Bush leaving global warming solution up in air

President Bush, having made his decision on stem cell research, must now turn to the equally thorny problem of global warming. The Bush administration withdrew United States support for the Kyoto Protocol in June, a move that has drawn almost universal international criticism and has left negotiators uncertain as how to proceed, says Charlotte Schubert in the June 18 issue of Science News.

In order to understand why the administration felt this Draconian measure was necessary, we need to examine the evolution of the treaty from its inception a decade ago to the present time.

In 1992, about 160 nations adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, according to David Sandalow and Ian Bowles in the June 8 issue of Science. In essence, it required a certain number of industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. The impetus behind this was a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said human activity was causing an increase in global warming that could be as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. How the treaty is to be implemented has been continually negotiated since 1992, culminating in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

The latter has since been signed by 84 developed nations according to an editorial in the May 18 issue of Science which called upon the Bush administration to follow suit. The editorial was signed by 17 national academies of science that agree with the IPCC’s report. Shortly thereafter, before a summer meeting with European leaders, the Bush administration made its decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

David Victor, author of the book “The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming,” offers reasons, in the spring issue of The Sciences, the Bush administration would opt out of the treaty. In order to reduce GHG emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, the 38 most industrialized nations would have to cut their emissions by 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The Kyoto treaty commits the United States to a 7 percent, or 1.12 billion tons, of this total.

The plan calls for each ton of carbon dioxide to represent a “pollution credit,” with the 16 billion tons having a value of $2 trillion. These could be bought and sold as a form of international currency and initially would be distributed to the 38 nations according to a formula based on their GHG emissions when the treaty took effect.

Some nations, such as Russia whose share is based on the old Soviet Union, would receive more credits than they now need and could sell the excess for billions of dollars. The United States, says Victor, would have to buy so many credits that the cost would come out to about $1,000 per household per year. These costs, plus the fact that emerging nations such as India and China are exempt from pollution restrictions, make the treaty political anathema to the administration and many members of Congress.

Shortly after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, says Richard Kerr in the July 13 issue of Science, President Bush formed the U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative to research areas of the global warming problem “where investments can make a difference.” Critics respond that this is no different from the U.S. Global Change Research Program his father initiated in 1990 and has since cost $18 billion with no tangible results.

Whether this is true or not, Kerr says in the June 15 issue of Science that it is likely Bush’s action was in response to a National Academy of Science report he requested shortly after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol. The scientists involved with the report agreed completely with the IPCC’s warning that the earth is warming and humans are the most likely cause. A spokesman for the president said he now “has a sound scientific basis on which decisions can be made.”

That decisions must be made, and made soon, is evident from Schubert’s article for she says that, far from reducing GHG output, U.S. emissions have increased by 11 percent in the past decade.

A cause for both hope and concern can be found in an article by Mark Schrope in the May 31 issue of Nature. In it, he quotes the chief executive of BP, a London-based oil company, as saying that fossil fuels are the cause of global warming. This is the first time any petroleum company has made such an admission and BP has followed it up with a promise to reduce its 1990 GHG emissions by 10 percent by 2010. Shell has made the same promise and promises to make the cuts by 2002. Both companies plan to meet their goals by trading emission credits. Exxon-Mobil, on the other hand, is against the Kyoto Protocol, questions the IPCC’s findings, and suggests the solution is a system of “voluntary reductions.”

Once thing is certain, unless international and domestic political pressure brings the Bush administration back to the bargaining table, the Kyoto Protocol is history and another round of interminable studies will begin.

Clair Wood taught chemistry and physics for more than 10 years at Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor.