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.