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 Today is the beginning of a new era in ecologically friendly economics or, at the very least, the beginning of new heated battles between internet nerds as to whether the U.S. should join the Kyoto Treaty. Regardless of what the U.S. does, however, some 141 countries, accounting for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified the treaty, which pledges to cut these emissions by 5.2% by 2012.
The basic idea of the protocol is pretty simple: different industries buy credits in order to release carbon into the atmosphere. There are a limited number of credits, so if you don't release as much as you have credits, you can sell yours to someone who needs to add a little more pollution into the air. If you need to release more, you buy more credits from someone else. Really, it's a pretty good idea, because it doesn't (regardless of what Cheney says) hurt business practices. In fact, for (supposed) "free hand of the market" types like the Bush administration, this should be the bastion of saving the world through free trade. It creates competition in the market and there are now carbon credit trading companies already starting to make money off of the new setup. Sounds like a great idea to me.
Of course, the Bush administration won't join more out of spite for the countries who are trying to get them to do so and also because at least a few of them don't even believe it exists. Anyway, this isn't about them - I've given up on them. This is about saving the planet, which is something that I doubt the Bush administration is going to end up being much help with.
From what I understand, irregardless of how great an idea Kyoto is, it alone isn't going to come close to making the changes necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. As I understand it, carbon emissions worldwide need to be cut by 70-80% immediately to actually stop the process of global warming. That's not something that trading some little credits is going to help with. In order to do that, we need an energy revolution.
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