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that “no regrets” had been mobilized to protect. Pushed by the European
Union, the Berlin Mandate also specifically exempted developing-world
parties from the 1997 targets. Byrd-Hagel made it clear that the Senate
would reject a treaty based on the Berlin Mandate. This left the United
States and the European Union struggling to bring the developing world
on board with binding commitments, but here again congressional politics
tied negotiators' hands. The State Department fiasco had demonstrated
that any plan for significant new development aid would fail in the Senate,
robbing the U.S. negotiating team of its one major incentive— a financial
one— for luring the developing world into some form of commitment.
Meanwhile, the American public (with some coaching from congressio-
nal conservatives and antitreaty groups like the Global Climate Coalition
and the Global Climate Information Project) had all but rejected anything
smacking of a “carbon tax,” and the newly signed North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) severely limited other legal and regulatory
mechanisms for enforcing emissions reductions. 64 For Eizenstat, things
did not look good.
Ironically, it was from this impossible position that the U.S. negoti-
ating team helped to devise the flexibility mechanisms that earned the
Kyoto Protocol the international support it eventually enjoyed. The first
of these, called joint implementation, allowed Annex I countries to meet
emissions reductions standards by investing in greenhouse gas reductions
in other Annex I countries (typically the “economies in transition” eventu-
ally listed in Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol). In part, this was a response
to the European Union's demands that Europe be allowed to reduce its
emissions as a collective unit. Perhaps more important, joint implementa-
tion provided a sort of global no-regrets framework that gave all nations
the incentive to address least-cost options for emissions reductions.
The second flexibility mechanism, the clean development mechanism,
provided for a similar least-cost approach to reducing developing-world
emissions. Under the CDM, Annex I countries could meet their domestic
targets by investing in emissions reductions and sustainable development
programs in developing-world nations that had no specific responsibilities
under the Kyoto Protocol. Much of this investment would come in the form
of “technology transfer,” whereby the industrialized world would replace
inefficient technologies and industrial processes with new and more effi-
cient methods and machines. Like joint implementation, the CDM gave
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