Labor & Employment Law

Trust, But Verify on Emissions

By admin

AFL-CIO Union Industries Director Bob Baugh is a member of a global union delegation attending the next round of the United Nations climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany. This is the second of a series of blogs on the talks. Be sure to check out part 1.

Here in Bonn, U.S. climate change negotiators are hard at work negotiating the process to ensure that nations are abiding by the commitments on targets for emissions and taking the actions they agree to in any final deal.

While the Copenhagen Accord broke new ground on issue of measurable, reportable and verifiable (MRV) commitments, there is still work to be done. In Copenhagen, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva helped break the logjam over MRV requirements. He acknowledged that the MRV demands by developed nations were “reasonable,” especially when they are providing funds to developing nations to assist their movement to cleaner energy. The question of being able to verify actions while respecting the sovereignty of individual nations is one of the most sensitive details to work out before there can be an effective system.

We discussed the U.S. approach to this issue in a union meeting with Trigg Talley, one of the leaders of the official U.S. delegation. He said the United States sees “the establishment of a current ghg (greenhouse gas emissions) inventory for every nation and an international registry with regular updates as a critical element.”  He said this will provide transparent data that will give life to any climate agreement. The information currently being used is years out of date. The last inventory is based on 1996 data and the next one will be based on 2000 data.

The United States recognizes that creating an updated database will take some work, but it is “doable,” Talley says, “and the U.S. is willing to provide technical assistance and help pay for nations to establish their system and report.” He cited countries such as the United States, Bulgaria and several nations in Central America and the European Union that are capable of reporting their national data from as recently as 2008. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is providing technical assistance to China in developing their monitoring and reporting system. 

The concerns over sovereignty arise over what happens with the data once it is reported. The United States and other nations have recommended creation of an independent panel of experts to review the reports and to ensure their accuracy. China and other nations have raised concerns that this review does not respect their sovereignty. 

As trade unionists and citizens, we believe that when it comes to the safety and health of our workplace and our community, we demand that data about our environment be accurate and informative. So it is with MRV. The State Department has it right. When it comes to ghg, “trust but verify” is the rule to follow.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 07, 2010 (boomark / email).