President Barack Obama's plan to slash electricity-generated CO2 emissions was welcomed Tuesday as a courageous step towards a lower-carbon future, but not yet enough to brake dangerous planet warming. Politicians and analysts said Obama's Clean Power Plan, which faces fierce opposition in Republican quarters back home, should foster global goodwill and spur the international effort to pin down a climate rescue pact by year-end.
But much more was needed, from the US and other nations, to get the world on track to meet the UN goal of limiting average global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, they warned. French President Francois Hollande said the first plan ever to limit US power plant emissions would be a "major contribution to the success" of the November 30-December 11 UN conference his country will host to ink a new global climate deal.
Hollande hailed Obama's "courage" in the face of Republican recriminations and the threat of legal action by the lobby group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Obama announced Monday that power plant owners must cut carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Power stations account for about 40 percent of US emissions of CO2 - the most abundant greenhouse gas and the main contributor to manmade global warming. The United States is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China.
The new Paris deal will be reinforced by a roster of nationally determined greenhouse gas emissions curbs, known in climate jargon as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). The US has pledged a 26-28 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2025, and the Clean Power Plan is part of the strategy for getting there. "This is definitely a step change... from what has been happening so far in the power sector in the US," climate policy analyst Niklas Hoehne of the New Climate Institute, a research body, told AFP. "On the negative side, while it is an important step towards meeting the US' international pledge, on its own, it is not enough." There was a "gap" of about 1.5 gigatonnes (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) between the emissions-curbing target in the US INDC, and the actions the country was taking, said Hoehne. The new plan has reduced the shortfall, on paper at least, by about a third - some 500 megatonnes.
But the INDC itself may not be adequate. A measure dubbed the Climate Action Tracker, to which Hoehne contributes, says the US target has "medium" ambition - as did those of the other top three emitters: the EU and China. "If all countries would do what the US does, we are more on a pathway towards 3-4 C," said Hoehne. Pierre Radanne, a French energy expert, said the US curbs were weak compared to the EU's aim to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030 over 1990 levels. "The US cannot stay at this level. This is not leadership," said Radanne, noting that the US target would represent a mere 13 percent reduction if measured from 1990 to 2030.
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