- The Guardian,
- Saturday July 22 2000
The United States is unable to meet the legally binding greenhouse gas reduction target it accepted at the Kyoto climate conference in 1998, Washington admitted yesterday.
Unless Europe gives way and allows the US unlimited rights to trade internationally in so-called "carbon credits", it will not fulfil "a large fraction" of its obligations, the under-secretary for global affairs, Frank Loy, said.
Countries can offset domestic carbon emissions by planting forests, buying credits from countries which have fallen below their own limits, or by helping to build clean power stations in polluting countries. But others want to limit America's ability to buy its way out of its domestic obligations.
Mr Loy said the booming US economy of the 1990s had pushed up carbon dioxide emissions by 12% on 1990 levels. To achieve the reduction of 7% on 1990 levels by 2010, as promised at Kyoto, it would have to get emissions 30% below the projected level.
"We have not got a snow ball's hell of doing this unless we use market mechanisms like carbon trading with other countries. The earth does not care where the carbon dioxide comes from. If we get more carbon cuts for each dollar in Kenya or China then the earth benefits more.
"There is only a certain amount of money available for climate change and we have to make the most of it."
Mr Loy said he believed it would be "tough" to get agreement on how to implement the cuts agreed in Kyoto at this year's climate change convention meeting in the Hague, but the US was determined to do so. He was asking Europe and the developing world to reconsider their demand for limits on the US.
Europe wants to limit Washington's ability to buy notional carbon savings from countries such as Russia to 50% of its total required savings, otherwise it believes the US will be let off the hook. The US produces 25% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said: "The US is doing tricks with arithmetic rather than deal with some of the fundamental problems of profligate use of fossil fuels."
Until now, Congress has been unwilling to support the Kyoto protocol, because of fears it might hit the gas-guzzling lifestyle of the US people.
Big business joined together to form a climate change coalition to successfully lobby against the protocol.But the coalition has fallen apart. Ford, Boeing, BP Amoco and other big companies had pulled out, Mr Loy said. All four US presidential candidates now acknowledged that the science of climate change was convincing and the US people wanted action.
"All this adds up to a complete change in attitude in the last two or three years. I am sure if we get what we want in the Hague, the US will be able to ratify the protocol and deliver a 7% cut in emissions," he said.
Mr Loy added that the US believed in the legally binding nature of the Kyoto protocol and wanted penalties if the US or other countries did not meet the target they agreed to.
Mr Loy's comments coincided with more evidence of the dangers of global warming. Nasa, the US space agency, warned that the warming climate is eroding more than 50bn tonnes of water a year from the Greenland ice sheet, increasing the risk of coastal flooding around the world.
Eleven cubic miles of ice is disappearing annually, enough to raise sea levels around the globe by 0.13mm a year.
"We see a significant trend. When we can go back after five years and see 10 metres of glacier gone, there is some thing happening," said William Krabill, head of Nasa's ice sheet measurement project.
The melting of Greenland ice and the calving of icebergs from Greenland glaciers is responsible for about 7% of the annual rise in global sea level. Measurements suggest that over the past century the sea level has risen about 23cm, enough to cause some low-lying areas that were once high and dry to be awash at high tide or during storms.
The trend could get worse, said Mr Krabill, if the Greenland ice sheet continued to melt.
