Collapse of climate-change talks in The Hague last month gives the oil and gas industry a reprieve but no reason to rest. Political forces supporting the probably doomed Kyoto Protocol have not subsided. Pressure builds to sacrifice human well-being to alarmist speculation. And the oil and gas industry remains divided.
Rhetoric at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change betrayed troubling political motives. French Pres. Jacques Chirac urged representatives from the US to "cast aside their doubts and hesitations" about the need for drastic response to climate change, asserting, "Each American emits three times more greenhouse gases than a Frenchman."
The arrogance of his statement typifies Kyoto politics. And it gives unforgettable context to the wackiest ideas to bob up in the froth surrounding the core agreement, such as the need for a global taxing authority and regulation of carbon dioxide as a toxic pollutant.
Human rights
If they had emerged in any other issue, these notions would have been laughed into oblivion as assaults on fundamental human rights-including the right to breathe. Yet otherwise sensible adults considered them seriously because of their association with an international response to global warming. When leaders behave this way, the last thing anyone should do is cast aside doubt and hesitation.
So the US was right to resist European nagging. It should not have signed the scientifically unsound Kyoto Protocol in the first place. The agreement doomed itself to futility by excluding developing countries. And it gave the US a disproportionate burden.
Against 1990 baseline levels, European Union members seemed to have shouldered the greater load, agreeing to an aggregate 8% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions against 7% for the US. But several European countries displaced coal significantly with natural gas between 1990 and the 1997 meeting in Kyoto. With this convenient head-start, the EU as a whole needed to lower emissions from levels projected for 2012 by only 15-20% to satisfy Kyoto, compared with 30-35% for the US.
To this imbalance, Europeans such as Chirac responded that the US leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions and should lead the world in cuts. The argument overlooks much, including dependency of most of the world-including Europe-on US military leadership and economic vibrancy. Building and sustaining global military capability certainly lifts emissions of greenhouse gases above global norms. So does maintaining growth of the economic anchor of worldwide markets and currencies. The urge to punish Americans for assuming unique responsibilities in the world, manifest in European insistence on costliest-possible interpretation of Kyoto requirements, is not a friendly one.
The oil and gas industry largely fell in line with this geopolitical schism. Companies based in Europe tended to support Kyoto initiatives. US companies tended to oppose them. Some measure of reconciliation is in order.
In and out of the industry, discussions about Kyoto and global warming in general haven't been constructive. They smother a complex climatologic issue with simplistic politics. They treat an essentially scientific question as a spiritual dilemma and dissent as unrighteous. Especially in Europe, science gives way to the precautionary principle, which asserts that the mere potential for threat warrants costly remedy.
Inevitably, companies oblige their governments. Some European companies, therefore, support Kyoto. For taking that position, they will receive no encouragement here until scientists can provide greater assurance than is now possible that Kyoto sacrifices would represent valid responses to a real problem.
In terms of demand for hydrocarbons, of course, none of this matters as much as the tone of past debate suggests. Kyoto's wildest prescriptions wouldn't greatly alter the energy mix. Mostly, they would limit economic growth and total demand for energy and subsidize renewable energy. Oil and gas would still hold commanding shares.
Skewed discourse
The problem with Kyoto has never been its threat to petroleum markets. It is instead the way Kyoto and climate-change politics have discounted science and skewed discourse on behalf of state manipulation of people.
A world governed by orders to suspend scientific doubt in service to communal notions of righteousness benefits neither the oil and gas industry nor its customers. This unapologetically American concern for personal liberty needs attention as a diminishingly American business works to repair its ideological rift.
