Kyoto Protocol Comes Into Force

Cally writes "The controversial Kyoto Treaty regulating CO2 emissions finally comes into force today. The BBC has several stories and backgrounders, and notes that international pressure is now mounting on the USA to take action as well, as the scientific consensus is well established. A key question is whether the US economy will benefit relative the rest of the world, with some arguing that new technologies such as clean power generation and energy efficient appliances will provide an economic boost."

Comments

'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Peeteriz]

Looking at the question of 'will USA gain a relative economical advantage' is missing the point - it IS clear that there are certain economic disadvantages - ensuring that our children have a decent world left will have some costs.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[I confirm I'm not a]

Looking at the question of 'will USA gain a relative economical advantage' is missing the point - it IS clear that there are certain economic disadvantages

Agreed, and I feel that the economic disadvantages have been grossly overstated: for example, a pundit on the BBC suggested that with Kyoto compliance it would take the UK until 2056 to achieve the same level of prosperity it would otherwise attain in 2053. I suspect there's grounds for error there, but that it's not far from the truth.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Kokuyo]

Yes, but considering the state of their social system I'd say we cannot expect them to first look out for the environment before feeding their children.

We live in relatively stable countries... it is OUR duty to show them how it should be done by example. Then they will follow this example.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[rsidd]

This treaty is, has been, and will continue to be a joke.

It's a starting point. Much more needs to be done. But the US is not even willing to make a start. As of now, India and China combined emit about 14% of the world's CO2 (it was a lot lower when the treaty was being negotiated and India's share is still low), while the US all by itself emits 25%

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[gilesjuk]

Then set them an example?

Honestly, it's a joke when the worlds biggest polluter stands up and complains about poorer countries who pollute less.

Sure it will have economic costs, but developing technology will create jobs and result in lots of energy saving technology which can be sold.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Tim C]

Ah, the old "they're not doing it, so there's no point me doing it" attitude...

Look, it's perfectly simple. The more countries sign up, the better. Yes, it would be preferable to get every country in the world to sign up and adhere to the treaty, but that's not going to happen right away. Failing that, the more the better. Even if a couple of major polluters don't sign up, those that do can still make a positive difference.

Hey, not everyone obeys inconvenient laws like not killing people, not stealing stuff, not dumping toxic waste into rivers, and so on - that doesn't mean that no-one should bother.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[frankthechicken]

India/China/Brazil are not in Kyoto as per head of population they do not contribute as much towards to Carbon dioxide problem as Western nations. The only so called industrialized nations not signed up to Kyoto are the US and Australia.

Australia is the one that amuses me, their PM's statement

"Until such time as the major polluters of the world including the United States and China are made part of the Kyoto regime, it is next to useless and indeed harmful for a country such as Australia to sign up"

Especially when their leading oppposition party states that

Australia is the world's worst greenhouse gas polluter per capita because of its heavy use of coal-burning power stations.

The arguement that because so and so aren't doing it, why should we, is not only childish, but considering stances against some countries for not commiting to certain agreements, it seems down right hypocritical.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Kokuyo]

No. We shouldn't be talking so they wouldn't have to be listening.

We should be a shining example with breathable air and water coming out of the tailpipes of our cars. And they will WANT to follow the example.

I do believe that clean energy will mean lots of cash in the future. If SOMEONE manages to make big bucks with it everyone else will follow. That is in the nature of humans. The problem is someone needs the cojones to INVEST first. And we really can't expect underdevelopped countries to do the investing, right?

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Kokuyo]

As I stated in my answer to another poster above:

This is not about respect or whether they will listen or not. This is about profit. Be it either financial or other means.

No, China gives a damn about what the US wants or says. But they will give a lot of thought about technological and economical advantages the US will gain over them. Make a market for clean energy and they will want to participate.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[killbill!]

Being less reliant on oil is a serious economic benefit.

You hit the nail right on the head. In fact, I'd argue that the main reason the US has to go Kyoto is not to save the global environment (because it might already be too late), but to save the US economy. Namely, to force companies that are too focused on their next quarterly results to save themselves.

Instead of complaining about the cost of Kyoto on the US economy, maybe US politicians should ask themselves why EU politicians are in favor of Kyoto. Seriously, do you really believe it's because they care about the environment? Or even their constituencies? Do you really expect them to be less sold out to Big Business than in the US?
Something tells me their backers did the math.

