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17 August 2005 Is the Kyoto Protocol Now a Dead Letter? What look like significant recent
developments in the fate of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing
greenhouse gas emissions have gone largely unreported in New Zealand. In the lead-up to the recent Group
of Eight (G-8) economic summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, British
prime minister Tony Blair and other European leaders hoped to change
the US position of opposition to the Protocol. Instead, at a meeting
overshadowed by the terrorist bombings in London, it was the US
position that prevailed. President George Bush argued that
the world should await further scientific evidence on global climate
change rather than make unwise decisions that would stifle growth.
As he put it in a speech before the summit, efforts to "oppose
development and put the world on an energy diet" would condemn
two billion people in the developing world to poverty and disease. Over-hyped language describing
global warming as "an urgent threat to the world" requiring
"immediate action" was removed from the draft summit communiqué.
Also eliminated were references to melting glaciers and rising seas. Instead, the leaders of the major
industrialised nations agreed that "uncertainties remain in
our understanding of climate science", rejecting the environmentalist
dogma (and assertions by energy minister Pete Hodgson) about "settled
science". Moreover, science cannot answer
questions that are at heart economic, in particular the extent to
which scarce economic resources should be used to mitigate warming
or be applied in other ways, for example to reduce world poverty
or improve sanitation and water quality. To state what should be obvious,
climate change science cannot predict the rate of economic growth
in China and India in the next century, or their rate of growth
in emissions, or the rate at which new technologies will displace
fossil fuels. Nor can it calculate the economic cost of adaptation
or mitigation. European governments may be realising
that any short-term effort to curb emissions using existing technologies
would be prohibitively costly and further damage their sluggish
economies. By some estimates, the global costs could reach well
into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, yet global temperatures
in 100 years' time would be barely affected. Bjorn Lomborg, author
of The Skeptical Environmentalist, describes Kyoto simply
as a bad deal. The push by European countries
at Gleneagles to strengthen the level of international commitment
to the Kyoto targets may have been weakened by the fact that carbon
emissions in these countries are on the rise and most of them are
not on track to meet their commitments under Kyoto. Two other events prior to the summit
reinforce the impression that Kyoto is becoming a dead letter. The first was the release of a
report on the economics of climate change by the influential Economic
Affairs Committee of the House of Lords. This expressed concern
that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was tainted
by political interference, played down some positive aspects of
global warming, and failed to reflect in a balanced way the relative
merits of adaptation and mitigation in the face of climate change. It stated that UK energy and climate
policy "appears to be based on dubious assumptions about the
roles of renewable energy and energy efficiency" and called
for alternative "architectures" for future Protocols,
"based perhaps on agreements on technology and its diffusion". Secondly, efforts to push the Kyoto
agenda in the US House of Representatives and Senate have recently
lost ground. While the Senate did agree to a non-binding resolution
declaring global warming a problem, Congress has clearly joined
the Bush administration in rejecting carbon constraints in favour
of the administration's strategy of research and development of
new technologies. Meanwhile, the government has revealed
a major error in its calculations of the economic consequences of
Kyoto, changing its estimates from a net benefit to an expected
cost of $307 million of meeting New Zealand's commitments in the
period 2008-2012. The government's previous assertions of economic
benefits were reckless and short-term in nature; the likely high
future costs were disregarded and are now expected to hit earlier. The government has long been naïve
to believe that the Kyoto targets would ever be met. Given the shaky
scientific and economic foundations of the Protocol, no western
government that tried to impose costly economic measures for, at
best, minimal environmental gain would be likely to survive democratic
elections. Recent events suggest that Kyoto may already be in the process of being ditched and that New Zealand would be wise to abandon its current policies in favour of a more rational approach to the climate change issue. Respected economic research indicates that the optimal approach is to facilitate the development of new technologies, adopt 'no regrets' policies (ones that should be adopted anyway on economic grounds, such as congestion pricing for roads), encourage voluntary action, and avoid early and costly regulatory measures. Roger Kerr is the executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable. For more information, contact: Roger Kerr Web: www.nzbr.org.nz |