Why didn't the US sign the Kyoto Protocol?

Question

Any details?

Answer 1

The Kyoto Protocol is a joke. There were hardly any senators who supported it when it was first brought to a vote in the late nineties. Then Bush, thankfully, rejected it all together.

There are numerous problems with them. First it ignores the biggest polluters in the world. In fact, even if it ignored the cleanest nations, it would still be flawed because CO2 emmissions would be taken up by those nations not subject to the protocols. In other words, if we lost the economic resources that produce CO2, China would take them and no net change to total emmissions would be present.

Finally, I would be amazed if you could point to one European nation that scoffed at us for not signing on that is actually following through.

I do have one idea though that can reduce greenhouse emmissions. Get the libs like Al Gore and Michael Moore to stop taking private jet trips around the country and world. A single trip burns more fuel then my SUV will burn in a lifetime!

Answer 2

Prior to negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution saying the U.S. should not sign any protocol that failed to include binding targets and timetables for both developing and industrialized nations or that "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

Arguments against the Kyoto Protocol generally fall into three categories: it demands too much; it achieves too little; or it is unnecessary.
In rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, which 178 other nations had accepted, President Bush claimed that the treaty requirements would harm the U.S. economy, leading to economic losses of $400 billion and costing 4.9 million jobs. Bush also objected to the exemption for developing nations. The president’s decision brought heavy criticism from U.S. allies and environmental groups in the U.S. and around the world.

Kyoto Critics Speak Out
Some critics, including a few scientists, are skeptical of the underlying science associated with global warming and say there is no real evidence that Earth’s surface temperature is rising due to human activity. For example, Russia’s Academy of Sciences called the Russian government's decision to approve the Kyoto Protocol "purely political," and said that it had "no scientific justification."

Some opponents say the treaty doesn’t go far enough to reduce greenhouse gases, and many of those critics also question the effectiveness of practices such as planting forests to produce emissions trading credits that many nations are relying on to meet their targets. They argue that planting forests may increase carbon dioxide for the first 10 years owing to new forest growth patterns and the release of carbon dioxide from soil.

Others believe that if industrialized nations reduce their need for fossil fuels, the cost of coal, oil and gas will go down, making them more affordable for developing nations. That would simply shift the source of the emissions without reducing them.

Answer 3

it would be a great sacrifice to do so. The economy of the US greatly depends on fossil fuels. I think it consumes close to 22% of all natural gas in the world and close to 25% of all oil.

Basically, the Kioto protocol required that every country reduced emissions

Here is a snip from wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" — which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 — the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China (the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide[43]). Bush also opposes the treaty because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasizes the uncertainties which he asserts are present in the climate change issue

Country

Oil - consumption
(bbl/day)

Date of Information
1
World 82,590,000 2004 est.
2
United States 20,730,000 2004 est.
3
European Union 14,700,000 2004
4
China 6,534,000 2005
5
Japan 5,353,000 2004 est.
6
Germany 2,650,000 2004
7
Russia 2,500,000 2005 est.
8
India 2,450,000 2004 est.
9
Canada 2,294,000 2004
10
Brazil 2,194,000 2005 est.
11
Korea, South 2,149,000 2004
12
France 1,977,000 2004 est.
13
Mexico 1,970,000 2004 est.

Answer 4

They Did sign it... They just have not done anything in our federal government to support it..

The United States (U.S.), although a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, has neither ratified nor withdrawn from the Protocol. The signature alone is symbolic, as the Kyoto Protocol is non-binding on the United States unless ratified. The United States is, as of 2005, the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations. The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" — which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 — the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China (the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide). Bush also opposes the treaty because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasizes the uncertainties which he asserts are present in the climate change issue. Furthermore, the U.S. is concerned with broader exemptions of the treaty. For example, the U.S. does not support the split between Annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:

This is a challenge that requires a 100% effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is the People's Republic of China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto … America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change … Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere."

