Transcript - Global Warming Briefing | |
| June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here | |
BURNETT |
Thank you. I am told that our next speaker has arrived. How are you today? Now that we've discussed some of the science, we thought it would be a good idea at the NCPA if we also discussed -- well, let's say that we're going to move forward to a discussion of the proposed climate change treaty because the Clinton Administration is doing so. What would the impacts of these proposed treaties be upon the economy. And we have several good speakers to address those issues, both from labor, from industry, and from the consumer's point of view. Our first speaker is Eugene Trisko. He's an attorney who represents the United Mine Workers of America in the AFL- CIO on environmental matters ranging from the implementation of the Clean Air Act, to global climate change. Mr. Trisko has a B.A. in Economics from New York University and a J.D. Degree from Georgetown University Law Center. On behalf of the UMWA, Mr. Trisko has participated as an NGO in all of the U.N. negotiating sessions subsequent to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where global warming really took off, so to speak, including the first Conference of the Parties to the Treaty (COP) in Berlin 1995, and all the meetings of the ad hoc group on the Berlin mandate, which you'll hear more about. He is principal author of the UMWA's climate policy position papers, and is involved in the development of economic analyses of the impacts of carbon reduction policies. So now I present to you to discuss the impact on jobs, Eugene Trisko.
| EUGENE TRISKO |
Thank you very much, Sterling. It's a pleasure to be with you today. I had a couple of handouts I left outside. I believe they've been distributed. I bought about 50 or so and I think some additional ones are being made. If you haven't received one, please make a note to ask the conference sponsors to provide you with a set. They're two documents, one called from Rio to Kyoto. It's a UMWAB COA labor management coalition briefing paper of 1997, and second, a compilation of American Labor Unions resolutions on climate change from the executive council of the AFL-CIO transportation trades department and also the industrial union department of the AFL-CIO. And I have some overheads if we have an overhead projector. You may have to locate that as best you can. Just bring it down a little bit on the projector. This is a chart that summarizes potential job loss in the United States associated with the imposition of a carbon tax for the reduction of CO2 emissions. I'd just like to leave this up for a moment to serve as an elite motif, if you will, for the statement of the AFL-CIO executive council that was issued February 20, 1997, in Los Angeles, and let me read in part that that document states. We believe the parties to the Rio Treaty made a fundamental error when they agreed to negotiate legally binding carbon restrictions on the United States and other industrialized countries while simultaneously agreeing to exempt high growth developing countries like China, Mexico, Brazil, and Korea from any new carbon reduction commitments. As much as 60 percent of global carbon emissions are expected to come from such countries in the next few decades, with China becoming the single largest emitter in the near future. The exclusion of new commitments by developing nations under the Berlin mandate will create a powerful incentive for Transnational corporations to export jobs, capital, and pollution, and will do little or nothing to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon. Such an uneven playing field will cause the loss of high paying U.S. jobs in the mining, manufacturing, transport, and other sectors. The AFL-CIO executive council urges that in the ongoing negotiations to amend the Rio Treaty on climate change, the United States insists upon the incorporation of appropriate commitments from all nations to reduce carbon emissions and seek a reduction schedule compatible with the urgent need to avoid unfair and unnecessary job loss in developed economies. The president should not accept, and the congress should not ratify any amendment or protocol that does not meet these standards. The graph on the screen depicts an estimated loss of 1.7 million American jobs by the year 2010, about a million jobs in manufacturing industries. The data for this study were produced in 1992 following the initial Rio Treaty. These data represent the last time that the government of the United States has chosen to provide the American public with an estimate of the potential impacts on American jobs of a policy to reduce carbon emissions. This is the most recent information you have, 1992. Now, we understand that more analyses that have been in the works now for, well, going on 18 months will be released in due course. Our expectation is that the job impact data provided by more recent studies, when they are released by the administration, will not be inconsistent with these figures. Next chart: Now, last year, the administration asked DRI, Inc., to run its energy model to estimate the impact on the economy, GDP in particular and other economic variables of a variety of carbon reduction policies, ranging from stabilization at 1990 levels -- that's the red square on this plot, and then a series of percentage reductions from 1990 levels, 5 percent by 2010, 20 percent by 2005. That's the so- called oasis protocol, and so forth. This is a summary of the overall GDP effects of the study that was released in June 1996. The indication at that time was that these policies could reduce overall GDP in a range of approximately $100-300 billion dollars annually, and that's expressed in 1987 dollars. Most of us