by Avrel Seale
It’s tempting to say that progress on carbon regulation is “glacial,” but considering how fast many glaciers are melting, that cliché doesn’t even work any more.
Last December’s U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen might have been doomed early by the hype. But whatever the reason, the underwhelming results have many of those who care about the issue wondering if these huge annual meetings with their draft declarations and street-theater protests are really the way to a solution.
Recently, panelists at the “Climate Change Law and Policy after Copenhagen” colloquium at The University of Texas made the cases for and against the continued emphasis on a United Nations approach.
David Hunter of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (the event’s cosponsor) argued that, though the Copenhagen Accord was but 12 paragraphs (long, dense paragraphs, it should be noted), and although it remains nonbinding or, in the oxymoron of the day, “soft law,” it was still measurable, reportable, and therefore valuable. Hunter especially called out progress on REDD and said that line of negotiation should be resurrected in Cancún.
But even Hunter, a fan of the U.N. framework, admits that Copenhagen at times felt like little more than “dueling press releases.” “The U.N. process took it on the chin a little,” he said.
Josh Busby of The University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs wasn’t as charitable. He called Copenhagen “a moment that freed us” from the U.N. framework. Busby said that he would be happy to see “the spectacle” of a 40,000-participant meeting “wither on the vine,” and made the case for smaller meetings with more flexible instruments. This is already happening, he noted, with meetings such as the G20 and the Major Economies Forum putting carbon on their agendas. Green Detectives Valerie Davis and Kevin Tuerff attest that there were nowhere near 40,000 participants in Bali or Poznan, and they don’t expect to see those numbers in Cancún either.
Hunter pushed back, saying that if we lost UNFCCC, and moved to negotiations with only the biggest actors at the table, “we’ll lose the moral authority of the island nations,” i.e. the small countries that will be first to succumb to the effects of climate change when a rising ocean swallows them up. (In related news, an island in the Bay of Bengal that had been disputed territory for years by India and Bangladesh is now completely underwater. Ten other islands in the area are on the verge, and officials estimate that if sea levels rise one meter by 2050, as projected by some climate models, 18 percent of Bangladesh’s coastal area will be submerged, displacing 20 million people.)
While David Hunter argues that the U.N. conferences create momentum for top-down change, he admits that the complexity of the issue is dumbfounding. The whole UNFCCC idea was modeled on the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 international treaty to protect the ozone layer. It successfully phased out CFCs. But replicating that success with something as basic as carbon dioxide, which affects every economy and therefore every person on earth, is different than dealing with a compound in aerosol sprays. Some have concluded it’s just too complicated for a Montreal-style process.
While the international process might seem like it’s all-or-nothing, there’s plenty that can be done and is being done at the national and sub-national levels, efforts like the European cap-and-trade system, the Western Climate Initiative in the American West, individual state efforts, and programs to reduce our carbon footprint city by city and house by house. It all, irrefutably, adds up.
The carbon-regulation debate on Capitol Hill seems to be a contest of who has the lowest expectations. It’s a soap opera that changes by the hour, with this issue, like most others, regularly held hostage by utterly unrelated issues. In the latest episode, a hopeful collaboration between senators Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman began to unravel last week when Graham, the lone Republican, withdrew his support, purportedly over pending congressional action on immigration, another issue on which he is likely to be a party outlier.
In the absence of congressional action, there is still the executive branch, and on April 1, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced a new national program that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel economy for new cars and trucks sold in the United States from 2012 through 2016. EPA finalized the first-ever national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards under the Clean Air Act, and NHTSA finalized Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
The urgency of the situation forces us to think beyond geography and, of course, beyond regulation, too. Lee Scott, longtime CEO and now chairman of Wal-Mart, has been credited with sparking a cultural revolution at the retail juggernaut that resulted most recently in a voluntary commitment to slash 20 million metric tons of carbon emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. When you’re talking about Wal-Mart, which is a de facto national economy unto itself, that voluntary goal surely has a greater impact than the regulatory triumphs of many smaller nations combined.
So should climate change be addressed from the top down, as with the U.N., or from the bottom up? The answer is, if climate change is as dire as scientists say, we’d be both crazy and criminally negligent not to attack it from both directions. We don’t have time for either/or arguments. Climate change action must be both/and. And we’ll need a little luck, even at that.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just 
Two days after Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced at climate talks $350 million over the next five years to promote clean energy technologies in developing countries, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today from Copenhagen $1 billion over the next three years to reduce carbon emissions caused by deforestation.
