By David Shiga
An international meeting that was supposed to cement environmental rules stemming from the 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming ended with little consensus besides an agreement to hold more discussions.
The meeting, held Dec. 6 to 17, 2004, in Buenos Aires, was the first since Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol in November. Russia’s approval fulfills the condition that countries responsible for more than 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases have ratified the treaty, so the agreement will take effect on Feb. 16. The Kyoto Protocol commits ratifying countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, by 2012, to 5 percent below their 1990 emissions.