Also, leaves lose less water as CO2 increases, so that plants are able to grow under drier conditions. Animal life, which depends upon plant life for food, increases proportionally. Thus, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide can contribute not only to more and cheaper food for people but also to the preservation of biodiversity for both plants and the animals that depend on them. The thrust of the Kyoto climate accords is to limit greenhouse gas emissions by limiting fossil fuel consumption. But that apparently includes only direct expenditures, not forgone production, which will be much more costly, because every form of economic production requires energy use.
Less energy means less economic production.
These economic costs translate into very human costs. But the United States is a rich country, far better able to cope with the costs of Kyoto than the vast majority of the world. The lost economic growth spells added decades of suffering and premature death for the roughly 4 billion people who now live in less-developed countries, for whom the affordability of basic water and sewage sanitation, health care, and safe transportation will be long postponed. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.