I take Wil's "exogenous" comment to mean that the bulk of UK emissions reductions would have occured in the absence of Kyoto.
From: owner-gep...@listserve1.allegheny.edu on behalf of Henrik Selin
Sent: Sun 12/20/2009 1:11 PM
To: gep-ed@listserve1.allegheny.edu
Subject: RE: Copenhagen result
2. on legally binding. You’re right of course that international law is weak in terms of enforcement. But you’re 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 aren’t 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 I’d claim that if Kyoto had just been a ‘political declaration’ then I can’t see the EU having set about achieving its targets so thoroughly without the legal status (although that’s a judgement call of course), and (b) you can’t 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 couldn’t 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 aren’t 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 don’t 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 can’t fool the atmosphere.
I don’t 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
