Kudos on a facts-are-friendly editorial on the US rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, OGJ, Apr. 9, 2001, p. 17.
Energy and climate experts from all ends of the political spectrum knew Kyoto was a dead man walking. Chris Flavin of the left-of-center environmental group, Worldwatch Institute, stated back in 1998, "The challenge now is to renovate the baroque structure that the Kyoto Plan has become-or else scrap it and get ready to start all over." And Bush did just that!
Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change stated last summer, "It is becoming increasingly clear that the targets in the Kyoto Protocol cannot, and will not, be met on the established timetable in the US and elsewhere." And Paul Portney of Resources for the Future told a packed house at a Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration conference back in March 1999, "I can find virtually no one-in government, in the environmental community, in business, or in the press-who thinks that the Kyoto Protocol has even the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of coming into effect in anything approaching its current form. This is every bit as true internationally as it is in the US."
Post Kyoto, the challenges for Bush will be to stay the course and refuse to label carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant for regulation and reject new proposals (such as recently floated in the New York Times by William Reilly) for some sort of a voluntary CO2 emission-reduction program for different industrial sectors. Government jawboning with a mandatory club in the closet is back door regulation waiting to come in the front door.
Bush's courageous act to scrap Kyoto in the face of domestic and international pressure could bust the European environmental cartel and give the science and economics of climate change the time needed to conclude that a moderately warmer, wetter, and CO2-enriched world-natural, anthropogenic, or both-is a better world for plant life and society. This will be very good news indeed, for the hydrocarbon energy age may still be very young.
Robert L. Bradley Jr.
President
Institute for Energy Research
Houston
