Energy use and carbon emissions worldwide continue to rise, and the rate of growth seems hardly to have been influenced by these agreements. Worse, there is no real change in the gross disparities that exist among countries in the amounts of energy they use. Though there have been some improvements in the efficiency of energy use – mostly for economic reasons — and greater awareness of the potential of renewable fuels – mostly through the efforts of civil society – the use of fossil fuels continues to grow unabated.

The heaviest costs resulting from the current patterns of energy use will be paid by the developing countries. It is we who will face the greatest threats from climate change, weather variability and sea level rise. And, being latecomers to the development arena it is our citizens who will suffer the greatest constraints on their aspirations for a better life.

The present approach cannot, by its very nature, produce the results that are needed.

UNFCC and the Kyoto Protocol are the outcomes of negotiations initiated and sustained largely by the scientific, economic and political interests of the industrialized countries. Because of a radical transformation in global geopolitics, and in pursuit of blatant, narrow self-interest, the government that had earlier been the prime mover and major champion of these initial negotiations subsequently opted out of them. Fortunately, the processes of global politics and the gravity of the issues have kept the momentum alive, and there continues to be a broad consensus for urgent and significant action to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, however, the Kyoto Protocol model for distributing the burdens of reducing energy use, which was, ironically, actively promoted by the same former champions, still remains the basis of negotiations. This model is based on the proportionate reduction of existing (or, technically, 1990) levels of energy use by the developed countries. By its very nature, it can only serve to preserve the current (quite huge) disparities in energy use worldwide.

Being arbitrary, narrowly conceived and serving specific national or corporate vested interests, it also creates unnecessary complications for the design and implementation of its processes. Witness the endless discussions, punctuated by interminable stalemates, in international fora on such artificial issues as reference years, baselines, additionality, incrementality, hot air, cold carbon and the like. None of these would be necessary in a regime that is based on equity, principles of global fairness and logic.

The premises underlying the Kyoto Protocol may have been widely accepted but they are fundamentally flawed. What is needed is a very different paradigm, a new genetic code, for designing a global energy regime that is in everybody’s interest – and workable.

In the 21st century, it is unthinkable that global democracy can for long countenance the continuation of a highly inequitable global economy such as that which exists today. Within the coming decades, it will surely be impossible to ignore the growing demand world wide for equitable access to global resources: energy, biodiversity and water being among the most important ones. Any global regime that seeks to control use of these will ultimately have to recognize the right of every individual on the planet to have a fair share of them.

It will also have to pay as much attention to adaptation issues as to mitigation, to the needs of the poor as to those of corporations and to the necessities of fundamental changes in the patterns of development as to incremental changes in the present ones. Ultimately, fuel guzzling societies will have to curtail their appetites for the things that energy provides and the energy poor ones will have to have space to increase their energy use, albeit in a far more efficient way, to levels that are sustainable – an inevitable process of "contraction and convergence". To reach such a stage, the "flexibility mechanisms" such as JI and CDM can only play a temporary and limited role: much of the work of energy reduction will necessarily have to be on the domestic front.