Climate Change, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, North America

ENVIRONMENT-U.S.: Plan Points Way to Greenhouse Gas Cuts

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, May 7 2004 (IPS) - As a five-year drought threatens water supplies in America’s west, a new report sets out how the United States could do its part to curb global warming.

While Iraq, terrorism and jobs preoccupy the U.S. public, the ongoing drought and record-breaking warm temperatures are making people more aware of global warming.

“I don’t think it will be an issue in the (November) presidential election but people are becoming more concerned,” says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, a public interest group that sponsors scientific reports on climate issues.

Rather than waiting for politics to catch up with the reality of climate change, the Pew Centre asked a group of experts from all sectors to create a mandatory greenhouse gas reduction programme for the United States that is effective and politically feasible.

Leaders from business, government and environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) reached consensus on the main points of what the plan should look like without entering into the thorny debate of whether such a blueprint is necessary now.

The administration of U.S. President George W Bush continues to question the vast majority of scientific opinion that says emissions of greenhouse gas, such as carbon dioxide, are triggering climate change.

The experts assembled by Pew agreed that a reduction programme would have to combine elements that include setting emission limits, or caps, and allowing companies to trade emissions credits they could earn by bettering those caps.

An initially modest but declining absolute national cap on greenhouse gas emissions would be placed on large sources, such as electric utilities and manufacturers.

According to the plan, companies that reduced emissions by more than their cap would get credits they could sell to firms that failed to meet their emissions limit.

A similar cap would apply to emissions from transportation fuel suppliers, coupled with tradable carbon dioxide-per-mile automobile standards. The group also recommended tradable efficiency standards for appliances and other manufactured products.

Emission credits would also be awarded for removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by verifiable means, possibly through carbon sequestration projects such as tree planting and creating plantations to grow vegetables (biomass) that would be used as fuel.

The European Union (EU) has a similar cap-and-trade scheme that goes into effect in 2005. Under the Kyoto climate change agreement, the EU agreed to reduce its emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels over the period 2008-12. The agreement does not specify how targets will be met.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme is considered the model for meeting reduction targets without harm to industries or economies.

The Bush administration opted out of the Kyoto Protocol soon after taking office in 2001, arguing that adhering to its standards would put U.S. business at a disadvantage vis-à-vis companies in nations that do not follow the global treaty.

But some U.S. states are much more amenable to reduction programmes. For instance, on Thursday the governor of east coast Massachusetts State released a plan to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The scheme relies on voluntary and state-sponsored measures, with its most significant mandatory element being that large industries must report the amount of their emissions.

The Pew report, ‘A Climate Policy Framework: Balancing Policy and Politics’, avoids setting specific emission targets, dates or costs.

“It’s a modest first step,” says Claussen, a former head of atmospheric programmes at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an interview.

“It’s an outline of what the U.S. could and ought to be doing right now.”

The report will carry little weight with the Bush Administration, which wants any emissions reduction to be voluntary she admits.

But U.S. senators and congressmen are less intransigent, and there is growing support for the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. The proposed law would put in place modest mandatory emission reductions. It was voted down in 2003 but has been tabled again this year.

Only mandatory cuts to emissions of greenhouse gases will help stop global warming, according to one expert.

“Voluntary emission programmes have been in place for many years but America’s emissions still grew 13 percent from 1990 to 2002,” says Janet Ranganathan, a greenhouse gas reduction expert at the World Resources Institute (WRI).

A big part of this growth is in the transportation sector, because of increased trucking of goods and Americans driving more and continuing to buy large Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs).

“There is little evidence that any kind of voluntary pollution reductions programmes have worked anywhere,” Ranganathan told IPS.

More importantly, drastic emission reductions on the order of 60-70 percent are needed in the next 20 years to avoid the worst case scenarios predicted for climate change, she says.

One such scenario recently suggested by Sir David King, science advisor to the British government, sees Antarctica as the only place on the planet where humans can survive by the year 2100.

A strong, mandatory reduction policy would also spark investment in new technology and increase energy efficiency, argues Ranganathan. “The U.S. is missing a huge financial opportunity to become a global leader in alternative energy and other green technologies,” she adds.

Even without climate change concerns, alternatives to fossil fuels are desperately needed to check air pollution, which has increased in the United States and is skyrocketing in many urban areas of the developing South.

Hydrogen-powered cars and power plants might offer a way to achieve large reductions but this technology is still a long way off.

There is no easy way to manufacture hydrogen without using more fossil fuels, says Claussen. Policies that greatly expand the use of hybrid cars and alternative energy sources, like solar and wind, would be very useful, she adds.

But what are also desperately needed are investments in a variety of new technologies, Claussen argues.

“We have to have something better to offer the South than the fossil-fuel driven economies that we’ve used.”