* Reinstein argues that the success of the Montreal Protocol was achieved at an acceptable cost because negotiators used a ‘bottom-up’ approach, working closely with businesses on what was technically and economically feasible, in contrast to the ‘top-down’ negotiation of emissions caps under Kyoto which depend on ‘technological forcing’ of low cost substitutes for fossil fuels that do not exist at present (Robert Reinstein, ‘Ozone Protection and Global Climate Change: Is the Montreal Protocol a Good Model for Responding to Climate Change?’, 1996).
[1] Maggie Farley, ‘Gore vows flexibility in climate talks’ in the Los Angeles Times, 8th December 1997.
[2] Richard Benedick, Morals and Myths: A Commentary on Global Climate Policy, 109 WZB-Mitteilungen (2005).
[3] Scott Barrett, Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making (2003), p. 360.
[4] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1993), pp. 177–8.
[5] Robert Reinstein, ‘Ozone Protection and Global Climate Change: Is the Montreal Protocol a Good Model for Responding to Climate Change?’ (Unpublished, 1996).
[6] J.T. Houghton, L.G. Meira Filho, B.A. Callander, N. Harris, A. Kattenberg & K. Maskell (ed.), Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change: Contribution of WG1 to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1996), p. 5.
[7] Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Of Montreal and Kyoto: A Tale of Two Protocols’ in Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 31 (2007), p. 24.
[8] ibid., p. 35.
[9] ibid., fig. 3.
[10] ibid., fig. 1.
[11] ibid., fig. 2.
[12] ibid., fig. 4.
[13] ibid., p. 45.
[14] ibid., pp. 45–6.
[15] ibid., pp. 22–3.
[16] UNFCCC figures extracted from Time series – Annex I, Total CO2 Emissions without Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/ghg_data_unfccc/time_series_annex_i/items/3814.php
[17] Tim O’Riordan & Jill Jäger (ed.), Politics of Climate Change: A European Perspective (1996), p. 18.
[18] Christiane Beuermann & Jill Jäger, ‘Climate Change Politics in Germany: How long will any double dividend last?’ in Tim O’Riordan & Jill Jäger (ed.), Politics of Climate Change: A European Perspective (1996), pp. 194–5.
[19] UNFCCC figures extracted from Time series http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/ghg_data_unfccc/time_series_annex_i/items/3814.php
[20] Dieter Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market: British Energy Policy since 1979 (2003), p. 169.
[21] UNFCCC figures extracted from Time series http://unfccc.int/ghg_data/ghg_data_unfccc/time_series_annex_i/items/3814.php
[22] John H. Cushman, ‘In Shift, US Will Seek Binding World Pact to Combat Global Warming’ in the New York Times, 17th July 1997.
[23] UN, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), Article 4 2 (f).
[24] UNEP, The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (2000), Article 5.
[25] Kevin A. Baumert, Timothy Herzog & Jonathan Pershing, Navigating the Numbers Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy (2005), Fig. 4.1.
[26] GDP per head, US $, constant prices, constant PPPs, reference year 2000, extracted from OECD Statistics, http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=559
[27] Joanna Depledge, The Organisation of Global Negotiations: Constructing the Climate Change Regime (2005), p. 28.
[28] ibid., p. 92.
[29] Farley, ‘Gore vows flexibility in climate talks’ in the Los Angeles Times, 8th December 1997.
[30] Michael Grubb with Christiaan Vrolijk & Duncan Brack, The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment (1999), p. xiii.
[31] Timothy E. Wirth email to author, 25th March 2011.
[32] Gore, Earth in the Balance (1993), p. 238.
18
China Syndrome
It’s the economy, stupid.
Clinton-Gore campaign war room, 1992
Ours are survival emissions. Theirs are luxury emissions.They have two people to a car and yet they don’t want us to ride buses.
Shukong Zhong, China’s chief negotiator, Kyoto, December 1997[1]
As a teenager, the future vice president and his sister read and talked about Silent Spring. A happy and vivid memory, Al Gore recalled. Rachel Carson’s picture hangs in his office and her example inspired Gore to write Earth in the Balance.[2] It is one of the most extraordinary books by any democratic politician seeking high elective office, for it constitutes an attack on Western civilisation and a fundamental rejection of two of its greatest accomplishments – the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.
