The Age of Global Warming: A History (24 page)

Should President Bush have gone to Rio?

As Clayton Yeutter describes it, the White House was in a no-win position. It was a matter of choosing the least damaging option.
[33]
On the other hand, John Sununu believes the decision was the single biggest mistake of Bush’s presidency. Until Sununu’s departure from the White House, Bush was all set to have given it a miss.
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Suppose the conference had been held four years earlier, what might Bush’s predecessor have done? Ed Meese, who served Ronald Reagan in the White House and as chief of staff when he was governor of California, thinks that Reagan would have gone to Rio to explain why he wouldn’t sign the climate change convention. His record as governor showed he was keen on protecting the environment, but as president, he was wary of international conventions. He would have been very suspicious of the science on which the climate change convention was based, Meese told the author, and was opposed to ‘environmental extremism’ being used as a way of advancing the grasp of government.
[35]
If Reagan had been watching ABC’s
This Week
on the eve of Rio, he would have had confirmation of that fear. ‘The task of saving the Earth’s environment is going to become the central organising principle in the post-Cold War world,’ Al Gore told David Brinkley.
[36]

In negotiating and signing a climate change convention without legally binding commitments to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the Bush administration ended up where the American political system and public wanted to be. The convention was swiftly and overwhelmingly ratified by the Senate that autumn. If Bush had not signed it, his successor would have. If the Bush administration had not negotiated in good faith, the convention would have ended up with similar provisions to the Kyoto Protocol that Clinton signed but couldn’t get through the Senate. In retrospect, Bill Reilly, the most vocal supporter of targets and timetables within the administration, believes their removal had been the right call. The strong economy of the 1990s would have blown the emissions caps and any practical chance to stabilise carbon dioxide emissions.
[37]

Not that Bush got any credit from voters. A CBS News poll, released towards the end of the conference, found that only nine per cent of those surveyed expected the summit to produce substantial results to help solve the world’s environmental problems. Seventy per cent said the president had been insincere in his expression of support for environmental issues. Asked if protecting the environment was so important that requirements and standards should be set regardless of cost, sixty-seven per cent replied in the affirmative, an indicator of public sentiment at the time, but a meaningless guide to what voters would actually accept in the absence of a context or consequences to the question.
[38]

There was a further irony, perhaps the biggest of all. In Rio, Bush administration officials were deeply frustrated that they were playing defence, as if America was the dirty man of the world. Since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, when America became the first nation to pass laws to preserve its natural heritage, no country had done more to preserve its wildernesses, canyons and coastline. Post-war environmentalism was born in America. In the 1970s, its government imposed the most comprehensive environmental standards of any major economy. Yet America was put in the dock at Rio, as was President Bush, accused by Bill Clinton of being Rio’s lone holdout against environmental progress.
[39]
Demonstrating the political dexterity that Bush lacked, Clinton flipped the position that he wouldn’t sign an agreement that took risks with jobs and the economy, and turned it against him. ‘When you’re weak at home, it weakens you abroad,’ Clinton told a newspaper.
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Clinton would bring those skills to the politics of global warming, matchlessly outclassing his predecessor in his political handling of the issue, but ending up precisely where Bush had left off in 1992.

17

Two Protocols

If there is one person in the world who has the history, understanding and reputation to bring this all together, it is Al Gore.

Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defence Fund, Kyoto, December 1997
[1]

Rio begat Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol has not begotten a son, only a string of COPs – Conferences of the Parties – and MOPs – Meetings of the Parties. ‘Since 1991, legions of well-meaning diplomats, scientists, and environmentalists have undertaken excruciatingly complicated negotiations in what is essentially a political exercise that creates the illusion of mitigating climate change while actually accomplishing little more than raising public consciousness,’ Richard Benedick, who led the US team that negotiated the Montreal Protocol, has written.
[2]

What accounts for the success of the Montreal Protocol in eliminating CFC emissions and the failure of the Kyoto Protocol ten years later? Writing in 2003, Scott Barrett argued that the Kyoto Protocol was likely to fail because it did not solve the enforcement problem. Appeals to a state’s sense of its responsibilities, offers of assistance or threats of naming and shaming were, Barrett thought, inadequate substitutes for having a credible enforcement mechanism. Barrett would press negotiators on their hesitation to address the issue. ‘Always I received the same unsatisfying response: enforcement was something that was best addressed later.’
[3]
Although the Kyoto Protocol specified that the parties should agree a compliance regime at the first COP after Kyoto, it only came up for discussion at The Hague COP6 in November 2000. By then, it was too late.   

