Kyoto Protocol Climate Conference on Global Warming Issues

1997, at the Conference of Parties III (COP3), Kyoto, Japan, the Kyoto conference on climate change took place. There, developed countries agreed to specific targets for cutting their emissions of greenhouse gases. A general framework was defined for this, with specifics to be detailed over the next few years. This became known as the Kyoto Protocol.

The US proposed to just stabilize emissions and not cut them at all, while the European Union called for a 15% cut. In the end, there was a trade off, and industrialized countries were committed to an overall reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases to 5.2% below 1990 levels for the period 2008 - 2012. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its 1990 report that a 60% reduction in emissions was needed.

However, there were many political factors involved during the conference and many industries such as oil and coal had a huge campaign to discredit the conference.

Leading up to the conference, during it, and since, big corporations with financial interests at stake have had a lot of influence in the outcome and on the media. A lot of primarily industry arguments against the Kyoto conference and Global Warming in general, claim that it will hurt the global (or USA's) economy and affect people's jobs.

Some of the well-respected scientists claiming that Global Warming is a myth have been sponsored in some way by various commercial interests as well.

Yet as the Kyoto Climate Change Conference ended in what Greenpeace has termed "a tragedy and a farce", the planet's temperature continues to rise.

At the end of March 2001, U.S. President George Bush said that he "opposed the Kyoto Protocol." One of the reasons he cited was because India and China would not be subject to Kyoto measures and would increase their emissions. Yet he ignored that on a per capita basis, India and China's emissions are far less than the United States, which is the worst. Furthermore, the U.S. for over 20 to 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, for just 4 to 5 percent of the world's population. Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment provide quite an explosive critique of Bush's claims:

In fact, these "population centres" which Bush refers to [in his March 2001 announcement] make an insignificant contribution of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, since they have extremely low per capita emissions. The US, on the other hand, contributes to one-fourth of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. The total carbon dioxide emissions from one US citizen in 1996 were 19 times the emissions of one Indian. US emissions in total are still more than double those from China. At a time when a large part of India's population does not even have access to electricity, Bush would like this country to stem its 'survival emissions', so that industrialised countries like the US can continue to have high 'luxury emissions'. This amounts to demanding a freeze on global inequity, where rich countries stay rich, and poor countries stay poor, since carbon dioxide emissions are closely linked to GDP growth.