Surely Kyoto was itself the compromise? The EU were actually pushing for harsher regulations and had to water down the proposal to its bare minimum in order to get other countries to even consider signing up to it.
Any underacheivement is the fault of the member states who sign up to it. Now that the biggest player has left the field, the other players are only playing half-heartedly.
No matter how small a drop in how quickly-rising an ocean, it is conceivable that Kyoto could have been just enough to stop some climactic event from a reaction going just too far off equilibrium.
Right. That’s why the Kyoto approach is unfortunately hopeless. If global warming is really coming, we need to find some more powerful antidote, if one even exists. Of course, a powerful antidote to planetary warming might have its own bad side-effects. Monkeying with the environment is risky and uncertain.
Probably, we should just resign ourselves to a warmer earth, and plan for it as best we can. I’m not happy about this approach, but it’s reality.
Are you assigning blame or saving the planet?
Anything is conceivable, but there’s no reason to think this is the case. Even the models used by supporters of Kyoto don’t show this.
Well, surely it is true that we have already committed ourselves to a certain amount of change that we can’t avoid but will just have to mitigate. But, I think it is entirely too pessimistic to just throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done. Do you think people should continue to buy Ford Excursions and throw the costs of this decision to the rest of us? Do you think the government should continue to encourage small businessfolk to buy 6000 lb + vehicles by allowing an extremely generous tax write-off on them? Do you think we should continue to heat and cool and light our homes and businesses as inefficiently as we do? Do you think we should continue to generously subsidize the exploration and development of fossil fuels, a mature technology, while rather meagerly subsidizing renewable energy technologies? Do you think we should continue to sabotage market forces that would push for new cleaner technologies by allowing the costs associated with fossil fuel use to be largely externalized? These are all choice that we are making as a society.
The current climate models cannot predicts dramatic nonlinear shifts that might occur if, say, the influx of fresh water from melting ice in the North Atlantic shuts down the jet stream. However, there is some growing understanding that things like this might happen. Where the “tipping point” would be and how likely we can or cannot prevent it is unclear. But, we ought to be taking reasonable steps out of precaution at this point, leaving us with more options in the future than a “burying our head in the sand” approach.
This is not entirely accurate. The Senate vote occurred July 25, 1997 http://www.csgmidwest.org/MLC/resolutions/98resolutions/98kyoto.htm (N.B. The Times of London recently and erroneously stated that the vote occurred in 1999 - which is the date I reported in a recent Pit thread at the request of Coldfire.Coldie, if you’re reading, sorry about the wrong date.)
The Kyoto Protocol was signed in December 1997 http://unfccc.int/resource/convkp.html
So, while some negotiating was still going on (although the framework of the Protocol, at the least, was already set), there certainly wasn’t a major change in the political climate or the state of the science in that six-month window between the Senate vote and the signing of the Protocol.
The senators also, no doubt, understand that if the US enters into treaties with other nations that the Senate doesn’t like, the Senate can (and repeatedly has) reject it.
I think rejecting Kyoto was a mistake but, ironically, I think Dubya’s rejection of it was a rare act of political courage. He could have simply let it go on to the Senate, where it would have been rejected.
One already exists. It is to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. Of course, we might be too far gone already, but would it not be prudent to try, just in case?
Your references to models are all very well, but the whole point is that there are simply too many variables to be modelled accurately. It is possible that no substantial change will occur. It is also possible that the Gulf Stream will turn itself off and cause a global catastrophe. Surely the way to proceed is to at least encourage frugality?
Why is it that the average American uses so much more energy than, say, the average Swede? I detect not just a reluctance but an outright hostility from Americans towards energy-saving measures. This, surely, is only an attitude?
Nope. You are (sadly) probably right that there is an “attitude” in the US against energy frugality (note those freaking SUVs), but there are also very real and practical differences between the US and Sweden that cause increased energy usage in the US.
The first is size. The large size of the US makes long-distance mass transit untenable. Hence, more need for cars.
The second is climatic variation. The differences between the climate of the north and south of the US mean that there is a need for air conditioning (be it heating or cooling) in at least some part of the country year-round. Sweden needs to expend energy on this for only part of the year.
I’m sure there are other practical differences of which I am unaware.
Well let’s see. When the Swedes want to travel from the west side of Sweden to the east side how many miles must they go? How much of Sweden experiences temperatures of over 90 degrees for 3 months out of the year?
Very well, Sua, howbout the average European? Mass transit throughout Europe is beautifully easy (except British trains!). Also, the general feeling one gets here is that air-conditioning for cooling (which I understand is far more energy intensive than heating) is not essential, merely an environmentally irresponsible profligacy.
Um, that wasn’t melodrama; it’s a fact - people in the US die from lack of air conditioning. If Greeks and Spaniards also die due to lack of air conditioning, then air conditioning is also essential in those countries.
Sua, you misread what I said. I did not claim that the major change in political climate or science occurred in the time between the sense of the Senate vote and the signing of the protocol. I claimed that it has occurred between that vote and now.
