Article > What Europe needs to know about Obama’s climate change options

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What Europe needs to know about Obama’s climate change options

Summer 2009

by Stuart Eizenstat

An era of closer cooperation seems to be opening between the U.S. and Europe, says Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was Washington's lead negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol. But he warns that the realities of U.S. politics may limit how far Barack Obama can deliver aggressive new climate policies in time for December's earth summit in Copenhagen

Commentary:

by Mikael Román

One of George W. Bush’s first actions as president was to withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. For much of his Administration, Bush and his senior climate officials denigrated the science behind climate change. They criticized United Nations’ studies which showed the dire and unmistakable consequences of climate change. They denied that human activity was a major cause of climate change, opposed mandatory action to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and virtually withdrew from UN climate negotiations. By 2007 President Bush was taking climate change more seriously, and launched a plan for major economies to consider new approaches to CO2 reductions, but even then he opposed any mandatory action, and it was outside the UN negotiating process.

As the U.S. dallied, the European Union moved towards an ambitious target to reduce member states’ CO2 emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 – the so-called 20/20/20 initiative. The EU also created the European Trading System (ETS), the world’s first platform for mandatory trading of carbon credits.

MATTERS OF OPINION

Climate change is the least of Americans’ green concerns

Policymakers in the Obama Administration are, in the run-up to Copenhagen, having to take into account recent findings that Americans worry less about global warming than about many other environmental issues.

Despite widespread media reporting of climate change, the U.S. public puts concern over global warming bottom of the list of their worries about the planet: the only issue on which more people are either ‘not at all’ or ‘just a little’ worried (40%) than worried “a great deal” (34%), according to a Gallup poll, conducted in March 2009.

The survey presented a list of eight environmental problems and asked Americans to say how much they worried about each one. Top of the list came pollution of drinking water (59% worried ‘a great deal’), followed by pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs and contamination of soil and water by toxic waste (both 52%), maintenance of the freshwater supply for household needs (49%) and air pollution (45%).

Global environmental problems were bottom of the list: the loss of tropical rainforests, the extinction of plant and animal species and, finally, global warming (all with less than 43% of Americans being worried a “great deal”).

http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/

The election of Barack Obama has dramatically changed the dynamics of climate negotiations for the better. President Obama has called climate change one of the most important challenges of our time, and placed it high up on his domestic and foreign policy agendas. The president is pressing forward with domestic cap-and-trade legislation and has the U.S. fully re-engaged in UN negotiations, despite the deep financial crisis and economic recession. He has called for a "major economies" meeting in Washington in the spring, but with UN participation.

This commitment is tangible. The president appointed Carol Browner as his special assistant at the White House for energy and climate change, with responsibility for coordinating the Administration’s position. Browner was head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, who signed the Kyoto Protocol before Bush was elected.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has appointed Todd Stern as her special climate change coordinator. Stern was an important member of the Clinton Administration’s team at Kyoto that I led, and has both the knowledge and talent to be a successful lead U.S. negotiator as the world approaches December’s Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to develop a global post-Kyoto agreement. On her first foreign trip as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton put climate change near the top of her agenda with China which, together with the U.S. and EU, holds the keys to the success or failure of Copenhagen.

The Obama Administration has taken the leading developing domestic legislation with Congress to impose mandatory caps on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The recent economic stimulus package includes $15bn for alternative energy development, more fuel efficient cars and a “smart grid” to bring them together. In a speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama pledged to double the percentage of alternative energy used in the U.S. within three years. Currently, alternative energy meets just 7% of U.S. demand. He has also made clear that cap-and-trade revenues are central to his goals and deeply imbedded in his budget plans. Under cap-and-trade, the federal government would set annual limits on total emissions of gases such as CO2 and allocate emission credits which could then be traded. With stronger Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate since last year’s elections, the political scene in Washington is now set for more progress on such climate measures.

There is also a sea change in public and corporate attitudes towards climate change in the U.S. Groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange and U.S. CAP include major corporations which have pledged to make binding reductions in emissions. This year, California will implement the nation’s first broadly-based climate change requirements from industry, and a dozen mid-Atlantic and north-eastern states will apply mandatory emissions reductions on utilities.

Does all this U.S. activity mean there is likely to be complete harmony with the EU on climate change? No it does not. There will certainly be closer cooperation than in the Bush era and there is a convergence of goals on climate change in the long term –around an 80% reduction by 2050. But there will still be substantial hurdles along the way and real leadership will be required on both sides of the Atlantic to avoid the kind of breakdown at Copenhagen that was only narrowly averted at Kyoto in 1997. So what are the main potential sticking points?

