President Obama is officially eyeing a U.S. emissions reduction target. (image: tdbimg.com and seedcapitalfunds.com)

Last week, President Obama ended months of speculation concerning his pre-holiday travel plans by announcing that he will personally attend the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen. The announcement is significant for two reasons, according to Darren Samuelson and Lisa Friedman in Wednesday’s New York Times.

First, Obama will be the first sitting president to attend the conference since George H.W. Bush in 1992, which lends the visit substantial symbolic value, even if Obama’s attendance doesn’t lead to an international pact. The fact that Obama is boarding a plane at all marks a break from the previous administration, whose public comments on climate change most often consisted of a wan shrug.

Second, Obama will bring with him a real, if “provisional,” plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions. This is the first time that the United States has gone on record with specific goals concerning the reduction of its emissions, and many supporters of climate legislation now hope that the president’s announcement of a firm target will encourage other industrialized and developing countries to offer specific goals of their own. While no one expects Copenhagen to produce a legally binding treaty, it is generally hoped that the conference will act as a “steppingstone” toward a global climate agreement, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it earlier in November.

In his announcement, Obama said that the United States will cut greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels” by 2020. This goal parallels recent plans outlined by Congress, which have incited various rumblings and approbations from Republicans and Democrats. The House climate bill, which passed earlier this year, also calls for an emissions reduction of 17 percent by 2020, while the Senate bill includes plans to cut emissions by 20 percent, although this target will likely be diminished during subsequent negotiations. The administration has hitherto avoided stating specific emissions goals, mainly because climate legislation has stalled in the Senate—and in Washington, as elsewhere, it is unwise to put the cart before the horse. In other words, Obama is taking a bit of a risk.

No doubt this is one reason why his remarks have been lauded by Democrats in favor of climate change legislation. With uncharacteristic verve, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) referred to Obama’s proposal as “one hell of a global game changer with big reverberations here at home.” Moreover, Obama’s public commitment to climate change legislation could put to rest the longstanding, largely conservative opposition to such legislation. According to Senator Kerry, the numbers offered by the United States will “lay the groundwork for a broad political consensus at Copenhagen that will strip climate obstructionists here at home of their most persistent charge, that the United States shouldn’t act if other countries won’t join with us.”

Another big question, of course, still remains: will other countries join us? With the United States leading the way, many have hoped that China and India—along with the US, the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases—would follow along. And while the results of Obama’s forward charge have been fairly encouraging, it seems ill-advised to call it a decisive victory. On Friday, the United States and India announced a “green partnership,” pledging—rather vaguely—to work together to fight against climate change. While significant, the announcement did not include specific emissions reductions targets, and did little to indicate exactly how much money the United States plans to give India to help bolster its green initiatives.

While visiting China earlier this month, President Obama released a similar joint statement with Chinese President Hu, suggesting that the Copenhagen conference should “include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions for developing countries.” This is simply a nice way of saying that the United States and China will be held to different standards when it comes to cutting emissions, despite exhortations from the United States and Europe that China deal more aggressively with skyrocketing pollution. Thus, taking advantage of yet another political euphemism, China has agreed to reduce its “carbon intensity” by 40 to 45 percent, rather than cut its “carbon emissions”—a different enterprise altogether, and one that allows its overall carbon emissions to continue to increase.

But here’s another way to look at it. The World Resources Institute calculates that President Obama’s goal of a 17 percent emissions reduction is equal to slightly more than a 40 percent reduction in emissions intensity—the percent reduction that China has proposed. Stated that way, it appears that the United States and China have a like-for-like deal, though each apparently prefers to state the deal in different terms. One wonders, of course, why China is so resistant to actual emissions cuts, and what effect that may have on future climate policy.

President Obama with Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh at the White House. (image: static.guim.co.uk)

In the latest development in the international run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, the U.S. and India have pledged to work together in the fight against climate change, according to Tuesday’s Guardian. The announcement was significant, as it sealed commitments from the world’s top three greenhouse gas emitters (China, the US, and India) to reduce emissions and combat climate change. It did not, however include any specific emissions reductions targets or dollar amounts of assistance that the US will provide to India to help bolster green initiatives.

According to the article, as well as a fact sheet issued by the White House, Washington and New Delhi will partner together in new initiatives to bring clean energy technology to India, which has emerged as the world’s third largest emitter of carbon during its recent rapid growth. India, China and other developing nations have asked first world countries for financial assistance as the world moves away from carbon emitting fuel sources. World leaders will convene at Copenhagen next month in order to work on a comprehensive and unified response to climate change.

Carbon dioxide emission. (image: co2-handel.de)

In the ongoing saga of what to expect from the U.S. at next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, a senior administration official said on Monday that the U.S. will propose a near-term emissions reduction target, but would not commit to a specific goal, the New York Times reported on Monday. The reason? The administration doesn’t want to preempt Congress, which has been debating climate change legislation, which now appears to be stalled.

