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While the GOP/Media clowns were babbling about bowing, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao were hammering out a climate-change deal in advance of the great Copenhagen climate summit.
Because of this deal, President Obama is now able to go to Copenhagen with the following good news:
The news that President Obama will seek a emissions target at global talks in Copenhagen has animated a once-moribund meeting and given hope to environmentalists that something tangible can come from them.
The emissions target is expected to correspond to numbers that have been discussed on Capitol Hill, namely a reduction of 17 to 20% below 2005 emissions levels by the year 2020.
This is a direct result of the meeting with China’s Hu Jintao and was expected by those news outlets that were actually paying attention instead of freaking out over bows. As I mentioned last week, both the US and China have now agreed to stop playing climate-change chicken.
And it’s not just China that’s agreed to join the US in working to curb emissions. Obama has met with the leaders of India as well, and got commitments from them on this.
This may be the most significant news of the last decade.
[UPDATE: And no, it's not too late. The economic downturn has bought us an extra 21 months in which to retool our economies to lower emissions. That's 21 extra months for China to retool the older, grossly inefficient and polluting steel factories it has idled because of the downturn. That's 21 extra months for India to do similar upgrades to its factories. That's 21 extra months for the US to do the same thing with its factories. Considering that these three nations account for 56% of the world's CO2 emissions, that's not a small thing.]
(Crossposted at Mercury Rising.)
15 Comments
Let’s see Chuck Todd misunderstand this and twist into a “loss” for Obama.
It’s all they know how to do at this point: horserace, GOP by a nose.
“The emissions target is expected to correspond to numbers that have been discussed on Capitol Hill, namely a reduction of 17 to 20% below 2005 emissions levels by the year 2020.” ; WHICH IS WAY TOO LITTLE AND TOO DAMN LATE.
THIS IS A LOSS, not for Obama but for the species ‘homo sapiens’ and the idea that the U.S. cares about other people in other nations.
Actually, it’s not at all too little or too late. The economic downturn’s lowered emissions so much that it’s bought us an extra 21 months.
Oh, exactly.
From your link, “The researchers found that if the economic downturn worsened into a depression as bad as that of the 1930s, emissions would be 23 per cent lower than predicted for 2012. However, that would only delay by five years the moment when the 2 deg C rise is reached. — AFP” ; AND the real target is the 6 degree celsius we are on the path to.
Um, Ubie — here’s what that passage really says:
The whole point of Copenhagen is to keep “business as usual” from resuming. But you left that out.
China in particular was holding off on making any moves because the US under Bush refused to make any cutbacks. Now with Obama agreeing to make emissions cuts, and with the worst of the polluting steel mills of the old “iron rice bowl” industries idled, China has even more incentive to retool the old factories to make them less polluting and far more efficient.
PW, I did NOT leave anything out; what I posted was right from the story you provided the link to.
And the ‘point’ of Copenhagen is debatable; the ‘real’ point is that what the U.S. (ObamaRahma Admin) is proposing does NOT do what is needed and we can blame Congress but the real ‘villains’ is an unwillingness to change our lifestyle.
“Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the island nation of Maldives, has called on fellow developing countries to embrace a carbon neutral future.
Mohamed Nasheed: “We want to ask you to consider carbon neutrality yourselves. In my mind, a bloc of carbon neutral developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen. At the moment, every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide.”
“NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the problem is the definition of success in Copenhagen has been lowered and lowered. A few months ago the definition of success in Copenhagen was countries agreeing to lower emissions, to levels that climate scientists were demanding. And the science is very clear that we really do need cuts of 40% below 1990 levels. The other definition of success was rich countries coming to the table with levels of funding for the developing world that once again meet the actual need. And we know what those types of figures are. The World Bank for instance has estimated the cost faced by developing countries to simply adapt to a changing climate dealing with droughts, dealing with increased flooding, is $100 billion a year. The cost of leapfrogging over those dirty energies, as I was saying earlier, that’s $500 billion-$600 billion a year. That’s a figure from independent UN researchers. But now what we hearing from the UN is there hope for Copenhagen is that they can get developed countries, rich countries, to agree to $10 billion a year.”
