Kyoto Accord

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©2002-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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The world's got a pretty simple choice here. It's between President Bush and grandchildren.

-- Australian Senator Bob Brown, calling for a U.S. oil boycott because of George Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

What Is The Kyoto Accord?

The Kyoto Accord is an international treaty whereby countries agree to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit if their neighbours do likewise. It is a very complex agreement that allows trading pollution credits. If it is cheaper to reduce emissions in country A, then country B can buy the pollution credits, and have them count toward its own quota of reductions. Happily, the global atmosphere does not care where the greenhouse gas reductions come from.

The current Kyoto round calls for a greenhouse gas emission reduction of 6% in Canada and 5% in the USA.

Why Ratify The Kyoto Accord?

After millions of years of remaining constant, greenhouse gas levels, particularly CO₂, started to climb sharply at the beginning of the industrial revolution. They are now almost certainly higher than they have been in 20 million years. This is not a natural fluctuation. It is a side effect of us humans diligently burning the oil, coal and forests. These greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, much like a giant greenhouse. The heating is called global warming.

Scripps Institute Measurements of CO₂ At Mauna Loa, Hawaii

Measured in ppmv (parts per million by volume)

Global warming has already reduced the depth of the winter polar ice cap since the 1970s by 40% . Polar bears will become extinct if the ice retreat continues. Nearly all glaciers on the planet are rapidly retreating. As the white reflective snow melts, it leaves behind the darker earth which is even more efficient at absorbing solar energy. This causes an acceleration of the heating effect.

So what? Who likes snow and ice? Consider:

The computer models show up to a metre sea level rise over the next 100 years, but they don't account for the large icecaps that are above ground melting. Large parts of Florida, and much of the eastern US seaboard will be at risk if the Greenland icecap and the west Antarctic icecap melt.
More heat means more energy in the atmosphere. This mean more turbulent weather. Super hurricanes will cause millions in property damage. We are already seeing more damage from tropical storms than ever before.
More heat means a redistribution of rain patterns. We are now seeing freakish storms all over the world that dump many feet of water in a single day where previously even an inch would have been considered a major downpour. This also means droughts in places that previously had abundant rainfall. For the first time in history, Canada had to import grain because of droughts. For the first time in history, rainy Vancouver's drinking water reservoirs were almost empty. The Monsoon rains, upon which Asian agriculture depends, no longer arrive with clock-like regularity.
There have been two mass extinctions in earth history, the Permian, 230 million years ago, was the worst. 70% of all species were lost. It was caused by natural global warming when volcanoes released greenhouse gases. (The other more familiar to most people was the more recent KT Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction event, 65 million years ago. It was caused when an asteroid plunged into the earth at Chicxulub Mexico wiping out the dinosaurs and half of earth's species.) We are re-experiencing the same global warming conditions that triggered the more devastating Permian extinction, only this time it is man made. When it gets too hot, plants die. When it gets too hot and dry, massive fires ravage huge areas. When plants die, insects and herbivores die. When insects die, even heat-resistant plant's don't get pollinated and die. Birds die without insects to eat. Carnivores die without herbivores to eat, all triggered by what seems so innocuous -- heat. Similarly, in the oceans, when they get just a few degrees too warm, corals expel their symbiotic algae and die soon thereafter. When coral reefs die, the fish that live on them die, triggering extinction chains. Satellites can chart the loss of vegetation over the planet. We are losing 4 species per hour, a rate on the same scale as the Permian and KT events. Man has no ability to live without the support of other species. We are committing suicide and killing the family of life on earth along with us.

Computer models show we can expect a five degree centigrade (nine degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average temperature within 100 years. This is far from the worst case scenario. (The worst case is a runaway greenhouse effect.) Five degrees does not sound like much, however, consider that the earth is a mere five degrees warmer on average than it was during the last ice age. Another way of looking at it is that a five degree warming represents a change equivalent to moving from San Francisco (average temp 12.5c/54.5f) to Los Angeles (average temp 17.5c/63.5f), or from Los Angeles to San Antonio Texas (average temperature 22c/72f).

