Toward Mitigating Further Warming

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a national nonprofit organization established in 1967, has helped forge a cross-sector alliance between corporate and environmental leaders, with the intent to achieve economically viable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The group, the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), is thus far composed of 10 dominant corporations and 6 leading environmental groups, including such big names as Alcoa, General Electric, and DuPont, as well as EDF and the National Resources Defense Council.

The alliance's proposal, "A Call For Action" [pdf], requests immediate federal government limits on greenhouse gas emissions and the creation of market-based incentives to achieve those limits. There is a clear need for such cap-and-trade requirements to be mandatory, so that early adopters will be rewarded by being able to stay competitive in relevant markets.

USCAP motivates its incentives with the NAS survey result:

In June 2005, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences joined with the scientific academies of ten other countries in stating that "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt actions."

Each year we delay action to control emissions increases the risk of unavoidable consequences that could necessitate even steeper reductions in the future, at potentially greater economic cost and social disruption. Action sooner rather than later preserves valuable response options, narrows the uncertainties associated with changes to the climate, and should lower the costs of mitigation and adaptation.

A personal analogy would be if organic vegetables were cheaper than conventional vegetables in the supermarket. That way I would not be penalized for being an early adopter of organic veggies. However, I of course don't have shareholders in my kitchen that won't let me buy organic veggies because it will ruin my bottom line for the current fiscal quarter [it's the chocolate and the wine that ruin my bottom's line, not the veggies].

When one considers how loathe the automobile industry has been to adopt similar policies, or how vigorously Lee Iacocca resisted seat belts, it makes these energy corporations look rather heroic in coming forward.

If not terribly altruistic, it is worthy of support, as we already have missed the opportunity to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at current levels. This type of endeavor, in particular if eventually reproduced in China and India, may keep the atmosphere below 500ppm CO2.

Not that I know any atmospheric scientist who is looking forward to living in a 500ppm CO2 world, but this alliance may buy the US time to look into the most viable carbon sequestration technologies. And since the US contributes 25% of the global CO2, any strategy that buys the US time buys the planet time.

* EDF key point & contextual summary of the uscap proposal
* NPR reporting on uscap criticism of bush energy policy
* NPR marketplace archive [audio] on business incentives for urging action

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