WASHINGTON
- Thursday's decision by the Russian government to
endorse ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to curb
greenhouse gas emissions has thrown a particularly stark
spotlight on the degree to which President George W Bush
has isolated the United States on the issue of global
warming, as well as other transnational problems.
While it is too early to predict whether the
Kremlin's endorsement - which is virtually certain to be
ratified by the Russian Duma in coming weeks - will have
any impact on US public opinion before the presidential
elections, many analysts believe it will force
Washington, regardless of who wins on November 2, to
reassess its position on climate change.
The
1997 treaty takes effect once it has been ratified by
industrialized countries that are responsible for at
least 55% of global greenhouse emissions in 1990.
Existing ratifiers, which include the members of the
European Union (EU), Canada, Japan and several Central
European states, account for only 44%. Russia's 17.5%
share will thus make the treaty law.
"Russia's
decision will require the US to rethink its stance on
addressing climate change," said Jonathan Pershing, a
global-warming expert at the Washington-based World
Resources Institute who served as the State Department's
main negotiator on climate-change issues during the
1990s.
"Until now, there was no legally binding
instrument out there in the world," he told IPS. "But
now that it looks like it will soon enter into force and
the industrialized countries, with the exception of the
US and Australia, have adopted this approach, we need to
reconsider whether the thing we're doing fits that
model, and if not, what we're going to do about it."
State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said
Washington's position was unchanged. The US signed the
Kyoto Protocol under former Democratic president Bill
Clinton, who nonetheless declined to refer it for
ratification to the Senate in light of strong opposition
from the Republican leadership in Congress, particularly
by lawmakers from states dependent on oil, gas or coal
production and automobile manufacturing.
Bush
himself denounced the treaty, which requires
industrialized countries to reduce their emissions an
average of about 7% below 1990 levels by 2012, in no
uncertain terms shortly after taking office.
Citing warnings by Kyoto opponents that
compliance could hurt employment and national
production, Bush declared in March 2001, "We will not do
anything that harms our economy, because first things
first are the people who live in America; that's my
priority."
His dismissal of the issue came as a
shock to many people worldwide, Europeans in particular,
and marked the first of a series of unilateralist moves
by Bush - including his rejection of international
arms-control efforts and the International Criminal
Court and culminating in last year's Iraq war - that
have produced unprecedented strains in the
trans-Atlantic alliance.
Indeed, Russian
President Vladimir Putin's long-awaited decision came
just two weeks after British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
who has been Bush's staunchest European ally, had
pledged in a widely noted speech to push climate change
to the very top of the agenda for the Group of Eight
(G8) industrialized nations when Britain takes over as
G8 chair in January.
In unusually passionate
terms, he warned that the consequences of climate change
could well be "catastrophic" and that the threat was
closer than many believed. "I mean in the lifetime of my
children certainly, and possibly within my own." Blair
described the impact of warming as "so far-reaching
[and] irreversible in its destructive power that it
alters radically human existence."
While his
administration appears to have gone from a position of
skepticism over scientific claims that greenhouse
emissions contribute to global warming to one of
acceptance that the relationship between warming and
emissions is real, Bush has thus far rejected any effort
to place mandatory limits on industry emissions. His
emphasis instead has been on voluntary actions to reduce
the "intensity" of emissions; that is, the level of
emissions per unit of economic output.
In
particular, he has failed to support a long-pending
measure co-sponsored by fellow Republican Senator John
McCain and Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman - and
supported by Kerry - that would require reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions by energy, transportation and
manufacturing companies to 2000 levels by 2010. McCain
recently denounced the administration's global-warming
policy as "disgraceful".
At the same time,
states and other local jurisdictions have tried to fill
the vacuum with legislation and even lawsuits. In the
most far-reaching policy to date, California state
regulators approved a new rule that will require
automakers to sharply increase fuel efficiency in order
to reduce automobile emissions by 30% by 2016.
Because California is the country's biggest
market, the new rule, if it survives court challenges,
is likely to become the national standard. For US
manufacturers that sell much of their output abroad,
Russia's ratification - and with it, the transformation
of Kyoto into international law - poses a similar
challenge.
A number of the largest US companies,
grouped together in the "Business Roundtable", while
still opposed to mandatory limits have grown
increasingly concerned about their own global
competitiveness if they fail to move - or be seen as
moving - toward compliance with Kyoto.
Also,
many firms are eager to take advantage of the global
emissions trading market authorized by the protocol
(which permits polluting firms to buy "quotas" from
"clean" companies not using all of theirs) largely at
the insistence of the Clinton administration.
Washington's continued boycott of the treaty could make
it more difficult for them to participate.
If
Bush himself does not understand the advantages of US
participation in that market, it is clear that Putin
does, according to Dan Dudek, the chief economist at the
group Environmental Defense. "Russian policy-makers
understand that participating in Kyoto's emissions
trading market can help attract new investment to make
Russia's energy infrastructure more efficient and less
polluting," he said.
According to the Russian
energy ministry, the country hopes to gain between $500
million and $4 billion a year by selling emission quotas
to other countries.
"This decision is further
indication that the Bush administration is isolated in
its approach to CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions and
climate change," said Jennifer Morgan of the World
Wildlife Fund, who in a statement added that 126
countries have now ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United
Nations Environmental Program, also suggested, albeit
more diplomatically, that Washington needs to reassess
its position, stressing that the recent series of
hurricanes that caused billions of dollars of damage to
Florida was a harbinger of the future, unless concerted
international action is taken now.
"Russia's
green light will allow the climate train to leave the
station so we can really begin addressing the biggest
threat to the planet and its people," Toepfer said in a
statement. "I hope other nations, some of whom like
Russia have maybe been in the past reluctant to ratify,
will now join us in this truly global endeavor."
