By Ross McKitrick, Canadian Financial Post

Why not tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming? Both skeptics and alarmists should expect their wishes to be answered.

After much effort, G8 leaders last week agreed to “stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” This is the same wording as in Article Two of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992. In other words, after months of negotiations, world leaders agreed on a text they had already ratified 15 years earlier.

Global-warming policy is stuck in a permanent stalemate for very basic reasons. Important divisions of opinion still exist on the extent of humanity’s influence on climate, whether or not the situation is a crisis, whether and how much greenhouse-gas emissions should be cut, if so how to do it, and what is the most we should be prepared to pay in the process.

With this stalemate in mind, I would like to propose a thought experiment about a climate policy that could, in principle, get equal support from all sides.  Read more about a tax tied to global warming.

Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, in a scathing indictment of global warming hysteria, shines a light on how climate science is being manipulated by climate modelers and the media.  His commentary includes the conclusions of many top climatologists, geologists, geophysicists, astrophysicists and meteorologists. 

Counterpunch describes itself as offering “muckraking with a radical attitude” and Cockburn is no fan of industry.  But he does understand what’s going on in the global warming debate:

Back in the 1970s, as the oil companies engineered a leap in prices, the left correctly identified and stigmatized the the conspiracy. Some thirty five years, here’s the entire progressive sector swallowing, with religious fervor, a far more potent concoction of nonsense to buttress a program which will savagely penalize the poor, the third world and the environment.

Read more of this left-wing columnist’s article here.

Strafor, 5 June 2007

European leaders have expressed dismay over U.S. President George W. Bush’s June 1 call for the creation of a long-term dialogue among the 15 largest greenhouse gas-emitting countries. The plan, they say, is another stall tactic designed to allow the Bush administration to appear as though it is trying to work with the international community on climate issues, when in reality it is not. Such action, they say, would take time and attention away from the difficult work being done on the issue via the Kyoto Protocol process.

In reality, however, the Bush plan signals the end of Kyoto—and the beginning of a new international consensus that relieves Kyoto’s pressures on governments. The United States, China, India, Canada and Australia produce more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—and those emissions are growing. To be effective, then, any climate regime that endeavors to make real cuts in emissions must include these countries. By bringing the Pacific Rim countries into alignment on the issue, Bush has brought the United States far more power over global greenhouse gas emissions policy than Europe ever has had. With this, Bush takes from Europe its one global foreign policy success story.

Ultimately, the Europeans are looking not just at a policy defeat, but also at the union’s strategic failure to have any joint foreign policy. Kyoto/environmental issues have long been the only significant program in which the union has managed to make its voice heard globally. Should Europe continue to champion Kyoto now, it not only will be left out in the cold, but it also will face sharp internal debate about the reasons for deeply cutting emissions when no one else is. Several European governments already are suing the European Commission over climate-related regulations they consider too restrictive, while a newfound Polish bellicosity has led Warsaw to threaten vetoes over this and a wide raft of issues.

For those who believe that nothing but firm caps, as in the Kyoto Protocol, will forestall global warming, this is an unmitigated disaster. Those who feel that any successful global policy has to include the major non-European emitters, however, will see this is a successful first step in a way that Kyoto never was. See full story here.