Kicking Kyoto
Like Alex, I spoke at the United Nations University symposium on climate change and innovation on Friday – and one notable theme was the ferocious kicking that Kyoto received from some of the speakers.
Leading the onslaught were Ted Nordhaus, author of The Death of Environmentalism, and Gwyn Prins, who runs the LSE Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events.
Nordhaus, writing with Michael Shellenberger, has called for Kyoto to be scrapped in the current issue of Democracy. “Kyoto is dead,” they write, “and that’s a good thing. In its place, we need massive global investment in new clean energy technology.”
Gwyn Prins takes a similar line, an argument he set out in a pamphlet written with Steve Rayner, and subsequent op-ed for Nature (which he says received a bigger response than anything the journal has previously published).
On Friday, both attempted to bang a few nails into Kyoto’s coffin. Gwyn, in particular, was adamant that the protocol had long been dead. Only a few diehards – emotionally incapable of accepting they are wrong – had failed to admit its passing:
We have to find a way, diplomatically, for the Europeans to join in [to a new approach to climate control] without losing face. You don’t get progress if you tell people that they must admit they made a mistake. Most of us don’t like to admit that we have made mistakes.
Prins and Nordhaus agree on a great deal. On Kyoto, they argue that:
- Its targets have had no impact on those countries that adopted them – not even slowing the rate of increase in their emissions.
- In Europe, any emissions reductions that have occurred are due to factors that precede the implementation of the Kyoto protocol.
- European emissions are rising faster than American ones (a ‘hard fact’ that embarrasses European politicians who relish looking down on ‘ugly Americans’ as Gwyn put it).
On a future climate regime, they contend that:
- Kyoto’s failure means that the Copenhagen agreement should exclude binding targets.
- Instead, a ‘bottom-up’ approach should be adopted, with investment in technology at its heart. This will reduce emissions more effectively than binding targets.
- Leadership on climate is shifting away from Europe and towards the United States.
I am going to leave future frameworks to another post. In this one – and below the jump – I look at Kyoto’s impact on Europe. There’s a lot of detail in the main post, so here are the key conclusions:
- It’s too early to say whether Kyoto has worked as advertised in Europe – but the evidence suggests that Europe as a whole will meet, or even exceed its targets.
- Later reductions in emissions seem likely to be due to policy responses to Kyoto. Governments are reacting to the pressure that a binding target applies.
- It’s likely that Europe would be emitting more if Kyoto had never been ratified – and it’s a real stretch to argue that the US is doing better than the EU on emissions.