Ziptrek Ecotours

Economy Vs. Environment

May 2009

Delegates from around the world will gather for the United Nations Climate Change Conference next December in Copenhagen. This gathering will produce a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1992 and will expire in 2012. It is hard to decide whether a renewed sense of urgency or a resigned sense of futility is in order, given the poor record of most participating countries in meeting their Kyoto targets for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

So far, the most effective way for a Kyoto signatory to cut its carbon output has been to suffer a well-timed industrial implosion, as Russia did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. The Kyoto benchmark year is 1990, when the smokestacks of the Soviet military-industrial complex were still blackening the skies, so when Vladimir Putin ratified the protocol, in 2004, Russia was already certain to meet its goal for 2012. What other countries have the best emission-reduction records on paper? Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic were all parts of the Soviet Empire and therefore look good for the same reason.

Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but is not faring as well as its Eastern European counterparts. Our Kyoto target is a six-per-cent reduction from 1990 levels. By 2006 however, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on climate initiatives, our greenhouse-gas output had increased to a hundred and twenty-two percent of the goal, and our government considers the target “impossible”.

Is prosperity the biggest obstacle to greenhouse gas emissions? The recession makes that relationship easy to see. Gasoline consumption fell almost six percent in the U.S. in 2008. That was not the result of a greening of the American consciousness but the rapid rise in the price of oil in the first half of the year followed by the economic collapse.

If nothing else, the ongoing global economic crisis has put a little time back on the carbon clock.  Because the climate change done by greenhouse gases is cumulative, the emissions decrease attributable to the recession has given the world a bit more room to devise a plan that might actually work. Hopefully we can find the road to a carbon reduced prosperity.