Environmental Product Declarations, improvements to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
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LOST's provisions on prevention of marine pollution from land-based sources could easily serve as a convenient peg on which to hang the greenhouse gas-regulating Kyoto Protocol, even though that treaty has also never been ratified.
But the largest greenhouse-gas emitters either did not ratify the Kyoto protocol (America) or were not obliged by it to cut emissions (China and India).
The United States will work with other nations to establish a new framework on greenhouse gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
The EU has also reduced its overall greenhouse-gas emissions to meet requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. compact adopted in 2005 which the U.S. hasn't signed.
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The protocol sets binding greenhouse gas limits on 38 industrialized nations and sets up apparatus such as "emissions trading, " in which a country having trouble meeting its requirements can buy credits from others that exceed them.
The US has yet to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol under which industrialised nations agreed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.
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Rejected as unworkable and unacceptably costly the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions that are said to contribute to global warming.
In 2001, however, President George Bush withdrew the U.S. -- the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter, responsible for approximately 25% of global emissions -- from the Protocol (Australia also withdrew).
There had been fears that Mr Bush would reject a UN-sponsored programme just as America has refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol whereby leading countries pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at least 5% below 1990 levels.
Canada, for example, signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, in the process pledging to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon trading was introduced as part of the Kyoto Protocol's goal to reduce certain industrial nations' greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012.
Next month's climate talks aim to strike a deal on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 pact that has legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Much of the talk at this week's conference was how major urban centers could work toward adhering to the Kyoto Protocol, the existing environmental treaty that sets targets for nations to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.
One obvious way to raise the funds is to sell greenhouse gas emissions permits on a global basis, rather than giving them away as under the current Kyoto Protocol.
Its greenhouse-gas emissions have fallen by 15% since 1990 comfortably inside its target under the Kyoto protocol compared with a 2% drop in the EU as a whole and a 14% rise in America.
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