Bush's growth and tech-based alternative to Kyoto

(1) The Kyoto Treaty was always a flawed treaty.  It failed to cover developing nations – who will account for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 - and it also risked a negative impact on economic growth.  In that regard Kyoto was a classic case of tomato environmentalism - it started off looking ‘green’ but has ended up producing 'red-coloured' bigger state solutions.  The regulatory ethos, hardwired into the Kyoto treaty, explains much of the sclerosis bedeviling Kyoto’s main champions - the inflexible eurozone nations.

(2) Six of the world’s most important economies - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States  - have formed the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development to tackle environmental problems.  The Partnership believes that economic growth and technological investment are much more likely to solve environmental problems than Kyoto’s emphasis on limits on growth and energy use.

(3) The Partnership is yet another illustration of US exceptionalism.  George W Bush built a 'coalition of the willing' – outside of the UN – for the war in Iraq, for tsunami relief and now again, with the APPCD.  Tony Blair was not consulted on the APPCD.

(4) Many suspect that President Bush’s search for new energy technologies is motivated by a strategic desire to avoid long-term dependence on the Middle East as much as by environmental concerns.

(5) Discussing the APPCD a White House factsheet noted the vital need to combine growth and environmental objectives:

”The best way to help nations develop, while limiting pollution and improving public health, is to promote technologies for generating energy that is clean, affordable, and secure. Some have suggested the best solution to environmental challenges and climate change is to oppose development and put the world on an energy diet. But today, about two billion people have no access to any form of modern energy - and blocking that access would condemn them to permanent poverty, disease, high infant mortality, polluted water, and polluted air.”

(6) The clean technologies that will be the focus of the Partnership include:

• Energy Efficiency
• Methane Capture and Use
• Rural/Village Energy Systems
• Clean Coal
• Civilian Nuclear Power
• Advanced Transportation
• Liquefied Natural Gas
• Geothermal
• Building and Home Construction/Operation
• Bioenergy
• Agriculture/Forestry
• Hydropower/Wind Power/Solar Power.

(7) Although the Bush adminstration remains sceptical about the science behind human-induced climate change it recognises that action against greenhouse emissions can support other worthwhile environmental objectives.  To that end it has spent about $10 billion on research into new environmental technologies since 2001.  FutureGen, a project to convert coal into gas and store carbon emissions underground, has received $1bn. A five-year hydrogen car project has been allocated $2bn.

(8) It would be unfair to say that Kyoto got it completely wrong. Defenders of Kyoto rightly note that some sort of regulatory impulse can be necessary to encourage businesses and householders to adopt clean technologies.

(9) Michael Hanlon, Daily Mail science editor, is a big advocate of tech-based greenery.  The ‘green potential’ of some technologies may be difficult for non-scientists to appreciate but Mr Hanlon focused on the science behind ‘smart domestic appliances’ in an article for The Spectator:

“All over the world scientists are working on brilliant ways to help us save the planet. Only last month scientific magazines reported the invention of ‘smart fridges’ and other electrical appliances which can respond instantly to fluctuations in the national grid. This means that they reduce their energy consumption at peak times. The overall effect, if we all owned smart fridges and air conditioners, would be a massive reduction in CO2 emissions.”

(10) The Asia Pacific Partnership is another sign of a shift of global power away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific arena.  That geographical shift is also marked by a movement towards growth and technology-based solutions to global problems such as African poverty and environmental pollution.  Development objectives were absent from the Kyoto accord and at July’s Gleneagles summit no serious attempt was made to connect Tony Blair’s poverty and climate change objectives.  In reality the Kyoto accord’s anti-growth stipulations would undermine the world economy’s role in lifting poor nations out of poverty.

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Comments

[Yonder]

Yes we do need technological solutions to climate change, but even if the Partnership does produce new technology (and as things stand it doesn’t guarantee a single cent for research and development) those solutions need to be implemented. Unless by some happy circumstance the new tech produces energy at well below the price achieved by conventional coal and gas plant, then it won’t be implemented unless there is some sort of legally binding framework to tip the market in favour of clean energy. Kyoto was a flawed attempt to create such a framework, the Asia Pacific Partnership doesn’t even try. I’m afraid that a degree of regulation is necessary – as it always is when government acts to price externalities into market mechanisms. The market can deliver the right outcomes, but it can’t always deliver the right incentives.

[Editor]

Fair comment Yonder - hence my point (8).

[Peter]

Good idea except always have a problem including China in something due to their still occupation of Tibet. Also while pro Nuclear as shown by both Iran and North Korea there hasn't been much success in terms of controlling raw materials when countries want to make a bomb which has to be done at the start point of any action plan on energy resources?

[wasp]

There are reasons why developing countries weren't included if you go to somewhere like India then there are power failures about 6 times a day meaning that every business, home or utility of any reasonable size has a huge diesel powered generator.

Attempting to introduce Kyoto syle limits on carbon emissions in a society containing massive private levels of emissions would be impossible.