KEY POINTS:
The world should abandon the Kyoto Protocol for fighting climate change and instead raise spending on clean energy research to tens of billions of dollars a year as part of a broader plan, two experts say.
Governments should view global warming as a strategic challenge, like the US drive to put a man on the moon in 1969 or to help Europe recover after World War 2, and move away from Kyoto-style caps on greenhouse gas emissions, they said.
"Time to ditch Kyoto", British social scientist Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and leading climate change researcher Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who holds dual US-British citizenship, wrote in the journal Nature.
"The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed," they wrote.
The 1997 Kyoto pact obliges 36 industrial nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. But many are over target in a sign that Kyoto is no "silver bullet" for slowing climate change, Rayner told Reuters.
The two urged governments to consider carrying out more research instead of tightening Kyoto-style caps. The world's environment ministers will meet in Bali, Indonesia, from December 3-14 to launch negotiations on a successor to Kyoto.
"Investment in energy research and development should be placed on a wartime footing," the experts wrote of efforts to create clean energy such as wind and solar power.
"It seems reasonable to expect the world's leading economies and emitters to devote as much money to this challenge as they currently spend on military research - in the case of the United States, about US$80 billion ($107.41 billion) a year," they said.
They said Kyoto had been modelled on treaties for protecting the ozone layer and curbing acid rain that focused on cuts in a few pollutants. But climate change affected the entire economy and solutions had to be more complex than caps on a few gases.
As part of the answer, they said the world should focus on curbs by top emitters rather than seeking agreement among 176 states that have ratified Kyoto. The top 20, led by the United States and China, account for 80 per cent of all emissions.
Prins and Rayner noted that many Kyoto backers had criticised President George W. Bush for bringing major emitters together for talks in Washington last month. But such talks may be a necessary first step to a broader deal, they said.
Bush rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying its emissions caps would be too costly and that Kyoto wrongly omitted goals for poor nations. Kyoto backers see it as a tiny first step to slow the effects of climate change such as more floods, heatwaves and rising seas.
The two experts said the world should create markets in greenhouse gases but efforts so far had failed to produce stable prices high enough to spur a major shift away from the fossil fuels widely blamed for causing global warming.
They said that, instead of ordering deeper Kyoto-style cuts in emissions beyond 2012, countries should develop policies only after experimenting with various ideas.
"Although a bottom-up approach may seem painfully slow and sprawling, it may be the only way to build credible institutions that markets endorse," they wrote.
-Reuters
