A recent video about how countries are attempting to work together to reduce emissions can be found at pbs.org. The focus of this video was on the Kyoto Protocol, its effectiveness, and if it will be followed up by any other sort of climate agreement. The Kyoto Protocol has been mostly ineffectual. Many of the countries that pledged to lower their emissions have actually increased the amount of carbon that they produce the United States and Canada being two of those. A few countries have been able to accomplish this goal, specifically the majority of those in the European Union. The Kyoto Protocol was meant to legally bind the countries that signed it so that there would be penalties if they failed. With the deadline of Kyoto coming up in December 2012 and the vast majority of the countries who signed it having increased their emissions, it is beginning to look like a failure. The video addressed what options the world faces and their consequences.
The overall world temperature is projected to increase eleven degrees by the end of this century. The only way that we can prevent this from happening is if we can somehow reverse the trend of increasing emissions and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m not really sure what specific theme to connect this to in my Sustainable Development class because it pretty much connects to all of them. The problems addressed in this video are the major symptoms caused by the subjects we have studied. Global Warming can be blamed on many different things; politics, mountaintop removal, the economic structure, environmental limits, and the modern definition of progress. We have addressed all these in my class and I am now beginning to understand how they fit together, causing these monstrous problems like global warming. Politics get in the way of governmental cooperation. No government wants to reduce their emissions if it means lowering their GDP. This in itself is a problem partially caused by what we consider progress. Instead of focusing on raising the standard of living, we look only to consumption and GDP. In this way many of our problems are connected. We could easily reduce emissions, lower our dependence on foreign oil, and improve our economy by investing in more sustainable technology and lowering subsidies on oil products. The reason that we haven’t done this is because the oil and coal companies are already so incredibly powerful. They can lobby the government and prosecute any who get in their way, any who promotes cleaner alternative energy.
Because of these problems the world has not solved its global warming crisis. Instead of working together to face the world’s greatest problem we sit around and argue about it. Almost no one wants to extend the Kyoto protocol and in my opinion it wouldn’t really matter if it was extended. The Kyoto Protocol is and always has been a way for political leaders to appease the people who do want change. Governments are simply going through the motions of doing something simply so they can claim that they are taking steps to mend the environmental problems when in truth they are doing nothing. Talk doesn’t save the environment, on action can, but all we have done so far is talk (specifically argue).
The fact that most nations have done next to nothing about carbon emissions does not surprise me. Politics has almost always been more about showmanship than any real action. While I do hope that something good comes out of the Kyoto Protocol and that it gets extended in a way that will actually be effective, I rather pessimistic in my opinions of its success. It is simply human nature to procrastinate until the last second then to do a mediocre job or to hide the problem instead of actually fixing anything.
Lastly, was the video biased in any way? It seemed to me that this video presented many of the facts about the Kyoto Protocol and its possible extension. It stated the European Union’s eagerness to extend Kyoto very plainly and the statistics of how emissions have changed since 1997. The video did try to blame political will on the problems with reducing emissions. It stated that the United States simply could not unite in any way to reduce emissions. I agree with the opinions of the video. They tried to present most of the facts in an unbiased manner, but they obviously see many of the attempts at slowing and reducing climate change as ineffective.
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