Global Warming Briefing

Transcript - Global Warming Briefing

June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here

BURNETT Thank you, Karen. Well, we've now discussed the science, where it stands, and we've looked at the impacts on consumers, workers, and businesses. We now move on to whether the treaty will, in fact, help the environment because this is what it's all about ultimately. And to discuss why the treaty isn't green is a friend and colleague of mine, Jonathan Adler. He's Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute where I worked at one time. I consider it the pre-eminent Washington based think tank, promoting free market solutions to environmental problems.
Mr. Adler is a frequent commentator on environmental issues on CNN, Nightline, NPR, as well as having published more than a hundred articles on environmental policy in leading newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Most recently he's the author of a very good book named Environmentalism At the Crossroads, Green Activism in America, published in 1995 by the Capital Research Center.

JONATHAN ADLER After hearing all the presentation so far, I hope I have a lot to add to the discussion. I think if we're going to characterize the treaty that is being discussed, that is being negotiated this summer, that it's all pain and no gain, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that not only will there be no environmental gain, the treaty could actually cause environmental damage and could preclude efforts to continue environmental improvements not only in the developed world, but more importantly, in developing countries. And we all know that the Clinton Administration has endorsed binding emission limits on the United States and other industrialized countries. That is the Berlin mandate they have agreed to, and that this summer they are negotiating on a document that they hope can be ratified, or that can be signed at the end of the year in Kyoto and then brought back here to be ratified by your bosses in the Senate and that that can put the United States on the course to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And as we know, or as we hear a lot of the time, that many of the world's countries agree that the United States should lead in this course, the United States should jump first, the United States should be the first country to demonstrate its commitment. Europe, we know that that's the attitude in many countries, you know, the developed world, since they're not being asked to do anything, it's certainly very easy for them as well to say please, United States, go ahead.
I would like to make one qualification, though, and that is there are a lot of countries that are concerned about the impacts, most notably Australia, countries that have refused to agree that they will sign a treaty in Kyoto, and some that may even refuse to sign any agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions altogether.
Now, hopefully when this treaty is signed, assuming that it will be, it will be brought to the Senate for ratification. And one comment that I would like to remind people of is that back in 1994, before some recent political developments, the Clinton Administration was looking at whether or not they could do a lot of the things they wanted to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, without even coming to the Senate, not even asking for a treaty to be ratified. In fact, there was a memo that the office of policy planning and evaluation at the EPA, looking at whether or not they could enact certain measures, including increasing cafe standards and imposing other restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions without going to Congress, and the conclusion of that memo was the administration has the authority to begin rule-making on its own without legislation. Hopefully, that is not a course this administration would take, and I trust that if it did, many members of the Senate and many of the offices represented here would try and do something about it.
And before we look at what the actual impact of the treaty is, I think we need to look at what its underlying assumptions are, because some of the assumptions of this treaty, quite frankly, defy credibility. They are just amazing. The first is that there is something fanciful about the idea that in 1997 we are going to design a treaty that's going to plan future energy use emissions 20, 30, 50, 100 years in the future. Dr. Balling pointed out that in the 1930s they were concerned about increases in temperature, and increased possible global warming caused by who knows what.
Imagine if we had tried to have this discussion in the 1930s. Think about what the world was like. Most roads were not paved, we certainly didn't have an Internet. We didn't have computers. Wires were still made from metals and not from fiber optics. The energy makeup and the industry makeup of this country and the world were remarkably different. Imagine 100 years ago. Imagine if we had tried to have this discussion in the 1890s and folks seriously sat down and said, we're going to figure out what energy use is going to be like in the United States in the 1990s. It's a good thing they didn't try, and I think we should think about that before we talk seriously, think seriously about a treaty that's trying to tell us what type of energy use we're going to have 20, 30, 100 years from now.
The second assumption is that any treaty could be enforceable. Several countries, including China, have made quite clear that they have their plans. China is one of the few nations left on the earth that does still believe that you can plan 20, 30, 40, 50 years out and they've made quite clear what their 20 year plan is with regard to their energy sources, that it's going to be Chinese coal, and there aren't any ifs, ands, or buts about it. We also know from international environmental treaties that are already in place that while the United States has a fairly good record of complying with those treaties, we can't say the same about much of the rest of the world.
We know about the Montreal protocol that phases out the use of chloroflourocarbons, but we also know that much of the developing world is going ahead with plans to implement or increase CFC production irrespective of what was agreed to international treaties. We also know that even countries that we like to think of as environmental good guys, and that even countries like Norway comply with only about half of the environmental treaties that they have signed.
