After Kyoto: a climate treaty with no teeth?

Will the destabilization of the global climate be stopped? International negotiators took a small but potentially important step toward that goal at the Kyoto climate convention last December. Some 10,000 government officials, non-governmental representatives, and media converged on this ancient city's space-age conference hall for the most heavily attended and high profile climate talks ever held. After 10 days of chaotic, complex, and contentious negotiations - culminating in two consecutive overnight sessions - more than 160 countries formally adopted a Kyoto Protocol, legally committing industrial countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases early in the twenty-first century.

The centerpiece of the Kyoto pact is an agreement by all "Annex I" countries - OECD and former eastern bloc nations - to collectively cut their output of climate-altering gases by 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels between the years 2008 and 2012. The main focus of the Kyoto deliberations, the final "target and timetable" was the outcome of a furious 48-hour negotiating session that followed U.S. Vice President Gore's announcement that his government would alter its hardline negotiating position - which had until then slowed the talks to a crawl. The European Union, which had called for a 15 percent cut, is to achieve an 8 percent emissions reduction during this period; the United States, which had wanted only a return to 1990 levels, agreed to a 7 percent cut; and host nation Japan, whose original proposal of an overall 5 percent reduction provided the basis for the final compromise, agreed to a 6 percent cut. Other nations argued for and received more lenient restrictions: New Zealand is permitted to allow its emissions to hold steady at 1990 levels, while Australia is granted an increase of 8 percent. And as current emissions from the industrialized countries are already 4.5 percent below 1990 levels, the Kyoto target actually represents a mere 0.7 percent decrease from today's output.

The required gains are weakened by various concessions and compromises, with which the final text is riddled. After protracted debate, negotiators decided that the Kyoto target would cover six greenhouse gases, but with different timetables. The three most important gases today - carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide - will be measured from the main, 1990 baseline. But three newer, more potent and long-lived gases - hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride - will be treated separately. Because uses of the latter three have grown quickly during the 1990s, countries increasingly relying on them - especially Japan and the United States - succeeded in shifting the baseline for calculating these emissions from 1990 to 1995, which will make the overall target less demanding.

The Kyoto goals are diluted as well by the exclusion and incomplete treatment of certain "sources" and "sinks" of greenhouse gases. Emissions from ships and planes traveling between countries - among the fastest-growing sources - were exempted entirely, thanks to the lobbying of the international aviation lobby and national defense agencies. Vague language on measuring carbon sinks - pushed through by the United States, Canada, and Australia - could enable countries to harvest standing forest without accounting for the resulting emissions, but later receive credit for the carbon subsequently stored by tree plantations or regrowth during the 2008-2012 period.

Another dangerous loophole in the protocol is the prospect of "hot air" emissions trading between industrial countries and nations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Generally agreed to in the text was the concept of a trading system under which countries bound by targets could buy or sell emissions "credits" to remain within their limits. The emissions of Russia and other former eastern bloc nations arc more than 30 percent below 1990 levels now, not because they have cleaned up their industries but because many of their obsolescent plants have shut down. As a result, they can expect to be well below their respective targets in 2008. This would give them a large supply of credits that, without controls on the trading system, could be sold en masse to countries seeking to dodge their responsibilities at home. The United States, Australia, and Canada all have expressed a strong interest in trading with Russia as a means of getting credit for reductions they won't actually have to achieve. That would violate the agreement's principle that "trading is to be supplemental to domestic actions."

A protest that emissions trading could simply shift reductions overseas was led by representatives of China, India, and other developing countries who feared the plan would become "a new animal . . . running wild" if established before rules had yet been put in place. These concerns were stoked by a recognition that the leading proponents of trading - the United States, Australia, and Canada - have also been the most deficient in dealing with the climate problem at home. The latter nations, however, remained adamant that their acceptance of emissions targets was contingent on the availability of trading. Following three and a half hours of debate that nearly scuttled the talks on the final night, a compromise was reached whereby the rules for monitoring and verifying trading would be put in place - before any actual trades take place - at the next conference of the parties to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina this November.

Also deferred until Buenos Aires was a topic not originally meant to be discussed in Kyoto but undiplomatically forced onto the agenda by a U.S. Senate that had been heavily influenced by fossil fuel industry lobbying and was awkwardly unaware of the international politics of climate change: the future commitments of developing countries. Ironically, prior to Kyoto the U.S. Administration had made progress in discussing with several key developing countries the possibility, of their voluntarily taking on their own, tailor-made goals for slowing down and eventually cutting emissions. But the Senate's sudden resolution of July 1997, demanding binding commitments from these nations, nearly accomplished exactly what its industry authors had hoped - a derailment of the protocol talks.

