Let's face it: the Kyoto Protocol has been a dismal failure. Riddled with loopholes like "carbon credits" that let rich countries off the hook from cutting back their domestic emissions, it was nonetheless decried as unfair by big polluters in those same countries, who lobbied against it so well that it took 7 years to be ratified by a quorum of signatory nations. Even then, its emissions targets are a fraction of those needed to meet its stated goal of "preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". With Kyoto being renegotiated amid dire news about the already-observed and projected effects of climate change, a fundamental rethink is imperative.

Kyoto stands in total contrast to its forerunner, the Montreal Protocol, which former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reportedly called "Perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date". Indeed, by eliminating ozone-depleting chemicals which are also greenhouse gases, the Montreal Protocol has actually had more impact on climate change than several Kyotos [1].

One critical difference between the two protocols - which may partly account for this difference - is the fact that Montreal regulates _production_, not _emission_, of CFCs. Imagine a Montreal-style treaty which allows industry to produce CFCs in unlimited quantities, but makes governments responsible for ensuring that they don't get released into the atmosphere: doubtless such a treaty would rival Kyoto in its worthlessness. Montreal works because it targets the manufacturing of CFCs, the only stage of the process where regulation can be effective. Even so, continued manufacture of illegal CFCs represents a serious problem [2]

Kyoto, on the other hand, set itself an impossible goal: to regulate the entire carbon cycle of the planet Earth, a vastly complex and often poorly-understood set of both natural and artificial processes; and to do so at the level of _emissions_, a globally distributed anti-bottleneck in the system. Not since the days of King Canute - or the Indiana House of Representatives' 1897 attempt to legislate for the value of pi - has there been such a hubristic mismatch between governments' ambitions and their capabilities.

To successfully halt climate change - and failure to do so is a prospect awful to contemplate - government action must be clear, effective and foolproof. Using Montreal as a model, an effective successor to Kyoto could be a treaty which regulates countries' rights to _manufacture_ the substances mainly responsible for climate change: in effect, mandating substantial cuts in worldwide extraction of fossil fuels. This would not correct all the anthropogenic imbalances in the Earth's climate system - but it would deal with the lion's share and, more to the point, unlike Kyoto, it would be clear, unequivocal, and probably work. Other treaties on other aspects of the problem might also be necessary - why should one document be expected to do everything?

Of course this would be difficult to achieve, since it amounts to mandating a global economic crisis - or if you believe the predictors of "peak oil", exacerbating one which is already upon us. But the effects of such a crisis would be minor compared with the likely impacts of climate change, and there is at least one example - Cuba - of a nation that has successfully navigated major cuts in fossil fuel use, while largely maintaining its quality of life . This is largely a matter of people's willingness to work together for sustainability - and we are more likely to do so if we voluntarily jump off the oil cliff than if we are pushed.

What is necessary, then, is that enough fossil-fuel-producing nations should be convinced that it is in their own (and the world's) best interest to become fossil-fuel-_stewarding_ nations instead: keeping their reserves underground where they are now, to be extracted later when more is known about how much we can safely burn, and how best to use it. In fact, given rising trends in oil prices, this approach may be economically justified for the countries in question, quite apart from considerations of climate change; or there may be climate-concerned investors who are willing to pay countries to artificially limit their production, either buying the oil, gas or coal itself (with the intent of leaving it in the ground), or purchasing options on its production that expire at a certain date in the future. But whatever happens, citizens concerned about climate change need to wake up to the fact that we can't afford to rely on scientifically dubious carbon offsetting or sequestration, or on bending over backwards to limit our own emissions in the naive hope that the rest of the world will follow suit. The only safe place for the world's remaining stocks of fossil fuels is to stay where they belong - underground.



[1] "Plugging the ozone hole cut global warming too", New Scientist, 05 March 2007

[2] "Illegal CFCs imperil the ozone layer", New Scientist, 17 December 2005.

[3] "World failing on sustainable development," New Scientist, 03 October 2007.