Where the US stands with carbon reduction
Since we owe much of our global financial predicament to our cousins across the pond, despite which we seem ever more to emulate their practices in all the wrong ways, I suppose a brief review of where the USA ‘is at’ with regard to an improved approach to carbon reduction and carbon energy conservation is not out of order. 2010 has begun for the Americans mainly with the embarrassment of the underpants bomber only demonstrated that US security is still weak, communications are poor and still took the President too long to respond publicly to the situation; so what did they do in 2009?
Well, having had a number of opportunities to do so, they singularly failed to put their mark to ratifying the Kyoto Accord.
They did, however, agree to make improvements to their electricity grid. The scheme to do this will cost about $3.4bn to the government and is backed by around $8bn of industry investment. This is a country that annually spends over $600bn on defence and over $2 trillion per year on healthcare. The most telling comment about this drop-in-the-ocean expenditure commitment (don’t forget, they haven’t spent it yet) came from analysis by the Electric Power Research Institute which estimates that the implementation of smart grid technologies will only reduce electricity use by some 4% by… 2030 - too little, too late.
Possibly the most damning statement by a representative of the United States throughout 2009 came at the end of the year; in fact, it was made at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. At a packed press conference in Copenhagen, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, launched her speech with the sound bite: ‘It’s all about the jobs’. Colleagues went on to say developing a low carbon economy was about weaning the country off foreign oil supplies and therefore protecting national security.
And that pretty much sums up the contribution to this most pressing of issues from the US delegation; it’s about jobs, national security and tokenism. We should not be surprised by this, however. Towards the end of last I reported on the infighting going at the US Chamber of Commerce, where the climate change deniers had been shown up by a spoof video put up on YouTube (Agnostics and Deniers) and there are still those in the USA who, like the creationists, continue to loudly deny the science of the Stern Report and the numerous reports issued by the IPCC.
So, as we enter a new decade – one that holds the promise of green-tech opportunities as well as the threats of carbon fuel and freshwater poverty – perhaps the business community in the UK should set the stage by not only holding politicians accountable for the green measures they have promised but also by taking the initiative and implementing carbon reduction strategies wholesale and utilising the savings by investing in the green tech sector.
As a business community, we took longer than most countries to come out of this latest recession; very likely because we have decimated our manufacturing base over the past 20 years. This decade we have the opportunity to redress this balance, thereby not only making the economy more resistant to another crash (which will doubtless follow in a smaller timescale than the gap between the last two) but also lead the way in sustainable business.
