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The restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions agreed to in Kyoto are not in any way minor or insubstantial. Reducing U.S. emissions 7% below what they were in 1990 by the year 2012 means reducing emissions almost 40% below what they would be absent the agreement. Adjusted for expected population growth, this means a 50% reduction per capita in greenhouse gas emissions. Virtually everyone agrees that these targets can only be met only by reducing fossil fuel consumption, the main source of virtually all anthropogenic emissions.
Environmentalists argue that such reductions can occur relatively painlessly, that we can cut the amount of fuel we use by 50% and actually produce even more economic growth as a result. Virtually no mainstream academic economist shares that opinion. The two most prominent and well respected academic specialists -- Robert Stavins of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and William Nordhaus of Yale -- maintain that only the functional equivalent of a $150 per ton carbon tax can accomplish this, which they calculates would reduce GDP by 3%, or, as Stavins puts it, "approximately the cost of complying with all other environmental regulations combined." A recent survey in Forbes summarizing the recent macroeconomic modeling that’s been done on the subject broadly agrees with Stavins’s and Nordhaus’s estimates.
Then there is the matter of whether the emissions cuts presently on the table are even worth the bother. According to the best computer model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Kyoto agreement, even if signed by all the nations of the world, would reduce global warming by an infinitesimal .18 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years. That’s not much bang for the global warming buck.
The reason is that, according to all observers, actually stopping any further global warming from occurring (assuming the median predictions of present climate models) would require a 70% reduction of present emissions, roughly the equivalent of completely abandoning the use of fossil fuels. This, according to Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton, "might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century." Indeed, environmentalists are frequently quoted as saying that, ultimately, we will need to completely restructure society around the objective of energy efficiency and sustainability, the economic and political costs of which we can only imagine.
Unless we’re prepared to see that journey to its completion, there’s little point in even bothering to sign the Kyoto agreement because, in and of itself, it will make virtually no difference to our planetary climate.
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