Transcript

Host: This is On The Line, and I’m Eric Felten.

President George W. Bush says the United States will pursue a new policy to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. These gases, produced when oil, coal, or natural gas are burned in automobiles, power plants, or factories, are blamed for rising temperatures around the world:

President Bush: "We will set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem. And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it."

Host: President Bush says that the challenge isn’t just to reduce man-made climate change but to do it in a way that doesn’t hobble the global economy:

President Bush: "Our guiding principle is clear -- we must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people."

Host: What is the president’s new approach? Can it, as he hopes, encourage economic growth and sustainable development while cutting carbon emissions? I’ll ask my guests: Robert Corell, Program Director at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; Ted Nordhaus, coauthor of the book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility;” Marianne Lavelle, a Senior Writer for U-S News & World Report; and joining us by phone from New York: Michael Levi, Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome, and thanks for joining us today.

Robert Corell, what is there new in this policy that President Bush is putting forward?

Corell: Well, I think one thing that’s really remarkable is that, given the past seven years, this administration’s position is that they are taking a step forward. This is a long-term process, and many of us are really quite pleased that there is now an action plan being proposed. While not as aggressive as our partners in Europe and elsewhere and many of us in the scientific community, but it is a step forward, and we’re looking to what those goals will be, how firm those goals will be. Will they be targets and timetables? Because, in this discussion, he merely indicated that next summer that’s when the goals will be set forth for the United States.

Host: Marianne Lavelle, what’s your sense of what’s different in the policy here?

Lavelle: There’s a real question whether there is anything really different in the policy. I think the German Environment Minister captured a lot of other ministers -- what their view was, that this was a great step for the Americans but a small step for mankind. We’re still far apart, he said. What differentiates and perhaps isolates the U-S from the other countries that are participating right now in the Kyoto Accord is that the Bush administration seems not to want to have mandatory limits and still believes that we can go forward in a voluntary way, setting goals but not hard limits. And there’s a lot of doubt that that really will get us the huge emissions cuts that are necessary.

Host: Ted Nordhaus, is the issue going to be whether there are goals or hard-and-fast things that have to be met?

Nordhaus: Obviously, we support establishing caps. I think the question is what level are we going to establish the caps at and what can we expect those caps to accomplish?

Host: When you say, “caps,” you mean caps are limits on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted?

Nordhaus: That’s right. That’s right -- caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. Our view is that -- and we think it’s quite well supported by the energy science and the energy economics -- is that those caps -- beyond setting those caps at levels that current technology is capable of through things like efficiency and, at least in the developed world, moving from things like coal-fired electricity generation to natural-gas electricity generation; the most important thing is that we need to, whether it’s through caps or a carbon tax or some other mechanism, generate substantial investment to kind of make the breakthroughs in deploying clean-energy technologies that are going to be necessary to make the deep cuts that climate scientists have recommended and have called for in order to stabilize the climate.

Host: Michael Levi, are you there by phone?

Levi: I am.

Host: What’s your sense of this debate on the Bush approach as opposed to the Kyoto process which the U-S Senate had specifically opted out of? Which is going to be the important one going forward?

Levi: It’s better to think about the broader U-N framework on climate-change process versus the Bush process, and they’re not necessarily contradictory. Talking about a second round of Kyoto that will be very similar to Kyoto is probably not going to be productive. We’re going to see a mix of different approaches. The Bush administration has focused on agreements on what would be called policies and measures on specific actions to be taken rather than hard limits to meet, and this has, for a long time, been part of the broader international discussion. At the same time, if the United States is going to want to take any kind of leadership position, they are going to have to get on board to some degree with either hard limits on emissions or what Ted talked about -- some sort of price on carbon, some sort of carbon tax.

Host: Robert Corell, one of the goals in the White House plan is “that each nation should design its own separate strategies for making progress toward achieving this long-term goal.” A lot of the complaint about Kyoto was there was sort of an overall strategy for everyone to meet that didn’t necessarily meet the different economic situations of countries that had different kinds of emissions. Is there hope that some kind of policy that meets flexibility for different countries to take different approaches may be part of the solution?

