Global Warming Treaty Poses
Sobering Costs, Speaker Says

By Colleen Schreiber

AUSTIN — Floy Lilley, who holds the Murchison Chair of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas, is no fan of Vice President Al Gore, and she doesn’t mind saying so. She recently did just that here in speaking to fellow lawyers, including a few who no doubt were liberal Democrats as well as government agency personnel, at a recent "regulatory takings" conference sponsored by CLE International, a leading provider of continuing legal education.

Her presentation, "The Convention on Climate Change," brought to light some of the rhetoric — and the risks — of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto conference, at which Gore represented the U.S. this past December, dealt with the issue of so-called "global warming."

The result is not a voluntary arrangement, but rather a legally binding treaty, which would require cutting emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 to 80 percent and electricity use by 25 percent. Such reductions, Lilly noted, are expected to be enforced via increased costs on fossil fuels.

Lilley, who was a participant in the conference, told listeners that, as usual, the science, the costs and the political consequences were not on the table.

"Gore keeps screaming that the planet is warming, when in fact, research proves that in the last 100 years the planet has warmed up one half a degree Celsius. Three-quarters of that warming took place before 1940, before any large concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," she said.

"The satellite and 60-year-plus history of temperature readings from the weather balloons also indicate no warming."

Research shows that world carbon dioxide levels have, in fact, increased since industrial times, up 396 parts per million, she said, but they have been 10 and 20 times higher than that in the history of the planet.

"Research shows that the sun, and not the greenhouse effect, has caused the half a degree increase in temperature," Lilley told the group. "The only monitoring devices that can show warmer temperatures are the surface monitoring devices located in cities near airports, and they’re showing a few degrees warmer, but evidence indicates that we’re nowhere near where global temperatures should be."

To exemplify how government entities often base their decisions on emotion, not scientific fact, Lilley told conference participants about a company that bought 740 acres north of San Francisco for the sole purpose of developing it. The company requested a permit in 1984. They completed all the necessary environmental impact studies and jumped through all the required hoops to learn that their land was clay, salt-saturated, without a threatened or endangered plant or animal, and yet 10 years and $12 million later, they were told they would not be granted a permit to develop the land.

The reason given by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Lilley told listeners, was that the land might be needed in a few years, "when catastrophic global warming has melted the ice caps and the Pacific is a little higher." Why? Because, then, "some species might need this for potential habitat."

Lilley said she asked an oceanographer friend if this would actually happen. "His response was: ‘yes, it could happen. All it would take would be to raise the entire temperature of the globe by 55 degrees and hold it to that temperature for 1000 years and the ice caps will melt.’"

That kind of misinformation and non-scientific propaganda was prevalent at the "global warming" conference last year in Kyoto, Lilley insisted.

Prior to the conference, the U.S. Senate passed Senate Joint Resolution 98 by a vote of 95 to zero. That resolution, Lilley said, sent an unequivocal message to the Clinton administration that no treaty would be signed that dumped negative economic consequences upon Americans, and no treaty would be signed that did not include developing countries.

"Al Gore arrived in Japan on December 7," she said, "and gave America away with the very words I never expected to hear come out of Al Gore’s mouth – flexibility. If there’s one word in the entire dictionary that I do not link with Al Gore, it’s the word flexibility."

"Gore says, ‘America will be flexible; let’s bring carbon dioxide emissions down to seven percent below 1990 emission levels.’

"It doesn’t matter that China will never do this and said so, and it doesn’t matter that only 26 specified developed nations and 13 nations listed as ‘in transition to market economies’ would be bound by the Protocol, while some 128 nations under no commitments would not be bound to this Protocol," Lilley said. "It doesn’t matter that there’s going to be a little negative economic disruption and it excludes developing giants like China, India, Brazil and Mexico."

What was really established was economic, not environmental, Lilley contended.

"In one fell swoop, this treaty brought about what many have been wanting — a global currency."

Lilley refers to that global currency as "kyo," or "GreenHouseGold," a takeoff on the initials GHG, which have become bureaucratic shorthand for "greenhouse gases."

"This means that any industrialized country desiring to undergo any project which required energy use would be forced to buy "non-emissions" (from backward countries) in order to proceed.

"Suddenly, all the countries who do not breath out," she continued, "who are not industrialized, who are not prosperous, hold the balance sheet of all the gold in the world, and those of us who are industrialized hold the debit sheet, and if we want to implement a single economic activity, we now owe the rest of the world."

Lilley gave a synopsis of a study conducted by Argonne National Laboratory for the Department of Energy. DOE asked Argonne several years ago to study the economic consequences of carbon dioxide limits so the nation’s leaders might be better informed. The report, she told listeners, was presented to President Clinton in February 1997, but because it did not bear well for U.S. citizens, Clinton ordered it suppressed and not published. It was leaked to Lilley and a number of other people, she said.

The report revealed that 70 percent of all national economic activity would be negatively impacted and 1,800,000 U.S. jobs would be lost or displaced. An "econometric" research firm known as WEFA projected that, "cumulatively, between 2001 and 2020, the loss of aggregate income per household would average almost $30,000.

The "cumulative loss in GDP to the U.S. in that same period would amount to $3.3 trillion."

She outlined the projected impact on Texas, based on the average Texas family of 2.75 children, and looking at three of the 15 ways being considered to tax fossil fuel. By that analysis, she said, the Texas family’s electricity bill would go from a monthly average of $197 to $256 after implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Today, gas for the average Texas family runs about $151 a month. After implementation, Lilley said, it would be $282.

And today, Texas families receive no bill for vehicle miles traveled. After implementation, that new monthly fee would be $111.

Because Texas is heavily-dependent on fossil fuel for energy, it will be among the hardest-hit states.

Some other projected national impacts, Lilley said, would include: all primary aluminum smelters to close by 2010; domestic paper production to be displaced by imports; the closing of between 23 and 35 percent of the cement industry, which happens to be a major employer in many small communities; and a 30 percent decline in the number of steel producers at a cost of 100,000 jobs.

"Can we really make a difference with this policy?" Lilley asked participants. "Do we want this kind of major international policy to be based on non-science?"

Answering her own question, Lilley cited scientific experts who insist that even if every human being stepped off the planet, the earth’s climate would still be constantly changing. Variations in the earth’s orbit, experts say, can cause a change in global temperature, as can variations in the sun’s solar output. Human beings only contribute three percent of the three percent change in climatic fluctuation.

In conclusion, Lilley warned listeners that Gore is "joined at the hip" with federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner, who "doesn’t mind citizens knowing that she intends the EPA to be the most feared agency, even more so than the dreaded IRS."

Finally, she said, "If signed, if implemented and if enforced, this Kyoto Protocol will transfer sovereignty to some global body, probably the UN, and return Americans to a colonial-like status of feudal serfs. Power to force reductions of carbon dioxide emissions is the power to ration energy, and the power to ration energy in our world is the power to determine who prospers and who languishes.

"Absent is rule by law," she continued. "Present is rule by men. What is lost? Ultimately, private property rights must be abolished in such egalitarian utopias. Oh, your name might still be on the title, and you may still pay taxes on that property, but regulations will have so constrained your individual actions that your personal, intellectual or real property will be ‘yours’ in sentiment only."