آیا سازمان اوپک از پیمان کیوتو دست کشیده است؟

A range of energy-economy models forecast losses to members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) should the Kyoto Protocol come into force. These forecasts are a powerful influence in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations. They are used by OPEC to advance the agenda on the impacts of response measures, covertly arguing for compensation for lost oil revenues arising from implementation of the Protocol. This paper discusses this issue, and explores the key assumptions of these models and their uncertainties. Assumptions about carbon leakage, future availability of oil reserves, substitution, innovation, and capital turnover are considered. The paper suggests that losses will not affect OPEC countries equally, and that these losses are not likely to be as substantial as the models forecast. A range of policy measures are proposed to lessen any impact the Protocol may have on OPEC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that by 2100 global mean temperature may have increased by 1.4–5.8°C and sea-level may have risen by between 9 and 88 cm, and that this increase is due to ongoing human activities (IPCC, 2001). Yet, international action on the problem is clouded by many unresolved issues among the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). One of these unresolved issues is the extent to which developed countries’ efforts to reduce emissions will impact on the economies of oil exporting countries, and how these impacts can be minimised (Barnett and Dessai, 2002). Negotiations on this issue revolve around Article 4.8 of the UNFCCC and Article 2.3 and 3.14 of its Kyoto Protocol. A key player in these negotiations is the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a grouping of 11 oil exporting economies including: Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. Based on global energy-economy models of the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on energy exporters, the members of OPEC believe that the Protocol's implementation will slow growth in their revenues from oil exports. The models suggest that policies and measures (PAMs) to implement the Kyoto Protocol (such as a carbon tax) will increase oil prices to consumers and reduce demand in developed countries which account for 60% of world oil consumption, thereby driving down global oil demand and prices received by producers. In the climate negotiations, OPEC members argue that developed countries must minimise these impacts on OPEC, thereby implicitly arguing for compensation for their losses. They are opposed by developed countries. This will prove a significant challenge to the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and the wellbeing of the Convention. This paper discusses this issue, and explores the key assumptions and uncertainties in the energy-economy models that inform OPEC's policy position. Energy-economy models have been very influential in the political economy of climate change (Henman, 2002). As well as informing OPEC, energy-economy models have been used by the United States and Australia to justify their recalcitrant stance in the climate regime, leading ultimately to their withdrawal of support for the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 (Christoff, 1998; Hamilton, 2001; Harris, 1999; Harrison, 2001). Despite their powerful influence, the assumptions and uncertainties in these models are poorly understood by policymakers, and there are very few widely available reviews of them. This paper reviews those models that address the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on OPEC.

Payment of compensation for lost oil revenues is implicit in the strategies OPEC promotes to minimise the impacts of the Kyoto Protocol. This is politically unrealistic (see Barnett and Dessai, 2002), and practically problematic. The extent of lost revenues to be compensated is impossible to define with certainty because to ascertain how much was lost requires knowledge of how the world oil market would have operated without implementation of the Protocol (Kassler and Paterson, 1997; FCCC, 2002). Assessing such an impact requires, among other things, a distinction between the impact of other unrelated PAMs from those taken pursuant to the Protocol; and disaggregating the effect of climate change PAMs on developments in technology, macroeconomic variability, structural economic changes and other exogenous changes which would have otherwise affected oil export revenues. As modellers make clear, an accurate assessment of how much oil revenue was lost due the Kyoto Protocol requires accurate understanding of these counterfactual but inescapably hypothetical and unknowable scenarios. Of course, as orthodox economic theory makes clear, subsidies and taxes always affect the distribution of incomes (Dasgupta and Heal, 1979). In general, they also have—in the short term at least—a negative effect on aggregate welfare. While there may be in principle a global gain in the long term—as forgone costs of climate impacts—from policies to implement the Kyoto Protocol there can be less understanding of the longer term distributional consequences of such policies. That is why there is argument over the implementation of the Protocol. We do not argue that policies to implement the Protocol will not affect the distribution of incomes between countries; rather that the level of this distributional impact is at present not known. In addition to compensation, there are at least six other policy measures that might minimise any possible losses to OPEC countries (Kassler and Paterson, 1997; WTO, 2002). First, OPEC argue that the removal of subsidies on coal production, and removal of taxes on oil consumption in developed countries would lessen the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on their export revenues. This has been a long-standing concern of OPEC prior to the UNFCCC. These measures would raise the price of coal and reduce the price of oil in developed countries, effecting a significant shift in fuel consumption from coal to oil. This would result in less carbon emissions per unit of economic activity as coal is more carbon-intensive than oil. Second, tax restructuring in developed countries to reflect the carbon content of fuels would also lessen the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on oil exporters as it would raise the price of coal, effecting fuel switching from coal to oil, and from oil to gas (discussed earlier in this paper). Gas is the least carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel and the bulk of long-term gas reserves are located in OPEC countries. Third, measures to discourage the production of fossil fuels within developed countries would increase OPEC's share of the oil market and their cartel power. Fourth, measures to abandon nuclear power generation would also favour oil exporters as more primary energy needs would presumably be met by oil. Fifth, developed countries could assist oil exporting economies to diversify sources of income, as models results show that economies with a diverse pattern of production and exports will be least affected by the Kyoto Protocol (Polidano et al., 2000). Finally, increased use of carbon sinks would lessen the emphasis on reductions in emissions from energy consumption as a means to implement the Kyoto Protocol. Though an accepted matter within the Marrakech Accords (under the form of forest management, cropland management, grazing land management and revegetation), this remains a contentious subject in climate science. At the heart of OPEC's concerns about the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on their development lie questions of belief in the methods, assumptions and results of simplified models of world energy trade. Certain assumptions in these models leads to overstated estimates of the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on oil exporters, including assumptions about: future oil reserves, international and domestic policy measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the power of cartel behaviour to influence the price of oil in the future. Model results contain compounded uncertainties of such a magnitude as to question whether OPEC will experience any negative impacts from the Kyoto Protocol. Should there be any impact at all, it will not affect OPEC countries equally. Many will experience larger economic losses due to the adverse effects of climate change per se rather than from the impact of response measures. A range of policy measures are available to lessen whatever impact—if any—the Kyoto protocol may have on OPEC, and these are more palatable to developed countries than the sometimes mentioned argument of compensation for lost oil revenues. Because the Marrakech Accords have provided more detail about the way the Kyoto Protocol will be implemented, there is a need to re-run all models to take this into account. An intensive comparative study of the results is necessary to establish the range of uncertainty, in the same way as is done for Global Climate Models. We expect that estimated losses to OPEC will be considerably lower if models are re-run to take account of the Marrakesh Accords. This, coupled with more detailed investigation of the adverse effects of climate change on OPEC countries, may substantially reduce the costs, and enhance the benefits of the Kyoto Protocol to OPEC. So, to answer the question in the title of this paper, we agree with Pershing who argues that ‘almost all (models) are likely to substantially overstate overall costs, and more specifically, overstate OPEC or oil exporting country costs’ (2000, p. 99); and with Grubb who writes that after ‘a sober appraisal ... neither oil exporting countries nor the companies that trade in oil have much to fear from long-run goals to stabilise the atmosphere’ (2001, p. 843). Nevertheless, a precautionary approach is required lest there be some residual impacts on OPEC economies, and the recent establishment of the special climate change fund for technology transfer and activities to assist economic diversification will assist in mitigating the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on OPEC economies.