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The United States sure knows how to throw cold water on international harmony.
Just two months have passed since the world’s top diplomats cobbled together the best plan we’ve ever had to start curbing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Yet already the Supreme Court of the United States said no, delaying much of the Obama administration’s strategy to deliver America’s contribution to the collective effort.
The White House claims it will prevail, assuring a fidgety international community it will deliver on the promises made at the climate summit in Paris in December. Those commitments proved critical to keeping the diplomacy on track and ultimately producing a deal among more than 185 countries representing more than 98 percent of global emissions.
And yet the
Consider the administration’s own assessments. Even as the American delegation in Paris offered to cut emissions to 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025, the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy was offering a different outlook.
Its reference case, based on federal policies on the books at the end of 2014, forecast that emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use (the United States’ main source of greenhouse gases) would not decline but remain flat through 2025 and beyond.
Methane emissions, which account for under 10 percent of greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere but trap much more heat than CO2, could increase 6 percent over the next 10 years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Emissions of highly potent hydrofluorocarbons could increase by half.
What’s more, the carbon storage of American forests, which offset as much as 13 percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2013, could start declining as early as 2020.
These, of course, are not forecasts but projections. Emissions could fall faster because of new regulation, technological breakthroughs, changes in land use and the like. Some of the nation’s most critical policies to combat 2 emissions from their electric power plants.
Still, the Supreme Court’s decision last week to delay the plan — until the United States Court of Appeals in Washington decides on the merits of a challenge by 27 mostly Republican-governed states — underscores just how politically vulnerable the United States’ promises truly are.
Because for all the administration’s claims that it can deliver on its commitments regardless, the fact remains that even under the most optimistic outlook — if the Supreme Court’s stay were to melt away and the Power Plan were to work impeccably — current policies do not get us there.
Last month, before the Supreme Court’s decision, the Rhodium Group, a research firm that has performed extensive analysis of climate-change projections, published a report concluding that even if the administration executed all its existing and planned policies with maximum effect, and the most optimistic forecasts for technological development and forest sink capacity were borne out, the United States would still not hit the target.
Using different assumptions — say, if the economy grew faster or energy technology didn’t progress as fast — it would remain even further behind. Assuming all the administration’s current and proposed policies were carried out, the analysis suggests that by 2025 American greenhouse gas emissions would be, at best, 23 percent lower than in 2005. In the worst case they would be only 10 percent lower.
That suggests we should hurry. “While the U.S. still has nearly a decade to put additional policy in place,” the report notes, “it will need to do so relatively quickly for the impact to be felt by the time the 2025 pledge comes due.”
The pledges offered in Paris are not a magic number. They are important nonetheless. Stiff cuts by the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, after China, were crucial to holding the international coalition together. These cuts are supposed to be just the beginning of a process of increasingly stringent emissions limits.
How will the United States get there, then? The Rhodium Group’s analysis proposes stricter limits for transportation and for electric power generation, which would remain the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country over the next decade even if the Clean Power Plan were put in place.
One idea would be further tightening the fuel economy standards for cars and trucks. The report suggests looking at emissions by the industrial sector — the third-largest emitter — which under current policies are expected to increase by 18 percent by 2025. Land use policies to enhance the forest carbon sink and tighter rules to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas could also help.
But these proposals just underscore how the American problem is first and foremost political. It is critical, the report concludes, “that policy makers now engage in a broad exploration and frank discussion of what additional steps can help deliver on America’s climate goals.” It will be difficult to hold this discussion when Congress is run by a party that rejects climate science.
We have known about these obstacles for some time. The Obama administration’s plan to repurpose the
And in that regard, the news is not entirely bad. If the Senate were to confirm whomever President Obama nominates to succeed Justice Scalia, one of the most conservative justices on the bench, the Supreme Court would probably become more sensitive to the imperative to combat climate change. That’s not just good news for the Clean Power Plan. It could open the door to more aggressive policies.
Last month, for instance, scholars from the law schools of Columbia University, New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report that suggested there is a provision in the Clean Air Act that would allow the E.P.A. to require states to reduce emissions that endangered other countries if such countries provided reciprocal protections to the United States.
“E.P.A. and the states could use the provision to establish an economywide, market-based approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the group wrote. “Such a program could provide one of the most effective and efficient means to address climate change pollution in the United States.”
Last week, this kind of thinking would have been unlikely to survive a spin through the Supreme Court. But perhaps it could survive a different one — maybe one that placed more weight on international harmony.
