Climate change: the world looks to Washington

Editorial
The Guardian, Friday 26 June 2009

Zoom down from the planetary perspective of climate science to the Washington committee corridors where America's climate policy gets thrashed out, and everything looks ugly. The House of Representatives today votes on the Waxman-Markey bill to establish a carbon cap-and-trade system, which shows all the signs of having been through the congressional mangle. It comes festooned with unattractive concessions to industries ranging from coal to biofuels. Worse, there is artful fuzziness on the central question of how far American emissions must fall. Unsightly - and sometimes alarming - as these blemishes are, they must not distract from the reality that the House will do something historic if it listens to the advice of Barack Obama and passes legislation that remains more ambitious than anything he promised on the campaign trail. If, as is more doubtful, the Senate does the same over the next few months, then the US can finally put a decade of denial behind it and turn up at December's Copenhagen summit in a position to give at least some sort of a lead to the world.
That meeting is charged with replacing the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gases, which the US never ratified. Its exclusion is not the only feature that renders the framework totally inadequate today; just as serious is the lack of any meaningful obligation on developing countries, which could be ignored in the 1990s but cannot be overlooked any longer. New figures from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency yesterday showed that the CO2 emissions from the developing world account for more than half the global total for the first time. The conversations that count in Copenhagen will be those between capitals that were never bound by Kyoto, and most particularly between Washington and Beijing. The fumes China belches out are largely generated in the course of serving the western consumer, a position that gives Beijing the right to do nothing until America demonstrates its commitment to making the first move.
Egged on by his determined climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown has grasped this logic, and appreciates that if every card is clung on to until the eleventh hour, Copenhagen will go the same way as the dismal Doha trade round. He will use a speech today to set out his approach, although his voice will command little direct authority, both because the UK negotiates through the EU and because it is not Brussels - which has had carbon targets for years - but Washington that holds the key to unlocking a deal.
The arrest this week of Nasa's climate scientist, James Hansen, as he protested at a coal-processing plant in West Virginia, seemed somehow to symbolise the struggle still faced by the forces of reason within the American establishment. Even before the amendments to Waxman-Markey, the pressures were evident in a cowardly change of language - environmentalists in the administration now talk less about the (obvious) need for carbon cuts than about those fuzzy objects, carbon profiles. They were evident, too, in the decidedly nervous noises that Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning energy secretary, has been making on the prospects for addressing America's ludicrously low rate of fuel taxation. Raising pump prices during a slump might be suicidal, but there should be other ways to start to wean Americans off their oil addiction - for example, putting a floor under the price of a gallon, which could then be increased over the years.
A dozen years of New Labour has repeatedly shown how, in the absence of a progressive strategy, mere tactics fill the void. Imperfect as it is, Waxman-Markey locks America into a plan, which is why it is so essential Congress endorses it today. Yes, the US is late to the climate-change fight; true, these steps are not big enough. But Washington is at last playing catch-up - and that is cause for modest optimism.