A WTO to take over from Kyoto

“Forget Kyoto!”, leads the Tageszeitung. “Kyoto is dead.” The alternative Berlin daily, a cheerleader on the climate change issue, opens on its front page with an announcement of the failure of talks on climate change organised by the United Nations, which end Friday in Bonn. Yvo de Boer, former secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), says in an interview that “a climate agreement that is not binding on the United States, Russia, Japan and Canada makes no sense”. All the other countries left over, the diplomat notes, account today for only 20 percent of global CO2 emissions. De Boer suggests that an alternative to Kyoto would be a “kind of WTO for climate” under which the frontrunner states that reduce their emissions would gain economic benefits. Alarmed, TAZ declares in its editorial a new era dawning in climate policy and insists “there is no time to lose.”