The US *has* to reduce its energy consumption lest it faces utter economic ruin in the coming decades. Right now, the US is burning twice as much energy per capita as the EU or Japan.
If you didn't know already, the EU is a larger economy than the US, and both the EU's and Japan's industrial sector are larger as a share of GDP than the US's. The US must be doing something seriously wrong somewhere.

When Peak Oil comes, the EU and Japan will have decades of technical and organizational expertise in energy efficience behind them. They will be able to bear the burden, as they will be thoroughly prepared.

The US on the other hand will have to reinvent itself completely in only a couple years. Even cities will have to be rebuilt from the ground up (try doing that 100 mile daily commute in a world where gasoline is 10x more expensive than it is today). They will have to build extensive public transportation systems that do not exist right now. And all this right at the time the foreign debt crisis hits.

To put it in a nutshell, it is going to make the 30's look like a walk in the park.
And it's going to suck even more when all the equipment needed to adapt the US has to be imported from China or the EU and paid in overly-expensive yuans or euros because no US company even cared about the looming disaster when it was still time.

On the other hand, it the US does get its act together and starts saving energy in earnest soon, then it might manage to pull it off.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Decaff]

We've been hearing this sort of thing for three decades now. Eco distaster is always just around the corner. We are always near the tipping point, close to the point of no return. Horror is coming!

You have been hearing it from a few for a long time. Now you are hearing from a majority of respectable scientists.

Despite the dire claims, we have yet to see any REAL environmental disaster. Nothing truly spectacular has happened (not on the scale the doomsayers have been predicting) and now we get Kyoto.

The problem is that by the time the average citizen notices major changes, its too late.

If you want evidence, look at your Glacier National Park. Check the temperature changes and mass changes of the glaciers. The evidence for climate change is there if you bother to look.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Pentagram]

Keep in mind that most of the US lives much, much more sparsely than Europeans.

CO2 emissions:

USA 5,410 million tons (20.1 tons per capita)
EU 3,171 million tons (8.5 tons per capita)

Care to justify your statement?

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[dave420]

Insisting on fairness? Ok... maybe the US should give 0.7% of its GDP to developing nations as it has promised to do, instead of giving the 0.1% it does now. That would be fair. Or, maybe, the US should give MOST of its GDP to poorer countries, as that would be EVEN FAIRER.

Back to the issue at hand - something has to be done now. The US is polluting more than any other nation on Earth, and more than most continents. Expecting to treat some struggling nation gripped by a military coup or millions of people starving the same way as a secured, comfortable, prosperous nation is so selfish it's beyond words. No-one was pestering the US to follow environmental treaties when IT was developing, but now you want to force those on other developing nations? THAT seems grossly unfair to me. Of course, I'm looking at a global picture, not one with myself in the middle looking amorously at a SUV ;)

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[Wyatt Earp]

Glaciers have been going away for the last 14,000 years in North America. Glacier National Park 14,000 would have been all the way down to Missoula Montana and into Wyoming. Glaciers shrink and the grow all over the World, the BBC piece with the photos "illustrating the change" are simply "best of show" pictures.

There are 160,000 glaciers in the world, over 65,000 of them have been inventoried and only a handful of those have been studied. They have tracked the mass increase and decrease for only about 100 of the 160,000 glaciers for five or more years

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_ga ll ery/05/sci_nat_how_the_world_is_changing/html/1.st m

More evidence, Ross Ice Streams in West Antarctica is increasing at 26.8 gigatons per year, according to Science 295: 476-80

Now people like to throw out that there will be more dangerous storms from GCC, someone from a US Congressman's Office on Monday used that as an arguement in my Geology class, well, for example, Hurricanes are not increasing in thier strikes against the US, nor in thier force. We might be inline for a good decade for 2000-2009, but it needs to pick up to match 1940-1949

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[goon america]

That's too bad because what I quoted above is quite true. Science is not about consensus, it's about fact. Politics is about consensus.

No, sorry, we use a consensus of scientists as informative because we are not scientists ourselves. I, and 99.99% of other people, want and need to know about of issues like climate change, but have no way of analyzing the data and knowing ourselves because we are not climatologists spending their whole lives doing this sort of thing. But we can look at polls of scientists to learn for ourselves. This is imperfect, I agree, but it's the only way to do things short of all us quitting our jobs and becoming climatologists.

