Beyond the Kyoto Conference
by Rhys Roth (Atmoshpere Alliance)

Kyoto - Ten thousand people from 160 nations gathered in Japan from December 1-10, 1997 to confront the ominous problem of global warming. The Third Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change convened with a difficult mission: to reach agreement on how to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly from fossil fuel burning.

The agreement by the biggest polluters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions is clearly an historic breakthrough, but an enormous chasm remains between the Kyoto Protocol targets and what is needed to stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Climate Action in Kyoto

When I arrived in Kyoto, I assumed that the real power rested in the hands of the governments, corporate-controlled media and the legions of industrial lobbyists representing private companies (many of them stronger than some national governments). I was initially skeptical that the small contingents of environmental activists assembled at Kyoto would be able to do much to affect such high-level economic and political negotiations. But my skepticism melted as I met my fellow climate activists. I was deeply impressed by their passion, technical expertise, skilled communication and tactical savvy.

The international Climate Action Network [CAN, 1200 New York Ave. NW Suite 400, Washington DC 20005, USA] immediately set to work to shift the negotiations' outcome, meeting daily to share intelligence with other NGOs and to coordinate strategy. CAN's activists outflanked fossil fuel PR spin doctors by preparing a steady stream of events and publications for more than 3,000 international press representatives. CAN's daily 4-page bulletin, Eco - which analyzed critical developments and lampooned the pro-pollution crowd - was read by government delegates, reporters and industry lobbyists alike. Eco clearly influenced the tone of the talks.

A "Medical Warning" on global warming - initiated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Eric Chivian and signed by over 1500 physicians - was delivered to world leaders in Kyoto. It read in part: "As physicians and health professionals, we are trained that when the risks to health and life are great enough, it is necessary to take immediate preventative action to avoid a potential medical catastrophe, even when one does not have all the evidence in hand. We believe this is the situation we face today with the threat of global warming."

The physicians' warning noted that it is the poor in developing nations who are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events, the spread of infectious diseases, loss of clean drinking water and disruptions in food production.

An activist from the Ogoni region of Nigeria explained how Shell Oil, in close partnership with the Nigerian military dictatorship, has extracted billions of dollars-worth of petroleum, devastating the land and the lives of the Ogoni people. In 1996, Goldman Environment Award winner Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other anti-Shell protesters were hanged. At the press conference in Kyoto, nine activists stood draped in black hoods with nooses around their necks, holding signs that read: "Are these the only loopholes that will be closed at this conference?"

Renewable Energy Revolution

For most of the two billion people in developing countries who are living without electricity, renewable energy is a more attractive and affordable alternative to fossil fuels in many ways.

The green-leaning European and American Business Councils for Sustainable Energy kept a high profile in Kyoto, supporting a strong treaty and insisting that the cure to global warming lies in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The Worldwatch Institute's new paper, Rising Sun, Gathering Winds: Policies to Stabilize the Climate and Strengthen Economies pointed out that the solar and wind industries are growing at well over 20 percent annually and now account for $3 billion in annual sales. Clean energy policies in Japan, Denmark and Germany have allowed these countries to seize leadership in the clean energy industries, creating many thousands of new jobs.

Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) debuted their new report, Climate: Making Sense and Making Money, which concluded that "energy efficiency and carbon displacement are highly profitable now, even at very low US prices." All that stands in the way of major reductions in energy demand.

Big Business: A Crack in the Monolith

The Kyoto conclave revealed that the business community is no longer a monolith united in opposition to protecting economic growth and corporate profit at the expense of the global atmosphere.

A major crack opened last April when British Petroleum withdrew from the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the fossil fuel industry's most powerful lobbying group. Conceding that global warming was real, BP announced its plans to sell $1 billion in solar panels per year within a decade. Royal Dutch Shell followed by directing $500 million into solar, wind, and biomass energy technologies in the next 4 years (though it failed to withdraw from the GCC). And, after the Japanese government announced it would put solar panels on 10,000 buildings to kick-start solar markets, Sanyo, Sharp, Canon and Mitsubishi Electric all announced major expansions into solar manufacturing.

The global insurance industry, which collects $2 trillion in annual premiums, presented its most comprehensive statement on climate change at Kyoto in a letter signed by 71 major companies. The Insurers' Statement declared that "climate change is a real and serious hazard" and warned that in several areas of the US a single storm could cause a staggering $100 billion in damages, enough to shake insurers to their financial roots.

A report from Munich Reinsurance, the world's largest reinsurance company (the companies that insure the insurance companies), concluded that the damage from a single mega-storm hitting a major industrial center "would be so great as to cause the collapse of entire countries' economic systems and could even bring about the collapse of the world's financial markets."

The Insurers' Statement noted that, "Even small shifts in regional climate zones and/or storm patterns carry the risk of a large increase in property damages." Increasing the windspeed of a 200 km/hr storm by 10 percent, for example, could increase by "about 150 percent."

Swiss Reinsurance and Gerling Insurance Corp. have each invested more than $2 million in solar ventures. The renewable energy industry currently does a few billion dollars in business, while insurers have a few trillion to invest. As the wind and solar industries scale up production, they will become an increasingly attractive investment for insurers and other major institutional investors.

