Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
widening of access on the demand side would be necessary to correct the chronic
oversupply.
I would suggest as well a tightening of access on the abatement supply side,
with only least-developed countries having unconditional access. Within this
proposal of mine, other developing countries would have access as suppliers to
the CDM if they chose to do so if they accepted domestically binding emissions
constraints and were living within those constraints without double counting
of abatement for which CDM credits had been awarded. If this approach were
adopted by the international community, international mechanisms would
need to be developed - perhaps through the established arrangements for Joint
Implementation - to monitor double counting of emissions.
There is good and bad news in the story of humanity's struggle to find a basis
for effective collective action on climate mitigation. The early news was never
going to be all good on an issue as complex, difficult and new to the international
community as this one.
The best news is of immense importance: emissions generally seem to be on
paths to meet or exceed the Cancun targets. They are on track to meet or exceed
the pledges even in the cases of China and the United States - the world's
biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, the largest and most influential economies,
and countries whose pledges represent dramatic reductions in established trajec-
tories. Moreover, the achievement of current pledges is being achieved at less
cost than was anticipated by most analysts. Early and widely based progress at
surprisingly low cost establishes sound foundations for a large and early increase
in national mitigation ambition.
Far from reaching a peak in emissions in 2025, as President Bush foreshadowed
in 2007, it now seems that United States emissions reached their highest level
in the year in which the President was speaking and have been declining since
then. It is not a decline in economic activity that dragged emissions down:
United States output last year is now significantly higher than in 2007. The
United States appears to be near a path to meeting its Cancun targets on
emissions reductions (National Resource Defence Council, 2012; Resources for
the Future, 2012).
The European Union is on track to achieve its unconditional target to reduce
emissions by 20 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 (European Environmental
Agency, 2012). Slow economic growth has subdued demand for emissions-
intensive goods and services, but the extent of reduction and the low price of
abatement in the emissions trading scheme suggest that emissions reductions
have been achieved at lower cost than had been anticipated.
In Australia, too, emissions growth has been well below anticipated levels over
recent years, tending around zero, despite the continuation of robust expansion
of population, output and emissions-intensive resource investment for export.
In the electricity sector, stagnant or declining demand has intersected with
increased renewable energy production forced by the renewable energy target to
cause faster decarbonization than had been suggested in early estimates.
