Russia and Its Neighbors - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 229

access for commercial logging. These boreal forests take a hundred years
to mature. The new towns, rail yards, and factories polluted the rivers.
In recent years Russians have cut large amounts of timber in Siberia
for export, chiefly to China and Japan. Furniture made from this wood is
exported to the United States. Up to half of the trees are cut illegally, with
no attention to whether the forests can sustain the harvesting of these
slow-growing forests. Opposition has come from the Bureau for Regional
Oriental Campaigns, a nongovernmental organization.
In 1992 at the time the Framework Convention on Climate Change was
being negotiated prior to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, Russia (as well
as the other former Soviet republics) sat on the sidelines, preoccupied with
its radical internal changes. At Rio, Russia officially became one of the
Annex I industrial countries, and at Kyoto became one of the Annex B
industrial countries. Unintentionally, Russia and Ukraine gained a great
benefit because the targets were calibrated according to carbon diox-
ide emissions as of 1990, and the economic output of the former USSR
declined rapidly after that year. The advantage for Russia and Ukraine
could not be anticipated at the time because no one predicted that their
economies would decline so much. This surplus in quotas, to become
known as “hot air,” did not help the other 13 republics very much because
their level of industrialization was much less.
After President Bush reneged on the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, Russian
ratification became crucial, for without it the participating parties would
not account for 55% of emissions, the minimum required for it to go into
force. Russia produced 17% of the world total. Finally, in 2004 it signed
the Kyoto Protocol in return for the promise of the Western Europeans
to support its admission to the World Trade Organization. This allowed
the protocol to go into effect. The ironic result of this cyclical bargain
was nothing. The World Trade Organization did not admit Russia, and
the protocol coming into force turned out to be only a formality. Indeed,
Russia was not admitted to the WTO for another eight years.
Although the protocol was officially in force, the cooperation of the
industrial countries weakened. Even countries like England, Germany, and
France, which claimed they would reduce greenhouse gases, did little to
meet their goals. Others like Spain and Italy actually increased their emis-
sions. President Medvedev attended the climate summit in Copenhagen in
2009, pledging a cut of 25% compared to the Kyoto Protocol limits based
on 1990 emissions. In fact, this was phony because the economic collapse
of the 1990s meant Russia was far below the limits.