States stepping up to climate challenge

Terry Tamminen is spearheading the creation of an emissions trading market centred in California. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It is individual states and not Washington that will lead the United States response to climate change, says Terry Tamminen, friend and adviser to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I couldn't agree more that the US has to step up. The good news - it is already happening," Tamminen said.

The former head of California's Environmental Protection Agency was in Wellington to give the keynote speech to a Chapman Tripp symposium on climate change, and to extend to Prime Minister Helen Clark an invitation for New Zealand to take part in a process he is spearheading - the creation of an emissions trading market centred in California.

"In June last year there were three states that had any kind of a comprehensive climate plan. Today there are 27 which have them or are developing them. Five have put them into law, which is extremely important because any politician can lay out a plan but if they are put into law you know what you are likely to get."

By 2009 when there was a new President in the White House and a Congress likely to take this issue seriously - "which the current President and Congress will not" - most Americans would live in a state with a world-class target for reducing greenhouse gases and a comprehensive and credible plan to achieve that, he said.

These states would also have put those plans into law and would be part of a regional carbon trading scheme.

'So a majority of the US population will already be doing what the rest of the world expects us to do."

The US makes up 5 per cent of the world's population but generates 25 per cent of its greenhouse gases, even more if you count indirect effects.

"Why is China building 1000MW a week of mainly coal-fired electricity generation? Partly it's so they they can provide Nike sneakers and plastic flamingos for the US.

"So with this direct and indirect impact on the rest of the world, it is clear that we have to make these moves if we hope to get them to follow."

Americans prided themselves on being inherently fair, he said.

"It's only fair that we solve the problem we created."

But there was also a huge economic opportunity in developing the technology the world is going to need to combat climate change.

"The alternative is to cede that opportunity to China and other places that could leapfrog us and sell those products back to us."

Three years ago California adopted that target of getting its greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80 per cent below that by the middle of the century.