Europe to trade waste-gas permits

The United States remains the biggest emitter of 'greenhouse gases.'
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Buyers, sellers, brokers and lawyers, even "specialists in carbon asset creation management," will convene Wednesday on the banks of the Rhine to launch a new business for a worried world.
CarbonExpo, in the cavernous congress halls of Cologne, Germany, is a three-day trade fair for those who would deal in carbon dioxide -- buying and selling permits to discharge the waste gas chiefly blamed for global warming.
This carbon trading is a Europe-wide effort to use supply-and-demand to control emissions and protect the climate, in the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol.
But the supply far outstrips demand, Europeans are finding. The climate of this marketplace itself is decidedly cloudy. Advance prices have plunged by half.
"At this point, one shouldn't portray it as a liquid, vibrant market," said Atle C. Christiansen of PointCarbon, a Norway-based research firm.
More than six years after governments negotiated the historic climate accord in Kyoto, Japan, the world is taking only halting steps -- not always forward, never in unison -- to follow through.
In fact, the Kyoto treaty itself is not yet in force, since it hasn't been ratified, as required, by industrial countries emitting a total of 55 percent of "greenhouse gases," such as carbon dioxide, that trap heat in the atmosphere that Earth otherwise would give off.
Here's the concern
Russia's expected accession later this year would clear the 55-percent hurdle. But even a functioning Kyoto agreement would have little impact: Its limited reductions would barely slow the greenhouse buildup, and the biggest emitter, the United States, would remain outside the treaty.
Scientists, meanwhile, grow increasingly concerned.
"If carbon dioxide had a color, if people saw the sky getting darker, people would have no problem recognizing what's going on," said climatologist David Pierce of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
What's going on is that the world's daily output of man-made carbon dioxide, from burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels, is 11 percent greater today than a decade ago.
Under Kyoto, industrial nations were actually supposed to be cutting back greenhouse gas discharges, to 8 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012.
The planet, meanwhile, is warming. Global temperatures rose almost 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1981 to 1998, NASA scientists report.
U.S. politics
As the mercury rose in recent years, so did U.S. political opposition to reducing power-plant and car-exhaust emissions, imposing energy taxes or taking other steps to try to stabilize the atmosphere. Higher energy and other costs would seriously damage the economy, it was said.
Economic analyses ranged widely, from a projected annual cost of $112 per U.S. family to comply with Kyoto, to $2,700 a family, with heavy U.S. job losses.
Environmentalists said dire projections didn't factor in the costs -- to coastal states, agriculture and other sectors -- of doing nothing, or the job growth in new energy industries.
Europe's "cap-and-trade" is by far the biggest and most ambitious.
"We want to demonstrate that this works, using market-based tools," the European Union's environment commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, told The Associated Press.
XThis is the final installment in a three-part series on climate change.
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