BY JIM GREEN
Delegations from more than 160 countries have finalised rules on the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions at a conference from October 29 to November 9 in Marrakech, Morocco. The treaty commits 38 industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse emissions by an average of 5.2% between 1990 and 2008-12.
Mainstream media commentators responded with the predictable headlines — the Kyoto Protocol was "rescued" from oblivion and Australia emerged the "clear winner" for its successful wfforts to widen the loopholes in the treaty.
But environmentalists reacted bitterly to the compromises won by the "Gang of Four" — Australia, Canada, Japan and Russia — at the conference, formally called the seventh conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
With the United States having pulled out of the process in March, the Gang of Four were well placed to gut the treaty of any meaningful content — lest the talks collapse altogether.
The most prominent result of the conference is the plan to establish a carbon emissions trading market from 2008. The November 5 Financial Times claims that the "magic of markets", in the form of an emissions trading market expected to turn over several billion dollars annually, will play a "critical role in the cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gases".
However, an emissions trading market — a carbon casino — will do nothing of the sort.
In the first instance, the major seller will be Russia, which is below its Kyoto target simply because of industrial decline since the 1990 baseline. All sorts of other scams will be devised to claim — then sell — credits which have nothing to do with greenhouse gas abatement. The buyers of carbon credits will not be doing so in order to address climate change but rather to avoid addressing climate change.
Flexible mechanisms
The Marrakech conference finalised rules on three "flexibility mechanisms" — the carbon casino, and two programs allowing countries to receive carbon credits for projects such as forestry plantations in developed or developing countries.
The Protocol establishes the principle that countries may receive credit toward their emissions targets for carbon absorbed by forests, soils and other "sinks". In July, a UNFCCC conference agreed to set country-specific caps on the use of sinks towards meeting emissions targets.
These caps were finalised at Marrakech, with Russia demanding (and winning) a doubling of its ceiling for sink activities compared to the July proposal. Countries who fail to issue a report justifying their sink credits won't be allowed to play in the carbon casino.
If claimed sink credits are found to be excessive, adjustments will be made at the end of a "commitment period" (the first is from 1990 to 2008-12) and tougher emissions reduction targets may apply in the subsequent period.
But "tough" isn't the word — the average 5.2% reduction is about one-tenth of the level estimated to be necessary just to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
Moreover, targets are negotiated, and as the Australian delegation demonstrated at the 1997 Kyoto conference, it is possible to win an extremely generous target (an 8% increase in Australia's case) by threatening to unilaterally scuttle the treaty.
Apart from the caps on sink activities, limits on the use of flexibility mechanisms have given way to diplomatic obfuscation — their use should be "supplemental" to domestic action to reduce emissions, and domestic action should constitute a "significant element" of the effort made by each party to the treaty.
Compliance
As the Kyoto Protocol now stands, for every tonne of emissions a country overshoots its target by, it will have to make up for the shortfall in following years at a penalty rate of 1.3 tonnes. A country failing to comply would also lose its "right" to take part in the carbon casino and would be obliged to produce an "action plan" demonstrating how it can meet its revised target.
The Australian delegation at Marrakech argued that the consequences for non-compliance should not be legally binding. The Gang of Four succeeded in deferring a decision on this matter until the first UNFCCC conference following the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Australian, Japanese and Russian delegations also wanted to restrict the ability to raise concerns about the compliance of other countries — this would result in a farcical situation in which parties to the treaty would only be able raise concerns about their own performance.
A "compliance committee" is to be established under the Marrakech agreement, though a number of delegations attempted to make the activities of this committee closed to public and media scrutiny.
Greenpeace noted in an October 20 media release, "In its ongoing attempt to avoid an agreement that has any legal consequences, Australia has tried to weaken the whole Protocol by substituting the word 'should' for the world 'shall' throughout the compliance agreement, weakening its legal power. Australia also wants to be able [to] play with its figures on forestry and land use, and is trying to get the rules written so it doesn't even have to say exactly where the forests are."
