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Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 6, NUMBER 9, SEPTEMBER 1993

NEWS...
U.S. PLAN DELAYED

Item #d93sep114

The Clinton Administration's revised National Action Plan for stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions will not be released until later this fall. The delay was announced in Geneva at an August session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), where the Administration had hoped to present a completed plan. Much of the discussion on the plan in the U.S. as well as at the INC meeting has involved the concept of joint implementation.

A key concept of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, joint implementation allows two countries to work together to reduce their overall greenhouse gas emissions. For example, an industrialized country or a private firm in that country might finance afforestation in a developing country. However, discussion at the August INC meeting (to be covered in the next issue of Global Climate Change Digest) shows that the concept lacks definition at the international level, and agreement on the details of joint implementation is still far off.

The Global Climate Coalition, representing diverse U.S. industries, favors the concept because many companies would find it easier and cheaper to finance offset projects in other countries than to lower their emissions at home. Environmentalists are of mixed opinion, some feeling that reductions in emissions should be achieved entirely within the U.S. The July issue of the monthly Energy, Econ. & Clim. Change is largely devoted to the debate over joint implementation, containing a 7-page discussion of a June workshop on the topic sponsored by the Administration as input for its action plan, and pro and con articles (and rebuttals) by D.M. Goldberg of the Center for International Environmental Law and M.C. Trexler and L.H. Kosloff of Trexler and Associates.