Posted: 07/22/2004 | Author: H. Sterling Burnett
No to Kyoto and Other Economy Wrecking Climate Policies is the Right Choice for Kerry
During the Presidential primaries, Senator John Kerry quietly renounced support for the Kyoto treaty on global warming. More recently, the Democratic party surreptitiously removed support for Kyoto – a treaty that their party’s leaders, then President Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore, negotiated – from the Democratic Party Platform.
John Edwards, Kerry’s Presidential ticket running mate, who supports Kyoto, should be forgiven if he is surprised by Kerry’s position, which essentially is now the same as President Bush’s. Indeed, the general public could be forgiven for not knowing Kerry’s stance on Kyoto. After all, none of the major media outlets have highlighted his rejection of Kyoto and his campaign has gone great lengths to portray Kerry’s position as pro-Kyoto. For instance, Teresa Heinz Kerry recently boasted that Kerry had attended more Kyoto conferences than any other major politician.
Kerry, as usual, wants to have it both ways. He wants to appear pro-Kyoto in public before the camera’s, while actually rejecting the treaty as a policy matter. But I digress, this is not to pan Kerry’s hypocricy but to praise his decision to reject Kyoto and to call on him to reject other proposals that would require U.S. companies to unilaterally reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Kerry’s position should not surprise anyone. After all, he was among the 94 other Senators who voted for a resolution that directed President Clinton not to sign a global warming agreement that either hurt the U.S. economically or that exempted developing nations – like China, India and Brazil, the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions – from emission cuts. As President Bush noted when he rejected the treaty early in his administration, Kyoto violated both of these provisions and thus would not garner Senate ratification and did not merit his support. Kerry cited the same reasons for rejecting Kyoto.
Yet his web site supports forcing “all major sources of greenhouse gas emissions to participate in a cap and trade emissions reduction program for CO2 and other greenhouse gases… whether at coal-fired utilities or from automobile tailpipes.” This goes farther than either the failed “Clean Power Act” of 2001 which Kerry co-sponsored or the Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship act of 2003, both of which would mandate greenhouse gas emission reductions from power plants. The problem is Kerry’s proposal, like the legislation which he supports, are just Kyoto writ small – they would have the U.S. make emission reductions unilaterally.
The environmental and economic consequences of either Kyoto, which Kerry claims to reject, or the domestic legislation which he supports would be the same. No environmental benefit, significant economic costs.
On the environmental side, neither the international emissions reductions called for by the Kyoto Protocol nor unilateral U.S. emissions reductions as Kerry proposes would have any effect on future global warming. Complying with greenhouse gas reduction limits in either the Kyoto protocol or the Climate Stewardship Act would only prevent a warming of between .07 and 0.19 degrees Celsius. This amount is too small to have an impact on the climate.
However, this feel good measure, comes with a high price tag attached. An Energy Information Agency analysis of the McCain-Lieberman bill estimates a cumulative GDP loss by 2025 of more than $776 billion. For comparison, consider that Congress has appropriated $135 billion to pay for the war in Iraq. Since Kerry’s proposal is much more comprehensive than the Climate Stewardship Act, one can only suppose that the costs would be even higher. Even worse for Kerry, most of the costs of these energy rationing schemes would be borne by those middle class and poor voters that he claims to care so much about. Higher fuel costs hurt the poor the most since a greater percentage if their income goes to fuel than the average worker.
One is left to wonder, how Kerry can reject Kyoto but promote its domestic equivalent? And how can he promote economic growth and improved employment opportunities for the middle class, while pursing policies bound to suppress both?