Well so what? Wouldn't it be nice to live in a warmer climate? There are at least three drawbacks:

You may find you have to run your air conditioner year round. Where are we going to get all the extra electricity to run the air conditioners? By the law of supply and demand, electricity prices will go through the roof, and you may find yourself unable to afford to run your air conditioner.
With higher temperatures, water evaporates more quickly. Global warming disrupts rainfall patterns bringing extra rain to some places and drought to others. For those in drought, tap water will have to be brought in from further and further away. This means higher water bills. It also means skyrocketing food costs since the farmers need huge amounts of water for irrigation.
If you live in Alberta or Saskatchewan or in the Ganges river valley, your tap water comes from glacier meltwater. Those regions will experience summer water shortages.
The trees can't pack up and move to a cooler climate. We lost many of our grand fir trees in the summer of 2002 due to heat and drought. You would pretty well have to cut them down and replant with new heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant species. It will take a generation for the newly planted forests to mature.

Who Are the Global Warming Culprits?

American lobbyists who oppose Kyoto would have you believe India and China are the major culprits. Who are they really?

CO2

The United States pumps out more CO₂ than the entire rest of the world combined.

Opposition to Kyoto

The opposition to the Kyoto treaty in Canada comes mainly from Ralph Klein, the premier of Alberta. Alberta is Canada's oil-rich province. Klein said in one of his anti-Kyoto commercials that perhaps dinosaur farts helped end the last ice age. I don't know who Klein's scientific advisers on Kyoto are, but they appear to be unaware the dinosaurs died out millions of years ago and the last ice age ended a mere 10,000 years ago. I think we can safely presume that Klein has not been receiving expert scientific advice to justify his gut feelings about global warming.

Klein imagines that the Kyoto treaty will be costly to the oil interests in his province. He reasons, if we reduce emissions, we necessarily will necessarily consume less oil, therefore Alberta will sell less oil, therefore Alberta will make less money. Therefore, Kyoto must but stopped, the planet be damned.

I think Klein has it backwards. The way to reduce emissions is by using more efficient cars and machines that use less oil. This means the oil reserves will last longer. This means the oil producers can continue to collect money for a longer time. The oil monopolies will be able to raise oil prices, knowing that their customers now have more money in their pockets from using more efficient vehicles. Yet it won't cost any more to produce the oil than now. Overall then, the oil producer would get more money for the same amount of oil in his reserves.

Though the vast majority of the world's scientists are on board for cleaning up the atmosphere, a few can be bribed to lie or mislead the public. TV, in an attempt at balance, tries to some one anti-Kyoto expert for every one pro, even though scientists are about 1000 to 1 in favour of Kyoto.

Industry similarly screamed at the acid rain restrictions. Yet it turned out the acid captured in the smokestacks more than paid for the equipment to collect it. This same pattern has repeated itself over and over. Capturing and reusing a pollutant, or avoiding creating it in the first place always turns out to be "unexpectedly" profitable.

We don't let children play with life support systems in hospitals, yet we allow alcoholic dufuses to meddle with the life support systems of spaceship earth. The politicians don't understand the science needed to deal with global warming

Doubt

As you might guess, I think those claiming doubt about climate change are a bunch of paid shills without conscience. But let us give them the benefit of the doubt. If there is doubt about climate change, what is the prudent thing to do?

Buckminster Fuller explained that our planet can be considered a spaceship, with a life support system -- the atmosphere. If you shank the earth to the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be about as thick as a layer of saran wrap. In other words, it is fragile.

One does not jerk around doing experiments to a spaceship's life support system. That is precisely what business wants us to do -- insert massive quantities of novel chemicals into the atmosphere. We are sure the effects won't be beneficial. The only doubt is whether they will be mildly or violently harmful.

The Business Opportunity in Kyoto

If vehicles were more fuel efficient, oil companies could charge the same as they do now, yet pump less oil. This would increase their profits and also make the reserves last longer. Instead, the fools lobby for fuel-inefficient vehicles.

Other businesses besides oil also have much to gain from Kyoto. More efficient use of energy always means higher profit in the long run, simply because it means reduced energy costs.

As the oil reserves are consumed, by the law of supply and demand, the prices of oil will rise. Black gold will go platinum. So irrespective of global warming, the world is going to be forced to switch to energy-efficient machines and vehicles.

We Canadians must decide whether we want to be the providers or merely the purchasers of that high-efficiency, low-emission technology. The sooner we adopt the new technology ourselves, the more likely we will become the providers to the world.

