There are two basic points of view on global warming: it’s a problem or it’s not. In most of the world that argument is over and the pessimists have won, but not in the United States. And yet politically, if not scientifically, the argument seemed to be settled long ago—on October 15, 1992, to be precise, when the United States became the fourth country, after Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Marshall Islands, to ratify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. George Bush had signed the treaty at Rio de Janeiro four months earlier. It committed us to an objective: Stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. All the important details were missing; that’s what the meeting in Kyoto last December was all about. But as a nation we formally accepted the basic principle—global warming is a problem and something has to be done about it—back in 1992.
Assuming we have a problem, then, what should we do about it? Again there are two basic answers: stop doing things that warm the planet—burning fossil fuels, mostly—or go on polluting and fix the planet so it won’t warm. The Kyoto Protocol adopts the first answer, requiring the United States to emit 7 percent less of six greenhouse gases by the year 2012 than it did in 1990. Those cuts are much less than environmentalists would have liked—but since 1990 our emissions have surged. Fossil fuel prices have fallen, and so we are using more of them. The voluntary restraint that George Bush promised at Rio never happened. The Department of Energy predicts that by 2010, if nothing has changed, U.S. greenhouse emissions will be a third higher than they were in 1990.
So complying with the Kyoto Protocol would require a big effort. To reduce carbon emissions we would have to either tax or regulate them—which is why industry and union lobbyists have promised to see that the protocol isn’t ratified. They predict it would put a million Americans out of jobs and cut the gross national product by several percent. Whole industries would flee to developing countries, which did not commit to any emissions cuts at Kyoto. Unilateral economic disarmament, the head of the American Petroleum Institute called the agreement. An error of staggering dimensions.
Of course, industries that are about to be regulated often predict that the costs will be staggering. When the Environmental Protection Agency instituted tradable sulfur-dioxide-emissions permits in 1990—the system that may be a model for how to reduce carbon emissions—the permits were priced at $1,500 per ton, because that was the industry estimate of how much it would cost to stop emitting SO2. By 1996 those permits were trading for a tenth their initial price; apparently the industry estimate had been wrong. In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, some economists do predict disaster if it is adhered to, but others do not. A study completed last fall by the doe concluded that something close to the Kyoto cuts could be made at no net cost to the U.S. economy—because the money spent on controlling carbon would also save energy. The study assumed that carbon permits would sell for $50 a ton, or about 12.5 cents on a gallon of gas.
One industry criticism of the Kyoto agreement is certainly true, though: it alone will not prevent an environmental disaster, if indeed one looms in our future. Steep as they may seem, the Kyoto emissions cuts are nowhere near enough to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. They’ll just slow the rise a bit. Which brings us to the second response to global warming—the planet fixers.
