Mr Leo W Gerard international president of United Steelworkers has appeared before the US House Trade Subcommittee saying that "The potentially catastrophic issues posed by climate change is the challenge of our generation, and meeting that challenge will require the mobilization of everyone in the world behind a common purpose."
He told the hearing that "America can and must lead this effort, not only by taking a bold stand to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but by harnessing this nation's greatest resource, the ingenuity and creativity of the American people. We must make a national commitment to rebuild America clean and green with products built here, to develop new forms of clean, renewable energy and provide incentives to further their deployment."
He added that "In creating a program to achieve these emissions reductions, we must make the development of manufacturing a centerpiece of that program. The products made by our members and millions of other hard working Americans are quite literally the building blocks of all these new technologies."
Mr Gerard said that the most difficult issue for workers and industry is the phenomenon by which emissions reductions in one country lead to increased emissions in another. Known as carbon leakage, he explained that the reason this happens is if one country puts a price on carbon emissions, that additional cost provides an incentive to the company to move its production and therefore its emissions to a country where additional cost does not exist.
He said that "All policy proposals to address climate change, including cap and trade, arise from the idea that if a price is put on carbon, it will provide an incentive to emit less carbon. This theory is sound, as long as the cost cannot simply be evaded by companies moving production overseas or by downstream producers and consumers avoiding the cost by purchasing imported materials from nations that do not share the US's commitment to climate change abatement."
He identified for the committee that the threat of leakage is particularly acute among manufacturers of energy intensive primary products like the ones made by members of USW. He added that "In commodity based industries like steel, glass, chemicals, rubber and paper, even small differences in production costs can devastate an industry if they are not managed effectively. Any climate change policy that does not seek to prevent the unnecessary off shoring of production from state of the art American industries to less efficient, more carbon intensive industries overseas will both cost American jobs and, perversely, will actually make the problem of global climate change worse."
He joined a panel of witnesses from environmental and business organizations to focus on what the Subcommittee chair Mr Sander M Levin said would be a discussion on the trade aspects of climate change legislation including how to minimize carbon leakage between nations and maintaining US competitiveness of workers and industry.
(Sourced from www.usw.org)