Jennifer Morgan from the World Wildlife Fund described Australia as the "leader of the backtrack camp". The Climate Action Network awarded Australia a "Fossil of the Day" award for trying to gut the compliance regime.
Australian recalcitrance
The Australian government is the only signatory to the Kyoto Protocol still insisting that it will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol unless the US does. Even the other three members of the Gang of Four are likely to ratify the treaty.
Australia is breaching international treaty law with its insistence on mandatory targets for developing countries, according to legal advice given to the Climate Action Network Australia (CANA).
Sydney barrister Stephen Gageler has advised that, under the 1969 Vienna Convention, parties to a treaty are obliged to refrain from acts which frustrate its objectives. Gageler said Australia's obligations stemmed from its 1992 ratification of the Kyoto Protocol's parent treaty, the UNFCCC.
Anna Reynolds from CANA said the Australian government should withdraw from the 1992 treaty if it did not want to be a party to the Kyoto Protocol, rather than continuing to take part in negotiations on its terms and conditions.
"They are trying to have a bob each way", Reynolds told The Age on October 31.
The Australian Financial Review gave the Marrakech conference front-page coverage on November 12 and editorialised in support of Australian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on November 14. If greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced, the AFR argued, then the smoke-and-mirrors "flexibility mechanisms" are the cheapest route.
The AFR's editors argued that Australia might face trade penalties such as increased tariffs if it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, although this possibility has generally only been raised by conservative "think-tanks" such as the International Chamber of Commerce and the (Australian) Lavoisier Group.
The AFR's editors also wondered "exactly how negatively the international community would regard a country that extracted maximum concessions in negotiations over the first commitment period, then declined to ratify, and then tried to muscle back into the negotiations for the second commitment period next decade".
The Kyoto Protocol will enter into force after it has been ratified by at least 55 countries, including industrialised countries responsible for at least 55% of the total 1990 carbon dioxide emissions from this group.
To date, 40 nations have ratified the treaty, but only two are industrialised countries — Romania and the Czech Republic. Despite the US withdrawal, and Australia's recalcitrance, it is likely that enough countries will ratify the treaty in the next year or two for it to enter into force.
The US government will not re-enter the Kyoto process but may set up a "parallel" process. Canada might participate in the US-led parallel process as well as ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.
With outside pressure from a weaker "parallel" system, and internal white-anting from the Gang of Four and other like-minded countries, it's not clear how many more times the Kyoto Protocol can be "rescued" — or whether it's worth the effort.
The collapse of the treaty might not be a bad thing — this would depend on the extent to which the issue was repoliticised, as it was following the US withdrawal in March.
As things stand, climate change abatement is in the hands of corporate polluters and capitalist governments — the institutions most responsible for the problem and the least likely to resolve it. Their repeated "rescues" of the Kyoto Protocol at UNFCCC conferences are a scam and a farce.
Environmental refugees
In further developments on the greenhouse front, the Howard government has refused to accept environmental refugees from the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, which has a population of about 11,000.
Paani Laupepa, assistant secretary of Tuvalu's ministry of natural resources, energy and environment, told the BBC in October that, "We have coastal erosion, droughts, and in the last decade we have also experienced an unusually high level of tropical cyclones. Salt water intrusion is becoming a problem, and this has affected our traditional food crops. Perhaps the most pronounced effect of climate change that we are actually seeing is the flooding of low-lying areas. A couple of decades ago the flooding was not so bad as last year's, and to us living on the atolls, this is an increasing sign of the times."
New Zealand has agreed to accept the exodus of Tuvaluans under a scheme beginning in 2002 and running over some decades.
Laupepa said, "While New Zealand responded positively in the true Pacific way of helping one's neighbours, Australia on the other hand has slammed the door in our face. Its justification is to compare Tuvaluans with the asylum seekers trying to enter Australia illegally."
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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