Unlike Kyoto, the Montreal Protocol has strong incentives for countries to join the Montreal regime and not to leave it. It provides the threat of trade sanctions on any goods produced using CFCs and other controlled substances by countries that had not ratified the protocol. Countries can be suspended if they have not complied with their obligations, freezing their rights and privileges.

Why, then, didn’t the international community incorporate similar mechanisms being used to reverse stratospheric ozone depletion to the global warming treaties? Put another way, how was it that President Reagan, allegedly a unilateralist who once said trees cause more pollution than automobiles, led the international community to agree an environmental treaty with teeth, whereas President Clinton and a vice president who had compared global warming to an ecological
Kristallnacht
signed a toothless protocol which he did not ask the Senate to ratify?
[4]

Robert Reinstein was alternate head alongside Benedick leading the US team that negotiated the Montreal Protocol and subsequently led the negotiations for the US on the climate change convention. In a 1992 paper, Reinstein highlighted differences in the nature and uses of the gases themselves and in the status of the science between ozone depletion and global warming. The initial international response to ozone depletion focused on eight synthetic gases that were manufactured for a limited range of specific applications, such as refrigerants and foam-blowing. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide occur naturally and are emitted mostly as by-products in processes that are basic to human survival. Whereas there were a limited number of chemical plants producing CFCs, every person who burns fossil fuels is a ‘producer’ of carbon dioxide and every farmer raising cattle or sheep is a ‘producer’ of methane.

Then there is the respective status of the scientific knowledge of ozone-layer depletion and global warming. Although the causes of stratospheric ozone depletion had not been proven, certain chemicals had been demonstrated to destroy ozone in laboratory tests under conditions comparable to those in the stratosphere. By comparison, Reinstein observes, the science concerning global climate is extremely complex. Many different layers of the atmosphere must be analysed, many different physical and chemical reactions; the role of clouds, oceans, land masses, vegetation must all be taken into account, as well as complex interactions with radiation from the sun and other parts of space.
[5]

The 1992 Climate Change Convention was adopted on the basis of the precautionary principle, Article 3.3 speaking of the need for the parties to take ‘precautionary measures’. Subsequently the official scientific consensus on global warming hardened with the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report. ‘The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate,’ although the IPCC acknowledged scientists’ limited ability to quantify the effect because the expected ‘signal’ was still emerging from the noise of natural variability (another way of saying the signal hadn’t unambiguously emerged).
[6]

Even if the scientific uncertainties could be resolved, there was a gulf separating the respective economic cases for the Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol. In 2007 Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who subsequently became President Obama’s head of the White House office of information and regulatory affairs, compared the two. Sunstein’s analysis focused on the differences between the ratios of perceived benefits to costs flowing from policies to reverse the depletion of the ozone layer and to slow down global warming, especially for the United States as the world’s largest emitter of CFCs and carbon dioxide. These differences helped explain and drove the differing assessments of national interest, the response of consumers and the role of powerful private actors, Sunstein argued.
[7]

The conclusion was stark. Of all the countries in the world, the US was expected to gain the most from the Montreal Protocol and lose the most from the Kyoto Protocol. The perceived costs of complying with Kyoto were $313 billion higher than the costs of Montreal while the perceived benefits of Kyoto were some $3,562 billion lower than the perceived benefits of Montreal.
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Put another way, each $1 billion spent complying with Kyoto Protocol was estimated to yield $37 million in benefits.
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By contrast, each $1 billion spent on complying with the Montreal Protocol was anticipated to yield $170 billion in benefits.
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For the world as a whole, Montreal was estimated to produce net benefits greater than $900 billion.
[11]
Kyoto, on the other hand, was expected to generate
negative
net benefits of $119 billion to $242 billion (the band reflects different treatments of the money spent by the US buying other countries’ excess emissions allowances).
[12]

