KEY POINTS:
Who suggests that?
Two British-based academics, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, have written a paper in the science journal Nature claiming that the Kyoto Protocol - the 1997 international pact that obliges industrial nations to cut greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012 - has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions.
Worse still, it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches and paid "no more than token attention" to "adaptation" - jargon for aid to the world's poor countries such as Bangladesh which will be in the frontline of flooding and other disasters produced by climate change.
Kyoto, they say, was always the wrong tool for the job. It was modelled on past treaties for tackling ozone depletion, acid rain and nuclear weapons.
But climate change is based on a much more complex connection of "mutually reinforcing, intertwined patterns of human behaviour" which percolates through the entire economy. All that cannot be changed by focusing on just one thing.
Also, an agreement between 176 nations ignores the reality that 80 per cent of the problem is caused by just 20 countries.
So what do they suggest instead?
A vast increase in spending on research on clean energy alternatives. Research and development budgets, which have been cut by 40 per cent since 1980, "should be placed on a wartime footing".
Nations should spend as much on climate change solutions as on military research. And much more money should go to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Is this all based on new science?
No. Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University are both social scientists. Their theory is not so much new science as old political ideology.
It echoes the stance of climate change sceptics like George Bush and other Kyoto refuseniks like John Howard, who long ago offered a similar analysis, calling Kyoto "top-down, prescriptive, legalistic and Eurocentric".
Some US right-wingers have even described Kyoto as a socialist plot to transfer wealth to the Third World.
What did Kyoto set out to do and has it achieved its aims?
It set out to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at current levels and set a framework for an agreement for radical cuts in future. It has only partly achieved them. Most countries are nowhere near reaching their Kyoto targets.
In Europe, plans to set up a carbon-trading scheme foundered because Governments didn't set a limit on the supply of carbon credits and then auction them, they allocated them in a politically compromised way.
But Kyoto helped put radical emissions cuts on the international political agenda.
Some $1.5 billion has been put into the UN Climate Change Adaptation Fund. Increasing this, and the need for more funding for R&D, is on the agenda for Bali in December where the world's Environment Ministers will meet to launch negotiations on a successor to Kyoto.
From the outset, Kyoto was an interim measure. It was always recognised that two further phases were needed, the second bringing drastic cuts in emissions and the third including far more countries.
"Just because many countries will not meet their targets doesn't mean Kyoto is a failure," says Ben McNeil of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.
"Establishing a carbon emissions market, increasing public R&D into clean technologies, focusing on large emitters and adaptation funds are all consistent within the over-arching Kyoto framework."
So what does the world need now?
In part what Prins and Rayner recommend: huge investment in clean energy research, far more money for poor countries' adaptation and improved bottom-up, market-driven strategies. But it also needs the top-down political decision-making which would be a bigger and better son-of-Kyoto.
Professor Barry Brook of the Climate Change and Sustainability Institute at the University of Adelaide warns of the danger in abandoning the Kyoto process.
"The prospect of building an entirely new international agreement is, frankly, daunting, and raises the terrifying spectre of yet another decade of delay, diplomatic wrangling and nationalistic plea bargains for special cases," he says.
But Professor Jim Falk, of the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Melbourne, says we would also be foolish to fail to innovate along the lines suggested by Prins and Rayner. "Let's get on with both, and quickly," he says.
The Bali conference, Professor Brook concludes, needs to be "Kyoto in a new business suit".
- Independent
