Despite global agreements to act on climate change, carbon emissions continue to rise. Is politics to blame? Read the first of our EconClimateBriefs and share your thoughts
scientists, environmental activists and politicians gathered in Toronto for a “World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere”. The aspect of its changing that alarmed them most was the build-up of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. In the late 1950s, when systematic monitoring of the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide level began, it stood at around 315 parts per million . By that summer, it had reached 350ppm—and a heatwave was bringing record temperatures to much of North America.
To many convinced environmentalists that shift seems self-evidently worthwhile. It fits with an ideology that commits them to lives that have less impact on the natural world. But in the face of climate change, individual willingness to sacrifice the fruits of a high-energy lifestyle is not enough. People, and countries, that do not share such motivations must act, too.
The second was that the Montreal protocol required remarkable faith in science. Unlike most pollution controls, which try to reduce harm already being done, it called for expensive action to deal with a problem that, despite the dramatic discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, was not yet hurting people. It was based instead on the likelihood of future catastrophe.
Specific emission cuts were agreed upon five years after Rio, in Kyoto. They were not global in extent, applying only to developed countries, which were responsible for most of the emissions. They were not ambitious either. And the Kyoto protocol was never ratified by America, then the largest global emitter.universal legitimacy. But fashioning a treaty that all could accept had meant producing one with little practical power.
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