The Green Road to Copenhagen
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- alisterpaine
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Later this year Copenhagen will host the final meeting on international climate policy at the government level before declaring the Copenhagen Protocol—a follow up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
The summit will focus on what the “global community” can do to reduce carbon emissions—but the real agenda is to have the United States sign on, and ratify, the Protocol which they refused to do in 1997. The United States had determined that the proposed restrictions were too costly and therefore did not ratify the Protocol which they had been so active in formulating.
Policy makers, including President Bush, were fearful that many large industrial companies would face massive financial penalties and that the Protocol would cause an increase in taxes while limiting industrial growth. The cost of ratifying the Protocol was simply not worth the short term gains.
If the Copenhagen Protocol is just a new name on the same “cap and trade” product that resulted from the Kyoto Protocol then we’ll find many nations regulating a handful of industrialized nations (Kyoto was ratified by 141 nations but only limited emissions from 35 industrialized countries). Developing countries like China and India were excluded from the stringent regulations proposed by Kyoto to give them “time to catch up” with the rest of the industrialized world.
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.alisterpaine.com/copenhagen.html
The summit will focus on what the “global community” can do to reduce carbon emissions—but the real agenda is to have the United States sign on, and ratify, the Protocol which they refused to do in 1997. The United States had determined that the proposed restrictions were too costly and therefore did not ratify the Protocol which they had been so active in formulating.
Policy makers, including President Bush, were fearful that many large industrial companies would face massive financial penalties and that the Protocol would cause an increase in taxes while limiting industrial growth. The cost of ratifying the Protocol was simply not worth the short term gains.
If the Copenhagen Protocol is just a new name on the same “cap and trade” product that resulted from the Kyoto Protocol then we’ll find many nations regulating a handful of industrialized nations (Kyoto was ratified by 141 nations but only limited emissions from 35 industrialized countries). Developing countries like China and India were excluded from the stringent regulations proposed by Kyoto to give them “time to catch up” with the rest of the industrialized world.
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.alisterpaine.com/copenhagen.html
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- groups:
- Green, Max and Jason: Still Up, Copenhagen
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- tags:
- Environment, Business, Energy, Copenhagen, 4 more
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Journal
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The U.S. has wastefully spent money trying to rebound from this recession mostly trying to fish private companies from the deep-end of in-the-red. Hopefully the Copenhagen Protocols will spur an investment in environmentally friendly business.
- 2 years ago
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