special section / By Ed Smeloff

The view from Kyoto

Without U.S. participation, the first-ever global-warming treaty was doomed to only partial success. Will Bali be better?

(Dec. 6, 2007)  Ten years. In geological time, 10 years is hardly noticed — a speck of dust. But for sentient beings, much happens in 10 years. Children grow up, parents and friends pass away, wars start and end, presidents are elected and disgraced, political parties rise and fall. In the last 10 years around 1.2 billion babies have been born. Some will live to see the 22nd century. Most will have children of their own.

Ten years ago, the nations of the world gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to take action to prevent dangerous interference with the planet’s climate. Many hoped that meaningful steps would be taken to protect the Earth for future generations.

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Ten years earlier, scientists working through the World Meteorological Society and the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess the science of climate change. (The IPCC is the first 20-year-old to win a Nobel Prize.) By 1995, the IPCC concluded that there was a “discernible human impact on the climate.”

Banal as those words sound, their significance is overwhelming. They communicate awareness that our generation can irreversibly damage the Earth’s ecosystems for future generations simply by the way we live. Slowing down and stopping climate change will require societal change on a scale never contemplated previously. The Kyoto Protocol was a first attempt by the nations of the world to bring about this vast change.

Welcome to Kyoto

Kyoto in December 1997 was festive. I was there as an observer, with my background in energy policy and management resources, for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and was working in tandem with a journalist who was reporting for Salon. (It’s interesting to remember that, 10 years ago, Internet journalism was still a novelty.)

Kyoto residents, dressed up as rabbits, ducks, trees and other fauna and flora, marched through the streets in well-choreographed demonstrations. Melting penguin ice sculptures were placed at the entrance to the newly built conference center. Banners and placards in Japanese and English filled the air. A big pink “CO2” wrapped in chains with a leaf growing out of the last link was ubiquitous.

Then-Vice President Al Gore was a target of the creatively inclined. “Al Gore — Cut GHGs Now or Go Home” was a Japanese favorite. Some Aussies brandished a red banner with a bunsen burner burning the planet from down under. Greenpeace built a monstrous scrap-heap Tyrannosaurus Rex with a scorecard-style banner that read Dinosaur Diplomacy 1, Climate 0. A beautiful tapestry of a fierce Fudo Myoo, the Buddhist deity of fire, draped the sides of the Kyoto conference center.

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