Posted on 12/17/2004 10:01:47 AM PST by jalisco555
BUENOS AIRES -- The Kyoto Protocol is dead -- there will be no further global treaties that set binding limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) after Kyoto runs out in 2012.
Under the Kyoto Protocol industrialized countries are supposed to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases 5.2% below their 1990 emissions levels during the first commitment period which runs from 2008-2012. The European Union agreed to reduce its overall GHG emissions by 8% during that period. To cut its carbon emissions, the European Union has established a carbon trading scheme in which companies must purchase permits to emit carbon. The number of carbon permits is capped at 8% below 1990 emission levels. The European Union and environmentalist activists have been pushing for negotiations to establish more stringent emissions limits for a second commitment period after 2012. It's not going to happen.
The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.
"I've been wondering if a cap and trade system for reducing carbon emissions would be successful," said Taishi Sugiyama, a senior researcher at Japan's Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry. "I think the answer is no. The market for carbon credits will likely shrink to be only within Europe after 2012." Sugiyama was participating in a panel discussion looking at "Options for post-2012 global climate regime". The consensus of the panel members including Henrik Hasselknippe of the Point Carbon trading consultancy, Jonathan Sinton from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Axel Michaelowa the head of the International Climate Policy Program at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, was that the Kyoto process is over. Sugiyama flatly predicted that Kyoto signatories Canada, Japan, and Russia will withdraw from the treaty after 2012.
So what now? Two different but complementary paths for addressing any future climate change have emerged from the Buenos Aires Climate Change Conference. The Europeans and activists have been pushing the first, which envisions steep near term reductions (next 20 years) in the emissions of GHG as a way to mitigate projected global warming. On the other hand, the United States has been advocating a technology-push approach in which emissions continue to rise and then GHG concentrations and emissions are cut steeply beginning in about 20 years. Over that time, the US sees the development of new energy efficient technologies, the creation of low cost methods for capturing and storing carbon dioxide both as emissions and atmospheric concentrations, and the invention of low carbon energy supplies. Such an approach has the advantage of fostering economic growth in the developing countries, lifting hundreds of millions from abject poverty over the next 20 years.
Sugiyama recommended that the technology-push approach be formalized outside of the Kyoto Protocol process with a Zero Emissions Technology Treaty. Such a treaty would have broad appeal because it avoids the inevitable conflicts over allocating emissions targets and because most countries recognize the importance of long-term technological progress. Sugiyama argued that a global cap and trade system is way too premature for developing countries to join because effective low cost ways to cut carbon emissions that they could use to binding emissions targets simply don't exist. "I cannot imagine a cap and trade system over the whole globe without low cost energy and emissions control technologies," said Sugiyama. However, as advanced energy technologies emerge over the next couple of decades, implementing a global cap and trade system becomes a more realistic prospect because developing countries will have access to effective technologies. In the meantime, the world could learn from the regional European carbon market what works and what doesn't work.
History will record that the COP-10 Buenos Aires Climate Change Convention is where it was first widely recognized that the Kyoto Protocol is a dead end. And where humanity chose to embark on a high tech path toward confronting whatever challenges any future global warming may present.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His email is rbailey@reason.com. His book, Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution, will be published by Prometheus Books in early 2005.
On the junk heap with the AWB and HOPEFULLY, the IRS and UN!
In other words, Kyoto was putting lipstick on the multi-billion $ Socialism Pig...
Nice try, losers!
Thank GOD. It's too bad thought that billions will be wasted in the intervening years until 2012.
good news...thanks Repubs in congress during the 90's and Pres. Bush
They deserve credit as well. Clinton didn't dare submit this atrocity to the Senate for ratification.
Gore would have probably signed legislation that citizens have to tear their houses completely down and crush the cement foundation if the house didn't meet EnergyStar standards. Gore is a simpleton. He would have made the homeless situation even worse.
Not really. The US is not participating and all the participating members are not complying.
A nice WIN for GWB for sure!
-- Then the Senate STILL would have rejected it 98-0!
Actually, the big scam is that no one ever really planned on doing anything with Kyoto other than stick it to the U.S. I'd be willing to bet that no country that signed this really intended to make the deep cuts that would be required to fund this debacle.
This is the best news I've read all week, no, all month!
The only U.S. companies supporting Kyoto were those who wanted to get CO2 defined as a "pollutant" so they could trade pollutant-reduction "credits" for things like shutting old inefficient plants (which they were going to shut anyway) to offset penalties for real pollutants like sulfur dioxide that they don't want to spend any money to fix.
Oh, and of course nuclear power companies supported Kyoto...
And all the "Hate America First" crowd desperate for any way to drag our country down to level of say a Pakistan or Canada.
This it the BEST NEWS OF DECEMBER 2004, if it turns out to be accurate.
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It is possible, though maybe not quite probable yet, that the Socialist will be out of real power in Germany in 06. It may be that most of Europe wants to avoid a trade war with the USA. I also think that bringing in the rest of E. Europe to the EU will be a bigger mouthful than the economies of "Old Europe" can chew. Those ?newer economies" will want US help. SO it is probably only rough going for a handful of years.
Now if Bush can get real economic reform and we can unleash the American economy everything surrounding Kyoto will look pretty foolish by the end of the decade.
That's basically the nut of the Kyoto Protocol. It would have put every single country on the globe at an equal footing. Just imagine the United States at the same footing as some 3rd world country. The Kyoto Protocol is nothing more than the United Nations of environmentalism.
As far as I am concerned the EU can sign up with any backward protocol it so desires. Just watch the EU get further dragged down once the EU signes up with something like Kyoto.
It is good news. Al Gore's baby is stillborn.
what you would have would be a UN carbon-credit trading scandal that would rival only oil-for-food in size and scope
My only hope is that we do not hear any "global warming" huffing and puff ing from the GOP in the WH or on the Hill. Just sell the whole thing as "energy independence" and help the various industries (ie. the Auto industry, the Nuclear Power industry) get the one up on competing industries in other nations. It is a chance to reinvent our economy.
Some breakthroughs would put us way out ahead again and we could get some real consensus going to move us ahead. Just let us not get PC about it. Global warming is a fraud put forward by the left, as is the environmental movement as a whole.
How dare you equate the two countries. You need to apologize to Pakistan.
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