Solar panels glisten from every thatched hut on this crowded island, one of the largest in this remote chain off the Panamanian coast. But the tiny emblems of green energy offer no hope against climate change.

They have helped the island's Guna people reduce what was already a minuscule carbon footprint. The Guna cook with clean-burning gas. They use a small amount of diesel fuel to power fishing boats and a generator that lights bare bulbs dangling above dirt floors after sunset. They own one of the most pristine stretches of tropical rainforest in Panama, cleansing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide naturally.

But larger forces threaten to uproot them, stemming from the failure by the rest of the world to rein in carbon emissions.

Pollution linked to global warming keep rising even though the world's two largest carbon polluters have pledged to combat climate change, with the U.S. committing to deeper cuts and China saying its emissions will stop growing by 2030.

It's a dangerous trajectory the U.S. is stoking with record exports of dirty fuels, even as it reduces the pollution responsible for global warming at home.

The carbon embedded in those exports helps the U.S. meet its political goals by taking it off its pollution balance sheet. But it doesn't necessarily help the planet.

That's because the U.S. is sending more dirty fuel than ever to other parts of the world, where efforts to address the resulting pollution are just getting underway, if advancing at all. While the exported fuel has gotten cleaner, in the case of diesel, about 20 percent of the exports are too dirty to burn here.

For the Guna, as carbon rises, so will the seas that imperil them. Several communities have plans to relocate to the mainland, fleeing severe floods and storms that have drowned some islands and divided others in half.

"We conserve. Others consume," said Guillermo Archibold, an agronomist and former delegate to the Guna tribal congress.

Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has reduced more carbon pollution from energy than any other nation, about 475 million tons between 2008 and 2013, according to U.S. Energy Department data.

Less than one-fifth of that amount came from burning less gasoline and diesel, primarily in vehicles. But an Associated Press analysis of the data shows that U.S. exports of gasoline and diesel more than made up for the savings at home in pollution abroad, releasing roughly more than 1 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere elsewhere during the same period.

"It's a false image," said Onel Masardule of the Indigenous People's Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative, a Peru-based environmental group that recently studied the Guna and climate change. "In reality, the U.S. is still contaminating."

Among the recipients is Panama, where imports of diesel and gasoline from the U.S. have nearly quadrupled since 2008.

Panama is the largest recipient of diesel fuel that is dirtier and more carbon-laden than would be allowed in engines in the U.S., but the fuel ends up in cars and trucks that don't have the same efficiency standards and are not regularly inspected and maintained, an AP investigation has found. Panama's requirement that drivers test emissions, including for carbon dioxide, are almost completely ignored.

This fossil fuel trade has soared under Obama as he has overseen a domestic boom in oil and natural gas production and ordered the biggest increases in fuel economy in history.

In 2010, the U.S. still imported more products refined from oil than it exported. A year later, it was a bigger exporter than importer, the first time that happened since 1949. In 2012, these products were the single largest U.S. export, worth $117 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures.

The boom has helped the U.S. reduce oil imports and create jobs in oil fields and ports. Without it, the Obama administration would be much further from a goal to double U.S. exports. The trade deficit would be wider.

But for global warming, it means that, at the very least, the U.S. is making a smaller dent than it claims on global warming.

In the case of gasoline and diesel, the U.S. is exporting far more abroad than it has reduced in domestic consumption in recent years through steps such as efficiency standards and blending gasoline with ethanol.

"This is their hidden success story that they would like to keep hidden," said Kevin Book, a Washington, D.C.-based energy analyst. Since 2012, he has been a member of the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group selected by the U.S. energy secretary.

"It has done a lot to improve our balance of trade standing, but it is not the most climate friendly way to do it. There is no way to avoid that there is a bigger emissions impact when you have more to combust," Book said.

There is no clear accounting of what America's growth as a fossil-fuel powerhouse is doing to the global warming picture. The administration has chosen not to get to the bottom of that.

U.S. projects that increase energy exports could be considered in such an analysis, such as huge terminals planned for the West Coast to send more coal abroad for power plants. Trade agreements could factor in the implications of energy trade on global warming. But not one trade pact negotiated by the Obama White House mentions global warming.

"They have the responsibility of analyzing America's exports on fossil fuel demand and consumption and climate," said Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International, an advocacy group dedicated to moving away from fossil fuels. "There has to be a holistic analysis of what those exports are and what role they are going to play in keeping the world within the climate limits."

The White House said it is working to strengthen environmental provisions in trade agreements and lower tariffs on technologies that ultimately will reduce emissions abroad.

The chief U.S. climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said in a recent speech that the "core imperative has to be to break the link between growth and fossil fuels."

That link prevails in part because the U.S. supplies a growing demand for fuel. But the administration contends that America's energy exports have not increased global demand or global emissions. The U.S. is the largest oil consumer in the world and imports twice as much crude oil as it exports in oil-derived products.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved