https://spectatorworld.com/topic/on-climate-change-democrats-ideology-delusional/
Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined.
In 1992, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 356.54 parts per million by volume (ppmv). Five years later saw the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first, last and only legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By then, carbon dioxide concentrations had risen to 363.88 ppmv.
The Clinton administration signed Kyoto but declined to submit the protocol to the Senate after senators unanimously adopted the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which stipulated that the United States should not sign any agreement that bound developed countries, but not developing ones, to emissions targets. From today’s perspective of net zero and the goal of reducing net emissions by 100 percent, the protocol was a modest affair. It required an overall reduction in developed country emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and, thanks to a late intervention by Vice President Al Gore, 7 percent for the US. In fact, American carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, peaking in 2005; in 2012, they were still 4.4 percent above their 1990 level.
In 2009, by which time carbon dioxide concentrations had reached 387.64 ppmv, the Copenhagen Climate Conference tried and failed to rectify the large and growing hole in the Kyoto Protocol. The aim was to reverse the decision of the convention’s first conference of parties in Berlin to exclude major emerging economies from making legally binding emissions commitments. Yet it was shot down by a coalition of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.