The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A 2007 study by Gupta et al. assessed the literature on climate change policy, which showed no authoritative assessments of the UNFCCC or its Protocol that assert these agreements have, or will, succeed in fully solving the climate problem. It was assumed that the UNFCCC or its Protocol would not be changed. The Framework Convention and its Protocol include provisions for future policy actions to be taken. Some environmentalists have supported the Kyoto Protocol because it is "the only game in town," and possibly because they expect that future emission reduction commitments may demand more stringent emission reductions (Aldy et al.., 2003, p. 9). Some environmentalists and scientists have criticized the existing commitments for being too weak (Grubb, 2000, p. 5). On the other hand, multiple economists think that the commitments are stronger than is justified. Particularly in the US, a number of economists have also been critical of the failure to include quantified commitments for developing countries (Grubb, 2000, p. 31).
Commentaries on negotiations
The choice of 1990 as the main base year remains in Kyoto, as it does in the original Framework Convention (UNFCCC). The importance of the choice of base year was discussed by Liverman (2008). According to Liverman (2008), the idea of using historical emissions as a basis for the Kyoto targets was rejected on the basis that good data was not available prior to 1990. Liverman (2008), however, commented that a 1990 base year favours several powerful interests including the UK, Germany and Russia. This is because these countries had high CO2 emissions in 1990. In the UK following 1990, emissions had declined because of a switch from coal to gas ("Dash for Gas"), which has lower emissions than coal. This was due to the UK's privatization of coal mining and its switch to natural gas supported by North Sea reserves. Germany benefited from the 1990 base year because of its reunification between West and East Germany. East Germany's emissions fell dramatically following the collapse of East German industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany could therefore take credit for the resultant decline in emissions. According to Liverman (2008), some of the former Soviet satellites wanted a base year to reflect their highest emissions prior to their industrial collapse. A high emissions baseline was an advantage for countries whose emissions had subsequently fallen due to economic collapse. On the other hand, some of the former Soviet countries regard their emissions surplus as compensation for the trauma of economic restructuring. Japan promoted the idea of flexible baselines, and favoured a base year of 1995 for HFCs. Their HFC emissions had grown in the early 1990s as a substitute for CFCs banned in the Montreal Protocol. Liverman (2008) argued that countries, such as the US, made suggestions during negotiations in order to lower their responsibility to cut emissions. These suggestions included the inclusion of carbon sinks (the carbon absorbed annually by forests and other land cover) and having net current emissions as the basis for responsibility, rather than historical emissions. Another perspective on negotiations was provided by Grubb (2003). The final days of negotiation of the Protocol saw a clash between the EU and the US and Japan. The EU aimed for flat-rate reductions in the range of 10–15% below 1990 levels, while the US and Japan supported reductions of 0–5%. Countries that had supported differentiation of targets between countries had different ideas on how it should be calculated, and different indicators were proposed, e.g., targets that were related to GDP, energy intensity (energy use per unit of economic output), and so on. According to Grubb (2003), the only common theme of these indicators was that each proposal suited the interests of the country making the proposal. Aldy et al. (2003) commented on the Kyoto targets and how they related to economic growth. Considering the growth of some economies and the collapse of others since 1990, the range of implicit targets is much greater than that suggested by the Kyoto targets. According to Aldy et al. (2003), the US faced a cut of about 30% below "business-as-usual" (BAU) emissions (i.e., projected emissions in the absence of measures to limit emissions), which is more stringent than that implied by its Kyoto target (a 7% reduction in emissions compared to 1990 levels). This contrasts with Russia and other Kyoto "economies in transition" (EITs), who, according to Aldy et al. (2003), faced Kyoto targets that allowed substantial increases in their emissions above BAU. Grubb (2003), however, commented that the US, having per-capita emissions twice that of most other OECD countries, was vulnerable to the suggestion that it had huge potential for making reductions. From this viewpoint, the US was obliged to cut emissions back more than other countries. Grubb (2003) also commented that for two or three years after the Kyoto agreement, the usual economic perspective was that emissions from the EITs would rise sharply as their economies recovered. In reality, however, emissions of the EITs failed to grow as multiple models had predicted. In August 2012, in a speech given at his alma mater, Todd Stern — the US Climate Change envoy — expressed the challenges of the UNFCCC process as follows, “Climate change is not a conventional environmental issue...It implicates virtually every aspect of a state’s economy, so it makes countries nervous about growth and development. This is an economic issue every bit as it is an environmental one.” He went on to explain that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a multilateral body concerned with climate change and can be an inefficient system for enacting international policy. Because the framework system includes over 190 countries and because negotiations are governed by consensus, small groups of countries can often block progress.
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