The Climate Post

First Things First: Conflicting early reports obscured events at a major international summit in L’Aquila, Italy. The Group of Eight has apparently resolved to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, but disagreed on thorny “mid-term targets,” to be reached by 2020 or so. And key players, such as the United States, have no mandatory climate programs yet to enforce this goal. Unimpressed, China, India, and other developing nations declined to offer their own specific targets. Time is running out before the world convenes end-of-the-year climate talks in Copenhagen, but efforts to salvage some kind of international program continues.

It’s also running out on a longer-term clock, according to scientific recommendations for prompt, aggressive pollution reductions. The G-8 nations acknowledged that warming should not proceed beyond a 2 degree C (3.6 degree F) threshold. That’s the thumbnail mark past which many scientists say positive feedbacks can drive the climate toward truly unpredictable change. (Global average temperatures have risen nearly 0.8 degrees C since record-keeping began; the atmosphere is locked in to another 0.6 degree rise.) The New York Times this morning offers the most cutting assessment of the situation, with developing nations throwing out their proposed goals, but agreeing to make undefined, “meaningful” improvements.

If You Are Reading This, You’re on the List: International climate talks follow guidelines set up in the early 1990s. They divide the world into developed and developing nations and set out different roles for each in addressing the problem. Bridging the rich-poor divide is central to global agreement, which is why the U.S. and China are in such frequent talks (to the European Union’s chagrin).

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publishes the sketch of a new paradigm.  Stephen Pacala and colleagues suggest that the worldwide distribution of the top billion or so richest individuals drive national targets. Under this approach, the number of high per-capita emitters in a country would shape its climate goals. The authors–who include Princeton’s Pacala and Robert Socolow of “stabilization wedge” fame–argue that their scheme fairly treats all high-emitting individuals the same, regardless of nationality.

Act II, Scene i: In Washington, the climate debate shifts to the Senate, where the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee and others opened hearings. Four top administration officials called for what Energy Secretary Stephen Chu labeled “a new industrial revolution” in “sustainable, clean energy,” including nuclear power — a central goal of Republicans that rankles many on the left. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) said his state’s reliance on coal causes him to take potential price rises into account, a far from unique position among Midwestern Democrats.

Issues potentially fatal to the bill have already risen, in agriculture, international trade, and coal-fired electricity. (Legislators also vote with their own dollars, like anyone else.) EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the panel the U.S. is falling behind other nations in clean-energy investment, a statement buoyed by this New York Times piece about China’s surge in manufacturing wind turbines. At first fast-tracking legislation, Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) EPW Committee will now take up the bill formally after the Senate’s summer recess.

Oh, behave!: A Wall Street Journal profile of Obama’s new regulatory chief, Cass Sunstein, is a good foray into behavioral economics, a favorite topic of this White House. Sunstein, the bestselling co-author of Nudge and Harvard law professor, is waiting Senate confirmation to be head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Behavioral economics upends common assumptions about human rationality and decision-making, and its implications have moved into government. Obama wrote shortly after taking office, “Far more is now known about regulation — not only when it is justified, but also what works and what does not.” Sunstein’s research has led him to skepticism about dominant approaches to confront global warming, an approach balanced elsewhere in the administration.

A 2007 energy efficiency law set new targets for lighting, thought to be a death knell for conventional incandescent bulbs. The power of rules to shape economic behavior was on display in this NYT piece about how the new law accelerated competition to build a better lightbulb. Compact fluorescents, heralded as less expensive and longer-lasting, don’t always work well with dimmers and in some cases contain poisonous amounts of mercury. Light emitting diodes are expensive but becoming competitive because of their long lifetimes. Inventors are shrinking Thomas Edison’s conventional bulb. Still harder might be to convince light bulb manufacturers pre-install energy-efficient bulbs lamps and fixtures to guide consumer choice.

