Kyoto Treaty - Chris Horner Interview
Chris C Horner has provided legal, policy and political commentary, hundreds of times on both television and radio including Fox News Channel, Court TV, MSNBC, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, BBC, CNN, CNN International, CBC and Reuters Television.
The purpose of this interview is to explain to the international community, and Americans, the very fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy and the Conservative position with regards to the Kyoto Treaty among others. This interview delves into core beliefs that lead the U.S to the decisions they made in regard to the Kyoto Treaty during the Bush years.
Gabrielle Reilly: What are your thoughts Chris on the very core reasons Americans don't want other government organizations regulating them as they would be with the Kyoto Treaty?
Chris Horner: Americans have an inherent suspicion of supranational and international institutions for very good reason. President Reagan pulled us out of UNESCO, President George W. Bush rescinded our signature into the International Criminal Court and, while he did not in fact pull us out of Kyoto as is misreported he has elected to remain outside of it, at least for now although his successor can change that position at any time.
The reasons behind this suspicion do not just derive from our resistance to socialism which is so embraced by Europe, which of course is a manifestation of our difference over our views on individual liberty and responsibility. These reasons include that such institutions largely tend to prove themselves to be anti-American in mission and practice, regardless of their stated purpose. In fact they, like much of their membership, seem to devolve to defining themselves as being against whatever the US is for. Americans see little need to subsidize this. Energy is of critical importance to our national security of course, so the combined abdication of "energy sovereignty" are simply untenable to President Clinton - who refused to pursue ratification, we should not forget even if the media conveniently do - and President Bush who ratified that position.
Gabrielle Reilly: I do believe America, and every other country for that matter, can become substantially more efficient energy consumers and plan on being part of the movement to assist in that. I would really like to take a moment to dispel some of the myths about America though that is inhibiting us from making greater strides environmentally. But first, here is some great news you won't often hear regarding the improvement in U.S energy efficiency over the past three decades:
"Improvements in energy efficiency since the 1970s have had a major impact in meeting national energy needs relative to new supply. If the intensity of U.S. energy use had remained constant since 1972, consumption would have been about 70 quadrillion Btus (74 percent) higher in 1999 than it actually was."
"Today's automobiles, for example, use about 60 percent of the gasoline they did in 1972, while new refrigerators require just one-third the electricity they did 30 years ago. As a result, since 1973, the U.S. economy has grown by 126 percent, while energy use has increased by only 30 percent. In the 1990s alone, manufacturing output expanded by 41 percent, while industrial electricity consumption grew by only 11 percent." U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration.
Most people around the world are told Americans create the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and I don't dispute that fact, but I would like to put it into perspective... America is a developed country with a population of around 270 million people living in severe weather conditions. The majority of Americans do not live in a standard too different than that of
Australians but the weather conditions require much more energy to prevent water pipes from bursting in the homes and to keep Grandmas and children from freezing to death in blizzards.
With a larger population, the commute to and from work to earn money to put food on the table increases also. I would like to compare America to the European Union to see how similar weather conditions, land mass, population and development compare... it would be more like comparing an apple with an apple rather than the environmental graphs I see more frequently that compare apples and oranges to manipulate statistics to satisfy an agenda. Most of the graphs compare underdeveloped countries where the majority of the population ride push bikes like China, or countries with more temperate climates on the tropic lines. So it is unrealistic to ask Americans to turn back to riding bikes and freezing in the winter and more astute to reform our energy consumption and sources as we head into a complete overhaul of an outdated U.S energy systems.
Chris, as I am sure you know, the Kyoto Treaty was structured so it was completely uneconomically viable to compete with China and India. Americans now compete almost directly with Chinese factory workers for jobs in manufacturing, and India for well educated, English speaking computer/communications workers due to the free trade agreement.
China has been buying extraordinary amounts of natural resources around the world such as iron ore as an example and with a population of 1.3 billion people have a tremendous resource of cheap labor to process into goods for the international community. China has virtually made it unviable to produce steel or many other manufacturing goods, not only in America, but in Australia also... which means many people loosing
their jobs. It is hard for an American to compete with such cheap labor.
When the international community sneer about "the U.S. big business" they often think of it in terms of just some big corporations that would be shut down. It becomes very impersonal and looses all "humanness." What it really means though, is that some poor man or women working in a factory in America would loose their job and be out on the street just as readily as they would be in China. These are people who may have children to feed and shelter too. As a parent protects the interest of their children and family, the leaders of a country should protect the interest of its citizens, but in both cases, hopefully not at the detriment of others. Beyond the problems we face with competition for jobs, China is pegging its Yen to the U.S dollar and getting a large discount in trade that we have to account for somehow too.
Gabrielle Reilly: So Chris please gives us some specifics on why the Kyoto Treaty made it unviable for the U.S to compete with other countries economically as we try and compete in this new global market.
