2. on legally binding. Youre right of course that international law is
weak in terms of enforcement. But youre wrong that many Annex B
countries will fail to meet their Kyoto targets the EU will get there
easily enough, as will (for hot air reasons) most ex-soviet countries. NZ
still has some to do but has set up a system which will mean it will buy
hot air in effect. Australia and Japan arent too far off. Only really
Canada is way off, and I despair at the idiots in charge of the country I
moved to. So the q to my mind is not about enforcement, but rather about
(a) the set of expectations that the term legally binding sets up
amongst states that they tend to behave differently in the context of
such a status to an agreement here Id claim that if Kyoto had just been
a political declaration then I cant see the EU having set about
achieving its targets so thoroughly without the legal status (although
thats a judgement call of course), and (b) you cant set up any sort of
institutional arrangements such as the CDM without the legal status of
an agreement. And Kyoto compliance overall for the Annex B countries (they
will get there collectively, canadian rubbishness being outweighed by
russian hot air) has been driven by the Kyoto-CDM-EU ETS relationship,
which couldnt have existed without a legal agreement.
· The EU is only meeting its targets because the expansion, which
brought in a lot of former Soviet entities whose economies (and thus
emissions) collapsed in the 1990s and early twenty first century. Peel
them away and you have a large number of EU states (Italy, Austria,
Ireland) who arent going to make it (some by very large margins), and
even purported stalwarts in the process e.g. the UK largely will meet
their commitments because of exogenous factors, like shutting down large
swaths of the coal industry. Until the recession, UK emissions, for
example, were rising at levels clearly not in line with the KP;
· You could certainly set up mechanisms like the CDM (which,
incidentally, has produced almost nothing in terms of emissions
reductions, and has wrought things like the HCFC scandals in China that
may have resulted in a net negative impact on the environment) without KP,
through bilateral agreements, so at least in terms of multilateral
agreements, I dont think so. And again, the flexible mechanisms may be a
poor rationale for binding international agreements;
· If we get to the KP target through hot air, the agreement is indeed
a chimera, and while you might be able to fool the public, you cant fool
the atmosphere.
I dont want to come across as an EU apologist here, but I think a few
things should be pointed out. First, the EU Kyoto target is EU-15 and that
has not changed with any subsequent enlargement. The EU-15 is still the
EU-15. As such, the EU Kyoto target is separate from any gains that the
EU-27 may have made since 1990 as a result of bringing in countries going
through economic and industrial reconstruction. The fact that the EU-15
member states are on track collectively to meet their Kyoto target is not a
result of enlargement (but you are absolutely right in your criticism of
some individual EU-15 countries not doing their fair share). Second, so
what if the UK is meeting its target in large part to switching away from
coal; is that not something we want to see on a larger scale globally? How
is that an "exogenous factor"?
Cheers,
Henrik
