US Senate likely to reject future UN climate deal – Interview

A possible UN climate deal, even watered down, will never make it past the US Congress, a senior advisor to the Chairman of the Senate’s environment committee told EURACTIV. He would rather see technology cooperation efforts instead.

Discussions launched in December last year under the United Nations framework will never win support from the US Senate, according to John Shanahan, a senior Counsel to the Senate environment Committee chairman, James M. Inhofe (Oklahoma).

“The United States is not going to ratify this process because the US congress is not going to allow them to do so, even if the Administration would sign up to it,” Shanahan told EURACTIV on his way to a climate change conference organised by think tank The Centre on 13-14 February in Brussels.

“You need sixty votes in the US Senate to pass anything. They [Supporters of a UN approach] have got 38 right now. And they may go for something ‘super light’ to win a few more symbolic votes. But they will never get sixty,” he predicts.

Shanahan warns that placing any sort of cap on US carbon dioxide emissions would result in the country switching away from coal for its electricity generation needs. And the question he asks is: “what do you move to?” In Europe, he says, “you have cheap natural gas. We don’t.”

Coal is the only fossil fuel still abundant in the US, with enough reserves enough to last for 250 years at the current rate of consumption, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). The US is also the country where coal reserves are by far the largest, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris.

“The US is not just the Saudi Arabia of coal but the OPEC of coal. And the Bush Administration has seen coal as an integral part of the economic future of the United States,” says Shanahan. 

And he believes the plants that are being built today are clean enough. “Now, they don’t reduce carbon dioxide but they do reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and various hazardous air pollutants. And we’re going to get cleaner in the future.”

According to Shanahan, the only way to go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions is through technology and international cooperation, such as the US-led Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development (EURACTIV, 12 Jan. 2006).

“Policies like the Asia Pacific Partnership actually accomplish what Kyoto could and should have been. That’s a more palatable solution to clean development and clean energy and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Asked about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which groups seven US States in a CO2 cap-and-trade system similar to the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, Mr Shanahan thinks it is a bad idea. “They’re going to experience economic pain in the future,” Shanahan predicts. 

“A lot of the states did not really understand what they were signing up to. They thought they didn’t have to do anything. They assumed that their emissions in the future would not be increasing anyway because there would be legislation mandating a renewable energy portfolio to build windmills.”

“Well, we’re not getting a renewable portfolio requiring our future power generation to be windmills. So it was bad analysis in the first place”.

Moreover, Shanahan believes cap-and-trade systems actually discourage technology developments because they absorb money that could instead be invested in clean technology. He says this has already been illustrated with clean air laws such as the Acid Rain programme which uses a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from fossil fuel combustion.

“Cap-and-trade encourages fuel switching. And fuel switching actually exacerbates economic pain. We felt this in the US dramatically – our natural gas prices went through the roof. As a result, our chemical industry is shipping overseas, we lost a 100,000 jobs and our fertiliser industry is largely gone.”

And the irony, says Shanahan, is that this has not even resulted in decreasing air pollution at the global level. “We’re moving jobs over to developing nations like China and India but we’re also moving real air pollution and we’re moving greenhouse gas emissions – we’re not even solving any kind of global problem. And worse, we’re moving controlled facilities with high environmental standards over to countries which don’t control them at all. So we’re actually increasing air pollution.”

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