Kyoto Treaty, RIP: Blair Delivers the Blow
Summary: The Kyoto Treaty, the high point of global environmental movement, is dead. Tony Blair has rejected its austere restrictions that would stifle economic growth, the US will never accept it, and the world is much better off.
Of all the enviro myths I have had to endure, global warming tops the list. This analysis from 8 years ago holds up nicely as primary evidence.
Yet the press, especially the worldwide press, treats global warming, and its linkage to human activity, as settled truth. Further, any natural phenomenon that appears to be changing in some way inevitably has some link to big, bad global warming. Storms, hurricanes, heat waves, cold waves, apparent weather extremes (this one is about Bangladesh), you name it–global warming is the all-purpose villain. End of discussion. The fact that “over 17,000 scientists have signed a proclamation stating that there is no credible evidence that man induced harmful global warming and ozone depletion is occurring” doesn’t faze them a bit.
The December 1997 Kyoto Treaty represented the height of government-sponsored global-warming hysteria. It most onerous requirement would have been an agreed-upon commitment by some (NOT all) of the participating countries to reduce their emissions of “greenhouse gases” from 1990 levels by specific percentages that are different for each country agreeing to a limitation by 2008-2012. For example, the United States, based on having a “93,” would have committed to an 7% reduction.
There’s only one problem: The more a country’s economy grows, the more energy it uses, and the more “greenhouse gases” it emits. Using shorthand, since the US economy grew (or would grow) at about 3% per year during the eighteen years from 1990-2008, its “greenhouse gas” emissions would be about 70% higher (3% compounded for 18 years) by 2008 than in the treaty’s 1990 base year. The US “commitment” of “93″ really represented a promised 45% reduction in projected emissions (from 170 to 93).
Such reductions, if even achievable, would have required draconian pollution controls with little measurable benefit requiring untold billions of dollars, and would have disrupted industrial production, office environments (get used to working in an 80-degree summertime swelter), and even farms (those dumb cows emit the greenhouse gas methane). They would have virtually guaranteed a major recession and permanent reductions in living standards if implemented. Meanwhile, China and India, which are not on the list, would have been free of any limitations. If the goal is to reduce worldwide emissions, those exceptions make no sense.
A Senate resolution pre-emptively rejected any treaty with what turned out to be Kyoto-like provisions 95-0 in June 1997. To avoid complete humiliation, the Clinton Administration never submitted the treaty to a formal vote. Instead, that administration, to placate its enviro base, and though it was never really serious, moved merrily along as if the Treaty was a done deal, made noises about voluntarily (and unconstitutionally) complying with Kyoto despite Senate rejection, and did nothing susbstantive.
Now the tide has turned irretrievably against the Kyoto propagandists, who have officially lost Tony Blair (HT Myopic Zeal):
NEW YORK – Kyoto Treaty RIP. That’s not the headline in any newspaper this morning emerging from the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, but it could have been — and should have been.
Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with “brutal honesty” about Kyoto and global warming, and he did. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had some blunt talk, too.
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, “My thinking has changed in the past three or four years.” So what does he think now? “No country,” he declared, “is going to cut its growth.” That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp — some say cripple — its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, “They’re not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto.” India and China, of course, weren’t covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty — which the US never acceded to — expires in 2012, there’s not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
So what will happen instead? Blair answered: “What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it.” Bingo! That’s what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course — that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.
Though Mr. Blair still appears to buy into the global-warming hooey (he could be merely humoring his country’s enviros), it really doesn’t matter. The world economic machine can now resume humming along and pulling people more and more out of povery and misery, as it has done (with appropriate government involvement to smooth out the rough edges) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This is marvelous news.
With how he governed until mid-2001, I never thought I would see the day when I heartily congratulated Mr. Blair twice in just over 4 years. First for his pivotal supportive response to the War on Terror, and second, for his summary dismissal of Kyoto. Well done, sir.
