Passage 7 Loopholes in Climate Deal Could Render It Useless
哥本哈根协议漏洞百出 《新科学家》

[00:02]Let us predict that there will be a deal here in Copenhagen.
[00:06]And that, at first sight, some of the numbers may look impressive.
[00:12]Not enough to ward off dangerous global warming maybe,
[00:16]but enough to satisfy diplomatic honour.
[00:20]But the devil, as always, will be in the detail.
[00:24]And numbers released by WWF yesterday stressed that loopholes in draft texts
[00:32]could render a global deal worthless.
[00:36]EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas supported
[00:40]one of the group's key points.
[00:43]WWF's headline statistic is that industrialised nations
[00:49]may walk away from Copenhagen having signed up to a promise
[00:55]to cut their emissions by as much as 20 per cent from 1990 levels,
[01:02]when in truth they have written themselves a cheque
[01:05]to increase emissions by 5 to 10 per cent.
[01:11]The leakiest of the loopholes is "hot air" the emissions permits
[01:16]that Russia and other east European countries
[01:20]were granted under the Kyoto Protocol
[01:23]but didn't use because their industries collapsed post-1990.
[01:30]The emissions of almost all of these nations have dropped
[01:34]by more than one third since 1990,
[01:38]and their governments have hidden the permits, whose value increases
[01:44]with growing pledges to cut global emissions.
[01:48]Now it looks like Russia and others
[01:52]will be allowed to sell them right through to 2020.
[01:57]EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas agrees
[02:02]that hot air is a major loophole.
[02:05]He estimates that there could be some 10.7 billion tonnes of hot air permits
[02:13]on offer in 2012. That's roughly one third global annual emissions
[02:21]and nearly three times the EU's emissions.
[02:25]This is huge. It means the EU could compensate all its promised cuts
[02:33]between 2012 and 2020 with hot air
[02:39]even if it ups its promise from 20 to 30 per cent of 1990 emissions
[02:46]in the final days of the Copenhagen talks.
[02:50]Other loopholes, carbon compensation for instance, are familiar.
[02:56]Done well, compensation allows rich nations to keep carbon out of
[03:02]the atmosphere more cheaply. Done badly,
[03:07]they are little more than carbon fraud,
[03:10]allowing countries to concede their emissions by making small investments
[03:16]in low-carbon energy projects in faraway lands,
[03:20]many of which were going to happen anyway.
[03:24]The European Union has already announced plans to make half a billion tonnes
[03:31]in emissions reductions through compensation in developing countries
[03:37]between 2012 and 2020. Other nations could triple that figure, says WWF.
[03:48]There is a similarly sized loophole in the rules governing
[03:53]how countries can claim credit for avoiding emissions
[03:57]by managing forests or farming soils to retain carbon.
[04:03]And finally, there is the matter of the start-date for measuring new targets.
[04:10]By juggling their baseline dates, WWF warns,
[04:15]countries like the US and Canada,
[04:18]which have greatly increased their emissions
[04:21]since 1990 could effectively concede those increases.