Tag: climate

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Pre-Election Maneuvering Marked by Fits of Climate Skepticism

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

“Recent comments from top White House and congressional contenders suggest an awkward mix of outright hostility or, at best, ambivalence toward the widespread scientific consensus that humans are responsible for the warming planet,” reports Politico.

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) blames his loss in the GOP primary to his public assertions that climate change is real. Only two Republican gubernatorial candidates running for election this November believe in action on climate change; both are running in states where their Democratic opponents feel the same.

In one race for the House in Virginia, a Democratic incumbent may lose his seat in part because of his vote for the House cap-and-trade bill.

Colorado’s tight race for U.S. Senate is turning into a referendum on the power of views on climate change to sway voters, at least in that state: Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) is attacking his opponent, Tea Party favorite and Republican Ken Buck, for saying climate change is a “hoax.” It’s a stance that earned a sharp rebuke from Colorado’s climate scientists (the state hosts one of the country’s premier centers for the study of climate change, the National Center for Atmospheric Research).

Despite support from some of his potential constituents — “Climate change doubt is Tea Party article of faith,” says the New York Times — Buck appears to be responding to the criticism by shifting his focus to the economy.

Green groups say they are pouring more money into this electoral season’s races than ever, especially in the fight to rescue incumbent Virginia Democratic freshman Tom Perriello, but their spending can’t match funds coming from fossil-fuel-related industries. Mother Jones says Alaska write-in candidate (and incumbent) Lisa Murkowski, in a dead heat with Tea Party favorite and Republican nominee Joe Miller, is a beneficiary of those funds.

On Tuesday, Jimmy Carter opined the Tea Party is backed by anti-green “hard-right oligarchs who want to prevent the oil companies and major corporations from having to pay their share of taxes or to comply with environmental laws.”

Which Will Characterize the Next Two Years on the Hill: Compromise or Gridlock?

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) told students at Utah State University to expect “two years of good old-fashioned gridlock” if the GOP wins the House in November, including, possibly, a shutdown of the federal government. Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) declared there will be “no compromise” with President Barack Obama on major issues.

It’s possible energy will be spared the fate of, say, the health care bill, says Darren Samuelsohn of Politico, suggesting incentives for nuclear, clean coal and even renewables might be prime candidates for bipartisan legislation. Lindsey Graham, who once participated in the creation of the senate cap-and-trade bill, says the GOP should work with Obama on energy, perhaps in the incremental approach currently favored by the Obama administration.

The oil and gas industry is already depositing checks into the coffers of candidates likely to head influential House committees after November; the industry remains focused on emissions rules and what it contends are unrealistic expectations about the ascension of renewables.

A “technology-first” approach to tackling carbon emissions is gaining favor among think tanks.

Are We Getting Cap, but No Trade?

Stephen Spruiell at National Review argues emissions regulations issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will make emissions for certain industries expensive without letting them trade for those emissions, as they would have under cap-and-trade. He also argues it may be nearly impossible to prevent the EPA from regulating emissions in this way.

Outlets on the left agree with Spruiell and argue, more or less, “see, we told you this would happen.”

The regulations at issue include the EPA’s first-ever fuel efficiency standards for trucks and buses, which the trucking industry supports. Canada is issuing its own rules in harmony with U.S. regulations.

Emissions Regulations Will Knock Out up to 7 Percent of U.S. Generating Capacity, says Study

A huge debate has erupted over a North American Electric Reliability report arguing in a worst-case scenario, the shutdown of coal-fired power plants will, as a result of emissions regulations, significantly impact U.S. generating capacity.

In Texas, farms, cities and environmentalists say the state has insufficient water for more coal-fired plants.

And Now Some Good News …

A four-seater electric Audi with ample trunk space managed to travel 375 miles on a single charge. The non-partisan (even though so far all of its members seem to be partisan) Climate Hawk movement gained momentum.

GM just released its first ad for the Chevy Volt: “This is American, man.”

Spending money on greenhouse gas mitigation efforts in developing countries could make up the shortfall in domestic commitments to existing Copenhagen pledges, says a new paper.

Nissan just fired up production for the all-electric LEAF, Tesla is about to open a factory to produce its all-electric sedan and Mazda is releasing a gasoline-powered car in Japan that gets 70 mpg.

OxFam’s new ads aim to bring immediacy to the impacts of climate change.

The U.S. government just approved the world’s largest solar thermal project — big enough to double U.S. capacity for solar thermal all by itself. We’re $100 billion away from increasing the proportion of U.S. electricity from solar to 4.3 percent by 2020.

The U.S. may have the world’s second-largest emissions of greenhouse gases, but on a map of per capita emissions it’s easy to lose the U.S. among all the countries with higher emissions, and Amazon wants to shrink their carbon footprint even further by offering greener shipping options.

… But New Challenges to a Livable Climate Continue to Arise

China’s chronic dependence on coal is still a monumental problem, reports Scientific American, and Chicago’s two coal-fired power plants cost neighboring communities $127 million in health-related expenses.