I think we can all agree that signing a treaty that this country will comply with but the rest of the world won't, certainly won't accomplish anything, and certainly won't accomplish what it was meant to do.
The third assumption that we need to recognize, or we need to question is the idea that reductions are necessary now. Mr. Trisco showed a graph from some research done by Wigley et al. on emissions trends, and their studies show quite clearly that once we set a target, depending on what that target is, we can still allow emissions to go up in the near term and meet that target, and waiting until such time when other alternative energy sources are more advanced before we would have to get those reductions, and to quote from some of their findings that were published in nature, they said that you could not conclude from their results that an immediate reduction in emissions is required if we are to stabilize concentration.
So the idea even that we need to make greenhouse gas reductions now is not even an assumption that is based on, and Mr. Trisco pointed out, a lot of that depends on what our target is, and interestingly enough, we have a treaty that -- we're negotiating a treaty to reduce emissions, but we don't even know what that target is. We don't even know what the end point is.
We're running towards the goal line, but we have no idea where that goal line is, and I think most of us would agree that when we try and bind our country and our economy to commitments, we should have an idea of where we are going, and we should have an idea of how we will know when we get there, and we have not even reached that basic step.
Now, we do know some things about the treaty, though. We do know some things about whatever is signed at Kyoto, what it will do. We do know that it will have tremendous costs. As Fran pointed out, while the impacts of global warming may be speculative, the impacts of global warming policy are not, and that we could be talking in excess of 1.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in terms of the costs, in terms of the reductions in our economic well-being.
To put that in perspective, right now, this year, compliance with all environmental regulations combined, about 2.5 percent Gross Domestic Product. So we are talking about increasing the costs of environmental compliance by more than half in one step. And we also know that that part of the thing that the Berlin mandate does is it imposes restrictions on the developed world, but not the developing world. And the idea is that sometimes we're letting them off the hook, but I think before we come to that conclusion, we should think about what imposing restrictions on countries like the United States and Europe will do on the developing world. I think it's common sense that even if you are poor, you'd probably rather not have poor neighbors, and that when you impose restrictions on industrialized nations, you will increase the cost of capital goods, you will slow technological development, and you will restrict and contract the export markets that many developing nations depend upon.
They aren't let off the hook. They are going to get hit pretty hard, too. But what do the costs get us? Nothing. Assume that industrialized nations stabilized emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2010, and that by the year 2020, we cut emissions 10 percent further. Global emissions still increase at a rate of 2.6 percent a year. We don't get anything. And as Mr. Trisco pointed out on that one chart, we can go turn off all the lights, go crawl into a cave, emissions still continue to go up. The treaty does not do what it purports to do, which is reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if reducing greenhouse gas emissions was something we needed to do. And in fact, the treaty as currently designed, as the Department of Energy study, the study that I urge all of you to have your bosses encourage the Department of Energy to finally publish the study, that was done at Argonne National Lab.
The treaty as currently constructed could actually accelerate emissions. But why is that? One of the reasons is because we're imposing restrictions on the industrialized nations, nations that tend to be the more energy efficient, tend to use less energy per unit of output. But we're not controlling the developing world. So we're going to accelerate the migration of energy intensive industries from countries like this to countries like Bangladesh, to countries in Latin America, to countries in Asia and Africa. And because they are less energy efficient, because the amount of energy they use per unit of output is greater. To receive the same level of production, they are going to have to emit more. They are going to have to use more energy. And this is one of the conclusions that the draft Department of Energy study concluded. If you conclude that the assumed policy scenarios would not produce a reduction in global emissions, the emissions could actually increase, as production of energy intensive industrial products is relocated from the developed to less-developed countries, emissions are also redistributed. That's something we can't forget about.
One last point I'd like to make is what are some of the other environmental impacts. I think as we've heard today, there are a lot of reasons why we can question the idea that we need to reduce emissions now, that we need to be so concerned about what happened to the climate because there are still many unanswered questions.
But we do know slowing the rate of growth, slowing the rate of technological growth in the world will have real environmental consequence. And not just in this country, but most acutely in the Third World.
So the environmental concerns that most of the world deal with aren't the things that we hear about on the evening news, not the things that we read about in fund-raising appeals from the National Audobon Society or the Sierra Club, but are things that are very real. The problems like drinking water and sanitation. World Health Organization estimates that 3-5 million people per year die in the developing world because of lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Concerns about air quality both indoors and outdoors in the developing world, and concerns about malnutrition, about 1 million deaths from measles in the world every year, not in this country, mostly in the developing world, mostly due to people being malnourished.
