Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
for energy, but the poor cannot, and cost considerations
will be important to energy choices in the developing
world. If the rich countries would pay more attention to
developing cost-effective, emission-free energy, we would
make much more progress in reducing emission than we
are making now.
.
Emission Targets
Global warming sneaked up on the world because of
greenhouse gas emissions in the last century whose effects
we did not begin to understand until recently. We still
have much to learn, but have learned enough to realize
that the nations of our world have to begin some sort of
collective action to bring global warming under control.
The
, set what
was to be a binding commitment by the richer countries
that signed it to reduce their emissions to roughly
first attempt, the Kyoto Protocol of
%
below their
, the original expir-
ation date of the Protocol. Meeting the commitment
requires that the average emissions during the
emissions by
years
from
be at or below the target. Most of
the signatories failed to make their agreed goal, but there
will be bene
to
ts in showing what kinds of things do not
work. I will come back to Kyoto and the reasons for its
failure and how we might do better in the later sections on
policy.
It is possible for the scientists to set an emissions goal
that stabilizes the climate at some new and higher tem-
perature relative to the preindustrial average tempera-
ture. As we saw in
Chapter
there is still much
uncertainty in how high the temperature will go for
