Russia on the road to implementing Kyoto pact

Russia’s lower house of parliament ratified the Kyoto Protocol on combating global warming today, putting the sweeping environmental pact firmly on the road to realisation.

The State Duma voted 334-73 to approve the treaty which gives industrialised nations eight years to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below 1990 levels.

Once approved by Russia’s upper house and President Vladimir Putin – which is all but expected – the pact will have been ratified by the necessary 55 countries that accounted for at least 55% of global emissions in 1990.

Without Russia’s ratification, that would be impossible because the United States declined to ratify.

The United States alone accounted for 36% of carbon dioxide emissions in 1990.

Although presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov has fiercely opposed ratifying the pact, Putin vowed to speed up the ratification process in May in return for the European Union’s support of Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organisation.

“By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Russia in fact is strengthening its international authority and becoming an ecological leader,” Vladimir Grachev, chairman of the Duma’s ecology committee, told the chamber before the vote.

First Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov has said restrictions of greenhouse gas emissions imposed by the pact wouldn’t affect Russia’s economic growth in the near future. Even after a five-year economic recovery, the collapse of Soviet-era industry in the 1990s has left emissions some 30 percent below the baseline.

Zhukov has said Russia would try to negotiate terms for its participation in cutting emissions after 2012.

Russia’s minister for economic development and trade, German Gref, said the Kyoto Protocol should provide the means to reduce wasteful energy consumption by increasing investment in Russian industry.

He indicated that he also wants to use the pact to help modernise Russian industry. The mechanism offers the opportunity to any developed country to achieve part of its Kyoto commitment by investing in emissions reduction projects in other developed countries to get carbon credits.

A top candidate for such help would be Russia’s electricity monopoly, Unified Energy System, which produces nearly 30% of total Russian emissions.

Grachev said Kyoto would “open up the possibility of significantly solving (Russia’s) problems of energy efficiency, energy supply and adaptation to climatic changes by receiving in fact free international resources.”