The 9th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change opened in Milan last week to news of a setback to the Kyoto Protocol. The Dec. 1-12 meeting, called COP9, addressed practical problems of implementing the international agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). As the meeting began, however, odds drooped that the protocol will take effect.
A senior Russian official on Dec. 2 confirmed in Moscow what President Vladimir Putin had indicated 2 months earlier: that Russia won't ratify the Kyoto agreement. The official, Putin adviser Andrei Illarionov, explained that Kyoto commitments would limit Russian economic growth. With the US refusing to ratify Kyoto on similar grounds, Russia's move keeps emissions of ratifying nations below the threshold that would bring the treaty into force.
Role of propaganda
The US and Russia are right to resist pressure to ratify Kyoto. The treaty would cost too much and accomplish too little. The rush to implement it comes more from propaganda than from science.
A festering example of this is the misleading "summary for policymakers" that appeared over the February 2001 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The summary is still viewed by Kyoto supporters and much of the media as an assertion of scientific consensus that global warming of human origin constitutes a threat compelling urgent response. As participating scientists have complained, however, the summary is more alarmist than the largely ignored bulk of the report, which dwells on the uncertainties and questions still unsettling climate science.
Those uncertainties raise genuine doubt that an international effort to cut GHG emissions can significantly influence global average temperature. Countries tend to find such doubt persuasive once the costs of cutting emissions become apparent.
That's happening in Europe. On the same day Illarionov articulated Russia's sound judgment on the subject, word emerged from the European Union of developments that should further condemn Kyoto. The EU has been the protocol's most enthusiastic fan club. It has tolerated neither questions about the extent of the global-warming threat nor suggestions that governments learn more about the climate before trying to regulate it.
The European Commission on Dec. 2 accepted a progress report warning that the EU will miss its collective Kyoto target—an 8% cut in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2008-12—unless members toughen up. EU emissions, after declining since 1990, rose in 2000 and 2001. The report said 13 of 15 member countries would miss their individual targets under existing policies.
An advantage the EU has enjoyed so far in Kyoto politics thus seems to be eroding. In pursuit of its aggregate Kyoto target, the group has been able to count large cuts in GHG emissions against the 1990 baseline that were going to happen anyway. In 1990, the UK was preparing to end mining subsidies in a move that ultimately replaced great quantities of coal with natural gas in British energy consumption. In Germany, restructuring of the coal-heavy economy of formerly Communist eastern states made for impressive emission cuts. Luxembourg scored large reductions by restructuring its steel industry.
The new EU emission figures indicate an end to easy progress. Without "further measures," the report says, total EU GHG emissions by 2010 will exceed 2001 levels by almost 2% and represent a decline from the 1990 baseline of only 0.5%. Only the UK and Sweden will achieve their agreed shares of the EU's target reduction.
Carbon tax
"This is serious," wrote EU Commissioner for Environment Margo Wallström in a letter to member-country environment ministers. "Time is running out. Measures that the EU and members states have not put in place over the next 2 or 3 years will not help us to achieve our Kyoto targets." Those measures include an EU carbon tax proposed but never implemented. Europe thus will have to revisit unpopular agendas if it chooses to keep itself enslaved to Kyoto.
It has another option. It can look closely at the science of climate change and recognize that the human contribution to whatever warming may be occurring, relative to natural variation, is minor at most. As the US and Russia see, Kyoto's costs grossly outweigh its potential to affect global temperatures.
