Word: protocolic
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...some of the past two decades’ most critical legislation was sacrificed to political expediency and Congress’s desperation to get something—anything—done. Comprehensive immigration reform was, after years of personal investment by President Bush, finally scrapped; ratification of the Kyoto Protocol was quietly shelved by the Clinton Administration. At least Hillarycare went down in a passionate and ignoble blaze...
That being said, the Poznan summit is only a waypoint on the road to negotiating a new Kyoto Protocol; it's not the final event. Kyoto, which mandated greenhouse-gas reductions for developed nations (except the U.S., which never ratified the treaty), will expire in 2012. And last year, at the contentious Bali summit, delegates managed to paper over disputes - including those among the U.S., which under the Bush Administration has generally played the spoiler at these talks; the European Union, which has routinely argued for the most stringent carbon reductions; and the big developing nations, like India and China...
...Poznan the atmosphere seems even bleaker. For one thing, economic catastrophe has made it harder for leaders to justify cutting carbon. A recent study by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), the independent investigative arm of Congress, sharply criticized the Clean Development Mechanism, the U.N. body that oversees the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-trading practices. The GAO found that carbon offsets - whereby a company in a rich nation pays for a carbon-reducing project elsewhere in lieu of cutting emissions itself - were at best a "temporary solution," not the answer to climate change. A new study by the National Center...
...Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements released 28 new reports last Sunday that will “offer a blueprint and information” to countries debating a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that has been widely panned as ineffective...
...Forest of Problems Avoided deforestation seems like a no-brainer - so why wasn't it included in the Kyoto Protocol? Ironically, it was omitted in part due to the work of a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They feared that avoided deforestation schemes could flood the trading market with countless cheap carbon credits; after all, there are an estimated 638 billion tons of carbon locked in the world's forests. If even a fraction of those credits are put on the market, it could let developed countries off the hook when it comes to making the hard changes...