28 November 2000
The Ecologist Magazine
Loopholes and hot air: or how to scupper our future in a few easy steps.
The Kyoto Fiasco

By Peter Bunyard, Science Editor

The failure of the COP6 climate meetings in The Hague last November left a lot of us 'gutted' besides John Prescott, and for rather different reasons. Initially, we had assumed that the Brits, with Prescott shouldering his way to the front, had stood up against the big, bad boys of the US who had been refusing to sign an agreement that would have committed them actually to cut back on their profligate emissions of greenhouse gases. Well, how wrong we were. It was our 'Green' friends in Europe, including Danes, Germans and French, who stood firm and refused to budge on a watered down agreement, brokered by Prescott, that would have left the US and its 'Umbrella Group' friends with enough loopholes to sink Holland, Bangladesh and a lot of small island states besides. In his desperate attempt to get something signed, Prescott compromised the integrity of the only valid position on global warming - that emissions had to be drastically curbed and not least in the United States. That betrayal is what gutted us.

What's next is pretty obvious. Those of us who are really serious about global warming had better start getting those emissions down irrespective as to whether the US and its accomplices are on board. It doesn't need much foresight to realise that tackling those emissions could well be a win-win, no-regrets situation, with more efficient energy systems, cleaner vehicles, better public transport, the deployment of renewable technologies, more comfortable homes, less pollution and a safer, healthier environment. And for those worried about the economy, there's money to be made in all that, especially when our friends in parts of the world where climate change will hit hard start seeking help on how to improve their economies without having recourse to burning fossil fuels.

But we shouldn't forget that fossil fuels and especially oil and natural gas, even with taxes heaped on them, are phenomenally cheap for what they give us. One reasonably fit human working non-stop, 24 hours a day, for more than two weeks, would just about consume the energy in one gallon of petrol. No wonder we like chain saws, motor mowers and comfortable tin boxes to hurtle around in, as well as electric power that comes to us via fossil fuel burners and steam/gas turbines. Consequently, any country that unilaterally puts a brake on its fossil fuel consumption whilst others are cavalierly blowing out greenhouse gas emissions, is truly shooting itself in the economic foot. It is just that kind of consideration which made the United States baulk at signing up to a climate protocol at Kyoto in 1997. It might have done so, it said, were developing countries such as India and China to put limits to their own use of fossil fuels in racking up their fast growing economies.

Well, as Aubrey Meyer and his friends at the Global Commons Institute are fond of pointing out, there is that little matter of historical emissions and of equity. Indian politicians do find some discrepancy in their country's per capita emissions of greenhouse gases compared to those in the US - some 0.24 tonnes of carbon per person in India compared to 5.5 tonnes in the US. If we are to have a hope of stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at no higher than 550 parts per million - which would be double pre-industrial levels - then, on an equitable basis, each of the world's 6 billion people would have rights to emit no more than 0.4 tonnes of carbon as carbon dioxide or methane, including those resulting from deforestation and land-use changes. China, emitting 3.5 times more carbon per person than India, clearly has no room left for manoeuvre, while we in the UK would have to cut back fivefold and in the US more than tenfold on current rates. A tall order in the short term, but that shouldn't stop us making a start.

In terms of curbing climate change, the Kyoto Protocol is already years out of date and, even had it been agreed to at COP 6, the loopholes regarding carbon sinks would have made it nigh ineffectual. It is all very well for countries such as the US stating that land-use changes, including the reversion of land to forest combined with the growing use of zero-tillage methods of cultivation are putting carbon back in the soil and therefore should be used in the overall balance of the carbon emitted, in its case 24 per cent of the world total. For a start what goes into biomass and soils can well come out again, just as it did with the forest fires raging uncontrollably across several of the states during the summer of 2000, or when farmers started breaking open the prairies in the first place.

Each year, every month, every moment, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being measured and what we see is that at least half of that emitted from fossil fuel burning and from land-use change is staying up there, currently at the rate of some additional 1.5 parts per million per year. That accumulation, ever compounding, should warn us that the most effective, guaranteed way of stabilising levels is through cutting back on emissions. For if the land and oceans were gulping down the CO2 as fast as we could put it up there, we wouldn't be talking about anthropogenic global warming.

Several loopholes had been agreed even prior to COP 6. Australia, for instance, had its request accepted that the carbon estimated to have been emitted from deforestation should be included in its 1990 baseline year inventory. That gave it an extra 0.8 per cent to play with, especially as its deforestation rate then conveniently declined. A number of countries with their 'economies in transition', including Hungary, Poland, Romania and others from eastern Europe, were also allowed to use a year later than 1990 as baseline. Since their emissions had by then increased, they too gained both in having an easier target and, should 'hot air' carbon trading take off, they would have more 'certifiable emissions' to sell.

