As we all know, the announcement that President Obama had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was met in the US with a mixed reaction. His supporters interpreted the Prize as validation that America was back as a moral leader after eight long years characterized by conflict, arrogance, and divisive politics under the Bush Administration. His detractors saw it as premature accolade for an untested leader still new on the world’s political stage.
As a leader in an international organization working to promote a peaceful and sustainable world--Greenpeace--I view the award through a different lens. I see the award as an affirmation of the President’s vision and a symbol of all of the world’s hope that President Obama will answer the call of history to lead, not slow, the global efforts to solve global warming.
In the first few months of his presidency, Obama helped institute several important measures to battle global warming—strengthening fuel-economy rules for automobiles, enforcing new energy efficiency standards, and moving to develop rules for regulating greenhouse gas producing power plants and large smokestacks with his executive authority.
But as the deadline for action at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen moves ever closer, Obama has moved away from directly challenging the twin problems of energy and global warming, and as a consequence ceded valuable ground to the coal and oil industries, which want to continue business as usual — no matter the costs to the planet and its people.
As opponents of clean energy rallied, they asserted their power in the halls of Congress, and it worked. Last Summer, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed watered down legislation that only aims to cut global warming pollution by 4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and provides massive subsidies to the biggest global warming polluters. Furthermore, the loopholes in the bill such as offsets will enable coal and other polluting industries to emit the same levels of pollution for decades to come.
The legislation falls well short of the recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The body of scientists, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change, says to avoid runaway global warming, developed countries must slash pollution by 25-40 percent below the important 1990 benchmark by 2020. Yet, instead of pushing for a target that meets this scientific standard, President Obama endorsed the bill and never called for it to be strengthened. The debate has now moved to the Senate, where it is stalled until after the negotiations in Copenhagen.
The failure of the US – the world’s largest polluter historically – to commit to a plan of action in line with scientific imperatives has frustrated the international process to address global warming and strained diplomatic relationships. In November, representatives from Africa, a continent already suffering from hunger and diseases brought by the crisis, walked out of climate negotiations in Barcelona to protest the lack of ambition shown by the US and other wealthy nations in the face of a looming catastrophe.
Unfortunately, this pattern of delay continues. During the recent Asian Economic Partnership Conference, President Obama announced that the US would not seek a legally binding climate pact in Copenhagen, but would instead push for a delay until 2010, by which time the Senate will perhaps have acted.
The move was a blow to the millions of people around the world looking to President Obama to live up to his campaign promises to tackle global warming and help lead the world to a sustainable future.
But, those who have followed the international climate talks over the years know that they have a history of defying conventional wisdom. Just two years ago in Bali, the United States returned to negotiations despite great cynicism and under an administration that questioned the very science behind global warming.
Certainly, the delegates representing communities watching the sea rise around them in the Pacific and the millions of people facing famine in Africa do not intend to give up on a deal that will mean the difference between life and death. The fate of the people who did not invite or contribute to the problem of global warming, but are nevertheless most vulnerable to its impacts, should provide the bottom line for action in Copenhagen.
The negotiations can still be saved by a true leader. President Obama, emboldened by the recognition of the Nobel Committee, must now go to Copenhagen and forge a deal that is ambitious, fair, and legally binding.
We know what the details of such an agreement look like: rich countries like the US must agree to cut their emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels in the next decade, replace dirty energy sources like coal and oil with clean, renewable wind and solar power, and create a $140 billion annual fund to help poorer nations increase their own renewable energy sources, end deforestation, and adapt to the unavoidable impacts of a warming planet.
We have the technology, the money, and the moral imperative to do this now. We only lack the political will. President Obama ran for office with the slogan “Yes We Can.” We can and we must, Mr. President. Now is the time for action.