The Kyoto Protocol and Global Warming

The evolution from fire to fossil fuels to nuclear energy is a path of improved human health and welfare arising from efficient and effective access to energy. One trade-off is that energy use by human beings has always produced environmental change. For example, it has resulted in human artifacts marking the landscape, the removal of trees from major areas for wood burning, and region-wide noxious air pollution from coal burning. On the other hand, ready availability of energy that produces wealth through the free market system provides ways to remedy or minimize environmental damage from energy use.

With widespread industrialization, human use of coal, oil and natural gas has become the centerpiece in an international debate over a global environmental impact, viz., global warming. Fossil fuels provide roughly 84 percent of the energy consumed in the United States and 80 percent of the energy produced worldwide. An attempt to address the risk of deleterious global warming from the use of these carbon dioxide-emitting fuels is embodied in the Kyoto Protocol and its attendant series of international negotiations. But on scientific, economic and political grounds, the Kyoto Protocol as an attempt to control this risk while improving the human condition is flawed.