The U.S.-China Carbon Accord: a Nod to the Competitiveness of the Green Economy, but Primarily Poltical

As we enter a second day where the U.S.-China climate accord fills the newspaper gobbling up precious column inches you have to hand it to Obama: he has flipped the conversation off the abominable performance of his party in last week's midterms and reestablished his relevance. And that is the way to look at the carbon-reduction agreement with China: foremost it is a strategic move on the political battlefield of the homeland; it elicits hostile reactions from the Republican leadership in Congress that paints them as knuckle-draggers sucking on billionaire Koch brothers tits at the same time it galvanizes important segments of the Obama-Coalition voters Democrats will need in 2016.

A set narrative regarding the Obama-Xi Jinping climate deal is already taking shape. First, the numbers. The United States has already pledged to reduce carbon emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama plans to achieve this through limits on tailpipe and power-plant smokestack emissions implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The deal announced the other day in Beijing commits the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions further to between 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

China has agreed to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 as well as shift 20% of its energy supply to clean, renewable sources.

The positive of the bilateral accord is presented in unsigned Gray Lady editorial, "A Major Breakthrough on Climate Change":

The climate accord represents a startling turnaround after years of futile efforts to cooperate in a meaningful way on global warming. It sends two critically important messages, one to the world and the other to the United States Congress. China and the United States together account for about 45 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their new commitments are thus almost certain to energize other countries to set more ambitious targets of their own before negotiators meet to frame a new global agreement at the climate summit meeting in Paris in December 2015. 

In the United States, the agreement cuts the ground from under people like Mitch McConnell, the next Senate majority leader, and others who have long argued that there is no point in taking aggressive steps against greenhouse gases as long as major developing countries refused to do likewise. This argument effectively undermined Senate support for ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The climate deniers in Congress will find other reasons to oppose a strong climate strategy, and are doing so even now. But the “China” argument has effectively disappeared.

Throughout the stories written about the climate deal with China these two points are consistently made: 1) it provides a strong impetus for something of substance coming out of the global negotiations in Paris next December, and 2) it rights a wrong, salves a wound that goes back to the Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. Senate failed to ratify because of any limits placed on China.

But I think the real positive of the agreement is one that Bill McKibben mentions in his assessment of the deal, "The Big Climate Deal: What It Is, and What It Isn’t," which appeared yesterday, namely, the Green Economy is already here:

These numbers are easy — if you were really being cynical, you could say they’re trying to put a floor under the retreat from carbon, to manage a retreat from fossil fuels instead of really putting carbon on the run. The Germans, for instance, will be moving in on 60 percent of their energy from clean sources by the mid-2020s, when we’ll still be cutting carbon emissions by small increments.

Germany, one of the planet's key industrial economies, and one of its most competitive, proves that the cutting edge is green energy. This is all about economic advantage among the big players. Germany has shot far out ahead, and what China and the U.S. are doing with the bilateral agreement is, as McKibben says, putting "a floor under the retreat from carbon."

The big negative is that the deal isn't big enough. As Henry Fountain and Jonathan Schwartz point out in  "Climate Accord Relies on Environmental Policies Now in Place":

Experts said that the emissions reductions in the agreement would not be enough to enable the world to keep global warming below the target of a 2-degree Celsius, or 3.6-degree Fahrenheit, rise in global temperatures that was adopted at a climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.

Two-degree temperature rise is an important marker because once you hit it there's no going back; we're cooked, so to speak.

Fountain and Scwartz also point out a lack of commitment of other big players internationally:

Beyond the reductions, they said the deal was important for what it showed the rest of the world, particularly other large carbon emitters like India and Russia, in advance of a meeting in Paris next year to negotiate a new climate treaty. 

“It shows that the two big dogs in the room are taking the issue seriously,” said Kevin Kennedy of the World Resources Institute, a think tank. “It provides a real opportunity for the start of what could become a race to the top.” 

But it remains unclear whether that will happen. In India, the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has signaled that it will not announce a reduction target for emissions cuts. India has long maintained that it should not be required to commit to such goals.

