Will the Collapse Cool Climate Change Fever?
“A great deal of the political energy which existed a few years ago has disappeared.” Those were the words Sweedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in an interview with the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper. As he spoke, the world economy was still reeling from another, indisputably man-made calamity - a global credit crunch - that threatens to undermine the momentum toward stringent carbon reduction policies. Just 11 days before Reinfeldt's interview, the European Union committed itself to a 20 percent cut in carbon emissions and an improvement in energy efficiency of 20 percent, both to be achieved by 2020. While European leaders patted themselves on the back for the achievement, environmental groups criticized what they viewed as an ultimately toothless sop to industry. Observers know full well that announcing targets and meeting them are two different things. The fifteen European signatories to Kyoto have thus far failed to curb their emissions to meet promised targets. And that was during relatively prosperous times. During a downturn, all bets appear to be off. The clock is ticking. The U.N.'s climate conference is due to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol in Copenhagen by December 2009. The developing economies of Brazil, China and India, who declined to tie themselves to binding commitments during the Kyoto negotiations, are unlikely to make dramatic promises during an economic downturn. So too, European and American leaders may be leery of heaping additional burdens on domestic industrial champions. Some advocates are urging the incoming Obama administration to make an end-run around the U.N. process all together, in favor of bi-lateral deals with the major carbon emitters. Still, President-elect Barack Obama may, in the eyes of his supporters, be able to leverage the economic downturn to the climate's advantage. He has pledged to make clean, renewable energy a plank in a sweeping (not to mention expensive) economic recovery package.
