The politics of climate change explained
Do developing countries have any obligations under the protocol?
Only in general terms. After all, they are mostly innocent victims of global warming, not the perpetrators. They face major climate changes while having per-capita emissions much lower than industrialised countries. Under the protocol, developing countries have to report on their emissions, but many want to go further and help industrialised countries meet their targets. The protocol allows industrialised countries to plant "carbon sink" forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.
The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets - even if those targets allowed emissions to increase. While that idea was quietly dropped by the Clinton administration, it might well become a crunch issue if and when the US decides to return to the protocol.
So is the Kyoto Protocol a good deal or a bad one?
As agreed in Kyoto, it was intended to cut emissions by industrialised countries by an average of slightly over 5 per cent by the year 2010. By the end of talks in Marrakech, analysts put the expected actual cut, after allowing for spurious sinks and "hot air" trading, at perhaps 1.5 per cent. That isn't much, but it's far better than the soaring increases that could have been expected if there'd been no deal at all. Perhaps the biggest immediate concern among scientists is that the protocol could fall apart because it will be hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks. But the desire to get an agreement at all costs finally overrode such concerns.
Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming?
They will hardly scratch the surface. The protocol's scientific advisers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say it will buy us 10 years at most. To halt global warming will need much more radical measures. The panel says that the world has to agree a maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today's levels. Because the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, hangs around in the atmosphere for a century or more, this means substantially lowering emissions over the next few decades. Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.
That sounds like a long-term strategy. But temperatures are rising fast now. Can we do anything in the short term?
The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century's time, not today. This was hardly a considered decision: in fact it happened almost by accident, because of the way the protocol lumps together the six different greenhouse gases covered by its rules. Each of these gases has a different greenhouse potency and spends a different amount of time in the atmosphere. CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it's there it is many times more potent.
The protocol's emissions targets lump together the six different gases and compare their relative warming effect over a period of a century. This "hundred-year rule" has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.
As it is drafted under the "hundred year rule", the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne. That reflects the relative importance of the gases over a hundred-year time frame. If the protocol had instead adopted a 20-year time frame, methane would have got 60 times as much credit, tonne for tonne, as CO2. Countries would have had much more incentive to cut methane emissions, whether from the guts of cows, leaking pipelines or fermenting landfill sites.
A 20-year rule would reflect more accurately the importance of methane in warming us today. And it would certainly encourage action to reduce methane emissions. Some scientists favour that approach as a way of heading off global warming in the short term. But this dimension got left out of the political discussions over the Kyoto Protocol, and few ministers who signed up for the protocol realised its significance. It may be that next time targets are set, there will be a new perspective - perhaps even a separate methane target - to deal with the short term.
So what should we be doing?
There is clearly a case for short-term action to reduce emissions of fast-acting greenhouse gases like methane. Landfills can be re-engineered to reduce emissions. Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.
Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels - the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn't affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.
But long-term, there is no question that CO2 is the big issue. We are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels - the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing that in a way which doesn't damage the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal.
Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for everyone on the planet, a policy endorsed last year by Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. The Brazilian government has also proposed that there should be a historical element in such an arrangement. This seems fair enough since most of the CO2 put into the air during the Victorian era is still there, helping to warm the planet.
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