Newspaper Uses “S”-Word: Governments and firms around the nation are addressing complicated energy matters, evident in this (South Carolina) State editorial, aptly headlined, “Everyone must sacrifice on coal plant plan.” A coal-fired generator planned for the Pee Dee River basin is desirable because of the state’s demand for power and “[w]ith power relatively cheap in South Carolina, there’s too little incentive to cut back.” The paper argues that “In the long term, whether this plant is ever built or not, we as a state must develop a multi-pronged approach to energy that includes conservation as well as traditional and new energy sources.”

Tough decisions abound. In Kentucky, two utilities have lowered initial estimates of rate increases. In Montana, officials may succumb to selling off rights to mine rich, untapped coal seams, the Associated Press reports. In Spain, local politics and economics knock heads over an aging nuclear plant.

If Ewe Are Reading This: Evolution and global warming meet in the hills of Scotland. A report in Science this week documents how successive generations of Soay sheep are diminishing in size. With less severe winters, the reproductive advantage accorded larger, “better-insulated” sheep has melted with each early spring. Climate change is thought to be a factor in this population shift. The sheep are not alone. The Times of London describes the intersection of climate change and evolution: “In virtually every population that has been studied in detail, evolutionary changes have been observed.”

Columnist in a Downard Trend: The WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel turns in another breathless climate change column. Climate Post cares not to weigh in about how or if any administration should treat a report in the vein of that submitted by EPA environmental economist Alan Carlin, her column’s subject. But certainly, given the level of (im)precision at which she’s writing, Strassel is factually incorrect to leave uncorrected statements such as, “The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend.”

Her error is rooted in the tricky subject of climate variability. Climate is very much a net phenomenon, an sum of various “forcings” that each nudge the atmosphere warmer or cooler. It’s a little bit like this: Imagine you are boiling water to make pasta, but need to add another two cups. When you add the cooler tap water, the temperature in the pot drops a bit. But t you would never conclude that the temperature drop indicates the burner isn’t working. Saying that the Earth is cooling is akin to saying that the stovetop water has stopped heating when the extra water is added. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a memo (pdf) clarifying this mistake. With El Nino gaining steam in the Pacific, temperatures for the next two years or so are expected to be warmer than they otherwise would be with “only” global warming.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist.

First things first: U.S. representatives may head into Independence Day recess with their climate work done for the moment. House leadership fast-tracked the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) after a breakthrough agreement Monday night between its co-sponsors and a powerful hold-out representing farmers and rural districts. A vote on the house floor could come as early as tomorrow.* The momentum shift drew President Barack Obama back into the fray, where he was soon peppered with questions over how much his energy policy is expected to reduce U.S. oil imports in the long haul.

Predicted economic costs of climate policy drive debate on the Hill. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the ACES Act could cost households $175 a year on average by 2020. The Environmental Protection Agency updated its assessment of an earlier version of the bill, finding that it could cost households between $80 and $111 a year on average; lower-income families could save money. The Washington Post addresses confusion about competing cost estimates for the bill. Fireworks previously ensued between Rep. John Boener (R-Ohio) and MIT professor John Reilly, whose study became the source for the former’s contention that the bill would cost Americans $3,128 a year in 2015. Overshadowing the whole cost-benefit debate is anyone’s inability to systematically value the benefits of action. This sentence from the Post strikes near the heart of the whole cost controversy: “The CBO, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, said it did not take into account any indirect benefits of slowing climate change, which are substantial but difficult to quantify.”


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was apparently listening to the concerns of House agricultural interests whose leadership withheld support for ACES bill for several weeks. Hoping to prevent such an impasse, Reid has begun to invite farm state senators into early debate in that chamber. The Senate may pick up the ACES Act as its starting point for deliberation. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will start working on climate change in her Environmental and Public Works Committee July 27. Reid says he would like committee work done by mid-September.

U.S. climate negotiators in Mexico nixed calls from developing nations that the U.S. reduce its emissions much more dramatically than Congress or the administration has publicly considered. Major economies moved toward an “aspirational goal” of halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with talks to continue in Italy next month.

