by John W. Anderson
February 1, 2006

With five other Pacific governments, the United States opened a new initiative to cut air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions at a conference Jan. 11 and 12 in Sydney, Australia. American spokesmen described it as a complement, not an alternative, to the Kyoto Treaty.

The new program reflects the Bush Administration's emphasis on technological development to reduce emissions, rather than the Kyoto Treaty's structure of regulations and mandatory emissions limits. It tacitly addresses two major shortcomings of the Kyoto system. Where Kyoto's emissions commitments run only through 2012, the Pacific initiative avoids enforceable targets altogether. And where Kyoto exempts all developing countries from any obligation to lower emissions, the Pacific initiative tries to draw the big ones --- China and India --- into an active although so far undefined role.

But, like all of the Bush Administration's approaches to global warming, this initiative raises the question whether a program that depends solely on voluntary cooperation can achieve adequate progress. Most experience with environmental policy suggests that it takes clear and legally enforceable requirements to make a substantial difference.

The program is entitled the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, or AP-6. In addition to China, India and the United States, it includes Japan, South Korea and Australia. Those six countries currently produce half of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important of the greenhouse gases generated by human activity. The United States and Australia are the only two developed countries that have refused to join the Kyoto Treaty.

The AP-6 is a "voluntary partnership," Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky said at a press briefing before the conference. "And it's designed to accelerate the development and deployment of cleaner, more efficient technologies to meet national pollution reduction, energy security and climate change concerns and in a way that promote[s] economic development and reduce[s] poverty."

It is unclear whether the partnership would be country-to-country or private business-to-business. If business is to take an active part there must be economic incentives. What form they might take, and where they might come from, has apparently not yet been worked out.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who led the American delegation to the conference, said, "In order to achieve meaningful results, we must engage growing and emerging economies from the outset and encourage the implementation of technologies that have demonstrated success."

The AP-6 can be seen as a move by the United States in the competition with the European governments, who are the most vigorous advocates of Kyoto, for the support of China and India on an issue of great importance in global environmental policy.

The developing countries, led by China and India, have expressed deep suspicion that country-by-country limits on greenhouse emissions, like those that Kyoto imposes, are intended to limit their economic growth. They find it unfair that they should be asked to accept limits at a time when their emissions, per capita, are a very small fraction of those in the developed economies. The architects of Kyoto have not, so far, been able to find an answer to these objections.

With the AP-6 the Bush administration hopes to circumvent this debate altogether by holding out the promise of new technologies and equipment that could cut the air pollution that is an immediate health threat in the big developing countries, while simultaneously raising fuel efficiency and producing greater economic output in relation to greenhouse emissions.

But it is not yet clear who would pay for the deployment of this technology in the developing countries. The Bush administration has said that it will ask Congress for $52 million in next year's budget to support the partnership, but that is a very small amount in comparison with the huge requirements of Asia's rapidly growing industrial sector.

The administration foresees this partnership working through eight key project areas, most of them focused on specific industries like power generation and steel, in which public officials and businessmen from the various countries meet to discuss possible technological solutions to their common concerns. According to the administration's plan, none of the eight key areas includes transportation. Because of the popularity of personal cars and trucks, and because of the troubles of the American automobile industry, transportation has proved to be, in political terms, the most difficult of all areas in which to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Beyond all the details, the central issue remains whether purely voluntary cooperation can show significant results.

A forecast was sketched out just before the Sydney conference by an Australian government research agency, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE). In the absence of any change of policy, it calculated, worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases would almost triple by 2050. If AP-6 is pursued vigorously, ABARE said, it could reduce those emissions substantially --- but they would still be, by 2050, more than twice the present level.

*****

John Anderson is Journalist-in-Residence at Resources for the Future.

RFF is home to a diverse community of scholars dedicated to improving environmental policy and natural resource management through social science research. Resources for the Future provides objective and independent analysis and encourages scholars to express their individual opinions, which may differ from those of other RFF scholars, officers, and directors.