Yet another attempt to ridicule the Kyoto Protocol, and minimise its importance!
In fact, the Kyoto Protocol has been, and continues to be, quite a success.
Leaders of the 27 EU countries agreed in March 2007 to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2020. They also pledged to increase the total energy from renewable sources to 12.5% by 2010, and then to 20% by 2020.
The European Commission says it's on track to meet a key renewable energy objective and that 19% of the gross domestic electricity generated in the European Union's (EU) 27 member states will come from renewable sources by 2010 at current rates of progress, falling just short of the target of 21% set in 2001.
A record 7,500 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity was built in Europe in 2006. Wind energy now supplies 3.3% of the EU's total gross electricity consumption. It is estimated that the wind power capacity will increase from today's 50,000 MW, producing 100THW of energy, to 180 GW, producing 500 TWH of electricity by 2020. Wind power could, some studies say, supply 16% of the EU's total electricity consumption by 2020. Nine countries are on track to meet their national renewable electricity targets of 21% for 2010: Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxemburg, Spain, Sweden and The Netherlands.
Germany has already overshot the EU target and 14 per cent of its gross electricity consumption is expected to come from renewable energy by the end of 2007. In 2000 the share was 6.3%.

Kyoto targets will be reviewed, with new national plans later this year. meanwhile, Kyoto gives the world, including the developing countries, the lead on real action to address global warming.
After all, the "developed" world put those gases up there. Kyoto provides an ethical way to teach and guide those "developing" countries, by example.

Australia and the US are the world's pariahs in this challenge of global warming. Christina Macpherson www.antinuclearaustralia.com

Why denigrate the only multilateral agreement that commits anyone to reduce emissions, only to suggest swords-to-ploughshares. Wasn't the UN supposed to achieve that earlier?

You'd need 100% consensus on diverting defence funds before any action happens at all. Is *anything* less likely to succeed than asking the USA, China, India, Russia, Pakistan and Indonesia to divert military spending elsewhere?

The Stern Report explains clearly that modest emissions cuts are cheap: equivalent over two decades to postponing the doubling of the size of a typical economy by six weeks. The delay might be longer in filthy, rapidly-growing China, but the environmental benefit correspondingly greater. Growing economies will have no trouble switching from dirty to clean technologies to "fuel" their growth if their emissions are capped.

A cap like that negotiated by Iceland and Australia, or even one indexed to economic growth, would have been appropriate for developing countries at Kyoto. Any successor agreement within the UNFCCC should impose such a cap.

Neither Hamilton nor Monbiot is wrong about offsets. Emissions *permit* trading, where total emissions are capped, is effective except where polluters get a free ride from "grandfathering". Offsets bought in countries which have not committed to a cap are less valuable, but nor are they worthless if the emission reductions are genuine and immediate.

The CDM under Kyoto requires very strict accounting for the benefits achieved, so emissions reductions bought with it are genuine. The best thing about CDM is that it prepares participating countries to make a commitment.

Offsets bought under other schemes (such as forestry) may or may not be devious: some operators maintain new plantations well and account properly for sequestered carbon, while others "buy" growth that might have happened in any case. But tree-planting is a slow and therefore ineffective subsitute for direct cuts. A tonne of brown coal burned today produces two tonnes of CO2 a newly-planted tree will take thirty years to extract from the atmosphere. Better to leave the coal in the ground.

A binding multilateral emissions cap is essential. Only a successor agreement to Kyoto will provide it.

There are two major problems in the world that are being ignored,(because they are politically incorrect), and make all current efforts under protocols such as Kyoto futile.

The first is that the population of the third world will double over the next 25 years.

The second is that we are going to run out of oil (at least of cheap oil).

Projections of carbon emissions assume a continuing increase in oil consumption, when the oil just won't be available.

The unpalatable conclusions are:

1. The third world will never be developed.

2. There will be a general drop in the standard of living everywhere, particularly in the first world. This will leave little motivation for continuing aid to the third world.

3. The third world country of hope, China, is only in that position because of its success in controlling its population through its one child policy.

4. Third world countries who continue to allow their population to increase will have to choke on the increase, as first world countries, particularly Australia, will not permit any but a selected few migrants from the third world. By 2020 our navy could well be using boats carrying illegal migrants coming from Asia for target practice.

5. Kyoto was a joke, or a sweetheart deal between the EU and the third world, whichever you prefer. It needs to be replaced by something universal and stringent, which includes provision for population control.

If these problems are not addressed they will be solved by natural means, which usually include the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

When you have a world shortage of an essential resource, you don't have rationing, you have a little war to see who will get the resource, and who will get nothing. That is why suggestions that aid could be funded out of foregone military expenditure are ridiculous.

plerdsus,

You drastically underestimate people's creativity and adaptibility by putting the population cart before the development horse.

