The world has been negotiating climate change solutions for 20 years now - I kind of wondered what stage we were up to. This blog is me trying to work out of the overall narrative of the climate change negotiations. Hopefully you will find it an exciting story with wickedly high stakes, betrayal, heart-break, black-souled villains and super-human heroes…

Once upon a time, back in 1992, 172 countries all got together and decided they were going to try and stop global warming from reaching dangerous levels - and that they were going to meet up every year to work on this process. They didn’t set any targets; this was more of a setting up of a broad vision and a framework for working out what to do next. This was called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

 

The next step was to create a legally binding treaty which involved specific targets. This was called the Kyoto Protocol and was signed in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol is pretty complex but I feel that there are two elements in particular that are worth going into because we are still feeling the effects of them today.

Firstly, the treaty splits the world into two groups: The developed countries (Annex I) and the developing countries (Non-Annex I). This was because the developed countries had contributed a lot more to global warming in the past, and were more capable of doing something about it now - so it was felt that responsibilities under the treaty should reflect this. Developed countries had specific targets that they were legally obligated to meet, whereas developing countries were just expected to generally work towards reducing their emissions.

Now we get to the villain of the piece… Every country under the UNFCCC signed this treaty but the US never ratified it (ratified=formally confirmed). To understand why this was the case Jonathan Pershing (one of the US negotiators) tells a good anecdote about an advertisement that was running at the time. It showed a map of the world that then removed all of the countries who had signed up for binding targets - America’s allies. The countries that were left were those who were America’s competitors like China and Korea. George Bush said “Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn’t in good faith have signed Kyoto.”

As the US was the number one emitter at the time this hampered the effectiveness of the treaty quite a lot…

Anyway, the second important thing about the Kyoto Protocol was that it set up an international market around carbon. Basically, it was thought that the best way to encourage less polluting practices was to put a price on carbon. There was already a really successful example of doing this sort of thing - and now I’m going to go on a slight tangent because this is really cool.

Okay, so this one time, a long, long time ago (1990) America was dealing with the horror-esque-sounding phenomenon of acid rain. Sulphur dioxide was being released in large quantities from power plants and this ended up in the rain, causing people heart and lung problems.

Rather than the government ordering a specific method for reducing sulphur dioxide, they said the emissions must be reduced by 40% by 2010 and then left it up to companies to work out how to do it - if companies reduced their sulphur emissions more than was required, they could sell off their extra permits and make money.

This method was a wild success. Sulphur dioxide emissions went down 8 years ahead of schedule and at one fourth the predicted cost. So I can see why America was so keen to use a markets-based system - even though they didn’t ultimately sign up to it, and the carbon trading doesn’t look so great in hindsight.

One more thing about the Kyoto Protocol! It wasn’t set up to last forever. It ran until 2012, by which point the UNFCCC was supposed to have a new treaty all lined up - one that would learn from the lessons of the Kyoto Protocol and would be relevant to the new circumstances of 2012 and beyond. This brings me to the next big turning point in our story:

If you want to find out about the conference that sent an entire social movement into a depression, tune in next week - same time, same place.