Monday Doom and Gloom: Kyoto Has Failed, We're All Doomed

A little unbridled hysteria to get your week off on a positive note.

Now that the vaunted Kyoto protocol has been established as worthless (hey, there's a reason it got zero votes in the United States Senate), it's time for--you guessed it--Kyoto 2!

But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU's emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe's biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.

A vast carbon market where certain obese hucksters (I won't name name, but you know who I'm talking about) get rich while children starve!

So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world's fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.

Global problems need global solutions, and we also need an effective replacement for the failed Kyoto protocol. The entire Kyoto system of national allocations is obsolete because of the huge volumes of energy embodied in products traded across national boundaries. It also presents a major obstacle to any new agreement – as demonstrated by the 2008 G8 meeting in Japan that degenerated into a squabble over national emission rights.

The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied "upstream" – for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change – accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.

Such a package of measures would allow us to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This avoids the economic pain that a cap-and-trade system alone would cause, and targets assistance at the poor, who are least to blame and most need help. The permit auction would raise about $1 trillion per year, enough to finance a spread of solutions. At a quarter of the world's annual oil spending, it is a price well worth paying.

Better yet, make the worst polluters (China, for example) pay their fair share.

But no, we can't do that. We have to make Western nations bear the brunt of this transfer of wealth instead, while lining the pockets of fat hucksters who live large on the gullibility of naive people.