American Eye

Perhaps only the rhetoric shifts in the White House - but there’s real change across the country, says Gil Friend, as states, cities and companies make themselves accountable for cutting their carbon.

It’s official - George W. Bush acknowledges global warming. But his State of the Union speech in January was notable more for gradual but continued rhetorical shifts than for innovation.

In last year’s address, Bush was bold enough to call the US addiction to imported oil by name. This time, he spoke those dread “global warming” words that were never to pass conservative lips. These utterances are significant, if only as grudging bows to the looming reality. “Like a dog walking on his hind legs,” as Samuel Johnson once notoriously said of a woman’s preaching, “it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. While the White House talks about voluntary emissions reductions goals, it has cut the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s climate science budget by one-third (from all of $18 million - barely enough to staple their reports together), and has been shutting down EPA libraries and other information sources on which both scientists and citizens depend.

The dramatic positive moves are coming from states, cities, and corporations. California’s landmark climate legislation, known as AB32, establishes mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emission levels and requires emission reductions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Cities, too, are announcing ever more comprehensive carbon cutting initiatives - Austin in Texas has just declared a target of zero emissions by 2020.

And, in what the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “corporate climate change on climate change”, top executives from ten large companies and four major NGOs have launched a new US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP).

The partnership, announced in January, proposes:

• setting targets for emission reductions, to between 10% and 30% below today’s levels within 15 years;
• creating a national carbon market;
• giving businesses hardest hit by emission limits free carbon dioxide credits to trade in the market, at least at first; and
• establishing a public/private effort to fund low-carbon energy research and development.

The corporate participants - Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, PG&E and PNM Resources - were quickly attacked by some, in the strange moral compass that only the poor and self-sacrificing can be virtuous. “Only in it for the money,” they derided - as if we’ll ever get the changes we need without harnessing the power of self-interest. Some observe - correctly - that PG&E, one of the country’s cleanest utilities, will benefit in any cap and trade scheme. But Duke Energy, primarily coal-burning, is still at the table - and not just because of progressive CEO Jim Rogers (ex-head of Cinergy until Duke took them over). His predecessor Paul Anderson came out in support of carbon taxes nearly two years ago. Perhaps these CEOs are not as blinkered as some of their critics.

As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, there are still “plenty of signs that industry will fight regulations it sees as going too far”. Carmakers, for all their trumpeting of cleaner models, are still suing California over its 2002 law requiring them to sell cleaner vehicles. Oil companies who applaud Governor Schwarzenegger’s initiatives spent more than $90 million successfully opposing a state ballot measure to tax oil producers to finance investment in alternative fuels.

California’s resilient governor, however, is pushing the world’s seventh largest economy toward climate and clean tech leadership as fast as his unexpected political coalitions will carry him. Implementation planning is under way for the AB32 emissions-cutting bill (there are of course calls to go farther and faster), which also opens the door for market-based cap and trade programmes.

At municipal level, so far 398 mayors have pledged their cities to meet or exceed the Kyoto Protocol goals on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The voters in frequent eco-pioneer Berkeley recently voted by 81% to pass a measure to reduce greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. Austin’s zero emissions target has just raised the bar.

“Americans love competition. But this time it’s a race to the top.”

Americans love competition, you see. But this time it’s a race to the top, as the old assumptions of ‘business versus environment’ begin to give way before the compelling challenges of transforming the economy - and keeping our feet dry.

Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic Inc, is a systems ecologist and business strategist, and writes for the New Bottom Line, WorldChanging.com, greenbiz.com, and his blog at http://blogs.natlogic.com/friend

9 March 2007

Gil Friend