The United States is reviewing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

Washington — The Obama administration is convening a meeting of 17 major nations April 27–28 in Washington to begin talks on international action to address climate change. The talks are a prelude to a U.N. meeting set for December in Copenhagen when a new global treaty on greenhouse gas reduction is expected to be forged.

The developed and developing nations attending the Washington meeting are responsible for 75 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and include Western European countries, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico.

“We believe that it is critical that those 17 be able to make progress on the outstanding issues and reach political consensus if there is to be to a deal in Copenhagen,” Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, told journalists April 24 at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center. The meeting will come days after the United States celebrated Earth Day for the 39th year. Marking that occasion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked about the urgency of addressing climate change.

“It’s a political challenge, it’s an economic force, it’s a security threat and a moral imperative,” Clinton said in an Earth Day speech at the State Department April 22.

21st-CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES

Development of sustainable energy technologies will also be on the table in the April 27–28 sessions, said U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, in hopes that nations will agree to work together to end the world’s reliance on carbon-based fuels that emit the gases believed to cause climate change.

Stern said the discussion of renewable technologies in the meeting is likely to be wide ranging and may address clean-coal technologies, energy-efficient building standards, solar power, electric vehicles and “any number of things.” His objective is not to devise a long list of technology projects, but rather to reach some agreement among nations for concerted development of “game-changing technologies” that will be less polluting and more sustainable.

Stern and Froman said the global economic crisis should not deter new climate change initiatives. Both challenges are urgent and need to be addressed at the same time, Froman said.

“The solution to climate change … is energy. The low-carbon transformation of the global economy is what this is all about,” the special envoy said.

The Obama administration’s economic recovery plan approved earlier this year includes $80 billion in new spending and loan guarantees to accelerate the national transformation to cleaner forms of energy, Stern said.

Emerging from the recession in a “clean-energy recovery,” Stern said, is “terribly important.”

A DIFFERENT ERA

Climate change was identified as a national security threat in February by the U.S. director of national intelligence. In recent months, the United States has been examining its own climate change policies. Congress has begun debate on a bill mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem and it will seek to regulate it.

During President Clinton’s administration, Stern was a member of the team that negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, a commitment among industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The United States subsequently did not ratify the treaty and is not a participant in the protocol.

“We don’t want a repeat of a situation where we sign a lovely agreement in some foreign capital and not have it approved back here,” he said.

At the Kyoto negotiations, the negotiating team was working in “a domestic policy vacuum,” Stern said. “There wasn’t any effort [within the United States] going on to get a bill to limit carbon pollution the way there is now.”

The public, political and corporate awareness of the climate change threat has changed the context for U.S. acceptance of an international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he said. “The linkage, the alignment between what’s going on domestically and going on internationally for the United States is absolutely critical, and we are very mindful of that.”

Stern said the Obama administration is working with Congress on a plan to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by about 14 percent to 16 percent by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050. He emphasized that the important point in negotiations for all countries is to demonstrate movement toward reductions that are recommended by scientists to avoid catastrophic global warming.

For more on climate change, see Stern’s comments on the State Department DipNote blog.