Word: kyoto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kyoto, whatever its drawbacks, did contain one breakthrough: an architecture that would have allowed countries to reduce emissions through a credit-trading system. The concept was pioneered by the President's father in his Clean Air Act, which cut acid rain in half by allowing U.S. utilities to trade sulfur dioxide credits. Today the system would permit the industrialized countries to trade carbon-emission credits (basically licenses to emit specific amounts of greenhouse gases) among one another and participating developing countries. Because climate change is a global problem, its solution is ideally suited to an international-trading regime. Such trading...
From that perspective, Kyoto was a pretty good deal for President Bush. It was an extraordinarily difficult task for the Clinton Administration to get other nations to agree to a system that both allowed trading to reduce costs and gave credit for establishing carbon "sinks" by protecting growing forested areas or planting trees on degraded farmland. Clinton and Gore negotiating the flexible, market-oriented Kyoto accord was a bit like Nixon going to China. A conservative like Bush could never have achieved such flexibility without vituperative criticism from activists and Democrats...
Clearly, the President now needs to move toward a Son of Kyoto that re-engages the international community. The plan should include three key elements. It must allow emissions trading, in order to reduce costs and induce all nations to participate. It must ask developing countries to adopt a ceiling against which their reductions can be measured. (For the trading currency to have value, it must be scarce.) And finally, its mechanisms must encourage actions that reduce emissions for the long term, not just an initial period...
...appropriate conclusions. "I don't think there is a values gap," said a senior Administration official who was on the trip. "The shared values between Americans and Europeans vastly and dramatically outweigh any differences. There are anti-death penalty Americans; there are people in the U.S. who think [the Kyoto protocol on global warming] was a great thing." Antony Blinken, a staff member on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, points out that it wasn't that long ago that Europeans and Americans had serious disagreements over basic matters--like the modernization of nuclear arsenals in Europe. After the cold...
...semiannual summit between the E.U. and the U.S., were bound to be trickier--and were. On their own territory--Bush was the first sitting U.S. President ever to visit Sweden--the Europeans set the agenda, which consisted mainly of beating up on Bush for his decision to junk the Kyoto accord. Climate change dominated both the formal meeting and the dinner that evening in Goteborg's town hall. Bush, said an Administration official, found the dinner a "long two hours...