What Happens when the Kyoto Protocol Expires?
This basically means that a company that meets or exceeds its pollution-reduction goals can sell “carbon credits” to another company that isn’t meeting its goals. Another big issue is the failure of the Kyoto Protocol to fully address issues of adaptation for developing countries. Kyoto focused mostly on mitigation of current pollution levels, as opposed to changes that would bring the majority of the world into a more Earth-friendly economic stance. The idea is to bring emissions down on average by turning “green” practices into moneymakers. With the meteoric rise of international trade, creating a worldwide carbon market could be an effective way to make reducing emissions a financial player on a global scale.
Just like any agreement of this magnitude, the chances of success hinge on a lot of different factors. That didn’t happen to anyone’s satisfaction. In 2006, thousands of delegates met in Kenya at the United Nations climate talk, where the hope was that they would set out a framework for achieving a post-Kyoto agreement. We can look to current attempts to replace the Kyoto Protocol to understand how difficult it is to maneuver the world into any agreement at all. First, there’s the endless red tape of global negotiations. A year later, the world’s nations sent representatives to Bali, where success was declared when delegates negotiated their way to an agreement to start negotiating at a future date.
For wealthy countries, adaptation is a viable (if expensive) move. But for poorer countries like South Africa or even China, a shift in production methods may not be realistic. This fund is used for adaptation efforts in poor countries. In the Kyoto Protocol, a fund was set up whereby a small percentage of the money spent by a developed country on a clean-energy project in a developing country goes into an adaptation fund.
Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are just a few greenhouse gases. They cause heat to be trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere much the way a glass ceiling traps heat inside a greenhouse. The result is rising temperatures that could alter weather systems and ocean levels around the globe. With many areas of the world facing record winter lows in 2009, and gas distribution problems in Eastern Europe leaving some of those people without heat, an increase in temperature may not seem like such a bad thing.
And the new agreement will have to make it economically beneficial for them. The timing of that new agreement is crucial. Some think 2010 is more likely. With China and India participating, along with a U.S. When negotiations began in Thailand in March 2008, delegates agreed to reach a new treaty by the end of 2009. It’s unclear at this point whether that’s a realistic time frame. Democrat-controlled Congress and presidential branch, it becomes far more likely that the United States will ratify a new agreement. At the 2007 summit in Washington, D.C., China, India and Brazil did agree to make commitments under a post-Kyoto treaty.
In the meantime, the United States was simultaneously lobbying to have emissions caps removed from the post-Kyoto negotiations and hosting its own climate-change summit that produced a heartfelt and completely nonbinding declaration that the G-8 countries along with China, India and Brazil will set emissions-reduction goals in the future. One big issue is the refusal of the United States to ratify the agreement. Those negotiations reveal some other prime reasons why Kyoto has been unsuccessful so far. But the problem has as much to do with the relationship between the United States and its trade partners as with the failure of the world’s biggest polluter to be involved at all. Finally, in 2008, just three years after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, negotiations began in Thailand to replace it.
