Kyoto Protocol: What’s there to celebrate?

Amids celebrations on Kyoto Protocol’s coming into force recently others are equally finding cause for grave concern. A coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs), environmentalists, activists, communities, scientists and economists across the world are mostly concerned about the climate crisis. The Durban Group, for instance, charged that the 1997 climate treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert climate devastation, but steals from the poor to give to the rich.

The Kyoto Protocol says that industrialized country signatories must reduce their emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The group, however, insists that this amount is not enough; it must be what the scientific community has called for which is a global reductions of over 60 percent below the 1990 levels.

What’s more, the carbon trading promoted by the Protocol hands Northern governments and corporations lucrative tradable rights in the use of the Earth’s natural carbon-cycling capacity, effectively stealing a public good away from most of the planet’s inhabitants.

Just last month, Danish power utility Energi E2 sold hundreds of dollars of the rights it had been granted free by its government to Shell after mild temperatures kept the utility’s carbon emissions below expected levels. No such free rights have been granted to ordinary citizens.

Attempt of the Kyoto Protocol to create "carbon dioxide-saving" projects in poorer countries is meanwhile stirring protests from Brazil to Africa. Such projects – which include industrial tree plantations and schemes to burn off landfill gas – are designed to license big emitters in the rich North to go on using fossil fuels. But they usurp land and water ordinary people need for their purposes.

Says Jutta Kill of Sinkswatch, a British-based watchdog organization: "You simply can’t verify whether a power plant’s emissions can be compensated for by tree plantations or other projects. In addition, Kill notes that almost all methods proposed so far to prove show how much carbon is saved by Kyoto’s "carbon saving" projects have been rejected by the United Nations itself. People are beginning to realize that this is ENRON accounting," she says.

It is ironic that the World Bank, which has a mission of entrenching the fossil fuel industry’ is now advertising itself as solving the climate crisis," as Nadia Martinez of the Sustainable and Environment in on Washington.

"If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic reductions in fossil fuel investments and use are inescapable, as is the protection of remaining native forests," confirms Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade Watch. "We’re joining many other movements of Northern and Southern peoples to take the climate back into our hands."