ed Setback in emission cuts

Is Seoul abdicating key role in curbing climate change?

At first glance, the government’s commitment Tuesday to cut the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases by 37 percent by 2030 seems quite ambitious. It marked a visible increase from the previous reduction targets, announced less than three weeks ago, which ranged from 14.7 to 31.3 percent. Seoul appears to have yielded to mounting pressure from civic activists and the international community.

A closer look reveals at least two problems. First, the plan calls for curbing the nation’s greenhouse gas emission to 535.9 million CO2-equivalent tons by 2030, down 37 percent from the 850.6 million tons that Korea is expected to emit on BAU terms ― if the nation continues "business as usual” doing nothing to reduce its release. It marks a setback, if slight, from the existing target of 543 million tons set for 2020, triggering controversy in international negotiations for the future.

Second, Seoul plans to meet even the lowered target, not entirely through its own reduction efforts, but by purchasing carbon credits from abroad. Up to 11.3 percent of cuts, or almost one third of the entire reduction goal, will come from buying of emission rights. Worse still, the plan has no details on how to buy them, and with what money.

The administration has apparently been racking its brains, sandwiched between domestic businesses loudly complaining about what they view as undue emission cuts and environmentalists at home and abroad who call for Seoul to take a leadership role in curbing climate change.

Unfortunately, the government has failed to satisfy neither and is under fire from both sides. Corporate Korea is pressing Seoul to pull down reduction targets while activists call for ending the cheating.

The Park administration has only itself to blame. All this confusion is due to its changing principles and consequent lack of a viable plan.

For the international community, which remembers Korea’s pledge for "green growth” under the Lee Myung-bak administration less than five years ago, the incumbent administration’s setback might have been incomprehensible. A change in the administration of a country can lead to a modification of policy. If a country played the host to an international agency, such as Global Climate Fund, to take the leadership role in global environmental issues, however, it should be able to weather through various expected resistance.

Yet bowing to the pressure from industry that threatens to stop making new investment, the Park administration drastically lowered the sector’s reduction target to 12 percent. That means other sectors, including transportation, power generation and household consumers, must shoulder far heavier costs for the nation’s manufacturers, in a glaring violation of equitable burden-sharing principle. Such burdens will be doubly heavy for the public, whose taxes will also be spent buying carbon credits from abroad. It is also unwarranted for officials to take the construction of two more nuclear power plants as granted, to fill the void.

To preempt the global environmental market, the nation should be able to revise its energy mix and even its overall industrial policy, not deterred by short-term growth. Even a failed administration has a good policy or two to inherit. One such rare case for the Lee administration was its environmental initiative.