The Kyoto Protocol: Twelve Years On

With the majority of the world’s governments set to have representatives at the Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, at the end of this year, there is naturally a great deal of interest and desire that the parties present will be able to get a deal in place whereby the world works at bringing down the carbon emissions on a country-by-country basis. This is, after all, the mood that was taken into a similar meeting in Kyoto, Japan twelve years ago. At the end of that conference there was a deal on the table – but slowly it became clear that the deal was not on the terms that many of the signatories found desirable. The very reason that the parties concerned are due to meet in Copenhagen is the failure to set terms at Kyoto that were fitting for each country.

Famously the United States, although a signatory to the protocol laid down in the agreement made at Kyoto, has never ratified nor withdrawn from the agreement, but it has been clear since early this decade that they wished to renegotiate what was laid down in the Kyoto bill. Critics of the agreement felt that it singled out the United States as a country which had to do more than others, and that attempting to live up to the provisions laid down in the bill would seriously and negatively affect the viability of the US economy. Indeed, the most skeptical commentators felt that the entire bill was slanted in favour of persuading the US to bend over backwards to do more than anyone else, and was an anti-American document per se.

In the light of these feelings, it became impossible to see how the United States would ever ratify Kyoto’s protocol, especially when it elected the notorious climate change skeptic George W Bush to two terms in office as President. Many people’s hopes for a move at the Copenhagen conference lean on the fact that Barack Obama is seen as more amenable to Green politics, and although there is evidence to support this it remains to be seen whether first of all Mr Obama is prepared to sign up to terms which will suit the other signatories to the bill, and secondly whether he will be able to carry with him a Congress which has become more partisan than ever in recent times, with the President having endless difficulties steering through a healthcare bill that carries no elements which would give the majority of other countries much pause for thought.

It is largely accepted that the Kyoto protocol are to all intents and purposes dead in the water. While countries have independently gone about meeting their requirements as set out in the document, it was a document that depended upon the agreement of all signatories if it was to meet its own requirements. Any bill now agreed may well be the son of the requirements set out at Kyoto, but the fact remains that without some quite searching negotiation, Copenhagen may well not be the endgame in the battle against climate change

Some hand-picked related and non-related posts:

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In Copenhagen And Closer To Home, Carbon Is The Priority

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Global Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.