Since the announcement of the summit, there have been reports about what can realistically be achieved–in other words, not much. Mr. Obama and leaders from other countries have indicated that the Copenhagen talks will not produce a comprehensive and binding treaty to address global warming. The goal now is to create an interim agreement that addresses the major issues without requiring international enforcement. President Obama did say he would consider attending the summit if his presence could help “close a deal.”

The Obama aid, who spoke anonymously to the Times, said that the President would present a “meaningful submission,” before the actual summit, which takes the current legislative stalemate into account. So it’s anyone’s guess what the phrase actually means: it could be a range of possible reduction targets rather than a single figure. Reuters reported that the emissions reduction target will be in line with proposals backed by congressional leaders.

“We don’t want to get out ahead or be at odds with what can be produced through legislation,” the official said. “Whatever number we put on the table will be with reference to what we think can come out of the legislative process.”

The House passed a measure in June that calls for a 17 percent reduction of domestic emissions of greenhouse gases, compared with 2005 levels. A Senate committee produced a bill last month that sets a 20 percent target, but it will likely be weakened as negotiations continue.

The official said that if Congress had acted on climate change legislation by this time, the President would have more influence at the upcoming conference.

Mr. Obama said last week that the goal of the talks will be a global deal with “immediate operational effect,” including creation of an international fund to help poorer nations adapt to a changing climate, and that the aim is not a partial accord or a political declaration, but rather an agreement that covers all of the issues in the negotiations.

Copenhagen—a lovely place for talks. (image: scienceblogs.com)

What a difference a few months makes. This summer, the goal of the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference was a signed international climate treaty with enforceable carbon reduction targets. A comprehensive draft of such a treaty was circulated for review, with high hopes of ratification by the year’s end.

Now, the goal for Copenhagen is simply to talk about climate change and what might be done, as reported by Politico.com on Saturday. Certainly, that’s an attainable goal—if there’s anything you can get senior diplomats and government officials to do, it’s talk—but what happened? How did putting in place an actual treaty to replace the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocols turn into simply hoping to advance international discussions?

Probably nothing “happened.” With hundreds of billions of dollars, economic development, and international trade competitiveness all at stake, binding multinational agreement may be impossible; and if achievable, will almost certainly require years of painstaking negotiation. All that has “happened” is public acceptance of what should have been obvious from the beginning.

Why was agreement this year foredoomed? Some, like Germany’s Chancellor Merkel, place a significant part of the responsibility on the United States for not passing its own climate change legislation, but that’s simplistic. Without denying the U.S.’s importance to any multinational agreement generally or fighting global warming specifically, blaming the U.S. ignores the reason why it has not passed climate legislation.

That reason is cost. The price of carbon reduction will be hundreds of billions of dollars—at least. Domestically, U.S. legislators are reflecting constituent’s unease with something that may cost them and their families significant sums, whether through higher energy costs, higher prices for food or manufactured goods, or lost jobs.

(To digress for a moment: make no mistake—while the exact cost is open to debate, there will be a cost. Nobody is actually “pro” emitting carbon; if it could be reduced at no or low cost, energy companies, utilities, and manufacturers would be doing it already, if only for the good PR.)

The issue of cost is not just domestic though—there is international disagreement over how much cost each nation will bear. African nations want the West to make exceptionally aggressive cuts in carbon emissions, which will help save Africa from some consequences of global warming while costing western economies greatly. Meanwhile, China has repeatedly demanded that developed nations make deeper emissions cuts than developing nations while also donating up to 1 percent of their GDP to developing nations (including China) to pay for carbon reduction efforts. Everyone is hoping that someone else will pick up this tab.

Given that it can take months to negotiate a simple business deal between two parties, expecting the entire world to come to an agreement affecting every human being on Earth in the same time frame was optimistic to the point of delusion.

What does this mean for the Copenhagen summit and the fight against climate change? As for the summit, as Secretary of State Clinton recently put it, realistically, the Copenhagen talks may be a “steppingstone” to global climate change agreement—but it’s not going to produce that agreement itself. What’s likely to emerge from the talks is simply an agreement to keep talking.

Is this a bad thing? There’s reason to think it isn’t. At the end of the day, a “binding” or “enforceable” international treaty is neither—it’s not as if China could be arrested for emitting too much carbon. International agreements are only as good as the intentions of the nations that sign them. A treaty that is unworkable will simply be ignored—history is replete with examples of that happening.

And, as the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday, an agreement in Copenhagen that has been downgraded from a legally-binding treaty to a “handshake” agreement could help the chances of passing a climate bill in the US. One of the central arguments of the Boxer-Kerry climate bill’s opponents is that US emissions-cutting legislation would put it at an economic disadvantage in trading with developing nations (specifically China) that have made no commitment to emissions reductions. A pledge from China, however informal, to reduce its greenhouse emissions, would help even the playing field of trade with the US and perhaps win new support for the climate bill in the Senate.

Although any agreements on climate change that come out of Copenhagen will fall well short of initial goals, they could provide an important foundation to serious progress toward emissions reductions, both inside and outside of the United States.