Hell-bent on Kyoto

Wednesday 1st May 2002

Is the government's new religion environmentalism, asks NIKKI MANDOW

As an agnostic student I spent many hours arguing with a religious friend over the existence, or not, of God. The debate was interesting but fruitless because it was based on belief: her belief in the existence of God, mine in his non-existence. There was no proof available for either argument, so there was nothing to move either party from her fixed belief.

It seems to me the Kyoto Protocol debate has developed something of a religious fervour about it. On the one side, the environmentalists believe that man's consumption-bent lifestyle is irrevocably damaging the planet, and that greenhouse gas emissions, and the impact they may have on the temperature of the planet, are a crucial symptom of that. On the other side, the agnostic business community just doesn't believe the symptoms are so bad, nor that the expense required to cure the problem is worth the effort. Each side sees the other as the epitome of misguided belief: crazed environmentalists versus vested-interest capitalists.

The debate has become hopelessly polarised. But after spending quite a few hours researching a feature in this month's issue ("Kyoto: OK or KO?"), my sympathies are increasingly with the anti-Kyoto lobby. Their arguments are just that much more reasoned.

Don't get me wrong. Humans and their pollutants are doing awful things to the planet. I am horrified by the stuff belching into the atmosphere (and our lungs) from car exhaust fumes, and I am astonished that successive governments refuse, for political reasons, to take basic - and relatively cost-effective - steps like making emissions testing part of the warrant of fitness test. I regret the destruction of rainforests. I was, until recently, a paid-up member of the Auckland Environmental Business Network. But however much I delve into the climate change science, I cannot convince myself enough proof yet exists on global warming to justify a huge, ongoing, mega-billion-dollar worldwide campaign to reduce greenhouse gases.

There are three important points here. First, greenhouse gases are not necessarily harmful. Water vapour is a major greenhouse gas (although it doesn't count for Kyoto Protocol purposes). As for carbon dioxide, plants love it; the more CO2 there is around, the bigger and greener they grow. Methane: well, I just find it hard to accept there can be so much harm in a gas that principally comes (and has always come) from wetlands and the burps and farts of animals. And there are a number of atmospheric factors (aerosols, for example) that are working to produce global cooling.

Second, while it is undeniable that increased levels of greenhouse gases could cause severe global warming, I find scant evidence they are actually increasing to anything like a catastrophic extent. There are many scientific scenarios about future warming in the tomes of the International Panel for Climate Change (the main body doing greenhouse gas research) but so far no one, including the IPCC, says they are anything more than that: scenarios. "Cooking with aluminium pots can cause Alzheimer's Disease" was a perfectly justified scenario a few years ago, but it was just that - a scenario. No one came up with the hard data to validate the scenario and, luckily for the aluminium industry, governments waited for that hard data before they acted.

Third, even if global warming is happening, the Kyoto Protocol won't work. This seems to be the one thing that experts from all sides of the climate change spectrum, including advisors to New Zealand Environment Minister Pete Hodgson, agree on: Kyoto won't achieve its stated aim of reducing global CO2 emissions. A few countries will, between 2008 and 2012, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels (or some agreed fraction of 1990 levels). The majority of countries will do nothing.

In 1834 French novelist Honore de Balzac published The Quest of the Absolute, the story of a rich nobleman and scientist who virtually bankrupts his family in a fruitless quest for the "absolute" substance from which all other materials are made. He believes the discovery - which will enable him to fabricate diamonds, gold and all other precious things - will be of unparalleled benefit to his family. Actually, his blinkered fixation with a single, foolish scientific principle simply eats up the family fortune.

Prime Minister Helen Clark won't allow Kyoto to bankrupt New Zealand - the government is too pragmatic for that. But New Zealand businesses have better things to do with their time and money than battle to implement a protocol that is not cost-effective, cannot achieve its stated aims and is based on science that isn't yet proven.

Nikki Mandow
nikki@unlimited.net.nz

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