Choose your words carefully: Switching the word “finally” to “initially” in the House climate bill potentially relieved 100 coal-burning power plants from greenhouse gas emissions regulations, Politico reports. Originally, only plants that are now “finally” permitted–or have survived any legal challenges–were exempt. Now, “initially” permitted plants, which have only begun the regulatory journey and are much more numerous, would be grandfathered in, too.

How can mere mortals catch such changes? (High-pitched) blog posts at the Sunlight Foundation drum against an age-old problem: no one, with the possible exception of this guy, has time to read and thoughtfully consider 1,000-page bills in the brief hours or days between release and vote. As a quick guide, the Energy and Commerce Committee did issue a broad map of changes here [pdf].

And now, the star of our show: Sunlight abounds in climate world this week, just as the Northern Hemisphere spins its way into summer.

Developments in “clean energy,” particularly solar technologies, occur at every scale, from U.S. neighborhoods to cities to states. This month saw an intercontinental project. A consortium of German firms and European official groups and nongovernmental organizations will invest $555 billion to build sunlight concentrators in northern African desert. (An earlier report had the power wired to Europe.)

Much of India sees the sun nearly 300 days a year. Yet its nascent solar industry exports two-thirds of its products to Europe, China, and North America. To date producers have paid less attention to the domestic market. That’s changing. Rising demand, falling costs, and government support have primed the market for growth. Industry leader Tata BP Solar is expanding into rural communities, in partnerships with banks and telecoms, with early success. In the province of Uttar Pradesh, one bank replaced its diesel-powered back-up generators with photovoltaics, which led to the financing of home lighting for 8,000 homes.

For most of the world, “going green” is less a motivator to adopt new energy technologies than “going electric” is. The Christian Science Monitor parachutes into Bangladesh to document the work of Grameen Shakti, the environmental wing of Grameen Bank, the microloan pioneer and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The group distributes photovoltaic-and-battery systems for a 15 to 20 percent down payment. The balance is paid off in two or three years. Some shopkeepers see their monthly energy bills–the price of candles are cited as an example–cut in half. More than 200,000 solar panels now pump electrons into the service of customers around the country.

Private investors could inject $10 billion into China’s solar sector, thanks in part to government cash incentives cut the cost of installation in half. The moves are expected to boost domestic demand for solar in China, and poise the Eastern giant to compete with German manufacturers.

Back in Washington, green business writer Marc Gunther attends a solar-industry press breakfast, where Dow Corning and other manufacturers read out the wish list they are giving to Congress. It includes a permanent tax credit for manufacturers; a mandate for utilities to build a legislated percentage of renewable electricity sources into their mix (hence the name, “renewable electricity standard”); and mandates to buy renewable-generated power at a premium (“feed-in tariffs”).

Next time, 196 one-pagers…: Media offered little follow-up to last week’s 196-page White House report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The Grand Island Independent registers this story about what the report predicts for the future of Nebraska’s water supply — now the most irrigated in the U.S., and in some places, over-irrigated. The pace of water use from the High Plains aquifer already outstrips natural replenishment. The federal report’s prediction of continued rising thermometers, faster evaporation, and more drought, will add pressure to reverse the state’s irrigation drive.

For those dedicated souls who have already marked-up their White House science report, the International Alliance of Research Universities and U.K. government provide additional leisure reading.

Coal my lawyer!: The New Yorker files a largely sympathetic profile of James Hansen (sub. req.), the monumental climate scientist who has led NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for nearly three decades. Hansen has led the pack of scientists studying global warming for three decades. In the past two years he has taken aggressive policy positions–atypical for a scientist–that have made him a controversial public figure in some circles. (This week he, actress Darryl Hannah, and former FDR and Truman aide Ken Hechler were arrested in a civil disobedience protest against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia.) Elizabeth Kolbert drops this admonishment into the profile:

There are lots of ways to lose an audience with a discussion of global warming, and new ones, it seems, are being discovered all the time.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat

* Any readers whose exclusive source of news is Climate Post should make sure to tune in next week for the outcome. If you can’t abide suspense, please visit any of the fine content purveyors in the right-hand column of the home page.

