NEW YORK — Businesses cannot be expected to take the necessary steps to limit climate change if federal policy doesn’t require them to, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Monday.
“You can’t expect businesses to do the things they need to do without the policy,” Paulson, a Republican who served under former President George W. Bush, said at an event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative.
Paulson has been calling for businesses and policymakers to address the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions that most scientists blame for climate change. He called it a “huge” financial risk, noting the costs that rising sea levels, drought, floods and other extreme weather linked to a warming planet will cost governments and taxpayers down the road.
“If there’s not a crisis, then we don’t tend to focus on it,” Paulson said.
The comments come as roughly 120 heads of state, including President Obama, plan to meet Tuesday for a United Nations climate summit in New York.
Nations there will seek to build momentum before formal negotiations next year in Paris. The Paris talks are viewed as a last chance to strike an accord that restrains emissions enough to avert a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has ambitious plans for the summit, which he wants to “lay the framework” for a price on carbon. Other global organizations are pushing for the same. The World Bank announced Monday that 73 national governments support a carbon price, though the U.S. wasn’t one of them.
Observers said they’re looking to the summit as an event to potentially change the dialogue about climate change and economies, though there is concern that slow growth could cloud future negotiations.
Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said Monday that her country was able to grow economically while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which she said demonstrated it was possible to simultaneously address climate change and improve the economy.
“First of all, you need to set the [emission reduction] targets,” she said, adding that nations also need a “framework that is stable, and very long term.”
Those aren’t necessarily things the United States has.
President Obama has pushed through much of his climate agenda by relying on executive action. Republicans and centrist Democrats likely wouldn’t support policies that restrain emissions, saying that doing so unilaterally would handcuff the U.S. economy.
But some Republicans who are no longer part of official Washington, such as Paulson, have started to embrace climate policies from a financial perspective.
Paulson recently joined billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to outline the potential costs of climate inaction with a report called “Risky Business.”
Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Labor Secretary George Schultz and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, all Republicans, have pressed lawmakers to enact market-based methods to reduce emissions.