And we hear that we should fear an increase in diseases in the developing world from global climate change, but we know diseases in the Third World correlate most with rates of economic development. Compare Singapore and Malaysia, the difference in malaria rates -- virtually nonexistent in Singapore, fairly prevalent in Malaysia, has nothing to do with the differences in climate, has everything to do with differences in economic development.
Research shows conclusively that increased wealth correlates with greater environmental concern and greater environmental performance. Reduced energy use per unit of output, reduced pollution per unit of output.....and we know that if we want the developing countries to have an environmental record similar to that in the United States, we can't be preventing them from growing. We have to be helping them grow. We should not force them on the same greenhouse road to serfdom this administration seems to want this country to embark upon.
And finally, we cannot forget that wealthier is healthier. When we slow down economic growth and we slow down economic productivity, it doesn't only mean we have less money to spend, it doesn't only mean we go to the movies less often or buy less expensive meals. It means that we can't spend money on things that improve our quality of life, the length of our lives, and the health of our lives.
It is estimated that a slow-down of economic growth in developed countries, between $7-12 million dollars results in a premature mortality. And look at the hundreds of billions of dollars we're talking about, the global warming policy we're seeing that the global warming policy could do a lot -- not only make us poorer, but to make us less healthy.
I'll close because I know that Sterling wants to open this to questions. We need to ask one last question -- what is driving this treaty? I know some of you may have seen the Washington Post on May 25, a cute little article by Ross Galvestan, Pulitzer Prize winning author. They didn't tell you what he won his Pulitzer Prize for -- it was writing about racial discrimination and housing in the 1970s. Important issues, but I'm not sure they qualify him to talk about global warming. He said that the scientific consensus then, all the things we're seeing in the world are caused by man-made emissions, by global warming. I assume that that article was sitting at the Washington Post for a couple of weeks before it was published because just knowing this earlier Science Magazine, perhaps the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal, published an article saying greenhouse forecasting is still cloudy, and it quoted one of the lead authors of a chapter in the IPCC report on attribution of climate change, whether or not we can blame human activity, and he said it's unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the chapter. I think the caveats are there. We say it quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution issue was a done deal.
It's not clear that the global warming treaty will do much to stop global warming emissions, it's not clear that we need a treaty to reduce global warming emissions, but it is clear that precipitous restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions will have real effects not only on our economic well-being, but also on the well-being of our families and on the environment itself. Thank you.
Next page...

Transcript - Global Warming Briefing
June 13, 1997 Global Warming - Program Agenda - click here
BURNETT	Thank you, Karen. Well, we've now discussed the science, where it stands, and we've looked at the impacts on consumers, workers, and businesses. We now move on to whether the treaty will, in fact, help the environment because this is what it's all about ultimately. And to discuss why the treaty isn't green is a friend and colleague of mine, Jonathan Adler. He's Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute where I worked at one time. I consider it the pre-eminent Washington based think tank, promoting free market solutions to environmental problems. Mr. Adler is a frequent commentator on environmental issues on CNN, Nightline, NPR, as well as having published more than a hundred articles on environmental policy in leading newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Most recently he's the author of a very good book named Environmentalism At the Crossroads, Green Activism in America, published in 1995 by the Capital Research Center.
JONATHAN ADLER	After hearing all the presentation so far, I hope I have a lot to add to the discussion. I think if we're going to characterize the treaty that is being discussed, that is being negotiated this summer, that it's all pain and no gain, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that not only will there be no environmental gain, the treaty could actually cause environmental damage and could preclude efforts to continue environmental improvements not only in the developed world, but more importantly, in developing countries. And we all know that the Clinton Administration has endorsed binding emission limits on the United States and other industrialized countries. That is the Berlin mandate they have agreed to, and that this summer they are negotiating on a document that they hope can be ratified, or that can be signed at the end of the year in Kyoto and then brought back here to be ratified by your bosses in the Senate and that that can put the United States on the course to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And as we know, or as we hear a lot of the time, that many of the world's countries agree that the United States should lead in this course, the United States should jump first, the United States should be the first country to demonstrate its commitment. Europe, we know that that's the attitude in many countries, you know, the developed world, since they're not being asked to do anything, it's certainly very easy for them as well to say please, United States, go ahead. I would like to make one qualification, though, and that is there are a lot of countries that are concerned about the impacts, most notably Australia, countries that have refused to agree that they will sign a treaty in Kyoto, and some that may even refuse to sign any agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions altogether. Now, hopefully when this treaty is signed, assuming that it will be, it will be brought to the Senate for ratification. And one comment that I would like to remind people of is that back in 1994, before some recent political developments, the Clinton Administration