I disagree that this took political courage. For one thing, politically, Bush was in a much better position to get it ratified than Clinton. If Clinton had tried, most of the Reps would have been dead-set against it. However, if Bush supported it, he probably would have gotten most of the Democrats and at least some of his own party on his side. I don’t know if he could have rounded up enough votes for ratification but, even if not, he could have then proposed an alternative with some teeth in it like McCain and Lieberman have. That would have been a demonstration of political courage.
jshore, the “political courage” to which I refer is the fact that Dubya was opposed to Kyoto. He could have gotten the result that he wanted - US withdrawal from Kyoto - and let the Senate take the heat for it. Instead he did it himself.
In any event, I seriously doubt that Dubya could have gotten 51 senators to change their mind (well, probably more like 40, with the changes in Senate composition due to the intervening elections). But that, I acknowledge, is unproveable.
::sigh:: If you may recall, we started this little tet-a-tet by comparing Sweden with the US.
But in any event, Greece and Spain will still use less energy than the US because, while they need air conditioning, they don’t have the climatic variation ('cause they’re a lot smaller) that would require them to also use as much heating in the winter.
I’m really not sure why we are having this fight. As I agreed with you at the beginning, part of America’s excess energy use is due to attitudes within the US. Could you also acknowledge that part of it is also due to practical conditions within the US? Or do I have to spend an absurd part of this day researching comparative temperature variation, cost per mile of railway right-of-ways, etc?
That is not a balanced news article but rather a diatribe against Kyoto. A more balanced report on the same thing was given above in the link by furt. A few things to note from that article:
(1) The EU is still 2.3% below its 1990 emission levels. [It needs to get down to something like 8% below by 2012.] By contrast, the U.S. is something on the order of 14% above our 1990 emission levels.
(2) While it is a concern that emissions have gone in the wrong direction in the last couple of years, it is still too early to make definitive predictions of how things will turn out for the EU. After all, many people were predicting that Kyoto itself would never be ratified by enough countries to come into force even before the U.S. rejected it. (After the Bush rejected it, even many pro-Kyoto folks were pretty pessimistic that it would be come into force.) Yet now, it is believed likely to come into force. (It is just waiting on Russia’s ratification now.) One of the strategies of anti-Kyoto folks is to jump on any instance of rejection of the protocol, increase in emissions, … to say “the protocol is dead”, “noone ever wanted it anyway and was just waiting for an excuse by having the U.S. reject it”, … A very successful strategy if you want something to die is to jump on any setback as indicating its likely death, thus trying to create an aura of inevitability.
Well, I suppose that if you set the bar low enough, you can call it “political courage”. My guess is that the political calculation was more complicated than that. For example, if he had sent it to the Senate and it had been rejected, he would have still gotten some heat for clearly just trying to get it killed rather than supporting it. He would have also allowed the Senate more control of the issue and, while rejecting Kyoto, they might have come up with a more serious alternative than the BS-policy he did by keeping the ball in his court. Furthermore, by getting out of the negotiations while they were still going on, he sort of guaranteed that things wouldn’t go “badly” for his point of view…i.e., that there wouldn’t be enough concessions made to the U.S. so that the treaty would be viewed more sympathetically. (He may have actually hoped that Kyoto would unravel altogether internationally once he had rejected it.) Finally, I think the treaty had become a big issue in right wing political circles so he probably calculated that this outright rejection would do good things for him with his political base (more than it would harm him because of people who would likely see through a strategy of having the Senate kill it for him).
So, what you call “political courage”, I would call a hard-headed political calculation that likely had absolutely nothing to do with courage.
Apologies, Sua. Yes, I should have compared Swedes to, say, Dakotans, or something.
Yes, also, there are practical differences. However, my point was that the physical and climatic differences, and I am not convinced there are any significant differences at all in this respect, simply cannot explain the difference in energy use between the US and Europe as a whole. The practical differences, such as they are, appear to me to stem from the “attitude”, eg poor town planning and lack of government investment in railways, inappropriate chioces of building materials etc. As for “throwawayism” and car size, don’t even get me started!
My guess is that the political calculation was more complicated than that. For example, if he had sent it to the Senate and it had been rejected, he would have still gotten some heat for clearly just trying to get it killed rather than supporting it. He would have also allowed the Senate more control of the issue and, while rejecting Kyoto, they might have come up with a more serious alternative than the BS-policy he did by keeping the ball in his court. Furthermore, by getting out of the negotiations while they were still going on, he sort of guaranteed that things wouldn’t go “badly” for his point of view…i.e., that there wouldn’t be enough concessions made to the U.S. so that the treaty would be viewed more sympathetically. (He may have actually hoped that Kyoto would unravel altogether internationally once he had rejected it.) Finally, I think the treaty had become a big issue in right wing political circles so he probably calculated that this outright rejection would do good things for him with his political base (more than it would harm him because of people who would likely see through a strategy of having the Senate kill it for him).