One early challenge for President Bush’s second term will be Russia’s upcoming ratification of the Kyoto global warming treaty-which will finally turn the Kyoto Protocol into a working international treaty. As more than 100 other countries begin to rein in their CO2 emissions, will Bush be able to hold firm his resolve to keep America out of the treaty?
Recently, 71 percent of Americans told a poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that they favored the U.S. ratification of Kyoto. Washington Post columnist Sebastian Malaby has suggested signing Kyoto would be a good way for the Bush White House to begin rebuilding its Iraq-fractured alliances with Europe.
There are still powerful arguments against the U.S. ratification of Kyoto, however.
As the Russian Academy of Sciences has noted, the world’s recent warming hasn’t correlated strongly with CO2 emissions. The global warming came in two surges, one from 1850–870, and another 1920-1940. Both warming spurts occurred before human cars and factories were emitting much CO2. Nor has the Earth much warmed since 1940, despite a major increase in CO2 emissions.
Cynics are already noting that as a Kyoto member Russia can sell some $10 billion worth of “emission rights” because its dirty old Soviet industries have been shut down, cutting its greenhouse emissions by 30 percent. European nations could buy the Russian emission rights to ease their own transitions into the lower-emissions mode required by the treaty.
Russian President Putin originally rejected Kyoto because of its economic constraints. He compared the U.S. economy to a full-grown man, and the Russian economy to a four-year-old child, and said Kyoto would stunt the Russian economy at the four-year-old’s size.
Putin has supposedly changed his mind about the economic pain of Kyoto; but again, cynics note that Western Europe has offered to back Russian membership in the World Trade Organization under the easier requirements for a “developing nation.” The Russians have even said that they will “negotiate” Russia’s CO2 requirements for the unspecified but supposedly far more stringent second phase of Kyoto, set to begin in 2012.
Putin’s economic concern was recently echoed in Germany, where the government has just said it can’t afford the modest CO2 emission cuts-5 percent from 1990 levels- required by the first phase of Kyoto. The Germans are now pledging only one-tenth of that reduction, 0.5 percent.
Both Kyoto supporters and opponents predict that, after 2012, Kyoto members would need to give up virtually all of their fossil fuel use to stabilize global CO2 emissions as big Third World nonmembers as China and India increase their fossil fuels use to expand their economies.
Should President Bush warn the American public that the Russians might simply be taking advantage of their $10 billion in emission rights, gaining WTO membership on highly favorable terms-and then may not enforce the tougher Kyoto constraints? It would not be the first time Moscow has ignored international treaty requirements.
On the other hand, President Bush could point to the broad recent evidence from ice cores, tree rings, and seabed sediments that the Earth has a moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle.
Based on the cycle, New York and Paris will warm another 1 degree Celsius or so over the next 600 years. Then the planet will enter another “little ice age” with temperatures suddenly dropping about 3 degrees C. These unstoppable solar-driven climate cycles have been around for the last million years, and the planet’s humans and wild species have survived at least 600 of them-without a single Kyoto Protocol.
