Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (19 page)

The other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, saw an opposite political dynamic. Socialist governments had come to power in Britain, Germany, and France, as well as in some of the smaller European countries. Long sympathetic to the environmental cause, they now found themselves relying more and more on the Greens for political support. In Germany the government was now a Socialist-Green coalition. Part of the Greens’ appeal was that they identified problems, like acid rain and pollution, that were of everyday concern. It also owed something to the sense of virtue people derived from fighting for clean air and water and healthy food. Beyond this, however, it also stemmed from and fed, in a kind of positive feedback loop, an emerging sense of European identity. As the European Community morphed into the European Union and focused on ‘deepening’ its economic and political integration, certain policies became vehicles for expressing Europeanness. One of these was, of course, the proposal for a single European currency. Another was environmental policy. Here was a good thing for which all Europeans could pride themselves on taking a leadership position. It was also a way of expressing their resentment of the United States. In a sense, environmentalism, and particularly climate change policy, became an expression of European nationalism and a declaration of European independence.

The weather continued to cooperate nicely with the prophets of doom. January 1995 found Dr. Rodolfo del Valle, director of the Earth Sciences Department at Argentina’s National Antarctic Institute, heading for an observation station on James Ross Island off the Antarctic peninsula to do research during the frigid continent’s brief summer. In the middle of the month, colleagues at an Argentine base on the Larsen Ice Shelf radioed to say they were being shaken by constant ice quakes. On January 23, they called again to say, ‘Rudi, something’s happening, the ice shelf is breaking.’
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Flying in a light plane over the thousand-foot-thick Rhode Island-sized shelf del Valle witnessed the unbelievable. The ice shelf collapsed before his eyes. ‘It was spectacular,’ he said. ‘What was once a platform of ice more than forty miles wide…looked like bits of polystyrene foam smashed by a child. The first thing I did was cry.’
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Looking then at the northern part of the shelf jutting into the Weddell Sea, del Valle and his colleagues predicted that it, too, would crack within ten years.

That was the most shocking climate event of the year, but hardly the only one. After a fifth consecutive winter without frost, New Orleans was overrun by mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites. Across the Atlantic, Spaniards were suffering through the fourth year of the worst drought on record, and in Russia the asphalt melted at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
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That was the backdrop to the opening of the first Conference of the Parties (COP 1) in Berlin pursuant to the undertakings of the Rio treaty. The objective of this meeting was to both determine if the signatories’ announced plans for emissions reduction were likely to be adequate and to recommend further steps if they were not. In view of the hardening attitudes in the European Union and the changed attitudes in the United States with the arrival of the Clinton administration, it would have been surprising if the COP had found that everything was dandy. In fact, the Berlin Mandate ruled that the plans and processes were inadequate, and called for further strengthening of commitments, perhaps through a binding protocol or other legal instrument. This declaration effectively opened the Rio negotiation all over again.

That more needed to be done seemed to be confirmed by the release of the second report by the now 2,500 scientists of the IPCC. Their computer models were getting better. They could now predict the past, meaning that what the computers said should have happened in past years matched pretty closely what had actually happened. The new results tended to strengthen those of 1990. The key sentence read: ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.’ The scientists predicted a warming of 1-3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 and said that this would result in continually rising sea levels, increased precipitation and more violent storms in some places, and severe drought in others. The cautiously worded report admitted that skeptics had some good points when they pointed to the weaknesses of the models in dealing with clouds, ocean currents, and small particles.
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Nevertheless, the picture of earth’s future painted for the delegates to COP 2, in Geneva in July 1996, was not a pretty one. The United States delegation, led by Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth, moved quickly to take the lead in doing something about it. The Geneva Declaration was based primarily upon a U.S. policy statement, and it recognized and endorsed the IPCC assessment and called for parties to set legally binding, medium-term targets for limitations and significant overall reductions of their greenhouse gas emissions. Here was the United States not only climbing on board but leading the charge for targets and timetables. It remained only to agree on the details and cut the actual deal at COP 3, scheduled for Kyoto the following year.

Wirth and the administration had made themselves popular with the European Union, but not with many others. The Australians, New Zealanders, and Russians rejected the call for binding targets, while the Canadians and Japanese waffled. Unlike the Europeans they would have a hard time hitting the targets being discussed. The G-77 developing countries, led by China again, emphasized that they would neither pay for the emissions sins of the developed countries nor allow them to use climate change as a latter-day colonial mechanism to keep the developing countries down. They would come to Kyoto only as interested bystanders and possible recipients of assistance. But the loudest objections came from U.S. businessmen, who saw the deck stacked against them. To begin with, they had nothing like the British natural gas, French nuclearization, or German shutdown of old East German power plants to help them meet a target. In fact, the environmental community would stoutly oppose any French-style nuclearization in the United States. One CEO jokingly suggested annexing Mexico and closing some of its ancient power plants. Beyond that, the base year of 1990 had been a recession year, when emissions were abnormally low. Now the country was in the midst of a great economic expansion and also experiencing strong immigration and population growth. So there had been a large increase in U.S. emissions since 1990, something the stagnant European and Japanese economies and declining populations had not experienced. Hitting some target of emissions below 1990 levels was going to hurt U.S. businesses harder more than others. Finally, they thought the yardstick was wrong and that they were not getting credit for what had actually been a good performance. Over the preceding fifteen years, U.S. industry had reduced emissions per unit of output far more than most of the rest of the world, and over 50 percent more than Britain or France.
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Focusing on tons of emissions rather than on emissions per ton of output seemed to penalize the fastest growing and most efficient producers and economies. So American business formed the Global Climate Coalition to fight what it feared would be an unfavorable agreement in Kyoto.

