Some good stuff on that global warming meeting/Klinton show in Montreal

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Senator Bingaman's Bogus Climate Proposal
All Economic Pain for No Environmental Gain

News Release
by CEI Staff
December 6, 2005

Contacts:

Myron Ebell, 202.320.6685 (Montreal)

Richard Morrison, 202.441.9652 (Montreal)

Jody Clarke, 202.331.2252 (Washington, D.C.)

Montréal, Quebec, December 6, 2005—U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) is scheduled to deliver a speech at the UN global warming meeting in Montréal this afternoon on his plan for mandatory carbon dioxide emissions controls in the United States. If similar to proposals Sen. Bingaman intended to offer earlier this year in the Senate, the plan would represent significant economic sacrifice without measurably reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

“While Sen. Bingaman’s approach has been presented as a moderate and sensible response to the possibility of global warming, it clearly is neither,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “If Bingaman were taking the alarmist position held by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol seriously, his plan would be far too modest to be of any value. If he were concerned about its economic impact, it would be far too expensive.”

Sen. Bingaman’s proposed amendment to energy legislation this summer was withdrawn once it became clear that it would be defeated. It represented a scaled-back version of carbon dioxide emissions limits first advanced by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The McCain-Lieberman amendment was defeated by 38 votes to 60 in the Senate and itself represented a much-reduced version of the emissions reductions which would have been called for had the U.S. Senate ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

“Bingaman’s approach would be both expensive and useless, making it difficult to believe he takes even his own current position seriously,” continued Ebell. “The only rationale for pursuing such a path would be to convince the U.S. Congress to establish the legal groundwork for mandatory emissions limits, only to greatly increase their severity in the future and ignore the spiraling costs.”

http://www.cei.org/utils/printer.cfm?AID=5029

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TCS COP 11 Coverage: More Than One Best Way
By Ronald Bailey Published 12/07/2005


MONTREAL -- A new consensus is emerging at the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Montreal. Some participants are beginning to recognize that the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate Change (AP6) is at least part of the way forward in a global effort to deal with any potential harms from man-made global warming.

The AP6 was announced last summer and includes China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the United States. The goal of the AP6 is to address climate change by focusing on creating and deploying technologies that emit less greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide. Dr. Shin Boo-nam, the deputy director general of South Korea's ministry of foreign affairs and trade explained, during a panel discussion organized by the International Council for Capital Formation, that the AP6 members aim to use technological innovation and cooperation to improve their energy security, reduce air pollution, and address climate change.



The goals of the AP6 appear to be aligned with the new proposals for combining economic development and climate policies being offered by various participants in the Montreal conference. For example, the environmental think tank the World Resources Institute issued a new study that focuses on how to boost the economic growth of poor countries while simultaneously helping them improve their energy efficiency.



The report, Growing in the Greenhouse: Policies and Measures for Sustainable Development while Protecting the Climate, offers a series of case studies in which fast growing countries like China and India are urged to adopt policies that encourage both economic growth and energy efficiency. The WRI calls this sustainable development policies and measures (SD-PAMs). The idea is that developmental paths are favored that result in significantly lower future greenhouse gas emissions.



For example, in China there are 12 cars or trucks for every 1000 people. In the U.S. the number is 800 per 1000 people. China's cities are growing rapidly and are building vast amounts of transportation infrastructure right now. In addition, China's leaders are worried about being at the mercy of insecure energy imports. China has the advantage of seeing what the results of 90 years of car-focused development in the U.S. and other western countries have been.



The WRI's Lee Schipper offered a case study in which the Chinese government could choose to adopt policies aimed at preventing gridlock in China's burgeoning cities and cut their oil imports. As outlined by Schipper, China's cities could choose to build more robust public transit systems rather than highways. Furthermore, China could apply oil saving technologies in the transit sector and charge Japanese-style prices for gasoline. According to Schipper, these measures would reduce the number of cars in China in 2020 from a projected 160 million to 130 million and cut oil imports by 1 million barrels per day. Such measures would also dramatically lower China's projected greenhouse gas emissions.



Similarly as India develops, its government leaders will be setting policies that affect how power will be eventually supplied to the 600 million of its citizens who are still without access to electricity. The type of power supplies India chooses will have a big impact on how much greenhouse gas it emits in the future and how much it will rely on outside sources of energy. Interestingly, the number of Chinese without access to electricity has dropped from 800 million in the mid-1980s to 225 million today. Rob Bradley from the WRI noted that small hydroelectric power now supplies electricity to 300 million Chinese.