First off, it must be understood that the EU and U.S. start from very different points in the race to reduce emissions. When the then 15-nation EU ratified the Kyoto Protocol, it pledged to cut CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012. With the U.S. outside the Kyoto process, U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases increased by 19% from 1990 to 2005. The EU-15’s emissions rose by 8% during that period, above the Kyoto targets but apparently well below the U.S. total. However, a closer look at the figures shows that much of the EU’s performance was not due to deliberate planning. Since Kyoto adopted a 1990 baseline, shortly after German reunification, East German emissions could be included in the EU’s initial data. UK energy policy also shifted from using coal to natural gas from the North Sea around that time. If you exclude the UK and Germany from the 1990-2005 data, the EU-13 emissions increased by 24%, above the equivalent U.S. figure of 19%. So the primary difference between the U.S. and EU performance was not the Kyoto Protocol or the EU’s climate policies; it was down to outside factors. The European Environment Agency still maintains that the EU will meet its 2012 target. But in order to succeed, the EU will have to use forests and other Kyoto mechanisms, including emissions trading which the EU had originally opposed at Kyoto.

Second, Europe needs to understand where the U.S. is coming from. The Obama Administration’s proposed emission reduction targets will be the high water mark for Congress, but which will fall short of the EU’s 20/20/20 pledge. The recent U.S. Obama budget established a target of 14% reductions from 2005 levels by 2020, with an 83% cut by 2050 (The Administration has properly chosen 2005 as a baseline, rather than 1990.) The bill that finally emerges from Congress is likely to have less ambitious targets. Therefore, the U.S. will go to Copenhagen in December with a very different set of targets from Europe and a different baseline. Todd Stern has already sent a very clear signal to the EU to recognise the different realities under which the U.S. is operating.

The EU must also accept that, in terms of domestic U.S. politics, it would be a Herculean task for Congress to pass mandatory emissions reduction legislation before the Copenhagen meeting. There are various reasons for this. For a start, a solid phalanx of senators is determined to kill any mandatory climate legislation. Also, the global economic crisis has created the worst possible environment to add more financial burdens on companies and households. Last year’s debate on the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner climate bill highlights the domestic political challenge. This bill was pulled prematurely from the floor after several Republican Senators miscast it as a cap-and-tax bill and many Democratic senators from industrial states also opposed it.

The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Henry Waxman of California, has promised to have a bill out of his Committee by the end of May, and the Speaker of the House, fellow Californian Nancy Pelosi, expects to have the bill on the House floor this summer. There is a real chance the legislation will pass the House by the August recess. Getting it through the Senate will be tougher as compromises will be necessary to achieve the 60 votes necessary to break a certain filibuster attempt. I believe Congress will pass some kind of mandatory cap-and-trade bill, but it is more likely to be next year than this year. And it will probably fall even further below EU targets than the Administration’s proposals.

Despite the Obama Administration’s commitment to dealing aggressively with climate change, it is unlikely to accept any binding international agreement at Copenhagen that goes beyond the targets that Congress will set. Nor is the Administration likely to muster two-thirds support in the Senate to support a post-Kyoto Treaty unless there are binding commitments from China and India too. China already has binding domestic efficiency standards, but will certainly not agree to binding economy-wide or growth targets. There is a real risk that a price for passing a domestic cap-and-trade bill will be some potential trade sanctions on big emerging country emitters, like China, who refuse to take mandatory obligations of some kind.

There are ways to avoid a showdown between the EU and U.S. at Copenhagen. Early and constant communications by the EU with Obama’s top climate officials will help the Europeans understand the likely U.S. position. Coordinated efforts to get key developing countries like China and India to make meaningful contributions to Copenhagen would also help, unlike the obstructionist tactics they employed at Kyoto. After all, China last year overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Most importantly, we need to develop a different framework than the Kyoto Treaty I would suggest that at Copenhagen, each country (or in the EU’s case group of countries) commit to meeting its own targets, with every effort made to ensure they add up to the overall level of reductions that scientists believe are necessary to stabilize global temperatures. A new international monitoring mechanism is needed to assure compliance. This would contrast with Kyoto, where the so-called Annex I developed countries took essentially identical targets. This change will prove difficult for the EU, since its companies will face a tighter set of targets than competitors in the U.S. or elsewhere. But it may be the best we can hope for under the circumstances.

U.S. attitudes toward climate change have been transformed under the Obama Administration. But political realities will limit how far the U.S. can go by Copenhagen and beyond. The sooner the EU appreciates these limitations the better able it will be to achieve a meaningful post-Kyoto agreement.

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How much can Europeans expect from Obama’s climate policies?

Stuart E. Eizenstat, Washington's former lead negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol, warns that the realities of U.S. politics may limit how far Barack Obama can deliver aggressive new climate policies in time for December's earth summit in Copenhagen. How much can Europeans expect from Obama’s climate policies?

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