Bob Burton:

A major oil producer ExxonMobil has sponsored a seminar featuring leading Australian and global sceptics disputing the science behind the Kyoto Treaty, ahead of two important international conferences this week backing the need for substantial reductions in greenhouse emissions.

Richard Dennis, the Deputy Director of the Canberra-based think tank The Australia Institute, dismissed the ExxonMobil-sponsored seminar in Parliament House on Monday as designed ‘’to muddy the waters’’ over climate science in the eyes of key decision makers. Organiser of the seminar Alan Oxley, chairman of the pro-free trade Australian APEC Study Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, described the sceptics’ seminar as a ‘’reality check’’ on last week’s announcement by Australian state governments that they would bypass the national government and their own national system to regulate and trade greenhouse gas emissions.

Co-sponsoring the seminar were Xstrata Coal, which operates over 30 coal mines in Australia and South Africa, and Tech Central Station (TCS), a conservative US commentary website which is published and funded by the Republican aligned lobbying firm DCI Group and its clients. Oxley hosts the Asia-Pacific pages of TCS. While Oxley emphasised the importance of his seminar, other than the speakers, it only managed to attract approximately 40 participants.

Before Russia ratified the Kyoto Treaty late last year bringing it into effect this February, critics complained that it should be opposed because it excluded developing countries such as India and China. Oxley is now seeking to woo developing countries as potential allies in an effort to ensure the Kyoto Treaty lapses at the end of the first implementation period in 2012. In a backgrou-nder for the conference Oxley argued that the treaty ‘’will constrain efforts of governments in the developing world to raise living standards.’’

But the world’s top polluter, the US, has not signed up to the treaty and neither has Australia. Prime Minister John Howard said the international protocol would undermine the country’s industries with ‘’no environmental gain to Australia’’. The US’s chief climate change negotiator, Harlan Watson dismissed the Kyoto agreement as too inflexible at the seminar. While a special fund, the Clean Development Mechanism, has been established to finance projects that reduce greenhouse emissions in developing countries, Oxley complains that ‘’the approval process will deter investment and the conditions on projects will make them less attractive to developing countries.’’

While many of the presenters at Oxley’s conference were critical of the science underpinning the Kyoto Treaty, scientist John Zillman defended the quality of the process and the integrity of its projections which government negotiators drew upon in the formulation of the Kyoto Treaty. Zillman, who for a decade was Australia’s lead negotiator to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advising governments on climate science, describes himself as being ‘’on the conservative side of the IPCC consensus’’ estimate. He said that he was ‘’not aware of any other mechanism with anything like the same pressures for objectivity. So my answer is that the IPCC assessments are the most reliable source of information on climate change that yet exists.’’

While the manager of ExxonMobil’s Science, Strategy and Programs, Brian Flannery, acknowledged that the climate science demonstrates ‘’the existence of risk that may be serious for society and ecosystems’’ he argued that the most appropriate action was to pursue further climate research ‘’to improve the understanding of risks.’’ — IPS