Kyoto Protocol: Ineffective and Expensive (Cato)

From: Cato Daily Dispatch for November 28, 2005
http://www.cato.org/dispatch/11-28-05d.html

"A United Nations conference opening in Canada on Monday will try to step up a fight against global warming by drawing the United States and developing nations into United Nations-led agreements beyond 2012," Reuters reports. "About 10,000 delegates -- from 189 governments, environmental lobby groups and businesses -- will attend the Nov. 28-Dec. 9 talks meant to start mapping out what to do after the first period of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012."

In the Cato Handbook on Policy's chapter on global warming and climate change, Patrick Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies, writes: "[S]everal lines of evidence all point to the likelihood that warming in the next century is likely to be modest, and all evidence demonstrates that Kyoto will have no measurable effect on that warming. But the Kyoto Protocol is enormously expensive, reducing the amount of capital that can be invested in evolving and increasingly efficient technologies. It is an inescapable conclusion that the Kyoto Protocol, or other similar instruments (such as S. 139), is precisely the wrong thing to do about global climate change."

Kristen Kestner, editor, kkestner@cato.org