Back in January, President Barack Obama announced a national goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by the year 2010. However, in the Fifth Climate Action Report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change submitted yesterday by the U.S. Department of State, projects that the United States of America’s greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 6 percent between 2010 and 2020 (see table, page 78 of the report).
A national goal is all well and good. It makes for great speeches by President Obama. The national reality in the report just released by Obama’s State Department, however, has a difference of 23 percent of current emissions from that goal.
What explains the difference? The 17 percent reduction goal was based upon hopes of a reasonable climate bill passed by Congress. However, no such bill has been passed. The House of Representatives approved a climate bill last year that actually increased subsidies to coal, and would only establish weak mechanisms to tweak greenhouse gas emissions. The Senate hasn’t approved any climate bill at all – and the most prominent suggestion for a bill, a draft by John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman, would expand use of dirty fossil fuels such as coal and oil, making greenhouse gas reductions actually more difficult.
The dominant excuse for congressional inaction has been that other nations need to take action before the United States can do much about the problem. That excuse rings hollow, however, when one considers that 37 nations actually have been reducing their greenhouse emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, passed 13 years ago, but rejected by the United States.
Postscript: A new analysis by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies finds that the last 12 months have been the warmest 12-month period ever recorded.