Cellulosic ethanol may be the cold fusion of biofuels, and fundamentally unsustainable, to boot, argues Grist’s Tom Philpott. Your next bottle of bioplastic might be made from plants, but in a world where cheap ethanol comes from cleared Brazilian forests, the move away from oil may not be all good.

Economists think energy efficiency might lead to more emissions, not fewer.Trees are prevented from soaking up extra atmospheric carbon by limited supplies of nitrogen, and just 1,000 spaceflights a year would warm the planet as much as the entire airline industry currently does.

Andrew Revkin, the New York Times’s lead climate commentator, reports climate change is “boring.” Perhaps that’s why the lead researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory believes “climate change journalism has gotten worse [in recent years].”

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Read This. Read Now. Pay Nothing.

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: The Obama administration today finalized greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and light trucks first proposed last May. The practical upshot of the rules is a roughly 40 percent rise in fuel economy, to 35.5 miles per gallon, by 2016. The government said the measures would save owners about $3,000 in fuel over a vehicles lifetime, but add a grand on average to sticker prices.

Of Drills and Bills: Energy independence has attracted bipartisan support and high-level media interest at least since 1948, when the U.S. first became a net importer of oil. Calls for freedom from foreign energy sources (or for “energy security” among the more sober-minded) have grown particularly acute in recent years. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin popularized the chant, “Drill, baby, drill!” during the 2008 presidential campaign. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich contributed “Drill here. Drill now. Pay Less.” Democrats have weakened in their rhetorical opposition to domestic offshore oil exploration as these slogans took off.

Politics can do funny things to strident partisan positions. Obama’s announcement this week on off-shore drilling might not be any more surprising than President George W. Bush’s re-purchase of oil-and-gas-leases off the Florida coast, during his brother’s, Gov. Jeb Bush, re-election bid. (“At the time, Bush’s decision was hailed by some environmental groups.”) Blood and electoral politics run thicker than oil.

The question, squarely framed by the New York Times, is, Will Obama’s political jujitsu work? Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Washington Post, runs amused through the top papers’ takes, from the NYT’s “nobody-much-likes-it” to the Los Angeles Times’ “this-won’t-accomplish-much” to right-wing pundit Don Surber’s observation that “Still, it is an admission by Obama that Sarah Palin was right.” He repeats the last four words about 125 times over a full browser page.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a key architect of the climate-and-energy bill expected in mid-April, said yesterday that Obama’s drilling proposal is a “good first step,” echoing other calls from Senate Republicans that the sale of drilling leases be expanded to include the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast, and Alaska. Graham and Lieberman at the end of last week chatted with reporters about two elements of their developing climate bill. Utilities would participate in a market for carbon-emission permits, and the oil industry would have to pay a “fixed fee” for their carbon emissions. Last week 10 coastal Democratic senators sent a letter to Obama admonishing the administration against “unfettered” drilling. Watch to see if Obama’s drilling announcement this week is sufficiently fettered.

Traders to the Cause: The 2009 results of the EU’s Emissions Trading System are drawing scrutiny. Analysts attribute to reduced economic activity an 11.2 percent drop in EU industrial greenhouse gas emissions, a number that falls at the high end of expectations. Critics say industrial firms that receive pollution credits for free are benefitting from cyclical market dynamics, instead of permanently reducing emissions by deploying clean energy technologies. The decline in carbon prices, reflecting the recession and diminished outlook for a global treaty, have led to carbon trading firms’ disappearance from HSBC’s index of companies involved in climate solutions.

EU authorities have stepped up enforcement of about $6.75 billion in tax fraud they suspect within the trading system. Spanish police arrested nine people suspected of running a “carousel fraud.” In this scheme, traders buy credits in one EU country without paying a value-added tax, and sell them in another country at a price that includes the price of a tax.

It’s confusing enough without the outright accusations of fraud. An executive board that oversees a carbon-finance program set up by the Kyoto Protocol has suspended four auditors in a year and a three monts. The most recent companies penalized are carbon-market auditors in Germany and South Korea, who may now seek clarification on the market’s rules.

Against the backdrop of sagging carbon credit prices in Europe, a group of economists led by the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton in the U.S., suggests that target costs of greenhouse gas pollution are too low to effect the scale of change that many scientists call for.

More ‘Sunlight’ in Climate Science: The U.K. Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee issued findings from its investigation into climatologists’ behavior as documented in emails hacked out of University of East Anglia servers last fall. The Members of Parliament, as many others before them, found little or nothing in the episode to weaken the evidence that suggests industrialization waste is transforming the global climate. But they slammed the climate scientists as a group for secretive handling of data. The MPs heavily faulted the university itself for the scientists’ poor responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. Phil Jones, who stepped down temporarily under fire as director of the UEA’s Climate Research Unit, was exonerated by the committee. Newspapers, such as the Guardian, tack on garden-variety “he-said, she-said” evaluations of the report.

