For many people the combat against climate change equals the Kyoto Protocol. This chapter takes a look at the most relevant elements and ideological assumptions of this most established climate protocol and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Problems can be identified ranging all the way from the definition of the problem to the tools and the solutions of it. The climate problem has been assumed to be more one-dimensional than it is in reality, which has led to excessive simplification. The protocol has tied the leaders’ hands to climate puritanism and the politics of limitation. Therefore, we can speak of a series of failures.
It can easily be said that climate change has been on the agenda for twenty years since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This time period gives a fairly reasonable basis to serve towards estimating the effectiveness and success of the selected strategy. Since international climate policy has had one clear mainstream, the Kyoto Protocol and the related approach to set emission ceilings; i.e., also called the policy of limitation. I will focus here on an analysis of this approach. It has been self-explanatory within public discussions that when talking about the need or responsibility to do something in respect of climate change, the Kyoto Protocol is predominantly referred to.
7.1 THE KYOTO PROTOCOL AS AN ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM
The Kyoto Protocol resulted from a diplomatic process at the Rio Conference in 1992, and was based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In Rio, the agreement came about by simply pushing the most difficult questions aside: the agreement concerned solely those issues, which were possible to agree upon. Binding targets for the member states weren’t any option, but a general statement to reduce emissions was entered in the Convention, which however didn’t concern developing countries. In 1995, all parties reconvened – First Conference of the Parties (COP), held in Berlin under the chairmanship of Mrs A. Merkel – and noted that the agreement was insufficient; it initiated a two-year negotiation process, which climaxed with the Kyoto Protocol. But, as with the UNFCCC, this strategy also followed the customary model: the agreement only concerned those matters that could be agreed upon, while the more difficult issues
were postponed into the future. In Kyoto, the US seconded binding targets and accepted cuts of -7% compared to the level of 1970, despite the fact that in June 1997 the US Senate voted the Byrd-Hagel132 resolution by 95 versus zero and refused any binding agreement not involving China and other big emitters. This is why, back home, the US government, Clinton and Gore never dare to present the Protocol for ratification. This led the process towards a situation in which an agreement on issues became increasingly unlikely to reach.
When the Kyoto Protocol finally came into force in 2005, after Russian ratification and the fulfilment of the required conditions133 at last, diplomats soon noticed two years later that the Protocol was insufficient. A new process followed and its climax was supposed to take place at the Copenhagen Conference in 2009: the idea was to find a replacement to the agreement that was coming to an end in 2012. As we now know, the result of the Copenhagen Conference was a total debacle. The old strategy, with the purpose of drawing an agreement only on those issues for which it would be possible to find a solution and to postpone the more difficult decisions into the future, was not relevant anymore. There were simply too many issues which needed to be decided upon: the countries with various and divided interests could not find a common solution to anything. (Victor 2011: 206–208).
Kyoto 2, which was born after the conferences of Durban and Doha, only demonstrates the weakness of the approach: the package covers less than 15%
of the industrial countries’ emissions. Significant parties have rejected the treaty framework and declared it inefficient.
The process of climate conferences (Chapter 2) illustrates clearly as to how many of the negotiating countries understood that the primary question was the sharing of the economic burden. Each level-headed country tries to negotiate the lowest possible reduction target for itself in relation to the other countries. This was also the crux of the matter in the EU’s internal burden-sharing in respect of the target assigned by the Kyoto Protocol.
It clearly shows the problems that a Kyoto-type approach has. The degree of progress is dependent on how much the various parties are willing to do within reasonable limits. This does not have much to do with the idea of how much should be done so that the climate would be “saved”. Science is necessary to provide a goal, but a complicated negotiation set-up (all countries, various country groups with their internal chemistry) like this clearly shows that freeriding is tempting – and the more tempting, the harder the others toil.
132 Chuck Hagel was at the time of writing (2013) the US Secretary for Defence.
133 The ratification did not require great sacrifices from Russia. The target, which was assigned to Russia, was to freeze the emissions to the level of 1990 – the limit was even 2/5 lower due to the country’s economic collapse. Helm (2009a) notes that the reason why Russia ratified the Kyoto protocol, which thus came into force, was the EU’s trading in respect of Russia’s membership in the WTO. The EU needed this in order to legitimate its own strict climate policy.
Helm (2009a:17–19) states that the Kyoto protocol and the COP process did not succeed in lowering the EU’s emissions in any significant way so that it would have any impact on global warming. Even those modest numbers, which we now have, are more and more modest considering that the Kyoto target didn’t contain provisions on air and marine traffic. After two decades of climate efforts the emissions are increasing at an accelerated speed. Carbon concentration has increased from the pre-industrial 275 ppm to a level of almost 400 ppm (Helm 2012:2). However, Helm does give the Kyoto Protocol credit for one thing: at its best, it provides a forum for dialogue.
The aim of the following review is to illustrate what is so problematic in the Kyoto approach.
7.1.1 INCORRECT ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM
“Global warming is as different from smog (…) as is nuclear war from gang violence; it cannot be understood as a straightforward pollution problem, but instead as an existential one. Its impacts will be so enormous that it is better understood as a problem of evolution, not pollution”, Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007:8) emphasised. According to them, the basic problem in climate policy is that climate change is interpreted as a pollution problem. Carbon dioxide is an invisible and odourless gas, and its effects are quite different than those of pollutants. Indeed it is a gas that we humans emit at each respiration.
Victor (2011) also comes to a conclusion that the problem is falsely perceived.
According to him, climate change should be interpreted as an economy and energy-related problem, not an environmental one. Therefore, solutions should be searched for in the WTO or GATT -like forums, rather than in international frameworks and agreements of environmental diplomacy.
According to Prins et al. (2010), getting stuck with a pollution and environmental paradigm has created a basic type of framing error. The solution models that arise from this paradigm have only handled tame problems; although they were somewhat complex but still clearly definable and attainable. Instead, climate change as a wicked problem requires a deep understanding of its blending into social systems, of its complexity and the trickiness of its resolution.
The consequence of this misunderstanding is that climate change was presented as a typical “environment-related” “problem” that is “solvable”. According to the writers of the so-called Hartwell Paper134, it is none of the options presented above.
134 In Chapter 9 I will present the so-called Hartwell Paper, which outlines an alternative to the Kyoto approach:
instead of the current carbon dioxide-oriented policy, it aims at broader climate policy and the decarbonisation
Rather than being a problem that should be solved, climate change had to be understood as a continuous condition whereby we should learn to survive and which could be only solved partially with a solution that is more or less better. It is one part of a larger conditional entity to which the population, technology, prosperity-based differences, usage of resources etc. belong. For this reason, it is not an environmental problem either. It is equally an energy problem, economic problem or a problem concerning the use of land; it might be easier to search for the solution of the problem through these paths.
(Prins et al. 2010)
7.1.2 WRONG MODELS
Among others, Prins & Rayner (2007b), Nordhaus & Shellenberger (2007) Hulme (2009a), Pielke (2010) and Victor (2011) consider that the problem of the Kyoto Protocol is that it is a copy of the Montreal Protocol, which was created to curb the depletion of the ozone layer. The general idea at that time was that the model was also suited for copying as a solution for the climate problem – and nobody noticed anything amiss in the scale. According to Rayner, the Montreal Protocol only set a small amount of artificially generated gases under control, merely produced by a limited number of factories in the industrialised countries. He also noted that when the agreement was being drafted, it was already known that there were some alternatives available to do away with these gases. However, it is not possible to curb carbon dioxide by just closing down a couple of factories. (Rayner 2006:3).
Prins and Rayner (2007b) also mentioned the agreements that restrict sulphur emissions and nuclear weapons as being wrong models. All in all, all three of these models of the Kyoto Protocol were problematic, in particular, because they were used for solving one-dimensional tame problems and a similar kind of model is not suitable for tackling a multi-dimensional wicked problem.
Hulme (2009a:291–293) states that the selection of an unsuitable model was no wonder. The Montreal Protocol was a success story whereby substances depleting the ozone layer could be restricted by over 90% between 1986 and 2004;
and the situation of the ozone layer began to stabilise. However, the superficial similarity of these problems – i.e. they both concerned gases intruding into the atmosphere, causing decades-long effects – was left secondary alongside more relevant differences: carbon dioxide has to do with all human activity, whereas the substances thinning the ozone layer are the by-product of a number of gases.
The former cannot be replaced with anything, while the latter can substituted for easily.