Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol, the world's only legal agreement to fight global warming, survived Copenhagen but its future remains very much in doubt.

The treaty, which binds 37 nations to emissions cuts, is still "an active agreement," but it appears "to be on life support," Erich Pica, executive director of Friends of the Earth USA, told SolveClimate.

The Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen talks failed to resolve the rich-poor impasse over the 1997 protocol.

Instead, the world agreed to "continue its work" on Kyoto until the next climate conference in Mexico in December 2010 — leaving open the possibility of downgrading or replacing it less than a year from now.

At little noticed talks last week in Port Ghalib, Egypt, climate advocates were hoping to seal a global agreement for the phase down of super greenhouse gases and give next month's Copenhagen climate talks a can-do running start. But the annual meeting of the 198 nations of the Montreal Protocol began on a note of contention that five days of discussions could not overcome.

The 22-year-old Montreal Protocol has delivered an unbroken string of successes in the battle against ozone depletion, accomplished with comity and cooperation, but now observers say it has caught the climate virus. Rhetoric trumped getting down to business, as an agreement to rid the world of HFCs, enormously potent global warming gases, was postponed for at least another year.

"We're approaching tipping points fast, and we missed an opportunity to take action this year," said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, who attended the talks in Egypt.

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Developing countries are expressing deep frustration at the attempts by wealthy nations to dissolve the Kyoto Protocol — the world's only existing international legal instrument to cut global warming pollution.

"What emerged [at climate talks in Barcelona Nov. 2-6] is that most developed countries want to kill KP and migrate to a lower-grade agreement," said Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the G-77 plus China.

The implications of this could be serious.

Contrary to popular belief, the Kyoto Protocol does not expire in 2012. A Copenhagen climate agreement in December was originally supposed to build on the existing legal treaty — not supplant it.

When you turn on the AC, what’s cooling you off is heating up the planet.

As temperatures rise, so do air conditioner sales, and what makes most of these 4 billion-plus machines cool indoor environments worldwide are HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), gases with global warming potentials thousands of times greater than CO2.

HFCs started out as environmentally preferable alternatives to ozone-depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons), now being phased out by the Montreal Protocol. Then scientists realized their true global warming potential. HFCs use is now increasing so rapidly that scientists warn that if not curtailed, greenhouse gas impacts of HFCs could undermine other efforts to curb global warming.

HFCs are so potent — atmospherically and politically — that the outcome of ongoing negotiations about their regulation could significantly affect both the rate of global warming and the course of international climate change legislation.

Hydrofluorocarbons – or HFCs – are gases most people have never heard of, even though almost everybody in America has bought their fair share of them.

They come inside cars and air conditioners and refrigerators as the newest gases of choice in cooling systems and are many thousands of times more potent than CO2 as climate warming agents.

Use of these gases is expected to mushroom with rising prosperity in developing nations, and if left unchecked could be equivalent to as much as 45% of CO2 emissions in 2050. It is an invisible emergency within a climate emergency whose outsized contours were confirmed in a scientific paper published last month by the National Academy of Sciences.

The public is barely aware of the issue, though, and as the White House works to hammer out its policy, it seems to want to keep it that way.

As a result, HFCs have become one of the most important sleeper issues in the international climate arena, caught in a Byzantine crossfire of conflicting interests and turf wars both within the administration and outside it. At stake right now is an opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate international leadership and score a big victory for the climate during meetings in Geneva next week. Most stakeholders fear a golden opportunity to build momentum ahead of Copenhagen climate talks will be squandered, even though many see an inspiring victory within easy reach.

"We can take HFCs out before Copenhagen and offer it as Exhibit A to the world to show what can be done to protect the climate," said Durwood Zaelke, founder and president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.

"This is exactly the kind of signal the climate markets need, and the big question now is what will the U.S. do."

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From the AFP’s Baghdad desk:

Iraq has formally ratified the UN's Kyoto Protocol on climate change, according to a government statement seen by AFP on Saturday.

No one, however, has been able to confirm the rumor that Iraq's presidential council worked overtime to pass the measure in time for President Bush to include the news in his State of the Union address last night. Which he didn't.

Oh well.