Obama announces huge cuts to power plant emissions

The Obama administration's initiative in the fight against climate change took years to become a reality. Photo / Getty Images

On Monday 3 August, US President Barack Obama made a long-awaited commitment to reducing the country's carbon emissions.

He announced the Clean Power Plan - huge, sweeping cuts to the atmospheric pollutants put out by power plants, equally effective to removing 70 percent of all cars from US roads.

The United States' carbon emissions will be reduced by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Obama emphasised it as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against climate change."

However, he admitted emotionally that this action comes almost too late. 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have already occurred within the 21st century.

"Climate change is no longer about protecting the world for our children and grandchildren; it is about the reality that we are living with right now. We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it."

The Obama administration's initiative in the fight against climate change took years to become a reality. Industry lobbyists and climate change sceptics in Congress did everything they could to block it, but it eventually broke through, to widespread celebration.

Dr James Renwick from the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington says Obama's announcement is a step in the right direction.

"Yet, it is only a start, and we need to see much more in this vein, from the whole global community, if warming is going to be stopped before it gets to 2°C. As the last two IPCC reports show, limiting warming below 2° will require around 40% reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - compared to 1990 - and 80-90% reductions by 2050."

Dr Renwick adds it would then also be difficult to maintain any improvements yielded by reducing carbon emissions.

"We would need to go to negative emissions, i.e. removing CO2 from the atmosphere, to be sure of staying below a two degree warming, which in itself is no guarantee of safety," he says. "If the emissions reductions had started 25 years ago, things would have been much more manageable, but better late than never."

He identifies New Zealand is not currently pulling its weight in the movement against climate change.

"The real contrast between the New Zealand situation and the latest announcements from the US is that the Obama administration has an actual plan to make changes that will genuinely reduce emissions," he says.

"Our government seems to have no such plan, rather a combination of wishful thinking and cashing in of cheap carbon credits, bought at bargain prices on the international market. That mechanism is what allows Minister Tim Groser to claim that New Zealand is on track to meet our target of a 5% reduction by 2020, compared to 1990, even though net emissions are now far higher than they were in 1990 and there is no policy in place to make reductions."

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