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20 comments on Kyoto Goes Local
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20 comments on Kyoto Goes Local
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I've always felt that the US should have signed Kyoto and I am glad that the mayors are on board but until someone tames the Chinese industrial dragon's emissions and the Indian subcontinent's emissions, Kyoto is doomed to fail.
The end state of the globe that I think we could all be happy with would be to bring China and India and Africa up to a living standard comparable to the US. Obviously doing that by bringing their emissions up to the industrial world's standard (a factor of 5 or 10 per capita higher) would be disastrous for global warming. But what that really illustrates is that the industrialized world's emissions are far, far too high, much more so than is usually recognized. And they're even higher if you take account of the offshoring of CO2 as others have pointed out.
In that context, I think it's politically unhelpful to place much burden on the poor states at the start. The rich states HAVE to start reducing their emissions, and the burden should be on them at the start. We in the US are after all far and away the biggest current and historical source of the problem, particularly on a per capita basis.
Certainly there's a lot that could be done to help China and India reduce their carbon burden, like aiding in building efficient factories and power plants. In addition I'd particularly like it if the US helped them ameliorate their "smokestack" phase by giving away pollution-control technology, so they could minimize the public health risk of all of those new coal plants.
In the end what we'll need is a Kyoto replacement that effectively controls CO2 on a per capita basis. Easy to do approximately on a per-nation basis. Not so easy to do the accounting really accurately, particularly with globalized manufacturing.
But the current step of having industrialized nations trying to slow their emissions under Kyoto, with developing nations exempted, doesn't strike me as fundamentally unfair, or even incomplete when viewed as the first step everyone agrees it is, and with industrialized nations busily exporting their consumer CO2 use.
Well, except for the fact that the US has exempted itself. But even ignoring that, Kyoto was always doomed to fail in the sense that it was never intended to be a full step to combat climate change. I considered it a victory just to have an agreement at all, however flawed.
Certainly the US and other industrial nations must reduce emissions. I never said otherwise. What I said was that excluding the developing nations ensures that global warming emissions will end up being worse than what they are now, probably by at least a factor of two.
We all need to reduce emissions. And it is in the best interests of the developed nations to teach the developing nations how to do it cleaner, and to loan them the money to do it cleaner than we did it.
Failure to address both the industrial nations and the developing nations will result in global warming going unchecked at all, because by the time China and India fully industrialize, every unit of emissions eliminated from the first world nations will have been replaced manyfold by emissions from the developing world.
This is the most sensible post in this thread.
However, Kyoto, if implemented, wasn't doomed to fail in goal of showing developing nations that the industrialized nations are acting in good faith. Per-capita accounting wouldn't be that hard to do if the accounting is left to the countries, i.e., a countries emissions goals is set to be proportional to its population.
Offshoring shouldn't be an accounting problem either. If China. for instance, had signed an agreement to limit its CO2 emissions and offshored production threatened to put it over its limit then they would have to incorporate that into the price they charged for the production. This would have the effect of discouraging the offshoring.
Certainly, we could help China and India limit their emissions through technology transfer. But more importantly we need to do is change our lifestyle. It would be far easier for the Chinese and Indian governments to convince their people that they shouldn't expect to drive around in private cars if we weren't doing it.
What it all boils down to is that our emissions are far, far, far to high. What we should be focusing on is reducing our emissions to the point that we can ask for the rest of the world's cooperation. To do otherwise is acting in bad faith.
By the way, can we stop with this Jevon's paradox crap? Jevon's paradox does not apply to the peak oil situation. Coal wasn't scarce in the 1830s and nobody had any reason to conserve it. What peak oil people are calling Jevon's paradox is really just acting in bad faith. We should just call it that.