Corell: I think even Kyoto recognized the differences. Each country did not have the same amount of carbon reduction assigned to them, so there was a recognition, even in Kyoto, which was a very narrowly structured arrangement. But this new arrangement must include all the countries of the world, particularly those who are the dominant players in greenhouse-gas emissions, like China and India, ourselves, and many others. But I think there’s been a major change in the mood around the world and in the United States, particularly in the private sector. You’ll find major leaders in our country, C-E-Os, arguing strenuously for a cap-and-trade system because they want a uniform playing field. One said to me, “I can’t deal with the fact that five states have different mechanisms for dealing with it because I can’t run one country in -- one company -- in five different places with different ways of doing it. So you hear these C-E-Os among the Fortune 500, the top leaders [of companies], of our country, saying it’s time for a cap-and-trade system. What I think is remarkable about the cap-and-trade system is it keeps it in the marketplace, which is what our president would like to do. He wants to stay where the market is a driving force, and the cap-and-trade system does exactly that, whereas a tax system has other dimensions not always keeping the money in the economic world. But I think there’s a major difference today than when we’ve talked about this in this room even a year or two ago, that the world is ready for it and it’s now time to move forward, because the science really makes it clear that it’s an urgent problem and it has to be dealt with right now.

Host: Marianne Lavelle, what’s your sense of the politics of, in particular, China and India, countries that have had tremendous economic growth and that economic growth has been both dependent on energy use and also energy use that is not necessarily the cleanest technologies and thus putting out lots of greenhouse emissions?

Lavelle: Right. In China in particular, with huge coal reserves and putting up coal-power plants every week, China and India, Indonesia -- this is the sticking point and really was for, as you said, the Senate’s vote a few years back not to ratify Kyoto. How are we going to come together on a global agreement that really recognizes this incredibly fast growth in China and India that can really overtake the U-S emissions and yet allow them the economic growth that they are seeking? I think there is some ground for agreement, because look at the terrible impact that global warming will have on India and China. They have an interest in this, and it really is the poorest countries in the world that are going to be the most deeply hurt. I think the one positive thing that came out of the Bush meeting was this talk of an international technology fund and no matter how -- technology really is one of the things that we have got to invest in to really come to some solutions that would work for all countries, developed and developing.

Host: Ted Nordhaus, what are the prospects for technological change that would be transformative, that would make enough of a difference to have an impact on the amount of emissions that are being said to drive climate change?

Nordhaus: Our view is that the only way we’re going to get to the levels of emission reduction even in the developed world that we need to make roughly seventy percent to eighty percent by mid-century and globally the same level of emissions reductions by the end of the century, which is what climate scientists are calling for, is to as radically and rapidly as possible drive down the real deployed costs of clean-energy technologies as quickly as possible. Because China and India have made it pretty clear that, at this stage in their development, they are not prepared to significantly increase energy costs, which are very closely tied to rising living standards. So, ultimately, to see -- to address the explosive growth of carbon emissions in the developing world, we have got to very quickly bring on line clean energy sources that can be deployed at cost-competitive or close to cost-competitive with, particularly, coal. And what it’s going to take to do that is not simply just sort of fixing the market or setting a cap. As Marianne said, it’s going to take a big investment in technology, in early-stage research, development, and deployment of those technologies, which is where we see the real improvements in performance and decreases in cost. That’s what it’s going to take to get where we need to go.

Host: Michael Levi, we’ve seen a tension in the realm of medicines around the world where the market that helps promote investment in new medical technologies then makes many of those technologies very expensive for the developing world, and that tension has never been fully resolved. Is there going to be a similar tension in trying to have market forces that will create new technologies for energy and yet making those energies affordable in the parts of the world where they most need clean technology?

Levi: There is, to some degree, a similar problem, not at the same level, perhaps. We’re looking at a couple of different things. In the near term, there are going to have to be incentives set up to get China in particular, India maybe in the medium term, to change the way they use resources and produce energy. Some of these are going to have to be financial incentives. The Kyoto Protocol has mechanisms for countries to pay for reductions in the developing world rather than reduce their own emissions, and this sort of thing in some modified form, because the mechanism right now doesn’t work so well, is going to have to be part of the incentive system. There also will have to be some sort of alignment of incentives that aren’t explicitly about climate change in ways that push these countries in the right direction: whether it’s developing a framework where Chinese pursuit of its energy-security goals also pays off in the climate-change dimension; whether Chinese pursuit of environmental air quality, local air-quality goals, also pays off in the climate change dimension. So there’s going to have to be some of that. At the level of an international technology fund and this sort of thing: yes, we’re going to have to have something like that, but it’s going to have to be paid for somehow, and if it’s not through a tax or through auctioning of emissions permits, it’s going to come through in income tax or payroll tax or capital-gains tax. The money has to come from somewhere, and it makes more sense in this area to have it come from some sort of penalty on the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Host: Robert Corell, what’s your sense of the likelihood that these new technologies can be created and created in a way that makes them available to people who don’t necessarily have the resources for them?

