News Service May 2, 2003
Kyoto: Hidden Cost Of Victory?
By Patrick J. Michaels You've got to hand it to Tony Blair. When polls
showed 80 percent of the British citizenry against America's military position,
Prime Minister Blair stood fast with President Bush. And, as has happened here,
his overall popularity (and support for his Iraq policy) has soared since
hostilities began and the outrageous nature of Saddam's regime and tactics
became common knowledge. But selfless political
sacrifice is as foreign as chastity in Washington. After the dust settles, Mr.
Blair wants Mr. Bush to drop his steadfast opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on
global warming. The Kyoto Protocol is wildly
popular in Britain largely because the country seems to lack scientists
courageous enough to point out that the government's alarmist view of climate
change is without merit. That's not the case here. And as everyone in the Bush
administration knows, warming in the next 100 years, given a very small range of
error, is likely to mirror what has happened in the last 40
years. Further, the administration knows that
the Kyoto Protocol, while enormously expensive, would stop less than one-tenth
of a degree (C) of warming in the next half-century, an amount too small to be
reliably measured. Soon after Mr. Bush took
office and National Security Agency head Condoleezza Rice said "Kyoto is Dead,"
the BBC reported Mr. Blair was under considerable pressure to oppose Mr. Bush.
In April 2001, Mr. Blair's deputy prime minister, John Prescott, "want[ed] to
end cooperation [with the United States] on global trade, national missile
defense, and even British support for the U.S. stand against China." Others in
Mr. Blair's Cabinet agreed, including International Development Secretary Clare
Short and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. When he came to Washington three months
later, Mr. Blair made plain his differences with Mr. Bush on the
Protocol. Fast forward to the radically changed
world after September 11, 2001. Speaking before the U.N.'s Earth Summit in
Johannesburg in September 2002, the London Guardian reported that "Tony Blair
launched into an unexpected broadside against George Bush on climate change,"
and added that "what makes it more surprising is that his [Mr. Blairīs] aides
appeared to be emphasizing the split with Washington. ... In what aides said was
a direct message to the White House, Mr. Blair said that Kyoto was not enough."
Going even further than the Europe's radical greens, Mr. Blair said, "Kyoto is
not radical enough." Mr. Blair shares more with
the discredited Hans Blix than he does with George Bush on global warming. Last
month, Mr. Blix said, "I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any
major military conflict." On Feb. 25, just three weeks before the start of war,
Environmental News Network reported that Mr. Blair "said world leaders must not
let the crisis in Iraq and the fight against terrorism distract them from long
term but equally important environmental
problems." Mr. Blair said, "The only answer is
to construct a common agenda that recognizes that both sets of issues have to be
confronted for the world's security and prosperity to be guaranteed." Further,
sounding more radical than Al Gore, he continued: "There will be no genuine
security if the planet is ravaged by climate change. We will continue to make
the case to the U.S. and to others that climate change is a serious threat that
we must address together as an international
community." It is doubtless that Mr. Blair has
told Mr. Bush the price of military alliance in Iraq: Drop U.S. opposition to
Kyoto. This won't happen in a very public
fashion. Instead, watch the legislation. The current Senate energy bill contains
three provisions that come pretty close to enacting Kyoto. If the administration
lets them slide through, the deal has been
done. One creates a permanent Office of Climate
Policy in the White House, which gives radical environmentalists direct access
to the president. The legislation also requires a national strategy to cut
carbon dioxide emissions, which is a complete surrender by the administration to
the nonexistent science propping up a hypothesis of dramatic and disastrous
warming. Finally, the bill creates an "early credit" for industries that cut
emissions now. These "credits" only have value if some type of legal limit on
emissions is imposed, so expect all these creditors to lobby for that limit.
That is precisely what Enron pleaded for from the Clinton administration in a
well-publicized letter from dethroned CEO Ken
Lay. George Bush I and George Bush II are men
of their word. In the first Gulf war, Bush I promised the Saudis that we would
not dethrone Saddam Hussein as the price for usage of their air bases. He kept
it, inadvertently creating today's war. His son's word is equally his bond,
which will become evident if the White House rolls over on Kyoto in the next
month. Patrick
J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute or
of "The Satanic Gases." [Non-text portions of this message have been
removed] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
