THE COSTS TO IRELAND OF GREENHOUSE GAS ABATEMENT. ESRI Policy Research Series. 1997

Conniffe, Denis and Fitz Gerald, John and Scott, Sue and Shortall, Fergal (1997) THE COSTS TO IRELAND OF GREENHOUSE GAS ABATEMENT. ESRI Policy Research Series. 1997. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

Most scientists believe and most governments seem to accept that global warming poses a threat to the world environment. Although there are residual uncertainties in tile scientific community as to the nature and gravity of tile global warming threat (Broecker, 1995), the solution to this problem can not be found in changes ill behaviour of individual countries or even individual trading blocks acting on their own. Instead, any programme of action to fend off the threat to tile world environment will ultimately depend on an agreement or agreements at a world level, which involve all the major economies, developed and underdeveloped. This makes the process of designing an effective strategy exceptionally difficult. (see Box A for a discussion of global warming). With the objective of reaching an initial agreement, a major international conference will be held in Kyoto in December 1997 under the auspices of the United Nations. This will be the second such UN conference to be held in the 1990s and it seems likely that the evolving policy debate will continue for many years afterwards, paralleling the continuing development of understanding of the problem in the scientific community. The role of the conference is to agree among tile major players in tile world economy a first policy response to tile problem which will lead eventually to an agreed comprehensive plan for action at a world level. The EU, as part of its negotiating position for the conference, has agreed a policy that would require a cut of 15 per cent in EU-wide emissions of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2010. This proposed restriction on emissions is at tile more ambitious end of tile range of proposals being put toward by the major economies of the developed world. However, it must be seen as but one of many different inputs into what will be an exceptionally difficult set of negotiations. Any agreement reached in Kyoto will involve not only the restriction of emissions of greenhouse gases but it will also have important implications for tile distribution of income between the developed and the underdeveloped world and among individual trading blocks or countries within the developed world itself.

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