Large-scale action for the environment: easy to agree on, but “a very hard beast to get moving”

The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Global Energy and Environment Initiative (GEEI) held a discussion today on “The Energy Economy in Transition: Mega Trends for the Year Ahead.” With ample global agreement on the need for reducing carbon emissions and ‘greening’ our industries, the discussion panel analyzed why there hasn’t been large-scale action for the environment.

Scott Barrett of the SAIS said “you can see that this is a very hard beast to get moving… John McCain wants to limit emissions in 2012 to where they were in 2005…. Obama has said that emission should fall 80% by 2050. It’s going to be extremely hard for any other country to move forward if the United States is not moving forward, and the United States won’t do anything ambitious unless the rest of the world goes with it.”

Barrett suggested that in order to achieve progress in reducing carbon emissions in the United States, we shouldn’t be too ambitious. Barret said, “the reason I want something modest is not because the problem demands something modest, because it doesn’t. The reason is that when we start to want to think more ambitiously, because of this need to want to bring other countries along with us, there’ll be a natural desire and instinct to want to attach trade restrictions to anything we do on our own, and I think that could be damaging.” The panel of experts at the SAIS and GEEI agreed that this issue would most likely not receive top priority in the next administration, due to other demanding economic issues at hand.

Still, the panel made it clear that a transformation of technology worldwide will be necessary to supply our overwhelming global energy demand. Barrett said, “one way you do it is you move to forms of energy that do not release green house gasses. But think about it—as you become more successful in using those, what happens to the price of fossil fuels? They fall… this is not an easy problem to deal with. The other way you do it is you use fossil fuels, but then you take the CO2 and put it under ground… Not only do we need government involvement, but we need global cooperation on a scale we’ve never had before.”