Sharp and the Japanese government are already tiling the roofs of Japan with solar panels. With that experience they believe they will soon develop a solution at less that $1 per watt that will be cheaper than hydro electric or coal/oil-fired electricity and the Japanese will rapidly dominate the global energy market. Does it make sense to hand this giant market to the Japanese on a plate by playing ostrich and pretending we can do oil business as-usual forever?

Economics Of Clean

Most people assume that cleaning up will be costly. Usually the reverse is true.

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

According to Amory Lovins in the 2002 Summer edition of Orion Afield we have very powerful techniques now that can triple or quadruple the energy and water efficiency of most existing buildings. In new building the energy savings can be more like 90 percent, and these buildings typically work better and cost less to build.

With all the potential for saving energy, its obvious that protecting the climate is not costly but profitable: saving fuel costs less than buying fuel. That's why DuPont the world's biggest chemical company, announced that in this decade its energy use won't increase, even though its business is projected to grow by six percent a year, because its goal is to get efficient at least that fast. STMicroelectronics, the fourth-biggest chip maker in the world has set a goal of zero net carbon emissions by the end of this decade, when they will be making 40 times the chips they made in 1990. British Petroleum just reached its 2010 carbon reduction goals seven years early -- at a net profit of $650 million. These thing are being done in the name of shareholder value. Smart companies are behaving as if the USA had ratified the Kyoto protocol, because they make more money that way. Washington will be the last to know.

Kyoto Is Just A Start

Unhappily, even if everyone in the world immediately reduced emissions to zero, we would still get a significant increased global warming caused by the gases we have already so cavalierly leaked into the atmosphere in the past. Even with a 6% reduction we are just making a tiny dent in the global warming problem.

So the 6% reduction is just a start, not sufficient to rectify the problem. You have to start somewhere. The worst polluters, e.g. Canada and the USA are scheduled first. The lesser ones such as China are scheduled to follow later.

Is Kyoto Practical?

Canada is committed to reducing emission rates to 6% below what they were in 1990, which is 20% below the 2002 level, and 35% below the projected 2010 business-as-usual level.

Even so, Kyoto is just a token start at the problem. The economic effects of the 6% reduction would barely be noticeable since the positive economic aspects of the cleanup would offset the negative. Economic factors like interest rates, exchange rates, wars and tariffs would dwarf the Kyoto effects.

For home appliances (e.g. refrigerators and washing machines) we already have the technology to cut the energy consumption in half. All it requires is gradually phasing them in. For automobiles we already have high efficiency vehicles. All we have to do is provide incentives to both manufacture and buy them, and disincentives to both manufacture and buy inefficient SUVs.

An area 100 by 100 miles in New Mexico covered with solar panels could provide all the energy needs of the USA. We need to create only a very few new clean energy plants to meet the 6% target.

Ratifiers

Who has ratified Kyoto already: The fifteen member states of the European Union ratified the Kyoto Protocol. 80+ countries have now ratified the Protocol, including 18 industrialised countries (the EU plus the Czech Republic, Norway and Romania), Japan, Russia, China, India, Canada and New Zealand.

The USA has not ratified the treaty. They have reneged on their agreement. America's excuse is that India and China should go first. Well, they have gone first. They have already ratified the agreement. The agreement was that Canada and the USA would develop the high technology required, field test it, then sell it to India and China.

The Greed Argument

Our generation has gobbled up more the earth's non-renewable resources than all previous generations combined. Surely that legacy belongs to generations besides ours. We are stealing from our grandchildren simply because no one is stopping us from taking it all for ourselves.

Lobby For Kyoto

Premier Klein and the Alberta oil patch interests have put a ton of money into sinking Kyoto, even though it is against their own long-term economic best interests. Their propaganda was having an effect on Canadian public opinion, though it was not sufficient to derail Kyoto. Prime Minister Chrétien ratified the Kyoto treaty. Write to him to congratulate him and urge him to get on with implementation.

Make a simple threat. "If you don't get behind Kyoto, I will vote for someone who will."

Best send a hand written letter rather than typed or email.

pm@pm.gc.ca
Prime Minister Paul Martin
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa K1A 0A2
Canada

You could also try writing American politicians such as the president. I suggest focusing on why Kyoto is in the best interests of American oil companies and big American business given that Bush and his cabinet are mostly ex oil executives. Bush has stated he will not ratify the Kyoto treaty.

