The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  A New York Times poll published on the first day of the Kyoto conference found that sixty-five per cent of those surveyed agreed that the US should take steps to cut its emissions regardless of what other countries did. Although fifty-seven per cent of respondents said environmental improvements must be made regardless of costs, when asked of the most important problem facing America only one per cent answered the environment.[46] Voters wanted symbolism and that’s what Clinton gave them.

  Yet the whole policy was based on a massive illusion. Through thick and thin, developing countries stated that the developed world had to take the lead in cutting carbon dioxide emissions. If America had met its Kyoto commitments through using the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms to the hilt, all it would have shown is that the super-rich America lives by its own rules and could buy other countries’ emission reductions so it didn’t have to cut its own. It is hard to believe that developing countries would have viewed that as a realistic basis for their participation in a regime to cap their emissions. The Europeans too had a point, except they were sharing the consequences of the collapse of communism within the EU bubble.

  Ultimately Clinton’s global warming policy failed. For sure, he managed the politics superbly and pulled out every stop to secure some measure of developing country involvement. At Buenos Aires, even the experienced Eizenstat got carried away when in reality the battle was over. But the longer-term legacy of his efforts was to perpetuate a myth that Kyoto would have been viable but for five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida.

  In this respect Clinton’s predecessor left a more durable legacy by risking isolation to exclude emissions targets and timetables from the 1992 climate change convention. As Clayton Yeutter sees it, the strong economy of the 1990s would have made it impossible for the US to have complied with any probable targets and timetables that might have emerged at Rio. Reasonable Americans might have argued about this in the early 1990s, but twenty years on President Bush’s decision was, in Yeutter’s view, clearly the right one.[47] What might someone who served at a similar level in the Clinton White House say? The final negotiating instructions to the American delegation in Kyoto were relayed over the speaker phone in the chief of staff’s office. Erskine Bowles, who held the position at the time, told me he was unable to recall his impressions of the evolution of the policy with sufficient accuracy from that long ago.[48] Silence speaks volumes.

  On 6th March 2001 Chuck Hagel and three other senators wrote to Clinton’s successor to clarify the new administration’s position on Kyoto. A week later, President Bush wrote back: ‘I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts eighty per cent of the world, including major population centres such as China and India.’[49] Only later in the month did the implications finally sink in: Bush was not submitting Kyoto to the Senate. ‘The President has been unequivocal,’ a White House spokesman said. ‘It is not in the United States’ economic best interest.’[50]

  It ignited a firestorm. ‘The world is tottering on the brink of climate disaster,’ Friends of the Earth raged.[51] The State Department was inundated with cables reporting the dismay of foreign governments. A more measured analysis was provided by MIT economics professor Henry Jacoby, who explained that Kyoto was two different things. ‘It’s the current text and numbers, and it’s a process,’ Jacoby said. ‘The numbers are no longer going to work, but the process is going to go on.’[52] Viewed like that, Bush had little choice, as Senate ratification was about giving its consent to the text and numbers in the Protocol.

  The White House was taken aback by the international reaction. On the eve of his first European trip in June, Bush had a second go and began to map out the beginnings of an alternative approach. Somewhat naively, chief of staff Andy Card told reporters that other nations would come to appreciate Bush’s decision. ‘The emperor of Kyoto was running around the stage for a long time naked,’ he said, ‘and it took President Bush to say, “He doesn’t have any clothes on.”’[53] Only in the fable does the boy get thanked for saying so.

  ‘Breaking up is so very hard to do if you really love him,’ the Walker Brothers sang in their sixties’ hit. ‘Oh baby, it’s so hard to do.’ It wasn’t for Bush. His no to Kyoto was how the new president introduced himself to the world. Breaking up wasn’t hard at all. That was what probably hurt the Europeans most of all.

