Shifting UN Carbon Trade Would Kill Kyoto, Dartmouth Fellow Says
Shifting the legal underpinning of United Nations carbon markets out of the Kyoto Protocol would kill the world’s only multilateral climate-protection agreement, said a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.
Canada, Japan and Russia may be suggesting the Clean Development Mechanism and the Joint Implementation programs, which create carbon credits for use in Europe and beyond, should be shifted into a different track of the UN climate talks, said Jerome Whitington from the Climate Justice Research Project at the college in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The markets were set up by the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in Japan in 1997. While developing nations led by China, India and Brazil want to renew Kyoto’s restrictions on greenhouse gases once the current limits expire in 2012, Japan, Russia and Canada don’t want to renew the treaty. The U.S. never signed it.
Whitington said carbon markets might be shifted into another track of the UN climate talks supported by the U.S. and known as the Long-term Co-operative Action stream.
That “would be a deathknell for Kyoto,” Whitington said today in an interview in Cancun, Mexico. “Kyoto is the one thing that is keeping negotiations sane” because it includes binding targets that have a chance of curbing climate change, he said.
The CDM is the world’s second biggest carbon market after the European Union cap-and-trade program.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mathew Carr in London at m.carr@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net
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