While the Kyoto Protocol has been signed and ratified by virtually every world power, the exceptions being the United States and Australia, the international policy itself offers no real solutions to climate change.
It has done nothing to curtail the polluting policies of the world’s now No. 1 producer of greenhouse gases and has served as little more than a multinational taxation system from developed countries to undeveloped.
The most disturbing portion of the Kyoto Protocol is not that it offers new financial incentives for multinational firms to pollute and exploit developing nations, but that the policy does not deal with the most important element of our climate — forestry conversion and urban sprawl.
Nations like Brazil and Indonesia are depleting forest at record rates to produce hydroelectric power, sugarcane for ethanol and palm or soybean oil plantations for biodiesel.
Many of these dams release more carbon dioxide into the air through forest flooding or removal than they would if their lifetime equivalent power supply were produced from burning coal.
Sugarcane production pushes monoculture farming deeper into the most valuable, biodiverse environments on the planet.
Palm oil production dries swamps and converts entire ecosystems in a fuel production regimen which will take centuries in cultivation to become carbon-competitive with fossil fuels’ output even without considerations for the destruction of the rain forest itself.
All of these dangerous practices are encouraged by Kyoto. The protocol has created a system wherein energy either comes from renewable resources at the expense of old growth forest, or is produced from fossil fuels in poorer countries for the benefits of developed nations.
Regardless of motivation, I believe the United States’ decision to abstain from Kyoto has removed the most prosperous economy in the world from supporting this short-sighted wholesale destruction of precious natural resources.
Kyoto cannot be supported by climate science when it has proven to encourage practices more harmful than the ones it discourages.
Editor's note: This letter refers to this editorial.
