Global Treaties Ineffective Against Warming, Experts Say

Nicholas Bakalar
for National Geographic News

September 15, 2005

Wide-ranging international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol may not be
the best ways to battle global warming, according to three California
scientists. Arguing that global treaties are only as effective as their
least willing signatories, the team says that climate change is better
fought from the bottom up.

Countries, regional partnerships, U.S. states, and even individual private firms, the scientists believe, can establish various controls to limit climate-changing activities—and many already have.

There are hundreds of independent policies at work now contributing to the effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of climate change.

The European Union, for example, limits emissions from about 12,000 industrial plants. And the United Kingdom and World Bank have established emissions-credit trading systems. Under these plans plants that exceed emissions limits may buy emissions "credits" from plants that emit relatively little greenhouse gas.

The United States government famously rejects greenhouse gas limitations. The U.S. nevertheless has at least two dozen firms that have imposed their own limits. And the rejection of binding limitations at the federal level has not stopped nine northeastern U.S. states from collaborating on their own plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Lowest Common Denominator

The authors of the new article, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Science, point out that international treaties tend toward the mildest binding measures, since such measures are always the easiest for everyone to agree upon.

The more countries that sign on to a treaty, the less stringent the terms become, because everyone has to be accommodated, the authors say. "A system that originates from the top," they write, "takes the speed of its least ambitious nation."

The authors see a different, and more effective, approach, one that is already underway: Make nonbinding agreements on goals at the international level and let each nation create its own climate-enhancing projects to meet them.

These projects can take various forms: commitments to control emissions, funding for scientific research into cleaner energy sources, or policies that make populations more resistant to climate change, for example.

Not all experts agree that this is the most effective approach.

A. Denny Ellerman is a senior lecturer with the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Invoking Mao Zedong's motto encouraging many ideas from many sources, Ellerman calls the bottom-up tactic the "let a thousand flowers bloom" method, and he remains skeptical.

"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."

Free E-Mail News Updates
Sign up for our Inside National Geographic newsletter. Every two weeks we'll send you our top stories and pictures (see sample).