Kicking the can on climate change surprise! Nations agree to keep talking about emission reductions for another year.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Column

THE NEW CLIMATE CHANGE agreement arduously reached in December at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was widely hailed as a "historic breakthrough." The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action commits all countries for the first time to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly carbon dioxide.

To achieve this goal the signatories have agreed to negotiate "a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force" by 2015.Whatever deal is reached then will have five years to be ratified so that it can come into force by 2020. On its face, this appears to be a significant step in climate change diplomacy. In reality, it's not.

First a bit of history. Under the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, only industrialized countries were required to cut their emissions, by an average of 5 percent below the levels they emitted in 1990. Meanwhile, developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil could continue to emit carbon dioxide by burning coal, gas, and oil to produce the energy needed to fuel their economic growth and reduce poverty.

President Bill Clinton never submitted the Kyoto Protocol to the United States Senate, which had passed a resolution, by a vote of 95 to o, declaring that it would not ratify any treaty that did not cover emissions from competitors like China. On this point American climate diplomacy has never wavered, not even under Barack Obama's administration.

In fact, the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen fell apart precisely because the Obama administration refused to agree to any new treaty governing greenhouse gas emissions that did not impose requirements on the big emerging economies, whose emissions are skyrocketing. Obama knew that trying to get such a treaty ratified back home was a political nonstarter. China refused to make the commitment, so the Copenhagen conference collapsed.

As a face-saving measure, both developed and developing countries made nonbinding pledges with regard to their greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the U.S. set the goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below the levels emitted in 2005, and China offered to reduce its carbon intensity (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar of GDP) by 40 percent to 45 percent from its 2000 level by 2020.Washington's 17 percent emission cut would amount to a reduction of about 4 percent below 1990 levels. Under the Kyoto Protocol the...