ABSTRACT
It has been widely accepted that human beings are facing increasingly severe global warming issues and the global temperature rise is mainly due to the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Since the 1992 Rio summit, countries of the world have been discussing intensively how to stabilize the level of the greenhouse gases (GHGs), especially the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The signing of the Kyoto Protocol which has come into force shows that the world’s major industrial countries are committed to reducing GHG emissions, but in the post-Kyoto Protocol era, the world has not yet reached an agreement on long-term emissions reduction responsibility. According to the research, about 50% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere can be attributed to developed countries up until the 2005 (Höhne et al., 2011). In recent years, however, the rapid economic growth in developing countries, especially in China and India, has caused a significant increase of global CO2 emissions. Consequently, the share of the CO2 emissions in developing countries has been expected to rise rapidly.
