Ceilidh

Michael Zey
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(CNSNews.com) - After years of debate, the Kyoto Protocol -- an international treaty aiming to drastically reduce the world's fossil fuel emissions -- takes effect Wednesday, but without U.S. participation.

Liberal members of Congress and most environmentalists are chastising the Bush administration for its "irresponsible" decision to remain on the sidelines, but those advocating a free market approach to climate issues insist the president did the right thing on a "huge moral issue."

"When the Kyoto Protocol enters into force [Wednesday], the world will take a significant and long-awaited first step toward stemming global warming," said U.S. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi Tuesday. "Instead of stepping forward as the world leader on climate change, however, the Bush administration is clinging to the role of world obstructionist.

"In defiance of the overwhelming evidence of global warming, the Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and international cooperation," Pelosi added. "The administration claims its under-funded research projects and voluntary emissions-reduction proposals are adequate, but it is tragically and demonstrably mistaken."

A coalition of liberal businesses and green groups, including Greenpeace USA, also warned Tuesday of the dangers of "global warming," renewing calls for "aggressive U.S. response to climate change."

"[I]n spite of the consistency and severity of these warnings, the United States remains wedded to a climate policy that is based almost totally on voluntary measures -- carbon sequestration, and long-term research," the coalition's letter to the White House and congressional leaders stated. "Such a policy is not only inadequate, it is irresponsible.

The letter criticized the U.S. for its decision to remain "isolated as one of the few industrialized nations that is not a party to the document.

"It is now long past the time when the United States, responsible for a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions but having only 5 percent of the world's population, should have embarked on a serious campaign to address this problem," the letter stated.

However, Myron Ebell of the free market environmental group, Competitive Enterprise Institute, (CEI) has argued that the Kyoto Protocol represents an alarmist approach to the world's climate issues, would lead to restrictions on energy and that "there is no future for energy rationing in the world.

"Approximately 2 billion people lack access to electricity. Kyoto will put us on a road of actually taking away electricity from people rather than adding more people to the modern way of life," Ebell said recently at a media briefing on Capitol Hill sponsored by CEI's Cooler Heads Coalition and the George C. Marshall Institute.

"It seems to me that this is a huge moral issue, it is an issue for human liberty," Ebell explained. "The world is not energy rich, it is energy poor. Approximately 2 billion people lack access to electricity. How are those 2 billion people going to reap any of the benefits of modern industrial civilization if they don't have electricity?" he asked.

The Kyoto Protocol was ratified by 140 countries, but the greenhouse gas binding restrictions will apply to only 35 industrialized countries. The protocol is designed to turn back the clock on the release of carbon dioxide and five other gases, forcing industrialized countries to scale back their emissions to 1990 levels by 2012.

But many liberal environmentalists have complained that even Kyoto is too weak to begin addressing their concerns about "global warming." The treaty will only have "symbolic" effect on the global climate, they concede.

"I think that everybody agrees that Kyoto is really, really hopeless in terms of delivering what the planet needs," Peter Roderick of Friends of the Earth International told Cybercast News Service in December during the United Nations climate summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"It's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, it's tiny," Roderick said. "It is woefully inadequate, woefully. We need huge cuts to protect the planet from climate change."

Even without formal American participation in the treaty, many environmentalists are still seeking fossil fuel emission reductions in the U.S. But skeptics of the Kyoto Protocol, gathered at the recent media briefing on Capitol Hill, took aim at the treaty's scientific premise -- that man is creating greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

"The science does not support the kind of apocalyptic vision that is offered by Kyoto advocates," said William O'Keefe of the Marshall institute, an organization that, according to its website, "encourages the use of sound science in making public policy."

"The basic theory behind trapping gasses and then warming the earth has not been validated by satellite measurements because the lower atmosphere hasn't warmed," O'Keefe said.

U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) added that "the science used to support Kyoto is collapsing." He also criticized the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which purports to show Arctic temperatures rising as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Arctic report is "a classic case of how to selectively use data," Inhofe charged. "There are numerous scientific problems with the report. It had no footnotes or citations, and worse, it focused only on Arctic climate over the last 30 years.

"That's probably because Artic temperatures in the 1930s were higher than they are today," Inhofe said.

He also ridiculed global climate models used to project temperature increases over the next century.

"As many in the scientific community know, these models are highly imperfect. They are incapable of replicating the present climate using known climate conditions," Inhofe said.

Ebell noted that while the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 during the Clinton administration, it is President Bush who is absorbing the attacks by liberal environmentalists. "People blame President Bush for walking away from Kyoto. In fact President Clinton never submitted it to the U.S. Senate for ratification," Ebell said.

"Even if President Bush did submit [the protocol] for ratification, it would be defeated overwhelmingly," Ebell added. "This treaty has been dead for a long time in this country."

Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the reason that approximately 160 countries have joined the U.S. in not supporting the protocol is because the nations fear the treaty more than any potential climate calamity.

"Those 160 countries believe that a failure to grow economically is a greater threat than (potential climate change). They believe that the Kyoto Protocol is a greater threat to mankind than climate change," Horner told Cybercast News Service .

Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, echoes the criticism of the Kyoto Protocol.

Claims of human-caused catastrophic "global warming" are "scientifically unfounded," Michaels wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Times. He labeled Kyoto "an economic weapon, not a climate instrument.

"Kyoto is absurd because it does absolutely nothing measurable within the foreseeable future about planetary temperature, while one nation - the United States - bears almost all the cost," Michaels wrote. Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of a new book "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media."

Michaels also wrote that "there is no technologically and politically feasible way to reduce emissions enough to dramatically change the current temperature trajectory ... The only method is to make energy (read: fossil fuel energy) unaffordably expensive."

See Related Articles:
Exclusive: UN Conference Shuts Up Reporter; Calls Global Warming Science Questions 'Silly' (Dec. 16, 2004)
Greens Concede Kyoto Will Not Impact 'Global Warming' (Dec. 17, 2004)
Bush Blamed for 'Devastating Consequences of Global Warming' (Dec. 15, 2004)

E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.