  The Europeans should have seen it coming. They had done little to assist the Clinton administration in securing developing world participation. The result was the outcome of the logic of the decision made by COP1 in Berlin six years earlier. To keep the G77 plus China in the process, the Berlin COP made a trade-off that increased the probability of losing the US further down the track. But the view the parties took then was if they hadn’t agreed to the developing world’s demands, there would have been no process at all.

  Columbia University’s Scott Barrett has criticised the Bush rejection for lessening the chances of adoption of a more viable approach than Kyoto. ‘In rejecting the treaty in the way that he did – and, crucially, in doing so without offering an alternative – President Bush only reinforced the view that Kyoto had to be the only way forward; and he only made other signatories, especially members of the European Union, more determined to conclude the negotiations and bring the treaty into force.’[54] No one gets criticised for blaming Bush, but the idea that the world was willing to entertain an alternative to Kyoto was for the birds.

  Four months later, the suspended COP6 resumed in Bonn. When it concluded, the EU environment commissioner, Sweden’s Margot Wallström, commented, ‘I think something has changed today in the balance of power between the US and the EU.’[55] What actually happened was rather different.

  The threshold at which the Protocol came into force had been set to accommodate American non-ratification. America’s exit gave the remaining members of the Umbrella Group, especially Japan, Canada, Australia and Russia, much more leverage because they could decide whether the treaty ever came into force. Ironically the EU conceded far more to them than they had refused the US the previous November at The Hague. COP7 at Marrakesh in November 2001 doubled Russia’s sink allowances from seventeen to thirty-three mega tonnes of carbon dioxide. The Japanese delegation, over eighty strong, gained a reputation for intransigence. At one point, a delegate speaking for the G77 plus China responded to Japan’s request with ‘you must be joking’.[56] They weren’t. They too gained concessions on sinks and significantly weakened the compliance regime, a negotiating objective they shared with the Canadians and Australians.

  In 2002, Canada announced that it would unilaterally claim a further thirty percent for its exports of hydro-electricity to the US, prompting the Globe and Mail to comment: ‘If a country like Canada can claim credits in violation of the agreement and get away with it, more deceitful ways of breaking with the agreement can easily be found by other countries.’[57] Canada, a midwife of sustainable development in the 1980s, had travelled a long way in the fourteen years since the Toronto conference had called for twenty per cent emissions cuts below 1990 levels.

  Kyoto ended up with a compliance regime that gave Annex I countries a free pass if they left the regime altogether (as Canada would do) and no financial or other economic penalties for staying outside it. By carrying forward excess emissions and adding an extra thirty per cent of the over-emission to the next commitment period, the compliance regime created incentives for countries to exit and incentives for everyone to forgive the overshoot to keep them inside it. Indeed, at COP16 in Cancún in December 2010, Japan confirmed it would not participate in a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. For the EU and the environmental NGOs, Kyoto had become too big to fail, enabling other large Annex I countries to punch holes in Kyoto with near impunity.

  Kyoto’s only rationale was as a proof of concept in which the developed countries in Annex I took the first step in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, with the rest of the w
orld following at some unspecified point in an unspecified manner. The numbers tell their own story. In 1998, Tom Wigley, a leading climate scientist, published a paper which attempted to estimate the implications of the Protocol for the climate at the end of the twenty-first century. The analysis used the IPCC’s value for climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide of 2.5oC in its Second Assessment Report. Adhering to Kyoto would, Wigley estimated, lead to a reduction in global mean temperatures of 0.08–0.28oC, depending on what happened to emissions after 2010.[58] This reduction compares to a projected 2oC rise by 2100 according to the IPCC’s IS92a scenario. If fully implemented, Kyoto was estimated to delay global warming by between four and fourteen years over the course of the twenty-first century. The impact of the Kyoto reductions accrued even more slowly on sea level rise. ‘The prospects for stabilising sea level over coming centuries are remote, so it is not surprising that the Protocol has such minor effects,’ Wigley wrote.[59]

  At one level, Kyoto could be counted a success. In 2008, reported Annex I emissions of the Protocol’s six greenhouse gases were 9.6 per cent below their level in 1990.[60] However, including methane and four other greenhouse gases, as required by the Protocol, leads to a distorted picture because different gases remain in the atmosphere for different lengths of time. Wigley found that there was no single scaling factor to convert between carbon dioxide and methane emissions.[61] A further distortion is that reported emissions also include estimates from changes in land use and forestry. In his February 1998 testimony, Eizenstat explained that changes in accounting rules meant that for the US, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent ‘is quite close to the President’s original proposal to return emissions to 1990 levels by 2008–12’.[62]

  Stripping out reductions from land use changes and emissions of other greenhouse gases to focus on core carbon dioxide emissions results in a quite different picture. The 9.6 per cent Annex I reduction shrinks to 2.2 per cent. If the US is excluded, reported carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1,142.7 million tonnes, or 11.6 per cent. But this reduction masks two opposing trends. The 1,142.7million-tonne reduction comprises a fall of 1,590.1 million tonnes from the former Communist economies of Central and Eastern Europe (Economies in Transition, or EIT parties, in Protocol parlance) partially offset by a 447.4 million-tonne rise in carbon dioxide emissions from the other Annex I countries. Other than the US, the largest absolute increases came from Turkey, Australia and Canada, which all increased their emissions at a faster rate than the US (110.1 per cent, 44.1 per cent and 25.9 per cent respectively compared to 16.1 per cent for the US). Japan notched up a 6.2 per cent increase. Even Norway, which in 2008 announced its intention to become carbon neutral by 2030, increased its reported emissions by 27.0 per cent.[63]

  Disaggregating the numbers produces a similar picture for the EU. The reunified Germany reported a 203.6 million-tonne fall in carbon dioxide emissions, but ninety-nine per cent of this fall was offset by increases from the four EU members that increased emissions the most: Spain, despite its colossal investments in wind and solar farms (up 109.3 million tonnes, or 47.9 per cent); Italy (up 32.3 million tonnes, 7.4 per cent); Greece (up 26.9 million tonnes, 32.4 per cent) and the Netherlands (up 16.4m tonnes, 10.3 per cent).

  Sweden, Denmark and France recorded small reductions (11.0 per cent, 3.9 per cent and 0.7 per cent respectively, amounting to 10.9 million tonnes in all). Overall, the 42.3 million-tonne reduction by the non-EIT members of the EU, including Germany, was more than accounted for by the UK’s 54.4 million-tonne fall, stemming principally from its dash-to-gas.[64] The EU’s reputation had been saved by UK electricity privatisation.

  Overall, the collapse of communism has been by far and away the single biggest factor in delivering the Kyoto emissions reductions – a truly one-off, epochal event. But these reductions have been swamped by the dramatic economic growth of the developing world. Wigley’s study indicated that Kyoto would shave 0.08–0.28oC off a two-degree rise over the current century. A joint IEA / OECD 2009 study found that global carbon dioxide emissions were rising much faster than Wigley had assumed. Such an emissions growth trend would be in line with the IPCC’s worst case scenario in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which projects average world temperatures rising by between 2.4oC to 6.4oC by 2100.[65] Taking the midpoint of this rise would imply Kyoto delaying global warming by between twenty-two months and a little over six years over the course of this century.

  Not that miracles don’t happen. COP7 at Marrakesh agreed to permit Kazakhstan to become an Annex I party to the Protocol, but not to the convention. Because it had made no declaration when the Protocol was adopted, Kazakhstan does not have an emissions target listed – and no hot air to sell.[66] Like the soul of an unbaptised infant in Catholic theology, Kazakhstan exists in a special state of climate change limbo all on its own.