was looking at whether or not they could do a lot of the things they wanted to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, without even coming to the Senate, not even asking for a treaty to be ratified. In fact, there was a memo that the office of policy planning and evaluation at the EPA, looking at whether or not they could enact certain measures, including increasing cafe standards and imposing other restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions without going to Congress, and the conclusion of that memo was the administration has the authority to begin rule-making on its own without legislation. Hopefully, that is not a course this administration would take, and I trust that if it did, many members of the Senate and many of the offices represented here would try and do something about it. And before we look at what the actual impact of the treaty is, I think we need to look at what its underlying assumptions are, because some of the assumptions of this treaty, quite frankly, defy credibility. They are just amazing. The first is that there is something fanciful about the idea that in 1997 we are going to design a treaty that's going to plan future energy use emissions 20, 30, 50, 100 years in the future. Dr. Balling pointed out that in the 1930s they were concerned about increases in temperature, and increased possible global warming caused by who knows what. Imagine if we had tried to have this discussion in the 1930s. Think about what the world was like. Most roads were not paved, we certainly didn't have an Internet. We didn't have computers. Wires were still made from metals and not from fiber optics. The energy makeup and the industry makeup of this country and the world were remarkably different. Imagine 100 years ago. Imagine if we had tried to have this discussion in the 1890s and folks seriously sat down and said, we're going to figure out what energy use is going to be like in the United States in the 1990s. It's a good thing they didn't try, and I think we should think about that before we talk seriously, think seriously about a treaty that's trying to tell us what type of energy use we're going to have 20, 30, 100 years from now. The second assumption is that any treaty could be enforceable. Several countries, including China, have made quite clear that they have their plans. China is one of the few nations left on the earth that does still believe that you can plan 20, 30, 40, 50 years out and they've made quite clear what their 20 year plan is with regard to their energy sources, that it's going to be Chinese coal, and there aren't any ifs, ands, or buts about it. We also know from international environmental treaties that are already in place that while the United States has a fairly good record of complying with those treaties, we can't say the same about much of the rest of the world. We know about the Montreal protocol that phases out the use of chloroflourocarbons, but we also know that much of the developing world is going ahead with plans to implement or increase CFC production irrespective of what was agreed to international treaties. We also know that even countries that we like to think of as environmental good guys, and that even countries like Norway comply with only about half of the environmental treaties that they have signed. I think we can all agree that signing a treaty that this country will comply with but the rest of the world won't, certainly won't accomplish anything, and certainly won't accomplish what it was meant to do. The third assumption that we need to recognize, or we need to question is the idea that reductions are necessary now. Mr. Trisco showed a graph from some research done by Wigley et al. on emissions trends, and their studies show quite clearly that once we set a target, depending on what that target is, we can still allow emissions to go up in the near term and meet that target, and waiting until such time when other alternative energy sources are more advanced before we would have to get those reductions, and to quote from some of their findings that were published in nature, they said that you could not conclude from their results that an immediate reduction in emissions is required if we are to stabilize concentration. So the idea even that we need to make greenhouse gas reductions now is not even an assumption that is based on, and Mr. Trisco pointed out, a lot of that depends on what our target is, and interestingly enough, we have a treaty that -- we're negotiating a treaty to reduce emissions, but we don't even know what that target is. We don't even know what the end point is. We're running towards the goal line, but we have no idea where that goal line is, and I think most of us would agree that when we try and bind our country and our economy to commitments, we should have an idea of where we are going, and we should have an idea of how we will know when we get there, and we have not even reached that basic step. Now, we do know some things about the treaty, though. We do know some things about whatever is signed at Kyoto, what it will do. We do know that it will have tremendous costs. As Fran pointed out, while the impacts of global warming may be speculative, the impacts of global warming policy are not, and that we could be talking in excess of 1.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in terms of the costs, in terms of the reductions in our economic well-being. To put that in perspective, right now, this year, compliance with all environmental regulations combined, about 2.5 percent Gross Domestic Product. So we are talking about increasing the costs of environmental compliance by more than half in one step. And we also know that that part of the thing that the Berlin mandate does is it imposes restrictions on the developed world, but not the developing world. And the idea is that sometimes we're letting them off the hook, but I think before we come to that conclusion, we should think about what imposing restrictions on countries like the United States and Europe will do on the developing world. I think it's common sense that even if you are poor, you'd probably rather not have poor neighbors, and that when you impose restrictions on industrialized nations, you will increase the cost of capital goods, you will slow technological development, and you will restrict and contract the export markets that many developing nations depend upon. They aren't let off the hook. They are going to get hit pretty hard, too. But what do the costs get us? Nothing. Assume that industrialized nations stabilized emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2010, and that by the year 2020, we cut emissions 10 percent further. Global emissions still increase at a rate of 2.6 percent a year. We don't get anything. And as Mr. Trisco pointed out on that one chart, we can go turn off all the lights, go crawl into a cave, emissions still continue to go up. The treaty does not do what it purports to do, which is reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if reducing greenhouse gas emissions was something we needed to do. And in fact, the treaty as currently designed, as the Department of Energy study, the study that I urge all of you to have your bosses encourage the Department of Energy to finally publish the study, that was done at Argonne National Lab. The treaty as currently constructed could actually accelerate emissions. But why is that? One of the reasons is because we're imposing restrictions on the industrialized nations, nations that tend to be the more energy efficient, tend to use less energy per unit of output. But we're not controlling the developing world. So we're going to accelerate the migration of energy intensive industries from countries like this to countries like Bangladesh, to countries in Latin America, to countries in Asia and Africa. And because they are less energy efficient, because the amount of energy they use per unit of output is greater. To receive the same level of production, they are going to have to emit more. They are going to have to use more energy. And this is one of the conclusions that the draft Department of Energy study concluded. If you conclude that the assumed policy scenarios would not produce a reduction in global emissions, the emissions could actually increase, as production of energy intensive industrial products is relocated from the developed to less-developed countries, emissions are also redistributed. That's something we can't forget about. One last point I'd like to make is what are some of the other environmental impacts. I think as we've heard today, there are a lot of reasons why we can question the idea that we need to reduce emissions now, that we need to be so concerned about what happened to the climate because there are still many unanswered questions. But we do know slowing the rate of growth, slowing the rate of technological growth in the world will have real environmental consequence. And not just in this country, but most acutely in the Third World. So the environmental concerns that most of the world deal with aren't the things that we hear about on the evening news, not the things that we read about in fund-raising appeals from the National Audobon Society or the Sierra Club, but are things that are very real. The problems like drinking water and sanitation. World Health Organization estimates that 3-5 million people per year die in the developing world because of lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Concerns about air quality both indoors and outdoors in the developing world, and concerns about malnutrition, about 1 million deaths from measles in the world every year, not in this country, mostly in the developing world, mostly due to people being malnourished. And we hear that we should fear an increase in diseases in the developing world from global climate change, but we know diseases in the Third World correlate most with rates of economic development. Compare Singapore and Malaysia, the difference in malaria rates -- virtually nonexistent in Singapore, fairly prevalent in Malaysia, has nothing to do with the differences in climate, has everything to do with differences in economic development. Research shows conclusively that increased wealth correlates with greater environmental concern and greater environmental performance. Reduced energy use per unit of output, reduced pollution per unit of output.....and we know that if we want the developing countries to have an environmental record similar to that in the United States, we can't be preventing them from growing. We have to be helping them grow. We should not force them on the same greenhouse road to serfdom this administration seems to want this country to embark upon. And finally, we cannot forget that wealthier is healthier. When we slow down economic growth and we slow down economic productivity, it doesn't only mean we have less money to spend, it doesn't only mean we go to the movies less often or buy less expensive meals. It means that we can't spend money on things that improve our quality of life, the length of our lives, and the health of our lives. It is estimated that a slow-down of economic growth in developed countries, between $7-12 million dollars results in a premature mortality. And look at the hundreds of billions of dollars we're talking about, the global warming policy we're seeing that the global warming policy could do a lot -- not only make us poorer, but to make us less healthy. I'll close because I know that Sterling wants to open this to questions. We need to ask one last question -- what is driving this treaty? I know some of you may have seen the Washington Post on May 25, a cute little article by Ross Galvestan, Pulitzer Prize winning author. They didn't tell you what he won his Pulitzer Prize for -- it was writing about racial discrimination and housing in the 1970s. Important issues, but I'm not sure they qualify him to talk about global warming. He said that the scientific consensus then, all the things we're seeing in the world are caused by man-made emissions, by global warming. I assume that that article was sitting at the Washington Post for a couple of weeks before it was published because just knowing this earlier Science Magazine, perhaps the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal, published an article saying greenhouse forecasting is still cloudy, and it quoted one of the lead authors of a chapter in the IPCC report on attribution of climate change, whether or not we can blame human activity, and he said it's unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the chapter. I think the caveats are there. We say it quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution issue was a done deal. It's not clear that the global warming treaty will do much to stop global warming emissions, it's not clear that we need a treaty to reduce global warming emissions, but it is clear that precipitous restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions will have real effects not only on our economic well-being, but also on the well-being of our families and on the environment itself. Thank you. Next page...