While international action is an important component in combating climate change, the Kyoto Protocol may not be the best way to go about it, professors said.’

Harvard Environmental Economics Program Director Robert Stavins and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Humanities in Essen, Germany Claus Leggewie spoke about the magnitude of global warming and its implications for world governments at the Harvard University Adolphus Busch Hall on Monday to an audience of about 20 attendees.

The U.S. has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a major agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed by 184 countries and aimed at reducing greenhouse gases around the world, he said. The Kyoto Protocol was introduced in 1997, and went into effect in 2005, although the United States was not a part of it.’

Stavins said he thinks the issue with the Kyoto Protocol is not a matter of leadership and the current president’s mindset, but the actual treaty itself.’ ‘

‘No matter who occupies the White House, [an] agreement that does not include developing countries will not be ratified,’ Stavins said.

He said he thinks Kyoto’s costs are much greater than they need to be; it generates trivial climate benefits and the short term targets are excessively ambitious.

‘It’s too little, too fast,’ Stavins said.

Even the seemingly non-progressive Bush administration deemed the protocol as a highly-flawed international approach, Stavins said.

Agreement on the protocol is necessary, Stavins said. However, effective policies need to be a ‘marathon, and not a sprint.’

Leggewie said the World Climate Bank, a hypothetical institution that would allow industrialized countries to purchase carbon dioxide emission credits from developing countries and would help create revenue for economic development, could be a possible option.

In addition, the initiative to combat the global crisis has a prominent generational aspect, Leggewie said.

‘Young people of today are realizing that climate change harms their prospects for the future,’ he said.

He said there are key groups of influential people in the elite institutions in states such as California and Massachusetts who are vital to the fight against climate change.

‘If they do not include these populations, the whole thing will fail,’ he said.

Stavins said not everything is going to change just because Obama is now in the White House, but Terence Trennepohl, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School whose research ranges from the effects of environmental law to Brazil’s economic and environmental interactions with the United States, said Brazil hopes to bring reform similar to that of the Obama administration.

Brazil should ‘copy a lot of the U.S.’s and Obama’s new environmental policies,’ he said.