The world’s first global treaty to combat climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, was agreed in December 1997 after exhausting, all-night negotiations in Japan that saw arguments, desperate telephone calls back to leaders in capital cities and inspired diplomacy.
“A more bizarre way of reaching agreement to tackle global warming cannot be imagined. Half of those involved were asleep on the floor, unaware that history was being made,” the Guardian reported.
The final text of the agreement was still in the form of the conference chairman’s scribbled notes as the politicians flew home.
Fast-forward a dozen years and the world is once again grappling with the need to find a way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that scientists are now confident drive climate change, and could raise the Earth’s temperature to catastrophic levels within our lifetimes.
The stakes are higher than ever. Reports and studies over the intervening years have spelt out the likely cost of failure: floods, droughts, famines and refugees.
Nothing is certain, but — and this is a fact conveniently overlooked by climate skeptics — although climate change may not turn out to be as bad as everyone says, it could be an awful lot worse. The only way to know for sure is to wait and see, by which time it will be too late.
Voluntary action, by people or countries, is unlikely to be enough. Energy companies may brand their gigantic sales of oil and gas with green-washing images of windmills, but they continue to sell oil and gas. Airlines see the shrinking world largely through dollar signs.
Fast developing countries such as China and India sit on vast stocks of coal that are already driving a second industrial revolution and forcing their emissions above those of the older polluters in the west. Forests offer a financial lifeline to millions who live in squalor in Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere, but only if they can be chopped down and shipped away, releasing huge clouds of carbon dioxide.
And at the top of the carbon food chain sits the Western consumer, with his or her weekends in Prague, all-year-round asparagus, plasma TVs and reluctance to pay more for the energy our lifestyles rely on.
The magnitude of the task involved in throwing a noose around that lot was what convinced world leaders they needed agreements like Kyoto. Firm targets to reduce greenhouse gases would surely force governments to introduce policies to steer their people away from their extravagantly polluting lifestyles and livelihoods.
How they did it would be up to them, as long as the numbers added up.
As many people in Kyoto suspected at the time, the reality has been very different. At the demand of the US, the Kyoto rules were tweaked to allow rich countries to buy their way out of their targets, a move that gave birth to the multibillion dollar carbon trading industry.
Then, having smuggled this slow-puncture into the world’s efforts to reduce emissions, former US president George W. Bush walked away from Kyoto altogether in protest at it only setting targets for rich countries.
From that moment, Kyoto was destined for the dustbin as a serious means to tackle climate change, and the world began to focus on bringing the US back on board.
The December meeting that spawned Kyoto was one of a series of annual UN climate conferences. The circus has since passed through Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali and Poznan. And the pressure to produce a meaningful successor agreement has grown.
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