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Energy without Hot Air
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Kerry: we lead, you follow close behind |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | 
 
And so to John Kerry, who followed Harlan Watson's press conference with quite a different performance. Like Al Gore - who will collect his Nobel prize later on today and then jet over to Bali - Kerry is now a climate veteran. His message to Bali in a nutshell: Bush is going, America will do its bit, but the developing world must act too. The core message was pretty clear:
The United States is
going to be at the table. The United States is going to lead. The United States
is going to embrace significantly changed policies in order to deal with
climate change.
I can say that, not based on what is happening in the future, but on what is happening right now. Progress, he argued, would be underpinned by a ‘vast network at grassroots' across the US; state action to reduce emissions; and a major shift in opinion among big business. The issue would be a major theme of the Presidential debate. Politics in 2009 would be "night and day" different from the country's current position. That said, it was striking that Kerry's was much harder on developing countries than the Europeans are. The senator did everything he could to disassociate himself from the Kyoto protocol. He had opposed the decision to exclude developing countries from binding commitments at the time, he said. The short shrift it has received was an inevitable consequence of its faulty design. It was now even more important to provide targets for countries like China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. "Other folks have to come in, in some way that is meaningful," he argued. Poor countries shouldn't have to "meet the same standards at the same pace, and achieve the same levels of reduction." But there needed to be guarantees over what they would do and when. "The industrial world can't do it alone, if the less developed world thinks it can simply do the same things we did," he said. Kerry was also strongly critical of the argument advanced by Angela Merkel among others, that countries should be aiming for similar levels of per capita emissions. I asked him to explain. (Getting a question in was something of a miracle. Kerry could never be accused of being concise. His 'final point' went on for a full twelve and half minutes.) This was his reply:
We all have to reduce
to a level that meets the science. The science told us a year ago that the
planet could tolerate [greenhouse gas concentrations] of 550ppm and [a
temperature rise from pre-industrial levels] of 3 degrees. Within one or two
years, that changed, it's now 450ppm and 2 degrees centigrade.
If that's true, and if certain countries are already at a developed level, the key is not to destroy everybody's economies and de-developize [sic] and throw everyone into unemployment, and play a per capita game. The key is to make it possible for every country to develop and continue to grow and prosper, without regard to the population ratio of their emissions, because their emissions are meeting the sustainable level that the science tells us we have to meet on a global basis. That means you're going to have to reach near-zero emissions. So what should we conclude from this? It's a little hard to say. But here's what I took away. First, Kerry was, in part, playing a domestic agenda. A Democratic administration won't be a push over, was the message. Second, internationally, his words can be taken as a warning. Don't push America too hard, he was telling the other rich countries. Keep focus on the main goal: getting ‘the United States into the picture.' And finally, I think his position reflects a very real concern vis-à-vis America's position among other developed countries. An American currently emits twice the quantity of greenhouses gases as a Brit, more than two and half times as much as a French citizen, and over three times as much as a Swede. You can see that it's going to be a huge mountain for the US to climb if its ‘fare share' of meeting future reductions is calculated on a per capita basis! | | | | | | | |
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John Kerry - Could do better