SAVING KYOTO: An Insider’s Guide to the Kyoto Protocol

SAVING KYOTO: An Insider’s Guide to the Kyoto Protocol
By Graciela Chichilnisky and Kristen A. Sheeran
Publisher: New Holland Publishers
Price: $14.95 / trade paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-84773-431-0


“Graciela Chichilnisky’s leadership in the global community, in producing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global climate change, has been revolutionary.”
-Jay Inslee, Member of the United States House of Representatives

HOW CAN WE AVOID A GLOBAL CATASTROPHE OF CLIMATE CHANGE?

World-Renowned Economist And Advocate For The Planet, Graciela Chichilnisky, Has The Answer – Saving The Kyoto Protocol

Imagine a world where great cities such as New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Mumbai are under water. A world where hurricanes, heat waves, and tsunamis are common place, and where droughts, famine, and disease are prevalent. We may not be faced with such disasters in our lifetime – however, this is the world we may be giving to our children and grandchildren. The increase in the earth’s surface temperate – known as global warming – has been a controversial topic among politicians, scientists, economists, and doomsayers for years. Global warming is said to lead to catastrophic climate change – a threat so serious, that an international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was created to combat global warming.

In SAVING KYOTO, Graciela Chichilnisky and Kristen Sheeran describe the dangerous road the world is on as climate change progresses, and explain why the Kyoto Protocol is so important.

The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in December 1997 and came into force in February 2005. It is a legally binding agreement under which industrialized countries must lower their emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990. Sounds like a positive goal. . . except that the main provisions of this treaty that limit carbon emissions are set to expire in 2012, and the United States never ratified the original agreement.

An eye-opening book, SAVING KYOTO, examines how the problem of global warming and climate change arose and what the international efforts have been to confront the crisis.

Co-author Chichilnisky worked extensively on the Kyoto Protocol’s main feature, creating and designing the “carbon market,” which is expected to become the largest commodity market in the world. This market, already worth over $60 billion annually, enables countries to meet their greenhouse gas emission targets by buying and selling emission allowances and reduction credits. Thus, it makes it costly to emit and profitable to be green, for the first time in history. This changes the value of energy and production in the entire world economy.

Other issues examined in SAVING KYOTO include:

How to reconcile the disparity between industrialized and developing nations that arises because 60% of all carbon emissions is produced by the industrialized countries which house only 20% of the earth’s population
The options that exist for non-industrialized countries to find a clean path of development and fund it via the carbon market
Why the United States hasn’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol
The steps China and the United States need to take in order to heal the global climate crisis
Why global warming/climate control went from being a scientific debate to an economic and political debate that has become a paramount issue of our times
The best outcome for the Copenhagen summit in December 2009

Never has the issue of Kyoto been more topical. “For the first time in human history, the future of the planet hangs in the balance,” says Chichilnisky. “The future depends on whether we can preserve these precious resources and overcome the global divide. I saved Kyoto once, with the creation of the carbon market that was essential to signing the Protocol. And I hope we can save it again with new proposals, financial and technical, to diffuse the China-U.S. impasse and bring clean development technology and funding to the poorest nations.”
# # #

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Graciela Chichilnisky

Director of Columbia Consortium for Risk Management, Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics, and Senator at Columbia University, Chichilnisky is the author of 215 scientific articles and 14 books, including Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency and The Evolving International Economy. Professor Chichilnisky served as the lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the 2007 Nobel Prize for its work in deciding world policy with respect to climate change.

Kristen A. Sheeran

Sheeran is Executive Director of Economics for Equity and the Environment, a nationwide group of economists focused on environmental policy. She has written many articles on environmental issues and has lectured on climate change.