The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty, which extends the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits State Parties to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, based on the premise that (a) global warming exists and (b) man-made CO2 emissions have caused it.
the Harvard scientists and economists who study climate change express almost universal criticism of the accord, which they fault as economically inefficient, unobjective, inequitable, andworst of allineffective. And they point out that the protocol fails to include the largest future sources of CO2 emissions. China, for example, will pass the U.S. in annual emissions of CO2 by 2013, according to Boas professor of international economics Richard N. Cooper. Another projection suggests that, by 2050, China's cumulative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere will exceed those of the United States.
The original agreement outlined in Kyoto committed individual countries to reduce their CO2 emissions to below-1990 levels. But the choice of 1990 immediately introduced inequities into the ensuing political process to determine who should cut how much, says Butler professor of environmental science Michael B. McElroy.
