Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
What are the standards that determine if a country has
some commitment to action?
What are the rules that relate economic development
to the size of the action that a particular country
should take?
billion people with no access to commercial energy, and
giving them minimal energy from even the worst of the
coal-
Much earlier in this topic I observed that there are
.
red power plants would only increase emissions by
about
%. These people live in the poorest countries, and
it should be possible to set some threshold value of per
capita national GDP before participation becomes the
normal expectation. If this is the mode adopted for exclu-
sion from action, you can bet that those countries part
way up the development ladder will argue to set this
number as high as possible.
For the second part of the question that relates income
to action, I have a vague picture in my mind that is shown
pictorially in
Figure
. The dashed line shows a stabil-
ization trajectory for allowed emission versus time that
will stabilize the atmosphere at
.
ppm. In my picture
the industrialized countries have to reduce their emissions
faster than the developing countries and their commit-
ments to reduction lie in the band below the dashed line,
while the developing countries
commitments are in the
band above. How to set the target for individual countries
will be a dif
'
cult negotiation. Here, I think the European
Union can be a model for all. In Kyoto-
the EU com-
mitment is as a bloc and they determine the individual
allocations within the bloc. There are now
members of
the EU, varying widely in per capita income. The poorest