Greenpeace has picked the loopholes apart, showing just what a scam it would be were they to be allowed in place of real cuts in domestic emissions. The industrialised, developed nations, including those with their economies in transition are lumped together as Annex B countries. According to the Kyoto Protocol, averaged out, all 39 of them should reduce their emissions 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010. In that context, the OECD countries of Annex B have a slightly more onerous obligation to reduce emissions by 6.9 per cent, which translated into carbon means 750 million tonnes less discharged per year. Take from that the 'extra' allowed by Australia as well as from another loophole which allows Annex 1 countries, such as Japan, to assess the greenhouse gas contribution of industrial emissions of HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), PFCs (perfluorocarbons) and SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride), in 1995 rather than in 1990, and the overall carbon reduction required falls to 690 MtC/yr). That reduces still further to 520 MtC/yr when the 'hot air' remaining to Russia, Ukraine and other countries in economic transition is included in the total.

The irony in the whole equation is that the climate models used by the IPCC to warn us of the consequences of business-as-usual emissions of greenhouse gases have been deficient to date in their failure to include life as part of the dynamic of climate change, yet the biggest loopholes involve putative carbon sinks in soils and forests. Sure, the models predict broad-brush changes to vegetation because of temperature increases and shifts in patterns of precipitation, but they patently do not incorporate the impact of changes to life, for instance in its ability to soak up carbon, on climate. As we point out in Fiddling the 'sinks' while the world burns, life makes a substantial difference to the consequences and degree of climate change, and not necessarily in a direction we would want. Therefore it is both premature and deceitful to resort to sinks that are neither guaranteed nor permanent. Yet, that is precisely what the US is calling for, and on which Prescott had tried to broker a deal.

The size of the putative sinks depends largely on whose criteria. The FAO has come up with its definition of what constitutes a forest and the activities of deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. For FAO any area that has a crown cover of 10 per cent or more is a 'forest', even when it consists of a planted monoculture. Nor is FAO concerned that all the carbon locked away in the forest ecosystem should at some future date, possibly sooner rather than later, be released back into the atmosphere. On the basis of the FAO definition of what constitutes a forest the OECD countries could claim 170 MtC/yr and therefore as big a credit as from 'hot air'. The need for domestic reductions in emissions would now be halved.

In its June 2000 report on 'Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry, the IPCC revealed that changes in land management and associated agricultural activities would yield a credit of 290 MtC/yr. Two months later the Annex B countries came up with their own estimates for LULUCF. They estimated 500 MtC/yr, with the US claiming 310 MtC/yr for itself, which if allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, would enable it nearly to meet its target of a 7 per cent reduction on 1990, even though its emissions had actually been rising by more than a fifth since then.

There is surely some perversity in a country claiming carbon credit for undoing the bad land use practices of past generations. Recent research has shown that carbon does re-accumulate in the soils of the great expanses of the Canadian and US prairies, as well as in the cerrado of Brazil and pampas of Argentina, when zero-tillage, direct-drilling techniques are applied in contrast to 'orthodox' cultivation techniques, which involve ploughing and harrowing. According to an Argentinian farmer, Roberto Peiretti, as much as 35 tonnes of carbon per hectare is lost in a matter of years when the pampas is ploughed, a fact confirmed by Saskatchewan farmer, Jerry Willard, for his own part of the world. By leaving the straw stubble to compost down and then direct drilling the seed plus fertiliser into the soil, they find that the soil regains its carbon in just over a decade. In leaving the soil relatively undisturbed, zero-tillage has some parallels with permaculture, but there the parallels end. Zero-tillage requires the use of herbicides, such as 'Round-up' to control weeds: hence the temptation to rely on Monsanto's 'Round-up Ready' soya, maize and other herbicide-resistant GM crops.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is potentially a massive loophole. The idea behind a CDM is that industrialised countries fund projects in developing countries that lead to an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from those that would otherwise have been were there no such project in place. The investor benefits from the 'certified emission reductions' which can be subtracted from the target reductions required and the developing country presumably benefits from 'environmentally sustainable economic development'. As with the other loopholes, the net result is no reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
CDMs can be of two kinds: one involves investment in carbon sinks, such as through forestry projects and land use changes: the other involves investment in 'cleaner technologies'. For instance, were a developing country to claim that it had planned a conventional coal-fired station, but through the CDM was instead building a 'combined-cycle' gas power plant or a solar power plant, it would gain the investment and the industrialised country the carbon credits. The nuclear industry obviously loves the notion of it being categorised as a climatically clean industry.

Certainly the CDM would be beneficial if it were to accelerate the development and deployment of relatively clean power-generating technologies, including renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind, tidal and perhaps mini-hydro, but not nuclear. On the other hand, to use it for providing ex-patria land mass, so that those in the industrialised world continued with their profligate emissions, would be nothing short of neo-colonialism. It reminds one of Georg Borgstrom's 'Ghost Acreages' whereby the high productivity of European agriculture was sustained by imports of cheap feedstuffs from the developing world and which led to the destruction of tropical forests, as in Thailand, to make way for the production of cassava meal. In bringing that into the context of the Kyoto Protocol, "Is it fair", asks Greenpeace, "that some Annex 1 populations that may be emitting 350 times the greenhouse gases per capita of a rural subsistence farmer in the South, now have the right to appropriate 350 times as much land in the South to offset this?"

