U.S. President Barack Obama has struck a deal with China on climate change. Canada has struggled in its pledge to keep pace with the U.S., and the new deal will put the Harper government even further behind. Obama has plenty of backing in the U.S. More than 100,000 people strode through Manhattan on Sept. 21 as part of the People's Climate March. Photo: JOHN MINCHILLO/AP for AVAAZ file For a lame duck, Barack Obama is looking distinctly frisky.
In the days since his Democratic Party took a pasting in the midterm elections, the U.S. president has been moving quickly across a number of contentious policy fronts: immigration, “Net neutrality” and now greenhouse gases.
It’s almost as if he feels liberated, as if he has nothing left to lose. As, in fact, he has.
The climate change agreement just concluded with China is both less and more significant than it appears. Less, because it mostly commits the two countries to doing what they were going to do anyway.
China’s carbon dioxide emissions were already on track to peak around 2030, the very year China has agreed its emissions should cease to grow. Indeed, China has every reason to move away from carbon-based energy sources without an agreement — for the sake of its own suffering citizens, never mind the planet. Plans are already well advanced for a national emissions-trading market, aimed at curbing the particulates that have made the air in its cities unbreathable. If it also reduces CO2 emissions, so much the better.
The U.S., while only formally committed until now (by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord) to reducing its emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020, has already put in motion the sorts of policy changes that would drive it toward the new, lower target of a 26 to 28 per cent reduction by 2025. That’s what Obama’s Climate Action Plan, announced last year, was all about.
True, much of it has yet to be fully implemented, but its regulatory-heavy measures were intended to be largely executable without Congress’s agreement. Once in place, he is calculating, future administrations will be loath to reverse them.
The agreement, what is more, is wholly non-binding, both in language and as a matter of practical reality. China has a history of abrogating its international commitments, while the Obama administration, whatever its own intentions, could not hope to get a binding treaty past Congress. The two countries, in short, have agreed to act more or less as they please, while pretending to be beholden to each other.
How, then, could it also be more significant than it appears? Because this isn’t only an agreement about the two signatories, or their specific commitments. Its importance is as much symbolic.
Maybe China has agreed to do what it was going to do anyway, but it is of some note that it has put its signature to it, if only because it makes it harder for U.S. opponents of action on climate change to object that it is unfair or futile because “China is not doing anything.”
China’s Premier Li Keqiang (L), Myanmar’s President Thein Sein (C) and US President Barack Obama (R) pose for a photo before the Plenary Session for the 9th East Asia Summit (ESA) in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw. Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images
Coupled with the European Union’s recently renewed undertaking, this means the world’s three largest emitters, together responsible for 60 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have all committed themselves to pressing forward.That’s important, as the world prepares for talks on a new climate change accord at next year’s summit in Paris.
The most immediate impact may be on Canada.
The government’s stated policy, recall, is to match whatever the U.S. does. We have not done even that. Not only are we nowhere near to achieving the promised 17 per cent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020, we are not on any realistic track to get there.
Policies we have enacted — a mix of subsidies and regulations, of a kind that went out of favour among environmentalists a generation ago — are among the costliest, most cumbersome and ineffective ways of reducing emissions that could be devised. And we haven’t even applied them yet to the single largest source of emissions, the oil and gas sector.
That’s generally laid at the feet of the Conservative government, which went so far as to pull Canada out of the first global climate change agreement, the Kyoto Accord. While the Tories have manifestly failed to live up to even the watered-down commitments made at Copenhagen, the opposition parties have yet to offer much of substance in its place. The NDP’s preferred carbon-trading scheme would apply only to heavy industry, while the Liberals, having run and lost on a more comprehensive carbon tax, now stick to vague generalities about “putting a price on carbon.”
But the parties are only the servants of public opinion. Canadians want something done about climate change — and they want someone else to pay for it. On the other hand, Canadians also don’t like to be outliers, out of step with the international community. Hence the genius of Stephen Harper’s made-in-the-U.S. policy: if it’s good enough for that nice Mr. Obama, many Canadians will have felt it’s good enough for us.
But we’re already out of step with the Americans, and this new agreement will make the discrepancy more glaring. The prime minister would seem to have two options. One, he can match the new U.S. targets, and bring in tighter emissions limits. But, absent a carbon tax, that promises to be economically and politically painful. Or two, he can abandon the policy, admit we’re no longer going to match the U.S., gambling the public won’t care. But that’s also politically risky. People don’t like having their own hypocrisy flung in their face.
There’s a third option: promise to match the U.S. target, but neglect to implement the policies to go with it. Or in other words, the status quo. It worked for Jean Chretien after Kyoto, and it has worked for Harper ever since Copenhagen. The public seems entirely OK with it.rely OK with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment