Editorial - Keeping Kyoto honest

Oct. 11, 2004
Now that Russia has all but ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, pressure will build on the US to fall into line.

Now that Russia has all but ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, pressure will build on the US to fall into line. For further reason to resist, US officials need look no further than a little-noticed House subcommittee hearing last week. Pressure belongs less on the US than on Kyoto's sponsor, the United Nations.

Typical of the squeeze on the US is this remark, quoted by the New York Times, from Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Program: "I hope other nations, some of whom, like Russia, have maybe been in the past reluctant to ratify, will now join us in this truly global endeavor." That, the allure of the "truly global endeavor," is what Kyoto politics has been about all along. And, of course, money.

Questions in context

So it's not at all cynical, as the diplomatically squeamish would contend, to raise questions about one global endeavor in the context of others that went awry. One of them is the UN's Oil-for-Food Program, the subject of an Oct. 5 hearing of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations.

That investigation is one of several under way into allegations that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein systematically corrupted the Oil-for-Food scheme, which operated under UN oversight from 1996 until late 2003. The program was supposed to channel to humanitarian uses the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales during the period of UN sanctions imposed in response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Saddam is thought to have used a rigged voucher system and other tricks to enrich himself and make international friends.

The US Government Accountability Office estimates that corruption of various forms skimmed the Oil-for-Food program for $10 billion, nearly half of it through crooked oil sales. The UN was supposed to be monitoring all this but apparently had distractions. Before politics knocked the Oct. 5 subcommittee hearing off course, lawmakers heard testimony that France, Russia, Syria, and China consistently blocked efforts within the UN to clean up the program. The names of companies from some of the balky countries appear on lists that have emerged in Iraq of participants in shady sanctions-era oil trading.

So far, the UN has managed to drift above the stench of its Oil-for-Food mess. But the investigations now under way, one of them inaugurated by the UN itself, will be devastating if UN officials are found either to have not noticed that Saddam and his cronies were getting rich off the program while other Iraqis starved or—worse—to have participated in the lucrative scam.

The question is inescapable: If the UN couldn't keep shysters under control in embargoed Iraq, how effectively might it referee the worldwide trading Kyoto envisions for greenhouse-gas emission credits? A lot of money will change hands in the far-flung and opaque market that's taking shape. Temptations for abuse will be enormous. It wasn't concern about global warming, after all, that made Enron Corp. a big Kyoto fan before it destroyed itself with nefarious trading and deceptive financial reporting; the old Enron knew a potential trading bonanza when it saw one in the making. The same motive must have been at play in Russia's turnaround on Kyoto ratification. Because Russian emissions of greenhouse gases probably were at their worst in 1990, the base year for Kyoto cuts, then fell in the recession following collapse of the Soviet Union and will be suppressed by modernization, Russian companies should make a killing selling credits.

Expensive treaty

Kyoto needs the trading scheme. Without it, the accord is an expensive straitjacket, doomed never to be ratified. With it, the treaty is just expensive. So how will the UN insulate international trading of emissions credits, for which it will have audit responsibility, from corruption?

The UN is an important forum of nations with a highly moral purpose: to promote nonviolent resolution of conflict. But management of global emissions-credit trading after Kyoto ratification will depend heavily on the organization's celebrated moral authority. Even without damage from the Oil-for-Food scandal, that authority is fundamentally limited. Things can be no other way for an institution diplomatically obliged to triangulate its moral position within a community of nations that is—does anyone need reminding?—no village of angels.