Second, you could use this argument to justify absolutely anything. If all you have to do to disprove a scientific finding was to simply say "all these scientists might be wrong" then you could disprove absolutely any scientific finding. So, how can you use it against one particular scientific finding and not (literally) all of the others? Logically, it applies with equal force. If you want to believe this, logically the only thing you can do is live in some world of Cartesian doubt where the only thing you can know is that you exist because you have thought. Everything you see even with your own eyes could, maybe, conceivably be an illusion somehow... so that means, if motivated, you can conclude that everything you see is an illusion, right?

While it is true that it is conceivably possible in some way that the consensus of scientists is totally wrong, how likely is that this is going to happen? Possibility != likelihood. In the past, in modern science, when virtually all of the given scientists studying the same hard science subject believed something, how often were they wrong? (And, by comparison, how often were the people with vested interests opposing them wrong?) It's, you know, possible that there's going to be some great Galilean revolution awaiting this field, but if you find that compelling enough to withhold any conclusions, then you can't conclude anything about anything scientific.

While it is true that "many important scientific discoveries have been in direct conflict with the consensus" what is the relative likelihood that this is true for any given scientific finding? Let's be scientific. You can't conclude anything by looking at only one corner of a 2x2 contingency table. Let's call the consensus of modern scientists on a topic of their expertise A and let's call the opinion of a few motivated non-experts B. If A or B is wrong, we'll call it !A and !B, respectively. All you're saying is that !A & B is possible, or non-zero, which is certainly true. So, what are the relative probabilities of (!A & B), (!B & A), (!B & !A) and (A & B)? Note that every cell is possible. !A and !B is possible -- it's possible that scientists and nonexperts are both wrong. (A & B may equal zero when A and B are contraries.) So, we just might as well conclude them true, right? But these four possibilities cannot be true at the same time, so you have to pick one, and I suggest you do so not by looking at only one cell and deciding whether it's non-zero, but based on the relative likelihood of all four cells comparatively.

Re:'gain a relative economical advantage'..

[xenobyte]

You have been hearing it from a few for a long time. Now you are hearing from a majority of respectable scientists.

A theory doesn't get to be more correct/accurate just because more and more people are repeating it... And I have a hard time respecting scientists mindlessly repeating this without actually bothering to look at the facts and keep the basic scientific methods in mind.

Now, let's just take a brief look at things...

• We know very little about natural climate variations. That they happened is about all we know. Why they happened are the bigger and much more interesting question. But even the climate-changing giant meteor that 'killed the dinosaurs' is subject of much dispute on every level. And for some reason almost all these 'respectable scientists' insist on the energy input from the Sun being irrelevant and without significance... Yet without it the Earth would be a very cold place indeed. So the Sun is a very significant element in our climate and we know very little about the periodic instabilities in the nuclear processes up there, so that's another bit of shaky ground.
  
  
• We know very little about the complex balances in the atmosphere and we're far from knowing with any certainty that additional CO2 will increase the apparent greenhouse effect. It may even decrease it!
  
  
• The 'ancient' meteorological data is full of inaccuracies and you cannot 'measure' (calculate) a 0.5 degree change based on data that's only accurate to +/- 2.0 degrees. Yet this is done even by the UN people!
  
  
• There's no viable alternatives to most of the CO2-producing technologies. Solar and Wind power is useless for anything but a nice supplement to a core technology that sustains business and city consumption without fail. Cars that run on anything but gas are still more or less on the prototype stage, and airplanes are not even on the drawing boards. We simply cannot give up our CO2-producing technologies yet!
  

Anyway... Make up your own mind.

IMHO: If it was costless to be on the safe side then by all means do that! - But it isn't costless. Quite the opposite. The CO2 reductions could easily cost many times the combined global GNP plus lower the stage of civilization in many places. And all this based on very uncertain theories... I say it's not worth it. Not yet anyway.

We need more absolute evidence that we are affecting the climate before we even should consider doing anything more than thinking about new ways to build the next generation of cars, airplanes, power plants etc.

That's just my opinion. Your milage may vary.

Seems to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the war on terrorism is to continue then decreasing our reliance on oil (which comes from the Middle East) should be a priority.

There is no denying that oil revenue undoubtably finds its way into the hands of those that wish evil against the US. Clean technologies reduce our need to funnel more money into that part of the world.

Environment comes first

[northcat]

A key question is whether the US economy will benefit relative the rest of the world,

It doesn't matter whether a country's economy benifits from this. The safety of our Evironment is more important than the economy of a country.

Re:Environment comes first

[R.Caley]

The safety of our Evironment is more important than the economy of a country.

The environment is perfectly safe. Whatever we do there will always be an environment.

