REVIEW & OUTLOOK

More Hot Air on Kyoto

"I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," said a dismissive President Bush yesterday, taking the opportunity to reiterate his opposition to the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Too bad the bureaucracy didn't show its report to Mr. Bush before it released it to everyone else.

The President was doing damage control on a report on climate change that his Environmental Protection Agency sent to the United Nations Friday. In what was widely hyped as a reversal of the Administration's policy, the report warned that global warming was in fact occurring and admitted that recent temperature changes were "likely due mostly to human activities." Aha, said the greens, "Gotcha."

Having plowed our way through some of the 268 pages, we can see how, without too much squinting, the report might be interpreted as a greater acceptance of the whole global warming doctrine, even if the White House now says it hasn't changed its position. EPA boss Christie Whitman sure has a knack for blind-siding her boss; someone should inform her that Al Gore lost the election.

Whether it was sloppy language, a runaway EPA, or truly a change in position, you'd think the Administration would know better than to hand the green lobby such an easy target. In February, when Mr. Bush laid out a voluntary plan for reducing greenouse emissions, environmentalists wrote it off as "window dressing." They have now seized on the EPA report as an "admission" and are renewing calls for Kyoto.

The good news in all this is that the Administration truly appears determined to stay out of Kyoto. "The Kyoto treaty would severely damage the United States economy, and I don't accept that," Mr. Bush said yesterday. Though you'd never know it from the media reports, the most important part of the EPA tome was that it dared to say the great unsaid: Even if you do believe in global warming, there's only so much that can be done. In other words, Kyoto won't help.

Kyoto's ineffectiveness remains the great dirty secret of the treaty, one its creators have been eager to hide under piles of statistics. Only a few brave souls have been willing to root through the numbers, including Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist." Mr. Lomborg's opinion carries special credibility since he is a former Greenpeace member and a devoted environmentalist.

He has been making the rounds with the nearby graph, which shows changes in the world's temperature -- both with Kyoto and without -- over the next 100 years. The graph, the work of a noted global-warming researcher, shows that if nations religiously follow the treaty, we will see an expected increase of temperature of 1.92 degrees Celsius by 2100. If we don't follow Kyoto, we will get hit by the same increase by 2094. In other words, Kyoto saves us six whole years.

That the whole world is in a huff over six piddling years might be funny, if it weren't for the very serious costs of the piddling. Starting in 2010, the world will pay up to $350 billion a year to comply with Kyoto. By 2050, as the treaty targets become harder to reach, the cost will skyrocket to 2% of OECD countries' GDP, or $900 billion a year. As it turns out, $900 billion is also about what the effects of global warming are estimated to cost nations by 2100. In other words, as Mr. Lomborg puts it, the world will pay for global warming twice.

To put all this in perspective, Mr. Lomborg has noted that for a one-time cost of $200 billion (the approximate cost of complying with Kyoto in 2010 alone), developed nations could today provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every single human on Earth -- saving two million lives a year.

As the EPA report notes, not all global warming is bad. Warmer weather will result in fewer cold-related deaths, longer agricultural growing seasons and even increased precipitation. Chances are that new forms of energy will replace fossil fuels long before Kyoto really kicks in.

All of this is further reason why Mr. Bush would be smart to stick with his current voluntary program. Whatever hot air rises from the EPA report, what really matters is the Administration's actions. So far, those actions have been the right ones.

Updated June 5, 2002

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