Europe emits CO2, US cleans it up...

British politicians have alleged that the decision to renege on the agreement would "kill thousands or millions around the world" because American emissions would cause catastrophic global warming. One member of Tony Blair's Labour party alleged that the decision was "equivalent to launching a nuclear attack."

If the plan had gone ahead, the US would have been responsible for much of the reform in the industrialized world. In 1990, the US was responsible for 48 percent of the developed world's carbon emissions, but it would be responsible for 64 percent of the Kyoto reductions. This calculation, however, only tells part of the story. The Europe that has been so scathing about the American decision is actually by far the biggest culprit in the emissions field.

This is because Kyoto did not take account of a crucial scientific fact. Carbon dioxide is not really a pollutant, as the Environmental Protection Agency has labeled it. It is a vitally important contributor to plant life, which uses much of the gas in the atmosphere. Geographic areas with large amounts of plant life therefore act as "carbon sinks," sucking in carbon dioxide from the air.

A scientific paper published in October 1998 ("A Large Terrestrial Carbon Sink in North America Implied by Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon Dioxide Data and Models," Fan et al, Science, Vol. 282, p. 442 ff.) concluded that the North American continent acted as a huge carbon sink, absorbing about 1.7 billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year. As North America is responsible for only about 1.6 billion tons of carbon emissions per year, the continent is actually a net consumer of carbon dioxide.

The same paper, however, found that the Eurasian continent was in a much less healthy state, consuming an "uptake" of only about 100 million tons of carbon per year while at the same time being responsible for 3.6 billion tons of emission. Unlike North America, the majority of the plant life in Eurasia is outside the Temperate Zone. The temperate areas of Eurasia, which include the industrial nations of Western Europe, actually act as a net "source" of carbon. It seems likely, therefore, that all of Western Europe's carbon emissions (about 1 billion metric tons in total) survive in the atmosphere, unlike North America's. Europe is actually a net polluter, while North America cleans up its own mess.

Just how great the discrepancy is can be seen when we look at the effects per person. Under the Kyoto Protocol, America would have to reduce its emissions by about 2.3 tons per person. Europe, with a far bigger population but a far lower reduction target, would only have to reduce its emissions by about 0.4 tons per person. But if we take the carbon sink/ source effect into account, America actually absorbs 0.4 tons of carbon per person while the average European puts out about 2.5 tons each.

The net effect of the Kyoto Protocol would be to increase the size of the net "free capacity" of the North American carbon sink to about 400 million tons per year. Western Europe, on the other hand, would go on "exporting" 860 million tons of this pollution annually.

Many people in Europe have been critical of the American idea of "emissions trading," whereby states in the former Soviet bloc could sell credit for their emissions reductions caused by the collapse of their economies to other states. It seems, however, that their beloved Kyoto Protocols was a different form of trading fix. In essence, Kyoto's effect would have been to legitimize emissions "dumping," whereby Europe's over-production of carbon dioxide would have been deposited on North America because it is able to absorb the extra supply. Those same Europeans are, of course, opposed to dumping in its more conventional, economic form.

It would perhaps be too cynical to suggest that this is what the Europeans had in mind all along, but Kyoto as it stands gives the European countries a free ride. It should be incumbent on the Europeans to find some way of cleaning up their own mess, rather than continuing on as they are, as the planet's worst net polluters.

IAIN MURRAY is a British science writer working at STATS - the Statistical Assessment Service - in Washington, DC.