For those mercifully far enough away not to know, the “Capital beltway”  is a looping highway, Interstate 495, the way many metro Washington residents ride to work. “Inside the beltway” isn’t coincident with Washington, DC. It also connotes a mythical place unrestrained by geography, a state of mind where consequential details of legislation attract and hold attention, sometimes for years on end. Whether you work inside or outside the beltway determines whether you think there was climate news this week in the capital, and by extension, Bonn.

Insider baseball: Reps. Henry Waxman  (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the committee chairmen who authored the climate bill now moving through the House, spent the week explaining the 900-plus-page draft to colleagues. At this writing, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) just began an agriculture committee hearing into how the bill might affect rural communities. Peterson and more than two dozen Democratic members of Congress threaten to hold their support from the bill unless Waxman and Markey address their concerns about equitable treatment of farmers. Republicans introduced an energy bill in the House Wednesday that emphasizes nuclear power and would set as a target the construction of 100 new reactors over the next two decades, 100 more than the U.S. has built in three decades.

Talks in Beijing between the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters, China and the U.S., overshadowed international negotiators in Bonn, who are wrapping up two weeks of United Nations-guided talks, according to the Economist.

Climate chatterers have ample material with which to choose how to think about developments in China. That’s not because the ideology behind different publications support different facts — although that does happen with greater frequency in the U.S. media. It’s because there are so many facts coming out of China, it’s hard to keep track of all the  trends. Here are two.  The Guardian buttonholes a national development officer who boasts that by 2020 China will produce 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources — on par with Europe. That’s not mutually exclusive with the continued rise in Chinese coal use — 1.8 percent higher in 2008 than in 2007, according to Bloomberg. A lively debate continues in scientific and policy circles about whether the rise of coal use in China is significantly reversing a three-decade long global decline in the carbon-intensity of industrial fuels.

“Outsider” baseball: Without a simple beltway story unifying the news, media coverage becomes a patchwork of simultaneous episodes in the climate saga. Disinterested observers might wish for a national or international climate regime, not because they care about a particular approach, but because it might help impose one central storyline on the whole climate space, its politics, policy, business, and science (Sort of the way that some argue for a national climate policy to  unify efforts in California, the Northeast, and the West).

Instead, this week stories play out in the Midwest and U.K., in Texas and China, as many people around the world confront the climate challenge locally. Two stories from Hawaii beg the question, why does this matter to anyone else? By any traditional standard, they don’t. Some 50,000 people on Oahu have been given rebates for solar water heating systems that are expected to cut fossil-fuel bills significantly. On Maui, a German-born entrepreneur is pushing the state’s utility regulator to adopt what’s called inside the beltway a “feed-in tariff,” a law that would offer homes powered by renewable electricity a fixed price per kilowatt, over a 20-year contract and guarantee a connection to the grid so homes and businesses can send electricity into the network. This nano-scale Hawaiian news suggests that forces other than politics are shaping energy transformation on the margins. A beltway insider recently suggested to Climate Post that climate legislation is having its make-or-break moment in Congress, and if it fails will vanish after that — poof! This week’s global headlines suggest that the potential for new-energy entrepreneurship — and, on the downside, risk of catastrophic climate change — will ploddingly change behavior.

Tilting at exploration platforms: Fights over wind power are a common trend this week in the Midwest. Chicago private and civic leaders fear that a national carbon regime is likely to raise electricity prices in the region, but is also likely to ignite the rust belt’s economic renewal. Midwest governors received a report commissioned in 2007 charting a cap-and-trade program to help six states reduce their emissions. Wisconsin is emblematic of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back success of wind power in the state, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Confusion about what to do isn’t limited to the Midwest, where this week’s reports document conflicts within neighborhoods and between interest groups. Greenwire catches a Monmouth University poll suggesting that individuals are conflicted within about energy issues: The number of Mid-Atlantic residents who support offshore drilling rose from 33 percent to 46 percent in two years. More than 80 percent support offshore wind farms if they can’t be seen from land — and 67 percent do if they are visible.

