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By Brett D. Schaefer and Nicolas Loris
December 5, 2012
The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is currently holding its 18th
meeting in Doha, Qatar. The two-week conference ending on December 7 is
intended to jump-start the stalled negotiations on a successor agreement
to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Midway
through the meetings, it is clear that very little of substance will
transpire, which has been the case for years.
The past four years have demonstrated conclusively that there is
no international consensus for action. The U.S. should refuse to attend
future U.N. conferences on climate change, call for a moratorium on
future conferences unless there is a fundamental shift in position among
key countries, and focus its efforts on alternative forums involving
key countries. Further, the U.S. should prevent and remove unilateral
attempts to address climate change that have adverse economic effects
and no environmental benefit.
Talking in Circles
The U.N. has been the central forum for discussing climate change
issues for more than two decades. The U.N. led the effort to create the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, which
released its first report in 1990 and, unsurprisingly, confirmed the
global warming theory and laid the foundation for an international
agreement to address the issue. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced the
UNFCCC, wherein countries pledged to consider actions to limit global
temperature increases and cope with the resulting impact of climate
change.
The high point of UNFCCC efforts was the adoption of the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997, which established binding restrictions on greenhouse
gas emissions in 37 industrialized countries, including principally the
European Community, by an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels over
the five-year period 2008–2012.
The U.S. is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, and supporters of
the pact point to this fact to justify its failure. In reality, even
accepting all IPCC model assumptions, shortcomings of the
agreement—particularly the exemption of major developing country sources
of greenhouse gas emissions, loopholes, and other ruses that allow some
developed countries to largely avoid emissions reductions—ensured that
the Kyoto Protocol would do virtually nothing to reduce emissions and
have no detectable impact on climate change.
[1]
The bottom line is that even with perfect compliance and U.S.
participation, Kyoto would not significantly arrest projected global
warming.
The past four years have seen successive annual U.N. conferences
(Copenhagen in 2009, Cancun in 2010, Durban in 2011, and Doha this year)
frantically trying to reach agreement among nearly 200 countries on a
successor to the Kyoto Protocol. In essence, these conferences have
succeeded only in wresting vague pledges from developed countries to
reduce emissions, contribute funds to help developing countries adapt to
climate change, and meet again to try to negotiate a binding treaty by
2015.
An Unworkable Premise
The problem is that the basic approach is unworkable. The Kyoto
Protocol essentially placed the entire economic burden of addressing
climate change on a few dozen countries while asking nothing from more
than 150 countries. Perhaps this makes sense if the industrialized
countries alone could address the issue by reducing emissions, but that
is impossible.
The primary source of greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly
the developing world. For a number of reasons—including sluggish
economies and a shift toward energy sources (such as natural gas,
nuclear, or renewable energy) that emit fewer greenhouse gas
emissions—most industrialized countries have seen their emissions
stabilize or fall. In fact, U.S. emissions are at their lowest level
since 1996, according to the U.N.
[2]
China surpassed the U.S. as the largest source in 2006, and its
emissions were 45 percent higher than America’s in 2009 (the most recent
year available). Other developing countries are also rapidly increasing
their emissions as their economies develop.
Developing countries, primarily India and China, have made it
quite clear that they have no appetite to slow economic growth or stop
using fossil fuels to curb emissions. In fact, according to a recent
report from the World Resources Institute, there are proposals to build
nearly 1,200 coal-fired power plants worldwide totaling over 1.4 million
megawatts. China and India alone account for 76 percent of the proposed
build.
[3]
For this reason, Canada, Japan, and Russia refused to sign onto a
new agreement committing them to emissions reductions unless major
developing country emitters were also included. Understandably, they see
little benefit in undermining their economic growth and their citizens’
prosperity for the sake of a symbolic gesture that, in the end, would
not significantly alter the trajectory of emissions growth.
All of this leaves aside, of course, outstanding uncertainty
about the accuracy of UNFCCC claims on climate change, the magnitude and
pace at which the climate is changing, its causes, and whether the
costs of emissions reductions might be better used in other ways.
Specifically, the famous “hockey stick” used by the UNFCCC for years to
illustrate global warming has been proven to be fabricated,
[4]
the models used to predict future temperatures have been unable to
replicate past temperatures, and global temperatures have stabilized
over the past 15 years.
[5]
Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and other experts suggest that the costs
of emissions mitigation are prohibitive and that countries should focus
on other, more urgent development problems.
[6]
U.S.
Should Be a Leader
Proponents of the U.S. taking action to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions often argue that if the U.S. acts, the rest of the world will
follow suit. As the developing world has made it clear, this is not the
case. Instead, the U.S. is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars
attending and financing these conferences and, ironically, encouraging
unnecessary emissions from those sent to represent their countries,
industries, or interests at these unproductive meetings. Instead, the
U.S. should demonstrate real leadership by:
- Undertaking independent efforts to more accurately determine the severity of climate change and verify U.N. claims.
- Working with a smaller group of nations through informal
arrangements such as the Major Economies Forum to undertake appropriate
steps that are both cost effective and effective in reducing warming.
- Refraining from attending future U.N. climate change
conferences and calling for a moratorium on conferences that emphasize
financial transfers and reinforce the flawed, ineffective Kyoto
methodology of differentiated responsibilities.
- Resisting and ceasing attempts to address climate change
unilaterally. This includes removing onerous and unnecessary regulations
on fossil fuels that are driving up the cost of energy, stopping
wasteful and ineffective attempts to subsidize carbon-free energy
sources, and preventing an implementation of a carbon tax. Attempting to
address greenhouse gases unilaterally comes at great cost to the
taxpayer and energy consumer for no meaningful environmental impact.
A More Effective Way
Efforts to address climate change do not need to be hammered out
at a U.N. conference. Indeed, by working with a smaller group of key
players, the U.S. is far more likely to negotiate a more effective and
less costly strategy to address climate change without the tangents that
bog down U.N. negotiations.
Instead of letting the U.N. funnel negotiations toward an
unrealistic, grossly expensive agreement, the U.S. and other key nations
should work outside the U.N. to hash out a realistic, effective
strategy by which they are prepared to abide.
—Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in
International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for
Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for
International Studies, and Nicolas D. Loris is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Joe Torsella
Environment News Service