The must-read story is Coral Davenport's "In Climate Deal With China, Obama May Set 2016 Theme"; she offers a compelling account that the Obama administration is guided primarily by politics here. First off, Obama's climate-plan architect is none other than John Podesta, Clinton eminence grise who soon plans to leave his White House post to manage Hillary's presidential campaign:

The architect of Mr. Obama’s climate change plan is none other than his senior counselor, John D. Podesta, who is likely to leave the White House next year to work as the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. 

The climate plan that Mr. Podesta has drafted for Mr. Obama is expected to serve as a blueprint for Mrs. Clinton’s climate change policy, should she run.

Climate change is a wedge issue for suburban swing voters, as potent as welfare queens were for Reagan Democrats. As Davenport says,

President Obama’s landmark agreement with China to cut greenhouse gas pollution is a bet by the president and Democrats that on the issue of climate change, American voters are far ahead of Washington’s warring factions and that the environment will be a winning cause in the 2016 presidential campaign. 

A variety of polls show that a majority of American voters now believe that climate change is occurring, are worried about it, and support candidates who back policies to stop it. In particular, polls show that majorities of Hispanics, young people and unmarried women — the voters who were central to Mr. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 — support candidates who back climate change policy. 

But Republicans are betting that despite the polls, they can make the case that regulations to cut greenhouse pollution will result in the loss of jobs and hurt the economy.

***

As evidence, Republican strategists point to their recent wave of victories in this year’s midterm elections, when they campaigned aggressively against Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations. 

But Democrats are increasingly emboldened by polls showing that in national elections, candidates who push climate change policies will win support from voters. 

According to a 2013 poll by Stanford University, 73 percent of Americans believe that the earth has been warming over the past 100 years, while 81 percent of Americans think global warming poses a serious problem in the United States. In addition, 81 percent think the federal government should limit the amount of greenhouse gases that American businesses can emit.

Twenty-one percent of Americans think producing electricity from coal is a good idea, while 91 percent of Americans think making electricity from sunlight is a good idea.

A 2014 poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that majorities of women, minorities and young people support candidates who strongly endorse climate action. That poll found that 65 percent of Hispanics, 53 percent of blacks and 53 percent of unmarried women support candidates who back climate change action.

Thomas Edsall in his midterm postmortem, "The Demise of the White Democratic Voter," argued convincingly that GOP success was due to the national party's ability to muzzle the Tea Party knuckle-draggers, the troubadours of "legitimate rape" and the global-warming deniers who provide the incendiary soundbites that not only drive Democrats to the polls but also prompt fickle suburbanites to let their inner liberal run free. As Edsall frames it:

Republicans are not satisfied with winning 62 percent of the white vote. To counter the demographic growth of Democratic constituencies whose votes threaten Republican success in high-turnout presidential elections, Republicans have begun a concerted effort to rupture the partisan loyalty of the remaining white Democratic voters. Their main target is socially liberal, fiscally conservative suburbanites, the weakest reeds in the Democratic coalition. These middle-income white voters do not share the acute economic needs of so-called downscale Democratic voters and they are less reliant on government services.

The Republican strategy to win over these more culturally tolerant, but still financially pressed, white voters is to continue to focus on material concerns – on anxiety about rising tax burdens, for example — while downplaying the preoccupation of many of the most visible Republicans with social, moral and cultural repression.

These are the very voters who believe in climate science and can see that converting to a Green Economy is a job creator that makes the U.S. more economically competitive. The Koch brothers who didn't appear to be such an enormous albatross in the midterms -- because Democrats often ran away from criticism of the oil and gas industry -- will not fair so well in 2016.

The next card for a suddenly more potent POTUS to play will be on immigration. Once that is done, the GOP will be effectively boxed for the next two years. The electoral science is largely settled: a presidential candidate can't win with Latino support in the high-twenty-percent range (Romney) or low-thirties (McCain).

If Obama plays his cards right, as he did in Beijing, the old warhorse Hillary might be bound for the White House after all.