June, 2001
One of President Bush’s principle objections to the Kyoto Protocol is that it exempts developing countries from emissions reduction obligations. To understand why it does so, it is instructive to examine the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed and ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate by George Bush senior in 1992. While it did not establish legally binding commitments, the treaty requires developed countries, and only developed countries, to aim to return their emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels, implicitly by the year 2000. For their part, developing countries agreed to take unspecified actions to address man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. They were not expected to reduce them from current levels, but merely to slow their growth. Moreover, developed countries agreed to pay the costs incurred in taking such actions, a crucial concession to cash-strapped developing countries.
This is precisely the approach taken by the Kyoto Protocol, which converts the soft developed country commitments to binding ones. The U.S. target under Kyoto is putatively 7% below 1990 levels, but modifications to the accounting rules make this target virtually the same as the one agreed to by George Bush senior.
Although they are not obligated to reduce their emissions under the protocol, developing countries may participate in the protocol’s
Clean Development Mechanism, which enables developed countries to pay for emissions reductions that take place in developing countries and receive credits against their own emissions in return. This benefits both developing countries, which gain access to new, cleaner technologies, and developed countries, which are able to meet their targets at a lower cost.
When he signed the framework convention, George Bush senior understood that it would be both unfair and futile to demand of
developing countries that they take actions commensurate with our own. Developed countries are responsible for virtually all of the excess emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere. Even today, on a per capita basis, their emissions exceed developing country emissions by an order of magnitude. Developing countries, if they are to achieve a lifestyle even close to that enjoyed by their northern neighbors, will inevitably increase their consumption of energy, hence their greenhouse gases, for some time to come. This increase can be greatly mitigated by the introduction of new technologies, but developing countries do not have the capacity to produce and deploy such technologies without assistance from developed countries. They have other demands on their limited resources, including reducing poverty and disease to levels already achieved in the U.S. and other developed countries.
For these reasons, environmental treaties have not made equal demands on developed and developing countries. For example,
the Montreal Protocol, a close precedent to the Kyoto Protocol signed by Ronald Reagan and subsequently strengthened by George Bush, gives developing countries a ten-year grace period in their phase-out of substances that deplete the ozone layer. Like the 1992 climate change treaty, it requires developed countries to pay for the “incremental costs” resulting from mitigation actions by developing countries.
The reluctance of developing countries to take on binding commitments under the Kyoto Protocol has not prevented them from making progress on lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Key developing countries, including China, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and India, have achieved reductions in the energy, transport and forest sectors. In China, emissions have dropped by about 17% since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, while U.S. emissions have risen continually during the same period.
Whether or not one agrees with the established approach to developing country participation, it is important to recognize that
developing countries cannot be forced to accept a different one. Until now, they have adamantly resisted doing so, and there is no indication that this attitude will change in the foreseeable future. For the U.S. to refuse to act unless and until developing countries relent could result in years of wasted effort and squandered opportunity to avert damaging, and possibly catastrophic, climate change.
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