Whither wind? Scientists cited in an AP story suggest that average wind speeds across the U.S. might be slowing. Roger Pielke Jr. takes a bite out of the finding at over at Prometheus, and Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann parse the question at Real Climate.

The eclectic physicist Freeman Dyson has garnered increased attention in the last couple of years for his skeptical thinking about global warming, in a New York Review of Books essay, a New York Times Magazine cover story, and this week an interview with Yale e360. In the latter piece, Dyson provides abundant caveats for his views, namely that he doesn’t know “technical facts.”  Dyson’s general attacks on computer modeling studies of climate change exclude the “preponderance of  evidence,” physical evidence, that suggest big changes are afoot.

Prefer glazed donuts, please: When a proposed law as consequential as the climate bill (few are more consequential) passes through a major committee en route to the House floor, prominent commentators forge new opinions in real time. When mainstream thinkers take on previously cloistered policy, it’s a good time for both communities to take notes. Take newly minted Pulitzer columnist Eugene Robinson‘s Washington Post column about so-called clean coal technology. He introduces the topic with this sentence:

The plan is to meet ambitious targets for limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse” gases through development and widespread use of an unproven technology known as — prepare for your eyes to glaze over — carbon capture and storage. [Emphasis added.]

Hawaiian solar water heaters, Ohio street dirt and “pulp liquor,” carbon capture and storage, and Mississipi Delta bamboo industry expansion (it exists) might not qualify as an eye-popping thrill ride, but it appears to be the ride we’re on.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Insitute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat

The U.S. Congress fast-tracks climate legislation, international negotiators hash through the first “negotiating text” for year-end global talks in Germany, and big businesses start counting their carbon. The pile of climate stories this week climbed faster than predicted New England sea levels.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act – aka Waxman-Markey, aka ACES, aka H.R. 2454 – may reach the House floor by the July 4th recess, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new legislative push proceeds as she intends. She has charged the eight committees evaluating the legislation to complete their work by June 19, which may be a particular challenge for Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D – N.Y.) and Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who have the most work to do on it. Chairman Peterson has said the bill deserves a close look to make sure the farm community is treated equitably.

Events on the Hill will shape the world’s reactions to White House policy at the COP15 climate change conference in December. In preparation, negotiators this week and next descend on Bonn, Germany, where nations have their first opportunity to react to the United Nations’ negotiating text, released last month. Diplomacy efforts continue to step up, in Bonn and elsewhere, with U.S. Special envoy on climate change Todd Stern visiting Beijing next week.

“How green is Obama, really?” asks Silicon India, in the headline to this short Indo-Asian News Service piece. It’s a sign of the times that international wire services are covering the U.S. Congress. But their readers will miss the magnitude of Congress’ task by offering as straight reporting judgments such as this: “[A] reluctant U.S. Congress is resisting even moderate cap-and-trade goals.” From inside-the-beltway, objectively speaking, things are moving quite rapidly for such a complex endeavor, however its goals are characterized.

With the climate bill out of its key committee, several newspapers stepped back recently and offered short explainers on a “cap-and-trade” climate system (the Wall Street Journal, McClatchy newspapers, the Financial Times). The Washington Post offered a fine effort that contains an interesting example of how space limitations in the news-article format can further muddle an already complex subject. Take this passage, about the potential per capita costs of the climate bill:

The EPA thinks it will fall between $98 and $140 per year, causing barely a stutter in the U.S. economy as a whole.

The Union of Concerned Scientists thinks the system will actually make money for families, since more efficient technologies will save on energy costs. But the conservative Heritage Foundation thinks it will cost big: $4,300 per family in a few decades.

