Kyoto’s primary mechanism for trading emissions, the CDM, has been the victim of such corruption. It allows participating countries to purchase emissions reductions made by manufacturers in poor nations. Perversely, the CDM led to the expansion, rather than reduction, of trifluoromethane (HFC-23), a by-product of manufacturing refrigerant gases, which is a greenhouse gas 12,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Developing-nation manufacturers, particularly in China, were paid 4.7 billion euros–two-thirds of all the payments into the CDM to 2012–to cut HFC emissions, even though manufacturing refrigerants without HFC-23 cost manufacturers just 100 million Euros, generating 4.6 billion euros in profits. In other words, the CDM gave Chinese companies an incentive to produce HFC-23, so that they could sell off cuts in its production later.

Kyoto’s other structural flaw is that it is focused on future emissions reduction targets rather than immediate action. In 1997, just weeks before Vice President Al Gore flew to Kyoto to negotiate the agreement, the Senate preemptively rejected, by a vote of 95 to zero, any treaty that would not require emissions reductions from developing nations or that would harm the U.S. economy. To give the Clinton Administration cover with Congress, Gore negotiated emissions targets that were weaker than what the European delegation and American environmentalists wanted. The modified accord, then, would reduce emissions by just 5.2 percent, instead of 15 percent, by 2012, and it would allow wealthy nations to purchase emissions reductions from developing nations. Gore and his team were so focused on establishing binding emissions targets that they ended up with the worst of both worlds: The treaty was both ecologically irrelevant and politically impossible.

The combination of low targets and a Byzantine international trading scheme meant that the global community could, for 10 years, merrily march forth under the illusion that meaningful steps were being taken to reduce carbon emissions. But during that time global emissions rose, unaffected by Kyoto. While the formal Kyoto compliance period, which runs from 2008 to 2012, has only just begun, it appears likely that almost all of the wealthy developed nations that ratified the treaty will either have failed to meet those targets altogether or will meet them by purchasing emissions reduction credits from other nations that are often of dubious legitimacy, as the deliberate production of HFC-23 showed.

Setting emissions targets and trading allowances pushes the day of reckoning into the future and does not require a nation to decommission a single coal-fired power plant or build a single wind farm today. And yet Kyoto proponents continue to conflate agreements on emissions reduction targets with actual actions to reduce emissions. In Europe, for example, the German government calls for aggressive emissions reductions targets while, at the same time, protecting its automobile manufacturers from tougher emissions requirements. Kyoto allows governments to blithely agree to reduce emissions in the future while subsidizing fossil fuels and protecting domestic industry in the here and now.

The Energy-Technology Gap

For 20 years, environmentalists and others have insisted that addressing climate change won’t be that hard or expensive. "We have the technology," insisted Al Gore last February. "If we just had one week’s worth of what we spend on the Iraq war we could be well on our way to solving this challenge." But the $2 billion we spend in one week on Iraq is actually a paltry sum–about the cost of a single new coal plant that captures and stores its emissions in a world of thousands of coal plants–and thus nowhere near enough to get started on, much less solve, the energy challenge.

When energy experts and climate scientists talk about reducing global emissions 50 percent by 2050–or U.S. emissions 80 percent–they are referring to what they believe will be required to "stabilize" atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 2050. The goal is to stabilize at 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide by 2050, the level that scientists believe is needed to prevent the melting of ice caps over West Antarctica and Greenland.

To help policy makers better understand how much carbon emissions must be reduced to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at 500 parts per million, the IPCC creates different estimates, or scenarios, for how much emissions are expected to rise between now and 2050. In 2004, the world emitted about seven billion metric tons of carbon, and the UN’s high estimate of emissions for 2050 is about double that. Thus, reducing emissions 50 percent from "business as usual" (BAU)–the baseline estimate for emissions absent action–means reducing emissions from 14 billion to seven billion metric tons. After stabilizing emissions in 2050, the world would need to keep reducing emissions until 2100, when emissions would need to be at something close to 90 percent of their BAU.

In 2004, two Princeton professors, Rob Socolow and Steven Pacala, wrote an article for Science that broke down this seven-billion-ton challenge into seven "wedges"–so named because of the triangular shape those reductions have on a graph. One gigaton wedges include ending all tropical deforestation and doubling the current rate of reforestation worldwide; doubling the number of nuclear power plants in the world; increasing 50-fold the number of wind turbines; and increasing 700 times the number of solar panels. Simply meeting one of the seven would be a Herculean task. In Socolow’s words, "There is no easy wedge."

A few months after Gore stated that a week’s worth of Iraq war spending would be sufficient to address the technology challenge, a spate of new analyses published in leading scientific journals revealed that the IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, had drastically underestimated the emissions-reduction challenge: Faster-than-expected economic growth and accelerated coal-burning in Asia make the challenge of stabilizing emissions at least twice as large as predicted. The global economy, they found, is "re-carbonizing"–meaning that the amount of carbon per unit of global GDP is increasing, not decreasing.

As a consequence, all six future emissions scenarios in the IPCC report, and the scenario used in Socolow and Pacala’s wedge analysis, probably greatly underestimate the challenge, as they are in part based on assumptions that the decarbonization trend over the last several decades in the United States and Europe (moving from coal and toward natural gas, nuclear, renewables, and increased efficiency) would continue globally. But developing nations like China and India, and their rapid creation of a fossil-fuel energy infrastructure, has reversed this trend.

The technology challenge is thus more than twice as large as was thought. As many as 18 stabilization wedges, not seven, may be needed, according to energy expert Marty Hoffert, a New York University physicist, who challenged Socolow and Pacala’s numbers in a special issue of Scientific American in 2006. Against Gore’s claim that "we have the technology," it’s notable that Socolow and Pacala, in their famous analysis, were only able to come up with 15 ways to cut emissions enough to constitute a one gigaton wedge. The problem is considerably more urgent than even Gore has warned.

While we do not have all the technologies or strategies we need to stabilize the climate, that does not mean we should not get started using what we have now. We should. But we must proceed from the recognition that many of the technologies we have today exist in nascent form and most are far more expensive than today’s fossil fuels. Several, like solar and wind, are intermittent and far from cities and industrial centers, thus requiring costly storage and transmission lines. Others, like carbon capture and storage, appear promising but have yet to be widely demonstrated.

Advocates of Kyoto-style regulation point out that when environmental (and other) regulations are established, industries quickly and cost-effectively adapt. This was the case with automobile-tailpipe emissions, smokestack scrubbers, and seat belts. To be sure, some actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, such as efficiency and conservation measures, will actually save companies money. But these steps, while important, will not result in the deep reductions that scientists estimate will be necessary to stabilize the climate. Indeed, the most-often cited study on the potential of energy efficiency and conservation to reduce carbon emissions, the Department of Energy’s "Five-Labs Study," found that with the perfect implementation of both strong efficiency and conservation regulations, and a $50 per ton price for carbon (a price that far exceeds most proposals currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress), U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced at most by 22.5 percent, a far cry from the 80 percent reduction scientists say we need by 2050. Subsequent studies have offered somewhat more optimistic estimates of the potential of efficiency and conservation policies, but few place that potential at greater than 30 percent.