West Florida Electric Cooperative Association, Inc.

CEO'S Corner - A message from WFEC Executive Vice President and CEO Bill Rimes

President Bush caught a lot of flak recently for opting to pull out of the Kyoto Treaty, but it was the correct decision, and he did it for some very good reasons. Tens of thousands of those good reasons live and work in areas supplied by power produced by coal.

The harsh reality is that the treaty drawn up by international bureaucrats in Japan would have its most devastating impact on small towns in states like Florida and Alabama. In other words, the drastic sacrifices mandated by the treaty would fall disproportionately on people who can least afford it.

The Kyoto Treaty would be a double whammy for rural America. First, it targets coal as a particularly undesirable fuel, meaning that U. S. power plants will switch to imported oil and natural gas. The reduced demand for coal will mean falling prices, falling wages, and ultimately falling employment, too. Studies have shown that coal-producing states could expect unemployment to be more than 2 percent above predicted levels without the treaty. The studies calculate that, all together, 2.4 million American workers would lose their jobs. And keep in mind that a disproportionate number of those people thrown out on the streets would be America's hardest workers - miners.

Second, studies have shown that working-class families are the ones who will have to pay the most for the rise in energy costs that result directly from the move away from coal. The wealthy can easily afford the steep price increases; the blue-collar sector will more directly feel the impact. It is ironic that the very families who have been producing the coal that powered our growing nation for two hundred years will be among those most penalized by the radical mandates of this foreign treaty.

Even worse, the miners' sacrifices would be futile. The result of the reduction in coal use would mean higher manufacturing prices in the United States, forcing U. S. companies to move their production overseas to stay competitive. Those developing countries have lower labor costs and, critically, are not restricted by the Kyoto Treaty in their use of inexpensive coal for energy production. Coal use in the United States would fall, but coal use will quickly grow elsewhere in the world as a direct consequence. High sulfur coals, lax antipollution standards, and less advanced scrubbing technologies mean that the levels of the very gasses we are trying to reduce will actually be increased.

There are many other reasons to dislike the Kyoto Treaty. The true costs of the mandates are hidden, but studies have shown that the overall impact on the American GDP could be as much as $300 billion a year! The slowdown in the largest economy in the world will adversely impact on the rest of the world's economies as well. One has to wonder if the treaty's drafters have considered these issues.

The Kyoto Treaty makes no sense. It ignores the reality of a globalized world, and it ignores the reality of supply and demand. The Treaty's attempt to reduce greenhouse gases would merely result in shifting production of the gasses from the developed countries to the developing countries, ensuring that the world production of greenhouse gases gets worse. This cannot be the intention, can it?

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