TERENCE CORCORAN 
For The Calgary Herald 
TORONTO

At the Omni Hotel in Montreal on Wednesday afternoon, Environment Minister David Anderson was scheduled to meet the media. The purpose was to brief journalists on how Anderson planned to conduct a session of environment ministers of the Americas on a riveting subject - the inclusion of forest and agricultural "sinks" under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol.

An hour before the media briefing, however, Environment Canada staff were scrambling to cancel. It made little sense to hold an earnest briefing on the absurd constructs of Kyoto's sinks and mechanisms when, to all intents and purposes, Kyoto was dead.

After five years of relentless hype, a decade of phoney weather scares and disaster scenarios over the prospect of global warming, the Kyoto Protocol to control the world's climate through a United Nations' bureaucracy crashed Wednesday. The wailing will be loud and prolonged, with U.S. President George W. Bush getting the blame.

His administration has indicated it has no plans to implement a treaty Congress won't ratify. He will be vilified and demonized as the man who pulled the plug on the protocol, the international agreement signed by Canada and other nations in an orgy of secret negotiations in the summer of 1997.

But Bush didn't kill Kyoto. Kyoto is going down for three dominant reasons: shaky science, bad economics and even worse policy.

In many ways, Kyoto was killed by the very elements Anderson was scheduled to discuss on Wednesday.

The concept of "sinks" involves measuring the amount of carbon dioxide molecules absorbed by forests all over the world - a monumentally bizarre accounting exercise in itself - and then deducting the amount absorbed nation by nation against the carbon dioxide produced in energy consumption.

Those calculations, if they ever could be sensibly completed, were to be used in part to determine how to operate the Clean Development Mechanism, a global money-laundering scheme whose main purpose was to tax the hell out of energy consumption in developed countries like Canada and ship the money to developing nations like China and the Sudan to subsidize their economic development.

That Kyoto was actually a massive plan to redistribute wealth wasn't the worst of it. Canada, for example, agreed to roll back its energy consumption to 1990 levels, targets so unrealistic they were impractical the day the protocol was negotiated.

The story of how Ottawa agreed to Kyoto is a miserable saga of policy secrecy, incoherent leadership and abdication of responsibility. Canada is now way over its targets and has no hope of ever meeting them. But our bullheaded ministers and bureaucrats were charging ahead right up to the end.

At least the U. S. Senate, three years ago, had the common sense to vote against Kyoto on the grounds it would hurt the U.S. economy and let developing countries off the hook.

Not only would the United States (and Canada) be forced to curb energy use at home, they would have to send money to developing countries so that they could increase their energy use.

The unreality of the Kyoto objectives was underscored Wednesday when the U.S. Energy Information Agency released a report that projected a 59-per-cent increase in global energy use over the next 20 years.

Carbon dioxide emissions are expected to almost double, with developing countries producing most of the increase. In other words, just as developing countries were gearing up to boost energy consumption and growth rates, the United States and Canada were to be ordered to cut back. Why would the United States and Canada agree to an economically suicidal policy?

The question is even more acute in the face of comments by global warming theorists that implementing Kyoto would be ineffectual.

James Hansen, one of the godfathers of climate change, said last year that it would take "30 Kyotos" to cut carbon dioxide emissions enough to reduce global warming. He said other schemes, including controlling other pollutants, would be far more effective and less costly.

But what is really sinking Kyoto is the science of climate change. The UN agency charged with producing the science -the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - has yet to publish its latest reports. Instead, it has been sending out sensational summaries claiming to have evidence of significant manmade global warming risks, catastrophic weather events and pending disaster.

In reality, the science is uncertain and speculative, and thousands of scientists know it. Last year's meetings in The Hague collapsed without agreement over Kyoto in part because of growing awareness the science and the economics made no sense.

Bad science and worse economics will not, however, stop the momentum of climate-change policy. The global machine set up under the IPCC is massive. Beginning today in Montreal' where environment ministers of the Americas from 30 nations will meet, the push will be on to restart the negotiations to develop a new protocol' Kyoto II.

Chances are, though, the science and economics are in for a major overhaul.

| home-dome.com | Global Warming first page |




comments to