Searching for a better understanding of his own life and how he was going to rescue the global environment, Gore concluded that modern civilisation was suffering from a spiritual crisis.[3] Although one of a number of environmental crises, global warming symbolised the collision between civilisation and the Earth’s ecological system.[4] Global warming turned the internal combustion engine into a more deadly threat than any military foe America was ever likely to face.[5] The current generation might even experience a year without a winter, Gore warned. [6]
Western man had only escaped the Malthusian trap by making a Faustian pact.[7] Men were to blame, for Western civilisation had emphasised a ‘distinctly male’ way of relating to the world. A solution might be found by ‘leavening the dominant male perspective with a healthier respect for female ways of experiencing the world’.[8] Western civilisation was a dysfunctional family, impelled by addiction to inauthentic substitutes for direct experience of real life, leading to the frenzied destruction of the natural world. It was well known, Gore observed, ‘that the vast majority of child abusers were themselves abused as children’.[9]
The chain of abuse went back to the two philosophers who anticipated the Scientific Revolution. ‘The unwritten rules that govern our relationship to the environment have been passed down from one generation to the next since the time of Descartes, Bacon, and the other pioneers of the Scientific Revolution.’[10] Gore reinterpreted medieval metaphysics as an ecological philosophy connecting man to nature in a web of life, matter and meaning, now lost to the modern world. By breaking with Aristotleanism, Bacon and Descartes had separated man from nature and science from religion. For them, facts derived from science had no moral significance. ‘As a consequence,’ Gore wrote, ‘the scientific method changed our relationship to nature and is now, perhaps irrevocably, changing nature itself.’[11] If science had kept its link with religion, Gore thought humans might not be threatening the earth’s climate balance.[12]
Bacon was morally confused, because he had argued that science was about the advancement of knowledge and making scientific discoveries without reference to any moral purpose. The divorce of facts from values and morality had terrible consequences in the twentieth century, Gore argued, Bacon and the scientific method thereby contributing to the extreme evils perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin.[13] Gore’s accusation against science shows an extraordinary misreading of history. The Nazis did not commit their crimes because they lacked values, but because their values were evil. Moreover the Nazis enacted the most environmentally friendly laws in Europe. They passed anti-vivisection laws (Gore criticised Bacon for dissecting animals for the sake of knowledge) but used humans instead. Nazi ideologists rejected the proposition that science is morally neutral, most horribly in their racial theories. Similarly, Stalin supported Trofim Lysenko’s genetic theories, not because of their superior explanatory power, but because they conformed to Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Yet Gore�
��s assault on the Scientific Revolution met with silence from leading academies and societies. Collectively scientists tolerated an extraordinary attack on the integrity and morality of their discipline because they were united by a common enemy – global warming and fossil fuel interests.
The book was well timed. Bill Clinton’s Arkansas had one of the worst environmental records in America. Environmental policy was not, as Clinton admitted, his strong suit. Gore gave Clinton a signed copy. ‘I read it, learned a lot, and agreed with his argument.’[14]
With Gore as vice president, there was no debate within the new administration on the science of global warming. Gore regularly hosted breakfast seminars with leading scientists, exposing agency heads to what scientists were thinking. Bob Watson, who worked in the White House during President Clinton’s first term, recalls Gore being an avid reader of Nature. He would often telephone, ‘Bob, what do you think of this paper?’ In preparing scientists for the seminars, Watson would tell them to speak for a maximum of seven minutes, as Gore will interrupt and ask questions. Gore’s biggest strength was in synthesising and connecting issues and Watson had no hesitation in putting him in front of a pure science audience.[15]
The economics presented a greater challenge. In his book, Gore strongly criticised the Bush administration for threatening to torpedo the Rio summit because of its refusal to sign up to targets and timetables. Ratcheting back emissions to their 1990 level was a target the US could ‘easily’ meet.[16] Here debates within the Clinton administration in the run-up to Kyoto were similar to those in the Bush administration before Rio. ‘Al has discovered it’s a lot easier to write a book about the subject than to grapple with the economic costs,’ one of Clinton’s top aides said, ‘but he’s getting the hang of it.’[17]
From his position in the State Department, Tim Wirth advocated an aggressive plan for significant cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions. The plan was scaled back as Clinton listened to warnings of senior economic advisers, notably Larry Summers and Janet Yellen of the Council of Economic Advisers. ‘The spin is that we won,’ an economic adviser told the New York Times. ‘We agreed there needed to be goals, even aggressive goals. But there also needed to be escape hatches, in case the economic effects turned out to be a lot more damaging than we thought.’[18]
Rescuing the environment was not the central organising principle of the Clinton administration. Within four weeks of being sworn in, Clinton announced what was – deficit reduction to induce a bond market rally, encourage private investment to spur productivity, job creation and growth. He proposed cutting spending and raising taxes. Gore argued for a broad-based tax on energy. Clinton called the BTU energy tax his toughest tax call, particularly after he had dropped his election pledge of a middle-class tax cut. Lloyd Bentsen, the treasury secretary, joined Gore in pressing him. ‘Finally, I gave in.’[19] A few days later, Clinton announced the BTU tax in his State of the Union speech in February.
