Branches of international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 159

Soon after the Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into
force, it became evident that the treaty system must be made tighter by defi n-
ing binding emission reduction targets for the industrial countries. The Kyoto
Protocol was accepted with strong support from the administration of US
President Bill Clinton (his Vice President was Al Gore, who has since focused
his career on working against climate change, and has become Nobel Peace
Prize laureate). Meanwhile, the US Senate warned the Clinton administration
that the USA should not accept binding emission reductions unless developing
countries are bound to equivalent obligations.
The Kyoto Protocol was constructed on the Framework Convention on
Climate Change: the countries listed in Annex I committed to legally binding
emission reductions. The parties did not have to implement all the reductions
in their own countries; fl exibility mechanisms gave them the opportunity to
implement emission reductions where it was least expensive. The idea was that
industrial activities in many developed countries were highly energy-effi cient
and caused comparatively low greenhouse gas emissions, so that it would be
less expensive to implement the reductions in developing countries or in
Eastern European transition economies, while the impact on climate change
would be at least as great.
The 'clean development mechanism' (CDM) allowed an industrial country
the opportunity to implement a project in a developing country, as long as it
could prove that the project actually reduced greenhouse gases and promoted
sustainable development. Joint implementation (JI) was a model by which a
country was able to implement a project in a country listed in Annex I (generally
Eastern European transient economies) so that the project actually reduced
greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions trading for its part allowed countries to
sell and buy emission reductions if their own quotas were used up or if they
had something to sell.
The detailed rules to defi ne the general rules in the Kyoto Protocol were
adopted by non-binding decisions of the meeting of the parties in Marrakesh -
the Marrakesh Accords. The Kyoto Protocol provided the authorization to
adopt these decisions.
For a long time, it seemed that the Kyoto Protocol would never enter into
force, as in 2001 the George W. Bush administration withdrew the USA from
the Protocol, and other big greenhouse gas emitters hesitated. 26 Finally, after
ratifi cation by Russia, the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, and its fi rst
meeting of the parties took place in Montreal in 2005. The next emission
reduction period should have been negotiated but this has been continually
postponed from meeting to meeting. In 2007, the Bali Roadmap was accom-
plished, with the ambitious objective to improve the treaty system and to
include both the United States and the major developing nations in the joint
work towards reducing emissions.
The 2009 Copenhagen Conference failed badly to achieve this objective,
however, and the USA led the creation of the last-minute non-binding