(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-01-31 21:51

Growing Domestic Pressures

On the domestic front, the Bush administration is also under growing political pressures to move beyond its resistance to mandatory pollution reduction.

One reason is that most major contenders in this year's presidential election is favoring hard targets for greenhouse gas emissions and the issue has become a hot topic on the campaign trail.

Democratic presidential election front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both pledged to cut US emissions by 80 percent from the 1990 level by 2050, saying this can only be achieved by legal caps on emissions.

The leading Republican presidential candidate John McCain has made similar promises, but he is only aiming for 65 percent cuts by 2050.

As for other Republican candidates, Mike Huckabee also supports emission caps, though he has not proposed any specific target for cuts.

The Bush administration officials tried to play down the expectation for a sharp turn in post-Bush climate policy.

This year's US presidential election is unlikely to have a great impact on the consistency of the country's climate policy, Andy Karsner, assistant secretary of energy told Xinhua Wednesday.

Speaking at a press briefing on the sideline of economies meeting, held here on January 30-31, Karsner said that the groundwork of US climate policy is actually laid down by mid-level officials who are often bipartisan.

"We are building a continuity in the civil service," he said.

Karsner also said that whoever becomes the new president, whether Republican or Democrat, he must make climate policy decision based on broad bipartisan support.

However, analysts said the appeals for mandatory pollution reduction targets have become a growing consensus in the United States, and the Bush administration's unpopular stance on climate change could hurt Republican candidates.

Although Bush is still resisting compulsory targets for pollution reduction, 22 US states with about 145 million people are exploring mandatory carbon-dioxide caps and emission-credit markets similar to that of the EU.

"The clear message from the states is that we need mandatory action," said Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

"There appears to be consensus within the United States and abroad that we need to move beyond the voluntary approach," Diringer said.

The two-day closed-door conference in Honolulu, known as the Major Economics Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change, has drawn representatives from the United Nations, EU as well as 16 major economies.

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