The first Kyoto Protocol commitment period for developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ends in 2012 without any sign of agreement on the next phase.
Although climate skeptics and many politicians have rejected the demands for developed countries (Annex 1) to reduce and pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto Protocol has been the only major international initiative on climate change for more than 20 years.
As we near the post-Kyoto 2012 deadline, there is a ground-swell of support from many climate activists for a new approach to emissions reduction. The failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits to agree on robust new measures has seen many disillusioned climate activists looking for a better answer.
Most commentators agree that the Kyoto Protocol’s framework convention (promoting the principles that all countries should reduce emissions and protect carbon sinks, and that developed countries should lead the way), is still the right basis for progress. Despite this, doubt is growing over the Protocol’s future effectiveness and the question now being asked is what different mechanism should replace the Kyoto Protocol.
Despite all the risks of opting for a new mechanism the urgency of a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is a powerful incentive for climate activists.
Kyoto flaws prompt search for new mechanism
The combined promises of all the countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol are still not enough to meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommended target of a 25 to 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases to 1990 levels.
These also don’t take into account many of the hidden emissions that countries can exploit, such as international shipping and aviation emissions that have risen 60 percent since 1990, but are not counted under the Kyoto Protocol.
Part of the problem is that the Protocol has led to many countries using political manipulation and creative accounting to fudge the books on their greenhouse gas emissions. One such example is countries with pragmatic targets that relate to what is politically acceptable, not what is necessary to meet the emissions reduction objective to avoid climate change.
New Zealand is an example of a country whose present government has weakened the Emissions Trading Scheme with so-called measures to ‘smooth the transition to a low carbon economy’. These measures give polluting industries and agriculture a subsidy (in free and low-cost emissions units) to continue to pollute, and remove the disincentive of an emissions-linked price mechanism.
Officials of the European Union claim that the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 will result in little effect on carbon markets, because these are driven by national targets. The EU has the largest carbon cap-and-trade program in the world, and is responding to some developed countries recently refusing to commit to future limits under the Kyoto Protocol from 2013.
EU's robust ETS has majority of carbon market
In a recent interview, the European Commission’s director general for climate, Jos Delbeke, said the UN summit in Durban in South Africa later this year may not be able to produce a deal with binding carbon limits, and a new treaty may be 20 years away.
The European Commission (EU) operates an emissions trading scheme that puts limits on more than 11,000 utilities and manufacturing companies, and leads to a cap in 2020 that would be 21 percent below 2005 discharges. Delbeke said that the EU’s ETS was 80 percent of the global carbon market and would continue.
In December 2010 more than 190 nations at the climate summit in Cancun (Mexico) agreed to; send up to $100 billion a year to vulnerable nations by 2020; protect forests; and outlined methods to verify cuts in fossil fuel emissions. However, disagreements have kept these negotiators from creating a new binding agreement.
While nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa have pressured developed nations to make pledges of bigger cuts, the response from Japan, Russia and Canada was a refusal to extend the Kyoto Protocol unless they also have acceptance of the treaty from the two biggest emitters, China and the United States.
Despite this, there has been a lot of activity on emissions trading from China and other nations such as Korea and Singapore that may signal a wave of activity on carbon markets from emerging economies.
Alternatives to Kyoto include carbon stocks and no mining
Alternatives to countries measuring and reducing greenhouse gas emissions include the concept of carbon stocks, where countries agree to leave coal (and other emissions-producing resources such as oil) in the ground, and/or measures that restore and protect forests in perpetuity.
This is because many critics of the Kyoto Protocol point out that the focus on international emissions trading is not the real problem. The problem is that countries are extracting huge quantities of non-renewable fossil fuel resources that cannot be compensated for, because fossil carbon and active carbon are very different.
Once fossilised carbon is mined and burned, it becomes part of the active carbon pool and because the balance has been changed, there is not enough capacity in the atmosphere to absorb it.
Coal is greatest threat to civilization and the planet
Climate scientist James Hansen from the United States (an adjunct professor in earth sciences at Columbia University and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute) suggests that the best response would be to stop mining coal, because it is “the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on the planet.”
Hansen sees no future in emissions trading schemes and offsets (such as planting trees).
In his book, Storms Of My Grandchildren (2010) he says, “the public must be firm and unwavering in demanding no offsets, because this sort of monkey business is exactly the sort of thing that politicians love and would like to keep.”
He says “fossil fuels are cheapest because we don’t take into account their true cost to society” including the effects of air and water pollution borne by human health”. The solution, according to Hansen is to increase the cost of fossil fuel energy by including the cost to society in the price.
No mining could be founding principal of new agreement
Australian climate scientist Tim Flannery, also advocates stopping coal mining when he says, “there is so much carbon buried in the world’s coal seams that, should it find its way back to the surface, it would make the planet hostile to life as we know it.”
In a recent interview, New Zealand energy expert, Jeanette Fitzsimons suggests not just stopping the mining and drilling, but making this the founding principle of a new international accord on climate change. It would be much harder to negotiate and enforce than annual emissions, she says and is not optimistic about it being adopted.
It certainly would change the international political perspectives on action for alleviating climate change, because two decades of wrangling over the Kyoto Protocol would be stopped and brushed aside with a whole new paradigm. A stop to mining and oil drilling would remove a huge amount of the greenhouse gas emission problem at source, although there would still remain the challenge of mitigating agricultural emissions.
Moving beyond coal to a clean energy future
While these solutions may seem impractical in global terms, they provide inspiration for environmental activists looking for post-Kyoto solutions to strategies for limiting climate change.
In a report from the Sierra Club of America entitled ‘Moving Beyond Coal’ the six case studies of communities destroyed by coal mining from around the world, detail the environmental degradation and social impacts of coal mining. These include toxic pollution, corruption, intimidation, poverty and the destruction of communities.
The solution put forward by the Sierra Club is a move away from coal to "grasping the opportunity for expansion of renewable energy initiatives including solar and wind power".
The report rejects the myth that the world needs coal and states, “Down one path lies a dangerous future of impoverished people and an imperiled planet. Down the other is a new way forward made possible by harnessing the limitless and cost effective power of the wind and the sun.”
In the report, case studies of activists and communities in Wallerawang (NSW, Australia), Cirebon (Java, Indonesia), Appalachia (West Virginia, USA), Hou Shier Quan Village (Inner Mongolia, China), Northern Limpopo and Mpumalanga Provinces (South Africa), and Konkan Coast and Kutch (Gujurat, India), show that there is a growing global movement to move beyond coal and into a clean energy future.
