Greenhouse Gases: How're We Doing?

Reports Say Gov't Doesn't Know Whether Reductions Reported By 230 Companies Are Real

(AP)  Shortly after taking office, Bush rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to cut global warming gases by 2012 by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels.

He argued that cutting the U.S. share to below 6 billion tons a year, as the treaty would have required, would have cost 5 million U.S. jobs. He objected, too, that such high-polluting developing nations as China and India are not required to reduce emissions.

Some members of Congress agree with the gradualist Bush approach, while others do not, Republicans among them.

“Everybody's talking about it. What the American people want is for somebody to start doing something about it,” complained Congressman Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican who is House Science Committee chairman.

Now, the United States is spending $3 billion each year researching technologies to cut global warming and $2 billion on climate research. In a program called the Asia-Pacific Partnership, Bush also is working with Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea — producers of half the world's greenhouse gases — to attract private money for cleaner energy technologies.

Connaughton calls that joint effort a major breakthrough. Senator Jim Jeffords, an independent, calls it an “excuse for further delay.”

Bush envisions using more hydrogen-powered vehicles, electricity from renewable energy sources and clean coal technology. The Energy Department's technology program has helped build 34,000 new energy-efficient homes and it plans to create “bioenergy” research centers and to advance research into hydrogen fuel and fusion energy.

However, critics say the government effort is too slow and needs refocusing. A review by the Energy Department's research lab said the program focused too much on work that can lead to “only incremental improvements” and called for emphasis on “exploratory, out-of-the-box concepts.”

A new government economic analysis recommends paying attention to markets in combination with research. The Congressional Budget Office report said any cost-effective U.S. policy on global warming must put a price on carbon — via an emissions tax or a “cap and trade” system of buying and selling emissions allowances among companies, as in Europe.

“Setting a current price for carbon emissions and announcing planned future carbon prices not only would induce firms and households to change their behavior but also would increase their demand for technologies that would reduce emissions,” budget office researchers said.

States aren't waiting for Washington.

On Sept. 28, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California legislation imposing a first-in-the-nation emissions cap on utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants, with a goal of cutting greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. An earlier California law ordered 30 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles. And Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced plans this summer to work toward a possible joint emissions-trading market.

Such a market pact is close to becoming reality among eight Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, which plan to impose caps on power plant emissions and encourage trading of allowances among utilities. Twenty-eight states in all have drawn up plans to combat warming, with some — notably Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico and North Carolina — also working toward possible mandatory limits on gases. Ten states plan to enact California's auto rule, if it survives a current court challenge.

Some businesses want national caps now on carbon emissions, believing them inevitable. “It is very difficult to have a product that is regulated significantly differently from state to state,” said Bill Gerwing, environmental policy director for the oil company BP America.

Contributing to Washington's impasse is skepticism in some quarters about whether global warming is even a problem.

The Senate Environment chairman, Republican Senator James Inhofe, likens concerns about the Earth warming to Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.

“Global warming is an alarmism. It's a type of a hoax,” said Inhofe. “The reality is that a cap on carbon is a cap on the economy, through the rationing of energy.”

Former Congresswoman Claudine Schneider, a Republican who in 1988 led the first major legislative attempt to curb greenhouse gases, said next month's congressional elections could provide the “most important push” in the debate.

In her current job of helping the Environmental Protection Agency recruit companies to cut carbon, she finds more shareholders viewing climate change as a top concern, she said.

“You've got the push of shareholders and eventually the pull of Congress moving America,” Schneider said. “We just need a new Congress.”

[paul_pitcl]

The atmosphere belongs to everyone, there is no "canceling out". Less pollution is less pollution and it does not matter who produced less, as long as they do.

[mjv2944]

I believe even if we comply 100% with all EPA regulations it won't mean diddly squat. All the pollutants that China, India and eastern european countries send into the atmosphere will cancel out our efforts. I don't know if global warming is caused by all this or if it is just a natural happening.