Posted on 08/29/2002 3:33:09 PM PDT by Mensch
Russia, under pressure at the U.N. Earth Summit to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, would be better off sinking the pact altogether, leading Russian scientists said on Thursday. Russia, one of the world's worst polluters, has committed itself to ratifying the accord on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. At the Sustainable Development summit in Johannesburg this week it heard calls to speed up the process.
India, host to an October U.N. Climate Summit, said it had received "positive indications", but Russian ecologists saw little sign Moscow intended to ratify the treaty any time soon.
Due to a complex weighting system, Russia's ratification is essential to bringing the agreement into force after the United States, the world's top air polluter, pulled out of the pact. "As a scientist, I understand Kyoto will not change the climate problem," Igor Nazorov of Russia's climate monitoring agency said. "The United States was not stupid. It worked out a list of reasons why it should not sign the protocol. There are better ways than Kyoto."
Vitaly Morozov, a scientist and adviser on the Kyoto Protocol at the Ministry of Natural Resources, said the pact was not in Russia's interests, despite a clause that would allow Moscow to sell the slice of its pollution quota that it does not use, bringing in some $30 billion by 2012.
Russia will not be able to use its quota fully in the medium term, mainly because of the collapse of the country's industrial sector since 1990, the reference date for the Kyoto pact. "Russia fully compensates for its waste emissions with its ecosystem, even if you discount the vast areas of forest," Morozov said. "Is this treaty fair to us? I am not sure. I understand a consensus has to be reached, but each country has economic and political interests." "After the 1990s, our economic collapse lowered (carbon) emissions, but because of that do we have to stay in poverty? If we are to live better, we must develop, and to develop we need energy," he said. "We need $150 billion to overhaul our energy sector. But no one will help us with the cash."
To come into force, the treaty's backers must include enough industrialised nations to account for 50 percent of what carbon emissions were in 1990. The U.S. withdrawal put its mammoth 36 percent share off limits and made Russia's 17 percent slice critical for the 1997 treaty's survival.
European Union countries and Japan have already ratified the accord, which Washington rejected on the grounds that fixed emission reduction targets would hurt the economy. But Natalya Oleferenko, head of the Greenpeace climate programme in Moscow, said Russia was unlikely to sign the deal by the September deadline announced earlier in the year.
"The reason we have not yet signed this document is difficult to explain to a Westerner. Russia can never decide whether something is profitable or not," Oleferenko said. "We signed the Stockholm Convention (on organic pollutants) a day before the deadline ran out. That says it all."
There were hopes that at the Earth Summit, a follow-up to the meeting in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago that began U.N. efforts to tackle global warming, could see the final implementation of the Kyoto accord.
But Russian ratification, scientific concerns apart, appears stalled by the Moscow's Byzantine bureaucracy, where four ministries and a government commission are responsible for the protocol, in the absence of a ministry dealing specifically with the environment.
The Russian scientists seem to have to have retained respect for the integrity of their profession, unlike the politicized junk-scientists that we produce. Perhaps it's because they have seen the worker's utopia up close.
God bless the Russians. The last "great" war was the U.S., Britain, and Russia against the Europeans. I fear the next one is shaping up that way as well
Unsupported, and untrue. And also unchallenged. What garbage. but the Russians are showing a little sense, which is good to see.
Even during the Cold War we knew it would be Russia and America on the same side against a common enemy next time. As always for the big ones
As did I. I grew up in the 50's and 60's, during the worst of the Cold War. But somehow, I've always known that the Russians are more like us than the rest.
I pray that we don't have to learn the hard way, as they did, what the utopians have to offer.
FReegards, Al
I know. I hope that the current generation knows better.
No, it makes lots of sense, and it wasn't thought up by greenies. I just am against trading them across national boundaries. It makes much more sense as a method of controlling pollution than command and control regulations. The main reason the Clean Air Act of 1990 has been more successful than its predecessors was that it allowed trading of pollution rights instead of using government regulations that micromanage industrial processes. The idea is that the government should not care how pollution is reduced, just the amount by which it is reduced. After initial allocation of pollution quotas companies were allowed to sell off the quotas the did not use. If a company figured out a cheaper or more efficient method of reducing pollution than the old command and control style regulations, it could then sell the the excess quotas to other companies with higher abatement costs.
An even better way to decrease pollution would be to tax it. That way there are economic incentives to develop new technologies and stragegies for decreasing pollution. Also, the revenues generated could be used to decrease income tax rates.
The big problem with the pollution trading system proposed by Kyoto was that it deliberately stacked the deck against the US. The US had already greatly improved its industrial emissions and could only meet its targets by either restricting industrial output, buying credits from other countries, or using much higher cost abatement technologies. Much of Europe was not as far along on cleaning up their industries and could meet its targets much more cheaply. Also with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the high level of pollution there was included in the base levels from which cuts would be made. Russia is in a good position, because their base level was determined prior to the fall of communism. The collapse of the Russian economy after 1991 decreased industrial output and its associated pollution, so they have considerable creditst to sell.
The Kyoto treaty specifically ignores the effects of reforestation on removing carbon dioxide from the air over North America. We have more forest today than 1492 when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. In fact, according to Peter Huber's book Hard Green, the growth of forests in the US may actually be removing more carbon dioxide than all the economic activity in the US is putting in to the atmosphere. If growth of forests were considered, the Euorpeans would have to be paying us for pollution credits!
For that matter, I'm not even sure that a "flat tax" on pollution would necessarily be UnConstitutional (always a nice consideration). Structure it as a simple per-unit Excise Tax, and there is (arguably) a Constitutional basis for the idea (as opposed to Bureaucratic Regulatory oversight, a very anti-Constitutional "command-and-control" methodology).
It will create its own version of Enron scandal. Let Euros wallow on it.
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