Japan, Italy and Spain face fines of as much as $33 billion combined for failing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as promised under the Kyoto treaty.
The three countries are the worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change. The 1997 Kyoto accord designed to slow global warming demands that polluting nations buy credits for their excess emissions from other industrial polluters or investors.
“They’re looking at a huge bill now,” said Mike Rosenberg, management professor at the University of Navarra’s IESE Business School in Barcelona. “That is because none would pay to reconvert factories, power plants and paper mills’’ to trim gases blamed for the planet-warming “greenhouse effect.”
Capping carbon emissions will be the focus of next week’s climate change conference on the Indonesia island of Bali, where delegates from 190 nations will gather to start talks on a new treaty after the Kyoto accord ends in 2012.
Penalties imposed by the Kyoto treaty have spurred emission reductions. Spanish utility Iberdrola SA in the last five years turned itself into the world’s largest owner of wind-energy parks, cutting CO2, or carbon dioxide, emissions per kilowatt by 15 percent this year.
Spain, Italy and Japan are likely to miss their Kyoto commitments because they underestimated economic growth and future emissions from factories and utilities.
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