Obama, Xi Make Deal on Greenhouse Gases - Wall Street Journal

In their "shirt-sleeves" summit in California, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping may have danced around dicey issues like cybersecurity, free trade and military tensions in the Pacific, but they managed to find common ground in one area, at least: fighting climate change. The two countries announced an agreement to phase out the use of a hydrofluorocarbons, a kind of gas that has gained widespread use in recent years for industrial applications, especially as a refrigerant. HFCs are particularly potent greenhouse gases, hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The White House said the agreement with China to phase out HFCs through the existing Montreal Protocol could eventually cut global emissions by the equivalent of 90 billion tons of CO2, or two years' worth of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Cutting HFCs is relatively inexpensive, while steps to curb carbon-dioxide emissions in recent years have repeatedly foundered on their short-term cost to big economies. China recently received international funding to eliminate a similar industrial gas, with projected benefits of cutting eight billion tons of CO2-equivalent for about a nickel a ton. "This is the single biggest piece of mitigation the world can get through 2020," when the next global climate treaty would theoretically go into effect, said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a nonprofit think tank. A U.S. deal with China may push India, Brazil, and Middle Eastern countries in the same direction, he said. Unlike CO2, which can last in the atmosphere for a century, greenhouse gases such as methane and HFCs only stay in the atmosphere for a few weeks or months—but they pack a powerful warming wallop while they do. Another short-lived pollutant is soot, prevalent in many developing countries. In recent years, momentum has been building for policymakers to grab the low-hanging fruit and take steps to curb short-lived pollutants. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry joined a group of other foreign ministers to call for a phase-down of HFCs at last month's Arctic Council meeting. Substitutes for these pollutants already exist, and cleaning up soot also dramatically improves human health in places such as India and Africa where indoor air pollution, especially from cookstoves, is one of the biggest killers. Recent research suggests that tackling short-lived climate pollutants could cut the rate of global warming and sea-level rise in half—and the effects could be even more dramatic in certain regions where soot accumulates locally, contributing to glacier melt and other immediate woes. One U.S. lawmaker recently introduced legislation to jumpstart U.S. efforts to tackle short-lived pollutants. "The idea that you didn't have to take on the whole energy industry to have a big impact is what attracted me," said sponsor Scott Peters (D., Calif.). CO2 still accounts for more than half the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. Advocates of reducing those emissions believe taking relatively easy steps to slow the pace now could buy time for the world to figure out how to manage the heavier lifting later. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEMwxfIS20dD7ibCdnH3lLSQSadEw&url=http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-249302/

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