Obama’s big climate journey: he has a mountain to climb and a gulf to bridge

Giles Whittell in Washington

President Obama has no official engagements for the Thanksgiving weekend but that does not mean that his Blackberry will be switched off. Behind the scenes he has a mountain to climb to sell his new climate change commitments to a sceptical American public.
For all the President’s aspirations to global leadership on climate change there remains a gulf between what the world expects and what he can deliver. That gulf has been exposed by starkly contrasting reactions at home and abroad to his pledge to cut US carbon emissions by 17 per cent relative to their 2005 levels in the next 11 years.
Mr Obama’s target is the first by a US administration in more than a decade, and the most realistic in the history of American involvement in UN-sponsored climate change talks. Yet it was “lower than we would like” and would prove “disappointing to some”, an EU spokesman said. On the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, said that it was likely to prove unacceptable to Congress because “it will harm our economy and have virtually no effect on climate change”.
Between such views the White House finds itself in uncharted territory, balancing the risk of being seen to undermine the Copenhagen conference with that of losing congressional support for Mr Obama’s entire domestic agenda.

His announcement that he will travel to Copenhagen with a concrete carbon reduction proposal has already yielded an historic dividend: yesterday’s response from Beijing — an undertaking to cut Chinese carbon emissions per unit of GDP by at least 40 per cent by 2020 — marks the first time the world’s two biggest polluters have committed themselves to measurable carbon targets as part of UN climate change negotiations. It will also allow Mr Obama to argue that the US is not committing itself to a costly process that demands no sacrifices from developing economies.
China’s exemption, along with India and Brazil, from core requirements of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol led the US Senate to reject it by 95-0.
In Denmark on December 9 Mr Obama will hail an almost complete reversal of US policy on climate change since then. He will point to new US car mileage standards and the passage of a climate change Bill through the House of Representatives as evidence that his Administration has done more to curb greenhouse gas emissions in ten months than its predecessor did in eight years. He will also say that the target of a 17 per cent cut by 2020 should become legally binding in a Bill he hopes to sign next year.
That may be enough to mollify those heading for Copenhagen who have accused him this week of snubbing the conference by appearing at its start — when he happens to be in the neighbourhood collecting the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo — rather than at the leaders’ forum near the end of the conference. Whether Mr Obama can indeed turn his 17 per cent pledge into law is another matter.
Senator John Kerry, Mr Obama’s closest congressional ally on climate change and the author of a stalled Senate climate change Bill, has called the pledge “one hell of a game changer”. Crucially, the US coal and coal-fired power industries have also broadly endorsed the principle of carbon cap-and-trade, by which major polluters receive an allocation of permits to pollute that is lowered year-on-year to meet carbon targets but which rewards firms that move fastest to cleaner technologies by allowing them to sell surplus permits.
“A well-designed cap will provide a smooth transition to clean energy,” James Rogers of Duke Power, one of America’s largest coal-fired power producers, said when lending his support to the Waxman-Markey climate change Bill passed by the House of Representatives this summer.
American Electric Power, Duke’s biggest rival, also endorsed the Waxman-Markey Bill. The company has since started pumping liquefied carbon dioxide thousands of feet beneath its largest plant in West Virginia in a project that it hopes will prove the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS), attracting sufficient federal subsidies to remove carbon from the smokestacks of the plants that still provide 40 per cent of America’s electricity.
The Waxman-Markey Bill set out roughly the same targets adopted by Mr Obama this week. His problem is that it cannot become law until it is merged with a comparable Senate Bill, and the 60 votes needed to pass one are still little more than a White House dream.
Senator John McCain, in the past a staunch campaigner for climate change legislation, is now withholding his support for a new Bill being drafted by Senators Kerry and Lindsey Graham, demanding sweeping guarantees for a new generation of US nuclear power plants before joining them.
Experts believe that Mr McCain will be won over eventually but senators from the major oil-producing states will have to swap sides as well to give a Senate Bill a hope of passing. Robert Dillon, spokesman for the powerful Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, has welcomed Mr Obama’s decision to travel to Copenhagen but he warned on Wednesday that whatever the Administration says there “the real negotiations on reductions happen here in Congress. We pass the laws.”
Environmentalists worry that the White House will concede almost anything to win the votes of the senators whom it regards as proxies for Big Oil because the US legislative timetable is already being squeezed by next year’s mid-term elections. “There is a desperation for getting something done before June next year because of the mid-terms,” a Greenpeace spokesman said.
Meanwhile, America’s climate change sceptics have seized on the hacked British academics’ e-mails that appear to point to the suppression of data that may undermine parts of the UN consensus of climate change science. Carole Browner, Mr Obama’s chief adviser on the subject, has made light of what conservatives are calling “Climategate”, saying: “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists” who continue to support the view that climate change is real and that humans are largely to blame.