U.S. Reluctance on Climate Change Persists
by Tom Zeller, Jr.
NEW YORK — Last Tuesday, Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was asked by a reporter to appraise the odds that Congress, in the throes of debating health care changes, would manage to pass climate legislation in 2009 — including provisions for an emissions cap-and-trade plan.
“So, you know, we are going to have a busy, busy time the rest of this year,” Mr. Reid replied. “And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year. We still have next year to complete things if we have to.”
That is, one might guess, the last thing many people in the international community want to hear as they round the final turn and tumble headlong, ready or not, toward a climate meeting in Copenhagen in December.
A statement from the European Union’s ambassador to the United States, John Bruton, was unambiguous in its displeasure.
“It is suggested that the U.S. Senate may not, after all, deal with the climate change issue until next year, when the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen is over and the delegates have gone home,” Mr. Bruton said. “If this were to happen, it would open the United States to the charge that it does not take its international commitments seriously and that these commitments will always take second place to domestic politics.”
Mr. Bruton added: “Is the U.S. Senate really expecting all the other countries to make a serious effort on climate change at the Copenhagen Conference in the absence of a clear commitment from the United States?”
Such, of course, has been the state of things for some time.
The Copenhagen meeting, after all, is meant to find a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the well-intentioned if somewhat unbalanced blueprint for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Many signatories, of course, have failed to meet the emissions reduction targets set out by the accord, which expires in 2012. But for those who foresee a grim comeuppance in the continued and unchecked belching of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the most notable shortcoming of Kyoto was its failure to secure a commitment from the United States.
Indeed, the United States never ratified it — partly because quickly developing and increasingly competitive countries like China and India were not required to set emissions reduction goals of their own.
A dozen years later, those fault lines are still more or less in place.
A bill that would implement a cap-and-trade plan, with the aim of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from major sources by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June. But as Mr. Reid noted, the prospects of even considering, much less passing a Senate version this year are far from certain.
Critics of such legislation — and of any binding agreement at Copenhagen — insist that emissions caps would hobble American businesses if growing economies like China and India and Brazil failed to make emissions reduction commitments of their own.
China and India, meanwhile, have said that the industrialized world, which has been responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions to date, must commit to far deeper cuts before negotiations at Copenhagen can succeed.
They also take issue with a provision in the House’s climate bill that would place tariffs on goods from countries that have failed to accept limits on global warming emissions.
“The developed countries, which are mainly responsible for the climate crisis, should be assisting developing countries instead of making them victims, doubly, of the effects of climate change and of climate-linked trade protectionism,” Martin Khor, the executive director of the South Center, an organization representing 50 developing countries, wrote in a column in The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, last week.
Such is the backdrop as hundreds of global leaders, industry executives, academics, economists and environmental groups descend on American cities this week for all manner of climate-related discussions.
In New York, delegates will gather at the United Nations for “Climate Week,” described as “a series of high-level meetings and events focused on the most urgent issue of our time.”
Up the road from the U.N. building, President Barack Obama is expected to address dignitaries, business leaders and representatives from nongovernment organizations for the fifth annual gathering of the Clinton Global Initiative, where issues of energy and climate change will surely loom large.
In Washington, meanwhile, the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which brings together the 17 biggest economies — and biggest greenhouse gas emitters — concluded last week with the U.S. special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, struggling to put a positive spin on what was surely a rancorous exchange of views.
Asked during a teleconference what was meant by his assertion that the differences between the multiple parties were narrowing, Mr. Stern said, “Again, the narrowing doesn’t mean the differences have disappeared. It means that there was a thorough airing — people understood, and I think that there was a — I think there was a narrowing of differences, but they haven’t disappeared.”
Rounding out the high-level talks is the meeting in Pittsburgh this week of the Group of 20, representing 19 countries with some of the world’s biggest developed and emerging economies, plus the European Union. The meeting’s discussion of the global economic downturn and financial regulations will be inevitably laced with a debate about the accumulating costs of climate change, and who ought to pay what and how.
