Annual Meeting Climate Change and Multiple Views of Fairness. At the recent Kyoto conference a consensus emerged on how much to reduce greenhouse gases in the short term and how to spread the costs of greenhouse-gas abatement. The Kyoto protocol, therefore, contains important principles of fairness for the present and future international response to the risks of climate change. Yet, the dissatisfaction on the part of the U. S. and many other developed countries on the exclusion of the developing countries in a process towards commitments may jeopardize ratification of the protocol.
Many questions remain about the form of joint implementation and emission.
Even if the provisions set out in the protocol am realized by 2012, experts generally agree that there will be only very marginal reductions in the forecasted climate warning of the next century. This inevitably raises the question whether the benefits of the Kyoto emission reduction commitments are worth their costs. One view holds that decisive global action to ameliorate destitution and impoverishment of persons alive today is a more effective use of global resources than greenhouse gas reduction, especially if the future victims of global warming are better off than their ancestors are today and thus able to adapt to a changed climate. Yet, such issues have hardly been posed in the Kyoto negotiating environment because of the hegemonic grip that the emissions reduction strategy has on the policy discourse. With predicted escalating emissions in the South, there is a gradual but significant redistribution of entitlements from the North to the South.