The Exclusion of Developing Countries from Binding Targets. The Kyoto Protocol currently imposes quantitative restrictions on industrialized countries, but does not impose similar obligations on developing countries.120 Although the Montreal Protocol had to overcome the same difficulties with regards to developing nation participation, the Montreal Protocol was successful in adopting a more rational sequential approach to negotiations. First, the parties to Montreal focused on creating binding targets for industrialized nations and hence tackled the most pressing issue first.121 Only then did the parties turn to the sensitive but secondary issue of developing world participation. The negotiators therefore managed to solve the common but differentiated responsibility dilemma by separating the two fundamental issues of industrial commitments and developing world commitments. At the Kyoto negotiations, however, the issue of developing world participation became entangled with negotiations over binding targets in the industrial world. As Xxxxx Xxxxxx states, “the climate change negotiations have taken an ‘inclusive’ approach in which both to secure an emissions trading scheme, so that it could essentially make up for its projected inability to comply with the targets by buying emissions credits from Russia. At the same time, the EU opposed (and correctly so) such a scheme under the pretext that it would easily meet its emissions targets. However, after U.S. withdrawal, the parties to the Kyoto Protocol nevertheless included an emissions trading scheme. Then, when it became clear that the EU would not likely meet its obligatory targets, it actively enticed Russia to ratify in order to gain access to its excess emissions credits. Id. 117. Id. at 15. 118. Id. at 16. 119. Id. at 17. 120. Kyoto Protocol, supra note 97, annex B; see also Xxxxxxx, supra note 11, at 370. 121. Xxxxxx, supra note 3, at 837-39. 322 DENV. J. INT’L L. & POL’Y VOL. 37:2 industrialized and developing nations have been involved in the negotiating process.”122 Compounding the problem, many industrialized nations have been reticent to agree to meaningful binding targets without the simultaneous participation of developing countries.123 In this way, misplaced focus on the developing world undermined and significantly diluted negotiations that should have been focused solely on binding targets for industrialized countries. Indeed, involvement of developing countries in the initial negotiations undermined the parties’ ability to form and frame a clear and ...
