Strategic Comments  – Volume 14, Issue 8 – October 2008   

Climate change and the US election

Better prospects for a global deal – whoever wins

While dealing with a stricken economy at home, one of the first major foreign-policy tests of the next United States administration will be the moves it makes – or does not make – towards a new international treaty on measures to combat global warming. Both main presidential candidates, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama, have taken much stronger positions than the George W. Bush administration on the need for, and nature of, solutions to the problem of climate change. Each proposes binding national and international 'cap-and-trade' systems (see right).

Therefore, the arrival of a new president seems bound to affect the global negotiating process begun at a United Nations conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007. The aim of the Bali process – of which the next stage will be talks in Poznan, Poland, in December – is to reach a new international agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Domestic legislation

There seems to be a growing appetite in Congress – and in the US generally – for stronger action on climate change, after years in which the Bush administration first downplayed the problem, then stood aloof from international efforts to reach a solution via the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

As of July 2008, more than 235 pieces of legislation relating to climate change had been introduced in the 110th Congress (2007–08). One, the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, was sponsored by McCain and independent senator Joe Lieberman. McCain–Lieberman called for an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, with graduated targets of greenhouse-gas emissions (see table). The bill was co-sponsored by nine other senators, including Obama and Hillary Clinton. Like most bills introduced in Congress, McCain–Lieberman has never been subject to a committee or floor vote, although subcommittee hearings were held in July.

Another bill, the Boxer–Lieberman–Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, was the first major piece of climate legislation to come to a floor vote in the US Senate. It would establish a cap-and-trade system with emission targets of 4% below 2005 levels by 2012, 19% by 2020 and 71% by 2050 – targets that were roughly in accord with McCain–Lieberman, although the use of a different baseline year complicates direct comparison with other proposals.

The vote on the bill in June 2008 was procedural – a vote to bring the bill to a vote, not a vote on the bill itself – and at 48–36 failed to achieve the 60 votes needed, or even the simple 51 majority that would be needed to pass the law. But six absent senators, including McCain and Obama, stated that had they been present they would have voted 'yes'.

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