Word: protocolic
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...short run, there's not much chance of halting global warming, not even if every nation in the world ratifies the Kyoto Protocol tomorrow. The treaty doesn't require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions until 2008. By that time, a great deal of damage will already have been done. But we can slow things down. If action today can keep the climate from eventually reaching an unstable tipping point or can finally begin to reverse the warming trend a century from now, the effort would hardly be futile. Humanity embarked unknowingly on the dangerous experiment of tinkering with the climate...
With the U.S. still skeptical about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to cut carbon dioxide emissions and curb global warming and the 83 other signatory nations still wrestling over the details, the E.U. was growing concerned that the pact might fall apart. In February, Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman reassured E.U. leaders that global warming remained high on the new Administration's worry list. But in March, President George W. Bush announced he was abandoning his campaign pledge to curb CO2 emissions from power plants, having concluded that the gas shouldn't be regulated as a pollutant, particularly during...
...California and possibly other states began facing power shortages, the Administration has been reluctant to do anything that would raise the price of fossil fuels and discourage their use. "I was straightforward with the European ambassadors in the way that the President has been straightforward on the Kyoto Protocol," Rice told TIME. "The notion that everybody was taken aback or surprised took us as a little...
What's more, the cuts the protocol requires are deeper than they seem. The Kyoto terms were drafted four years ago, but they would not go into effect until 2008. The CO2-reduction goals would not have to be met until 2012. U.S. greenhouse emissions are projected to grow more than 20% by then, which means that getting 7% below 1990 levels could actually require a 30% cut in output. Even then, the difference might not be enough to have any real impact. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a Kyoto booster, believes that in order to put the brakes...
...explains the Administration's objections. The category of developing countries, for the purposes of the accord, included China and India, major powers by almost any measure. Giving two such heavyweights a CO2 waiver while the U.S. had to carry its share struck a lot of people as galling. "A protocol that excepts China and India and...penalizes American industry...wouldn't be ratifiable," says Rice...