don't remember 1987 dollars clearly, but if you apply a GDP inflation to that, it's a factor of about 1.3. Next chart: This chart simply takes the GDP effects that we looked at before, applies the GDP inflator of a factor of 1.3 to bring it up to 1995 dollars, and then divides the GDP effect by the U.S. population projected by the Bureau of the Census going out to the year 2015. This measures, in effect, the impact that the reduction of the production of goods and services on the part of the average American. And this is implicit in what the administration released in its June 1996 workshop analyses. And what we're looking at here is a range of loss of goods and services, lost production of goods and services of approximately $500-$1,500 dollars per capita in the United States across this range of policy options. Now, I'd like to just briefly give you a different way of thinking about this issue. You recall that the Rio Treaty calls for parties to the treaty to agree to an atmospheric stabilization target for greenhouse emissions that will prevent so-called dangerous, and that was never defined, so- called dangerous anthropogenic interference with global climate. The basic negotiating posture that the United States now finds itself in, following the Berlin mandate in which we agreed that developing countries would not need to undertake new commitments under the treaty, is that we are now negotiating for percentage reductions of our carbon emissions, leaving roughly half of the control equation off of the table without first establishing what the target reduction, the target concentration level ultimately called for under the treaty may be. We are setting benchmarks for our own emission reduction that are independent of the subsequent determination of atmospheric concentration targets. That is terribly important because it means that when push finally does come to shove in this process, and the rest of the world, if they ever do, joins us at the table to vote on an appropriate stabilization target, that we indeed may have shot ourselves in the foot economically by picking a premature target and reduction timetable that is inconsistent with the one ultimately agreed upon by parties to the convention. Now, this first chart simply shows you that levels of carbon emissions allowable over the course of the next hundred years under different stabilization targets, that target has not been picked at this point. This is a range of 450, 550, and 650 parts per million. Most of the protocol proposals on the table today in Bohn are consistent with industrial countries meeting a 450 ppm atmospheric concentration target. However, let's take a look at the next chart. Actions by the industrial countries alone cannot achieve any of the target concentrations that are now frequently discussed within the scientific community, this range of 450-650 ppm. This chart, which is based upon state of the art forecasting of emissions growth by developed and developing countries, this chart looks at the reductions that would be necessary by industrial countries in order to achieve those atmospheric targets -- 450, 550, and 650. And what's important in looking at this chart, what's important is an understanding that in order to approach those targets, emissions from industrial countries have to go below zero. We have to more than disappear from the map to achieve any of them -- obviously, an algebraic impossibility. Next one: This is where the rubber hits the road. This chart depicts the rate of allowable growth of emissions for developing countries. The 50 percent of emissions that aren't now at the table bargaining with us, and refusing to bargain over the reduction of their own rates of growth. This indicates how much time would be available under these alternative emission targets -- 450, 550, 650 -- for developing countries to continue to grow before they get to the point at which they must join in collectively a global effort to address global climate change, which is what we thought we were in when Rio was negotiated in 1992. Well, what this tells us is that developing countries, as a matter of self-interest, would never agree to a target of 450. Why Because their reductions would have to begin essentially now. They'd be on the same target, the same time table that we are proposing to commit ourselves to. Look out at the 550 ppm line. That's the middle red line. Developing countries at 550 would have approximately another 40 years to continue to grow before they, too, would have to reduce their rates of emission growth and get on a declining trend. Look at 650, however. At a target of 650, developing countries would have roughly another 75 years, and there are some other projects here, as you can look at. This is the WRE series, which many regard as the most authoritative. But there are alternative versions of this chart. But no matter which one you look at, you reach the same conclusion that developing countries which also happen to control the majority of votes in this process, controlling the majority of votes in the United Nations, will not agree to a set of emission reductions that unduly constrain their own economic growth. That is why it was essential for the United States to agree in the Berlin mandate in order to allow this process to continue along the lines that it has to date, to let half of the world off the hook on this issue. Well, if and when they do decide to get on the hook, cast your vote with the majority and look very skeptically at any proposal that would bind the United States to a set of premature reductions that are not necessary in order to achieve the ultimate targets, and it will cost more than a million American jobs in the process. Thank you.
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