Obama gets tough on emissions
Clean-up
US President Barack Obama is gambling that aggressive and never-before-tried limits on carbon dioxide emissions from domestic power plants unveiled in Washington yesterday will put to rest long-lingering doubts about America’s commitment to tackling climate change and set a compelling example for the rest of the world.
Under the President’s direction, the Environmental Protection Agency said it was proposing a plan to reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions from all of America’s generating plants by 30 per cent within 15 years, compared with 2005 levels. It was hailed by green groups and instantly condemned by many in the business lobby.
The second-largest source of greenhouse gases on the planet, the United States has been a giant among laggards in the global effort to tackle warming starting with President George W. Bush’s refusal to adhere to the 1997 Kyoto accord.
Obama’s emissions law collapsed in Congress in 2010, partly because of his focus at the time on healthcare. However, he is able to impose these new rules on his own. If they survive legal challenges and efforts by opponents to subvert them, they should be finalised next year and implemented in phases thereafter.
While many in Obama’s own party will complain that the regulations will kill jobs, particularly in coal- producing states like Kentucky and West Virginia, and hurt them in midterm elections this November, they come in the nick of time from an international perspective, with world leaders due to discuss climate change in New York in September with the goal of agreeing a new global treaty at the end of next year. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, must persuade 194 nations to sign up to a new global warming treaty at Paris in December 2015. These new steps by the US could provide an important fillip.
Obama is hoping that the plan will give him the moral power to per- suade other nations, notably China, to take similar steps. The alternative scenario is that China will step in to buy cheap US coal that will no longer be consumed domestically.
Individual US states will be granted maximum flexibility to find ways to make the overall national targets happen (cutting CO2 emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 and 30 per cent by 2030) and in some cases won’t have to submit their implantation plans until 2017, by which time Obama will be gone. Some of the proposed reductions are already happening as power plants switch from coal to suddenly abundant natural gas for economic reasons.