kyoto Protocol. As Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a proponent of emissions targets, said in a statement on Nov. 1: "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge."
Not even Chirac is that dumb.
This is as true, in different ways, in developed nations with high unemployment, like Germany and France, as it is in Russia, which said last week that it may have spot energy shortages this winter.

Some veterans of climate diplomacy and science now say that perhaps the entire architecture of the climate treaty process might be flawed.
And the science, and the technology, and the politics, and the advocacy, and ...
The basic template came out of the first international pact intended to protect the atmosphere, the 1987 Montreal Protocol for eliminating chemicals that harmed the ozone layer, said Richard A. Benedick, the Reagan administration's chief representative in the talks leading to that agreement. That agreement was a success, but a misleading one in the context of climate. It led, Mr. Benedick now says, to "years wasted in these annual shindigs designed to generate sound bites instead of sober contemplation of difficult issues."

While it was relatively easy to phase out ozone-harming chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons, which were made by a handful of companies in a few countries, taking on carbon dioxide, the main climate threat, was a completely different matter, he said. Carbon dioxide is generated by activities as varied as surfing the Web, driving a car, burning wood or flying to Montreal. Its production is woven into the fabric of an industrial society, and, for now, economic growth is inconceivable without it.

Developing countries - China and India being only the most dramatic examples - want to burn whatever energy they need, in whatever form available, to grow their economies and raise the living standard of their people.
Try being the prime minister of India and telling nearly one billion people that you're going to limit economic growth so as not to add more carbon dioxide to the air.
And the United States - by far the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases - continues to say that emissions targets or requirements would stunt economic growth in both rich and poor nations. All this has turned the Montreal meeting, many participants have conceded, into, at best, a preliminary meeting on how to start over in addressing the threat of global warming.

Indeed, from here on, progress on climate is less likely to come from megaconferences like the one in Montreal and more likely from focused initiatives by clusters of countries with common interests, said Mr. Benedick, who is now a consultant and president of the National Council on Science and the Environment, a private group promoting science-based environmental policies.

The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.
Because the science and technology simply isn't there. It's one thing to invest enormous amounts of money to make something work when you have a basic theory that's sound. The Manhatten Project proved that; it was enormously expensive, but Fermi, Oppenheimer and the rest had a very good idea of what they were doing and that they would be right in the end. Contrast that to the problems of generating energy without generating carbon dioxide today (with nuclear fission off the table), and there's no underlying, proven theory that you can bank on as you invest. Fusion? Bio-fuels? Geo-thermal? Solar? None of them have an underlying premise that says, 'do this, this and that, and you'll have the answer you need to have.'
Enormous investments in basic research have to be made promptly, even with the knowledge that most of the research is likely to fail, if there is to be any chance of creating options for the world's vastly increased energy thirst in a few decades, said Richard G. Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit center for energy and environment research.
"The train is not leaving the station, and it needs to leave the station," Mr. Richels said. "If we don't have the technologies available at that time, it's going to be a mess."
Mr. Richels has it bass-ackwards. First you do enough small time research (small time in a comparative sense) and develop ideas that have promise. Then you spend the big dollars. Right now there's no promising idea. That's the problem of looking for one big thing. So we're left with, of all things, the Bush approach of quiet collaboration with countries and industries that have a shared interest. And that, not Kyoto, has the best chance of getting us towards controlling emissions as we continue to grow.
Posted by:Steve White

#5  What's next?

Simple, eventually the radical greenies will want to find a way to shut down fully half of the photosynthesis cycle - the one where the process reverses from using CO2 to create oxygen (don;t tell anybody, but that's a contributor to the oxidyzing agent "ozone" which has been shown to contribute to greenhouse gas buildup) to storing and releasing excess CO2 not used in the reductase process.

All those zillions of trees will simply have to go - along with every plant that utilizes the dark/light photosynthesis cycle - that'll help clear up all that nasty haze over the forests.

Oh, yeah - that grass all over the place? That'll have to go too.

Doesn;t matter that the oceans absorb enormous quantities of CO2 and act as an enormous heat sink, that the carbon cycle is also present in the _rocks_ of the earth and that natural weathering releases gigatons of the stuff every year that's been locked up by natural processes.

Oh, no...but all that's simply real science. Can't have that.

There's nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

Posted by: LC FOTSGreg   2005-12-05 23:14  

#4  Airborne plant food (C02) is a pollutant?

Whatever next?
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2005-12-05 17:00  

#3  By sure numbers of Population certainly China wins but I think Europe gets extra Carbon credits for the amount of hot air their politicians have created and the heat of said air.

Either way someone should reavaluate viza-be the USA where Bush barely even defends himself.

My bet is the carbon released by Mt St Helans reuptions is far greater than anything put out by the industrialized nations and if there is a hockey stick (which I believe was disproved by the original guy who came up with the idea when he realized his data was bad) it has far more to do with Volcanic eruptions than human action.

Should we avoid shitting in our own beds, yes, but better a mess in bed than to become so poor we can't afford a bed at all.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2005-12-05 14:32  

#2  I believe China is by far the largest producer of green house gasses. Unless they stop exhaling.
Posted by: Thritch Ebbugum4328   2005-12-05 10:29  

#1  And the United States - by far the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases. Correct me if I'm wrong but Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is a biproduct of human exhalation (breathing). Europeans pontificating about Kyoto spew out enormous amounts of hot air at an increasing rate since Kyoto was signed.

I think someone needs to reexamine those figures.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2005-12-05 10:24  

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