According to Sunstein, the difference in the cost benefit assessments of the two was corroborated by differences in consumer behaviour. These in turn drove political and business incentives. Vivid warnings about the consequences for human health of CFCs and the trivial costs to consumers of mitigating the risk led Americans to cut purchases of aerosol sprays by more than half. Politicians responded quickly. Who would want to run for election in the Sunbelt on a platform in effect favouring skin cancer for light-skinned people? In 1978, Congress banned the use of CFCs as an aerosol propellant. After DuPont developed HCFCs as viable (and profitable) substitutes for CFCs, businesses followed, pledging to phase out CFCs and lobbying for international controls.
*

Given their comparative advantage over foreign competitors, American businesses could expect to benefit from global moves that generated higher demand for replacements for CFCs. ‘If environmentally unfriendly products are unpopular in the market, industry is likely to respond with safer substitutes.’
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Again, the contrast with global warming is telling. Despite the enormous media coverage of global warming, if judged by their actions as consumers, Americans do not rate climate change as a serious risk compared to the benefits they derive from the burning of fossil fuels. ‘Contrary to their behaviour in the context of ozone layer depletion, American consumers and voters are now putting little pressure on either markets or officials,’ Sunstein observed.
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To Sunstein, US leadership in obtaining international agreement to cut CFC emissions conforms to the model of a global hegemon providing public goods because it benefited from doing so.
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How does Kyoto fit this model?

Not very well. Insofar as there were any benefits accruing to the US from complying with Kyoto, they were a fraction of the costs. Although the Clinton administration pledged to reduce emissions by seven per cent compared to eight per cent for the European Union, it was vastly more challenging for the US. The 1990 base year chosen for the Kyoto Protocol was the trough of recession in America, which occurred in 1992 for Europe. In that period, US carbon dioxide emissions rose by 1.3 per cent. In Europe, thanks to recession and the implosion of the former communist economies, emissions fell by nearly five per cent.
[16]

Special factors affected Europe’s two largest emitters which had nothing to do with policies to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Helmut Kohl’s Germany was one of the most strenuous in demanding deep emissions cuts, but its approach was based on extraordinarily shallow analysis. After the 1988 Toronto conference had called for developed countries to cut emissions by twenty per cent by 2005, a German study team concluded that the goal was under-ambitious.
[17]
In early 1990, Kohl asked the BMU, the federal ministry with responsibility for the environment, to prepare a carbon dioxide reduction target.

After only four weeks looking at the issue, the ministry concluded that a 30.5 per cent reduction was feasible. In June, the government adopted a twenty-five per cent target compared to 1987 levels for West Germany. The target for the former West Germany was reaffirmed in November, the government stating that it expected larger reductions from the former East Germany.
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It proved wildly optimistic. Although German carbon dioxide emissions fell in twelve of the fifteen years from 1990 to 2005, at the end of the period they were 17.7 per cent below 1990 levels, half the fall coming in the first two years after reunification.
[19]

For Britain, the speed of its fall in carbon dioxide emissions was in response to a major policy error in privatising the electricity industry. The original idea had been to create a power generating duopoly so the larger company could own the country’s nuclear power stations. Preparations for privatisation revealed what many economists and environmental groups had long argued – after taking into account decommissioning costs, nuclear power was fundamentally uneconomic. The nuclear power stations were dropped from the initial privatisation package, but the generating duopoly was preserved. To provide some competitive pressure, the electricity regulator encouraged local electricity distributors to build their own gas-fired power stations by letting them earn temporary super-profits from vertical integration. According to Dieter Helm, the leading authority on the British energy industry, ‘The consequence was that gas came on faster than would have been dictated by competitive markets, and the coal industry contracted more quickly.’
[20]
Together with the effect of a sharp recession at the beginning of the 1990s, the switch from coal to natural gas helped Britain’s emissions to fall by nearly seven per cent from 1990 to 1997.
[21]

As the negotiations progressed, the EU proposed their members share the British and German reductions under an EU ‘bubble’, even though they were simultaneously arguing that other countries should be held to flat rate reductions. Yet the high cost of meeting Kyoto’s seven per cent cut for America was not the decisive factor behind America’s non-ratification of Kyoto. The fundamental reason lay in the architecture of the Protocol, which followed the ground plan of the convention. This divided the world into two, with developed nations listed in Annex I of the convention. Non-Annex I nations therefore comprised the rest of the world – the least developed, oil-rich exporters, successfully industrialised and the world’s fastest growing economies.

