ESSAY
IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE: REDUCING U.S.
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS BY FORTY PERCENT
David Hodas
*
Economic worry and fear of change are two fundamental motivations
behind opposition to U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol and to the
adoption of mandatory limitations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The prospect of the United States reducing its GHG emissions to seven
percent below its 1990 emission levels is viewed by some as too
expensive,1 with some economists predicting that costs of Kyoto
compliance will top three hundred billion dollars.2 Many Americans do
not believe that GHG reductions can be achieved without significant
hardship and reduced economic competitiveness with developing
nations. Moreover, it is difficult for individuals to perceive how their
actions will have anything but a miniscule impact on the climate change
problem,3 even though the cumulative effect of individual efforts to
reduce GHG emissions would be significant and long-lasting. Each unit
of carbon dioxide (CO2) not emitted is one unit that will not persist in
the atmosphere for 100 years, and each reduction, no matter how small,
reduces overall GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.4 As individuals
* David Hodas is a Professor of Law at Widener University School of Law, Wilmington,
Delaware. This Essay grows out of and is an expansion of the ideas recently published in
Imagining the Unimaginable: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions, NAT. RESOURCES & ENV’T
and State Initiatives in GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND U.S. LAW (forthcoming 2008).
1 The definition of what is “too expensive” for the nation is highly subjective. Nothing is too
expensive if we want to pay for it, but everything is too expensive if we do not want it. See Ruth
Greenspan Bell, Keynote Address at the Virginia Environmental Law Journal Symposium:
Global Climate Change: Individual, Private and State Responses (Mar. 23, 2007).
2 William Nordhaus & Joseph Boyer, Requiem for Kyoto: An Assessment of the Economics of