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How to Improve the Kyoto Protocol

by James N. Markels

Environmentalists are wringing their hands over President Bush’s move to pull the United States out of the Kyoto protocol for reducing global warming, but the treaty was doomed from the start. The Senate had already voted a ringing denunciation of the protocol’s exclusion of Third World nations from emissions requirements. European Union leaders are looking for ways to alter the treaty to make it signable, but addressing the Senate’s concerns are only the first step.

If the Kyoto treaty is meant to address CO² emissions, then it must allow for CO² sequestering. If the production of CO² is bad, then the absorption of CO² is thereby good and must be rewarded. All the CO² absorbed by plants in the United States should count toward America’s CO² emissions status. But this implicitly allows that CO² production itself is not bad providing it can be “cleaned up” later by planting more trees and the like, and this is not the message that the EU is interested in sending with the Kyoto treaty.

When one looks at the EU’s proposals, one clear belief shines through: The United States is morally wrong to produce and consume so much, and we must be punished.

Otherwise, how to explain the exclusion of developing countries from emissions regulations or the resistance against CO² sequestering? Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission—the executive branch of the EU, argued in an op-ed last Thursday, “Nobody denies that emissions from developing countries also need to be addressed. It’s a question of timing. The Kyoto Protocol is our first step towards solving this problem, but it will be an incremental process that eventually involves everyone.” If global warming is such an immediate concern, why not include everyone? If developing countries are going to improve their economies, their first steps will require the production of CO² through industrialization. Letting them off the hook while America is forced to cut back only indicates a dislike of America, not an honest effort to combat global warming.

Prodi and others cite the terrible dangers predicted to occur from global warming, from rising ocean levels to more extreme weather, but they have not bothered to find out whether the earth is already warming naturally, with or without our involvement. After all, there has never been a fixed link found between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, as these emissions have steadily grown since 1900 yet global temperatures have fluctuated in that time. What if reducing, or even eliminating, CO² emissions won’t stop global warming? Then what?

The Kyoto treaty offers no alternatives for such a situation. It assumes a direct causation. Even more interestingly, if global warming is a problem, one would naturally realize that efforts to promote global cooling would be beneficial. Yet the Kyoto treaty makes no effort to promote action that will cool the earth, such as spraying chemicals into the air that will increase cloud-cover and reduce sunlight, or investigate options that could eat up more CO² such as ocean fertilization.

But the Kyoto treaty doesn’t allow for such possibilities because allowing humans to consciously work to cool the earth means justifying human manipulation of the environment, which is exactly what the treaty was created to denounce. If the earth was found to be cooling, would the Kyoto treaty have encouraged industrialized nations to produce more CO² in order to warm the climate? Absolutely not. If anything, Kyoto signatories would have tried to find a reason to link America’s economy to cooling.

In a sense, the Kyoto treaty is left between a rock and a hard place: It seeks to punish those who cause global warming, but offers nothing to actually stop or reverse global warming.

The treaty must also account for the weakness of the science that supports its claims. A new article in the journal Science finds a link between ocean temperatures and the earth’s climate. “By and large, it was always thought that there was very little evidence that any of the variability in climate was controlled by variations of oceans,” co-author James Hurrell says. “We’ve shown that the long-term changes in the climate from the east of North America across the Atlantic Ocean onto Europe and Asia are indeed linked to the warming of the tropical oceans.” Explanations for what causes ocean temperatures to fluctuate or how oceans affect the climate are not yet known, and the authors offer only possibilities, but the treaty makes no allowance for the likely possibility that we are still in the dark on climate change, and what we know today may wind up being significantly off the mark from reality.