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Gaming Climate Change Treaty Negotiations
Bloomberg’s financial wire service reports that “the Bush administration is proposing to eliminate tariffs worldwide on solar, wind and related technologies to spur their use and reduce global warming.” The purpose, explains Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council On Environmental Quality, in an interview with the service, is to finance “the deployment of existing technologies” to the developing world in order to head off efforts to curb imports from countries that don’t agree to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions. The Bloomberg report notes that, “French President Nicolas Sarkozy and some U.S. unions want to impose a ‘carbon tax’ on imports from countries such as China that don’t move to cut their use of greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for raising global temperatures.”
The Bush Administration proposal, however, is a win-win for the United States without taking any responsibility. All the benefits from this trade idea would flow to U.S. companies and others in the developed world without having to do anything to reduce emissions. The United States would no longer have tariffs levied on exports of clean energy technologies—and it is one of the top four countries that produces/exports these technologies, according to Bloomberg—but at the same time no country without a cap on greenhouse gas emissions (read:
the United States) gets penalized in trade deals.
What a sweet deal for the administration. If President Bush really wants to do something about capturing the opportunities provided by promoting low carbon energy technologies here and abroad, his administration should cap our carbon emissions to show we’re serious, and then participate in such dialogues to promote clean energy technologies. And we should be investing in helping developing nations get these technologies in place to alleviate energy poverty via low-carbon pathways. These are the kinds of policies President Bush and Chairman Connaughton should be presenting to the world’s major industrialized and developing countries as they prepare for climate treaty negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, next week.
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