Global Equity Dawns at Kyoto's Darkest Hour

Although there were two and a half years between COP1 in Berlin and COP3 in Kyoto, it seemed that the delegates did not dare to start discussing the most critical issues of the protocol  until the last two and a half days. When they found this wasn't enough time they changed their clocks from Japan time to Washington time to gain an extra 14 hours and continued to work throughout two nights. The critcial problem was the lack of any consistent principle for allocating emissions quotas to all countries... 

At the end of the Kyoto negotiations, the entire debate came to centre on the issues of trade and the assigning of property rights in the future carbon budget. By definition, emissions trading cannot occur until the principle of property rights has been agreed and the entitlements have been assigned and ratified.

At 3.00am when the negotiations were already into injury time, the paragraph in the draft Kyoto Protocol relating to trade came up for acceptance. The US re-iterated their insistence on the acceptance of emissions trading. The governments of China and India, contrary to people's expectations, did not rebut the idea. Instead they responded by saying that acceptance of trade depended on the issue of "equitable allocations" of emissions entitlements. The Africa group of countries intervened, re-iterating that this was why they wanted "Contraction and Convergence". The US replied by saying that they were attentive to the call for "Contraction and Convergence" but felt it was too soon. This underlined the remarks made at the GLOBE International workshop in Bonn in October 1997 by US Ambassador Mark Hambley to an international gathering of Parliamentarians, that the idea is being taken seriously in Washington. They have said since it is the only game in town.

The meeting broke for half an hour. On resumption, Chairman Estrada read out a prepared text (now known as article 16 bis). In effect the COP issues instructions to SBI and SBSTA to elucidate during 1998 the rules, principles, modalities etc relating to trade, in time for COP4 in Buenos Aires in November 1998.