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A United
Nations panel on Friday released its most comprehensive
strategy to avoid the catastrophic effects of global
warming, but experts said that political and economic
realities likely doom it to failure.
Although
more than 100 countries backed the report, experts said
that its call for a global, multi-trillion-dollar effort
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is unrealistic.
The
United States and China—which account for more than 40
percent of the world’s emissions—approved the report but
have given no indication that they would reverse their
long-held opposition to mandatory reductions in
emissions.
“It’s
not realistic from a political standpoint, and it’s not
realistic because those targets are incredibly
expensive,” said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale
University.
Even
supporters of the plan were daunted by the speed and
scale of action required by the report to stabilize
carbon emissions at roughly current levels.
“It’s
hard to imagine,” said Jae Edmonds, an economist at the
Joint Global Change Research Institute, located at the
University of Maryland. “So many things have to happen
so fast, and they are so big.”
The
report, by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, was released in Bangkok, Thailand, after a week
of contentious debates.
Its
primary instrument for reducing greenhouse gas
concentrations is a system in which governments would
place a cap on emissions and charge polluters for every
ton of carbon dioxide beyond that point. That would
force companies to cut emissions and invest in energy
efficiency and alternative fuels.
The
price per ton would reach as high as $100 by 2030. By
then, the system could cost up to 3 percent of the
world’s gross domestic product, the report said.
The Bush
administration quickly denounced the restrictions as too
expensive. “It would cause a global recession,” said
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council
on Environmental Quality.
But
Robert Socolow, a carbon mitigation expert at Princeton
University, said that taking a cheaper and slower path
could be costly. A study by the British government last
year found that damage from global warming—flooding,
starvation, drought and other calamities—would easily
top 5 percent of global GDP annually.
The UN
report looked at a variety of scenarios, but only the
most expensive would avoid the worst perils of rising
temperatures.
That
course requires annual emissions to peak by 2015 and
fall 50 percent, to 85 percent of 2000 levels, by
mid-century. It would limit the temperature increase to
3 degrees Fahrenheit.
The
concentration of greenhouse gases would be stabilized
between 445 and 490 parts per million carbon dioxide
equivalents—a measure that factors in the warming
effects of all greenhouse gases. The current
concentration is about 425 parts per million.
The
United States has opposed calls for mandatory emissions
cuts and carbon taxes, instead placing its hopes on
voluntary reductions and future technologies that would
be cleaner and cheaper.
China
also has opposed mandatory reductions, saying they would
derail its economic growth.
The
world’s most populous country unsuccessfully fought to
delete the most stringent emissions scenario from the
report, participants in the conference said. India, the
world’s fifth biggest polluter, joined in the effort.
The most
prominent supporters of the plan were European nations.
“The
report shows—and this is encouraging—that ambitious
climate protection is economically manageable,” said
German government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm.
The UN
report is the third of four installments being issued
this year. With the input of more than 2,000 scientists
and the approval of more than 100 governments, they are
the closest thing the world has to a consensus on global
warming.
The
release in February of the first report, which
definitively blamed humans for global warming, helped
galvanize world opinion after years of debate and
shifted the focus of activity toward fixing the problem.
The
second report, released in April, looked at the
potential impacts of global warming. It said that rising
temperatures, if left unchecked, would lead to
widespread coastal flooding, starvation and species
extinctions.
The
current report is as much about policy as it is about
science, asking how much the world is willing to pay to
stem global warming.
Among
its options are several more affordable scenarios. For
example, one plan would stabilize greenhouse gas levels
between 590 and 710 parts per million. It would cost 0.2
percent of global GDP in 2030, compared with 3 percent
in the most stringent plan.
Annual
emissions would continue to rise until 2060, increasing
more than 60 percent above 2000 levels. But under that
scenario, temperatures would rise about 6 degrees, which
the UN panel has described as calamitous.
Global
temperatures have risen about 1.5 degrees since the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th
century.
Peter
Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the Union
of Concerned Scientists and an author of the current
report, said he hoped it would increase pressure on the
United States
to agree to mandatory emissions cuts.
The
United States, he said, lags behind Europe, which
already runs a market in which emissions permits are
bought and sold.
The crux
of the problem is deciding who should pay to contain
global warming. China and other developing countries
argue that industrialized nations should foot the bill,
since they are responsible for the bulk of carbon
dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere over the last two
centuries.
That
view is reflected in the Kyoto Protocol, which requires
participants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by
2012 by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels.
The Bush
administration has refused to join the Kyoto pact on the
grounds that it does not restrict emissions in the
developing world.
China,
which opens a new coal-fired power plant once a week, is
on track to surpass the United States as the biggest
polluter as soon as this year. |
