After years of global negotiations and more than a week of round-the-clock meetings in Kyoto, Japan, representatives agreed to a sketch of a climate treaty that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol. The draft assigned different countries varying responsibilities. Most rich, industrialized nations were supposed to cut their emissions by at least 5 percent by 2012, relative to their 1990 levels.
Many of the problems plaguing this month’s Copenhagen climate meeting, itself an outgrowth of the process that brought us Kyoto, were already in play. Relatively poor countries like China wanted to continue building their carbon-intensive manufacturing industries, and were thus reluctant to commit to emissions reductions. Developed countries’ negotiators were bent on protecting their own established industries, so would only agree to small cuts.
To make the deal work, each developed country got its own specific target, while developing countries signed a general pledge to cut pollution. Further provisions were added to make the deal palatable to other interest groups. The United States insisted on an emissions-trading scheme, and the Clean Development Mechanism was introduced to stimulate carbon-light economic activities in poor countries.
No one claims that the compromise treaty was perfect. Rich countries could buy their way out of emissions cuts, and poor countries didn’t have to do much of anything at all, even as their contributions to global warming continued to grow. The solution didn’t match the scale of the problem.
Even with the deal’s modest goals, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it, kneecapping what was supposed to have been a global framework. Perhaps with American participation, the Kyoto mechanisms would have worked well in containing the world’s emissions; perhaps they wouldn’t have. The way things went down, we’ll never know.
And that’s too bad, because Kyoto and other global environmental treaties express one of humanity’s strangest and arguably finest qualities: long-term thinking extended beyond narrow national self-interest.
“Rarely, if ever, has humanity made an attempt like this one: to exercise deliberate, collective foresight on a risk whose full impact is unclear and will not be felt for decades,” wrote William Stevens in a 1997 New York Times report to mark the beginning of the Kyoto meeting.
Psychologically, climate change is a tough sell. The dominant metric for measuring the problem is the amount of carbon dioxide, an invisible molecule that is generally good, not bad, for life. While the case for global warming is not dependent just on complex climate models, we are reliant on very long-term projections of the energy and Earth systems to understand how much the big picture problem might affect our small-scale lives.
The global scale, the diffuse bases of responsibility, and the long timescales on which the problem will manifest make it tailor-made for humanity to ignore. Behavioral psychologist Dan Ariel of Duke University put the conundrum like this: “If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming.”
Then, as now, the costs of taking action on climate change are as uncertain as the costs of doing nothing.
It just doesn’t seem like there are any good options, so not much at all happens. Right now, the world is not on a path to make the radical cuts to emissions that would be required to keep CO2 concentrations at levels that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says are necessary to avert dangerous derangement of the atmosphere. Until the financial crisis, the world’s emissions had outstripped even the worst IPCC scenarios.
And yet, despite it all, the world’s diplomats are now plugging away in Copenhagen, hoping to use the combined power of Earth science and political acumen to bring the world’s nations together with the common purpose of keeping the climate within the range that humanity has known — and depended on — over the last 100,000 years.
Many of the problems plaguing this month’s Copenhagen climate meeting, itself an outgrowth of the process that brought us Kyoto, were already in play. Relatively poor countries like China wanted to continue building their carbon-intensive manufacturing industries, and were thus reluctant to commit to emissions reductions. Developed countries’ negotiators were bent on protecting their own established industries, so would only agree to small cuts.
To make the deal work, each developed country got its own specific target, while developing countries signed a general pledge to cut pollution. Further provisions were added to make the deal palatable to other interest groups. The United States insisted on an emissions-trading scheme, and the Clean Development Mechanism was introduced to stimulate carbon-light economic activities in poor countries.
No one claims that the compromise treaty was perfect. Rich countries could buy their way out of emissions cuts, and poor countries didn’t have to do much of anything at all, even as their contributions to global warming continued to grow. The solution didn’t match the scale of the problem.
Even with the deal’s modest goals, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it, kneecapping what was supposed to have been a global framework. Perhaps with American participation, the Kyoto mechanisms would have worked well in containing the world’s emissions; perhaps they wouldn’t have. The way things went down, we’ll never know.
And that’s too bad, because Kyoto and other global environmental treaties express one of humanity’s strangest and arguably finest qualities: long-term thinking extended beyond narrow national self-interest.
“Rarely, if ever, has humanity made an attempt like this one: to exercise deliberate, collective foresight on a risk whose full impact is unclear and will not be felt for decades,” wrote William Stevens in a 1997 New York Times report to mark the beginning of the Kyoto meeting.
Psychologically, climate change is a tough sell. The dominant metric for measuring the problem is the amount of carbon dioxide, an invisible molecule that is generally good, not bad, for life. While the case for global warming is not dependent just on complex climate models, we are reliant on very long-term projections of the energy and Earth systems to understand how much the big picture problem might affect our small-scale lives.
The global scale, the diffuse bases of responsibility, and the long timescales on which the problem will manifest make it tailor-made for humanity to ignore. Behavioral psychologist Dan Ariel of Duke University put the conundrum like this: “If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming.”
Then, as now, the costs of taking action on climate change are as uncertain as the costs of doing nothing.
It just doesn’t seem like there are any good options, so not much at all happens. Right now, the world is not on a path to make the radical cuts to emissions that would be required to keep CO2 concentrations at levels that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says are necessary to avert dangerous derangement of the atmosphere. Until the financial crisis, the world’s emissions had outstripped even the worst IPCC scenarios.
And yet, despite it all, the world’s diplomats are now plugging away in Copenhagen, hoping to use the combined power of Earth science and political acumen to bring the world’s nations together with the common purpose of keeping the climate within the range that humanity has known — and depended on — over the last 100,000 years.
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