The U.S. is On Course to Miss Its Emissions Goals, and One Reason is Methane

Chinese President Xi Jinping (center), President Obama (right) and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon shake hands during a joint ratification of the Paris climate change agreement ceremony ahead of the G20 Summit at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China on Sept. 3. (EPA/How Hwee Young)

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature Climate Change - Assessment of the climate commitments and additional mitigation policies of the United States

washingtonpost.com - by Chris Mooney - September 26, 2016

In recent months, the key story of international climate policy has been about how quickly countries will join the Paris agreement and cross the legal threshold to bring it into force. And as of now, that seems very close to happening.

As soon as it does, though, the question will shift. People will start asking not about which countries will join the deal and how quickly, but about whether any of these countries are on track to do what they’ve already said they would under the agreement — namely, hit their voluntarily pledged targets to cut their emissions.

And in many cases, that may be a lot harder than simply getting the agreement ratified or otherwise approved at home.

Take the United States. It pledged, as part of the Paris process, to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025. And it outlined a bevy of policies, most prominently the contested Clean Power Plan, in order to get there.

Since then, there have been questions about how achievable this U.S. goal is — and now, a new study in Nature Climate Change appears to raise concerns to a new pitch. The paper, by Jeffery Greenblatt and Max Wei of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, does the math on current and proposed future U.S. climate policies and basically finds that it will be difficult (although certainly not impossible) for the country to hit its embraced target, without doing even more than is being contemplated right now.

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