Americans must borrow forty cents out of every dollar they spend and the Euro is in crisis. But you wouldn’t know it from the United Nations-sponsored World Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Delegates from 194 countries are meeting to discuss, again, combating climate change by reduction of carbon emissions, which some say cause global warming.
One topic is extending the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set limits on 37 industrialized countries’ emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide. It expires in 2012.
Another agenda item is wealth transfers from rich nations to poor, in the form of a $100 billion fund to help developing countries reduce their emissions.
Early indications are that the meeting will achieve little.
At Monday’s opening, Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that “to be a success, Durban needs to address further commitments of developed countries under the Kyoto Protocol.”
With the global economy struggling, countries have no appetite for a new Kyoto Protocol. Japan, Canada and Russia will not sign. Neither will Europe, unless America and China sign. Which won’t happen.
There is another way to address the potential problem: geoengineering, or changing selected characteristics of the Earth’s atmosphere. It would be less disruptive of business activity, less threatening to employment, and it promises to be relatively inexpensive.
Most important, it would lower warming even if certain countries that shall remain nameless did not agree to reduce their emissions, reducing the need for carbon caps and the regulatory burden of monitoring and enforcement.
Some scientists, including Dutch Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, believe that altering some features of the Earth’s environment would be a more cost-effective and efficient way to combat global warming.
Geoengineering includes solar radiation management, which diminishes the warmth caused by the sun’s rays.
One way to do this is by injecting fine sulfur particles or other reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect incoming radiation. Another way is to spray clouds with saltwater to reflect more heat back toward the sun, away from Earth.
A third method is to brighten structures and paint roofs white, and increasing the reflectivity of deserts and oceans.
Successful geoengineering would permit the Earth’s population to make far smaller reductions in carbon use and still achieve a retarding effect on global warming, but at lower economic cost.
University of Texas professor Eric Bickel and Hudson Institute fellow Lee Lane estimate that the discounted cost of enhancing clouds’ reflectance through saltwater spraying for 200 years could cost $300 million to $1.8 billion. Benefits over the same period would be $4 trillion to $10 trillion.
Such costs are small in comparison to the economic damage that could result from reduced use of carbon fuels and the high cost of non-carbon substitutes, such as solar and wind power.
Surprisingly, there appears to be no funding for geoengineering research in President Obama’s 2012 budget. My calls to the Departments of Energy and Commerce and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy were not returned.
A 2010 Government Accountability Office study found that only $950,000 was spent on solar radiation management research in 2009 and 2010.
In contrast, billions of dollars are spent on conservation and renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and the Environmental Protection Agency wants companies to spend billions to reduce carbon emissions.
With Southern Europe facing economic collapse, and unemployment in many countries persistently high, industrialized countries don’t want another costly round of greenhouse gas reductions.
From Durban to D.C., those concerned about global warming should investigate the simpler solutions provided by geoengineering.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth ([email protected]), former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
