Kyoto Accord May Not Die (or Matter)

[pmbryant]

From the NY Times: Dec 4 2003

Into Thin Air: Kyoto Accord May Not Die (or Matter)
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Since it was negotiated in Japan in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty that would require countries to curb emissions linked to global warming, has lingered in an indeterminate state, between enactment and outright rejection.

On Tuesday its prospects were dealt what may have been a fatal blow when a top Russian official said his country would not ratify it. But some experts on climate and diplomacy say that the fate of the Kyoto treaty itself is rapidly becoming less important than the longer-term processes it set in motion.

Even without approval by the United States and Russia — first and fourth on lists of the world's largest emitters of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases — the treaty has already changed the world in small but significant ways that will be hard to reverse, these experts say.

From Europe to Japan and the United States, just the prospect of the treaty has resulted in legislation and new government and industry policies curbing emissions.

(snip)

Regardless of which way Russia steps, the process of moving the world toward limiting releases of the gases after more than a century of relentless increases has clearly begun, said David B. Sandalow, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration who worked on the treaty.

"The standard of success isn't whether the first treaty out of the box sails through," he said. "The standard is whether this puts the world on a path to solving a long-term problem. Other multilateral regimes dealing with huge complex problems, like the World Trade Organization, have taken 45 or 50 years to get established."

(snip)

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/international/europe/04CLIM.html

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. I love the last sentence of that article..it is true

Business will always cry wolf and will never change their behavior unless forced or threatened to. Even right now in America people can claim they are doing things voluntarily but that is ONLY due to the threat of losing power and a backlash.

They will always say it costs too much and can't be accomplished in the time frame and it will always occur in less time than they said and much lower costs than they screamed about. We already went through this in the 70's. Unfortunately, the American public has NO LEGISLATIVE MEMORY!