Although rumors of its death may be exaggerated, the Kyoto Protocol hasn’t so far been anyone’s idea of a rip-roaring success. The question remains: is the international treaty fundamentally flawed, or is it a fixer-upper that bureaucrats are slowly tweaking into an effective carbon-fighting regulatory framework?
Two pieces of recent evidence boost the fixer-upper view. The first is a report from a prominent research group suggesting that a large part of the European Union’s drop in carbon emissions last year are attributable to the cap.
EU emissions dropped by 3 percent in 2008. According to New Carbon Finance, 40 percent of this drop is due to Kyoto. Another 30 percent is due to the recession. Much of the drop came from a switchover from coal to natural gas.
To be sure, this is a modest improvement. The drop itself is small, and natural gas is still a fossil fuel. Nevertheless, this is how a carbon price works: gradual, steady pressure yields incremental movement toward cleaner technologies. The mechanism appears to be sound, and legislators are presently engaged in the political task of making the cap more stringent.
The second piece of evidence is a study showing that green patent counts are rising in countries that have adopted Kyoto. In the long term, innovation is crucial to defeating climate change.
Innovation is also notoriously hard to measure. Researchers have long used patent counts as an imprecise gauge of how much effort is being put into applied technology development. And by that measure, Kyoto seems to have coincided with a burst of clean-tech innovation in member countries:
City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks
Comments
View as Flat
Charles Komanoff Posted 3:26 am
23 Feb 2009
I already rebutted the "report from a prominent research group suggesting that a large part of the European Union's drop in carbon emissions last year are attributable to the cap." I pointed out that the EU's drop was scarcely more than ours, which was done without any cap-and-trade, and that any difference was probably due to unrelated factors such as a bigger percentage gain in wind power generation. I also noted that the "prominent research group" sponsoring the key finding has an interest in carbon markets and is thus hardly impartial.
The other notion here, re more intense innovation in Kyoto signatories, suffers from classic conflation of correlation into causation. A host of other causes could be at work, most likely the possibility that nations which signed the treaty already had a greater cultural and economic bent toward climate sustainability that has manifested in greater green innovation during the past decade in which climate has become a pressing concern.
Sorry to be the proverbial you-know-what at the garden party, but can we all join hands and raise our analytical standards just a little bit?
Charles
http://www.komanoff.net
Permalink
Adam Stein Posted 11:09 pm
23 Feb 2009
I'm curious: did you actually read the reports?
(I also have to say: your explanation of the patent trend in Kyoto-signatory countries is, well, beyond lame. These countries have a "cultural bent" toward climate sustainability, so starting in 2000 they began patenting a bunch of stuff? That's some serious analytical standards you got there.)
www.terrapass.com/blog
Permalink