What often is touted as the most far-reaching treaty negotiation ever attempted comes to Marrakech, Morocco, this week as government officials from around the world meet at the 1,000-year-old crossroads in an attempt to put the finishing touches on the Kyoto Protocol.
The pace of negotiation, modification, ratification and implementation of this proposed first baby-step in the solution to the greenhouse gas problem often seems glacial. By international standards it is the closest thing to an express train that is supposed to help ward off a possible climate catastrophe.
Most climate scientists agree there will be significant global warming over the next century and that steps must be taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the prime suspect in the warming.
The general concepts necessary to put the Kyoto Protocol in place were agreed upon in Bonn last summer at a meeting that included essentially all the world's national governments, with only the United States refusing to sign on.
In Marrakech, concepts will become exact numbers that will set national carbon dioxide emissions levels, credits allowed for having forests that absorb carbon dioxide (sinks), and standards for trading unused portions of emissions quotas.
The procedure for technologically developed countries to get credits offsetting their emissions by investing in technologically developing countries will be specified under the Clean Development Mechanism. The 14-page conceptual political agreement of Bonn will become a 200-plus-page legally binding agreement, once ratified by enough countries. The treaty will attempt to regulate greenhouse gases worldwide for the period of 2008 through 2012.
In perhaps the most contentious portion of the treaty, the compliance section, a penalty for noncompliance would be set in the following treaty period of 2013 to 2017, in the form of an emissions reduction.
According to Michael Zammit Cutajar, executive secretary of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, everything is on track. "I am confident that the political momentum from Bonn will carry through to Marrakech and the remaining work will be successfully accomplished. The Marrakech package of decisions will be a basis, for legislatures that have not done so, to ratify the Kyoto Protocol," Cutajar told United Press International. The Kyoto Protocol has been negotiated under the guidelines of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Cutajar believes once the agreement is finalized, businesses will be motivated to invest in the technologies necessary to move toward a low-carbon economy of the future.
Not everyone shares Cutajar's optimism. Myron Ebell, executive director of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute thinks implementing the Kyoto Protocol is not realistic, even if enough countries ratify the Kyoto Protocol following agreement in Marrakech.
Ebell told UPI: "The road from Kyoto is really a dead-end. ... They may cobble together some kind of agreement in Marrakech, but it seems to me that actually implementing Kyoto and reaching the targets and time tables is politically unfeasible for many countries, including some European Union countries."
Elliot Deringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Va., strongly supports a treaty but echoed Ebell's thoughts.
"They could reach an agreement, but if the decisions aren't the right ones, then the thing might not be able to take off and fly," Deringer told UPI.
Somewhat curiously, the attitude in the U.S. Senate, where any climate treaty would need to be ratified, appears to have changed radically. In 1998, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution saying the United States should not join any climate treaty unless it mandated that technologically developing nations control their greenhouse gas emissions.
But this year, in August, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations unanimously voted out a resolution titled Sense of Congress Relating to Global Warming, that could be seen as supporting U.S. participation in a climate treaty. The House of Representatives passed similar language this May in a State Department appropriations bill, H.R.1646.
But the Senate resolution is part of this year's Foreign Relations Authorization Act and has not been voted on by the full Senate. The Senate resolution recommends reducing greenhouse gases from all sources, pursuing approaches such as emissions trading and sequestration, as well as participating in international negotiations and putting forward a meaningful proposal at Marrakech.
The bill voted out of the Committee on Foreign Relations, S. 1401, says the 1998 Senate resolution "should not be used as an excuse for the United States to abandon its shared responsibility to help find a solution to the global climate change dilemma. ... It is the sense of the United States Congress that the United States should demonstrate international leadership and responsibility in mitigating the health, environmental, and economic threats posed by global warming ... "
That is not going to happen any time soon.
According to a U.S. government official, a delegation will attend Marrakech and essentially take the same approach taken at Bonn -- they will not obstruct, but neither will they join in.
Yet, the official told UPI, "The president is committed to addressing the issue of climate change in a way that protects our environment, consumers and the economy." A cabinet-level review started early this year is still in progress, the official said.
Kevin Baumert, a climate policy specialist at the World Resources Institute in Washington, told UPI while it looks good for an agreement, it is not a done deal.
"The Bonn agreement is a political agreement and although it has the support of every country in the world except the United States, it is somewhat fragile in that some countries such as Japan and Russia have indicated a willingness to entertain alternative U.S. proposals," Baumert said.
In Bonn, Japan was watched closely as the potential spoiler. This time it could be Russia. Japan was able to wrangle some additional credits for forests at Bonn and many observers believe the Russians will attempt to radically increase their forest sink allowance at the Marrakech conference. Increased allowances for forest sinks would translate into hard currency for cash-starved Russia because they would then have more emissions quotas to sell. However, with the United States out for now as a player, the demand for carbon dioxide emissions credits will be lowered and so will the price the Russians could expect to get selling emissions credits.
Russia has lots of emissions to sell because the levels are based on outputs in 1990, before much of Russia's crash in industrial production.
Japan, which was a key player in Bonn -- appearing to some to hold out until the last minute but claiming all along it supported Kyoto -- seems ready to support the treaty. Tsuneyuki Morita, director of the social and environmental systems division at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, told UPI he believes Japan will promote action to ratify the agreement. The entire issue of cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions is taken very seriously in Japan.
The Japanese Ministry of Environment is studying the possibility of a carbon tax as one mechanism to meet its Kyoto goals. The carbon-tax plan is intensely disliked by a number of heavy industries and some politicians.
In 1969, when Crosby, Stills and Nash first sang in their legendary "Marrakech Express," "Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes," it would seem unlikely that they were thinking about the sunset of civilization as we know it, from an overheated world. Yet the song's last line would clearly echo the sentiments of most of the world's governments as regards the Kyoto Protocol meeting in Marrakech this week: "All on board!"
