Getting the vapours

The Buenos Aires Conference of the Parties, the tenth annual review of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, did not agree, as some had hoped, on a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol when that ends in 2012. Instead, another, less formal conference in May 2005 will look at further limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

That prompted the Independent to headline “U.S. fails in bid to kill off Kyoto process,” even as groups like the World Wide Fund for Nature decried American “obstruction.” On the other side of the issue, critics of the Protocol are declaring it dead.

It may be a little too early to hang out the crepe or, if differently inclined, break out the CO2-generating cigars. But governments generally seem to be recognizing that if other large developed countries don’t sign on to Kyoto, the ones that have — European Union member states, Canada, Japan — would have let themselves in for some serious economic hurt. And — although this part would not normally matter to governments — they would have done so for no sound environmental reason, and without making a dent in the world’s output of greenhouse gases.

So there has been some assiduous back-pedaling about who will meet his Kyoto targets, and when, and how. European Union countries are “on track” to meeting their Kyoto goals, says a press release from the Union’s ultra-politicized civil service — but only if everyone delivers on his promises and some countries over-perform. Canada and Japan are unlikely even to get close. Russia, whose scientific and economic establishment resisted the treaty, but who signed on to jab the Americans, isn’t on the scale. And of course the developing countries, most notably China and India, aren’t even bound by the treaty.

That state of affairs proves the approach of the United States and Australia — to refuse to ratify the treaty — was far more honest. (It is an entertaining curiosity of the times that people regard those countries’ refusal as a moral failing.) And it also has forced the admission — given grudgingly in some circles, and conveyed in spite of wild-eyed denial in others — that the Kyoto goals never had a prayer of being met and would have made no impact on climate change, and that the Protocol was always about money and economic gamesmanship, not the atmosphere.

That’s a stark contrast in itself. Over the years, the pro-Kyoto line in Canada has varied its substance, if not its self-righteous tone. The earliest sales pitch took it as a given that there would be some economic dislocation, but that it was a small price to pay for saving the planet.

When the public started to wonder whether the price really was worth paying, and whether Kyoto would do anything about it, the line changed: instead, there would be opportunities to make ourselves rich by developing alternative energy technologies. Wind, which in recent years seems to have supplanted solar power as the favoured substitute for goaded, turned and haltered fire, was the great hope; as so often it is in politics and persuasion. Others abandoned that rhetorical lifeboat in favour of a pure appeal to our First World guilt — that we had lived high off the carbon hog, at the expense of our impoverished fellow man.

But in the end, Kyoto made it on brute political force, the sort at which Liberal politicians excel. Former Environment Minister David Anderson told the world that letting Parliament debate Kyoto was a gratuitous kindly nod to the talking shop, rather than responsible government; then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien, characteristically, simply forced a whipped vote in the Commons. Other developed countries were happy to see Canada, Japan and the European Union signing off on a promise to throw themselves off the economic ledge.

Fortunately, in the end, we are off the hook. Having ratified a treaty, only someone that hadn’t lived through years of Liberal government might suppose we are obliged to live up to it.