Write your Senator, Member of the House of Representatives or
President George Bush Jr.
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500 USA
It is best to hand write your letter. However in a pinch you can email:president@whitehouse.gov

"Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war."
~ Environment Canada (The Canadian equivalent of the EPA)

Links

Pew Center: somewhat more accessible that IPCC.
Bush Acknowledges Global Warming: after years of claiming global warming was a hoax, the Bush administration has finally admitted it is caused by human activity. However, the USA still refuses to ratify the Kyoto treaty.
Mark Fiore's animation on the energy bill
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the United Nations international body co-ordinating climate change research. They are the most official source for scientific information on climate change.
PDF Presentation: light, colourful, illustrated. Brings you up to snuff on the basics. Prepared by the Argentine government, a politically neutral source of information. This is the source of my chart.

Earthfuture: Guy Dauncey's site has a huge list of links. Guy kindly proofread this essay and corrected a large number of factual errors.

Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change

0-86571-421-5

Guy Dauncey, Patrick Mazza

Guy is incredibly energetic and optimistic. I have heard him speak publicly twice and have talked with him personally and exchanged many emails. He is good people.

Earthfuture - Stories from a Sustainable World

0-86571-407-X

Guy Dauncey

As we enter the 21st century, the greatest challenges we face may not be environmental, but psychological - a failure of vision prompted by a world beset by so many problems that people have lost hope and fear that things can only get worse. Earthfuture restores optimism by providing us with positive, and achievable, alternatives. Earthfuture presents over 40 provocative and inspiring glimpses into a world that people are managing to make sustainable. They are premised on the idea that, if we can visualize a paradise on Earth, then we can create it. Set in the early years of the new millennium, it is a world of ecovillages and self-organizing city neighborhoods, of near-zero garbage and climate-friendly cars, of work-sharing and social investment, of neighborhood democracy and the 'syntropy revolution,' of a world-wide sustainable trade and environment treaty, and the Earth Pledge. In short, it is a world where wealth is defined by peace, a healthy environment, and the high quality of our relationships. At the same time, it is not, of course, a world without its nightmares - such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and genetic pollution. Nor is it without its difficult choices - ecologically managed forests versus business-as-usual, or the free-flow of city traffic versus community gardens...

With its mix of utopian fiction, and reportage of near-reality, Earthfuture sows the seeds of an alternative future with skill and obvious delight. Highly readable and accessible, it will appeal to a wide readership including social and environmental activists, progressive urban planners and local government officials, and students in environmental, social, and urban studies, and community economic development - as well as the general reader tired of the doom and gloom.

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation

0-609-80529-0

Thom Hartmann, Neale Donald Walsch, Joseph Chilton Pearce (Afterword)

A spiritual approach to conversion to a renewable energy economy.

Life as a whole is not fragile, only species are. Consider the dandelion.

~ Roedy

Earth is very tough indeed. In its billions of years of existence, it has withstood at least thirty major planetesimal impacts, each capable of wiping out more that half the life present at those times.

~ James LoveLock

The truth surely is what we may ultimately come to do is destroy the particular type of life as we know it. If that happens, then, of course, our species would die off (alas, taking make other species with it): in the grim final analysis, the problem would be self-correcting. The earth can be a stern as well as bountiful mother, and were we to disappear she would have the ages that belong to her in which to restore herself before giving birth to other orders of life. Earth's song will go on whether or not we are part of it.

~ Paul Devereux

Re-Visioning the Earth: A Guide TO Opening The Healing Channels Between Mind And Nature.

0-684-80063-2

Paul Devereux

This is an unusal book, about how different cultures experience the natural world. Our experience depends much more on our Western cultural conditioning than we would ever imagine. It is one of the few books I have seen that tackle the same subjects as my essay called Experience Is A Hallucination.

Robert Kennedy Jr. speaks on the state of environmental and energy legislation in the USA. He talks about how Bush has gutting the clean air and water act, and the huge backward step the USA has taken since Bush was elected president.
ABC News, Global Warming is Real
Greenhousenet.org: provide speakers on climate change.
Economic Democracy Eco links
Grist Magazine: suggested actions.
BushGreenWatch.org: daily email feed on what Bush is up to destroy the environment.
Al Gore's Speech on Global Warming and the Environment

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