Criticism of the Kyoto Protocol

He regarded the Kyoto agreement as discriminatory and not universal, since the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions like the US, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Korea, as well as a number of developing countries, did not impose any restrictions on themselves.

Andrei Illarionov also referred to a large number of works that cast doubt on the very idea of a "greenhouse" effect caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide.

For example, the former Soviet Union and eastern European countries did little to tackle the problem and their energy efficiency was at its worst level in 1990, the year just before their communist regimes fell.

On the other hand, Japan, as a big importer of natural resources, had to improve its efficiency after the 1973 oil crisis and its emissions level in 1990 was better than most developed countries.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and eminent climate scientist, has claimed that the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, between December 7–18, 2009 (which includes the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 5th Meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP 5) to the Kyoto Protocol) is a 'farce' and planned to boycott it because it was seeking a counter-productive agreement to limit emissions through an inefficient and indulgent "cap and trade" system.

[12] The Bush Administration has criticized the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that 80 percent of the world is exempt from emissions reduction standards as well as the potential of economic harm to the United States.

The text of the Global Warming Petition Project reads:We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997...The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind...There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.

Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

[22] They argue that trading pollution allowances should be avoided because they result in failures in accounting, dubious science and the destructive impacts of projects upon local peoples and environments.

Regulatory agencies run the risk of issuing too many emission credits, diluting the effectiveness of regulation, and practically removing the cap.

[22] Groups such as the Corner House have argued that the market will choose the easiest means to save a given quantity of carbon in the short term, which may be different from the pathway required to obtain sustained and sizable reductions over a longer period, and so a market-led approach is likely to reinforce technological lock-in.

[citation needed] The Financial Times published an article about cap-and-trade systems which argued that "Carbon markets create a muddle" and "...leave much room for unverifiable manipulation".

[30] More recent criticism of emissions trading regarding implementation is that old growth forests, which have slow carbon absorption rates, are being cleared and replaced with fast-growing vegetation, to the detriment of the local communities.