Population growth in developed countries (including the former Second World) has slowed not by population control policy, but by people making informed personal choices in an economic context. That supposedly liberal governments try to *reverse* the trend shows a selective deafness to market signals. Population can stabilise elsewhere in the world in the same way. If well-informed people with the means to control their reproduction choose to have children, they have their reasons.

China is the *only* country with a successful top-down population control policy, achieved mostly by force. Its booming economy has also been achieved top-down by opening all paths for investment (state, private, foreign and domestic) to exploit its workers and resources with near-complete disregard for quality of life and the environment.

There is no evidence that Chinese economic growth is a consequence of its population control.

Calling China a "country of hope" is disturbing -- it's a scary place right now. My hopes for that country are only that its leadership is not entirely insane, bolstered by convincing signs of a commitment to better environmental outcomes, quality standards and consumer protection, but undermined by disregard for personal freedoms of the non-property kind and one of the world's most arbitrary legal systems.

We are never going to run out of oil, because as it becomes more scarce its price will soar. If it were not for destructive externalities like atmospheric pollution, global warming, urban sprawl and soil depletion, our use of liquid fossil fuel would be unproblematic. Of course we use more now than ever before, it is a resource at the peak of its production! We have no choice but to use less, starting Very Soon. Big deal.

Development may be slowed, but cannot be halted, by changes in the cost of readily harnessable energy. The techniques to which we switch -- most importantly in the developing countries -- as oil becomes more expensive will on average be less wasteful and less destructive.

xoddam,

You are right in saying that the world will never run out of oil. The significant thing is that we will run out of cheap oil, which I mentioned, and you appear to agree on this point.

Back in 1948, when it had been devastated by damage in ww2, Japan instituted a draconian program of population control, which was the foundation of its economic recovery. I know of no poor country that has managed to break out of the poverty trap since ww2 which did so with a population increasing at the rate we are currently seeing in the third world. If you know of one, please tell me.

The only way we know how to run an economy is with continuous growth. The only recent example of an extended period of zero or negative growth was the Great Depression, and it was largely responsible for the second world war, as well as not being much of a fun time to live in.

The need to cut oil consumption will almost certainly end the current period of long-term economic growth. Even though a two hundred year period of growth, punctuated by occasional periods of depression, is unusual in history, many people have come to believe they are entitled to it and its absence will cause much discontent.

The reason I call China a country of hope is that a Confucianist government seems to be only one capable of enforcing population control. Think where we and the world would be if there were 200 million more Chinese, which is what we could easily have had without the one-child policy.

Basing policy on the hope that innovation and technology will deliver a currently unseen bonanza is not realistic. The electric car, for example has been available for 100 years, apart from the continuing failure to develop a suitable battery. I am sure you would join with me in hoping for the development of a new, pollution-free source of energy (nuclear fusion seems the most promising candidate), but until it can be made to work we cannot base policy on its availability.

Kyoto is a very important first step. But even first steps need to be taken correctly. For all it's bennefits, Kyoto has some serious flaws, notably an over reliance on carbon trading. Emmissions trading has worked in the past, notably in reducing the pollution from surfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the US and Europe to deal with the acid rain problem in the 1990s. But there are serious problems with it too.

However, the point the author does not make clear is that Kyoto was only ever intended as a first step. We need to keep pressure on governments to make meaning contributions in further discussions, as opposed to "aspirational" APEC like talk fests.

There's not much point talking about a stronger 'post-Kyoto' regime, unless our political leaders can make the small sacrifices demanded by the initial treaty.

As the previous poster states. Kyoto was to be a first step. Bush and Howard seem unwilling to take that step.

Simply put capitalism and environmentalism do not go together... how are companies meant to protect their bottom line? Third world countries won't get proper support until the capitalist nations are ready to exploit their workforce as they have done for many years now, China happens to be that country for now and as soon as they form unions wanting better pay they'll move onto possibly the african nations. Why don't we move to socialism now because when we run out of third world countries to exploit capitalism will expire anyway.

Plerdsus, I don't hope for a "bonanza" of future innovation.

Innovation *already* delivered technologies which have been sidelined throughout the 20th century (by industry and government alike) to maximise the return on oil assets. These range from fuel crops and suburban electric tram networks to hydrogen fuel cells and algaculture. Batteries included. All will compete again as oil prices escalate.

If oil-displacing technology had developed sooner, it would have reduced oil-industry returns. Once the oil production peak is acknowledged, oil investors will no longer want to suppress efficiencies and alternatives. Indeed they may become the biggest investors.