The SD-PAM strategy sounds an awful lot like the development and climate policy goals of the AP6 of which China and India are already participating members. And like the AP6 initiative, SD-PAMs are intended to complement other greenhouse gas control efforts such as the emissions restrictions imposed on the parties to the Kyoto Protocol.



At a press conference, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change discussed its report, Climate Dialogue at Pocantico, calling for a more flexible international framework allowing countries to take on different types of climate commitments. The report recognizes that most developing countries see increased energy use as essential for their economic growth and will not join the current cap-and-trade system for carbon control embodied in the Kyoto Protocol. In order to get developing countries involved in addressing global warming, Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center, called for the launching of a high level dialogue outside the current climate negotiations. As envisioned by the Pew Center's report, this new dialogue would involve the 25 countries that account for 83 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, 71 percent of the world's population and 86 percent of the world's GDP. The Pew Center's Eliot Diringer proposed that like-minded countries could form agreements along different tracks that would address potential climate change.



It turns out that the AP6 is already a jumpstart on the sort of parallel process being proposed by Pew. The AP6 partners constitute 45 percent of the world's population, account for 49 percent of the world's economy, consume 48 percent of the world's energy, and produce 48 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And once the AP6 partners adopt a charter and finalize a work program at the ministerial meeting next month, Dr. Shin noted that the founding countries will consider ways to include other interested countries.



When asked about the AP6 partnership, Claussen said that it was interesting and suggested that it could be part of what the Pew Center is proposing. Diringer added that the AP6 has some potential, but that his colleagues are waiting to see what comes out the ministerial meeting in January.



In any case, it is clear that there is a growing recognition at the Montreal Climate Change Conference that the Kyoto Protocol is not the only answer to handling the potential problems caused by man-made global warming.



Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. His email is rbailey@reason.com.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/120705B.html

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TCS COP 11 Coverage: An Unethical Environment?
By Roy Spencer Published 12/07/2005


MONTREAL -- I've been thinking a lot lately about people who - -despite living in industrialized countries -- find affluence and the associated consumption of natural resources troubling. By their lights, wealthy countries like the US are the world's principle consumers -- unfairly rich, winners of life's lottery, polluters of the environment and so on. They claim that rich countries wish to "impose" their way of life on the rest of the world.

Maurice Strong, for example -- long an influential executive officer at the U.N. and the head of the 1992 Earth Summit -- once said: "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" In his book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore (who could easily be the US president right now) advocated "bold efforts to change the very foundation of civilization."



What motivates these people? Have they tried poverty and decided that poverty is better than wealth? I doubt it. The poor of the world aspire to gain what we have. Many will risk their lives (some will lose their lives) to enter the United States to be able to enjoy what we frequently take for granted.



The single most important underlying theme that unites these critics of affluence is a misunderstanding of basic economics. I'm not talking about the intricacies of economic theories and their associated technical buzzwords. I'm talking about concepts that are so basic to the health and happiness of a society that they should be taught in every high school -- perhaps before. Yet, most college graduates do not understand even the basics of economics.



While one of the most famous definitions of economics is "the study of the use of scarce resources that have alternative uses," I would like to advance a more fundamental definition. The practice of economics is simply "people doing useful things for each other." Anything that makes that process more efficient will contribute to the creation of wealth, which leads to health, longevity, and a more comfortable existence for any given individual. Central to this process is the fact that a person, not the government, is ultimately the most qualified to determine what is 'useful.' The aggregate effect is people in society finding the processes are the most efficient and beneficial without knowing it.



Here's my list of some basic economic principles that must be understood in order keep us from falling prey to popular misconceptions that, when acted upon, hurt the economy -- and thus the processes by which people achieve health and well-being. While these are not new, I have restated them in ways that might be more meaningful to non-economists.



1. Wealth is created; it is not static. Russia has immense natural resources, but remains a very poor country. Japan has very few natural resources, yet has one of the world's strongest economies. Why is this? Because what people do with the natural resources, not how many natural resources their country has, is what is important. If a society constantly strives to produce what its people want, maximizing efficiency in the process, then that society will develop a rising standard of living. A society that doesn't, won't.



