The Changing U.S. Climate

On energy and climate issues, is the United States an emerging world leader or a “cacophony of chaos”, as one US Congressman described it?

The WBCSD presented its energy and climate Policy Directions to 2050 document in Washington DC recently, and organized a panel of US policymakers, politicians, NGOs and business leaders to judge the US response to these challenges.

There was agreement – of a kind. After a brief argument over whether cap-and-trade or a fee or tax was the best way forward, World Resources Institute President Jonathan Lash pronounced himself firmly in favor of both. And he was also in favor of the US adopting policies that would signal world leadership on these issues.

Holly Koeppel, Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer of American Electric Power said, “I agree with everyone. We need economy-wide solutions and we need the science behind them.”

Other panelists argued that economic pressure to limit greenhouse gas emissions would spread as countries like China and India found themselves trying to sell products, particularly appliances, into the carbon constrained economies of the US and Europe. Big developing countries such as India, China and Brazil “are interested in developing their own national low-carbon strategies, but they must own them”, asserted World Bank Environment Director Warren Evans.

Gregory Manuel, International Energy Coordinator for the US State Department, noted that energy had long been a key foreign policy consideration and climate was becoming one. But being involved in energy “requires that you are trilingual: you must speak the languages of technology, business and policy apparatus.”

He saw a “watershed moment” developing through a combination of a growing consensus in the US, high oil prices pushing India and China towards efficiencies, lower-carbon substitutes becoming more competitive, and management talent and capital markets “colluding to identify and take advantage of new opportunities.”

However, all was not sweetness and light – or even hope - on the panel. Representative Wayne Gilchrest, a Republican who serves on the House Natural Resources Committee, said that the debate in Congress was getting more focused but the policy scene was “a cacophony of chaos.” He said it was hard to make progress when some Congress members believed that the earth was only 6,000 years old and others thought climate change to be “a hoax.”

Phil Sharp, president of Resources for the Future and himself a former Congressman, argued that a politically agreed energy price rise “is not going to happen.”

He told the largely business audience that “business has not put on the table a concrete set of proposals that include action by business.” He added that even the US Climate Action Partnership “has not put forward a legislative proposal.”

WBCSD Chairman Travis Engen noted that any approach must be pursued for decades; “five or ten years is just not going to cut it.”

This led one member of the audience to observe afterwards: “The consensus seems to be that to lick climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere, for a very long time.”   

Comments

[Calvin Jones]

“The consensus seems to be that to lick climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere, for a very long time.”

I almost agree with that.

I'd say, we can't lick climate change...we are already seeing the impacts now. We have 50 years more in the system from emissions already made, then we have the lack of the economic system to react. If we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere and we have a very short time to do it.

I don't know if you have seen the temperature vs co2 concentration papers and the connected this to emissions to stabilize at a given concentration but its pretty overwhelming. However, don't be overwhelmed business is the most dynamic part of society and a revolution in business is needed. Good luck!

[Graham Douglas]

Thanks for this succinct report.

“The consensus seems to be that to lick climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere, for a very long time.”

May I suggest that while this may be the way it seems there is one fundamental thing we all have to do first.

The challenges we face in our economies and societies in our divided unsustainable world are perhaps greater than at any other time. These challenges have arisen because of how we have been trained to think, plan and act as individuals and how we have applied this training to the way we organise and govern ourselves. We have thought, planned, organised, governed and acted as though our world is comprised of parts that can be separately exploited by humans and managed by us from one stable state to another. We have forgotten we are just one species in a complex natural world. We have tended to act without a sense of wholeness - without integrity. Meeting these challenges will require new approaches to how we are trained to think, plan and act as individuals and how we are trained to organise and govern. These new approaches will need to be based on our current scientific understanding of our world and the human mind.

For further information about where to start please see "Achieving Sustainable Development: The Integrative Improvement Institutes Project" which was presented at the Inaugural All China Economics International Conference in Hong Kong on 19 December 2006. A copy is available online at
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/businessenvironment/rc/ItemDetail.do?itemId=1091332

This may seem a bold suggestion. However it is a very low-cost and self-funding one that, if adopted, could greatly improve our chances of doing what is needed now and what will continue to be needed if we are to achieve sustainable development as if people and their physical, social and cultural environments mattered.

GRAHAM DOUGLAS
FOUNDER, INTEGRATIVE FEDERATION
Achieving Sustainable Development
http://www.integrative-thinking.com
integrative@optusnet.com.au
Topic Editor, Sustainable Development, Encyclopedia of Earth
http://www.eoearth.org/

[Thomas Brewer]

The U.S. is presently somewhere between a ‘cacophony of chaos’ and a world leader, and one hopes in the midst of a transition to the latter. Unfortunately, it will be two or even three years before we know what the future consensus in Washington will be.

We can reasonably assume, however, that the current U.S. administration will mostly continue with the policy of delay-and-deceive - i.e. a policy that has been in place since its inauguration in January 2001. What has changed in the recent past is that the denial of the existence of the problem, as in deny-delay-deceive, has been abandoned. So there is not likely to be a fundamental change in U.S. administration policy until sometime after January 2009, when the administration itself changes.

Until then, however, there will continue to be a certain amount of chaos, as business leaders and members of Congress refine their positions. Because Congress is an inherently decentralized - and thus often confusing institution - it will take time before a new consensus on climate change is established. Regardless of which party wins control of the new Congress in January 2009, however, there will be a new consensus. And the new consensus will support more constructive U.S. engagement in international climate negotiations.

What, then should the rest of the world, including the members of the WBCSD, do in the meantime? (1) Do not waste any more time engaging in wishful thinking about the current administration. Its recent ‘change’ in rhetoric is simply an attempt to protect itself from domestic criticism (when its domestic popularity is hovering at historic lows) and create an impression for its legacy that it tried to address the problem of climate change before it left office. (2) Develop specific proposals for the post-2012 regime. These can be based partly on lessons that can be learned from the EU ETS experience. Further, the WBCSD could endorse the proposal of EU Commissioner Mandelson that the Doha Round negotiations at the WTO seek an agreement on zero-level tariffs on energy efficiency, renewable energy and other climate-friendly ‘green goods’.

Finally, the WBCSD could endorse the principle of the use of import measures to address the ‘free rider’ problem in the present and future multilateral climate agreements. The European Parliament has already called upon the Commission to consider imposing offsetting tariffs on imports from free-riding countries that are not parties to the Kyoto Protocol. There is also now - ironically - a proposal gaining support in Congress that any U.S. legislation establishing a national cap-and-trade system include a provision for the imposition of a requirement that U.S. importers be required to buy emission credits to offset the lower energy costs of imports from any countries that do not undertake significant measures to reduce their GHG emissions. (China, India and Brazil are the most commonly mentioned countries in discussions of the issue.)

In sum, the WBCSD and its members should not count on anything except more delay and deceit from the current administration. But they should count on serious interest in international cooperation beginning in 2009, and they should move ahead with their own initiatives toward strengthened post-2012 climate regime.