Strategic Comments – Volume 14, Issue 8 – October 2008
Climate change and the US election (page 3)
Obama, on the other hand, can rely on greater party support. Where Democratic Party activists disagree with his climate-change policy, it is to say that it does not go far enough. However, after two defeats in presidential elections, Democrats see the value of party unity and recognise that it would be pointless to advocate policies that might be electoral liabilities and would have difficulty passing through Congress.
The Democratic Party platform calls climate change an 'epochal, man-made threat to the planet'. It mentions climate change in several places in the context of national security, US leadership and international relations, and contains language taken directly from Obama's position papers, especially on the cap-and-trade proposal – albeit adding a mention of interim emissions targets.
Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has long supported the 80% emissions-reduction target in Obama's proposal. With Republican Senator Richard Lugar, Biden also sponsored a strongly worded 'sense of the Senate' resolution in 2006 on the need for the US to address climate change via 'negotiation of fair and effective international commitments' through the UN process.
The resolution was co-sponsored by Obama and 26 other Senators from both parties – but not by McCain – and passed the Foreign Relations Committee, which Biden chaired. It has not come up for a floor vote in the Senate.
Whoever wins the presidency, most indications are that the Democrats will increase their current 51–49 majority in the Senate by four to seven seats, and make substantial gains in the House of Representatives. As president, McCain would need strong support from Democrats for any domestic legislative agenda and would be likely to govern from the centre, despite leaning to the right during the election campaign.
On an issue such as climate change, he is personally more in accord with the Democrats than with much of his own party, and thus might give it high priority on the grounds that he would have a chance of substantial accomplishment. He also has a good record of working with other senators on the issue.
Obama has said he, too, would make climate change a priority, but like McCain he scarcely mentioned it in his acceptance speech, other than in the context of energy independence. Climate change has slipped well down the list of issues voters say are important, while energy prices and energy policy are near the top.
As president, Obama might be more flexible than McCain on binding targets for developing nations, but could face resistance on this issue in Congress.
In 1997, during the debate over Kyoto, the Senate passed, by 95–0, the Byrd–Hagel Resolution, declaring that the US should not accede to any emissions protocol or treaty that did not include binding targets for developing nations, or that 'would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States'.
However, the recent vote on Boxer–Lieberman–Warner indicated a significant damping down of this attitude, and the projected gains for the Democrats make it more likely that significant climate-change legislation could be adopted in the next Congress.
Either way, the new administration's position will be very different from the Bush administration's, and the prospect is that the US will be a more positive force in agreeing a comprehensive international greenhouse-gas emissions regime in Copenhagen.
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