The international Kyoto Protocol has now come into effect and, with member countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to five percent below 1990 levels by 2012, has been greeted around the world as an important first step in tackling climate change. The only big criticism that its admirers have is the refusal of the US, credited as the world’s major polluter, plus such as Australia, to stay out. The task now, they say, is to get them on board.
This is a case of enthusiastic self-delusion. The protocol is fundamentally flawed, not simply because the US has stayed out — although it is an issue that needs to be addressed — but because there is no joined-up thinking behind it. The trends of global trade and economic development have not been understood and taken into account.
Take the decision to exempt countries such as China, Brazil and India. The justification — to give them the right to develop without hindrance — was laudable but it was wrong given their rapid industrialization. It is far faster than anyone imagined when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. It is likely that India and China will become the world’s biggest polluters within a very short time, each emitting far more greenhouse gasses than the US at present. In China alone, over 500 new coal-fired power stations are being built or are planned, more than half the total global amount planned, and that does not take into account the rest of the country’s industrialization. In India too, despite laudable attempt to cut pollution in some cities, pollution levels are rising fast.
The consequence of these exemptions is going to be far greater global gas emissions, not less. Who, a decade ago, imagined that Tiananmen Square would now be one massive traffic jam with not a bicycle to be seen or that Mercedes Benz cars would be made in Pune, India and exported back to Germany?
With or without limits on greenhouse gas emissions, India and China would anyway have developed at breakneck pace. They will continue to perform economic miracles; cheap labor and low exchange rates guarantee it. It would have been far better, and ultimately far cheaper, to have insured that they industrialize along the right environmental tracks, rather leaving them to become the top polluters well before 2012. That is no solution to global warming.
The other mistake in the Kyoto Protocol is the notion that cuts in gas emissions have to be forced on the industrialized economies. Technology and the transfer of industry to cheaper labor economies will do that anyway. Even without pressure, the UK is well on target to achieve its required reductions by 2012. There is also a public appetite for cleaner environment. Thus, though Washington is opposed to Kyoto, individual states are going for best practice — California, for example.
Its supporters say Kyoto is a symbolic first step. But how many first steps have their already been. Who remembers the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 or its decisions? No one, because they were ignored. Kyoto is doomed too, not just because it does not include the US, but also because it does include China, India, and Brazil. If global gas emissions are to be reduced, they all have to be brought into the equation.