Environmentalists were thrilled. A retrospective paper by one called it ‘brilliantly conceived in every way. It was simple, clean, easy to administer and raised significant revenue’.[20] The BTU tax quickly became the most controversial part of Clinton’s deficit reduction package. Manufacturers claimed it would cost more than half a million jobs. When the Senate deleted the BTU tax two months later and substituted a 4.3 cents a gallon gas tax, Clinton’s relief was palpable. ‘The bad news was that the gas tax would promote less energy conservation than the BTU tax; the good news was that it would cost middle-class Americans less.’[21]
The loss of the BTU tax was enormously consequential. Even when Democrats controlled Congress, taxation as a policy response to global warming was not politically feasible. So the Clinton administration turned away from energy taxes to champion the major environmental policy innovation of the Bush administration – tradable pollution permits. Emissions trading had solved a politically intractable problem that had stalled progress on tackling acid rain and led to a market-based way that enabled the Bush administration to propose the most ambitious target of a fifty per cent emissions cut with the most creative means.[22] Although Gore had been a bystander in the Clean Air Act debates, emissions trading and flexible market mechanisms became the central plank of the Clinton administration’s negotiating strategy.
Transposing a mechanism designed to cut emissions from the chimneys of a few dozen power stations in one country to creating a market for the right to emit a gas used in processes too numerous to count, a gas, moreover, that is part of a naturally occurring cycle and therefore influenced by land use changes, then extending the market to cover developed countries and, through the Clean Development Mechanism, to embrace virtually every country in the world, posed technical, legal, verification and compliance challenges several orders of magnitude more complex.
Carbon taxes would have been simpler, easier and cleaner. Focusing negotiators on setting quantities, in the form of emissions caps, rather than setting prices, in the form of taxes, also created irresistible incentives for gaming. It incentivised countries to target emissions reductions that would have happened anyway (essentially the position of the European Union) or to negotiate trading mechanisms to take advantage of other nations’ emission reductions that were happening anyway, principally those caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc (the American goal).
The outcome was very different from the Montreal Protocol. All the reductions of CFCs and other substances controlled by the Montreal Protocol occurred as a direct result of regulatory actions designed to reverse the depletion of the ozone layer. On the other hand, the interest of the Annex I parties in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol was to free ride to the greatest extent possible reductions that would have happened anyway or existed only on paper.
The Clinton administration’s journey along this road began in October 1993 with its climate change action plan. The forty-nine-page document listed forty-four actions designed to meet the president’s personal commitment to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade (they actually increased by 16.1 per cent compared to the 3.4 per cent fall needed to return to 1990 levels).[23] It was thin stuff. All the actions were voluntary and the plan involved only $1.9 billion in new and redirected spending between 1994 and 2000.
Some environmental NGOs disguised their disappointment. Others couldn’t. The Sierra Club said the administration had looked global warming in the eye and blinked. The National Wildlife Federation compared it to date rape. And there was an endorsement the administration could have done without. Fred Singer, a leading scientist opposed to the scientific consensus, wrote that the voluntary measures made ‘a certain amount of sense’.[24]
Losing both houses of Congress in the November 1994 mid-term elections put the Clinton administration’s climate policies on the defensive at home when its presence was required on the international stage. In March 1995, Helmut Kohl addressed the first COP in Berlin. There was a certain irony as Kohl urged delegates to remember the lesson of Berlin. Never again should walls of enmity be erected between peoples and nations, Kohl declared, for the Berlin Mandate institutionalised a new division across the world between North and South.[25]
The demarcation line had been agreed at a late stage in the negotiations on the Climate Change Convention three years earlier at an INC session in Paris during Holy Week. There were various attempts to define developed and developing countries. GDP per capita was felt not to be a good measure, as there were lots of countries in between. Because there were more developing countries, it was easier to define the developed countries, which was done on the basis of membership of the OECD (a definition that put Turkey in an anomalous position as a developing country which was also an OECD member) plus Eastern Europe.[26]
Angela Merkel, the German environment minister, had to fashion a compromise to reconcile the contradictory demands of North and South. Growing up in East Germany, Merkel was versed in the uselessness of infl
exibility. She was helped by Britain’s environment secretary, John Gummer, one of the most pro-European members of John Major’s government who had replaced the Atlanticist Michael Howard two years earlier. Gummer’s views were closely aligned with mainstream European attitudes and was an early admirer of Merkel. ‘Very, very able,’ Gummer found her.[27] China had to be kept onside, recognising Chinese sensitivities to anything that appeared to them to infringe their sovereignty (at times, Gummer recalls negotiators spent longer debating the rights and wrongs of the Boxer Rebellion than climate change). In Gummer’s view, the difficulties America had over China were not fundamentally about climate change, but sprang from fears about China’s rivalry with the US.
Apart from the EU and the G77 plus China, the other main negotiating bloc was the US-led Umbrella Group, loosely comprising Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, and the Ukraine as a counter-weight to the EU. Merkel’s strategy was to target Canada’s environment minister, Sheila Copps, the leading left-winger in Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government. Copps was peeled away from the Umbrella Group, which helped convince the Chinese delegation that they should have confidence that Annex I parties genuinely accepted overwhelming responsibility for taking action to tackle global warming.[28] Shuttling between two rooms, one with developed countries, the other with developing countries, she produced a compromise text at six in the morning and declared the Mandate adopted despite protests from OPEC members.[29]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 27