By CKR
Michael Northrop, of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, gives some facts and figures about the benefits industry is deriving from the Kyoto Treaty in a Washington Post op-ed. With the small quibble that alternatives to burning fuels that produce carbon dioxide may have their problems too, this is a good example of the benefits of engagement.
Opponents of the Kyoto Treaty have used extrapolations of current trends to argue that only economic damage can result to the developed countries from the restrictions the treaty imposes. However, for a very basic change in the way business is done, simple extrapolations may not be accurate predictions.
Kyoto regulates carbon dioxide emissions. Before Kyoto, "emissions" usually applied to low-level amounts of dangerous chemicals, like nitrogen oxides from cars or mercury from coal-fired power plants, that were not essential to producing power. The production of carbon dioxide is not an option in combustion, whether the fuel is coal, natural gas, or biomass. It's also the natural product of animal metabolism: what you breathe out is carbon dioxide. The use of the same word for both types of product masks that fundamental difference. Another big carbon dioxide producer is the cement industry, and there too the product is an essential part of the process.
Northrop notes that companies like IBM and DuPont have realized savings from increased energy efficiency and decreased carbon dioxide emissions, motivated by Kyoto. Britain is experiencing improved economic health due to its Kyoto-inspired energy plans.
There has always been a conservative tendency to regard all change as detrimental. But new technologies and new ways to order the world have more often been beneficial. Combustible fuels are finite, and the move away from them will come sooner or later. The signatories of the Kyoto Treaty have decided to make that sooner.
The United States, over the past decade or so, has decided to conservatively avoid such changes, particularly in the area of fossil fuels. The mindset extends to a magnificent isolation that will allow other countries to surpass the US technically and economically. This magnificent isolation diplomatically has the potential for much more damage.
When a problem is engaged and dialog ensues, solutions become evident that may not be envisioned by a single party in isolation. The Bush administration has tended toward one-sided dialogs: If we talk to North Korea, that will give them a point in the game, because they say they want us to engage. So we won't reward them by talking to them. Similar thinking seems to have been operative in the case of Iran.
As in the case of Kyoto, this kind of thinking suffers from the assumption that past trends will continue, that North Korea will cheat on all agreements, that Iran will continue with ambitions toward nuclear weapons. There is an element of truth to the idea that past behavior is a predictor of future behavior, but circumstances can change behavior. This last concept has not been ignored by the Bush administration, merely confined to a single idea: regime change by military or economic action. There is also a sense, more appropriate to the less-developed fraternities on campus, that simply speaking to these countries would grant them a boon that they don't deserve.
Good things don't happen in a single simple step. It's not a matter of the US sitting down with North Korea for a single session, after which North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons. That's now how Libya gave up theirs. The negotiation itself, and thinking out the strategies for that negotiation, force the formulation of specific plans that can spin off multiple positive results. Why not, for example, work with Russia to develop a safeguarded way that Russia can control the exchanges of fuel rods for Iran's Bushehr reactor? This would allow Russia to build up its reprocessing capability, something it wants to do for foreign exchange, and would greatly diminish the probability that Iran would extract plutonium from the spent fuel. During negotiations with Russia, the IAEA, and Iran, even better ideas might emerge. There's no way to know until negotiation takes place.
The countries that have signed Kyoto are developing new ways of using energy that will make them more competitive. While stem cell research has been slowed down by the religious preferences of a minority in the US, other countries are developing the technology, which may make them more competitive in the future.
The stakes are higher in the nuclear negotations from which the US has chosen to keep itself magnificently isolated. It's good to see that there is a report today that George Bush is rethinking the US posture in the Iran negotiations.