World climate plan clears hurdle, still weak tea

The weakest tea comes from the United States. Besides pledging to do less to cut emissions than EU members, or (it is expected, announcement later this week) Japan, America is guilty of, to use a football metaphor, moving the goalposts. What else can you call the Obama Administration wanting to use 2005, not 1990, as the benchmark year from which to measure cuts?

Indeed, that’s exactly the way the EU feels:

EU Commission representative Artur Runge-Metzger cautioned against moving the goalposts.

“It’s not about making numbers match and making them close to each other, I think at the end it’s a question of what's the effort behind it,” he said.

He added, though: “It's easy to say we start from a clean slate and we forget what the EU has been doing in the past, and what kind of efforts, what kind of economic burden we have been putting on ourselves in order to move forward.”

It’s clear Team Obama is NOT an environmental administration. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says CO2 emission is a serious health risk, but won’t do anything to regulate it, instead punting to Congress. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wasn’t a friend of the Endangered Species Act before he was first elected to Congress and he isn’t now. Economics czar Larry Summers, in past lives, made noises about environmental issues being means tested.

And, that brings us to this international foot-dragging.