The coalition made essentially two arguments. The first was that the deal would cut economic growth and cost jobs. The administration had done an economic analysis indicating that measures equivalent to a $100 per ton carbon tax would reduce U.S. emissions in 2010 to 1990 levels while reducing GDP less than 1 percent in the first ten years after enactment, and actually result in increased growth thereafter. But a number of independent analysts took the administration to task for making heroically optimistic assumptions. One study, based on a well-known Wharton Economic Forecasting Associates model, showed that instead of a $100 carbon tax equivalent, it would take a $200 equivalent to hit the target level of emissions. This would result in a cut in GDP of over 2 percent and the loss of 1 million jobs. The second business argument was that even if the deal were done as proposed, it wouldn’t work because the greatest future growth in emissions would be from the developing countries, which had already been excused from any obligations. Worse, in the event of a deal, they would become magnets for U.S. companies relocating factories abroad, exacerbating the loss of U.S. jobs while cutting global emissions not at all.

Environmentalists pointed out that all these calculations did not include the potential costs of doing nothing, costs that would be catastrophic if even half of the IPCC predictions came true. This may have made sense to European leaders and certainly to leaders in the Association of Island States – but the U.S. Congress wasn’t listening. The congressional attitude was well reflected in a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing on rising sea levels chaired by the avid surfer Dana Rohrabacher, Republican from California. When told that scientists project a 3-foot rise in sea levels that will drown up to 60 percent of U.S. wetlands and inundate an area the size of Connecticut over the next century, Rohrabacher responded: ‘I am tempted to ask what this will do to the shape of the waves and rideability of the surf. But I will not do that. I will wait until later, when we get off the record.’
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More serious were former Senate Majority leader Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia, and Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel. In July 1997 on the eve of the Kyoto meeting, they introduced a resolution affirming that the Senate would not consider passing any treaty that would harm the U.S. economy or that excluded the developing countries. This resolution passed by a vote of 95 to 0 as a kind of bon voyage note from the Senate to the U.S. negotiators about to board their planes for Kyoto. Three groups gathered in Kyoto that December. Over one hundred delegates came from the developing world – mainly, I suspect, to visit the old temples and see the sights of Japan’s ancient capital, as they had already made it clear they wouldn’t agree to any emission reductions. The second group was the Europeans and their close allies from the small island nations, who were seeking substantial reductions below the 1990 levels. The core of the final group was the Americans, with die Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Japanese on the perimeter. The Americans were under the most pressure not to make painful cuts, but the others in the American group were also wondering how they would meet the targets and hoping the Americans would shield them from too much pain – both economically and politically. The debate was essentially between the United States and the EU. The negotiations were eye-glazingly complex and ended around 4 A.M. the morning after the deadline. But there were really only four issues – gases to be covered, sinks, emissions trading, and targets and deadlines.

Gases

The popular discussion of greenhouse gases focuses on carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. But carbon dioxide makes up about 65 percent of the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. The other 35 percent is composed of methane (significantly derived from rice paddies in developing countries), CFCs, HFCs, and nitrous oxide. Because CFC emissions were already being cut by the Montreal Protocol, the American group wanted them included as a way of making the ultimate target easier to reach.

Sinks

Forests and oceans soak up about 55 percent of the carbon dioxide currently emitted into the atmosphere. They thus constitute ‘carbon sinks’ that help reduce growth in atmospheric concentration. Reforestation such as that taking place in the northeastern United States thus contributes significantly to reducing net emissions. Indeed, there is some evidence from the Carbon Modeling Consortium that if sinks are counted into the calculation, the United States may not be a net emitter. In any case, the American group wanted sinks to be counted for the purpose of reaching the ultimate targets.

Emissions Trading

Emissions trading is a mechanism for harnessing market forces to achieve maximum reductions at minimal cost. It can be very complex but the concept is simple. Once a target for emissions is established, emitters would be issued permits or coupons for the amount of their allowed emissions. If one emitter found it unnecessary to use all the coupons, he or she could sell them to an emitter in danger of exceeding the limit. This device works particularly well if developing countries are included. To close an existing power plant ahead of schedule in order to meet an emissions reduction target in a developed country is very costly, amounting to throwing away a part of the capital invested. But developing countries are adding new plants for the first time. By selling their emissions permits, developing countries can get the money necessary to invest in more expensive but cleaner plants, while the developed country’s plant is able to operate until the end of its financially viable life. This can be a win-win situation, but the more players who play the better, particularly if many of them are developing countries. Since the Americans, of course, wanted trading, they began urging the developing countries to participate, if only on a voluntary basis.

Targets and Timetables

The Americans were still willing to aim for 1990 levels, but they didn’t want to go below them. It was already obvious that no one, including the Europeans, could hit even this target by 2000 as originally planned in Rio, so the issue became whether the deadline should be 2010 for a 15-percent reduction below 1990 emissions levels for three greenhouse gases (the EU position) or 2008-2012 for a reduction to 1990 emissions levels for six greenhouse gases (the U.S. position). Obviously, a later date gave more time for new technologies to come into play. That, of course, was what the Americans wanted.

The Europeans and the island states began with a view of the American lifestyle as bloated and wasteful and of U.S. economic policy as selfish and exploitative of America’s privileged international financial position. They saw all these sinks and gases and trading schemes as artful dodges by which America sought to evade its responsibilities to the global community. Here was the very essence of U.S. hypocrisy, claiming to be the virtuous world leader while looking for loopholes. With 4 percent of the world’s population, America accounted for more than 25 percent of global pollution. It was time for America to stand up or shut up. So Europe opposed the flexibility sought by the Americans and again cast them as the only thing standing between the humble masses of the world and their environmental salvation.