Moving beyond Kyoto
To seriously address the issue of global climate change, policymakers need to establish a framework that extends through the end of the century
Late in 2006 several events moved the U.S. and other countries closer to serious global negotiations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is therefore timely to ask what a meaningful global agreement would entail. A solid starting point is the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that binds countries to act on the problem and under which specific measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are adopted. The signatories to the Framework Convention, including the U.S. and almost all other countries, declared the objective to be the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the climate system." The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, did not implement this idea very well: it took a short-term view of a long-term objective and as a result lost clarity, credibility and support along the way. The key now is to move beyond it.
The Kyoto Protocol calls on the high-income countries and the postcommunist nations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to reduce their GHG emissions as of 2012 by around 6 percent compared with the 1990 level. This commitment is far better than nothing (a fair description of the Bush administration's nonpolicy), but it has two major flaws. First, it leaves out the developing countries, which soon will emit more than half of the world's GHGs. Without the active participation of China, India and other developing countries, stabilization of emissions is simply impossible. Second, the Kyoto Protocol takes the long-term objective of stabilization of GHG concentrations and transforms it into a short-term target on emissions reductions, with no clear link between the two. The main actions for stabilization will have to be long-term changes in technology, which exceed the 2012 horizon of the Kyoto Protocol.