Environment
US To Lead Climate Change Plans
Today’s Wall Street Journal Asia is carrying an article that shows what is in store for developing countries attending the Bush sponsored Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change. After years of lethargy, and calling on the developing world to act, the Bush Administration and many others in the US have decided that they must act on the issue. And more important, that they must force the developing world to act with them.
The Bush administration will offer a variety of diplomatic carrots this week to encourage China, India, Brazil and other large developing nations to join a global effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, which are warming Earth’s atmosphere. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress is working on what amounts to a stick: an economic penalty that could be imposed on goods imported from developing nations if those nations don’t move to curb carbon dioxide and other related emissions by 2020.
An unusual coalition-including major utilities, labor unions and some environmental groups-are backing a proposal in Congress to punish U.S. trading partners that don’t take greenhouse-gas reduction actions. It would be part of a U.S. cap-and-trade system that proposes to cap carbon-dioxiode emissions and then gives U.S. companies allowances to emit based on a declining scale over time. The allowances could be traded.
The proposal would require countries that don’t act to reduce emissions by 2020 to compensate for the energy in certain goods exported to the U.S. by buying “international reserve allowances” from the U.S. The allowances would be imposed on imports of…goods that require a lot of energy to make.
The proposal, which assumes the U.S. would begin restricting its emissions by 2012, has been endorsed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the AFL-CIO and several other labor unions.
There are two things interesting about this report. First, there is now clearly enough momentum within the US for climate change action that domestic legislation will take place. More important, lobby groups (such as labor unions) will ensure that such legislation gets extended to the international arena, so some form of post-Kyoto framework is not a certainty. Unfortunately, by clinging desperately – and for far too long – to their ethical stance on climate change, India and other developing nations seem to have missed the opportunity to shape that international framework, loosing a great opportunity for bargaining on trade and technology transfer (see previous post on IEB, or here). They must now face the consequences.
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