The prime minister of France has issued a proposal that oil and gas companies should treat as a looming political hazard.
At a World Bank meeting last month in Paris, Lionel Jospin called for creation of an international body to enforce environmental regulations.
"Problems are now global and require global solutions," the Socialist Party leader declared. Acting alone, he said, states can't guarantee the protection of citizens' interests or the delivery of benefits from globalization. From these observations he deduced the need for something called "political globalization," which he equated with regulation.
"The time has come to address the problem of how to structure global regulation," Jospin said. He called for the strengthening of United Nations institutions trying to guarantee international "public assets" needed for sustainable development. But he insisted that's not enough.
"The structure must be reinforced in those areas where there are still gaps, where organizations are lacking, such as for example a world environment organization enforcing international commitments. During its presidency of the European Union, France will be taking an initiative along these lines based on the UN system and in particular on the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)."
Flawed assumption
This is a potential nightmare that the oil and gas industry should hope never gains political traction.
Its basic flaw is the assumption that global politics can solve essentially scientific problems. The record suggests otherwise. When environmental issues enter the global political theater, the curtain comes down on science.
Obfuscation of science by politics has dreadfully distorted the issue of global warming. Politicians now toss off climate change as a global threat indisputably in need of remedy. During the same meeting at which Jospin spoke, World Bank Vice-Pres. Jean-Francois Rischard put global warming at the top of a list of 20 issues requiring "global governance" through mechanisms he recommended called global issues networks. He cited "increasingly clear consensus about the peril of global warming."
The consensus just doesn't exist. If anything is increasingly clear, it is that doubt grows with time and that people can change behavior enough to change temperature significantly against natural variation (OGJ, July 3, 2000, p. 23).
The so-called consensus about global warming achieved political infallibility in the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995, an outgrowth of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The often-quoted passage, legitimacy of which is disputed by some of the scientists who worked on the study, reads: "The balance of evidence, from changes in global mean surface air temperature and from changes in geographical, seasonal, and vertical patterns of atmospheric temperature, suggests a discernible human influence on global climate."
That suggestion of a discernable human influence set the global political machine in motion toward the still-unratified Kyoto Protocol of December 1997. The protocol calls on developed countries to commit to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, inevitably through large taxes on combustion of hydrocarbons. Much political rhetoric now treats the Kyoto agreement like a certain solution to an unquestionable problem.
Yet in the same document in which the disputed assertion about a discernible influence appears, there is this, mostly ignored warning: "Although these global mean results suggest that there is some anthropogenic component in the observed temperature record, they cannot be considered as compelling evidence of a clear cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in Earth's surface temperature."
Cause for alarm
Selective reading of scientific findings thus helped an increasingly doubtful theory snowball into global pressure for a massive transfer of wealth from individuals to governments. This is at least as much cause for alarm as the low risk that human activity will significantly warm the planet. And it's an example of where Jospin's recommendation would lead.
A world environment organization would serve as a forum for fear-mongers and a breeding ground for statist prescriptions. The political path leading to Kyoto shows how it would work. The oil and gas industry doesn't need it. The world doesn't need it. And neither one can afford it.
