What are US conservatives stated objections to Kyoto?

[smiling_bandit]

Push come to shove, hybrid cars and future energy sources will probably do so much more for the environment than any legislation. I’d prefer more government funds be directed to research there, but it’s coming anyway.

[asterion]

@astorian

So, why George W. Bush is singled out by foreigners as the main obstacle to passage is beyond me.

My guess, coming from conversations I’ve had on the internet (mostly on the now defunct UK Independent message board) is that he “unsigned” the treaty. They didn’t seem to understand, or want to understand, the way treaties are processed in the US. The Clinton administration signed it and that was good enough for them. It didn’t matter that the Senate had already clearly indicated that they had no intention of ratifying it or that the new Senate composition after the 2000 elections meant that it was even less likely than before that it would be ratified. It didn’t matter that Clinton didn’t send it to the Senate anyway before his term was up. So I’m not sure if it was a misunderstanding of part of the American political process or if it was just basically America-bashing. I’d link to some of the threads now that the board is defunct but I don’t think it still exists on the Delphi servers.

The whole reaction to the ABM treaty dissolution seemed to be along the same lines to me. But this whole post is getting awfully GD.

[Dr_Paprika]

It’s just another case of Euro-leftists saying "How can we do absolutely nothing while SEEMING to do something?

This is a common view in the States. On a fighting ignorance level, however, many European countries and the EU overall have lowered their emissions, whereas the United States (and signees such as Canada) have not.

The US objections to Kyoto – the exemption of some big players like China, the perceived lack of profit to be made by trading “our country pollutes less so buy our surplus from us so you can pollute more” futures, the general idea that the world has any right to tell the US how to run its affairs, inflated estimates as to the costs of such a treaty – matter more than “it just won’t work”. Environmental trends such as hybrid vehicles are successful (or fail) due to consumer demand (high gas prices). The US government is far more interested than the economy than the environment and arguments like “it just won’t work”, while certainly true if the US remains disengaged, do not mean the US government is terribly interested in finding alternatives that would help the environment. It is odd that enviromentalism in itself is seen as a democratic or republican issue – particularly after New Orleans.

[kanicbird]

How is the US dependent upon cleaner emissions?

US is dependent upon emissions (which is the byproduct of combustion), they just happen to be pretty darn clean about.

[BrainGlutton]

From the Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol#Opposition_to_Kyoto:

Opposition to Kyoto

The two major countries currently opposed to the treaty are the USA and Australia, based on the public statements of both governments and the US Senate. Some public policy experts who are skeptical of the global warming hypothesis see Kyoto as a scheme to either retard the growth of the world’s industrial democracies or to transfer wealth to the third world in what they claim is a global socialism initiative.

Some critics say there are problems with the underlying science.

Further information: Global warming controversy

Some critics state that the protocol will prevent or damage economic growth.

American Council for Capital Formation

United States Department of Energy

National Bank of New Zealand

The 1997 Leipzig Declaration called the Kyoto Protocol “dangerously simplistic, quite ineffective, and economically destructive to jobs and standards-of-living”. However, most of the signers of the Leipzig Declaration were non-scientists or lacked credentials in the specific field of climate research.

Some argue that the protocol does not go far enough to curb greenhouse emissions (Niue, The Cook Islands, and Nauru added notes to this effect when signing the protocol UNFCCC kpstats PDF), and the standards it sets would be ineffective at curbing or slowing climate change. In addition, there have been recent scientific challenges to the idea of carbon credits, planting “Kyoto forests” or plantations to reduce total carbon dioxide output. Recent evidence shows that this may in fact increase carbon dioxide emissions for the first 10 years, due to the growth pattern of young forests and the effect it has on soil-trapped carbon dioxide. Several industrial countries have made carbon credits an important part of their strategies for reducing their net greenhouse gas outputs, further calling into question the effectiveness of the protocols.

Additionally, some theorists predict that even if the world’s leading industrial nations agree to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, it is likely that there would be no net change in emissions worldwide. In fact, China, a non-Annex I country is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. If the industrialized countries cut their demand for fossil fuels to meet the emission reduction responsibilties, the law of supply and demand would tend to cause the world prices of coal, oil and gas to go down, making fuel use more affordable for poorer nations. These theorists predict increased fuel use (primarily coal) in the “non-Annex I” countries, tending to offset the reductions of the “Annex I” countries.

It is argued by many that Kyoto fails to address larger issues of sustainability. While one may agree with establishing an international precedent for regulation of greenhouse gasses, failing to address other sustainability issues, such as typically rapid population growth IIASA among “non-Annex I” countries, suggests to some that Kyoto represents an anti-industrial agenda rather than a fair attempt to mitigate climate change. But the supporters of Kyoto emphasize the protocol is just dealing with the greenhouse gas emission issues, and other sustainability issues should be addressed by other protocols. This point is just to confuse the focus of greenhouse gas emission issues.

Cost-benefit analysis

It is possible to try to evaluate the Kyoto Protocol by comparing costs and gains, though there are large uncertainties. Economic analyses disagree as to whether the Kyoto Protocol is more expensive than the global warming that it avoids; the recent Copenhagen consensus project analysis found it to have an overall benefit, though less than an “optimal” carbon tax. Defenders of the Kyoto Protocol argue however that while the initial greenhouse gas cuts may have little effect, they set the political precedent for bigger (and more effective) cuts in the future. Also, they demonstrate commitment to the precautionary principle.

[Dr_Paprika]

An interesting aside.

Changing science

[Go_You_Big_Red_Fire_Engine]

@kanicbird

US is dependent upon emissions (which is the byproduct of combustion), they just happen to be pretty darn clean about.

Could you please phrase your sentences so they make sense?
Saying the US is dependent upon emissions (which happen to be clean) is not the same as saying the US is dependent upon clean emissions.

[wevets]

@Rachm Qoch

I wasn’t stating my opinion, just answering the OP.

We can see how stable eastern European economies were in 1990:

@http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol1/eurecon_body.html

In 1990, after the collapse of its communist governments, East-Central Europe confronted a daunting challenge: to transform its stagnant economies as quickly as possible, with few resources and little experience. Although differing in many respects, the countries in the region suffered from many of the same problems. They carried (or would soon carry) large foreign debts, supported a huge number of unproductive state enterprises, could no longer rely on the trade network of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), and faced serious health and environmental problems. The U.S.—along with key international funders such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)—offered a firmly stated and well-articulated panacea: structural adjustment.

This one specifically about Poland:

@http://countrystudies.us/poland/53.htm

Postcommunist economic reform initially brought both positive and negative results in the key areas of prices, productivity, inflation, and wages. In general, early indicators showed that the adjustment to a market economy would require more time and greater social discomfort than was anticipated in 1989.
Price Increases

Sudden liberalization of prices brought an average price increase of 79.6 percent in the program’s first month. The high prices were intended to eliminate some major distortions in pricing and begin to adjust demand to the existing limited supply. Price liberalization stopped hyperinflation but, unexpectedly, inflation remained high.

Annual price increases were 250 percent in 1990 and 70.3 percent in 1991. Except for the first quarter, however, average quarterly price increases in 1990 were considerably smaller than the equivalent increases in 1989, when the administrative system of price determination and controls still dominated. The average quarterly price increases were lower in 1991 than in 1990.

While Eastern Europe was becoming better off in 1990, the adjustments needed to turn stagnant, moribund state-run economies into freer markets were neither easy nor contributed to ‘economic stability,’ whatever that may be.

You could argue Kyoto is unfair to American interests, but arguing that it is unfair because of the unusual stability of Eastern European economies in 1990 doesn’t make a lot of sense.