[lit-ideas] Re: If Not the US, Who?

  • From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:23:14 -0800

Eric wrote, quoting Teemu:

>>We need a way to put a price tag on CO2 . . . .That is really the only big thing now, and the USA will not do anything about it. 

And then in his own write:

That's not true, at least based on what I know. The entire US suggestion of "Carbon Trading" advanced at Kyoto did exactly that. If we put a price tag on carbon dioxide reduction, allowing the US can do its share (e.g., by helping other countries use cleaner power generators) without crippling the US economy. The total effect is a reduction of CO2 paid for by the US, rather than forcing the US to destabilize by making a too-abrupt change.

As I understand it, the US walked out of the Kyoto talks because the group would not let the US put a price tag on carbon dioxide. 

The New Yorker

GLOBAL WARNING
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Issue of 2005-12-12
Posted 2005-12-05

The Kilinailau Islands—also known as the Tulun Islands, or the Carteret
Atoll—which lie four hundred miles from the coast of Papua New Guinea,
are tiny, low, and impoverished. Their fate, thanks to global warming,
has long been a foregone conclusion. In 1995, most of the shoreline of
Piul and Huene washed away, and the island of Iolasa was cut in half by
the sea. Saltwater intrusion has now reached the point where islanders
can no longer grow breadfruit, and have to rely on emergency food aid.
Last month, Reuters reported that the decision had finally been made to
give up. The islands’ two thousand residents are being relocated, at the
expense of the Papua New Guinean government, to the slightly higher
ground of Bougainville Island, some sixty miles to the southwest.

The atoll’s evacuation fits into a pattern of grim, if unsurprising,
news. In September, the area of Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low,
prompting glaciologists to conclude that the ice had entered a state of
“accelerating, long-term decline,” and to warn that at the current rate
of loss the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free in summer “well before the
end of this century.” At about the same time, a team of researchers at
the University of Colorado announced that the extent of surface melt on
the Greenland ice sheet had reached a new high, and a second team of
researchers, at Georgia Tech, reported that the number of Category 4 and
Category 5 hurricanes had nearly doubled in the past three decades.
Global temperatures, meanwhile, continued their steady upward climb;
2005 is on track to be the hottest year since record-keeping began, in
the late eighteen-hundreds. (Eight of the ten hottest years on record
have occurred since 1996.)

These events are the all too relevant backdrop for the current round of
international climate talks taking place in Montreal. The talks are the
first since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, this past February.
Technically, the United States, not being a party to the protocol, will
be excluded from many of the sessions in Montreal. But, by virtue of its
contribution to climate change—Americans produce nearly a quarter of the
world’s greenhouse-gas emissions—it will still have a great deal of
influence on what does, and does not, get accomplished there.

When the Bush Administration’s policy on climate change was first
articulated by the President, in early 2002, critics described it as a
“total charade,” a characterization that, if anything, has come to seem
too generous. Stripped down to its essentials, the Administration’s
position is that global warming is a problem that either will solve
itself or won’t. The White House has consistently opposed taxes or
regulations or mandatory caps to reduce, or even just stabilize,
greenhouse-gas emissions, advocating instead a purely voluntary
approach, under which companies and individuals can choose to cut their
CO2 production—that is, if they feel like it. (At the G-8 summit this
summer, the President embarrassed British Prime Minister Tony Blair by
refusing to accede even to minor modifications in this position.) In
Montreal, the Administration’s chief climate negotiator, Harlan Watson,
has been touting the efficacy of the voluntary approach, pointing out
that between 2000 and 2003 the United States’ carbon-dioxide emissions
dropped by .8 per cent. Conveniently left out is the fact that since
2003 they have shot back up again. According to the latest government
figures, the country’s CO2 emissions are now three per cent higher than
they were three years ago. (The brief dip, it should be noted, had
nothing to do with government policy; it was entirely a function of the
downturn in the economy.)

Much of the Montreal talks will be taken up with the nitty-gritty of
implementing Kyoto—how, for example, to structure the “clean development
mechanism,” under which industrialized countries can receive credit for
financing emissions-reducing projects in developing ones. Such details
are clearly important if the protocol is to have an impact. But Kyoto
is, and has always been understood as, a first step, and a baby step at
that. As President Bush likes to point out, the protocol imposes no
restrictions on countries like China and India, whose emissions are
growing rapidly. (China is expected to overtake the United States as the
world’s largest carbon emitter sometime around 2025.) Kyoto, moreover,
is a temporary measure; it lapses in 2012, at which point it will need
to be replaced by something much more ambitious. The protocol took
almost three years to negotiate and seven years to ratify; at that rate,
work on its successor should have begun back in 2002. Many countries are
pressing for post-Kyoto talks to commence immediately. In characteristic
fashion, the Bush Administration is refusing to participate. “The United
States seeks to focus attention on progress . . . rather than to detour
positive approaches toward a new round of negotiations” is how Watson
put it shortly after arriving in Montreal last week.

America’s failure to ratify Kyoto is widely viewed as a scandal. The
Administration’s effort to block a post-Kyoto agreement has received
less attention, but is every bit as dangerous. Without the participation
of the United States, no meaningful agreement can be drafted for the
post-2012 period, and the world will have missed what may well be its
last opportunity to alter course. “If we don’t get a serious program in
place for the long term in this post-Kyoto phase, we will simply not
make it,” Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, told
reporters last month. “We will be crossing limits which will basically
produce impacts that are unacceptable.” Such is the nature of global
warming that the problem is always further along than it seems. The
kinds of changes that are now becoming evident—the rise in sea levels,
the thawing of permafrost, the acidification of the oceans, the
acceleration of ice streams—mean that much larger changes are rapidly
approaching. To continue to delay is not to put off catastrophe but,
rather, to rush toward it.
-------------------------

Robert Paul
Reed College

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