  * In 2004, the General Accounting Office analysed the factors that led to these dramatically different cost ranges. It found the Council of Economic Advisers used a model that generally assumed that the economy adjusts smoothly to new policies over the longer-term. By contrast, the Energy Information Agency model used a more comprehensive cost measure and was thus able to capture certain costs that the Council of Economic Advisers’ model did not. Other differences included assumptions about international trading and the proportion of reductions that would be achieved domestically. General Accounting Office, ‘Estimated Costs of the Kyoto Protocol’ GAO-04-144R, 30th January 2004, p. 3.

  [1] Bill Clinton, ‘Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union’ 19th January 1999 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=57577

  [2] Willis Witter, ‘Gore dares Congress to resist pact’ in the Washington Times, 9th December 1997.

  [3] Associated Press, ‘Lott: Treaty faces “bleak prospects” in Senate’ 10th December 1997.

  [4] John Godfrey, ‘White House to hold off sending climate pact to Hill’ in the Washington Times, 12th December 1997.

  [5] Frank Loy interview with author, 21st February 2011.

  [6] Loy interview with author.

  [7] President William J. Clinton, ‘Remarks at the National Geographic’ 22nd October 1997, 1997 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States Vol. II, Washington DC, p. 1400.

  [8] Council of Economic Advisers, The Kyoto Protocol and the President’s Policies to Address Climate Change: Administration Economic Analysis (1998), p. 51.

  [9] ibid., p. 52.

  [10] ibid., Table 5.

  [11] Energy Information Administration, What Does the Kyoto Protocol Mean to US Energy Markets and the US Economy? – A Briefing Paper on the Energy Information Administration’s Analysis and Report (1998) p.17. Estimated 2010 GDP of $9,425 billion is extracted from Energy Information Administration, Impacts of the Kyoto Protocol on US Energy Markets and Economic Activity (1998), p.xvii.

  [12] Andrew Turnbull interview with author, 7th April 2001.

  [13] IISD, Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Vol. 12 No. 97 (16th November 1998), p. 2.

  [14] ibid., p. 10.

  [15] William K. Stevens, ‘Argentina Takes a Lead in Setting Goals on Greenhouse Gases’ in the New York Times, 12th November 1998.

  [16] ibid.

  [17] John H. Cushman, ‘Washington Skirmishes over Treaty on Warming’ in the New York Times, 11th November 1998.

  [18] ibid.

  [19] Al Gore, ‘Statement By Vice President Gore on the United States’ Signing of the Kyoto Protocol’ 12th November 1998 http://clinton4.nara.gov/CEQ/19981112-7936.html

  [20] John H. Cushman, ‘US signs a Pact to Reduce Gases Tied to Warming’ in the New York Times, 13th November 1998.

  [21] ibid.

  [22] ibid.


  [23] IISD, Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Vol. 12 No. 97 (16th November 1998), p. 3.

  [24] Robert Reinstein email to author, 3rd April 2011.

  [25] Earth Negotiations Bulletin (16th November 1998), pp. 7–8.

  [26] ibid., pp. 2–3.

  [27] ibid., p. 13.

  [28] ibid.

  [29] IEA, CO2 Emissions From Fuel Combustion Highlights (2010), Fig. 10.

  [30] Robert Reinstein email to author, 3rd April 2011.

  [31] Earth Negotiations Bulletin (27th November 2000), p. 3.

  [32] Amy Royden, US Climate Change Policy Under President Clinton: A Look Back (2002), p. 60.

  [33] Earth Negotiations Bulletin (27th November 2000), p. 19.

  [34] Jan Pronk, ‘The Last Straw’ The Hague, 13th February 2007 http://www.janpronk.nl/speeches/english/the-last-straw.html

  [35] Jacques Chirac, ‘Speech By Mr. Jacques Chirac French President To The VIth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change The Hague’ 20th November 2000 http://sovereignty.net/center/chirac.html

  [36] Mary H. Cooper, ‘Global Warming Treaty’ in CQ Researcher, Vol. 11, No. 3 (26th January 2001), p. 55.