For example, Iceland can fairly easily shift to non-fossil-fuel power (in fact, already has), because they have significant geothermal energy sources. Other countries will need to expend more effort to get rid of coal and (mined) natural gas.
Some countries have good public transportation systems, and thus can restrict cars with little impact on most citizens. Other countries are structured such that someone without a car is at a severe disadvantage, and thus are unlikely to significantly restrict cars.
Some countries have large areas that they could use for forests, peat bogs, or other forms of carbon capture, and could use carbon capture efforts to offset any emissions they make. Others have limited land.
And so on.
Economics
Different set of beliefs within their nations
Different sets of political realities
Differing government types
Differing government priorities
Just to name a few.
Some countries will have coastal areas at risk, and others island nations may be faced with their country being engulfed by the sea. Others may be land locked and low on water resources. With glaciers melting these countries could end up with limited water for agriculture or possibly none
Each country has it's own geography and that geography will dictate which areas will warrant protecting
the basic solution is to reduce CO2 emissions, so it's all about where energy is extracted- and that is dependent on location.
if a country has plenty of sunshine and deserts, solar energy makes more sense than hydroelectric power.
for a country sitting near volcanoes, geothermal plants maybe used to extract hydrogen.
for a country that has a lot of coal, they might want to look into carbon capture (storing CO2 deep underground)
it's all about not adding more CO2 into the air.
Global warming is such a problem that it is necessary to deal with all its aspects, which includes the politics. When politicians formulate their policy they need inputs from many disciplines and from science as well. But unfortunately global warming has become an absolutely political issue and politicians do their best to influence even science.
In 1992 at the Earth Summit the decision to prevent such dangerous climate change was taken. The first step was the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which is supposed to come into force in 2005.
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One of the reports of the U.N. Panel on Climate Changes warns that the U.S. and other wealthy countries should immediately cut their oil and gas consumption and agree to get at least a quarter of their electrical energy from renewable resources - solar and wind power; and that they should double their research spending on low-carbon energy by 2010.In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to make Clinton Administration not to send the Kyoto treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification. In his first term president Bush rejected Kyoto. Russia ratified it, but most believe that Putting was made to do that as British Prime Minister and other European Union officials threatened not to let him become a member of World Trade Organization, which could cost Russia billions of dollars each year. But the chief economic adviser of Putting - Andrei Illation shows his doubts as for the upholding commit to Kyoto, he says: "There is no evidence confirming a positive linking between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. The U.N. Panel's so called scientific data are considerably distorted and in many cases falsified" (Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb? by James Hansen, 2003, pp.2-15). One of the main ideas of Clarion and others is to break the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan, by persuading the multi-national companies to move plants and jobs to developing countries in order not to comply with emissions restrictions. But the president of the American Policy Center in Washington - Tom Decease doesn't agree that it makes sense, he states as the main concern and the prime target is the wealth of the United States it would not be wise to place factories in Third World countries, as the same amount of emissions would come out from jungles of South America instead of Chicago and in this case we are not talking about the protection of the environment any more. He is right in a way.
The main goal of the meeting in Kyoto was signing the amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Rio Treaty) in order to require the signatory nations to take the necessary steps to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as these gases cause an alarm situation with global temperatures. The costs of signing it for the U.S. could be really high, as the county could be made to reduce between 10 and 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020 that would cause reduction of gross domestic products by $260 billion annually; it is equal to $2.700 per household. Certainly it was hard to prove that such costs are justified. Besides as millions of American people could be put at risk, several important questions appeared. The first one was about the possible merits or drawbacks of global warming. The World Bank researches prove that about one-third of the whole population suffers from water shortages. By 2025 they say - around 40 % of the whole population could be living in countries without sufficient water supplies. The crops will also suffer from lack of water. Global warming leads to more condensation and more evaporation, thus producing more rains. So it could be in a way an answer to the problem about lack of water. The second positive point about global warming is possibility of agriculture in North America and Europe, the southern regions of Greenland were not covered with ice when between 10th and 12th centuries the temperature was 0.5 degrees warmer than today, and could be also cultivated. The evidence of this was found when: "scientists from the National Science Foundation sponsored Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 extracted in an ice core from Greenland's ice sheet that spanned more than 100.000 years of climate history. Samplings from the core suggest that a Little Ice Age began between 1400 and 1420, blanketing the Vikings' farms in ice and forcing them to abandon their farms in search of more hospitable climates".( Michael Crichton's State of Fear: Climate Change in the Cineplex, by Amy Ridenour pp.1-5). Thus global warming could mean more agricultural productivity and more water resources.
What climate change? where is the proof?
