Word: kyoto
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...coming into force of Kyoto is, however, not entirely without significance. The public failure of the treaty would have stymied future global policy initiatives and deeply disheartened those who seek more profound global action to combat climatic change. Importantly, the Protocol does make an important political statement by insisting that no one country, no matter how powerful, should be allowed to veto the global public interest...
...result of the Kyoto process to date has been that U.S. stubbornness has cost the world seven precious years during which the energies of the climate community were diverted towards saving an agreement that had assumed a perverse political salience but was never climatically meaningful. Now that the political battle is over, we need to ensure that the protracted politicking of the last seven years does not permanently scar the future direction of global climate policy. In particular, there are three important ways in which future climate policy initiatives will have to move away from the shadow of the Kyoto...
First, the U.S. has very successfully evangelized the argument that the Kyoto Protocol is somehow inequitable because major developing countries were not required to make emission reductions. The argument was originally advanced by the U.S. government as a diversionary justification for its own policy reticence. However, it is now routinely propagated by U.S. nongovernmental organizations as well as U.S. academia. The attacks have particularly focused on China and India. Both countries are easy targets because they have over a billion people each, and just about anything when multiplied by a billion becomes a very large number. The fact...
Second, there is a real need to involve the developing countries in the effort to curb global emissions. The way Kyoto sought to do this was through variants of emission trading schemes where investors from the industrialized countries could capitalize on the cheaper emission reductions in developing countries. The jury is still out on whether this so-called “clean development mechanism” (CDM) will be successful. There are many potential reasons why this experiment might fail. But even if it does not, picking low-hanging fruits cannot be a long-term solution. Ultimately, developing countries will...
Finally, the Kyoto formula of asking countries to reduce their emissions by a percentage of current emissions will simply not work for developing countries. (It is not reasonable to ask someone who is emitting at nearly zero to reduce his emission to absolutely zero!). If the atmosphere is a global common, we will have to shift towards some form of per capita allocation of emission rights. Why should someone living in Boston be granted the right to consume more of the global atmosphere than someone living in Bahawalpur? Others have already suggested a system where each individual is allotted...