Thursday, December 17, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — A warning to delegates in Copenhagen: If you’re looking for President Barack Obama to cave to pressure and deepen U.S. efforts to curb greenhouse gases, don’t bet on it.
Obama, like most world leaders, is constrained by tough politics at home. And that makes it tougher for the summit to produce meaningful pollution cuts.
U.S. officials stressed Wednesday that when Obama travels to the climate conference in Denmark this week, he won’t bring anything to the talks beyond Washington’s already stated goals: to commit to reducing greenhouse gases by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and to pay a “fair share” into a $10 billion fund to help developing countries deal with climate change.
Developing countries have called on the United States and Europe, which are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases that have gone into the atmosphere in past years, to make much deeper cuts in the short term — by at least 34 percent from 2005 emission levels by 2020. Those are reductions far beyond what members of Congress — even those supporting climate legislation — say they will accept.
“We don’t want to promise something we don’t have,” Todd Stern, chief of the U.S. delegation to the climate conference, told reporters this week in Copenhagen. He said he did not anticipate any change in the U.S. commitment.
Said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a co-author of a climate bill already passed by the House: The president “is not going to go further. ... The words he is going to use are the same words he has been using for the last two weeks.”
For Obama, it’s something of a juggling act: On the one hand, he wants to present a strong case to the world that after eight years of relative inaction by the Bush administration, the United States is ready to tackle the climate issue head-on, but he also is fully aware of the political and economic realities back home.
Stern and other administration officials have said frequently they do not want to repeat the mistake of Kyoto, where the United States was key in hammering out a climate accord, only to see President Bill Clinton decline to submit it to the Senate for ratification for fear of its being rejected. Later, it was discarded altogether by President George W. Bush.
Any emissions-reduction targets — and commitments to financing — will have to be backed up by a Congress that is skittish about passing new mandates for heat- trapping gases in the midst of a recession and is concerned that other countries that don’t follow suit will out-compete the U.S. in a global marketplace.
But Obama is not alone in facing conflicting domestic and international priorities.
China has refused even to discuss actually reducing its current greenhouse-gas pollution because that would go contrary to the country’s rapid pace of economic growth. It says it will cut emissions as a percentage of future economic growth but has balked at international verification and monitoring, calling that a threat to its sovereignty. Instead, it prefers to act as its own watchdog on compliance.