Crop-based biofuels, as a ready-made alternative, are already large in the public consciousness, but their indirect costs are high enough that they can never supply all our mobile energy demands.

It is likely that the fuel crop revolution will have a major effect on the population of many developing countries, both by pouring money into rural economies and by raising the price of basic foodstuffs. I only hope (with little confidence) that the resulting destruction will be contained as the poorest (those isolated from the windfall) starve, whilst forests are cleared and soils depleted.

Japan was developed and industrial prior to WWII and it recovered not thanks to population control but just like Germany did: generous subsidies from the occupier. Poor countries can grow rich whilst maintaining high population growth (eg. Taiwan in the 1960s, Malaysia and Vietnam more recently). Truly rapid growth persists mainly in countries that lack either education or contraception.

There will be no sudden end of cheap oil, unless it already happened and I blinked. In 1989 it was estimated that algaculture could produce biodiesel at twice the prevailing cost of diesel. Diesel has doubled in real price since then. Miraculous new energy sources are not required; we just have to get used to paying more (not much more) for ones we neglected before as uneconomical.

"Oil shocks" have happened before, and more will come, but they will gradually have less relevance. Foot-dragging fossil-fuel-reliant dinosaurs will suffer worse than early adopters and suppliers of the alternatives.

GBH,

Capitalism as-we-know-it-today is clearly incompatible with environmentalism. But that, after Stern, is merely a "market failure". Perhaps you haven't heard of Natural Capitalism:

http://www.natcap.org/
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/03/hawken.html

Natural Capitalism accounts realistically for services provided outside the money economy. It is likely to succeed whatever mess is left behind after Peak Oil and global warming strike hard. Any genuine small-l liberal leadership should strive to enable the markets that would let Natural Capitalism flourish, ASAP.

Capitalism is such a broad concept that it covers equally well the merchants of 17th-century Venice, the laissez-faire industrialisation of the 19th-century USA and the liberal mixed protectionist economy Australia maintained from Federation to the 1970s, as well as America's "IP"-centred "new economy" and the dig-it-up-here-but-make-it-in-China mechanism we prosper by today. Once an economist grasps the all-embracing meaning of the word "capital", all economies become some form of "capitalism" by definition.

Though I love the idea of valuing all resources and eliminating waste, and I acknowledge and enjoy the sheer power of market mechanisms to seek real efficiencies (when price signals properly indicate them), it eats my conscience that markets will always inherently generate winning and losing players. There's no fairness and no equality to be had even in the most well-regulated market. The welfare state and old-style socialism are grossly inefficient attempts to redress the inevitable inequity generated in a market economy.

But we must remember that a really free market, the sort that apologists for laissez-faire capitalism love, has never existed. Always the big market players have exerted control over small ones, consumers and workers, by force and by misinformation, directly and through the agency of government.

So while I push the ideas of Natural Capitalism against the follies of today's make-it-anywhere-ship-it-anywhere mercantilism, I'll oppose to markets as soon as a bloodless push beyond the entrenched power of the manipulators to a more efficient, equally productive bottom-up economy becomes achievable.

Alongside Natural Capitalism, Participatory Economy will grow. Perhaps one day it may succeed markets altogether:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

Kyoto is basically dead in the water.
While ever China and India are classed as developing countries then the
treaty is a joke.
The UK for one will not get near its target as many European countries
are also failing.
In any case you are worrying about the wrong problem.
Read the article on OLO by Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala Uni, search in the authors list
for his article. You will then understand that the IPCC projections
cannot happen because the fuel will not be there to generate the CO2.

Wakey wakey !

Bazz,

The Aleklett article

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5933

is correct in one sense, that the extreme scenario of high fossil fuel consumption in the IPCC's worst-case projection is unlikely for economic reasons. The lower projections remain quite reasonable; his figures are wrong. Greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere have yet to make their full contribution to temperatures (if we stopped all emissions today warming wouldn't stop for years), and industrial emissions will continue indefinitely unless one presumes that oil depletion will result in massive economic collapse. As I've argued above this is very unlikely. It is climate collapse that may eventually kill the economy.

But the IPCC projections are fatally flawed for another reason. They make no account for the largest potential (but uncertain) positive climate feedbacks: polar albedo, accelerated decomposition of tundras and thawing of deep-ocean clathrates. Even a "business as usual" anthropogenic emissions scenario would not be a major climatic catastrophe if none of these occur. The likelihood is that one or more of them *will* occur, making the risk of ongoing industrial emissions staggeringly high.

