Archive by category | Mitigation

Pre-Poznan: China makes the first move

Pre-Poznan: China makes the first move

Though experts have pegged China as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter for well over a year, it was only two weeks ago that the government first openly admitted China’s emissions have caught up with the US (just barely, they insist).  Read more

The wrong trousers

The wrong trousers

There’s an interesting commenary in Nature this week by Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute in Oxford and Gwyn Prins of the LSE, arguing that while emissions abatement is a global priority, the Kyoto Protocol is the wrong tool for the job — a one-size-fits-all approach that, among other failings, doesn’t actually look likely to deliver the reductions that it has promised. Unfortunately, as they argue, this sub-optimal approach has developed an iconic status of its own, so that in many minds to be against Kyoto is tantamount to being against any form of action on climate. They’re worried that this means people will uncritically attempt to follow up the Kyoto protocol (which expires in 2012) with a son-of-Kyoto that contains many or all of the same flaws, when they should be having a much more radical rethink.