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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
In an embarrassing rebuke to the White House, a group of Republican and Democratic governors is embracing the Kyoto accords on global warming.
Jul 21, 2003 | A bipartisan group of Northeastern governors is expected to announce an historic agreement this week to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, a plan that would break sharply with Bush administration policy on global warming.
The agreement for mandatory greenhouse-gas emission caps could put the states on the road to compliance with the Kyoto climate-change treaty, an embarrassing rebuke to the president, who made a decision in 2001 to pull the U.S. out of negotiations on the pact. In another repudiation of Bush doctrine, the states say that their move away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy will not only benefit the environment but the economy as well.
"I think what you'll see is nearly every Mid-Atlantic and New England state agreeing to join in a regional [carbon dioxide] cap and trade regime," Bradley Campbell, commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, told Salon. Campbell said that Republican governors are expected to sign on to the plan despite backroom coercion by the White House. "Several of my counterparts in Republican-led states have reported active efforts by the Bush administration to pressure them to not participate in a regional program to implement greenhouse gas reductions," he said.
While it's not surprising that Northeast Democrats would defy Bush, it seems likely six Republican states will break ranks with the president's refusal to address climate change, certainly including New York Gov. George Pataki, and possibly Vermont Gov. James Douglas, New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson and Connecticut Gov. John Rowland. Only Maryland, said Campbell, is so far siding with the president. "Republican Gov. [Robert] Ehrlich has largely aligned himself with the pollution policies of the Bush administration which has been hostile to even acknowledging climate change as a problem," Campbell noted. "I think the jury is also out on Pennsylvania because their economy is so coal dependent, and because [Democratic] Gov. [Edward] Rendell is new to these issues and newly elected."
Campbell argued that the states have been forced to act due to the White House's lack of leadership on climate change. National and regional climate change assessments generated by U.S. scientists during the Clinton administration -- but disregarded by the Bush team as too extreme -- forecast dire global warming consequences for the states, including financially disastrous tidal surges in coastal cities, significant stresses on forest, wetland and estuary ecosystems, and increased human diseases such as West Nile Virus.
The Bush administration's response to these and other scientific warnings has been feeble at best, and sometimes counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney energy plan (a fossil fuel corporate-feeding frenzy) is dead on arrival in Congress, and Bush's carbon dioxide reduction plan (corporate volunteerism at its most cynical) is stillborn. In fact, Bush's entire environmental agenda is in disarray, with EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman resigning after her many battles with the White House, and with Bush's "Clear Skies" air pollution initiative seen as so corporate-friendly that it is creating defectors even among stalwart Republicans like Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
Led by New York and New Jersey, the Northeast governors are looking to act on climate change by moving beyond coal and oil. And they are listening seriously to visionary alternative-energy gurus who see a booming wind-hydrogen economy not decades ahead, but just around the corner.
"If we can go from making cars to making tanks and bombers in a single year, like we did in World War II, then we can transition to a wind-hydrogen economy in just a few years," Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, told Salon. "But we can only do it if we want to. That level of commitment exists elsewhere. Germany, for example, is planning to cut carbon emissions 40 percent by 2020. The difference isn't that they have engineering know-how we don't. It is that they have leadership."
The regional carbon dioxide emission cap and trade program agreed to in principle by the Northeast states would put limits on the amount of CO2 produced by power plants. Each governor's home state would be allowed to set its own caps, while allowing individual plant owners to trade emission credits with energy producers around the region. The program will likely be designed similarly to the nation's successful cap and trade program to limit sulfur dioxide air pollution. For example, one plant might emit less C02 than allowed under the cap; it could sell its surplus to a plant that exceeds its cap. That not only limits emissions, but gives both plants a financial incentive to reduce greenhouse gases.
Pataki challenged the Northeastern states to join him in a CO2 cap and trade program in April, and asked for a response by his fellow governors by this week. While an announcement is expected shortly, most officials declined comment.
Campbell speculated that the regional cap and trade program might be so much like that achieved by the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty that it would allow U.S. power plants, and eventually other industries, to trade their greenhouse gas pollution credits internationally. "There is a long-term possibility that we may, as a region, or as states, be able to participate in Kyoto in spite of the Bush administration's rejection of the treaty," Campbell said.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol calls for a 5.2 percent cut in planet-wide greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, achieved by 2012. The treaty, rejected by the U.S., has been ratified by 100 nations but has yet to be implemented. It still requires approval by countries representing 55 percent of 1990 carbon emissions. If Russia ratifies this year, the treaty will go into effect. America's cuts in all greenhouse gases under Kyoto were to have been 7 percent, made no later than 2012.
Beyond the technical complexities of the plan, some U.S. governors are setting significant mandatory quotas for electricity generated by alternative power -- wind, biomass, solar and hydrogen.
The most outspoken and daring participant among the states is Pataki. The New York governor has steadily distanced himself from Bush on the climate change issue. "It's important to remember that Pataki led the way by inviting the Northeast governors to participate in the [cap and trade] initiative back in April, and that he has worked closely with the environmental community on global warming," says Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This allows environmentalists, almost three years into the Bush administration, to work in a state where we are still making progress, while others around the country and especially in Washington are fully on the defensive."
Since taking the White House, the president abandoned the Kyoto Treaty, reversed a GOP campaign promise to regulate power plant CO2 emissions, ignored scientific reports on climate change, and opted for a toothless global warming program. In June, a long section of an EPA environmental report outlining risks from rising temperatures was censored, "whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs" after White House arm twisting, according to the New York Times.
Bush does offer limited support to sustainable energy. The administration, for example, allocated $720 million in new funding over the next five years to develop the much-hyped "Freedom Car," a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. By comparison, federal coal and oil subsidies now run to $5 billion annually, says Taxpayers for Common Sense. This doesn't even take into account the $55 billion to $96 billion spent yearly by the Pentagon to guard fossil fuel corporate interests worldwide, as calculated by the International Center for Technology Assessment.
Pataki has gone his own way. In 2001, he launched a state greenhouse gas emissions reduction taskforce. It made tough recommendations, which the governor is striving to meet. In an interview, state Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Erin Crotty said Pataki's state energy plan sets a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, and 10 percent by 2020.
In this year's state-of-the-state speech, the governor announced that within 10 years, New York will get at least 25 percent of its electric power from renewable resources such as wind and solar. This goal, while ambitious, is not as challenging as it looks, since the state already generates 17 percent of its electricity from renewable hydropower. The governor has yet to officially commit to a specific cap on CO2 emissions from power plants at 25 percent below 1990 levels (a cut the taskforce said can be made with no cost to consumers).
Further, Crotty said, Pataki plans to adopt the California Zero Emission Vehicle standard to cut carbon dioxide exhaust from cars -- if the California standard holds up in court. Pataki's backing of the so-called "California Car" is significant since the Bush administration has joined carmakers in suing California to block the initiative.
