At the end of the hottest October on record, delegates from 165 countries met in Marrakech last fall to finalize the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. At first glance, the Kyoto goals seem negligible: By 2012, greenhouse gases must be cut to slightly below 1990 levels--a reduction to be realized through a loophole-ridden system of emissions trading. And thanks to the Bush administration, the 165 signatory nations do not include the United States, the superpower superpolluter that emits a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases.
But the agreement's puny goals may have masked the beginning of a seismicshift in the global balance of political power--away from the United States andtoward the European Union. "The view is nonetheless widespread in Europe,"Jessica Tuchman Matthews wrote recently in Foreign Policy magazine, "that the U.S. decision on Kyoto could become a turning point in trans-Atlantic relations." Some European officials actually exulted because U.S. delegates were not present. Indeed, with the United States not involved, the agreement may prefigure more aggressive solutions to global warming. The European Union has already insisted that the World Trade Organization address environmental impacts--a requirement that could dampen President Bush's ability to make use of his anticipated new trade-negotiating authority from Congress.
Time and again, the Bush administration has isolated itself by refusing tojoin international agreements on everything from land mines and internationalcriminal courts to biological weapons and global climate change. Domestically,Bush reneged on a campaign promise to cap carbon emissions from power plants.His energy plan calls for construction of at least 1,300 new plants over the next20 years. Bush's withdrawal from the six-year-old international climatenegotiations, then, epitomized his views both on energy and on internationalagreements.
Bush's dismissal of Kyoto sparked hostile demonstrations in Madrid, Stockholm,and Geneva, and drew angry words from EU officials. Even Tony Blair, America'sstaunchest ally in the antiterrorism campaign, declared just weeks afterSeptember 11 that "we could defeat climate change if we chose to. We will implement [Kyoto]," he said. "But it's only a start. With imagination, we coulduse technologies that create energy without destroying our planet."
In the face of the U.S. withdrawal, the other nations gamely struggled toproduce a consensus plan to address the climate crisis. Having already madesignificant concessions in a futile effort to secure U.S. participation,negotiators inserted more loopholes into the Marrakech version to overcomeobjections from Russia, Australia, and Japan.
Critics dubbed the resulting product "Kyoto Lite." On its face, the treatyobligates the world's 38 industrial nations (minus the United States) to reducecarbon emissions an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But giventhe additional loopholes--chiefly, the inflation of allowances forcarbonabsorbing trees--the real reductions will barely amount to 3 percent below 1990 levels,several analyses show. (The use of forests to offset global warming is dubious atbest. If all the world's forests were preserved and its deforested areasreforested, all those trees would absorb only about 15 percent of the fossil-fuelemissions necessary to stabilize the climate, according to the UN-sponsored IPCC,the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes more than 2,000scientists from 100 countries.) Most European nations will meet the Kyoto Litegoals through such relatively painless domestic efforts as increased energyefficiency, small carbon taxes, or internal emissions trading.
Still, the Kyoto Protocol was a real diplomatic accomplishment.Despite its loopholes, minimal goals, and lack of an enforcement mechanism, itdoes at last provide an international framework for diminishing the climatecrisis. And with the absence of recalcitrant, foot-dragging U.S. delegates, othercountries may find it easier to promote more aggressive approaches to reversingclimate change.
There is, in fact, a range of cost-effective solutions that could bothpacify the climate and begin to reverse the grotesque economic inequities thatfuel anti-U.S. hostility in the third world. Three years ago, more than 2,500economists, including six Nobel laureates, declared that we can cut ouremissions--up to 30 percent, by some estimates--simply through efficiencies andconservation, with a net gain in jobs and productivity. A report issued in earlyDecember 2001 by the Tellus Institute, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and theAmerican Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, found that by 2020, the UnitedStates could meet 20 percent of its electricity needs with renewables, saveconsumers $440 billion, and avoid having to build 975 new power plants.
