Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
U.S. economy, and that with the right leadership, the country could meet
the targets proposed at Rio through purely voluntary measures, his argu-
ment spoke to the same no-regrets ethos.
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But the Bush administration applied its no-regrets policy within a
decision-making framework that inverted one of the precepts of the envi-
ronmental movement: the principle of precaution. In its simplest form— as
institutionalized by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and
the Endangered Species Act of 1973— the environmental precautionary
principle assumes that an action or policy that may be harmful to the
environment ought to be considered harmful until it is proven otherwise.
Under this rubric, even the most conservative reading of the first IPCC
assessment— one that highlights the uncertainties of climate science and
downplays the risk of climate change— would not provide grounds for
inaction on the credible threat of climate change.
Bush's application of the no-regrets idea turned this approach on its
head. As historian Tim Walker argues, instead of an environmental pre-
cautionary principle, the administration articulated an “economic precau-
tionary principle,” wherein any action or policy to curb environmental
degradation was assumed to represent an economic threat unless proven
otherwise.
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Heavy financial commitments to sustainable development and
binding emissions targets— both commitments that represented credible
threats to economic growth— violated that principle.
The details of the Europeans' proposal for binding targets made it even
less desirable for the Bush administration. As part of its plan to meet its
greenhouse gas commitments, the E.C. Environment Ministry introduced
a measure to create a simple, gradually increasing carbon tax that would
raise the cost of a barrel of oil by about ten dollars by the end of the decade.
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For the economically conservative President Bush— who had run his 1988
campaign on the back of the promise “Read my lips: no new taxes”— a
carbon tax was both undesirable and politically untenable. U.S. resistance
to binding targets— and to a domestic carbon tax— helped to fragment an
already weakening E.C. position on the UNFCCC, and in May of 1992,
the European Community voted the carbon tax down. The Dutch, the
Danes, the Italians, and the Germans feared that an E.C. carbon tax not
contingent upon a similar scheme in the United States and Japan would
prove ineffective in curbing climate change and put the nations of Europe
at a competitive economic disadvantage.
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Similar concerns arose over the
