Obama Undercuts Leverage on Climate Enforcement - by Jeffrey Laurenti.

Byline: The Century Foundation

NEW YORK, June 29 (AScribe Newswire) -- Following is an op ed by Jeffrey Laurenti. Laurenti is a senior fellow and director of foreign policy programs at The Century Foundation, a public policy research institution.

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In attacking congressional Democrats' provision for tariff penalties against goods from countries that do not curtail their emissions of greenhouse gases, President Obama may be holding progress against global warming hostage to the shibboleths of Washington's free-trade lobby. No agreement to reverse global warming will be effective without enforcement against those countries that refuse to implement emissions limits.

Even as he congratulated the House of Representatives for approving America's first landmark step against climate change, Obama denounced the enforcement provision as "protectionist." He should instead be praising House Democrats for setting out a marker -- crude and imperfect, to be sure -- that puts the world on notice that the treaty that emerges in Copenhagen this December from U.N. climate change negotiations must have strong provisions against free riders. Congressional Democrats have given him leverage to win a strong international agreement.

The president seemed oddly oblivious to the political reality that trade enforcement against reckless emitters of greenhouse gases was essential to winning the barest of House majorities for the legislation, which passed 219 to 212. Lawmakers from America's industrial heartland, who have seen countless factory jobs disappear to low-wage, no-environment competitors, will simply not support climate change controls that rogue competitors can blithely undercut.

It is certainly true that the climate change enforcement provision adopted by the House will need to be modified -- not because it impinges on trade, but because it is unilateral. Such a multilateral enforcement mechanism needs to be embedded in the global warming treaty in Copenhagen, and the Congress should then conform the U.S. provision to the internationally agreed mechanism for determining which countries are derelict in their emissions-control obligations and subject to punitive measures.