The world needs global strategies that will enable countries like India,China, Mexico, and Venezuela to replace their coal- and oil-based energyeconomies with wind, solar, hydrogen, and biomass sources--and provide sufficientclean energy for future development. That transition would create huge numbers ofjobs abroad and allow the world's poorest citizens--many of whom feel abused andexploited by the wealthy nations--higher living standards, without the assault onthe environment that characterized Western development.
One such plan, called Contraction and Convergence, was developed by the GlobalCommons Institute in Britain. It addresses a fundamental inequity embedded in theKyoto Protocol, which essentially allows high-polluting nations to keep onpolluting by using their past emissions levels as a baseline. The burden ofreducing global emissions would fall disproportionately on less-developednations. Not surprisingly, those nations want a single global per capitaallowance for carbon emissions so that they have room to develop.
Contraction and Convergence provides an ingenious mechanism for the world bothto set a maximum carbon limit by a date certain and to achieve convergence in thenations' emissions rights, which would gradually be redistributed so that theworld would achieve a uniform per capita allocation. This would put appropriatepressure on rich nations, which generate the most pollutants, to shift tononpolluting renewables.
An even bolder approach, the World Energy Modernization Plan--drafted by agroup of energy-company presidents, economists, energy-policy specialists, andothers (including this writer)--proposes a combination of three policies thatwould reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent. The plan calls for the redirectionof energy subsidies away from fossil fuels to renewable sources in industrialnations; the creation of a fund on the order of $300 billion a year to transferclean energy to developing countries (financed either through a .025 percent"Tobin tax" on international currency transactions or through carbon taxes inindustrial countries); and the replacement of the Kyoto framework ofinternational carbon trading with a progressively more stringent fossil-fuelefficiency standard.
Under the stricter standard, every nation would increase its fossil-fuelefficiency by 5 percent a year until the global 70 percent reduction is achieved.Since few economies can maintain a 5 percent annual growth rate, emissionsreductions would outpace economic growth. This would be much easier to monitorthan measuring emissions; it would simply entail comparing the ratio ofcarbon-fuel consumption with gross domestic product. Countries would initiallyrealize their goals by implementing inexpensive energy efficiencies, such asbetter conservation and more-fuel-efficient cars. As those efficiencies becamemore expensive to capture, countries would meet gradually tougher standards bydrawing more energy from renewable sources. That shift, in turn, would createthe mass markets and economies of scale for renewables that would make them ascheap as or cheaper than coal and oil.
This subsidy switch would convert oil companies into energy companies. Theprogressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard would also jump-start renewableenergy, propelling it into a global industry. Worldwide competition for the newmarket in clean energy would power the whole process.
By refusing even to consider a plan of this scope and scale, Bush is not onlyrisking the U.S. leadership role; he is also ceding the leadership of the nextenergy economy as European-produced solar, wind, and hydrogen technologiesgradually come to dominate world energy markets.
In Marrakech, November is normally the height of the rainyseason. As the delegates convened, however, Moroccans were struggling through thefourth year of a severe drought that is destroying forests, depleting water tables, and promoting the spread of deserts into villages. In nearby Algeria, theworst flooding in memory killed more than 1,000 people, collapsed buildings, andturned streets into rivers--another indicator of the violent and unseasonalweather that marks early-stage global warming.
Climate change is unmistakably accelerating. The deep oceans are warming.The tundra is thawing. The glaciers are melting. Infectious diseases aremigrating. Violent weather events are occurring more often. The very timing ofthe seasons has changed. And all this is the result of just one degree ofwarming. According to the IPCC, the earth will warm from 4 degrees to 11 degreeslater in this century.
In November the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet estimated that millions of people, mostly in developing countries, will die over the next 20 years from warming-driven outbreaks of dengue fever, malaria, cholera, encephalitis, and pulmonary diseases. If the world does not soon address the climate crisis in its true dimensions, it will not much matter where global political leadership lies. Our fossil-fuel dependency will propel us all into an indeterminate season of disintegration.
