Industry "Greens" to Clinton: Don't Push Kyoto

Just say no to Kyoto? That’s what industry big hats, mainly green, determined recently at the Aspen Institute, which describes itself as an "educational organization that convenes people of diverse perspectives and views to seek new approaches to contentious policy issues."

At Aspen’s forum on global climate change, 12 of the biggest participants wrote a letter to President Clinton telling him not to submit the Kyoto protocol to the U.S. Senate, but to initiate other policies reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

The big dozen included the CEO of the nation’s largest provider of natural gas, Enron Corp., the force behind the Pew Foundation’s national campaign to persuade people that global warming is a threat requiring prompt action. (Here, prompt action means having the government coerce utilities into using more natural gas to produce electricity.)

In fact, Administration wags will tell you, though not for attribution, that the purpose of Kyoto is to "dial coal out of the economy" by substituting natural gas. Enron is just behaving logically here, like any other corporation that stands to corner a market (in this case, electrical generation) because of a shift in government policy.

Other signatories included Amory Lovins, the energy guru to the Carter Administration (no gas line jokes please), the presidents of the World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute, and former Congressmen Bennett Johnston and Phil Sharp, among others. Two "conservative" public servants who signed were some deep-down-in-the-department employees of the Reagan and Ford administrations.

Why not green?

First and foremost, the signatories urged the President to shut off the political nature of the current debate, asking him to "moderate the political aspects" of the discussion about global warming by appointing a bipartisan "Blue-Ribbon Commission."

Some might argue that the debate about what to do about global warming is a political necessity. What’s more, the forward-thinking individuals who thought up this great country created a political process to deal with complex issues just like this one. Our brand of political discourse keeps people from resorting to gunplay to settle their differences, or attempting to shut one another up by stuffing blue ribbons down their throats.

Let’s not argue

The industry leaders referred to their proposal as an "educational effort" that would lead to "subsequent policy actions" that would deal with "the long-term threat—unsustainable concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Aspen group agreed not to debate the science of climate change..."

Huh? The last we heard, there is an intense scientific debate about that very concept: What on God’s getting-greener Earth is an "unsustainable" concentration of carbon dioxide? In fact, some scientists have concluded a little more carbon dioxide in the air might be a good idea. Because carbon dioxide is widely known to improve plant productivity and water use efficiency, the good old preindustrial Little Ice Age concentration may ultimately be less "sustainable" for the biosphere than what we enjoy today.

Not only that, but darned near all the plants we live with and depend upon for food evolved in an atmosphere with many times more carbon dioxide in it than today’s Earth. Thousands of scientific experiments show that when plants are returned to a higher-CO₂ environment, their combined growth habits resemble the Garden of Eden’s (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Schematic of the relative growth of Eldarica pine trees under various concentrations of carbon dioxide in experiments conducted by Sherwood Idso. The Aspen people want to limit "unsustainable" concentrations of carbon dioxide, whatever that means!

Under the rug

Having told Clinton to squash debate and accept a scientific consensus that simply does not exist, the Aspen signatories then told him to hide the Kyoto embarrassment in the basement: "Do not reject the Kyoto Protocol nor submit it for ratification now." These Aspeners know it will be summarily rejected. Even our greener friends can’t count up more than about 15 Senatorial votes in favor of the thing.

The real reason to shove the protocol under the desk, of course, is that opening Kyoto up for political debate—which is what these folks want to stop—will expose the remarkably juvenile nature of the "science" espoused by global warming extremists.

The Aspen group’s CEOs, former bureaucrats, and former elected officials then tell us that the Senate’s rejection of Kyoto would "put America at a competitive disadvantage as the world develops a sustainable energy system in the 21st century."

The only thing this statement can mean is that the Aspen people think that if we don’t pass the Kyoto treaty, American business will be incapable of producing things that people want. Where does the Kyoto Protocol say this?

Or maybe their idea is that if the government doesn’t tell industry how to produce, they will lose out in the international marketplace. Can these guys say "Former Soviet Union"? Or "Japan Inc."?

Finally, the signatories urge the President to establish "bilateral carbon reduction programs with key developing countries" and to "establish the rules for crediting early, voluntary emissions reductions."

We think this means give a subsidy to some of the signatories who just cornered the electricity production market. In Washington, virtue is its own reward.

Think About It

Thanks in part to energy potentate and WCR contributor Mark P. Mills (who was not invited to Aspen), we can perform the following thought experiment concerning the CEO letter to Bill Clinton. At the outset we’ll stipulate what everyone in Washington knows, which is that the likely outcome of Kyoto would be to displace coal with natural gas for electrical production. Incidentally, 56 percent of electrical generation today results from the combustion of coal. Imagine, if you will, the following sequence of events:

1.  Completely displacing coal with natural gas reduces overall U.S. carbon emissions by about 13 percent, bringing them back roughly to 1990 levels.

2.  Washington issues a press release about how great this achievement is.

3.  Natural gas usage doubles, and so does everyone’s electric bill.

4.  El Niņo cranks back up, and some northern cities get hotter than heck.

5.  The poor can’t afford to run their air-conditioners.