Cap and trade is business as usual. Instead of taking the kind of bold action we need, such as putting down the fossil fuel crack pipe, Obama is proposing a Greenspanian solution of imposing market discipline.
We know how well market forces work at allocating resources most efficiently and avoiding moral hazard.
Ubie, again, that assumes that emissions would return to pre-downturn levels. The whole point of Copenhagen is to keep that from happening.
Here’s a list of the top twenty carbon emitters. China, the US and India alone put out 56% of the total emissions for the group. These are the three nations that have now agreed to engage in dramatic CO2 emissions reductions, without which Copenhagen wouldn’t be possible. (Now if we can get Russia to do the same, that would really help.)
Marcos, it turns out that Kyoto works:
Remember, the Kyoto protocol, which uses cap-and-trade, only aimed for an 8% reduction below 1990 levels. Even with Spain and Italy slacking off, other nations have more than met the Kyoto goals — and without harming their economies.
More on this here.
I did see this piece of news, PW, but you’re right it was not with any of the legacy media. It was online!
recommended
PW, what I’m trying to communicate to you is that Copenhagen will NOT result in even an agreement to return to levels ‘pre-downturn’(as if the world ended in 2008). What the U.S. is proposing is a 20 (17)per cent reduction from 2005 levels BY 2020.
COMPLETELY INADEQUATE ! China has it’s own needs to reduce pollution for it’s own sake; when the himalayan glaciers disappear, so does the sources for it’s major rivers. Indians -the privileged ones- want to have all the goodies ‘American’s’ have and I’ve seen interviews with people in their tech cities that refuse to accept anything but what we ‘have’. And India faces the same water issues as China if the himalayan glaciers disappear.
It’s not just a matter of agreeing to emissions cuts but how much and when; NOTHING Obama has done -nor any of his ‘agreements(and BTW, why aren’t such agreements written up somewhere? what EXACTLY was agreed upon?) are what is needed.
The economic downturn has bought us an extra 21 months
I’ve been keeping track recently, and the month-to-month increases have been smaller this year than last. I was wondering why that was, and then it hit me: It’s the economy, Stupid. Just like always.
Uh-huh. When the depression hit last year, the older steel factories, by far the worst of the polluters (and the ones that weren’t contributing much to the economy anyway), were the first to be idled. Even as they’re kept idle (and under consideration for retrofitting to more modern, less polluting standards), China is putting up windmills and solar facilities at an astonishing rate — China had less than a gigawatt’s worth of wind turbines at the end of 2004 and it’s now the fourth-largest wind-power producer in the world, soon to be the second-largest.
Another thing is that China’s current lack of official emissions limits didn’t cause a stampede of European manufacturers to its shores when Kyoto was implemented; nor were these countries hurt economically by the Kyoto protocol, even as they’re cutting emissions by over half again as much as their original target. Thus, two key incentives for not having limits are no longer operative.
Finally, China’s last argument for not putting any limits on its CO2 emissions was that the US under Bush wasn’t going to do so. However, that argument is being taken away from Beijing as well, pending Congressional approval of Waxman-Markey.
‘Encouraging signals’ From here
De Boer said that there had been “encouraging signals” for the summit in recent days, including a revised pledge by Russia to restrict emissions to 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The European Union is pushing for a commitment to a cut of 20 per cent, raising the target to 30 pecent in the event of an international agreement, while Japan has offered 25 per cent, but attached conditions.
“But still the aggregate pledges do not match up to the level indicated as necessary by science,” De Boer said. “There is no time to lose.”
Given that the U.S. has increase it’s emissions levels 15 per cent since 1990, the call to reduce emissions by 17-20 per cent of 2005 levels is bullshit.
17-20 per cent from 2005 levels equals 2-5 per cent reduction from 1990 levels, COMPLETELY INADEQUATE RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL PROBLEM !!
There is only one solution and that is for U.S. lifestyles to undergo a radical transformation and the ‘leaders’ of the U.S. are scared to shit of telling the citizens of the situation. And that is consistent and keeping with the robbing of developing nations resources to feed the industrialized nations decadence.