If the CDM legitimises the use of any energy source, whether fossil fuel, nuclear power, hydro as well as the remaining renewables, that are deemed to offset greenhouse gas emissions which would otherwise have been emitted then, according to Greenpeace, the potential carbon credit amounts to 440 MtC/yr, of which only 15 MtC/yr would result from renewable energy projects. The credit falls to 120 MtC/yr when fossil fuels are excluded. The CDM sinks offer even more credits, particularly when lax criteria are used, such as those of the FAO with regard to forests. In theory CDM sinks could amount to as much as 710 MtC/yr, or 415 MtC/yr if only forest projects were included.

But, as with all such putative sinks we cannot guarantee that they will last, especially were climate change to bring about forest die-back as well as increased soil respiration and the loss of organic carbon. And what if the project caused social unrest and the displacement of people who were then forced to move into marginal lands or into city slums? Indigenous peoples, whose lands may be considered eligible for sink projects, or who could bear the brunt of such projects in neighbouring colonised regions, so far have had virtually no say in the negotiations of the 'parties' at consecutive COPs. They have declared their unequivocal opposition to land use change and forest projects being considered legitimate carbon sinks.

And what is the legitimacy of cashing in on a system of management that would have occurred anyway. Peiretti, points out that 40 per cent of the farmers in the pampas region of Argentina have already resorted to zero-tillage methods, and not for the resulting carbon sinks but because it improves yields and increases profits. Would it be reasonable for agro-industry in Canada or the US to acquire a stake in Argentinian or Brazilian land and then claim a carbon credit, which it could then sell on?

If countries were allowed to make maximum use of all the loopholes, then they would have 3 GtC/yr (3000 million tonnes of carbon per year) available to set against their Kyoto commitments, or three times more than the total required for emission reductions.

A medium loophole scenario limits the Annex 1 countries to 50 per cent of additional sinks and assumes afforestation/reforestation activities generate credits of 146 MtC/yr instead of the 415 MtC/yr in the maximum loophole scenario. And, instead of allowing 20 per cent credit against tropical deforestation, estimated at leading to the emission of 1644 MtC/yr, the medium loophole would allow 10 per cent and hence 164 MtC/yr. The potential credits amount to 1.5 GtC/yr which is double the requirement for emission reductions.

Finally, a low loophole scenario limits the additional sinks to 25 per cent, therefore taking the credit down to 125 MtC/yr and allows no more than 2.5 per cent of tropical deforestation avoided. CDM sinks are limited to 10 per cent and non-sink credits to 119 MtC/yr. On that more stringent basis the loopholes just about balance out the emission reductions required of 750 MtC/yr.

The logic of the loopholes lets everyone off the hook. Meanwhile, through carbon credit exchange, the commercial world gets immeasurably wealthier, and even though the climate is deteriorating rapidly, with more and more people suffering, the world economy booms. That is the reality of the commodification of climate change. To take it to its absurd limits, US economist Nordhaus finds that the economic gains in leisure and recreational activities just about balance out the damages resulting from climate change. His analysis suggests that even though three times as many Chinese were to die from the impact of global warming than would be so without climate change, the increased mortality would be more than compensated as a result of the overall recreational gains made by the surviving Chinese population. Applied worldwide, such economic nonsense suggests that because worldwide agriculture represents no more than 3 per cent of total gross world product, it wouldn't matter if it were wholly destroyed in the cataclysm of climate change. We could all take our dogs for a walk instead.

In a nutshell, just how flexible if at all should the Kyoto Protocol be? The European Community position has always called for a 'quantified' limit to be imposed on the Protocol Mechanisms. According to the EU all Annex B parties must take proper measures to limit their emissions domestically. At most, no country should be allowed to offset more than 30 per cent of its required reductions by means of the Kyoto Mechanisms.

Basically the European Commission finds that a 15 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2012 would be technically feasible among member states and without onerous economic penalties. Improved fuel economy vehicles, increased energy efficiency in industry and the home, fuel-switching in the power generation sector, plus more combined heat and power, deployment of renewable energy sources and biomass fuels. Methane emissions are to be curbed through better management of animal manures, through recovery of landfill gas and improved leak detection and repair.

And according to a recent US government study, Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future, the US could virtually meet its Kyoto target from domestic policies that promoted energy efficient technologies and renewable energy systems, with little or no net cost to the economy. One scenario, the 'Advanced Scenario' indicated that CO2 emissions could be brought close to 1990 levels by 2010 with overall economic savings of some 3 per cent. But the White House global warming coordinator at COP 6, Roger Ballantine, was to have none of it. "The new US government report", he said, "does not in any way reflect the Administration's policy."

The climate is not all that impressed with the wrangle over flexible mechanisms. It will change willy nilly. So, let's make sure we expose flexibility for the sham that it is, and that any deal brokered next May in Bonn between the EU and the US does not include ecologically and politically suspect sinks. In the meantime, why not start putting into practice policies that keep greenhouse gases for the most part well and truly fossilised?