E-Mail This Article to a Friend GLOBAL WARMING Dear Mr. President: Please do something BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

So we find ourselves, seven years after signing the Kyoto Protocol, without a serious national policy on global warming — or even a national discussion of the topic. The current president and the Republican-controlled Congress are satisfied with the status quo: our current emission-reduction targets are equal to the rate at which emissions have been declining for decades without any special effort. But as David G. Victor, director of the program on energy and sustainable development at Stanford University, points out, the Democratic Party and John Kerry don’t seem interested either. "On Kerry’s site there are 10 buttons of issues at the top, and ‘environment/energy’ is number nine," Victor says. "Number 10 is ‘other.’"

In an attempt to jump-start a new round of debate, Victor has penned a provocative book for the Council on Foreign Relations slated for release later this month, Climate Change: Debating America’s Policy Options (Brookings Institute Press). In it, he presents a plain-spoken, easy-to-read "Memorandum to the President" that serves as a primer on the scientific, historical, and political aspects of the issue. The "memo" concludes with three dramatically different courses of action, which are then laid out in three alternative presidential speeches.

What’s especially refreshing — or frustrating, depending on your perspective — is Victor’s acceptance and understanding of political and economic realities. He’s not afraid to acknowledge, for example, that any hope of US lawmakers creating a "cap and trade" system for reducing emissions (in which the government would set a total-emissions cap and then allocate — most likely through a combination of auction and handouts — emission permits to polluters, who could then trade them at a market-driven per-ton rate) will require an unfair multi-billion-dollar payoff by Washington of free emission permits to coal-mining companies and other industries likely to suffer the most under the scheme — and who have lobbyists working Capitol Hill. "As a matter of political expediency such allocations are probably unavoidable," Victor writes.

Victor also harbors no nostalgia for the increasingly irrelevant Kyoto agreement, which sought to establish a global cap-and-trade system. "Kyoto was never going to be politically feasible," he says. "The whole idea that you are going to create a new emission-trading system — which is essentially introducing a new form of money — and do that from the top down, is crazy." Without significant monitoring and enforcement, any large country like China or Russia could end up misrepresenting its actual emissions — in effect, printing phony cash in the trading market — and completely undermine the system. (Although he doesn’t make the point in the book, Victor says that Russia has strong incentive to undermine the system anyway, as prediction models increasingly show that global warming would bestow significant economic advantages on the long-suffering country.)

Kyoto’s emissions targets for the US — a seven percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2008 — were infeasible politically, if not technically, from day one, Victor says. They would most likely have required US firms to buy tens of billions of dollars’ worth of emissions credits from Russia, which would have benefited from doing nothing: the country started out well below its Kyoto targets thanks to the post-Soviet economic collapse that shut down many of its factories. When the final Kyoto meetings took place, Victor notes, the US goofed by sending Vice-President Al Gore. "It was a severe mistake, because if you go into a negotiation that you might have to walk away from, you can’t have someone so high up that he can’t be seen walking away." Rather than suffer that embarrassment, Victor argues, the US signed a treaty it couldn’t abide (President Clinton never even submitted it to the Senate for consent) and tried to renegotiate it more discreetly afterward. That failed, and ultimately Clinton left it to George W. Bush to declare the treaty’s official death.

This interpretation of events sets the stage for Victor’s three policy options, the first two of which are clearly straw men designed to set up the third as the truly viable approach. Option one, "adaptation and innovation," calls for turning attention away from emissions reduction, and toward "improving our capacity to adapt to a changing climate." By playing this argument perfectly straight, and outlining exactly how to proceed with it as a national strategy, Victor superbly exposes the folly of inaction on emissions. He then does much the same to naive environmentalists in policy-option two, "reinvigorating Kyoto."

Finally, Victor lays out what he admits is his own preference, "making a market." The US, he argues, should unilaterally create its own emission-trading system, and support the efforts of other countries or regions to do the same. Then, down the road, we can create trading mechanisms among these established systems, ultimately arriving at a Kyoto-style global system by building it up from the ground, rather than trying to institute it by global fiat.

The European Union, which will debut its own emission-trading system next January — ostensibly to comply with Kyoto — can serve as an important first step toward Victor’s plan. But the EU system will require a lot of political support from the US to keep it going through the inevitably tough implementation phase. More important for the US, Victor says, now is the time to influence the system the EU adopts — before it becomes the de facto global standard. "We may find that critical rules of trading are real facts on the ground," he says. For example, Europe plans to use Kyoto’s measure of a country’s emissions by total volume. The US administration currently prefers a standard that measures emissions relative to the size of a country’s economy. China, unsurprisingly, likes a per capita measure.

Victor’s proposal probably underestimates some impediments — such as the likelihood that isolated implementation would encourage firms to relocate to countries without emission-trading plans. But it is bold, potentially feasible, and worthy of debate. Sadly, however, Victor has little hope that his "presidential memorandum" will have much effect. "I don’t predict we’re going to have a change in policy anytime soon," he says. "I think we’re going to be in gridlock for a while."