This week 5,400 delegates from 189 countries gather in Buenos Aires for what’s called COP 10, or officially, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) 10th Conference of the Parties. The purpose is to combat climate change and it was this conference that spawned the Kyoto Protocol. COP 10′s official website is here.

There is little media coverage of the conference here in the states, aside from NPR and alternative sources, but it’s certainly worth following. Tech Central Station host James Glasson is convinced that “global warming extremists” are “on the run.” He cites Michael Crichton’s new book State of Fear, which Eric Seymour recently discussed at ITA, as one reason why. Duane Freese labels it “confusion.” No matter what take you have on the developments, though, you can be sure the United States will not be adopting the Protocol. As such, the focus should turn to more realistic agreements the conference will agree to as a whole.

One focus will be a proposal called “contraction and convergence” (C&C) which aims to set an appropriate level to which greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be allowed to rise and then allocate the right to emit carbon on a per capita basis. Over time, to achieve convergence, each year’s ration of the global carbon emissions budget for each country progressively converges to the same allocation per person until they become equal at some future date. This will allow poor countries more freedom to use carbon energy sources to fuel further economic development.

This probably isn’t a view shared much on a libertarian blog, but the C&C appears to be a relatively sensible solution to global carbon emissions. The devil is in the details that have yet to be worked out. Here is a State Department summation of official Bush policies to address climate change. Hopefully the US and other states can come to a more cooperative agreement that is void of the unfairness inherent in the Kyoto Protocol.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 at 4:53 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.