By Henry Lamb
The single most significant accomplishment of the delegates to the global warming talks in Bonn, Germany, is a new commitment to bring the Kyoto Protocol into force no later than 2002, the 10th anniversary of the Rio Conference that gave birth to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Environmental Ministers from more than 100 nations stood to reaffirm their nation's commitment to the Protocol, and to make it the law of the planet.
Frank Loy, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, was among the speakers firmly committing the U.S. to such a course.
Interesting. The U.S. Senate has said by unanimous vote, that the Kyoto Protocol will not be ratified as it is now written. The Protocol cannot be amended until it goes into force. It cannot go into force without U.S. ratification. How, then, can the President's hand-picked spokesman stand before the world and commit the United States to a course of action the Senate has said will not happen?
Perhaps the President has been emboldened by his previous manipulations that have successfully by-passed Congress: the Staircase-Escalante Monument, for example, or the Land Legacy Initiative, or any one of a dozen or more actions that left Congress wondering why they bother coming to Washington.
Perhaps the President is counting on the Democrats regaining control of the Senate in next year's election, and reversing the position the Republican-controlled Senate took last year.
Perhaps there's more going on at the U.N. than meets the eye. It is true that the Kyoto Protocol cannot be amended until it goes into force. Listening to the delegates at any of the negotiations since the Protocol was adopted (there have been four major international conferences and a host of smaller workshops), would leave the impression that the Protocol's ultimate ratification is inevitable.
One possible scenario is the diplomatic punishment of plain language. A crunch issue is whether or not the Protocol will apply to all nations. The delegates say no. The U.S. Senate say yes. Bill Clinton says "...it depends on what the meaning of apply is." "Meaningful Participation" by key developing nations is the condition that the President says is necessary. A few nations have made voluntary, non-binding commitments, on the condition that the U.S. meet its Kyoto Commitment to give them money. Do these voluntary non-binding commitments bring the developing world under the Protocol?
The Protocol binds 38 developed nations to meet emissions reduction targets mandated by the United Nations Conference at Kyoto. All the other developed nations appear to be waiting for the United States to ratify the treaty first. All nations, both the developed and developing nations are demanding that it be ratified in sufficient time to take effect by 2002.
Every day, political pressure is building on the United States to ratify the Protocol. Almost every speaker in Bonn made some reference to climate changes in his country, or extreme weather events that are caused by the United States "luxury pollution." The Commissioner from the European Union said that if every one on earth lived as the people in developed countries, we would need ten globes to supply the resources - "and we have only one," she said.
The real goal of the Kyoto Protocol is to empower the United Nations to force equity among all the people on earth, by taking from those who have, to redistribute to those who have not.
The delegate from China made that point quite forcefully by claiming that the gap between the North and South is widening. He said that in 1960, the per capita gap was $5,760; in 1997, the gap was $23,532. Sounds dramatic, but the gap is about the same when inflation is taken into account. Most people who earned $5,000 per year in 1960, earn well above $23,000 today. More significantly, he said that each American produces 12 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, while people in developing countries produce only 2 tonnes each.
This dramatic-sounding comparison loses sight of the fact that Americans produce that carbon by using energy to create all the wealth the developing nations so desperately want redistributed. The goal of any international agreement should not be to reduce America's wealth-generating capacity by cutting off access to energy. The goal should be to elevate the capacity of developing nations to produce their own wealth, and allow free markets to continue to invent new technologies which make energy use cleaner in both the North and the South.
The delegates assembled in Bonn have a different view. They are hell-bent on bringing the Kyoto Protocol into force no later than 2002, giving the U.N. the power to regulate energy use in the North, and forcing payments from the North to the South and East. Lost in the pursuit is the increasing probability that whatever the U.N. does, is not likely to affect what the climate does one way or another. The artificial and arbitrary reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be viewed at some future date, to be as ridiculous as we now view the formerly enlightened practice of draining blood from sick and dying patients.
The earth will take care of itself, regardless of what enlightened humans do. It is an ingeniously designed self-balancing, self-correcting system created expressly for all its inhabitants. The only extraneous addition not included in the original design, is government, which, historically, has caused more environmental degradation and human suffering than all the natural disasters that have ever occurred.
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), and chairman of Sovereignty International.