Government ministers are meeting at a UN conference in Bali, Indonesia, to try to launch talks on a successor to the
Kyoto pact to be concluded by 2009, which would allow three years for ratification before the existing pact expires.
The protest marked the start of the
Kyoto pact to fight global warming.
Japan in talks with Romania on emissions trading under
Kyoto pactEver since the US backed out of the
Kyoto pact after Pres Bush took office in 2001, Russia has held the treaty's fate in its hands.
When he became president, he promptly rejected the
Kyoto pact on climate change, which has been approved by more than 170 nations and mandates reductions of greenhouse gases.
Japan will push for the conclusion of the
Kyoto pact on global warming without revisiting the controversies that almost derailed the negotiations in Bonn last July, according to a Japanese position paper for U.N.
Then (if the
Kyoto pact is ratified)...they will also have access to high-quality carbon sequestration benefits under Kyoto's flexibility mechanisms.''
Using a mix of financial incentives, regulatory changes, and market measures, the report says, the United States could reduce emissions by 14 percent from 1990 levels, double the goal mandated by the
Kyoto pact. And last year the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that the United States can meet its emissions-reduction goals with no net impact to the economy and actually stands to prosper from "technologies that will become increasingly important in the 21st century."
What has likely condemned the
Kyoto pact to the fate of the still-unsigned biodiversity treaty was its failure to get developing countries to agree to binding targets.
If revisions to the
Kyoto pact cannot be achieved, delegates may seek to adopt a decision at the talks that would set emissions cut targets for developed countries, a compromise that would not be legally binding and therefore unlikely to satisfy developing countries.
The existing
Kyoto pact obliges industrialised nations to cut emissions until 2012, and the idea behind the Copenhagen talks is to get action from all major emitters, including China and India, which were exempt from the Kyoto agreement.
The leaders will be meeting in Singapore a month ahead of global climate talks in Copenhagen to thrash out a successor to the
Kyoto pact.
