A fresh look at curbing greenhouse gases
With the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change officially going into force this month, the battle among countries to bring the protocol to life is now over. But those gunning for a slowdown in worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have a new challenge: Countries that have ratified the agreement now face the daunting task of charting a course to stabilize emissions beyond 2012, when the protocol expires.
“I think arriving at effective approaches to take us beyond Kyoto will be far more challenging than bringing Kyoto to life,” says Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an independent think tank that considers new approaches to protecting the climate and sustaining economic growth.
Robert Bradley attended an international climate change meeting last December in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as an observer with the independent think tank World Resources Institute (WRI). He says that two big issues still hang over the climate change effort: what can be done to bring the United States back into discussions on mandatory reductions, and how delegates can engage developing counties, both those with growing economies and those that are the least developed.
The two issues are very closely tied together. When President Bush pulled the United States out of the protocol talks in 2001, saying that the reduction commitments would harm the U.S. economy, even behind-the-scenes talks slowed on the vexing question of how to proceed after 2012, says environmentalist Jeff Fiedler of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Ratification by the Russian government last November was expected to reinvigorate international discussions on this topic, Fiedler adds.
But when the representatives from 167 governments met December 6–17, 2004, in Buenos Aires for climate change talks, the protocol was not yet in effect, Bradley says. They met as the Conference of Parties (COP 10) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The protocol is an amendment to the UNFCCC, the international agreement signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that pledges signatory countries to stabilize GHG concentrations at levels that would prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Unlike the protocol, UNFCCC does not include emissions limits or market-based mechanisms. The protocol, agreed upon in 1997, requires developed countries to reduce their GHG emissions by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels.It also requires that countries begin discussing this year what they will do after the protocol expires. Yet, at COP 10 many governments were reluctant to begin talks aimed at new reduction goals, says Bradley, making it “largely a frustrating COP” for Kyoto supporters.
Harlan Watson, the senior climate negotiator at the U.S. Department of State and the head of the U.S. delegation to COP 10, instead reiterated Bush’s 2001 climate change statement that it would be premature to discuss a post-2012 policy. A 2012 review of U.S. emissions would determine whether any other actions should be taken to reduce GHG growth, Watson told participants.
Many in the U.S. energy and business communities support Watson and believe, as Bush does, that the protocol will slow growth. During COP 10, officials from India, China, and oil-producing Saudi Arabia backed Watson’s position, which he expressed as a signatory to the UNFCCC. Watson’s position was eventually accepted.
For protocol adherents, “the reality is that the news is not good,” Bradley says. “The best we could get was [that] we could have talks about talks.” During the final hours of the last day of COP 10, participants agreed to a seminar in May that is described as “an informal exchange of information” by government representatives only. The agenda is to discuss steps that governments are taking to carry out their commitments under Kyoto and ways they can “continue to develop” climate-related actions. “This seminar does not open any negotiations leading to new commitments,” the UNFCCC document says.
The diplomatic language lets all sides claim a victory, observers say. Participants can float ideas for next steps, which could be brought up again in subsequent meetings. “It is really a hair-splitting difference,” Bradley adds, “and is indicative of where we are in the process.” But for EU countries, where the public doesn’t support abandoning Kyoto, other nations that have taken steps to reduce GHG emissions, and those least developed countries, anything that keeps the process moving forward can be seen as a victory.
Kevin Fay, executive director of the International Climate Change Partnership, which is composed of large, multinational companies with voluntary reduction programs, predicts that the U.S. withdrawal from the protocol is apt to bring talks about reductions in the second phase to a screeching halt. Several officials from industrialized and developing nations said they won’t proceed post-2012 without the United States, says Fay, who also attended COP 10. “Kyoto without the U.S. and developing countries after 2012 is not very viable.”
Others agree. “It would be hard for countries that are moving forward with their Kyoto commitments, such as the EU and Japan, to move even further beginning in 2012 without the U.S.,” says Dan Bodansky, former climate change coordinator at the U.S. Department of State and a senior U.S. negotiator from 1999 to 2001, now at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Things aren’t too likely to be affected by the lack of U.S. participation in the protocol now, but in five or six years, there is bound to be more pressure on the U.S. to come back to the climate change negotiations, Bodansky says. “Most countries want the U.S. to re-engage more generally,” he adds.
“I think there can be progress [after 2012] without the U.S., but progress might be faster with the U.S. on board,” says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an independent research organization. China, for example, “is ready to play ball on this,” he says, “but they are reluctant to do so without U.S. leadership.” The Chinese are investing in energy efficiency projects and renewable energy sources. Because of their rapidly growing population and expanding economy, the Chinese see benefits in shifting from a carbon-based energy system toward one that is more sustainable, Flavin says.
In light of the re-election of Bush last November, environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations urged the parties at COP 10 to forge ahead with discussions about the next steps without U.S. participation, hoping to reach agreements on even more progressive solutions. Industrialized nations, in particular the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, instead urged the group to keep the United States involved in these talks, no matter what.
“With European industry worried about the competitiveness impacts of Kyoto’s emission targets, EU governments want to show they are engaging other countries in discussions to broaden and extend commitments post-2012,” says Diringer.
With at least one meeting set for this year to discuss progress, many experts predict that when talks begin on the post-Kyoto commitments, they won’t involve higher emission reduction targets. “You will need something different than Kyoto to move to the next stage, because you need to draw different parties in,” says Diringer. During COP 10, Pew researchers released their report Beyond 2012: A Survey of Approaches, which discusses more than 40 proposed approaches for continuing international climate change and emissions reduction policies after 2012.
Any new agreement must be able to accommodate the range of individual country strategies. Rather than set reduction targets, negotiators instead can call for actions that bring about reductions and move toward climate stabilization, such as achieving zero net emissions from the power sector or replacing gasoline with hydrogen by 2050, Diringer suggests.
Ironically, the United States was advocating a broader Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the late 1990s, but most negotiators from developing countries were suspicious and wanted to keep the focus limited to individual projects, Bodansky says. The CDM, agreed to under the protocol, allows industrialized countries to fund projects in developing countries in return for emissions credits.
Views have changed, and developing countries are likely to show “a lot more openness” to broaden the CDM in the talks about post-Kyoto actions, Bodansky says. An updated CDM could include policy-related changes, such as removing subsidies from a country’s energy sector to allow market forces to decide the cost of fuel, which might raise the price of and reduce the consumption of carbon-based fuel.
A large developing country such as China could benefit, for example, if officials there adopted broad policy changes in the transportation sector to encourage more use of mass transit and less reliance on cars, Bodansky suggests. Developing countries might put controls on car use, similar to a new policy in place in London, by limiting access to certain high-density areas. “That would be good for local air pollution in China, it would be good for the climate, and it would also allow the country to gain credits under the CDM that they could sell,” Bodansky says.
