Commentary: U.S climate legislation matters little for success in Copenhagen

Obama administration officials have said that the U.S needs to have a climate change law
in place before international climate change talks start in Copenhagen.
(AP Photo/Pat Roque)

With members of Congress back from their August recess today they will have to start focusing on some of the important business left unfinished. But while many expect a health care reform to pass before the end of the year, uncertainty exists about the climate bill. And that can be tricky, especially since diplomats from nearly 200 countries will descend on Copenhagen in December to negotiate the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

“We think it is important for the president to be empowered to be able to say to the rest of the world that America stands ready to lead on this issue," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters after an energy briefing at the White House recently.

Indeed. Ever since the Obama administration took steps to limit carbon dioxide at home - with the U.S. House of Representatives in June narrowly passing legislation to cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent by 2020 – the hopes for a break through climate deal has been high.

But should they be? Probably not. According to Michael A. Levi, a Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations the odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small.

The reasons, outlined in an article published by Foreign Affairs, are several. Dr. Levi points, for example, to that while many U.S lawmakers want absolute near-term emission caps from China and India, those countries are not interested in signing anything for at least another decade and especially not before developed countries cut their greenhouse gases with 40 percent by 2020. China is also, together with other developing countries, asking wealthy nations to commit more than $300 billion annually to help the rest of the world reducing its emissions.

And this is only half of the problem, Dr. Levi says: “Even a blockbuster deal in which every country signed up to binding emission caps would come nowhere close to guaranteeing success, since the world has few useful options for enforcing commitments to slash emissions short of punitive trade sanctions or similarly unpalatable penalties”.

Something Texas’s GOP representatives probably would agree on.

“Cap-and-trade, which is better termed “cap-and-tax”, creates an artificial market for greenhouse gas emissions by capping nationwide emissions at an arbitrary level and auctioning off the right to emit these through credits. Unused and unneeded credits can then be traded and sold in the market”, says Rep. Pete Sessions of Dallas.  “Cap-and-tax would be detrimental to the U.S. economy—effectively creating a national energy tax that would increase energy prices, kill jobs, and transfer wealth overseas”.