- As the Kyoto protocol, the world climate change treaty,
starts to crumble because of Russian reluctance to ratify it, evidence
is mounting of the very threat it is designed to counter.
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- Since January, many of the predicted consequences of
a steadily warming atmosphere have started to come true. In June the World
Meteorological Organisation drew attention to extreme weather events across
the world and in a highly unusual move, linked them to global warming explicitly.
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- India, Sri Lanka and the United States have registered
record high temperatures, rainfall and tornadoes this year. There has been
an increasing number of scientific reports of rapidly melting ice in both
the Arctic and the Antarctic, and rapidly melting mountain glaciers. Continental
Europe has seen forest fires like never before, and great rivers like Italy's
Po have been reduced to a trickle.
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- Britain had its own extreme: on 10 August we registered
the first three-figure Fahrenheit air temperature - 101.3F (38.5C) - in
a reliable record that goes back to 1659.
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- The 10 hottest years in the global temperature record,
which goes back to 1860, have all now occurred since 1990, with the hottest
being 1998, which, according to the Climatic Research Unit of the University
of East Anglia, was probably the hottest year in the northern hemisphere
for 1,000 years.
-
- It is followed in the table by 2002 and then 2001, and
it is already clear that 2003 will also be in contention as one of the
hottest years ever.
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- In Britain, four of the five hottest years in the Central
England Temperature Record, which goes back almost 350 years, have also
occurred since 1990.
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- If the evidence of global warming is mounting, how can
the treaty designed to counter it be going down?
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- The answer lies in its own contradictions. The Kyoto
protocol requires legally binding cuts in greenhouse emissions, yet in
some countries the demand for fossil fuels is so strong that the agreement
would be impossible to fulfil. This is the case in the United States where
four per cent of the world's population spews out nearly a quarter of the
world's total greenhouse emissions.
-
- Led by Bill Clinton's then Vice-President Al Gore - he
wrote the lauded environmental polemicEarth in the Balance- the US delegation
at the Kyoto negotiations in 1997 signed up to what some commentators now
see as a lot more than it could afford.
-
- It agreed that America would, by 2010, cut back its emissions
of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to seven per cent below where
they were in 1990.
-
- But thanks to Mr Clinton's dot-com boom, the American
economy has expanded and by 2010 CO2 emissions will have shot up accordingly.
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- To get back, by 2010, to the level prescribed by the
treaty would mean an emissions cut of more than 30 per cent. Cut your energy
use by a third? Short of turning all Californians out of their cars and
onto bikes, this is simply not possible.
-
- Senior figures in the State Department recognised this
at the time, so in a clever move they found a potential way for the US
to meet its target: so-called "flexible mechanisms" or, in effect,
licensed cheating.
-
- The most important of these was the ability of the US
to buy notional "surplus emission cuts" from countries that had
them to spare, as did Russia after its heavy industry collapsed in the
1990s.
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- But the US would have to pay through the nose for these
tactics and after the Republicans regained control of the White House under
George W Bush, their analysis was brutal: "Why should we pay a billion
dollars to the Russian mafia to keep a car plant open in Chicago?"
This view, and the fact, strongly resented in Congress, that only industrialised
nations and not developing countries like India and China, were required
to cut emissions under the treaty, led George W Bush to repudiate it as
one of his first major acts of policy.
-
- But in doing so he also deprived the Russians of one
of the major attractions it had for them - the chance to sell their surplus
emission cuts for a great bundle of cash.
-
- Deprived of the possible benefits, the hard-nosed economists
around President Vladimir Putin such as Andrei Illarionov focused on the
treaty's potential drawbacks, and yesterday it was Mr Illarionov who signalled
his country's own withdrawal.
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- DOOMSDAY FOR THE PROTOCOL
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- * The Kyoto Protocol sets targets for countries to reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases identified as contributing to global warming.
-
- * 188 nations are attending a 10-day United Nations summit
on global climate in Milan to work on the treaty
-
- * 120 countries, including Britain, have signed the protocol
since it was formulated in Kyoto in 1997.
-
- * 55 countries are required to ratify the pact in order
for it to take effect
-
- * The countries must include the industrialised nations
that account for at least 55 per cent of that group's carbon dioxide emissions
in 1990
-
- * To date, the nations that have signed account for only
44.2 per cent
-
- * The United States, the world's number one polluter,
withdrew its 36 per cent stake in 2001
-
- * As Russia accounts for 17.4 per cent - which would
allow the group to exceed the required 55 per cent total - its ratification
is an essential casting vote for the protocol's implementation
-
- * Countries would be able to buy or sell the right to
pollute, depending on its own emissions levels.
-
- * As a result, economists have argued that Moscow would
stand to gain from the pact as the collapse of many of its Soviet-era industries
would leave it with billions of pounds-worth of excess emission quotas
to sell
-
- * The first hint that Russia might not commit itself
to the treaty emerged two months ago when President Vladimir Putin stated
that a warmer climate would benefit Russian farming and enable people to
save money on coats in winter.
-
- * The EU has passed legislation to permit the trading
of emissions to commence in 2005
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=469569
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