At his post-shellacking press conference last week, U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged that, in light of the mid-term election results, he’d not have the votes in Congress “this year or next year or the year after that” to pass comprehensive climate change legislation. Without such legislation, the international negotiations that foundered in Copenhagen will continue to go nowhere. And Kyoto will die a natural death in 2012.
The good news in this for Canada is that we’ll not now be subject to the huge financial penalties that would have accrued from having signed an agreement that successive governments made no effort to implement after the United States – our most important trading partner – failed to ratify it.
However, as the President also noted at his press conference, this does not mean that nothing can be achieved to address the problem of global warming. One example he cited are the new vehicle emission standards, which – having learned the major lesson of the Kyoto experience – our government co-ordinated with the US. And in today’s edition of the New York Times comes a report of a promising additional avenue that could slow global warming by a decade. An avenue, as it happens, with a distinctly Canadian connection – “including greenhouse gases under an existing and highly successful international treaty ratified more than 20 years ago [including by the United States], the Montreal protocol”:
As the signers of the protocol convened the 22nd annual meeting in Bangkok on Monday, negotiators are considering a proposed expansion in the ozone treaty to phase out the production and use of the industrial chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs The chemicals have thousands of times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.
HFCs are used as refrigerants in air-conditioners and cooling systems. They are manufactured mostly in China and India, but appliances containing the substance are in use in every corner of the world. HFCs replaced even more dangerous ozone-depleting chemicals known as HCFCs, themselves a substitute for the chlorofluorocarbons that were the first big target of the Montreal process.
“Eliminating HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is the single biggest chunk of climate protection we can get in the next few years,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a nongovernment organization based in Washington….
But the plan is not expected to be adopted this year. Large developing countries, including China, India and Brazil, object that the timetable is too rapid and that payments for eliminating the refrigerant are not high enough. …
Along with Mexico and Canada, the Obama administration has proposed a rapid series of steps to reduce HFC production, with rich countries meeting a faster timetable than developing nations and helping to pay the poorer countries to find substitutes. But the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that adopting the HFC proposal could eliminate the equivalent of 88 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2050, and slow global warming by a decade.
