February 14, 2002
The Bush Administration today released its long-delayed alternative to the Kyoto climate change treaty. The proposal was immediately derided by activists throughout the world as wholly inadequate to deal with the threats of global warming and as an attempt to distract nations from their commitment to Kyoto.
The Administration proposes a voluntary system that would lower U.S. emissions growth to no more than a third of its gross domestic product growth. However, as Center for International Environmental Law attorney Glenn Wiser observes, “The industrialized countries’ fossil fuel emissions have brought us to the brink of a climate catastrophe, and the United States produces more of this pollution by far than any other nation. Voluntary policies have failed in the past, and would allow the United States and any other country that followed our lead to continue increasing emissions, which is exactly the wrong approach.”
Because the Administration plan would codify continued emissions growth instead of reductions, it not only fails in comparison to the Kyoto treaty, but also would put the United States in breach of our existing legal commitments under the 1992 Rio Climate Convention. Signed in Rio de Janeiro by then-President George H. W. Bush and promptly approved by the U.S. Senate and ratified by the United States, the Rio Convention requires us and other industrialized nations to develop plans to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. According to CIEL attorney Donald Goldberg, “By planning to reduce only the growth rate of emissions while allowing actual emissions to continue increasing indefinitely, the Administration’s new plan would violate both the spirit and letter of the Rio treaty, which, like all treaties ratified by the United States, is part of our ‘law of the land.'”
The President’s plan would allow U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to increase to about 30% above 1990 levels over the next ten years (about 10% higher than they are today). The White House claims that “this goal is comparable to the average progress that nations participating in the Kyoto Protocol are required to achieve.” This is, at best, highly misleading. The Kyoto climate treaty, which President Bush rejected in March 2001 as “unfair” to U.S. economic interests, requires industrialized countries to lower their emissions, on average to 5% below 1990 levels. Rules to implement the Kyoto treaty were finalized and accepted late last year by over 180 countries. The governments of Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany and nearly all other U.S. allies have announced their intention to ratify the Kyoto treaty with the hope that it will enter into force before the World Summit on Sustainable Development later this year.
Yesterday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer indicated that the Administration might expect to distract the world community from Kyoto when he said, “The president will make an announcement tomorrow about a new approach, new policy, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout the world, led by the United States.” To the contrary, says Wiser, “the plan released today reveals that the Administration has no intention of reducing emissions at all, but would lead the United States–and any government willing to follow–down a path of continued emissions growth and continued consumption of coal and oil, and toward an increasing threat of uncontrollable climate change.”
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) is a public interest, not-for-profit environmental law firm founded in 1989 to strengthen international and comparative environmental law and policy around the world. CIEL is a member of the Climate Action Network (CAN), a coalition of more than 285 nongovernmental organizations throughout the world committed to limiting human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels.