Having signed the Kyoto agreement under a previous Liberal government, Canada did little to stop its emissions rising.
And the yet-to-be-named post-Kyoto agreement on climate change would likely hinder our economic development through regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
In countries that did not sign up to the Kyoto agreement, cities took it upon themselves to reduce their carbon footprint.
To be genuinely useful any post-Kyoto agreement must meet many conditions.
On the Kyoto agreement, McCormick says the treaty puts too much emphasis on energy emissions from smokestacks and autos, while missing the role of deforestation in carbon emissions.
From the start developing countries should accept the idea that, if the rich countries can make the Kyoto agreement work, they will eventually have to do their bit.
Late last year, the EU said its emissions have fallen 17.5% since 1990 and were "on track" to meet its 20% reduction target under the Kyoto agreement by 2020.
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The Bush administration has upset U.S. allies opposed to its plans to develop a missile defense system and its rejection of the Kyoto agreement on limiting industrial emissions linked to climate change.
Carbon emissions hit a 20-year low (in the first quarter 2012 according to EIA) and some industry observers believe that the U.S. could meet the Kyoto agreement standards by 2020 (even though the U.S. did not sign it).
What is agreed at the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change starting December 7 will determine how far individual countries are prepared to go to curtail their carbon emissions when the Kyoto agreement expires at the end of 2012.
But Tyson's proposal could spark a backlash from politically powerful business groups and meet with stiff opposition from Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who see environmental regulation and international accords like the Kyoto Agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions as a threat to opening markets and increasing trade around the globe.
Yet for all the factors working against any sort of agreement in Kyoto, the last hope of controlling that change may depend on what happens there this week.
The visit to Kyoto also featured the signing of a Cooperation Agreement with Professor Hiroshi Matsumoto, President of Kyoto University, for the establishment of an internship programme to strengthen UNESCO's action -- "through many talented young women and men coming from one of the world's leading institutions of higher learning, a haven for Nobel Prize winners and Fields medallists" said Irina Bokova.
We sincerely hope that such a mechanism will be included in the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.
Consider the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement between 181 countries designed to reduce the emissions of gases that cause global warming.
In 2002 Germany joined other European nations in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement requiring the EU to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 8% by 2012.
In a stroke of unilateralism the White House announced it wouldn't even try to fix a decade- in-the-making international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, to address global warming.
Next month's climate talks aim to strike a deal on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 pact that has legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
These countries have produced their own draft document, which would absorb any new agreement into the existing Kyoto framework.
The December summit in Denmark is intended to secure a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
This year the focus will be on the details of a new global climate agreement for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
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"I'm confident that some kind of agreement will be worked out in Kyoto, " says Toshiaki Tanabe, Japan's ambassador for global environmental affairs.
This is less likely to trip up an agreement if the targets set at Kyoto are modest enough for the rich countries actually to comply with this time around.
That is why the best outcome from Kyoto would have been a modest, politically workable agreement to curb emissions of greenhouse gases pending further study.
Next year in Copenhagen, world leaders will assemble and attempt to write the successor agreement to the 10-year-old Kyoto protocol.
European Union countries wanted to know whether Bush would return to negotiations on sealing the 1997 Kyoto pact on reducing pollution blamed for climate change, an agreement he had called "unfair to America" during his election campaign.
He says he is committed to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol - and played a key part in drawing up the agreement in 1997.
Kyoto's critics in America are unlikely to sign up to any agreement that encourages developed countries to pay over the odds to modernise factories in China, as under the current system.
Conference was intended to produce a framework agreement for climate change mitigation beyond 2012, as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
While the United States did not sign Kyoto, 825 U.S. cities and towns signed up to a climate protection agreement that embraced that protocol's goals.
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