EDITORIAL: Kyoto was always full of hot air

A startling admission recently by Canada's former Liberal environment minister regarding the Kyoto accord hasn't received anywhere near the attention it deserves.

That was a candid acknowledgment by federal Liberal leadership contender Stephane Dion -- literally the "Mr. Environment" of the federal Liberal party -- that Canada cannot meet the targets to lower greenhouse gas emissions the Liberals committed us to when they signed the Kyoto treaty.

The story appeared on July 1 in the National Post, one reason it largely slipped under the public's radar, since everyone was out celebrating Canada's 139th birthday at the time.

Dion conceded even a future Liberal government with him as prime minister, should he win the Liberal leadership and defeat Stephen Harper, would not succeed in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, as the Liberals always insisted was possible, and as was required under Kyoto.

Dion's main point was that Kyoto isn't just about meeting targets, but about creating a shift in societal thinking about how to deal with the world's looming energy crisis effectively.

Still, Dion told the Post's John Ivison: "In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don't think I will make it" -- meaning, he didn't think he could meet Kyoto's targets.

Under Kyoto, Canada agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. (These emissions are believed by many scientists, although not all, to be a significant contributor to global warning.)

What actually happened was that Canada's greenhouse gas emissions rose by 24% from 1990 to 2003.

During the last federal election, then prime minister Paul Martin further undermined Canada's credibility on Kyoto when he raced to a UN climate change conference in Montral in mid-campaign to scold the Bush administration for lacking a "global conscience" in refusing to sign Kyoto.

Then it came out that the U.S., without signing Kyoto, had done a better job of slowing the growth rate of greenhouse gas emissions than we had. Compared to our 24% growth rate between 1990 and 2003, the U.S. growth rate was 13.3%.

Dion still praises the Liberal record on Kyoto and says the Grits made the right decision in trying to meet much tougher targets than other countries that had signed on to the accord.

But the Conservatives say Dion's admission of the impracticality of Koyoto raises the question of whether the Liberals misled the public all along, knowing they could never reach its goals even as they were committing billions of dollars to it.

This fall, the Conservative government will announce what it says will be a sweeping environmental strategy aimed at cutting smog, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, cleaning up toxic wastes and improving air and water quality.

The good news is that with the Liberals' former point man on Kyoto having admitted the targets it set were not feasible, we can finally get down to achieving what Canadians really want -- a serious strategy for cleaning up our environment, with workable, practical, effective, sustainable results.

Energy & Environment

Fire, of Ice?
by William Rusher
Posted Jul 20, 2006

The New York Times's headline read, "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise." Well, what's so new about that? The Times has been having an historic fit about global warming for years, hasn't it?

Yes, but that particular headline ran in the good gray Times on March 27, 1933 -- 73 years ago. What's more, the Times changed its mind dramatically on the subject 42 years later, in 1975, when it startled its readers on May 21 with "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable."

Nor has the Times been the only major periodical to blow hot and cold (if you will forgive me) on the subject of the global climate. On Jan. 2, 1939 Time magazine announced that "Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right ... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer." Yet Time scooped The New York Times by nearly a year when, reversing itself, it warned readers on June 24, 1974 that, "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." Today, of course, Time has changed its mind again and joined the global-warming hysteria. On April 3 this year, it announced that "By Any Measure, Earth is At ... The Tipping Point. The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame."

The last major attack of hysteria, in the mid-1970s, focused on the peril of global cooling, and was especially severe. Fortune magazine declared in February 1974 that "As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed. It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude." Fortune's analysis was so impressive that it actually won a "Science Writing Award" from the American Institute of Physics.

But the prize for sheer terrorizing surely belonged to Lowell Ponte, whose 1976 book "The Cooling" (a predecessor of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," though from the opposite point of view) asserted that "The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations." If countermeasures weren't taken, he warned, it would lead to "world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000."

All of the above quotations, and many more, can be found in a wonderful new booklet by R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor of the Business & Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va. (Full disclosure: I am the avuncular and largely indolent board chairman of the latter.) Entitled "Fire and Ice," it quotes alarmist predictions of both global warming and a new ice age dating back to 1895. The authors identify no less than four swings of scientific opinion, with considerable overlapping, from global cooling (1895-1932) to global warming (1929-1969) to global cooling (1954-1976) and now back to global warming (1981 to the present). The booklet can also be read for its sheer entertainment value. (I particularly liked the anecdote about the penguin found in France in 1922, which was widely viewed as an "ice-age harbinger," though wiser heads concluded it had probably escaped from the ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.)

The booklet notes sensibly that "Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn't mean scientists concur that mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear." And in its wisest paragraph it concludes, "This isn't a question of science. It's a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science."

But if you're looking for a new career, here's a hint: "Global warming is a good business to be in for government funding. More than 99.5% of American climate change funding comes from the government, which spends $4 billion per year on climate change research."

Mr. Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.

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