For much of its time in office, the Bush administration stiff-armed the international community on climate change. It rejected the Kyoto Treaty, resisted binding greenhouse gas emission targets, questioned the growing body of science that pointed to the dangers posed by climate change, and cooked the books by removing or downplaying passages in reports that linked global warming with human activities. (The oil industry, through its financial support of front groups and politically conservative think tanks, helped write the administration's playbook).
More recently, the administration has sought a leadership role, organizing a handful of Asia/Pacific nations into a "partnership" to promote clean-energy technologies development and deployment; and sponsoring a multilateral conference in Washington September 27 and 28, to consider "how to deal with global climate change after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012."
The question is, where does the US intend to lead?
The members of the Asia Pacific Partnership are the US, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea. Japan is the only industrial nation in the partnership that has agreed to accept Kyoto's emissions-reduction targets. Developing countries, such as China, India and South Korea don't have Kyoto reduction targets, although their greenhouse gas emissions are growing and China's are expected to exceed those of the US very soon. The goal of the partnership is to promote voluntary measures to remove barriers to the introduction of innovative technologies..
In addition to the US, participants in the upcoming meeting are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and representatives of the European Union. The meeting will also emphasize technology and "seek agreement on the process by which the major economies would, by the end of 2008, agree upon a post-2012 framework," President George W. Bush said.
The White House-sponsored meeting is being held two days after a special United National General Assembly meeting on climate change; and two months before a UN climate meeting in Bali, which will continue efforts to develop a successor agreement to Kyoto, including binding emissions-reduction targets and timetables. Meanwhile, the administration continues to emphasize voluntary approaches, which most observers consider woefully inadequate, given the magnitude of the problem.
Critics suggest that the administration's goal is to undermine support for the UN process and to deflect international pressure to accept mandatory greenhouse gas limits. The White House insists it wants to aid, not conflict with, the UN's efforts. But nothing in the Administration's record suggests it would support a process that leads to even deeper emissions cuts than required by the KyotoTreaty.
The Bush administration was not the onely one to stiff arm Kyoto. Bill Clinton signed it likely knowing it would not be ratified by legislators of both stripes who were legitimately concerned about the impact on the economy. Here in Canada a Prime Minister wanted to upstage the US by accepting even tougher targets and blindly pushed through a ratification meanwhile doing nothing and watching the country's GHG's rise to more than 30% over the target. Kyoto has turned out to be a flawed process because politician signators generally did not understand the massive effort and the the time needed to reverse emission trend, and left developing economies off the hook. That is now starting to change as many countries now are setting much longer term goals and APEC is working to include developing economies.
There are legitimate concerns about the science and it may well be that the world will become appropriately less dependent on carbon based fuels for the wrong reasons. There is alternative science that predicts global cooling in 20 years simply because of a change in sunspot activity. The planet has sustained major temperature cycles in the past and did not "die". Rising oil prices, dragging along with them the price of alternative fuels are creating an umbrella for the development of renewable alternatives and better nuclear plants.The need to reduce reliance on unstable supplies of oil may in the end be the better reason for reducing GHG's.
I covered the Kyoto negotiations and the signatories did understand the effort and time it would take to reverse the greenhouse gas emissions trend, which is why Kyoto was always considered a starting point. There was always the intent to go beyond Kyoto with deeper cuts over a much longer time period. It was also widely understood that developing countries, particularly China, in the first instance, would have to, sooner rather than later, scale back and ultimately reduce emissions; but that developed countries should make the initial commitments because they are primarily responsible for current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (you are free to disagree with that approach). There have indeed been climate cycles in the past, but never before have human activities been such a factor in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. As for sun spots, I've seen studies discounting their effect on global warming when compared to the contribution from greenhouse gases. The fault, I think, is not in our stars...