Governments around the world are watching closely as President Barack Obama prepares to announce a United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s 600 coal-fired power plants.
His speech next Monday will be closely scrutinised by government analysts in Beijing, Brussels and beyond to determine how serious the US president is about fighting global warming.
As US media outlets reports the regulation will be President Obama’s most forceful effort to reverse 20 years of relative inaction on climate change by the United States.
That inaction has stood as the greatest obstacle to international efforts to slow the rise of heat-trapping gases from burning coal and oil that scientists say cause warming.
As the New York Times newspaper reports the president tried, without success, to move a climate change bill through Congress in his first term, and such legislation would now stand no chance of getting past the resistance of Republican politicians who question the science of climate change.
Now Mr Obama is taking a more controversial step and is using his executive authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue an EPA regulation taking aim at coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of carbon pollution.
“I am closely watching this. This standard is the real test of how serious the Obama climate action plan really is,” Dr Qi Ye, director of the Climate Policy Centre at Tsinghua University in China told the New York Times.
The university is one of about half a dozen institutions that the Chinese government has tasked with immediately analysing the new rule, according to Chinese experts.
China and the United States, the world’s two largest economies and greenhouse gas polluters, are locked in a stalemate over global warming.
While today China pollutes more than the United States, Chinese officials insist that, as a developing economy, China should not be forced to take carbon-cutting actions.
China has demanded that the United States, as the world’s historically largest polluter, go first.
Chinese policy experts say that President Obama’s regulation could end that standoff.
Dr Qi said that while he did not expect the Chinese government to publicly comment on the EPA rule, a strong regulation, like one that led to a 20 per cent cut in coal plant pollution, could stimulate policy changes.
The New York Times reports the EPA rule comes at a crucial moment in the fraught international effort to slow global warming.
In March, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, released a report warning that human-caused climate change is leading to food and water shortages, extreme heat waves and droughts, rising sea levels, and stronger storms.
But scientists have also warned that collective action, with carbon cuts by all the major economies, is essential to achieve the drastic reduction in carbon pollution necessary to stave off the most destructive impacts of global warming.
This December, leaders from many nations will gather in Lima, Peru, at a United Nations summit meeting aimed at drafting a treaty, to be signed in 2015, that would legally bind the world’s major economies to cut their carbon pollution.
“We’re very excited to see the new rule on existing power plants. We see this as absolutely the backbone of US climate strategy,” said Günter Hörmandinger, environmental counsellor to the European Union delegation in Washington.
The EU, which enacted a carbon-cutting policy after the Kyoto Protocol, has been among the critics of the US climate change policy.
“Once it’s out, I will be rushing to understand it and report back to Brussels,” said Mr Hörmandinger, an Austrian who has spent the past four years studying the Clean Air Act.
The New York Times reports that within the US, opponents of the climate change rule, chiefly the nation’s coal industry, are preparing to fight with lawsuits, and global analysts are assessing whether the rule will stand up to those attacks.
“I think it can be done legally, going back to the Supreme Court decision that led to EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions,” said Mario Molina, a climate policy adviser to President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico.
Mexico, which enacted an ambitious climate change law in 2012, has urged other Latin American nations to pass similar legislation.
Many governments are also mindful of the opposition to climate change science in the United States Congress.
The New York Times says perhaps no governments are anticipating the rule with more urgency than those in the small island nations that could be threatened if sea levels rise.
A series of scientific reports have concluded that as the planet warms, melting polar ice will drive up sea levels two to four feet by the end of the century, threatening the very existence of some of those islands.
“The path we’re on right now is that our country will disappear,” said Ronald Jean Jumeau, the UN ambassador from the island nation of Seychelles, and a spokesman for the Alliance of Small Island States.
“This will slow things down and give us more time to adapt and restructure our economies. Taking action now gives us more breathing room.”
Also paying close attention will be Saudi Arabia, which has sought to block global action on climate change.
Economies that are deeply dependent on producing fossil fuels fear that lowering the global demand for oil and gas presents a grave economic threat.