2. Hard work does not necessarily create wealth. If half of us spent our time digging holes in the ground, and the other half fill the holes up again, we would be doing a lot of work, but we would have a very low standard of living. In a free market, people are paid wages based upon the value of their services and knowledge to other people, balanced against the supply of other people who make the same skills available to the labor pool.



3. Free markets improve the standard of living. When individuals determine what is of value, through purchases of goods and services whose prices depend upon supply and demand, their standard of living will be improved. The interplay of supply and demand is an impressively self-regulating process. While well-intentioned governmental planners have attempted to do a better job than the market, they have been unable. No subgroup of people can be more knowledgeable about what society wants than the people who make up that society (i.e. those involved in each and every transaction.)



4. Profits positively motivate free markets. Profits are good for the economy as a whole. On average, transactions in a free market result in about 10% profit and 90% recovery of the costs of doing business. The hope of sharing in that profit, though relatively small on a percentage basis, is part of what motivates people (and companies) to increase efficiency and develop new products or services that the public desires. If someone becomes immensely wealthy, it is because the public has "voted" through their purchases. That means, the products that the wealthy person produces are more valuable to his customers than alternative products or services they could have purchased elsewhere.



5. Higher prices can spur competition and prevent shortages. No one likes high prices, yet they play a crucial role in a market. When prices rise -- whether due to shortages, the increased cost of raw materials, or increased demand -- free market mechanisms will act in such a way as to reduce those prices. Demand will subsequently go down. New types of materials will be found to replace those that have become too expensive. More efficient production capabilities will be developed. High prices also attract greater investment, which helps to facilitate these changes. If you prefer, call high prices a necessary evil. But they are indeed necessary for the system to work. Government price controls (to prevent prices from going too high) or price supports (to prevent prices from going too low) ultimately hurt the economy. That's because prices have important information in them.



6. Governmental interference in the economy is almost always harmful. Other than preventing either the formation of a monopoly (which is extremely rare) or collusion to fix prices among companies in a particular sector (which is like a monopoly), the best role for government is to simply stay out of the way. Interference with an economy's price mechanism limits the benefits to be obtained from flourishing free markets.



Yet to this last point, governmental interference is central to the UN's conference on climate change (COP-11) in Montreal this week. In order to reduce mankind's production of greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide), the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (commonly called the Kyoto Protocol) was devised by many of the world's bureaucrats to keep you from producing so much carbon dioxide. And despite the health and well being these people have personally achieved from access to affordable energy, most of them will likely lobby for prosperity-dampening restrictions on energy use.



A presentation by experts in philosophy and ethics at COP-11 this week, sponsored by the Tides Foundation and Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute, made it clear that it is, in their view, unethical for the industrialized countries of the world to threaten the health and well being of poor countries by releasing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even if the threat has only a low probability of being realized, they argue, the only ethical course of action is to stop this "risky" activity. But just as command-and-control approaches by governments have historically hurt humanity, we can see that once again governments are ignoring the negative unintended consequences of the proposed "solutions" to the problem.



Access to affordable energy has benefited most of humanity in one way or another. Therefore, the very real dangers of restricting energy use have to be weighed against the potential dangers associated with climate change. An admittedly extreme, but simple, example would be our dependence on food. Even though you risk choking to death when you eat, do you stop eating? Of course not. Yet the majority of the COP-11 participants continue to march humanity toward solutions to a potential environmental problem without realizing that they could, at the same time, be shooting everyone in the collective foot.



It is imperative that people understand what is necessary for the well being of humanity as a whole: political, personal, and economic freedom to do as one chooses. Just as technology has solved past problems as they have arisen, so economic growth will lead to new energy technologies that reduce the risk of global warming. But these solutions will only come about when people are left free to generate the wealth that will be required to invest in the development of these new technologies.



And economic growth, facilitated by the global spread of freedom, is now blossoming in historically destitute countries such as India and China. Somewhere in a poor village in Africa, China, or India may well be a child who will grow up to spearhead the development of a new energy technology that will eventually remove global warming as a threat. As the economist Thomas Sowell put it, our most valuable and scarcest natural resource is human knowledge. If the anti-growth folks at COP-11 have their way, this natural resource will be greatly restricted. The global warming problem (to the extent there really is one) will only become graver.

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