Transcript Global - Warming Briefing | |
| June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here | |
BURNETT |
Thank you, Fran. Moving on, now to talk about the economic hardship on business is Karen Kerrigan, president of the Small Business Survival Committee, a nationwide nonprofit, nonpartisan small business advocacy organization. As head of SBSC, Ms. Kerrigan fights against flawed and unnecessary government regulation and taxation on America's small businesses. Ms. Kerrigan also serves as president of the small business survival foundation, a research and education organization that studies the impact of global government policies on entrepreneurship and economic growth. Ms. Kerrigan has appeared on numerous national television networks including CSPAN, CNN, CNBC, CBN, and her work has been cited in Investors Business Daily, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Times, and the Washington Post, among others. I now present Karen Kerrigan. |
KAREN KERRIGAN |
Thank you very much for that kind introduction, and I'd also like to thank the National Center for Policy Analysis for having this very important briefing this morning. I think it's extremely critical that we continue to have these types of forums to educate the American public about the current course of negotiations, and where the Clinton Administration is taking our country in terms of this policy. I believe I can speak with a relative degree of certainty that the consensus within the business community is that the Clinton Administration's approach in policy to global warming is indeed, in the words of the Honorable Mr. John Dingell, badly conceived and poorly executed. There is widespread agreement that in order to meet the binding and targeted CO2 emission levels in the proposed treaty, and to properly enforce these requirements at an international level, that some type of new taxes and stringent regulatory measures are most certainly going to be imposed on business. Increased taxes on gas, utilities, and other forms of energy, the application of a carbon tax as has been discussed, and other options being considered by our government, for example, increasing CAFE standards will drastically increase business costs while decreasing efficiency and profit margins of many businesses, and that assumes, of course, that you're a business that has a profit. For many businesses, especially energy intensive small businesses with slim profit margins, these new added costs will surely push many businesses into early collapse. For those businesses where transportation and utility costs are the most burdensome, any option being considered by our government to reduce CO2 emissions will especially be difficult from a cost perspective. Although President Clinton has promised a full economic impact statement of the treaty, one which was supposed to be provided to the U.S. Congress and the American public by the end of last year, the administration has yet to produce one. But based on the findings of a leaked Department of Energy study conducted by Argon National Laboratory, it is easy to understand why the administration is eager to avoid this important and critical discussion about the treaty. As Fran mentioned, Argon found that six energy-intensive industries would be substantially impacted, if not devastated, by the current course of treaty negotiations. Those industries include chemicals, petroleum refining, paper and allied products, iron and steel, aluminum, and cement. Private studies by prominent economists also detail the harsh realities of the treaty. Dr. Lawrence Horwitz of DRI McGraw-Hill found that a $100 per ton carbon tax which could maybe lower emission levels to near 1990 levels would cost the American economy $203 billion each year. In human terms, that amounts to 520,000 lost jobs each year over a 15 year period. A $200- a-ton tax to ensure CO2 emission levels below 1990 amounts to $350 billion a year in reduced production of goods and services, or 1.1 million jobs lost per year over a 15 year period. Now, in respect to the new regulations imposed on businesses in order to comply with the mandated CO2 reductions, needless to say, we envision a bureaucratic nightmare. Now consider the following. With this U.N. controlled effort, an international agency would be established and given power to punish business and governments and other organizations that fail to meet targets. And we are just dying to know how the U.S. would establish and control this complicated national accounting of man-made CO2. Just how would the national accounting of global warming emissions, which will be more warmly known as hot air headquarters, determine whether a tree was absorbing naturally occurring or man-made CO2. And what happens when or if the local pizza parlor is charged with cheating on its CO2 budget? And we can only begin to imagine the type and volumes of paperwork required of both national and international bureaucrats. Because the draft proposal of the treaty hands over international compliance to a yet to be defined multilateral secretariat, with full power to penalize nations that fail to achieve their binding CO2 reductions, our economic fate would essentially be placed in the hands of a global environmental police force. The U.S. would be relegated to only one of a number of votes determining whether nations are complying and sanctions for those who don't. And of course, that's far weaker than our standing in the U.N. Security Council where we hold permanent veto power over measures conflicting with U.S. interest. But what has to be the most foolish and probably inexcusable aspect of the entire treaty, as Mr. Trisco points out, is the fact that the U.S. is proposing to impose these harsh mandates on itself while countries like China and Mexico and other current and emerging international global competitors have decided to sit this little deal out. Now, if a trained psychologist were to examine this treaty, he or she would probably say that the U.S. is exhibiting classic, self- destructive co-dependent dysfunctional behavior. This highly controversial aspect of the treaty would put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage by subjecting Americans to stringent and precise CO2 reductions while emissions in countries like China and India go unimpeded. The proposal sets no defined reductions for so-called developing countries which already have lower labor and production costs. The result is a no-brainer. Business and industry, those who can afford to, will move off-shore. With industry go jobs, and in this case lots of them. The unilateral approach makes little environmental sense because it's universally acknowledged that the CO2 emission increases of countries like China and others will far exceed those of so-called developed countries and indeed, as has been mentioned, may overwhelm whatever CO2 mitigation efforts may be undertaking by the U.S. and other nations. For example, placing restraints on U.S. electricity generation when coal-fired electricity for China's 1.2 billion citizens goes unabated, amounts to a mere act of futility. From a business perspective, from a worker perspective, from a consumer perspective, the current course of U.S. negotiations us a very serious issue. Based on the fact the scientific community is in disagreement on the issue, and even scientists who endorse the theory of global warming say we can wait until the science firms up before embarking on such drastic action. We believe that the Clinton Administration can afford to take a go-slow approach as well, especially in light of the fact that the administration has yet to produce the most basic of information about the business and worker and other economic impact of its current global climate change policy. Thank you.
|