Preoccupied with negotiating numbers with Europe and Japan for most of the talks, the U.S. found its binding-commitment proposal furiously attacked by China, India, and a phalanx of developing countries in the early hours of the meeting's final morning. Efforts to provide more conciliatory language proved fruitless, and after several hours of debate the conference chair deleted the U.S. proposal from the text - but noted that such discussions could be continued in Buenos Aires. The removal of this article sent shock waves to Washington, where several members of the U.S. Congress pronounced the protocol "dead on arrival," and Administration officials asserted they would ensure "meaningful developing country participation" before sending the protocol for ratification - the deadline for which is March 1999.

The U.S. decision to override Congressional opposition and remain at the table in Kyoto graphically illustrated the presence of public opinion in pressuring governments to reach a legitimate agreement. Many of the foot-dragging countries, in fact, arrived at the meeting to realize their positions were far weaker than the steps supported by their public. A New York Times poll released shortly before Kyoto suggested, for example, that the controversial U.S. positions on emissions trading and developing country participation were not particularly popular with U.S. citizenry. Only 15 percent of those polled favored the trading concept, while 65 percent favored U.S. action (on such concrete domestic steps as energy-efficiency standards and tax incentives for clean energy) regardless of what other countries did. Polls conducted in Australia and Canada - other chronic laggards at international climate talks - came up with similar findings.

Another key to the Kyoto deal was the creation of a Clean Development Mechanism: a fund to help provide developing nations with the money and technologies they will need to address climate change. Under this voluntary program - now being tested out in pilot "joint implementation" projects - companies in industrial countries can, beginning in the year 2000, receive emissions credits for investing in developing country climate change projects. But the specifics of the fund - including the means of assuring that the reductions are additional to what would have otherwise occurred - have yet to be spelled out.

Perhaps the most troubling gap in the protocol is that, though legally-binding, it remains toothless. Governments were unable to agree on penalties for countries that fail to comply with its provisions, and must now do so under a later amendment to the protocol - which will have to be ratified separately. Nor is there yet any regular procedure for swiftly reviewing progress and strengthening the protocol as will likely be needed in the coming years. Such a procedure proved essential to turning the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances - which was similarly weak when first adopted - into an effective environmental agreement.

The weaknesses - and toothlessness - of the climate treaty as it now stands reflect a dangerous rift between the science of climate change and the public grasp of it so far. A 5 percent emissions cut among industrial countries barely begins to point us toward the 60-80 percent global reduction - the "structural decarbonization" of the economy, as IPCC chairman Rob Watson put it - that will be needed in the next century to stem serious disruptions. The key to making the Kyoto pact effective will be to give it the ability to evolve much more quickly than it has to date, in order to better keep up with the rapid, accelerating, and unpredictable advances that characterize the science and technology - and politics - of this issue.

Earlier this century, a Japanese philosopher was known to meditate on the dilemmas of his time by strolling alongside a stream between two of Kyoto's famed temples - a route now known as the "Philosopher's Walk." A similar path is now needed to lead us from Kyoto to climate stability over the next century. Like all long walks, it begins with basic steps, and for the treaty to work at least the following three will be essential:

Pin Down the Targets. To ensure that the Protocol encourages the protection and expansion of forest area, the accounting of carbon sinks must exclude the regrowth of harvested forest areas. To focus the attention of governments on domestic actions, ceilings (e.g. 25%) must be set for the percentage of emissions reductions that can be achieved through trading.

Give the Treaty Teeth. So countries will have an incentive to actually meet their goals, specific penalties and dispute-resolution procedures must be set for non-compliers. To improve the treaty's tracking of new scientific and technological developments, a process for reviewing the protocol's commitments needs to be established so that more ambitious goals can be considered promptly following the release of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report in 2000.

Fairly Phase in New Developing Country Commitments. For developing countries to leapfrog the industrial world in the decarbonizing effort, the Clean Development Mechanism will need to quickly become more than a concept on paper and begin to put on the ground pilot projects that make real reductions. And for these nations to take on more specific commitments under the protocol - possibly through a "Buenos Aires mandate" launching such talks - industrial countries must make a good faith effort to implement the protocol at home. That can be accomplished by removing fossil fuel subsidies; installing carbon and gasoline taxes; setting new energy efficiency standards; enacting covenants with industry; supporting cogeneration and renewable energy; increasing forest area; and reining in not only carbon dioxide but other significant greenhouse gases. Such policies are already proving their potential to deflect emissions downward.

If we can begin this walk in earnest, and if public consciousness and concern can be sustained and steadily ratcheted up to pick up our pace in the months and years ahead, the Kyoto conference may one day be regarded as having been a turning point in the decade-long battle against climate change.