"It sounds appealing to say that everyone will do positive things," he said. "But are they really doing them or just claiming they are? Acting together is fine, but what are we agreeing to do? That's the problem.
"How do you develop some sort of standard and structure beyond just voluntarism?" Ellerman said.
International Treaties: Symbolism Over Substance?
David G. Victor is the lead author on the new paper and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He says that the grassroots approach is less a recommendation than a description of what is in fact happening.
"The real heavy lifting," he said, "gets done by national governments and markets, not international treaties." These treaties are not irrelevant, but they don't push nations into changing their behavior. Instead, he said, they "codify what is already happening at the ground level."
For this reason, Victor believes, signing onto the Kyoto Protocol is more symbolic that substantive, and focusing too much on such all-encompassing international agreements could be harmful.
There are 190 nations participating in the Kyoto process, but "the vast majority—about 170—play only tiny roles in the climate problem and its solution," he said. Many of the major signatories, like Saudi Arabia, "are actually opposed to any effective scheme that would tame the use of fossil fuels," Victor said.
Focusing on the Future
The answer, he said, is to "focus instead on real actions inside the countries that have the strongest interest to address the problem, and the result will be a much more effective climate regime."
But Victor is not optimistic. "There are too many vested interests in the treaty approach—and Kyoto in particular," he said.
The Kyoto Protocol will continue this fall, when the next round of negotiations will be aimed at creating a treaty that will come into effect in 2012, when the current treaty expires. "So far," Victor said, "most signals suggest that the diplomats will simply repeat what they did in Kyoto."
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