Despite its refusal to submit the protocol to Congress for ratification, the Bush Administration has taken some actions towards mitigation of climate change. In June 2002, the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the "Climate Action Report 2002". Some observers have interpreted this report as being supportive of the protocol, although the report itself does not explicitly endorse the protocol.[citation needed] At the G-8 meeting in June 2005 administration officials expressed a desire for "practical commitments industrialized countries can meet without damaging their economies". According to those same officials, the United States is on track to fulfill its pledge to reduce its carbon intensity 18% by 2012. The United States has signed the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a pact that allows those countries to set their goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions individually, but with no enforcement mechanism. Supporters of the pact see it as complementing the Kyoto Protocol while being more flexible, but critics have said the pact will be ineffective without any enforcement measures.[citation needed]

In September 2006 the journal Nature reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had blocked an internal report which concluded that global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions may be contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes.

The Administration's position is not uniformly accepted in the U.S. For example, Paul Krugman notes that the target 18% reduction in carbon intensity is still actually an increase in overall emissions. The White House has also come under criticism for downplaying reports that link human activity and greenhouse gas emissions to climate change and that a White House official and former oil industry advocate, Philip Cooney, watered down descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists, charges the White House denies.[Critics point to the administration's close ties to the oil and gas industries. In June 2005, State Department papers showed the administration thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, including the U.S. stance on Kyoto. Input from the business lobby group Global Climate Coalition was also a factor.

In 2002, Congressional researchers who examined the legal status of the Protocol advised that signature of the UNFCCC imposes an obligation to refrain from undermining the Protocol's object and purpose, and that while the President probably cannot implement the Protocol alone, Congress can create compatible laws on its own initiative.

Answer 5

If you allow me the term "thinkability," I mean whatever comes to the consciousness as a cognitive form. Not many people anywhere are able to put in mind an idea that is more than local and in their immediate social space and permit that idea as an abstraction to trigger emotional buttons. If ideas don't push emotional buttons, their thinkability score doesn't reach prescience, or to say it another way, we live in a global information and biochemical soup created by ourselves by institutions and institutional eratta, but curiously we are literally unable contextualize and personalize the consequences. Americans are particularly manipulated by media that is designed in a profit environment to get their emotional buttons pushed, because, by association or just attentionally are intended and do get associated with spending money in a particular way. Our specie, noted for its abiltity to create environment, has reached a point where the incidental effects of our local/personal environment space has created global effects that now are bringing a new geological era. It is strange, but abstract ideas take a while to inculcate local culture and its actionable framework to secondarily enter habit of mind and personal truth. Americans just happen to be particularly habituated to electronic media that does have the ability to enter personal thinkability, but commercial interests paying for the media have yet to understand how to profit from the imagery of cimate implying an unnatural scaling in time and space for media consumers (all Americans). If you are the wildebeest sage, realizing the heard is hoofing off to brown pastures and you try to turn around and head back, the flow of the masses make your journey an arduous one indeed. The group mind of the heard has synched on a signal about where green pastures used to be. Our tragic flaw, somewhere implanted in our Pleisticene brains is a dis-synchrony that has created what will be the greatest specie die-off known in all of geological time. How strange, we believe ourselves individually properly in control, yet here we are, collectively on such a binge of tragic destruction on such a mammoth (pun intended) scale, we are fools within our own knowing, yet our feeble resopnse is going to have our progeny in complete puzzlement, that is if they have not still understood and mastered the brain's inherent dis-synchoroies. I literally cry for the ugnlness of this all and the helplesness, somehow finding solice in the magnificant beauty in Renaissance choral music when the full hope of monotheism seemed to present such ultimate promise.

Answer 6

Because it has 0 impact on global warming and is purely a state welfare system.

If we signed Kyoto.. we could still pollute just as much as we are now. We'd just have to pay some 3rd world country for it. Now impact on any environmental problems.. just more free money for the 3rd world.

Answer 7

Bush couldnt pronounce Kyoto Protocol, he thought it to be some sort of an animal!

Answer 8

It would have been bad for us. A highly disproportunate burden for reducing carbon emissions would have been required of the US. That's why Clinton did not submit it. It would have been defeated, probably by the most lopsided margin in the history of US diplomacy.

Answer 9

And make the U.S. part of a coalition to rectify the pollutants created by our industries backed by Bush and his buddies?

Ha ah haa haaa--yeah right!!

Forcing our corporate entities to adhere to laws and create jobs in the pollution control business would benefit the Middle-Class--since when is that a priority?

Answer 10

Because the US does not need to be in any more one-sided agreements that we morally bind ourselves to, spend exorbitant amounts of money on, and watch the other nations breach, with very little repercussions.