Kyoto's failures haunt new U.N. talks

In the Kyoto Protocol's accounting of greenhouse gases, the former Eastern bloc is a smashing success.

Russia: Down 29% in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990.

Romania: A 43% reduction.

Latvia: A resounding 60% drop.

Reductions such as those across Eastern Europe were the main reason the United Nations was recently able to report a 12% drop in emissions from the accord's industrialized countries over the 1990-2005 period.

It was an illusion.

The progress wasn't due to a global embrace of green power, but rather to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which shut down smoke-belching factories across the region.

"Their emissions dropped before Kyoto even existed," said Michael Gillenwater, a climate policy researcher at Princeton University.

Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol's status as the flagship of the fight against climate change, it has been a failure in the hard, expensive work of actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Its restrictions have been so gerrymandered that only 36 countries are required to limit their pollution. Just over a third of those -- members of the former Eastern bloc -- can pollute at will because their limits were set so far above their actual emissions.

China and India, whose fast-rising emissions easily cancel out any cuts elsewhere, are allowed to keep polluting.

And the biggest polluter of all, the United States, has simply refused to join the treaty.

That leaves Western Europe, Canada, Japan and New Zealand to do the work of the world. Their emissions are rising despite their commitment, starting next year, to reduce them by an average of roughly 8% from 1990 levels.

No more leeway

Fixing the flaws of Kyoto has become an urgent crusade as United Nations talks begin today in Bali, Indonesia, to create the successor to the treaty, which expires at the end of 2012. Negotiations are expected to last at least two years.

This time, scientists say there is no leeway for weak measures. The push has come from a series of landmark reports this year by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must begin declining in the next decade to prevent a dangerous temperature rise.

The panel, which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, laid out a framework for reducing emissions that could cost trillions of dollars over the next two decades.