Kudos to Kyoto?
BY BRIAN SCHIMMOLLER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
world’s two leading emitters – China and the United States –
many countries felt the Protocol was simply unworkable. These
concerns limited the global effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol
and ultimately led to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which is
decidedly less prescriptive.
Still, Kyoto was a watershed moment. It marked the beginning
of substantive climate change dialogue and policy debate on a
global basis. Moreover, Kyoto can lay claim to some climate
successes, or at least lay claim
to a role in these successes.
GHG emissions from countries that supported the Kyoto Protocol were more than
20% lower than 1990 levels
in 2012 according to the
United Nations, far exceeding the 5% target. While other factors were certainly at
play in that reduction – such
as economic slowdowns, the
rapid growth of renewable
energy, and the existence of decarbonization policies in some
countries – Kyoto initiated a new way of looking at greenhouse
gas emissions. Mechanisms were devised for introducing an
international carbon market, new techniques were developed
for reporting and verifying emissions, and green investment
funding schemes gained traction around the world.
Multi-national efforts like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris
Agreement are inherently difficult. Getting hundreds of nations
to agree to targets – whether hard or soft – is a complicated
political, economic, and emotional tug-of-war. Still, momentum
can behave like a nagging parent, not letting an issue go until
action is taken.
Perhaps multi-national efforts are simply too difficult. That
doesn’t mean action is impossible. The growing patchwork of
climate change activities – by cities, states, even corporations
– are sustaining the momentum in the absence of national
commitment.
Whether these action are ultimately to the benefit of nuclear
power is unclear. We’ve seen state-level actions that hold promise
for tagging nuclear as a clean energy source. It will be interesting
to see in 2018 if those actions are viewed as one-off historical
artifacts or if they become momentum builders.
A happy, belated 20th anniversary to Kyoto.
TELL ME if you’ve heard this one before: “EPA is considering
proposing emission guidelines to limit greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions from existing electric utility generating units (EGUs)
and is soliciting information on the proper respective roles of
the state and federal governments in that process, as well as
information on systems of emission reduction that are appli-
cable at or to an existing EGU, information on compliance
measures, and information on state planning requirements
under the Clean Air Act (CAA).”
Those are the words from an advanced notice of proposed
rulemaking that EPA released on December 18, 2017. Let’s call
it the Clean Power Plan – Trump since, at a very high level, the
proposal is similar in intent to what President Obama’s EPA
attempted to achieve with the original Clean Power Plan (CPP)
in 2014. In 2016, the Supreme Court halted implementation
of CPP-Obama before it could take effect, and the Trump
Administration has promised to replace it.
In practice, CPP-Trump would likely be quite different from
CPP-Obama. Whereas CPP-Obama had an ambitious goal of
reducing power plant GHG emissions by more than 30% over
2005 levels by 2030, CPP-Trump appears to be targeting specific
efficiency improvements at certain plants instead of large sys-tem-wide reductions.
The EPA will undoubtedly receive thousands of comments
on CPP-Trump from both sides prior to any form of implementation. It’s pretty safe to say, though, that it won’t be as
stringent as CPP-Obama. And while clean power regulations
are generally a positive for nuclear, the narrower expected scope
of CPP-Trump will not be a silver bullet for existing nuclear
power plants.
The resurrection (or reincarnation) of CPP got me to thinking
about the evolution of climate change regulation. In case you
missed it last year, 2017 was the 20th anniversary of the Kyoto
Protocol, an agreement reached among industrial nations in
late 1997 to slash their GHG emissions. Industrialized nations
that signed the Protocol (plus the nations of the European
Union) were required to reduce GHG emissions 5% below
1990 levels by 2012; developing nations, including India and
China, were asked to voluntarily comply.
Although the Protocol officially went into effect in 2005
when countries representing at least 55% of the world’s GHG
emissions ratified it, the Kyoto Protocol never truly reached its
promise. The mechanisms developed for implementing the
Protocol were challenging, and without participation from the
“The growing
patchwork of
climate change
activities are
sustaining the
momentum in the
absence of national
commitment.”
