Bush's climate goals vague – but a start

Technology's role

Business interests found much to like in the president's call for developing and deploying new technologies that, among other things, would keep the country's enormous coal reserve in the energy mix, through capturing and storing the carbon dioxide these power plants emit.

President Bush has laid out a constructive and balanced set of principles, says John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. "Manufacturers seek climate-change solutions that offer significant environmental benefits without undue risk to jobs and the economy. Technology should play a leading role in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions."

The speech came on the eve of the third in a series of Major Economies meetings called by the White House to help develop a new climate treaty to pick up after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol's first targets expire.

Mr. Bush noted that the European Union and Canada were also setting interim emissions objectives as they weigh post-Kyoto steps. But they aim for absolute cuts in emissions, rather than merely stabilizing them. Last year, the EU called on industrial countries to reduce emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. And Canada's leaders have set a goal of reducing emissions by 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020.

Critics note this would not even meet the country's current Kyoto Protocol commitment, but it does recognize that stabilizing emissions isn't enough.

All these goals are based on last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. According to the IPCC, holding the increase in global average temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 would likely help stave off the more-onerous effects of global warming. To do that, however, the IPCC estimated that global greenhouse-gas emissions would have to peak by 2015. And by 2020, industrial countries would have to cut emissions by up to 40 percent below 1990 levels, and by as much as 95 percent by 2050.

The Bush plan, by contrast, calls for US emissions to stabilize by 2025 and does so without specifying the leveling-off point. Given carbon dioxide's long lifetime in the atmosphere, stabilizing emissions means it would still be building in the atmosphere at a time when many scientists say emissions should be falling. The ultimate goal – stabilizing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere, and hence temperatures – means that emissions must fall to virtually zero.

Pressure to lead

The lack of meaningful cuts in Bush's proposal is a nonstarter for developing countries, who must begin to deal with their own emissions in a new global climate agreement.

"In order to get a real agreement, first the US must agree to hard targets," says one diplomat familiar with the thinking of many developing nations. Without US participation in a meaningful set of reductions, he says, the economics of carbon trading won't be attractive enough to allow some of the mechanisms developing countries are proposing to work.

"If the US does not have the political will to accept targets, as the largest economy in the world, how could any politician in a developing country keep his or her job by taking on heavier burdens than even the US will accept?" asks the diplomat.

One area where analysts converge is on Congress and the White House taking the lead on climate policy, rather than leaving it to federal regulatory agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency, which the US Supreme Court recently ruled has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

As it wraps up its final months in office, the White House has offered up "a well-thought-out set of principles" that deserve serious consideration as the US tries to craft a sustainable climate policy, Mr. Book says.

• Staff writers Ron Scherer and Mark Clayton contributed to this report.

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