THE MORNING BRIEF, Wall Street Journal, By JOSEPH SCHUMAN, December 3, 2007
Finding a Successor To the Kyoto Protocol
In his first official act as a new prime minister, Kevin Rudd today signed paperwork that will lead to Australia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, further isolating the U.S. on climate issues just as negotiators are meeting in Bali to start work on Kyoto's successor.
Mr. Rudd's signature would seem to bolster the United Nations-sponsored Bali conference's momentum, already building since the Nobel Peace Prize was co-awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its work documenting human-induced global warming.
The latest scientific warning came just yesterday, in a study published by peer-review journal Nature Geoscience, which found the earth's tropical zones have begun to spread toward the poles. While some of the earliest signs of climate change came through melting ice in the Arctic, the study reports evidence of tropical expansion that could threaten subtropical societies. "Poleward movement of large-scale atmospheric circulation systems, such as jet streams and storm tracks, could result in shifts in precipitation patterns affecting natural ecosystems, agriculture, and water resources," it says, but cautions that the implications still aren't well understood.
And yet, despite the warnings and burgeoning political consensus, there's also little certainty about what the Bali talks will produce.
While the U.S. delegation declared it won't be a "roadblock" to a new agreement, the Bush administration remains opposed to mandatory emission caps for greenhouse gases and some other steps many of U.S. allies support. China, which has seen billions of dollars in crops destroyed by the pollutants of its coal-burning power plants, and India, threatened by melting glaciers and devastating droughts, have both said they won't sign a treaty that slows their pace of economic development, as the Associated Press reports. Both countries are allowed to keep polluting under the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which itself has led to little actual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.
The product of much geopolitical wrangling, it required only 36 countries to limit pollution, and just over of third of those countries were former Soviet-bloc countries, the Los Angeles Times notes. The likes of Russia, Latvia and Romania have sharply lowered their carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, but that's more due to how the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union shut down smoke-belching factories, the Times says. And the Kyoto emissions were set far above the countries' actual emissions.
Under Kyoto, industrialized countries that ratified the treaty were charged with lowering their emissions by 5% from 1990s levels -- requirements that expire in 2012 -- but in many big industrialized countries emissions have continued to increase. That's part of why regimes were created to allow countries to trade carbon credits, buying, for example, Eastern European's permission to pollute in order to emit more in Western Europe.
It was a way, as The Wall Street Journal says, of harnessing market forces to deal with global warming. But the trading "hasn't yet ignited the green-energy revolution its architects were expecting," the Journal says. "The cap-and-trade system has brought about useful projects targeting a few especially potent greenhouse gases. It hasn't, however, forced the industrialized world to meaningfully curb what scientists say is the biggest problem of all -- the growing consumption of fossil fuels."
* * *