Is The Paris Climate Conference Doomed To Fail?
The United Nations Climate Change Conference – or Paris 2015 – is just around the corner, seven months to be exact. The goal is ambitious: to develop a viable, and comprehensive, successor to Kyoto, applicable to all countries, and with the aim of keeping global warming below 2 degrees centigrade. Expectations aretempered, but hopes remain high as the particulars begin to take shape and individual nations confer their climate goals. Conspicuously absent thus far however, is any meaningful carbon dialogue from the world’s second largest emitter, the United States.
The Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs are beginning to pour in and the public declarations will serve as fodder for any international agreement in Paris. To date, Gabon, the European Union, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States have published their INDCs. Together, this group accounts for approximately 34 percent of global CO2 emissions – the US alone is responsible for about half of that.
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Individually, support for international market mechanisms a la the European Union’s Energy Trading System appears to be widespread – a pattern attributable to their growing success worldwide, and in the US, at the state level.
In the US Northeast, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is exceeding expectations. Since 2008, the cap and trade program has reduced emissions from the power sector by 30 percent. Over the first three years of the program, RGGI states turned $912 million in proceeds into $1.6 billion in economic value for state economies and created 16,000 new jobs.
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