Kyoto Koolaid

I have never been able to understand the “obsession with the Kyoto protocol” from those on the left of the political spectrum. They paint it as the most logical and effective way for the world to reduce its greenhouse gasses, thus combating global warming, but as soon as you start challenging their arguments, you are treated as an uneducated and mis-informed individual and almost immediately get accused of being "in the pocket of the oil companies" "not caring for the environment" and referred to as a "global warming denier"

I came across a post in the Conservative Hipsters blog titled, Rethinking Kyoto, in which he noted the pollution on a visit to China and when he questioned the effectiveness of the Kyoto protocol without involving China, a commenter gave the following response:

...You also misunderstand Kyoto. It was never intended to fix global warming, merely to get the developed industrialized world committed to taking the first concrete steps to curbing emissions. This has to begin somewhere, surely you can grasp that....

Well, if it is not intended to fix global warming, then we should all forget about implementing the protocol then, since it will be very costly to our economy, right? Shouldn't the first concrete steps to curbing emissions involve "all" of the major polluters?

Recently I bumped into a friend who is an ardent supporter of the Kyoto protocol and a member of one of the other opposition parties. I asked him point blank, “Why do you support the Kyoto protocol?” He gave me the usual speal about the world reducing greenhouse gasses, rising sea levels, flooding and how much of the world was not going to be habitable in 50 years.

It was pretty much the same hysteria expressed in Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. But unfortunately for Mr. Gore, while he is urging Americans and others to conserve and to save the world, he and others like him are not practising what they preach. His household is consuming more than 20 times the electricity consumed by an average American household.

When other prominent Kyoto activists are pressed on why they are not personally trying to reduce their own carbon footprints, many of them give the excuse of purchasing carbon offset, which in effect allows them to continue their way of life without making any sacrifices for what they supposedly believe in. Many of these activists "talk green", but their lifestyles and behaviour are anything but green, as observed in the article by Steven Milloy below.

The Greenest Hypocrites Of 2007

This is what I am getting to. Not everyone is required to make the necessary sacrifices, only the select few, who can buy their way out of implementing any meaningful changes, which is why the Kyoto protocol will never work.

I then asked my friend, if the global warming was such a big problem and would affect the world in the way he described, why then would the Kyoto protocol place binding targets on only 35 of the 129 countries that signed the agreement and exclude major CO2 emitters such as India, China, Russia, etc.

I advised him that the CO2 emissions produced by those excluded countries would easily surpass the CO2 emissions reductions of countries like Canada and the EU if they were to achieve their targets, so in effect would negate billions of dollars in expenses and taxes that the tax payers of the industrialized countries would have to pay to achieve these targets. I asked him that of global warming was such a big problem as described, then why not have binding targets on “all of the major CO2 emitters, including China and India”

He about lost it at that point and started saying that the industrialized countries were the ones who created the problem and that they should fix it. He said that countries like China and India should be given the same opportunity to develop their economy as those countries in the west.

So now he has abandoned the most logical principle of solving a "worldwide problem". If this problem affects the whole world, then "all the countries of the world" need to take steps to resolve it. When we had world war 2 in the 1930's and 1940's, countries who agreed to participate with the allies were not given exemptions from supplying troops.

I then asked him how prepared was he and his family to make the sacrifices necessary for Canada to go 6% below the 1990 emission level? When I advised him that if Canada got rid of its entire manufacturing sector, got rid of air traffic, took all the cars off the road, it still would not be able to achieve its target he really got agitated and started talking about how Canada could achieve its target by buying carbon credits and developing new technologies.

I then pointed out to him that under the present Kyoto protocol, worldwide CO2 emissions would increase, rather than decrease and the carbon credit system would only facilitate money being paid to third world countries, which would have no incentive to reduce their emissions. I advised him that any reduction in manufacturing and economic activity in Canada and the industrialized world would be replaced by manufacturing and economic activity in China and other developing countries, thus negating any positive effect. So in effect, Kyoto was just a scheme designed to transfer wealth from richer countries to poorer countries.

You definitely see where this argument was going. In the beginning it was about how the world was in danger and how the world needed to reduce its CO2 emissions, but as soon as you question the mechanisms of the Kyoto protocol in achieving this, you start getting ridiculous arguments.

It was obvious to me that the protocol in its present form would not work and would cause unnecessary hardships on the citizens of our country if implemented. For that observation, I was accused of supporting the “oil companies” by not going along with his line of thinking. And that seems to be the problem with a lot of supporters of the Kyoto protocol. They have just not thought it through.