Heated rhetoric for a cold day

Dr. Harlan Watson, chief US negotiator on global warming,

has told a UN conference on global warming that [the US] has no intention of re-joining international efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions,

BBC reported on Tuesday, adding that Watson insisted that the Kyoto Protocol was a "political document" based on "bad science."

The conference, being held in Buenos Aires, had begin with an opening offered to the US when the head of the Climate Change Convention suggested that after 2012, countries might be able to pursue different means to the same end.

But if it was an olive branch, the US has brushed it aside.

Dr Watson, who is leading the American delegation here, told a news conference that this was not the moment for the US to reassess its policies.

He said US President George W Bush had a 10-year programme to reduce the carbon intensity of the US economy by 18% by 2012.

The government was totally committed to carrying out the programme and wanted to wait to see the results, he added.

That is, the US is committed to not examining global warming for at least the next eight years. Funny how he can declare that, since the administration can only be in office for another four, but we know such details do not matter to the Shrub team.

They're not the only ones, of course: Most of the media was uninterested in the details of who Watson is or how he came by his position.

His State Department biography says he

previously served for more than 16 years on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, including over 6 years as Staff Director of the Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. ...

Dr. Watson earned a B.A. in physics from Western Illinois University, a Ph.D. in solid state physics from Iowa State University, and an M.A. in Economics from Georgetown University.

That is, he was a Republican Congressional staffer whose previous involvement was in matters relating to energy, not the environment, and who does not have professional credentials in the environment, meteorology, oceanography, or climatology; even his physics background is in solid state physics, not the fluid dynamics relevant to weather and climate. So how did he, in 2001, get picked to be chief negotiator on global climate change?

Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that shortly after the Shrub gang came into office, a lobbyist for Exxon-Mobil specifically recommended he be made "available to work with the team" dealing with climate negotiations?

That would hardly be surprising: After all, in the same memo Exxon-Mobil's errand boy also urged the Bushites to see to it that the highly-qualified, highly-respected Robert Watson (no relation) was forced out as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and "to assure that none of the Clinton-Gore proponents are involved in any decisional activities." (Underlining in original.) What's more, in 2003, Greenpeace uncovered a memo from the Competitive Enterprise Institute which leaves no doubt that the White House sought the help of the group, which is heavily funded by Exxon-Mobil, in dealing with an EPA report on the effects of climate change - and clearly implies that the White House itself suggested to CEI that it sue the administration over the matter.

With that kind of record, it's doubly distressing that another detail that was of little if any interest to the media was the utterly deceitful nature of the White House's "program." Almost none of coverage made any attempt to describe what a plan of reducing "carbon intensity" means.

In fact, what it means is measuring greenhouse emissions as compared to GDP. As Watson himself put it at an earlier UN conference on global climate change in New Delhi in October, 2002,

[t]his policy calculates that when the annual decline in greenhouse gas intensity equals the economic growth rate, emissions will stop, and when the annual decline in intensity exceeds economic growth rate, emissions will reverse.

Watson said that under the "business-as-usual" scenario, greenhouse gases would decline by 14 percent over the next 14 years. Bush's goal is a four percent improvement on this, he added.

"The President's goal is to lower the United States ratio of emission from an estimated 183 metric tonnes per million dollars of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2002, to 151 metric tonnes per million dollars of GDP in 2012," Watson said.

Get it? As long as GDP increases faster than the output of greenhouse gases, you get to say that you are cutting emissions even as they continue to grow. It's like saying that if one year I make $30,000 and have $5,000 in debts and the next year I make $33,000 (an increase of 10%) and my debts are $5,250 (an increase of 5%), I owe less money than I did before. Unfortunately, nature doesn't count it that way. Just like my debtors are concerned with how many dollars I owe them, not with what portion of my income it represents, so, too, nature is only concerned with how much CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are being produced, not with the size of the economy that produced them.

Unfortunately, there is one way in which the Bushites are right, although they're not right in the way they intend: When they say Kyoto is not based on "sound science," they're right: Sound science would demand that we do much more than Kyoto required, far more.

Footnote: Recommended reading: Boiling Point, the new book by Ross Gelbspan, author of the earlier The Heat is On.