UPDATE: U.S. Senators John Kerry and Lindsay Graham, along with U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, had a press conference on December 10 announcing their desire for bi-partisan cap-and-trade legislation. Their letter to President Obama lays out their overall vision of the structure and goals of such a bill, but at only four pages, it provides few details besides setting the cap “in the range of” 17% below 2005 emissions by 2020.
The election of Democrat Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency was filled with the promise for a new forward thinking U.S. policy on global climate change, but observers are now tagging Copenhagen as yet another example that President Obama cannot deliver.
But the administration’s focus on China could be productive in the long run, so perhaps it is too early to count Obama out. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has laid out in its solarium II project, with input from the Baker Institute, on how a China-first negotiating posture could produce a win-win for the United States on both climate and energy security. Chief U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern aptly noted during a Washington, D.C., speech in June, “China may not be the alpha and omega of the international negotiations, but it is close.”
However, efforts with China have been slow going, and it remains unclear how exactly China would implement Copenhagen climate target pledges, even if it makes them. Easing fuel subsidies is one way China is pushing its domestic market to be less energy intensive. A few years ago, Beijing also passed an energy savings law that called on state enterprises to reduce energy consumption per unit of production by 20 percent. But Beijing has less control over the economic policies of southern China than one might imagine, and this means implementation of grander commitments might be hard to achieve.
With China potentially not playing ball, the Democrats’ other Band-Aids for Copenhagen don’t seem up to the triage. The Center for American Progress, closely associated with its founder John Podesta, who is now President Obama’s White House-based chief adviser on science and technology, released a briefing paper listing pro-climate U.S. executive actions as evidence that President Obama “has reversed course and reoriented us in a new direction.” However, the reality is that climate is not a winning area so far for this administration. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that can be regulated garnered some mild praise at the ongoing Copenhagen meetings, but the reality is that the United States is not steering the Copenhagen ship, except perhaps to hold things back.
The president is greatly inhibited by domestic politics. Efforts to have Democratic climate cheerleader John Kerry and Republican Lindsay Graham forge a set of bipartisan principles that might lay the foundation for a compromise climate bill out of Capital Hill have not moved past their New York Times op-ed.
In point of fact, inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, the betting is that U.S. climate legislation could still wind up the unintended casualty of health care reform. With the health care bill taking so long, climate legislation is pushed to the back burner, running the risk of being taken off the table ahead of the midterm elections. That could delay a climate bill until 2012, Washington insiders believe. Even climate legislation backers wonder if the White House might shift priorities.
Fallback positions include taking on financial market regulatory reform first so as to ease Congressional concerns that the only ones who will benefit from a cap-and-trade carbon market might be New York speculators while average Americans wind up with the costs. Another idea is that the administration might repackage legislation as an energy bill and emphasize the U.S. electricity sector, including preparedness for electric plug-in cars, while tossing Republicans a nuclear power bone. But one thing is for sure. The U.S. Congress has sandbagged the president’s saddle for Copenhagen, preventing him from getting out in front, early in the race.
Amy Myers Jaffe is the Baker Institute Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies and director of the Energy Forum.