In from the Cold: The Climate Conference in Montreal Breathes New Life into the Kyoto Protocol (original) (raw)
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Climate Change as a Political Process : The Rise and Fall of the Kyoto Protocol
2014
This research focuses on climate change as a political process: it describes the Kyoto Protocol, its origins and ratification process in the international climate-diplomatic arena, as well as the climate strategy based on the United Nations' framework convention on climate change, its results and consequences. It views the issue of climate change as a decision-making problem focusing on the relationship between climate science, policy development and politics. This monograph revisits the scientific discussion on the topic and prepares an advanced synthesis and a bigger picture on developing policies for mitigating climate change. Some unpublished and previously unpublished sources like notes, e-mails, transcripts of meeting minutes and diaries are used for the description and analysis of UN Climate meetings and UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP). Parts of this study feature elements of action research: the writer has participated as an active legislator in the topic at hand, as is the case for emissions trading. The study discusses climate change as a so-called wicked problem-i.e. a multi-faceted bundle of problems. To sum up, it can be said that the Protocol has not met the expectations. There are many reasons for this. The climate problem has been assumed to be more onedimensional than it is in reality-a wicked problem-, which has led to excessive simplification. The relationship between science and politics has been problematic in the field of climate science. The public demands more certainty and more precise information than science is able to provide. For the climate scientist, this implies a pressure to act as committed advocators rather than objective scientists. One of the core claims of this research is that preserving the epistemic or cognitivist ideal of science is still necessary in climate science. Otherwise, the error margin of the research risks increasing and even multiplying, when the value-laden preferences accumulate at the various levels of this interdisciplinary field. Researchers should not make political accentuations or risk assessments on behalf of the politician or decision-maker, but rather restrict their research to the production of information as reliable as possible. The study evaluates the main instruments of EU climate policy, such as emissions trading (ETS). It explains why such a genius system in theory has not been able to show its strength and results in practice for the EU. The overlapping legislation can be considered a key reason. Also the unilateral economic burden has proven to be problematic, when solving the global problem of climate change has been attempted by local means. Future climate policy is likely to be more practical and is composed of parallel elements. The special position of carbon dioxide may be challenged and the prevention of pollutants like black carbon will also be placed parallel to it. Reaching a global agreement is more and more unrealistic. Instead of setting emission ceilings the major emitters prefer technological investments and decarbonising the economy. If the EU desires a global climate policy it should approach the others and stop waiting for others to jump onto a Kyoto-type bandwagon. Emissions trading may well be functional as an emissionreduction instrument. It could also work well in the reduction of soot, i.e. black carbon, which is China's most urgent pollution problem.
Climate Policy, 2014
The year 2014 marks an important transition for the Climate Policy journal and, being the 20th formal anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), it is a good year to reflect on wider international progress-or lack of it. The UNFCCC, adopted in 1992, entered into force on 21 March 1994 (as it happens, it is also a decade since Russian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2004 triggered its entry into force). Twenty years on is a good time to reflect on some fundamental questions about the regime. Part of the current difficulties stem from the mismatch between today's geopolitical and economic realities-as well as emission trends-and a regime forged in another era. The collapse of the Copenhagen conference in 2009 demonstrated the limits of the old structure and its assumptions. In practice, having been conceived in the early 1990s, the UNFCCC inevitably reflects a different world; the twin problems are inadequate institutional mechanisms to enable the regime to evolve, and the fact that key Parties, interest groups and individuals do not, in practice, want it to develop. The painstaking remodelling of the global climate change regime has made important strides, but has yet to face up to core issues. The world has changed much faster than the UNFCCC. For example, the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) countries are major economic powers and together with other major emerging economies like Mexico and South Korea account for over a third of global emissions; Asian companies own substantial parts of 'western' industry; the EU is still struggling to emerge from the deepest recession in two decades; powerful sections of US and European industry verge on paranoia about competition from the emerging economies; and China's per capita emissions are now on a par with those of France. The underlying fault lines in climate change are unrecognizable when compared to the situation a quarter of a century ago. Domestic divisions in countries are arguably more important than international ones. The US is split between the more progressive coastal states (east and west) and the more conservative-and often coal-producing-interior. Europe is split between its traditional northwest leading countries and eastern Europe, with southern Europe-the most vulnerable front-line victims of climate change-marginalized by their economic woes. In Australia, struck by unprecedented weather events, the new government promises to deliver its Kyoto II targets while dismantling domestic climate legislation in favour of commodity-based industries. California and Guandong (and other regional schemes in China) are at the cutting edge of establishing effective carbon pricing, while the EU struggles to restore even basic credibility to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). In December 2013 I was fortunate to attend a workshop near Delhi, convened by the Centre for Policy Research, on 'Building the Hinge'-the link between domestic action and the international system. Most of the workshop featured animated discussions on the lessons, learnings, and developments in different parts of the world-the progress, the setbacks, and the genuine differences that determine what is possible and appropriate under different circumstances. Unquestionably, the stage of economic development is an important factor, but only one amongst many, in the creative search for 'win-win' possibilities, and politics as the 'art of the possible'. But, when the workshop turned to the session specifically on the UNFCCC, it was as though the connection was lost. Discussion seemed to move into a different world, from another era.
From Kyoto to Paris and Beyond: The Emerging Politics of Climate Change
India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2021
Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as the most disruptive socio-political issue in the last few decades. The Kyoto Protocol’s failure to curb the rising greenhouse gases emissions pushed the UNFCCC-led negotiations towards a more flexible, non-binding agreement at the Paris COP21 meeting in 2015. The Paris Agreement’s hybrid approach to climate change governance, where flexible measures like the nationally determined commitments are balanced against the ambition of limiting the global temperature within the two-degree range, ensured the emergence of an increasingly complex and multi-stakeholder climate change regime. The article outlines the roadmap of the transition from the top-down approach of Kyoto Protocol to the legally non-binding, bottom-up approaches adopted for the post-Paris phase. The article outlines the post-Paris developments in international climate politics, which hold long-term geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. The article focuses on the fundamental ...
The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference: A Post-Mortem
American Journal of International Law, 2010
This short piece analyzes the background and content of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change, which was agreed to last December by leaders of roughly 25 countries, including all of the world's major economies. Although the Copenhagen Accord is a political rather than a legal instrument and has been criticized by some as inadequate or worse, it represents a potentially significant breakthrough. On one side, developed countries agreed to put significant new funds on the table for climate change mitigation and adaptation, both for the short and medium terms, and committed to implement national economy-wide emissions targets for the post -2012 period, which will be internationally listed. On the other side, developing countries agreed for the first time to reflect their national mitigation actions in an international instrument and to subject their actions to some form of international review. The failure of the conference as a whole to adopt the Accord leaves its future uncertain. But if the participating states actually carry through on what they negotiated in Copenhagen, the bottom up architecture of the Accord could help encourage and reinforce national actions. In any event, as the most that world leaders could accept through direct negotiations under an intense international spotlight, the Copenhagen Accord may well represent the high-water mark of the climate change regime for some time to come.