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Shifting UN Carbon Trade Would Kill Kyoto, Dartmouth Fellow Says
2010-12-08 22:12:34.795 GMT
By Mathew Carr
Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- 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.
For Related News and Information:
EU carbon-market stories TNI EU ENVMARKET <GO>
Today's top energy, environment news ETOP <GO>, GREEN <GO>
--Editors: Reed Landberg
To contact the reporter on this story:
Mathew Carr in London at +44-20-7073-3531 or
m.carr@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephen Voss at +44-20-7073-3520 or sev@bloomberg.net