While China is indeed at its coal production peak, it still has fifty years' reserves and unproven longer-range coal resources. The suppoesd "decline in energy content" of coal mined in the USA doesn't actually indicate that the USA is past its peak -- estimates of US coal resources remain in the *centuries* at present consumption rates. The only way they'll run out faster is if coal is used faster (as it probably will be), which will worsen the climate scenario, not improve it. Resources elsewhere may be rather less than presumed, but we still need to be afraid of the consequences of burning them with abandon.

It is with relief that I note that decent investment will bring several "renewable" electric power sources down in price to be prima facie cheaper than coal, even without an emissions cap. Simple economy will without doubt enable a reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels, including coal. But only multilateral emissions reductions will compel the rapid transition required to prevent climate catastrophe.

Hi again Bazz,

On closer reading of related information (especially David Rutledge's assessment of economic limits to fossil fuel extraction, linked by michael_in_adelaide under Aleklett's piece: http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ ) I'll revise my criticism.

Aleklett's numbers aren't wrong, just excessively optimistic. If his projections of fossil fuel economics are accurate -- and I hope they are -- we *still* risk hitting a major climatic turning point if, for instance, thawing Arctic tundra releases large quantities of methane.

The politically-agreed "safe" level of 450ppm CO2 equivalent or a 2 degree temperature increase (to which Kyoto aspires) is *too high* to prevent catastrophic feedbacks unless we're exceptionally lucky. Aleklett's projection would still have us reach this point (and Kyoto is far too feeble to prevent it). *This* is why further intervention is urgently required, limiting emissions and accelerating the development of non-fossil energy supplies.

Aleklett is a "Polyanna economist": he argues that fossil fuel extraction will stop altogether when it becomes too costly, after the historical precedent that energy resources are never mined out because cheaper supplies displace them.

I am 100% in agreement with Aleklett's case for future fossil-fuel extraction, providing that renewable energy is developed on a grand scale, sufficiently early to compete. This is probable, but not inevitable.

The historical limits on extraction of fuel resources have been imposed not by scarcity but by abundance -- the pattern will continue only if cheaper alternatives continue to become available as each fossil fuel resource becomes more expensive to extract. Otherwise we will pay more for fossil fuels, reopening all those already-abandoned wells and seams. The scope is huge for improved consumption efficiency, so poor EROEI today doesn't limit extraction in the long term.

If, on the other hand, alternatives out-compete fossil fuels before they are mined out, there is not "too little energy". Aleklett's closing words (echoed somewhere by our own relda) are contradictorily pessimistic.

I'm confident a future energy path is possible which has much lower emissions than Aleklett projects. But even Aleklett's scenario would be unrealistic without strong development of low-emission energy technology.

Xoddam;
Thanks for the interesting reply. One thing that seems to be lost in
these global warming discussions is the natural warming effect.
So many statements and discussions seem to assume that it is all the
fault of humanity.
For just what percentage is human activity responsible ?
1934 was the warmest year by some measurements.

I suspect that perhaps human activity effect is quite small.
If our efforts are overwhelmed by nature are we completely wasting our
time worrying about our CO2 emmissions ?

Only a few factors affecting climate are human in origin: changes in greenhouse gas levels and albedo from land clearing, agriculture and industry, and atmospheric particulates.

Each of these factors would have only a minor impact in isolation. But some "natural" factors -- atmospheric humidity (water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas), polar albedo, cloud cover and "wild" biosphere activity -- are sensitive to temperature, mostly *amplifying* any warming due to other causes.

While human land use may have had a small effect on climate for a long time, and we have been burning fossil fuels for several centuries, it is really only since WWII that human activity been on a scale sufficient to make a big difference, and only since the 1970s (when sulfur dioxide emissions were largely eliminated from coal flue gases) that the net human effect has clearly been a warming one.

The 1934 peak (the hottest year to date in the USA, but not globally) was the result of high solar radiation. It has been amply demonstrated (most vocally by those who deny a significant human effect on the climate) that until the 1980s, temperature changes on earth closely tracked the natural variation in solar radiation. Since the 1980s solar radiation has *decreased* as the Earth has warmed up.

While recent (and imminent "committed") climate change is alarmingly rapid, it is nothing compared to the chaotic responses that might develop as a result of delayed positive feedbacks.

The climate has changed before, and it has changed suddenly before. The biosphere has suffered, and (over geological time) recovered. But the climate has never before changed suddenly with 6 billion human beings dependent on agriculture. *That* is why we need to be worried. It is the human cost, more than anything else, that demands that we avoid abrupt climate change.

I completely reject any argument that we should not try to stabilise the climate if anthropogenic factors were not responsible for the observed change. Civilisation depends on a relatively stable climate and we are justified in the attempt to preserve our existence.