Corell: First off, the urgency demands that we move right now on those, because some of them do have some lead-time in terms of development. But as I’ve wandered around the world, talking with people about this, I see new technologies just around the corner. In fact, I would argue that we have right now enough of the new technology necessary to really start moving on that target that was mentioned of maybe sixty percent to eighty percent by mid-century. We ought to be introducing them very rapidly, and I think the discussion to date in this meeting is there has to be a price on carbon. There needs to be a signal in the marketplace that says, “We’re moving in that direction,” and whether you use cap-and-trade or tax, getting a price on carbon and bringing that price to the point where the marketplace moves -- The market will move over and start picking up some of these technologies. China’s working on some of them but not as aggressively as some of us would like to see. The science demands, and I think clearly that urgency is the issue, and it’s not only that the climate’s changing rapidly, it’s that these technologies and their investments have a time scale associated with them, and we clearly don’t want to go much beyond four-hundred-fifty P-P-M [parts per million], or we really do enter a regime where we have dangerous intervention from the climate system.

Host: Marianne Lavelle, the effort, though, to put a tax on carbon, which would directly raise energy prices – we see a lot of support in the U-S for the notion of doing something about climate change, but when people are confronted with higher gas prices, higher energy prices -- and there’s a lot of speculation that to have a real impact on the use of energy, you have to be talking about a tax on carbon that would significantly increase energy prices -- what happens to the political support for climate-change policy in the U-S? And is there a similar barrier to support once energy prices go up elsewhere in the world?

Lavelle: If the idea of a carbon tax -- if you go on Capitol Hill, people feel it’s a political nonstarter in this country, and that’s why folks have been talking about the cap-and-trade model. It’s something that was really a made-in-the-U-S-A idea. We use it right now, very successfully, to limit acid-rain emissions in the country. The utilities are familiar with it. They know that it works, and that’s why you see so many utilities saying: “Hey, let’s use it for carbon emissions.” If you did auction off those allowances at the beginning, those emissions allowances, it would have much the same effect as a carbon tax. In the European system, there was an issue with how the allowances were first meted out, and the countries gave too many to their industries, and so there are perils in going that way. It has to be done very carefully.

Host: Let me ask Ted Nordhaus, what’s your sense of how you maintain the political support for making changes without, at the same time, doing something that will have a significant impact?

Nordhaus: Our view is that the tolerance for -- whether it’s through a carbon tax or through a cap-and-trade system, one way or another, you’re setting what economists call a carbon price. And there’s probably some tolerance for a carbon price, and it may be easier politically to establish it through a cap-and-trade and auction regime rather than a carbon tax. But, really, the levels you would need to set a carbon price at given the current costs and performance of clean-energy alternatives to bring things like solar photovoltaic on line in large scale to displace coal are well beyond anything that’s going to be politically imaginable or sustainable. So when we look at this situation, again, we think that there are a lot of reductions that can be achieved not at the levels that climate scientists are saying we need to make but still significant through things like efficiency, moving from coal to natural gas in places like the U-S, and we ought to set a carbon price consistent with that. But in our view, the most important thing is that, however you set the carbon price, it’s done in such a way that it raises a significant amount of revenue for this early-stage research development and deployment of these more far-reaching clean-energy alternatives so that we can very quickly drive their costs down so that they can be competitive.

Host: We have about a minute left. Michael Levi, a quick question: one of the policy proposals from President Bush is to focus on a technology already in place, which is nuclear technology, with the caveat that that technology has to be proliferation-resistant. Is it possible to pursue increases in nuclear power without raising the issues of, for example, in Iran that that technology might be used for weapons development?

Levi: Any spread of civil nuclear technology is going to raise the prospect and the possibility of nuclear-weapons proliferation. The question is, “How much is it going to raise it, and is it worth that risk?” And a lot of that depends on the policies you have in place that deal with proliferation. We’re not going to be able to have a rapid increase in nuclear power for quite a while, perhaps at least for another decade or so, simply because the facilities to produce what we need for power plants aren’t in place yet, and over that time, we will need to develop a better approach to preventing the misuse of civil nuclear technology. It’s going to almost certainly be part of the solution.

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. We’re out of time. But I’d like to thank my guests: Robert Corell of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; Ted Nordhaus, coauthor of the book “Break Through,” Marianne Lavelle of U-S News & World Report, and joining us by phone from New York, Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On the Line,” I’m Eric Felten.