Change has come to America... but maybe not this year

Mark Micallef looks at the state of play with US climate change politics ahead of talks on a deal on global warming in Copenhagen next week.

Climate change is big on the agenda of the 44th US President. On his first day in the White House, Barack Obama promised to help shift America towards a green future and the talk was accompanied by action in his 10-month stint in office so far.

Just six days after taking his oath of office, Mr Obama signed two executive orders that set stricter limits on car exhaust emissions.

He also asked the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its refusal, under former President George W. Bush, to allow California to cut car exhaust by 30 per cent. He called on the Department of Transportation to draw up a new 35-miles-per-gallon fuel standard for all cars rolling off the assembly lines from 2012.

The most significant move, however, came in the estimated $100 billion set aside for green investment from the $787 billion economic stimulus package spilled into the US economy to fight the financial crisis. Coupled with the message to the international community that the US was prepared to take part in a global deal to save the planet, these moves constitute a seismic shift from the days of the Bush era.

In a recent visit to the US, I had the opportunity to gauge first-hand what this radical shift in attitude had done to the spirits of American climate change scientists who were disillusioned, put mildly, with the way their country behaved on the world stage on the question of global warming.

In briefings with a group of 14 journalists from across Europe, some were almost apologetic in their tone as they described the results of years of study which, so far, had little impact on policy.

"As a scientist who has been working on climate change for the past decade I can understand the frustrations of Europeans... you just have to be a little more patient with us though, because America has come round," one scientist, who would rather not be named, said.

The first real test on climate change for the new US Administration will be in Copenhagen but the prospects are not looking very good.

The summit, starting on Monday and running until December 18, originally set out to agree on a legally binding international agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; the first international treaty to combat global warming.

However, expectations have been lowered tremendously over the past months and this is, to a large part, a result of the state of play in the US. Goodwill is not enough.

Mr Obama is not really able to commit to any legally binding targets on curbing greenhouse gases, unless he has a law backing him from Congress. In fact, the US had signed the Kyoto agreement under President Bill Clinton but it never got ratified by the Senate, rendering that endorsement symbolic.

As he announced his attendance at the UN summit, Mr Obama offered "provisional" targets for emissions cuts - a 17 per cent cut in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, 30 per cent by 2025, 42 per cent by 2030 and 83 per cent by 2050. But the key word remains "provisional".

The cuts actually follow targets laid out in a landmark Bill approved by the lower house of the US Congress. The American Clean Energy and Security Act (or the Waxman-Markey Bill, as it is more commonly known) was approved by a slim majority of 219 to 212 votes. However, for it to enter into force, it needs the Senate's approval, which will not take place in time for the meeting.

The Senate has prepared its own 821-page version of the Bill, which is actually bolder in certain respects than Waxman-Markey - it calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent rather than 17 per cent over 2005 levels by 2020 for instance - but debate on this had to be put on the back burner to make way for the equally fierce debate about the reform of the US healthcare system.

But as one congressional staffer explained, the real problem is that the greening of the White House was not followed through in Congress.

The confirmation of this comes from the slim majority with which the Waxman-Markey Bill was passed, considering that the Democrats have 255 out of 435 members in the lower house and only still managed to scrape through with 219 votes, which included those of some Republican congressmen.

In the Senate the situation is possibly worse. Of 100 members, the Democrats only have 56 and 10 of these have already registered their concern with any climate change legislation that might hurt their constituencies. These senators come from mid-western and coal-producing states, like the 44 Democrat congressmen who voted against the Waxman-Markey Bill.

"...Even if you have the most liberal member from those states, they are still responsible to their constituents and they will still not look favourably towards climate change legislation," the same staffer explained.

But the Obama Administration seems confident it will manage to push through legislation in the Senate, just not in time for Copenhagen. Hence the strategy (not only the US's, since Australia, for instance, is in a similar predicament) is to push for a political deal that would be followed by a legally binding agreement in 2010, when the Senate would, hopefully, have passed the Bill giving Mr Obama the mandate to commit his country.

Beyond what type of agreement is reached next week, the cuts pledged by the US are far from impressive. The EU, for instance, is pledging a 20 per cent cut from 1990 levels (as opposed to the much higher 2005 benchmark from which the US is pledging to cut emissions), rising to 30 per cent in the event of a global agreement.

Again, this has to be seen in the context of where the US came from in the past 10 months.

In the words of the presidential science adviseor, John Holdren, the most pressing issue right now is that a global momentum has picked up on cutting greenhouse gases with key players like the US and China on board.

Dr Holdren's reasoning is that technological advancement is likely to make it easier to cut emissions in the coming years. Moreover, once the effects of climate change start being felt more, people would push governments to go greener.

Of course, it does not help that as many as 41 per cent of Americans, according to a Gallup poll in March, thought global warming was "exaggerated"; the highest level of public scepticism about mainstream reporting on climate change in more than a decade of research by the renowned firm.

The timing of the Copenhagen pact could not be worse. Over the past months, public opinion in the US has been digesting the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, a surge of 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and the highly divisive healthcare reform.

Climate change usually only manages to gain access to mainstream television networks when the news item focuses on how measures to mitigate global warming could hurt the economy.

But, focusing on polls can obscure the more complex workings of grassroots support for climate change action. While the US gives off a very powerful and coherent view of itself to the outside world, politically, it is anything but. Each of its 50 states has its own needs and idiosyncrasies as do the hundreds of cities within those states. Take San Francisco, for instance, in California (which is only the 14th greenest state in the US according to Forbes.com despite its reputation).

In the absence of leadership from the federal government, this west coast city trail blazed ahead with its own targets. It is aiming to cut greenhouse gases by 25 per cent below 1990 levels - more aggressive than the EU's current targets - going up to 40 per cent by 2025 and 80 per cent by 2050.

And the targets are not just talk. The city-owned San Francisco International Airport (the US's 10th largest), has already reached its 2017 target eight years before schedule, while still running a healthy profit and handling over 37 million passengers.

The operations it has some control over, such as its buildings, its vehicle fleet and support services on the runways, produced an estimated 801,500 tons of greenhouse gases in 1990. These went down to about 627,000 tons in 2007, a 22 per cent cut.

The results come primarily from investing in a hydro-electric plant, an electric train to shuttle passengers to and from terminals and a switch to renewable energy sources for the vehicle fleet. The airport is so bent on reducing its carbon footprint, it is even willing to support the development of inter-state train facilities, which could cut back some of the internal traffic heading its way.

"There is an environmental cost to air travel and we are aware of it plus it makes more sense for us to focus on long-haul flights and international flights," Ivar Satero, the airport's deputy director for design and construction, explained.

People won because they did not have to catch a plane to travel into San Francisco from a nearby state and the environment won too because there was less pollution, he added.

Naturally, in a private corporation where profit was the bottom line, Mr Satero would be out of a job and he acknowledged this. In many other states in this great country, that is very suspicious of anything which is not privately run, that would be gobbledygook but this is California and, more specifically San Francisco, where a public, eco-friendly airport is possible.

It is a slice of America, and a small one at that, but one which proves that hope, and change, are possible.