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Potomac Crossings --By George Mason

Bonn-Bonns for Bush The Bush administration watched from the sidelines as 178 nations meeting in Bonn, Germany voted to create hobbling global environmental rules from which 139 of them were exempt. This exercise in the deeply cynical French and German politics of resentment has little or nothing to do with the environment. ‘We have left environmental politics behind," said Herman Ott, head of climate policy at the German Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. " Now we have only world politics and power politics." "What has been agreed to," according to the London Daily Telegraph," is at best marginal, and at worst an expensive exercise in gesture politics. None the less, the summit succeeded in its primary purpose which was to allow the participants to posture in front of their domestic electorates." Key European governments are coalitions in which the left-of-center Social Democrats hold a plurality but not a majority. To achieve a majority, they form an alliance with the further left Green Party. In return for their support, the greens usually get to head the environmental ministries. Green bureaucrats then select the delegations found at Bonn. The green/socialist coalition represents the dying gasps of the European authoritarian left. A primary tactic of the Marxist left has always been to attempt to create a moral justification for coercion. Environmentalism furnishes them a good horse to ride. For the run-of-the-mill cynical non-believer politician, however, Kyoto is an attempt to erect an economic roadblock to U.S. competition, imposing higher costs on the U.S. economy. Since carbon dioxide results from the burning of all fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas, wood – the only effective way to cut emissions is to limit energy use through a high carbon tax or ban use entirely by government fiat. As rushed through without the required translation, the protocols are "diplomatically" rather than "legally" binding but they allow for the establishment of a compliance procedure in the future. The concessions to Japan heavily dilute the treaty. Carbon sinks (credit for forests that reduce CO2 count towards a net rather than gross national emissions number) and flexible pollution rights that can be traded across borders are permitted. When Clinton representative Frank Loy proposed these same modifications at The Hague last year, he literally got a pie in his face. This time, they were necessary EU concessions to get Japan’s critical vote. It has a lower house election coming up at the end of the month. Malte Meinshausen, a climate expert for environmental lobby group Greenpeace, estimates that with the Japanese loopholes, instead of lowering CO2 emissions in 2010 by 5-6 percent, emissions will actually rise by 2-3 percent. Why bother? Stephen Singer of the Worldwide Fund for nature explains, " The psychological effect that carbon must be restrained is much, much bigger than the ecological effect in the first period." Environmentalists plan to press for much bigger emissions cuts after the initial period of 2008-2012. What is important now is to get a coercive procedure in place. The next step is not ratification per se, but to get the United States to reduce its emissions either within the Kyoto framework or along side it, Reuters reports. The idea, after all, was to stick the U.S. with the costs, not to incur them in Europe while America floats free. Hurrying along a compulsory mechanism translates into canonizing the flawed science of the moment. Even the latest report of 12 scientists gushed over by a green-sympathetic media (www.nap.edu/catalog/10139.html?onpi_newsbooks_060801) uses the words "uncertain" or "uncertainty" 43 times in 28 pages. Those who actually read the report instead of just the press release will find: Carbon dioxide emissions were insignificant from 1890-1940 and yet the earth warmed anyway. From 1940-70, the earth cooled. There is no agreement on whether we have a cycle or a trend. The warming of a little less that 1 degree F in 100 years had beneficial not adverse effects – a longer growing season, less harsh winter nights. Warming measurements have been observed only on the surface of the earth. That method has provable inaccuracies of up to 40 percent, especially at sea. Accurate and daily-monitored NASA satellite measurements of the upper air show no warming has occurred over the past 22 years. No assumptions used in computer modeling have been verified by any actual measurement. Predictive climate models fail when backtested. Accurate computer simulations would need to track five million parameters and incorporate their relevant interactions - a computational impossibility. There is no scientific evidence to date that supports catastrophic warming from any cause, human or otherwise. If it is a problem at all, it is not here-and-now, but one that gradually unfolds over decades. What is here-and-now, however, is a fragile global economic condition. For the first time in many decades the three great economic engines of the world – Japan, the U.S. and Europe – are all slowing at once. World GDP, says economist David Malpass of Bear Stearns, will probably shrink 1.1 percent in 2001. That figure would indicate that things are worse than the 1997-98 meltdown in Asia, Russia and Brazil. Euro-zone GDP rose a mere 0.6 percent in the first quarter. Japan is headed for its worse recession since 1974. In Genoa, the G8 political leaders discussed absolutely no new proposals for halting a recession or increasing global economic growth. Mid-week, the European Commission released a White Paper on reforming governance that described the widening gulf between Europe and its voters. They increasingly see Brussels as "remote" and "too intrusive." The EU Council of Ministers, the report notes, is the only legislative body in the world that meets in secret except for North Korea and Cuba. The highly unpopular and determinedly elitist EU badly needs a diversion such as the Kyoto Protocols to obscure the fact that Europe’s disparate economies won’t allow for a common recovery to an economic slide. As always, each country will seek its own remedy, regardless of the impact on its neighbors or the feeble Euro. What will investors do? "The United States." Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria points out, "has the worst economy in the world – except for all the others." The dollar should fall in a time of declining interest rates but it hasn’t. The safety of the U.S. explains the gravity-defying performance of the dollar. Just why would Asian and European investors use their savings to buy American bonds when they can get higher interest at home? In an inter-connected global economy, people can invest anywhere, anytime. They choose dollars. Investors around the world believe that America is the best place on the planet to invest for risk-adjusted returns, according to Bush economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey. "America has problems, " MIT economist Rudi Dornbush says, " but it also has solutions." To global investors who find bad fiscal policy, bad monetary policy, bad regulations and an unwillingness to change nearly everywhere they look, a flight to the dollar is a judgement on who has sound governance. For the Bush administration, that’s a far more serious vote than Bonn.

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