I’ve just returned from Europe with a new understanding of what the world expects from the United States on global climate change, now that Barack Obama will be president.In a word: Everything.
I spent two days in Poznań,
The weather in Poland was cold and gloomy, the weather in London was cool and foggy, but the mood in both places was sunny in anticipation of U.S. leadership. Obama’s approaching inauguration has filled international climate activists with hope.
But — and this will be good news for the president-elect — I came away with the sense that the world community isn’t expecting Obama to be Captain America, single-handedly preventing a tragic decline in the Earth’s hospitality to our species. The world expects the superhero to be America, the nation. Obama’s election isn’t seen as the anointment of a miracle-worker; it’s seen as a sign that America has returned to its senses, has reasserted its ideals in a way that surprised even us Americans, and has become in the words of one colleague in London, “cool again”.
(At one event in London, I spoke to a gathering of environmental leaders at the historic East India Club, where the walls are adorned with portraits of the United Kingdom’s heroes. As the stern visage of Winston Churchill looked down upon us, I was reminded of something he said that perfectly summarizes the state of climate policy in the United States as Obama takes office: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing … after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”)
I trust that others who stuck around Poznań longer and who are more directly involved in the negotiations will report on progress when the conference ends in a few days. I want merely to report that the global community is once again investing its hope in the United States. I heard the same message in London from cabbies to business and civil leaders: After eight years on the dark side, eight years in which America seemed to forsake its highest and best values, and eight years in which Washington, D.C. has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil, the world believes the United States is back again, in the nick of time. Or so my small sample of Europeans indicates.
“No other nation can do this,” one environmental leader told me, referring to the need for leadership on climate action. “No other nation is as innovative and creative and as able to break loose from the status quo.”
More than 11,000 delegates from 187 nations, along with leaders from business and non-governmental organizations, have assembled in Poznan to work on a post-Kyoto climate agreement. Between now and next December, they will have to bridge the wide gap between developed and developing nations. It’s easy to be skeptical. There is widespread speculation in Washington, D.C., that the Congress will not be able to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year — a failure that some experts say would take the wind out of the sails of international resolve for a global agreement.
But however we do it — with a carbon trading bill or in other substantial ways — we Americans cannot let the world down. I’ve always heard that the world looks to the United States for hope. But until television showed the joy in the faces of people around the world on election night and until my trip to Europe last week, I never fully realized how large we loom in the global aspiration to get climate change under control.
– Bill B.
Related Posts:
- What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China
- Obama can’t get a global climate treaty ratified, so what should he do instead? Part 1
- Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us
- If there’s no U.S. climate bill in 2009, would U.N. climate talks collapse in Copenhagen?
- Youth report from Poznań: Taking Back Our Future
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Lets hope you aren’t relying on Joe to formulate policy. According to Joe any form of gas tax is impossible and the US should delay any form of committment to CO2 reductions until a domestic climate bill has been passed. In the UK we view it the other way round – make a committment to the world then use it to push through domestic legislation.
[JR: Not sure where your hostility comes from, but I don't really like your misstating of my views. I never said "any form of gas tax is impossible." I merely stated what is quantitatively and politically obvious in this country -- you need a huge gasoline tax to make a meaningful dent in emissions or vehicle efficiency, and political capital is more wisely spent on a higher leverage actions, such as getting a serious price for carbon.
That you you don't get US climate politics is clear from your brief comment. As an earlier post I wrote suggested, in the U.S., domestic action has to come first. Indeed, having an international treaty before U.S. domestic legislation that could turn out to be a political catastrophe that kills both.
You may know UK politics and policy -- although I'm not certain if you're final sentence is an accurate description of recent British behavior, since your government has announced strong domestic targets before an international agreement has been reached. But you don't know U.S. climate politics and policy, so you should probably keep your unjustifiably snide criticism of those who do to a minimum.]
This article unfortunately backs up my theory that GW is dropping off the agenda. Without public pressure action will be impossible:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/back-to-media-trance-on-climate/
Here is another piece from the Guardian, the paper which Joe was attacking yesterday for downplaying the GW threat:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/09/poznan-copenhagen-global-warming-targets-climate-change
I quote:
“Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control – far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.”
[JR: To correct the record, again, I criticized one article, and I didn't criticize it for downplaying the threat. I thought you Brits had a thicker skin.]
Scary, a little off topic, but relevant.
This article bears in some intriguing ways to the problems being encountered in combatting climate change.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
What is the Monkeysphere and how does it relate to climate change?
An interesting and thought provoking article from a unexpected source; I just stumbled upon this.
Dill Weed
This article has got to have generated the most post of a climate change blog…11 pages and counting since last night.
Thanks for the report re Poznan. I wonder if you saw the word “biochar” there – my current principal activity. See http://www.biochar-international.org for their activities/presentations at Poznan. Presumably you know of Jim Hansen’s endorsement of biochar in his last publication. Biochar also was featured in Time magazine this week. I believe biochar is critical to achieving atmospheric carbon reductions in a cost-effective manner. If biochar is not yet in your proposals for the transition team, I hope you will add it. Ron
Joe, Thanks for your comments. They don’t spring from hostility, just a sense of frustration about what I see as a lack of consistency and real understanding of either the problem or the solution in your posts.
For a start you seem to place undue emphasis on cars and oil. This is only a small part of the problem – coal is much bigger.
Then there is the question of efficiency. Increasing efficiency is not going to fix emissions because if we burn all the coal, oil and gas anyway it isn’t going to make one iota of difference whether we do it efficiently or not. The goal has to be to leave most of it in the ground, not use it efficiently.
The world needs really ambitious goals. Even the UK goals are nowhere near enough, not if you are serious about wanting to get back to 350ppm. And action is needed straight away, not delayed until the politics look better – they never will.
It’s not enough to just echo whatever Obama has said in his last speech. You publish a blog where (I hope) you should be pushing a more ambitious agenda.
[JR: Have you read my posts on coal and its replacements? Or on how to achieve 450 ppm? Most people in this country would say my agenda is wildly ambitious -- if they read my blog, that is. Look, we're headed to 1000 ppm. That's the reality. We could beat 450 ppm. That's the tragedy.]
Joe, I hate to pick nits, but if you check the list of participants the UN publishes at the beginning of each COP and updates on the final day, you’ll see that there are 11,000-plus participants–not delegates–in Poznan. Loads of journalists make this mistake every single year, confusing the number of people attending the meetings for those who are actually grinding it out in closed-door negotiating sessions. About 4,000 delegates are here in Poznan, about 400 journos, and the rest belong to the various non-governmental groups (NGOs) representing business, industry, environmentalists, etc.
[JR: Actually, this one is Bill, but thanks for the correction!]