The Plot Thickens: Stuart Eizenstat Blows More Smoke in House Hearing About Kyoto's Impact on U.S. National Security

(Washington, D.C.): In testimony yesterday before the House International Relations
Committee,
Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat took issue with concerns that have
been expressed
by, among others, the William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy concerning the
adverse effect the Kyoto Protocol is likely to have on U.S. national security. Unfortunately, in so
doing, Secretary Eizenstat simply reinforced misgivings that — in the words of the Center’s
Director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. (who also appeared before the Committee on
Wednesday) — the
Clinton Administration either does not understand what it has agreed to or is willfully
misrepresenting its agreement to the Senate.

Specifically, Mr. Eizenstat declared that suggestions that the Kyoto Protocol would have dire
national security implications were “totally untrue” and “fallacious.” He asserted that the accord
“fully protects the world’s only superpower” and that the negotiating team he led in Japan last
December “achieved what we intended to and all that the Department of Defense asked for.”

What’s ‘Totally Untrue’?

As Mr. Gaffney’s testimony makes clear (see href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-C_83at”>the attached excerpts), whatever one thinks of the
impact on the Pentagon arising from the treaty signed last December in Japan, it is — to use
Secretary Eizenstat’s formulation — “totally untrue” and “fatuous” to suggest that the Defense
Department got all it asked for at Kyoto. After all, prior to the meeting in Japan, DoD had sought
and been told it would get a blanket exemption from the Protocol’s limitations.
During the event,
this proved inconvenient to Vice President Al Gore and his National Security
Advisor Leon
Fuerth who directed the U.S. team to accept something quite different. When the
negotiations
were over, the language adopted in the Protocol read as follows:

The Conference of the Parties…decides that emissions resulting from
multilateral operations pursuant to the United Nations Charter shall not be
included in national totals, but reported separately. Emissions related to other
operations shall be included in the national emissions totals of one or more
parties involved.

Secretary Eizenstat suggested to the International Relations Committee that this
formulation protects such priority Defense concerns as “bunker fuels” and “maritime transports”
as well as all multilateral, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, whether
authorized by or
simply “consistent with” the UN Charter. That is not clear from the text.
Unless he can present
agreed definitions — or other clauses and/or negotiating text — to support these claims, they
cannot be credited.

In fact, the thrust of the treaty’s text (and the aforementioned negotiating history)
clearly
contradicts suggestions by the Clinton Administration that it has fully protected the
military’s operations and activities from the effects of the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory
emissions-reduction regime. It is not self-evident, for example, that unilateral
operations can be
called “multilateral operations” for the purpose of exempting them from the treaty, simply because
the U.S. buys fuel from foreign nations — a contention made to the Senate Armed Services
Committee in March by Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security Sherri
Goodman.⁽¹⁾ It is certainly debatable whether, as Ms.
Goodman also claimed, that the U.S.
would, in practice, have the flexibility of fobbing off onto foreign governments the emissions
associated with operations of American forces based overseas.

How Will This Work?

No less puzzling was the claim first unveiled by Secretary Goodman in March, and forcefully
reiterated yesterday by Secretary Eizenstat, to the effect that all of DoD’s domestic
operations
would be exempted from the effects of the Kyoto Protocol. Ms. Goodman’s testimony makes
clear that this was not the U.S. position at or even for several months after the
meeting in Japan.
In fact, it was not adopted until immediately before her appearance before the Senate
Armed
Services Committee.⁽²⁾ As she put it: “The Administration
has decided that it will oppose efforts
to impose emissions limits or constraints on domestic military operations and training.
That is
new news I am announcing here for the first time.”

Not only is this “new news” an obvious afterthought; it remains to be seen how it will work.
If
the United States government decides to exempt domestic “military operations and training” from
its national emissions reductions, more draconian reductions will have to be made by others if
national targets are to be met. Will this feed anti-military sentiment? How will “operations and
training” be defined? Will facilities dedicated to supporting such activities be exempted, or just
the weapon systems involved? And what does it mean when the NSC promises to protect the
Pentagon’s “ability to reallocate to the Defense Department emissions resulting from overseas
activities and bases pursuant to the agreement at Kyoto”? Would such reallocations mean that
they are exempted — effectively adding them to the U.S. national emission tab?
Are limited
defense resources to be further squandered in allocating and accounting for greenhouse gas
emissions, yet another Clinton “defense mission” that contributes nothing to national
security?

The Bottom line

In short, questions abound about the extent to which an administration that refused to honor
the
Defense Department’s request for a clear-cut blanket exemption from Kyoto will now be able to
accomplish the same result, despite the prejudicial language it agreed to in Japan. To be on the
safe side, Congress should insist upon affixing a condition to the Kyoto Protocol that
explicitly exempts the U.S. military from its restrictions and to legislation that protects the
Pentagon from any effort to implement the Protocol without its formal ratification. In
light
of the solemn assurances recently presented by Secretaries Eizenstat and Goodman,
surely
President Clinton and Vice President Gore would not object.

– 30 –

1. See the Perspective entitled Is
the Administration Lying to the Senate About Kyoto’s
Adverse Impact on National Security — Or Just Kidding Itself? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-C_70″>No. 98-C 70, 23 April 1998).

2. In fact, Ms. Goodman told the Inhofe subcommittee that this
information reached her after she
submitted her prepared remarks. The National Security Council, however, did not provide
“White House guidance concerning the obligations of the Department of Defense in implementing
the Kyoto agreement” until 27 March, more than two weeks after Secretary Goodman’s
testimony. The relevant portions of this “guidance” are as follows:

It has been determined that measures intended to promote reductions in
emissions of greenhouse gases shall not impair or adversely affect military
operations and training (including tactical aircraft, ships, weapons systems,
combat training and border security)