Kyoto a pointless exercise

The Kyoto Protocol is in force as of today. Big deal. This planet has gone through numerous warmings and coolings over the billions of years. Global warming is a natural phenomina. Nothing that puny humankind can do will stop the cycles of warming and cooling. China, India and other emerging countries get to spew as much of these "greenhouse" gases into the atmosphere as they want. This is more an economic protocol then an environmental one. Alan Wood makes a good point here; if you cannot get an accurate weather forecast for 3 days hence, how can you predict what the global climate will be in 100 years? - Sailor

Kyoto a pointless exercise
By Alan Wood
February 16, 2005
The Australian

TODAY the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions comes into force. If you believe the climate change propagandists, it is the first step in saving the world from the terrible consequences of global warming. The truth is Kyoto is a joke.

It will do next to nothing to lower the rate of global emissions of greenhouse gas and provides no workable framework for future action. By 2012, when ratifying countries' commitments under Kyoto to cut CO2 emissions expire, we will find key countries have failed to comply and global emissions will be rising steadily as the result of world growth.

For this we can all be thankful. The costs of following a Kyoto-style system of emission caps and timetables would, on most available studies, exceed the benefits. This is not, of course, what you will hear from the legion of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, companies and politicians who have taken seats on the Kyoto gravy train. But privately at least the smart ones know Kyoto is a dead duck.

This does not, apparently, include the retreaded Labor leader Kim Beazley and his environment spokesman Anthony Albanese. Boldly undaunted by the disastrous failure of Labor's forest policy and its electorally unproductive alliance with the Greens, they launched a pro-Kyoto stunt for Valentine's Day.

Labor's Valentine's Day gift to the Australian people, Beazley told a press conference in Sydney, was Anthony Albanese's Avoid Dangerous Climate Change Bill. This bill would require the Howard Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol within 60 days of its being carried, which fortunately it won't be.

Urging Australians to make the Protocol their Valentine comes close to advocating national necrophilia. Kyoto has been a corpse since December. That was when the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held their 10th session in Buenos Aires.

The aim of the European Union and its allies among the green non-government organisations and lobby groups was to use Buenos Aires to both celebrate the coming into force of the Protocol and to prepare the way for its extension beyond 2012. Recognising just how limited Kyoto was, the idea was to get agreement to a so-called second commitment period, with tougher emission targets for developed countries and a commitment from the developing countries, particularly China and India, to emission targets.

Instead the European Union was isolated and rebuffed by the developing countries, notably India and China, who joined with the US to reject any move to extend the system of enforceable caps on emissions that is at the heart of the Kyoto approach.

So, importantly, did Italy - an EU member. Its environment minister declared there was no point in trying to replace Kyoto with something similar after 2012 when it was unacceptable to the US, India and China. According to a Reuters report last week, even the European Commission is backing off any binding commitment on future emission reductions after 2012. It said any future EU commitments to further reductions should depend on the level and type of participation of other big emitters.

The failure of Kyoto should not come as a surprise. Following a series of attempts in 2002 and 2003 by the Green's Bob Brown and by Labor to introduce a bill to, guess what, force the Government to ratify Kyoto in 60 days, it was finally introduced and was referred to a Senate committee for inquiry and report.

One of the witnesses to appear before it was Australia's then ambassador for the environment, Chris Langman, from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

"The question is," Langman told the committee, "how can we engage India and China, where most of the growth in the global emissions will take place over the next several decades, in a way that is effective from an environmental point of view? I have very little sense from the negotiations that the [Kyoto] protocol and its approach of binding quantitative caps on emissions, is feasible in terms of engaging those countries."

Australian economist Warwick McKibbin, an internationally recognised authority on climate change issues, has said for some time that Kyoto's system of targets and timetables for emissions was economically flawed and politically unrealistic. McKibbin is similarly critical of its emissions trading regime.

As far as I can see, the only public recognition of the importance of Buenos Aires has been in a background paper by Alan Oxley, a former senior Australian trade negotiator and now a consultant on trade and environment issues. Oxley thinks it marks a shift away from Kyoto's attempt to regulate emissions to a new paradigm of collaboration on development and adoption of new technologies to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

This is the US and Australian approach, he says, although Australia's Environment Minister Ian Campbell surprisingly missed the significance of the shift. However, the Australian approach risks pouring a lot of taxpayer's money into dubious renewable energy projects and doubtful technologies. With Kyoto dead in the water, it is time Australia rethought its approach, including its unquestioning acceptance of the science behind greenhouse, which is being challenged on several fronts.

Attempts to turn every unusual weather event into confirmation of these forecasts by climate change propagandists and politicians, from England's Tony Blair to Australia's Beazley, should be seen for what they are - either misinformed or fraudulent.

Rather than let them alarm you, ask yourself this: do you think people who can't tell you whether it will rain next Wednesday are really capable of building models that tell you what the climate will be like 100 years from now? I wouldn't trust any economic modelling that forecast what the world economy would look like a century hence, and climate models are at least as flawed as economists' ones.