A Nail in the Coffin

[NardofDoom]

This will be just one more nail in the coffin of US dominance. While other countries are out developing new technologies, we'll continue to drive inefficient vehicles and burn coal for electrical power. Eventually, the rest of the industrialized world will have switched to fuel cells and renewable or nuclear energy, and we'll end up buying our cars and power systems from them.

So we better start getting really creative, really fast. Otherwise we'll have nothing to sell anyone.

Dragging my feet, fa la lala!

[Epistax]

We're talking about the country which doesn't admit smoking causes cancer until ~ twenty years after it's proved. Then we don't admit second-hand smoking causes cancer until... wait have we admitted it yet? Wait, we're still using land-mines?

Calling the Kyoto treaty unfair is irrelevant. Pointing out other countries engaging in the same ignorance as our own is irrelevant. The US drags its feet when it comes to international and social issues. I don't know which is more depressing.

I hate to have to keep doing this: This not a troll. This post contains only facts (except the ~ twenty is a guess). If you feel a violent reaction to this post I suggest you start thinking before you post.

Kyoto Rules

[grqb]

theWatt has a summary of the important details. Basically 127 countries have signed up (but not the US). Countries that have ratified the protocol must reduce emissions (such as CO2, methane, NOx etc) by 5.2% of 1990 levels by 2010, this is expected to be about a 29% cut if Kyoto was not implemented by 2010. If a country exceeds their target, then they can sell carbon credits (at about $30-40/ton in the US and $70-80/ton in Europe), if they're under, they can buy credits.

The second round of Kyoto starts in 2012 and will try to lure in those emerging countries like China and India. The omission of China and India is the big reason why the US isn't going for Kyoto.

Bush and Kyoto

[poindextrose]

Bush will never force the industry of his country (including power generation) to conform to the Kyoto accord. It's bad business.

In fact, he passes laws that relax the current regulations on pollution. His not-so-aptly-named "Clean Skies" initiative allows coal-fired generating stations to increase the amount of pollution they produce in favour of dumping more wattage on the grid.

This sort of behaviour disgusts me. I live in Toronto, and although we have a busy airport and traffic corridor, we don't produce nearly as much pollution as our neighbours to the south. Nanticoke generating station generates enough power for the city of Toronto without running at full capacity. It produces less emmissions than a plant half its size in Detroit. It does this with not-so-new-but-expensive technology that is invested in in favour of oh, say, being able to breathe.

I went down to D.C. recently, and when I left on the plane, looking east, I couldn't tell where the ground ended and the sky began. It was a disgusting layer of brown that looked like it spanned five hundered meters in the air... probably more.

I hope someone manages to bring sanctions against the Bush administration. His lack of regard for anything not minted or drilled or slipped into his pocket is disgusting.

Controversial ? I think not

[MosesJones]

The controversial Kyoto Treaty

This is the same way as Christian Fundamentalists in Kentucky et al describe Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Quick Summary: Everyone in the world thinks that someone has to be done about pollution. Except the biggest polluter.

Basically this is the same as elements like the Chemical and Biological non-proliferation treaty (objected to by the US), the International Criminal Court (objected to by the US) and a host of other good ideas that the US President objects to because he didn't think them up.

The US Approach of "Build Bigger SUVs and let our kids sort out the mess" is a disgrace to the 21st Century on a par with any other act of wilful destruction that can be conceived. The US is deliberately increasing its pollution rates and refusing to do anything about it. This already causes increases in deaths in the US an abroad due to breathing disorders and toxic poisoning.

And if its about the economy, how about trimming that massive debt George ?

Environmentalist have to take some blame

[Nine Tenths of The W]

Modern nuclear power is cleaner, safer, cheaper and more efficient than it ever was, yet we continue to build toxic, filthy fossil fuel plants. Why?

Because of the relentless, unscientific green PR campaign that's portrayed every nuclear plant as a Chernobyl in waiting. Wind, sun and waves are not always an option, and anti-nuclear campaigning has left no choice but fossil fuels.

Re:Smoke Screen

[jrumney]

The basic American claim that the treaty is unjust towards wealthier nations, while benefits countries like China and India, is true.

It is only true if your definition of "just" includes the right of Americans to pollute ten times as much as Chinese and Indians so that they may maintain their already significantly higher standard of living.

True Doublethink is a reality

[SimianOverlord]

Republicans: Sure, Iraq's elections aren't perfect, but they're the first step on the road towards true democracy....

Republicans: Since the Kyoto treaty isn't perfect, but is a first step on the road towards a solution to global warming, we'll stay out...