The European Union Commission this week outlined a diplomatic framework for negotiations to craft an international climate change treaty. The document cites an independent calculation that it could cost 175 billion Euros a year by 2020 to fight climate change. Yet the Commission dodges the key question of who will pay for this “green” revolution in energy production, stating only that, “international financial support for actions exceeding a country’s domestic capabilities should come from sources including public funds and international carbon crediting mechanisms.”
So the question remains: Who’s going to pay what? The United States Senate remains unlikely to ratify any international agreement to ration energy that doesn’t also include rapidly developing countries responsible for an ever-greater share of global emissions. Developing countries, however, refuse to put global warming over poverty reduction and their “right to develop.” The EU procrastinates. Global emissions continue to rise (while temperatures stay the same).
President Barack Obama kicked off another fun-packed week on Monday by directing the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open California’s request for a waiver from the Clean Air Act so that it can begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles. In December 2007, then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson denied California’s request. If it is allowed to go into effect by EPA, California’s law would require that emissions from new vehicles be cut by 30% by 2016. The way California’s economy is going this should be easy to do without regulation by selling a lot fewer new cars.
President Obama also directed the Department of Transportation to publish the regulations implementing the higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for new cars and trucks that were included in the anti-energy bill enacted in December 2007. Either granting the California waiver request or implementing the new CAFÉ standards should be enough to make America’s domestic auto industry a permanent ward of the federal government. It appears that Obama is determined to do both and to pour however much money it takes to keep Detroit going.
Numerous approaches have been described to cool what some insist is a warming world (though not over the past few years). In any event, not all the strategies would have the same impact,
so here’s an interesting ranking of them from Wired. Many ideas are surely kooky, but it definitely makes sense in an energy-starved world—where most families and children lack basic necessities—to always look at options apart from carbon constraint.
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