Captain's Log

Kyoto: To sign or not to sign?

A long time ago Parker asked me if I had opinions on the Bush administration's policy with regard to not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, since I'm an environmental engineer. I'm a water treatment person, and I haven't really done much with outdoor air, let alone global climate science. So I don't have any 'expert' opinions in terms of the science.

A few years ago we had a seminar in our department by Gerry Schwarz. (Video link).
The whole thing is pretty long (1:30), but the part about global warming is from about minute 14 to minute 23. It's covered by just two slides (3 and 4). It's worth 10 minutes of watching if you are interested. The point of his lecture is that dealing with politics and engineering is a complex issue. His conclusion about Kyoto is that it's a 'badly flawed political solution to an extraordinary complex problem.' He says that Kyoto puts an unfair burden on the United States to reduce its emissions. Regulation in the 70s and 80s brought CO2 emissions down in the US and many of those policies were ahead of other countries. The wording of the Kyoto Treaty says that each nation has to reduce it's CO2 emission to a certain fraction of its 1990 levels. The problem from the US's point of view is that it already spent resources lowering CO2 levels prior to 1990, and it is even more expensive to reduce emissions further. Other nations that had large emissions at the time have to make simpler, cheaper improvements to see the same reduction, which is economically unfair to the US.

There's another viewpoint from Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth in which he says that he would have pushed to ratify the treaty had he been elected president. One of the ideas Gore tries to get across in the movie is that we need to make serious efforts to reduce worldwide CO2 or the effects of global warming will be significant very soon. He says those effects (and subsequent environmental and economic losses) will be so severe that it is worth the cost to make emissions reductions now. It's reasonable considering that the US produces a large fraction of the CO2 emitted in the world, and has an extremely high per capita emission rate.

So where do I stand? I'm not completely sure, but I do believe that global warming is a problem, and some effort needs to be taken to slow down whats happening at the moment. I don't know that the Kyoto Protocol is a great answer, but I can't imagine it's a horrible one. We'll have to pay the cost to reduce emissions at some point, and if we put that money into research now it'll pay off in the future.