Chris Horner: Kyoto, of course, purported to cover only covered 38 of 191 countries, including such titans as Liechtenstein, Monaco, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the US, while excluding tiny China, Mexico, India, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, and others that simply cannot be explained in any rational way. As such it would have selectively saddled the US with a requirement that we tax our energy far more than we do now, far more even than the Europeans do at present, which as you know is exorbitant. As a sidebar, readers should also note that despite their venal rhetoric toward the US on Kyoto, Europe is not complying.
Consider the recent spikes in the price of gasoline, which are consistent with the increase some predicted back when Kyoto was agreed in 1997. However, instead of demand collapsing we have seen the indispensable role that automobility and energy otherwise play in our individual and commercial lives; that is, demand increased despite the hurt the price now puts on average Americans and businesses operating at the margins in competition with low-cost or, as you pointed out, artificially subsidized competitors.
The point of this experience is that in order to comply with Kyoto's energy rationing of one-third less than 1990 emission levels, the US would face staggering energy tax increases in order to reduce demand by about one-third. That is important to walk through, that it would take a reduction of one-third of our "greenhouse gas", or energy use, emissions to get to our promised Kyoto level of 7% below 1990 levels. That would be an economy killer, with tragic social consequences all in the name of what is annually proven to be a wildly hyped environmental claim like so many before it.
Gabrielle Reilly: What impact would the Kyoto Treaty have had on American farmers?
Chris Horner: Farmers not only have major energy requirements but methane is a feedstock in many of their necessary products necessary for them to operate. Methane emissions, like the emissions from combusting methane - carbon dioxide - are also capped at the levels I cited earlier, that is, deep cuts would be required. Finally, nitrogen oxides, also capped, are essential to our farmers. In sum, our farmers would be hit as hard as if not harder than any energy-intensive manufacturing or transport industry.
The final absurdity to all of this is of course that farmers are burdened under Kyoto with "emissions" from masticating animals, that is their flatulence, as if the farmer combusted energy or owned a leaky gas pipeline producing those emissions. So, in the 38 countries that would be covered, agriculture would simply have to be off-shored to the 150 exempt nations.
Gabrielle Reilly: Chris, do you have any comments or additions to this premise?
Chris Horner: The greatest hypocrisy in this relevant universe is the left's insistence that "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" is somehow consistent with obstructing our ability to increase access to domestic sources of oil, coal and gas. From their support for energy taxes and regulatory obstacles impeding domestic production, to Clinton's ANWR veto a decade ago and recently overcome Senate Democrat opposition to ANWR and upgrading our electrical network, their efforts to strangle supply on every front can mean only one thing and it is entirely consistent with Kyoto's energy rationing regime: reducing dependence on foreign energy is code for restricting our ability to use energy. Energy being the lifeblood of the economy, this is a dangerous agenda.
Gabrielle Reilly: If the Kyoto Treaty wasn't the solution for you Chris, can you give me a viable solution that addresses the energy/environment debate that you would like to see implemented?
Chris Horner: America may produce a little over 20% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but it also produces 25% of the world's GDP. Turning the prism, you might say that we are disproportionately productive and the attacking philosophy is simply the tired old redistributionsim. We also have reduced our energy and emissions intensity, that is, how much energy or emissions are required to produce each unit of GDP, as the chart below shows. This raises the point of a possible "Plan B", President Bush's preferred approach to what remains the catastrophic warming theory - one that the science seems to weigh more strongly against each month - and one that might be viewed as a "no regrets" or do no harm approach: even further reducing emissions or energy intensity. Those are in fact two slightly different things, not necessary to resolve here, but the chart below (from the UN I might add) demonstrates that in fact, unlike under Kyoto's energy rationing scheme, one can grow their economy while improving their emissions profile. (light bar is economic growth, in the positive, others are two measurement periods for emission intensity, which are going down; that relationship exists in the healthier economies )
If one is sincerely concerned about Man's possible influence on the climate, then the obvious choice is pursuing improvements in energy intensity through no regrets policies such as removing regulatory barriers to innovation, expediting the expensing of capital equipment, removing subsidies and deregulating energy and transportation industries.
One further note, if I may. The Law of the Sea Treaty has an entire chapter, Article XII, dedicated to environment. In fact, when then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher trumpeted LOST, he called it the grandest environmental treaty in history. This is worrisome, as clearly the Kyoto claims of rising sea levels, melting ice caps and carbon deposition in the ocean. LOST's tribunal has already expressed that it will determine its own competence, or scope and jurisdiction. As such, if Kyoto was a bad idea, LOST is utterly unsupportable, as it adds the two elements missing from the greens' Kyoto dream: jurisdiction over the US, and an enforcement mechanism. This in addition to all of the valid arguments made against LOST under President Reagan and today, and you see there is no good reason to not reject this treaty in the strongest terms.
END
"Choices are the hinges of destiny."
- Pythagoras
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