This quick triptych suggests that three organizations looked at the same legislation in the same way and deduced a range of outcomes when in fact they were responding to varied legislative scenarios. The risk in presenting the material this way is that they have actually conducted different studies, with different initial assumptions, and that juxtaposing them so quickly adds distortion to simplicity. A broad Economist narrative of the U.S. climate debate cites only a Congressional Budget Office estimate, and glibly concludes, “If politicians pretend they can save the planet at no cost, they risk a backlash when people realize they were fibbing.”

Reduced carbonation?: Finding your carbon and reducing it is becoming the next big quest for big business. The Economist article, “A Green Revolution,” appears in a large section about rebuilding American business, a topic that won’t go away any time soon. The U.N. observes that in 2008, for the first time ever, clean tech drew more investment than fossil fuel power generation globally. Nearly six percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from 417 large companies – a percentage that many firms are trying to reduce their contributions to, BusinessWeek reports in a special package about carbon accounting. Coca-Cola officials assumed the company’s biggest contributions came from its truck fleet. But that’s before they discovered greenhouse-gas-rich refrigerants and electricity-hungry vending machines are responsible for five times more than its transport: 15 million metric tons of CO2 a year. “If we had never put pencil to paper and done the calculations, we might not have understood it ourselves – or believed it,” one official said.

The New York Times, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times also mark the launch of Hara, a new software start-up that helps companies, including Coca-Cola, track and reduce their emissions. Backed by the leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins (Al Gore sits on its board), Hara is the newest of several young companies offering large firms a step-up from the spreadsheets that have marked many carbon-reduction efforts to date.

Did everyone get the memo? A recent Gartner survey of 575 companies found that 13.6 percent of the firms didn’t know whether they had carbon management systems in place.

Drops to drink?: Two days before President Barack Obama deliver his major address about Middle East peace in Egypt, a Canadian non-profit issued a report highlighting concerns that climate change could exacerbate security threats in the embattled region. Already, AFP reports, drought forced 160 Syrian villages to relocate to cities in 2007-8. “Climate change could hold serious implications for regional security,” the report’s authors write.

The world’s rivers may already bear the marks of climate change, according to a new study in Environmental Science and Technology. Scientists assembled streamflow data, taken as far downstream as possible, from 925 rivers on all continents except Antarctica. The authors compared the data to a climate model and concluded that direct human effects on rivers (ie, drawing water from them) is small when compared with climate change from 1948-2004. Water levels dropped anywhere from 3 to 14 percent in some major rivers flowing into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Mississippi and some other rivers saw increased flow, as the result of changing rain and snow patterns. Empirical studies such as this can add gravity to even unrelated calls of concern. Namibian Minister of Environment and Tourism Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told a group in New York last month that warming means increased drought, desertification, and land degradation in her country.

Many unanswered questions… except that one: The Calgary Herald offers the most outdated story of the week, a run through the ideas of a visiting Israeli chemist. The story itself is of less concern (time being what it is) than the lede, which reads:

As the world continues to grapple with the issue of climate change, one question remains unanswered: Is global warming the result of human behaviour or is it part of a heating and cooling cycle that has gone on for millennia?

And it’s the absence of an answer to this question that is going to continue to bedevil industry and government alike for the foreseeable future.

In fact, global warming is largely the result of human behavior. IPCC scientists have said that there are nine chances out of 10 that greenhouse gases have caused global warming observed in the past 50 years. And they elaborated on these causes in a full chapter (pdf here) of its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. But what these studies translate to for practical purposes is, yes, fossil-fuel powered industry and deforestation are the significant causes of global warming. “Industry and government alike” are “bedeviled by questions for the foreseeable future,” but these bedeviling questions instead concern, for example, the rate of ice melt in Greenland, how to transform the energy system, predicted drought in the American Southwest, and as the article does indicate, if carbon capture and storage will work on a global scale. It’s just one sign of the complexity of climate change that the simplest question – What’s going on?! – still eludes many well-meaning people who are simply trying to explain it.

–Eric Roston