The price of global warming remedies

By Joseph Perkins Copyright 1998 San Diego Union-Tribune November 6, 1998

I have just finished reading a fascinating collection of essays, "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field," by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Kerry Mullis. Among the La Jolla-based author's more provocative conclusions is that the whole global warming scare is hype and that the scientific evidence is far from convincing that human consumption of fossil fuels is overheating the planet.

But Mullis goes one step further. He says that the scientists who've climbed aboard the global warming bandwagon have done so because they have visions of grants and fellowships dancing in their wee little egg heads.

"It becomes financially unuseful for scientists to question it," said Mullis, in a recent interview with my colleague, Union-Tribune science writer David Graham. "Science is the way they make their living, make their payments," the Nobel laureate continued, "and they don't want that to disappear.

"But," says Mullis, "scientists are obliged to re-examine their jobs and ask: Is my hypothesis wrong?"

Mullis' writings, his subsequent interview, comes to mind as delegates representing more than 150 nations are gathered in Buenos Aires to thrash out details of the global warming treaty they negotiated 11 months ago in Kyoto, Japan.

The so-called Kyoto Protocol would require the United States to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012, which would amount to a real reduction of 30 percent when taking into account growth in the nation's economy and population.

Meanwhile, more than 130 nations that enthusiastically agreed to the global warming treaty would be held to no emissions reductions whatsoever, including such "developing" countries as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia, which are expected to experience the greatest growth in greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades.

This is borne out in a report by David Ridenour for the National Center for Public Policy Research. He estimates that Indonesia's emissions grew by 40 percent between 1990 and 1995, India's by 28 percent over the same span, China's 27 percent and Brazil's percent.

All of which leads Ridenour to conclude that over the next 20 years, " developing nations will be responsible for as much as 60 percent of all greenhouse emissions."

Yet these developing nations adamantly refuse to be bound by any emissions reductions, even as they endorse painful emissions cuts for the United States over the next 15 years, which, if put in place, would have a staggering effect on the U.S. economy.

Indeed, when I returned from last December's global warming summit in Kyoto, I asked Harvard economist Robert Stavins to estimate the cost of U.S. compliance with the treaty. He said that the government would have to dramatically increase the cost of energy to drive down demand by as much as 40 percent.

That would mean that the cost of petroleum and natural gas would double. The cost of coal -- which generates two-thirds of the nation's electricity -- would quadruple. All told, said Stavins, this would amount to a $200-billion annual toll on the U.S. economy.

It hardly makes sense for the United States to move full speed ahead with Draconian cuts in greenhouse gas emissions when, as Mullis notes, there is no scientific proof that human activity is overheating the planet; when, as Ridenour reports, more than half the growth in greenhouse gas emissions will come from developing countries (exempted from the global warming treaty); and when, as Stavins, estimates, full compliance with the Kyoto Protocol will drive up domestic energy prices and suck $200 billion a year out of the economy.

So the object for the U.S. delegation to Buenos Aires ought to be threefold: To encourage more scientific investigations as to whether global warming truly is occurring, and if human activity is responsible, to insist that, if the U.S. is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions (and not by a real 30 percent by 2012) that developing nations agree to meaningful targets as well, and that the Buenos Aires delegates agree to market-based mechanisms (like international buying and selling of emissions credits) that would allow the United States to meet its emissions target (if the Senate ultimately ratified the global warming treaty) as painlessly and economically as possible.

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