Kyoto - a lot of hot air

The resulting agreement would be hailed in the media and by activists but would mean precisely nothing. Perhaps the Chinese central government would make an effort to meet those targets - they would have just taken umpteen billion dollars of the west’s money so they should be seen to be doing something - but there is nothing in the country’s record to suggest that there would be any useful result. In China, for example, a written, signed contract is not seen as binding, but merely what the parties think will happen at that stage of the negotiating process.

At best, party officials, under pressure from the central government, may fudge the books to make it look as if something has been done. Worse, those figures may be taken at face value, as have the figures on economic growth. China may melt down - as noted there have been mass factory closures - so the cuts in emissions may be temporarily met, but once the crisis is over the Chinese will be back at work with cheerful disregard for the Western fetish about carbon.

Then there is America. Ernest, young activists say that they expect the Obama presidency to count for something and point to the fact that the president-elect has promised major cuts in emissions.

Reality check. Say that the new President decreed that to meet targeted emissions cuts, he would raise taxes on petrol by $1 a gallon? This would still not bring taxes on American petrol to anywhere near the levels of tax motorists in Australia and Europe have been paying for years, but the new President would be lucky to avoid impeachment. Although in one sense a powerful position, the American presidency is strongly constrained by numerous domestic checks and balances. Apart from any other considerations, presidents also want to get re-elected, and will not get re-elected by raising taxes or throwing voters out of work to meet emission targets.

In response to that uncomfortable truth activists may burble that emissions cuts will not cost all that much and, in the same breath, say that there will be plenty of jobs in building alternative energy power plants. Right! I will believe both those assertions when I see them happening, but as there is no real chance of significant emissions cuts we are unlikely to be in a position to test those assertions.

The Kyoto signatories are supposed to sign off on Kyoto Round II at a meeting in Copenhagen late next year. The talks in Poznan in Poland, to which Australia’s climate minister Penny Wong has jetted off, is a part of the process. The eventual result may make an agreement on cuts which will make the various governments concerned look good to the electorates back home, but they will not be met. After all, they did not meet the much easier cuts required under round one. More likely they may not agree on anything at all. Whatever the agreement, the result will be a lot of hot air.