The climate threat we can beat
The climate threat we can beat / David G. Victor, Charles F. Kennel, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, N° 3, May/June 2012
summary (© Foreign Affairs) :
For too long, climate diplomacy has focused on carbon dioxide. But at least 40 percent of global warming can be blamed on shorter-lived pollutants, which also cause disease and damage crops in developing states. Reining in pollution would thus accomplish two goals, while finally getting countries such as China and India into the climate-change business.
For more than two decades, diplomats have struggled to slow global warming. They have negotiated two major treaties to achieve that goal, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. And last year, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, they agreed to start talking about yet another treaty. A small group of countries, including Japan and the members of the European Union, now regulate their emissions in accord with the existing agreements. But most states, including the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, have failed to make much progress. As a result, total emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading long-term cause of global warming, have risen by more than 50 percent since the 1980s and are poised to rise by more than 30 percent in the next two to three decades…