Goldmark: On emissions, we trade with China

In 2008, both major-party presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, promised that if elected they would act to curb global warming. They argued that a binding set of carbon limits within a cap-and-trade framework was the best way to do that.

Now a different set of voices, many of whom profess to be unsure if climate change is real, have taken over the Republican Party. President Obama talks about global warming almost not at all, and his actions amount to even less than his words.

In the meantime, the global warming clock ticks implacably on. Every year of inaction enlarges the scale of the disaster that awaits us down the road, and makes the cost and difficulty of curbing carbon emissions more severe than they would have been had we begun to act in a timely manner.

Some parts of the world have started to reduce carbon emissions. Europe is in the seventh year of a cap-and-trade system that has begun to reduce emissions, and last month the state of California issued regulations, affecting all sectors of the state's economy, that establish an ambitious cap-and-trade program that will make serious cuts in that state's carbon emissions.

But at the federal level, the United States has retreated. The Obama administration now assumes the weak posture for which it once criticized others -- pursuing a halfhearted, voluntary program with no teeth and no possible hope of achieving the reductions the United States and other large economies would have to make to avoid frying the planet.

Later this month, the annual meeting of global climate change negotiators will convene in Durban, South Africa. And what is the U.S. team doing? Led by the State Department's Todd Stern, the U.S. team is visiting other countries and urging them not -- repeat not -- to advocate legally binding, long-term programs that would reduce carbon emissions.

I can remember when U.S. presidents used to criticize China for advocating only voluntary actions. Our country used to ask rhetorically: Why should we cap our emissions if China, our economic competitor, won't?

How things have changed. Today leaders in China are debating internally whether and when a system of hard, binding limits on carbon emissions would make sense for their country and for the rest of the world. And it is the U.S. government that is urging the Chinese not to argue for that course.

Global warming is one of the most serious long-term threats to our planet and our civilization. Like lead in gasoline, like nicotine in your lungs and like DDT on your vegetables, the only way to address this threat is to cut down on the chemicals causing it. The way to do that is to embark on a multiyear program of progressively reduced levels of carbon emissions, during which the global economy can transition to a higher-efficiency, lower-carbon model. It can be done -- just as we've reduced the pollution in our rivers, reduced sulfur-dioxide in our air (through a cap-and-trade program aimed specifically at these emissions from large power plants), and begun to stabilize the ozone hole over the South Pole.

Our country is paralyzed politically on the question of global warming, and we are choking on a cloud of toxic misinformation emitted by the propaganda outlets of the extreme right. But that's absolutely no reason for our government to be urging others -- including the dirtiest, fastest-growing economy in the world -- not to propose anything serious and binding that would actually make a difference in reducing carbon.

It must be hard for the Chinese to know whether to laugh or cry.

The most serious victims of all this will be our children. The next generation will have to pay more and suffer more because our generation fiddled and procrastinated while a serious threat accelerated in scope and intensity.

And, on yet another important issue, Beijing emerges as the place where the pivotal decision may be made.

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.