Kyoto
The Kyoto Protocol: Advantages and Limitations The advent of industrialized civilization has brought to us many remarkable feats that enhance our everyday lives. Such things as automobiles, airplanes, tractors, mainframe computers, and even relatively simple machines like lawnmowers have intertwined themselves into the everyday culture of modern day industrialized countries.. These products have provided us enormous benefits compared to the types of lives our ancestors used to live. In the eyes of some, the consequences of industrial activities that have evolved around the world will not pose any problems in the future, however as most have realized, this is not true. Contemporary production processes use fossil fuels such as oil, which release dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. In addition, certain products such as vehicles are notorious for their inefficient combustion cycles that also release comparable amounts of certain greenhouse gases into the air. Moreover, emissions from agricultural practices, land use change and forestry, and other industrial activities have led to dramatic increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases since pre-industrial times. (Fig. 1) The
However, this is not the case, and this characteristic highlights another advantage the agreement holds. Developing nations, such as Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and the Ukraine are on equal footing with the largest of industrial nations. In the front line of controversy of the Kyoto Protocol is its proposal of "emissions trading mechanisms" by which an economic system of tradable emissions certificates would allow countries to buy extra emissions, per say, from those countries who have emitted below their allotted amount. An upfront testament to this is the fact that there have been several meeting by the "Parties to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change," including the seventh held between October 29 to November 9 in Marrakech, Morocco. Products such as solar power, wind power, biomass, geothermal power, and hydropower are now widely being studying to create processes that use less coal, oil, and natural gas in production. The Kyoto Protocl, therefore, can be regarded as a symbol of our first step in the right direction. In the United States, ethanol is typically produced from corn and other grain products, although in the future it may be economically produced from other biomass resources such as agricultural and forestry wastes, or specially grown energy crops. Conventional fossil fuels unlock carbon that has been stored for millions of years, which disrupts the balance of earth's carbon cycle. Any ethanol product can traditionally be used in a way such that a car, for instance, would run on fuel that contained a certain mixture of ethanol and gasoline, nevertheless, carbon emissions would not cause as much damage as would one-hundred percent gasoline run vehicles. Another pitfall of the Kyoto Protocol involves its discussion of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which provides a system where industrialized nations would finance technological development in underdeveleoped nations, in an attempt to cut emissions, while receiving domestic credit. Many developing countries are also actively promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy. It seems as if all the downfalls of the Kyoto Protocol represent incomplete formalizations to the procedures that have been decided upon. Some developing nations have conjectured that the targets should be based on a pre-set per capita emissions level, arguing that this is the most equitable and enduring system because all citizens of the world should have the same 'right' to emit. In today's economic climate, countries who have more resource tend to gain an edge in how the world works, and the fact that nations whose economies are more or less in transition are as equally important as the U.
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Acceptance Essays
