Putting the Genie Back by David Hone

Author:David Hone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787149328
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

But there was a third issue, relating to sovereignty as a result of the allocation of allowances by the United Nations to the United States. The implications of a potential loss of national control over the future of the US energy system were too significant to ignore.

Despite the move by the United States the Kyoto Protocol was eventually ratified in 2005 when Russia signed on the dotted line, but the United States had nevertheless triggered the beginning of the end, even before the first compliance period started. By 2007 at COP13 in Bali, a new negotiating track was emerging designed to include the United States, but in so doing the UNFCCC process became increasingly complex and fractured. This eventually led to the collapse of the negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009.

Although the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in order that the first compliance period could start on schedule in 2008 and the 2012 Doha Amendment extended its reach through to 2020, albeit with a reduced number of developed countries, the overall implementation never reached its intended scale and ambition. Canada formally withdrew in late 2011 and compliance was always a formality for the former Soviet states given that their 1990 base-year emissions were taken from their old economy, prior to the economic collapse of the bloc and consequent huge fall in emissions.

The need to manage global emissions and put a halt to the relentless build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere requires the intervention of governments and cooperation between them to ensure their success, particularly when implemented through a cost on carbon dioxide emissions. There is an ongoing debate around the role of government and the scale to which it should be allowed to address the issue of global warming. There are many who believe that government should have only a modest role in society; others accept a much wider role, including one to solve broad-based issues that affect society at large; for example, the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For the latter group, a carbon price may not go far enough; it is a tool designed to tease out the solution over a generation or more. In the case of those who seek to limit the role of government, the imposition of a pricing mechanism across the entire economy can be seen as a step too far and may even raise questions about the foundation upon which the mechanism is based, namely the science of climate change.

Interventions have been attempted at both the national and global level since the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide passed 350 ppm more than twenty years ago, a level already well above the pre-industrial concentration of 275 ppm. Yet society knows how to solve the issue of continued carbon dioxide emissions and has known for more than a generation. President George Bush made that clear in his Kyoto exit speech on 11 June 2001 when he noted only two ways to stabilise the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; these are to avoid emitting in the first place or to capture afterwards.

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