At the convention’s first COP in Berlin in the spring of 1995, the parties agreed that the commitments of the Annex I parties needed to be strengthened. As a condition for allowing the process to proceed, the G77 plus China stipulated that no new commitments should be introduced for non-Annex I parties. This agreement was incorporated into the Berlin Mandate, which defined the objectives and parameters for the negotiations that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol.

At COP2 in Geneva the following July, Tim Wirth, now serving as undersecretary of state for global affairs, announced that the Clinton administration would be urging Annex I countries to negotiate ‘realistic, verifiable and binding targets’ to reverse the trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions. ‘This is a big deal,’ Wirth told the
New York Times
.
[22]

It certainly was. A year later, the US Senate adopted the Byrd-Hagel resolution by ninety-five to zero; America should not sign any protocol which imposed limits on Annex I parties unless it also imposed specific, timetabled commitments on non-Annex I countries within the same compliance period. In some respects, the resolution represented the Senate taking a second look at the convention it had ratified less than five years earlier by a similar margin as it had adopted Byrd-Hagel. The principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ – the first of the convention’s five principles – and the bifurcation between Annex I parties and the rest of the world were central to the convention’s ground plan.

There was always a high risk of the Annex I bifurcation becoming unbridgeable, as the convention did not provide an automatic mechanism by which non-Annex I countries could or should graduate to Annex I. However it contained two provisions that might have served as a basis for bridging the divide. Article 4.2(f) stipulated that by the end of 1998, a future COP should have reviewed available information ‘with a view to taking decisions’ on the matter, so long as any move into Annex I was with the approval of the party concerned.
[23]
The provision was essentially stillborn, only being used to remove Turkey, considered a developed country for the purposes of global warming, from the Annex II donor countries, which mirrors Annex I, so Turkey remained in Annex I but does not have Annex II donor obligations. The second provision, Article 4.2(d), required the periodic review of adequacy of the commitments of Annex I and non-Annex I parties. As we shall see, the fate of this provision provides one of the most telling pieces of evidence as to the attitude of the developing world to the global warming negotiations.

The effect of the Berlin Mandate was not to change the structure of the convention, but to build a wall around the existing Annex I parties and thereby institutionalise the division between North and South. To date, only Malta has crossed this new Berlin Wall, and that was because it had joined the EU (Cyprus, the only other non-Annex I country to become a member of the EU, so far has not done so). If there was any issue that risked triggering the collapse of negotiations at Kyoto, it was in response to any attempt to fragment or erode the solidarity of the G77 plus China on this issue.

By contrast, the Montreal Protocol avoided this by having a unified ground plan based on objective criteria. While bearing in mind the developmental needs of developing countries, to use the words of the Montreal Protocol’s preamble, there is no list of countries subject to quantitative limits; the annexes simply list the various categories of controlled gases.  Developing countries are subject to the full control regime while capping their per capita consumption of ozone depleting gases. In the case of CFCs, developing countries which consume less than 0.3 kg per capita of CFCs a year are granted a grace period of ten years ‘in order to meet its basic domestic needs’ before having to comply with the full rigour of the Protocol’s controls, as long as they keep their per capita consumption below 0.3 kg a year.
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Thus the Montreal Protocol provides a tough, universal regime with powerful sanctions for compliance. The bifurcated regime adopted in the 1992 climate change convention and developed further by the Kyoto Protocol can only be judged superior to the Montreal Protocol if the principal objective is assumed not to be the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

History helps explain why such divergent approaches were taken. The Montreal Protocol was negotiated between 1985 and 1987, in the brief period after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and before the formal adoption of the doctrine of sustainable development in 1988. Agreement on the final text was secured five months after publication of the Brundtland Report in April 1987. By contrast, the climate change regime is an offspring of the doctrine of sustainable development, a term that does not appear anywhere in the Montreal Protocol, and its fusion of First World environmentalism and the Third World’s demand for the New International Economic Order.