It is becoming increasingly clear that the targets in the Kyoto Protocol cannot and will not be met on the established timetable in the United States and elsewhere.
When the Kyoto Protocol enters into the force tomorrow, the world will take a significant and long-awaited first step towards stemming global warming. Instead of stepping forward as the world leader on climate change, however, the Bush Administration is clinging to the role of world obstructionist.
Attempts to estimate the impacts of climate change continue to be highly speculative.
It just seems to me that the world's kind of a mess, and the more messy it gets, the more interested I am in escapist fare. Having a good time is something that isn't about the war in Iraq or the Asian flu or the Kyoto protocol - things that are horribly depressing to consider in our real lives. I'm eager to get away from them.
Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance.
I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.
With each passing year the difficulty of meeting any fixed quantitative target increases progressively. Moreover, plausible estimates of when the Protocol would go into effect leave such a small window of time before the first commitment period that achievement of the Kyoto targets will eventually pass out of reach.
I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.
Even meeting Kyoto targets barely makes a dent in what we have to achieve.
If the relatively rich participating countries want to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, they will have to pay at least some poor countries to reduce their emissions. Achievement of substantial reduction in this way implies international transfers of wealth on a scale well beyond anything in recorded history. There is no effective political support for such a Herculean effort, particularly in the United States.
Nobody is going to give away the farm in Kyoto. It is not anybody's to give away. And even if the United States Senate would actually ratify a bad treaty, anything called for under the treaty would require legislation passed through both houses.
The Bush Administration believes the Kyoto protocol could damage our collective prosperity, and in so doing, actually put our long-term environmental health at risk. Fundamentally, we believe that the protocol both will fail to significantly reduce the long-term risks posed by climate change and, in the short run, will seriously impede our ability to meet our energy needs and economic growth.
The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Kyoto costs a lot, does nothing to prevent calamity, and pays no compensation in the event of loss. If my insurance broker offered that sort of policy, I would not carry insurance. Instead what my broker offers is a policy that costs a little and pays full compensation in the event of loss. If someone wants to propose that as a policy on global warming, I'm all in favour.
Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.
We've abnegated the Kyoto treaty, we've instituted a voluntary program that's obviously not been working, we've taken every effort to excise references to global warming from official documents, to try to undermine international conferences that work on environmental issues, and on and on and on.
If Canada, one of the richest nations in the world, can't meet Kyoto targets, why should China or India give any considerations for meeting the targets?
The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world.
I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.
Kyoto is dead and has been dead, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't done some real damage and won't continue to do some real damage," "If global warming turns out to be a problem, which I doubt, it won't be solved by making ourselves poorer through energy rationing." "It will be solved through building resiliency and capability into society and through long-term technological innovation and transformation.
The climatically inefficient and economically disastrous Kyoto Protocol, based on IPCC projections, was correctly defined by President George W. Bush as "fatally flawed". This criticism was recently followed by the President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin. I hope that their rational views might save the world from enormous damage that could be induced by implementing recommendations based on distorted science.
The bottom line for Canada is that Kyoto will precipitate a recession that will cause a permanent reduction in employment, income and the size of our economy. And if global warming is going to happen Kyoto will do nothing whatsoever to prevent it or even slow it down. Why are we still considering it?
Redirect federal spending aimed at fulfilling the terms of the increasingly irrelevant Kyoto Protocol.
Perhaps - and this goes for the Kyoto School too - one of these insights is that nothingness and unknowing don't have to be equated with a destructive nihilism but with the experience of unity and participation - whilst resisting the tendency of objectifying metaphysics to claim that we can in some way 'know' that this experienced unity is really the truth of how things are, i.e., reveals being itself.
If you look at the polling data, long before anyone had thought about Iraq, it was the [George W.] Bush Administration's decision in the first few weeks in its tenure in office to abnegate the Kyoto treaties that set our international perception into a nose-dive. People around the world looked on in amazement as the biggest part of the problem decided it wasn't going to make any effort to help with the solution.
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