Group items tagged

he base year, and 2010.

an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia.

European Union have agreed to share out their entitlement

atification of the treaty in national legislatures.

“flexibility mechanisms”

meet some targets by encouraging the natural environment to soak up more CO2 rather than by cutting emissions.

carbon sinks”

qualify for carbon credits by planting forests that soaked up CO2.

It was finally agreed that countries will be able to claim some carbon credits for planting forests in developing countries. And they will also be able to allow countries to claim credit for activities such as soil conservation, which will allow more carbon to be soaked up in soils.

carbon trading

But the fear is that some countries may find themselves with spare credits to sell just because their economies have slowed down, which would undermine the whole purpose of the protocol.

hot air”. Japan, Canada and perhaps others would like to buy up Russia’s spare permits.

But sceptics still see hot-air trading as a Trojan Horse for undermining the protocol.

lean Development Mechanism. This allows industrialised countries to claim credit for various activities in developing countries. It could become a major engine for getting clean energy technologies into poorer countries, so heading them off the dirty path to industrialisation that the rich nations took.

And the rules are biased towards small energy projects – solar cell systems, for exampl

he protocol allows industrialised countries to plant “carbon sink” forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.

The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets

hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks.

at perhaps 1.5 per cen

Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming? They will hardly scratch the surface. T

say it will buy us 10 years at most

. A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today’s levels.

Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.

The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century’s time, not today.

CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it’s there it is many times more potent.

This “hundred-year rule” has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.

the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne.

Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.

Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels – the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn’t affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.