Object of contention is now the Kyoto Protocol, which, if ratified, would bind the north to reduction commitments while not requiring formal commitments in the South. Slide
The Clinton administration, and the more moderate elements in the business community that are not actively fighting the treaty, have convinced themselves that we cannot afford to implement the Kyoto Protocol unless international emissions trading and the Clean Development Mechanism are operational. Yet an insistence on immediate, new commitments from developing countries’ risks a blow-up at the negotiations and puts progress on emissions trading and the Clean Development Mechanism in jeopardy. Then there will be two reasons to fight ratification and implementation.
This would be an especially unhappy outcome. Against tremendous odds the US won agreement in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on a broad range of “flexibility mechanisms” like international emissions trading, five-year compliance periods, and most surprisingly of all, the adoption of a new instrument, the Clean Development Mechanism. The Clean Development Mechanism links developing and industrial countries. It has the potential to serve as a new channel for financing sustainable development, escalating the transfer of money, technology and expertise towards low-carbon, high efficiency alternatives to highly polluting, conventional technologies and practices – all this while making it cheaper and easier for the US to meet its targets. And it is not only the US that is interested in the CDM: over the past year there have been dozens of meetings and discussions on the CDM, with heavy developing country participation.
