Have countries complied with the Kyoto Protocol?
Climate change is in the news, what with Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement.
However, agreements to do something about climate change arn't new. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, which aimed to get countries to cut their emissions to 20% below their 1990 levels. The USA, China and India did not sign it, but 191 other countries did.
So, over 20 years later, how have they done? The answer is "patchily".
Some countries like Britain have knocked it out of the park. As at 2017, Britain's emissions are 38% below it's 1990 levels.
But countries like Japan and Canada actually withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011 saying it was too hard to meet the targets, and both have emissions above their 1990 levels. So not only did they make no progress, they actually made things worse.
What about Europe? Progress is patchy there too. Here is what the EU's statistics arm says about it:
As you can see, the Netherlands is only 8% below 1990 levels, France 14% below 1990 levels. Spain, Portugal and Ireland are all below 1990 levels.
In other words, these countries signed a treaty but didn't deliver. That means that all this fuss about the Paris agreement is virtue signalling. France for example is making a great deal of fuss about how they support it - so why haven't they complied with the previous agreement?
I think Japan might have withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011 because of the Fukushima disaster. They had to switch off all their nuclear power stations and burn oil. They've switched the nuclear power stations back on though from 2014 onwards.
At the tome Japan withdrew from Kyoto their emissions were above 1990 levels though - so they'd made no progress at all in reducing their emissions, and I guess the Fukushima disaster made things worse.
I wonder why Japan had made no progress with reducing emissions. They're a really high tech country - I would have thought they'd be into solar etc. Didn't they invent hybrid cars in the 1990's?
I didn't realise it was as bad as that. The Paris agreement has no chance of being implimented, has it?
Some countries will implement it simply out of self-interest. No-one wants to be dependent on foreign oil for example, so people might take up renewables just for energy independence.