The White House Climate Policy Going Backwards Again
Musings
I recently saw some information about the Biden administration's reaction to the European Union's proposed new rules on supply chains for products derived from forested areas.The EU has been working on a new set of rules for over five years to identify the supply chains that originate from forest locations to provide products to various companies that produce the end products that are sold in the EU. In effect they are requiring companies to trace their supply chains to ensure that their products did not derive from sites created by deforesting the environment and then shipping products to become endproducts in the European Union. The purpose is to reduce deforestation in places such as South America, Central America, East Asia, tropical Africa and other places with large areas of forest that are often cut or burned down to either provide wood products or to do farming or grazing of animals. The net effect of this reduces the forest canopies and has a negative effect on the climate. The EU's set of rules is an attempt to try and reduce climate warming by making the companies that provide the endproduct to consumers police their own supply chain to eliminate products created from deforested land and, if the products are found to violate the supply chain rules, there are significance penalties for the companies offering that product for sale.
In typical fashion there has been a strong lobbying reaction to oppose this effort or at least delay its implementation. Some of the various companies that will be affected are lobbying their respective governments and then the governments are lobbying the EU to try and delay the implementation of this set of rules.The Biden administration is one of the governments that has joined the lobbying effort to delay the implementation.
Contemplations
Whenever new statutes, rules, and regulations are imposed some number of companies that will be affected always protest that they will be detrimentally affected, it will hurt the economy and their employees and their communities. These same types of complaints were made when mileage requirements were established for car manufacturers. There was a howl of howawful the result would be. This seems to be the usual type of lobbying and complaints made by companies that mass produce products for consumer consumption. The problem is that these companies usually have strong lobbying efforts and good ties into their governments and they are often able to have exceptions made so that they don't have to meet the regulations.The result is that the effort intended , in this instance to reduce climate change, is sidetracked and often has trouble getting back into play.
The EU rules are meant to reduce the destruction of tropical forests and temperate woodlands which are then converted into 7 basic commodities: cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soybeans and wood which are then cultivated on the newly cleared land. The United States paper companies suggested that this would cause a shortage of diapers and sanitary pads in Europe! I presume their opposition was more profound but in essence it is clear some companiesbegan a strong lobbying effort to oppose the rules and the Biden administration joined in. The confusing and disappointing fact is that the Biden administration did join in the lobbying effort to delay the rules. Supposedly the Biden administration is strongon environmental issues and wants to implement rules to delay or stop climate change. This would seem to be right up its alley. However, it is an election year and the Biden administration has once again shown that it knows how to support a policy fromone side of its mouth but take a contrary position from the other side of its mouth, always with some nice statement about how it's important for some reason or other and it's only a delay for a period of time. That is the position of all of the companies and countries that oppose the EU's new rules. It is a egregious position.
The EU began taking comments on these proposals in 2020. The new law was approved in 2023 after review efforts by the EU's governing body. All of the protesting companies had clear notice that this issue was coming up and the actions of the supply chains of these companies were on the table. Yet they delayed taking action because that would have cut into their profits. Instead they simply continued operating as before or with only few changes and trusted their lobbying efforts to delay the implementation of the rules to be imposed at the end of this year after much advance notice. Yet, the Biden administration still jumps in to encourage the EU to delay. That is incomprehensible. It would be nice if our politicians actions would follow their statements of support for a policy but obviously this is a disease which seems to affect all political entities.
There are a number of large companies that determined tofollow the new regulation and created the information to track their supply chains and a number of countries that have set up a system to track the production of the produce from their forested regions to ensure that the deforestation does not occur. For example, Ghana has managed to set up a system to track itsforest to ensure that it is not deforested for the production of cocoa. If Ghana can set up a system to handle this issue and various companies have managed to set up systems that track their supply chain, the United states should not be lobbying the EU that this is too arduous for some United States companies. Once again it seems that our political response ignores our stated policies.
Thoughts
To me this is a no brainer. The Biden administration and the United States policy is supposed to be busy trying to support efforts to reduce climate change. The EU's efforts to do this in forested areas and reduce deforestation has been underway for a number of years. There's absolutely no reason to be lobbying the EU to reduce its very positive set of new rules on supply chains from forest products.
Silence Dogood
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