OPINION:
Back in 1997, President Bill Clinton signed on to the goals and processes of the Kyoto Protocol, which commits signatory countries to reduce greenhouse gases in amounts sufficient to prevent dangerous man-made interference with the climate.
In an attempt to lend some solidity to that imprecise target, the United Nations in 2018 concluded that the world must achieve net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050 to meet the Kyoto commitments.
How is that working out so far? Well, despite what propaganda you might have consumed, the short answer is, not well. Why not? Let’s take a brief cruise through the actual data.
The interim goal laid out in 2018 called for a 45% reduction in greenhouse gases from 2010 to 2030. To meet that target, the world would need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 16 billion tons — an amount equal to the combined greenhouse gas emissions of China and the United States — in the next seven years.
That seems unlikely. In the last 25 or so years, the world has increased greenhouse gas emissions — going from releasing about 42 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually to releasing about 55 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually. That trend does not suggest progress toward net zero.
Nor does the fact that nearly 3 billion people (in Africa, Asia and Latin America) still depend on traditional biomass for cooking and heating, and even at this late date in the Industrial Revolution, biomass still supplies about 5% of the world’s energy. It is a pretty good bet that those 3 billion people don’t worry much about climate change or the goals set by U.N. bureaucracies. They probably worry more about getting enough energy and enough calories to make it through the day.
With respect to the use of coal, oil and natural gas, those three energy sources still meet about 82% of our primary energy demands, way down from the 86% they supplied in 1997. More importantly, the world is using more coal (about 50% more), more oil (about 20% more) and more natural gas (about 60% more) than it used in 1997.
The irreducible fact of energy is that all energy sources are additive; as more sources of energy are discovered and developed, they are added to the stack of energy sources. People are always going to use more energy because it is the single most important component of modern life, and everyone wants more prosperity, more opportunity, and, at a fundamental level, a greater ability to accomplish more in the limited hours of each day.
This is especially acute in the United States, a nation partially founded on the idea that no matter what the question, the answer is almost always more.
If you think climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed, you need to start advocating a change in regime, because the Kyoto Protocol — despite or perhaps because of the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to achieve its goals — has been a spectacular failure by any metric.
Those who wish that people would use less energy or substitute alternative energy sources for affordable and reliable energy sources are swimming against a very powerful tide. To date, they have been carried away by that tide.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.