Jeremy Leggett, former Greenpeace climate director, now heads a task force appointed by Britain's new Labour government charged with determining how the UK can become a world leader in clean energy. Leggett's Solar Century Initiative to accelerate the growth of the global solar market has already enlisted banks, hotel chains, utilities and cities, and has brokered the first deals for insurers to finance solar-electric installations.

The financial sector is closely linked to the insurance sector, and is thus vulnerable as well to ravaging by global warming; interest in supporting a transition to clean energy is seeping out from the financial industry. A 1995 report for the London-based Delphi Group concluded that "climate change presents major long-term risks to the carbon fuel industry (which have) not been adequately discounted by financial markets. The alternative energy industry offers greater growth prospect than the carbon fuel industry. Diversification into this sector also offers substantial scope to offset the risks of climate change."

Glutton Against the World

With only 5 percent of the world's population, the US generates nearly a quarter of world emissions of climate-changes gases - including more than a billion tons of CO2 every year. Wielding that huge block of emissions, US representatives worked to hold the planet hostage and exact demands on the rest of the delegations.

The US found itself isolated, however, as the primary barrier to a meaningful agreement. Some 85 percent of the world's population backed the European Union proposal for a 15 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized nations by 2010, with a cut of 7 percent by 2005.

The debate was not about whether or not global warming is dangerous or whether action is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is so compelling that not a single government in Kyoto, even the most fossil fuel-dependent, contested its basic conclusions. Not the US, not Australia, not the OPEC nations. Even the notorious US fossil fuel lobby avoided attacks on the science.

Instead, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) and US government representatives argued in Kyoto that a treaty committing the US to emission cuts would trigger job-flight to poor countries, a contention flawed on at least two counts. First, energy is a small fraction of total business costs (about 1.3 percent for the average US manufacturer). If energy prices mattered that much, Japanese industries, which pay three times more for electricity, would have all moved abroad by now. Second, member corporations of the GCC clearly care very little about the loss of their workers' jobs. From 1992 to 1996, GCC members shed 84,000 employees - an 18% reduction - while increasing profits by 117 percent.

The US demand for poor nations to commit to emission cuts was a cynical negotiating ploy concocted by fossil fuel PR firms and advanced by the US Senate. The consensus in all the agreements leading to Kyoto - Rio in '92, Berlin in '95, Geneva in '96 - was that industrialized nations would lead the charge because they are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases. Rich countries, - with plenty of food, an overabundance of automobiles and wealth - can most afford to lead.

Developing countries have said that they will agree to targets once industrial countries demonstrate their commitment through real action. In fact, many developing nations have already done far more than has the US. China, for example, has cut fossil fuel subsidies from 50 percent to almost zero. Europe and the US still subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

It was difficult for US negotiators to argue publicly that they had popular backing for their treaty-endangering demand. In spite of a $14 million propaganda campaign by fossil fuel PR groups in the run-up to Kyoto, a New York Times poll on the eve of the conference found that 65 percent of Americans believe the US should take action to fight global warming now, regardless of what other countries do. Climate activists posted the full-page article describing the poll on every high-traffic door at the conference, with a note to the big fossil fuel lobby group: "Dear Global Climate Coalition: At least we know the American people don't believe you."

The Planet's Future Lies Beyond Kyoto

The fossil fuel industry's grip on global energy politics is weakening; the Kyoto Protocol is evidence of that. Some of the major loopholes that could have made the treaty meaningless were rejected and the final agreement went significantly beyond what the fossil fuel lobby wanted.

The Protocol sets different targets for various industrialized nations that average out to about a 5 percent cut below 1990 emission levels by the period 2008-2112. The US is committed to a 7 percent cut.

The US was successful in inserting language to support its plan for an international emissions-trading scheme, the details of which will be worked out in advance of the next major meeting planned for Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 1998. Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine will be allowed to sell pollution credits (based on the recent sharp reductions in their emissions due solely to their collapsed economies). The Protocol allows some perverse incentives that would reward clearcutting and replacing mature natural forests with tree plantations - on the grounds that young, faster-growing trees can trap more atmospheric CO2 that mature, old-growth forests.

Between what science tells us is needed and what the Kyoto targets promise lies a huge gulf. An article in Science magazine quoted Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, as saying we'll need about 30 Kyoto-sized CO2 reductions just to stabilize the climate.

In the coming battle over US Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, activists must place several urgent facts at centerstage:

- To stop the climb in atmospheric CO2, we must cut emissions not just 5 percent globally, but 60-80 percent;

- US taxpayers must halt subsidies worth tens of billions of dollars to fossil fuel corporations and redirect the savings toward renewable energy, and;

- Plans to build hundreds [how many?] of new coal and nuclear plants over the next few decades must be abandoned in favor of accelerating the renewable energy revolution already gaining momentum.

- The World Bank, US AID, and the Asian Development Bank, have historically favored centralized, environmentally destructive coal-fired plants, dams and nuclear reactors. They must changed course and promote renewable technologies.

Real success in escaping the climate crisis depends on people, businesses and governments accelerating revolutionary changes in our energy system, and doing so much more quickly than is required by the Kyoto accord.

Related Stories:
Sabotaging Kyoto by Privatizing Compliance
How to Create a Solar Economy in Four Years

Rhys Roth, Atmosphere Alliance, 2103 Harrison Ave NW, #2615 Olympia, WA 98502, (360) 352-1763, fax 943-4977, email: atmosphere@olywa.net, web: atmosphere alliance