'Is This a Crash Program?
Inconvenient Thoughts About Rich-World Climate Strategy By Tom Athanasiou
t r u t h o u t Guest Contributor
The political situation has changed remarkably in the last six months, not least with regard to climate change. At least that's the case in the rich world, where a whole flock of serious proposals has finally made it onto the agenda:
· The European Union has agreed to a joint carbon-dioxide reduction target for its 27 member countries and their 490 million citizens. To wit: the EU is committed to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. And if other countries - like, say, the United States - agree to do more, the reduction target goes up to 30 percent. Whatever happens, 20 percent is on the table unilaterally.
· The UK has published a draft climate-change bill that will make it the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon targets. The bill will set the UK's targets - for a 60 percent emissions reduction by 2050 and around a 30 percent reduction by 2020 - into statute. It will also inaugurate a new system of legally binding five-year "carbon budgets," designed to make it easy to tell if the UK is actually on track to meet its commitments.
· In the US, the House's Safe Climate Act, the Senate's Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act and the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 all define closely related emissions-reduction trajectories. These vary a bit, but just a bit. In general, the US would freeze its emissions in 2010. These would then be cut by roughly 2 percent per year, causing them to return to 1990 levels by 2020. After 2020, the annual cut would rise to average about 5 percent per year, so that, by 2050, emissions would be 80 percent lower than in 1990. And if that's not enough, there's Al Gore's new proposal, which would immediately freeze the level of US emissions and drop it by 90 percent by 2050.
So here are a few questions: Are the differences between these proposals significant, or should they be seen as variations on a theme? And if they are, does this theme deserve the name "crash program?" As in the phrase "a crash program to stabilize the global climate and avoid a climate catastrophe."'
· The European Union has agreed to a joint carbon-dioxide reduction target for its 27 member countries and their 490 million citizens. To wit: the EU is committed to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. And if other countries - like, say, the United States - agree to do more, the reduction target goes up to 30 percent. Whatever happens, 20 percent is on the table unilaterally.
· The UK has published a draft climate-change bill that will make it the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon targets. The bill will set the UK's targets - for a 60 percent emissions reduction by 2050 and around a 30 percent reduction by 2020 - into statute. It will also inaugurate a new system of legally binding five-year "carbon budgets," designed to make it easy to tell if the UK is actually on track to meet its commitments.
· In the US, the House's Safe Climate Act, the Senate's Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act and the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 all define closely related emissions-reduction trajectories. These vary a bit, but just a bit. In general, the US would freeze its emissions in 2010. These would then be cut by roughly 2 percent per year, causing them to return to 1990 levels by 2020. After 2020, the annual cut would rise to average about 5 percent per year, so that, by 2050, emissions would be 80 percent lower than in 1990. And if that's not enough, there's Al Gore's new proposal, which would immediately freeze the level of US emissions and drop it by 90 percent by 2050.
So here are a few questions: Are the differences between these proposals significant, or should they be seen as variations on a theme? And if they are, does this theme deserve the name "crash program?" As in the phrase "a crash program to stabilize the global climate and avoid a climate catastrophe."'
Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032607O.shtml
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