U.S. Climate Change Initiative Has Little Effect, GAO Says

U.S. Climate Change Initiative Has Little Effect, GAO Says
Monday, November 10, 2003

A new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office released late last month finds that one of the goals of U.S. President George W. Bush's Global Climate Change Initiative - to cut greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 18 percent between 2002 and 2012 - would reduce the rate just 4 percentage points more than expected if no action were taken.

Under the initiative, which the Bush administration announced in February last year, almost one year after it rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the government would be committed to reducing gas emissions intensity. That indicator is calculated by dividing emissions in a given year by economic output that year. According to the report, that means that gas emissions intensity could drop even if gas emissions themselves rose.

Analyzing gas emissions in 10 nations that account for 59 percent of the world's energy-related carbon emissions - the United States, China, Japan, India, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, South Korea, and France - the GAO said that carbon dioxide emissions are expected to increase in all 10 countries while emissions intensity is expected to decrease in all of them.

According to the GAO, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that even without the U.S. climate change initiative, the country would naturally see a 14 percent decrease in emissions per million dollars of gross domestic product between 2002 and 2012. With the initiative, reductions would be 18 percent.

The "natural" reduction in emissions intensity, said the GAO, stems from reduced reliance on fuels with a high carbon content, as coal and oil have been increasingly replaced by nuclear energy, hydropower and natural gas over the last half-century (GAO release, Oct. 28).