California Conservative

January 16 marked the one year anniversary for the Kyoto Treaty, aimed at staving off global warming. However, the celebration by supporters has been unusually low key amid criticism that the Treaty has turned out to be a failure thus far.

The protocol opened for signature in Kyoto, Japan in December of 1997. (Read the text of the Kyoto Protocol)

One year ago it became a treaty with 160 countries ratifying the agreement. 30 countries refused to sign, including two notables, the United States and Australia. Pres. Bush said :

“I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80% of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy.” and “The Kyoto Protocol was fatally flawed in fundamental ways..”

Thomas Sieger Derr, author and Professor of Religion and Ethics at Smith College, wrote about Kyoto:

The Kyoto treaty would not make a measurable difference in the climate—by 2050, a temperature reduction of maybe two-hundredths of a degree Celsius, or at most six-hundredths of a degree but the sacrifices it would impose on the United States would be quite large. It would require us to reduce our projected 2012 energy use by 25 percent, a catastrophic economic hit. Small wonder that the Senate in 1997 passed a bipartisan resolution, the Byrd-Hagel anti-Kyoto resolution, by 95-0 (a fact rarely recalled by those who claim that America’s refusal to sign on to the treaty was the result of the Bush administration’s thralldom to corporate interests).

The absurdity of the treaty becomes obvious when we recognize that it does not impose emissions requirements on developing countries, including economic giants such as China, India, and Brazil. (China will become the world’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in just a few years.)

The National Center for Public Policy Research explained:

The Kyoto Protocol requires industrialized countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. But 13 of the 15 original members of the European Union have increased their emissions since 1990, not reduced them. New data by the EU’s own European Environmental Agency show that by 2010, the 15 nations’ emissions collectively will exceed 1990 levels by seven percent

The treaty is economic suicide, and most European nations know it. According to the Brussels economic research organization International Council for Capital Formation (ICCF), the UK’s gross domestic product will fall more than 1 percent in 2010 from what it otherwise would be, Italy’s by more than 2 percent, and Spain’s by more than 3 percent as a result of Kyoto’s emissions targets. The UK, Italy, and Germany each would lose at least 200,000 jobs; Spain would lose 800,000.

For what? Even if European nations did comply with the Kyoto targets, for all the economic hardship, they’d achieve a paltry reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 0.1 percent by 2010, according to Margo Thorning, economist and managing director of ICCF.

Even more criticism of the Kyoto Treaty and global warming is described in detail at JunkScience.Com. Kyoto to date is estimated to have cost about $150 billion, while only hypothetically reducing the average global temperature by 0.0015 degrees Centigrade. At that rate, it would take 667 years and cost $100 trillion to hypothetically avert just 1 degree Centigrade of global warming. Worth the cost?

Historically, the earth’s warming and cooling have naturally risen and fallen in cycles long before the industrialization of civilization. The earth was warmer in the 10th century than it is now, and it cooled dramatically in the middle of our second century (the “little ice age”), and then began warming again. Temperatures were higher from about 800 to 1300 AD than they are today, and the 20th century represented a recovery from the “little ice age”. Remember, Norsemen settled Greenland (which is now anything but “green”) a thousand years ago. The land was hospitable to agriculture and settlement, which inhospitable to it today.

Perhaps the failure of Kyoto to be anything more than a symbolic gesture of environmental concern reinforces the decision of Pres. Bush to pull out of the treaty last year. With volcanic eruptions producing far more poisonous gases and pollutants than man has ever been able to equal, and with the earth’s natural ability to cleanse herself, perhaps man should step down off his pedestal and trust a bit more in Mother Earth and less in himself.

Cross-posted at Amy’s Blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Author: Amy Proctor, Environment, Europe, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.