Data’s Gotta Come from Somewhere: Obama’s 2011 budget proposes increased funding for NASA’s aging Earth observation infrastructure—62 percent more by the end of 2015. The investments would shore up data streams on ocean temperature, ice extent, ozone, and anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Satellite monitoring would be much easier if the risks of launching tin cans to space weren’t so high. NASA expects to rebuild its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), after the initial model fell into far-southern waters. The OCO may be the best-named satellite ever. A triple pun, OCO is a normal acronym, a chemical diagram (carbon dioxide is a linear molecule, O=C=O), and a homophone of the Polish word for “eye.” This week Europe will launch its CryoSat-2, a device precise enough to measure changes in ice thickness within “a few centimeters” accuracy. The first iteration, CryoSat, was destroyed in a launch failure five years ago. This week’s most thought-provoking statement from a scientist occurs in the Nature story (see previous link) about CryoSat-2:

Technical problems with the rocket have already delayed the launch, which was originally scheduled for February. “I hope this time around probability is on our side,” says Duncan Wingham, CryoSat-2’s principal scientist, who will watch the launch from the European Space Operations Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Beware of Dueling Headlines:

Green economy grows despite policy vacuum (DailyClimate.org)

Where have all the green jobs gone? (BBC News)

The truth is out there. Ernst & Young probes the renewables market in greater detail. A third of the jump in U.S. climate spending came from last year’s stimulus bill, according to a Congressional Budget Office report.

There’s Something up There… What do people think about climate change who rarely think about climate change? A minor indication came this week in a Washington Post book review of Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar (NB: The first paragraph of the review has an adult theme). The third paragraph addresses global warming:

The subject, though, is hot. Whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere, there’s no denying that novelists are warming up to the subject.

Perhaps I’m over-thinking this, but how is it intelligible to pose the question, even in a dependent clause, “whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere”? Certainly, there is carbon dioxide coming out of our tailpipes, smoke stacks, and melting permafrost. Maybe what’s accumulating in the air is something that has the same spectral and biochemical properties as carbon dioxide, but isn’t actually carbon dioxide.

At any rate, something that behaves identically to carbon dioxide is doing this. “Should” the author of the review (an editor) know that, even as a cute framing device, this dependent clause has negative communicative value?

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. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

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Melting Ice Makes Slippery Slope

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Several high-profile exits from the climate conversation—Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) from the Senate; BP, Caterpillar, and ConocoPhillips, from USCAP; and chief climate negotiator Yvo de Boer from the U.N.—were widely reported this week. None of these stories carry as much long-term significance as the under-reported-on difficulty of many major English-language public information sources to communicate both that potentially dangerous climate change is underway and that professional researchers have enough confidence, despite uncertainties, to attribute it to human activity.

This problem is giving leaders an opportunity to shut down climate policy discussions.

Climate science and the policies designed to address it will never be understood and appreciated by the public quite as well as, say, pairs figure skating is. It’s for the best, really. But, if verifiability and accuracy are qualities that we would like to see in leaders from every sector of civic life, then–as consumers and producers of public information products–maybe we should set a baseline, and point out when something smells funny. So, for today, I’d like to loosen Climate Post‘s standard format, and share my own reaction to this WSJ piece.

It smells funny.

This Next Section, This Second One, Here, Is Fake; I Made it all up: The spate of recent controversies about climate research has given fresh voice to a group of scientists who question the mainstream view on two points: that human activity is warming the planet at a slow, imperceptible pace; and that human societies and institutions will be able to adapt. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in his occasional e-mailed newsletter, “At the rate world policymakers are chasing Titanic-like policies down to the bottom of the rising Atlantic ocean, our grandchildren, perhaps even our children will curse our generation as the most murderous and selfish of any in the four billion year history of life on Earth.”

Hansen’s is one voice in a coordinated chorus who are taking advantage of recent climatological observations—rising average ocean temperatures, retreating mountain glaciers, earlier spring blossoms—to promote to a wider audience the same criticisms of what they call “mainstream, slow-warming suicide science” that they have advocated, with great difficulty, in smaller circles for some time.

In the economics and policy sphere, Hansen’s concerns are echoed by the Anti-Refrigerator Forum of the American Renewables Foundation (ARF-ARF), a group of liberal economists from prestigious institutions who want to outlaw residential and commercial refrigeration in the U.S. because cooling chemicals, hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, are powerful heat-trapping gases and refrigeration causes high carbon emissions. “It’ll be the refrigerators that march us up nine degrees Celsius,” said Akaky Akakievich, chairman of the ARF-ARF…

Okay, Back to ‘Reality,’ However Defined, and Non-Fiction, Here: That’s what an article might look like that attempted to take ideas from the (left) fringe of climate policy and pump them up into a credible movement claiming to know something no one on Earth knows: How and how quickly industrial emissions and land-use changes might change the planet’s life-support systems. It would be a disservice to write an article like that, at least without emphasizing where the critics’ extreme predictions for the future deviate from the consensus expectation: something in the vicinity of three degrees C of warming, from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels, over several decades.

To be charitable, what the Journal has done is overlook the likelihood that its readership doesn’t understand the first thing about manmade global warming: that there is manmade global warming. This is understood at a much higher confidence level than newspaper reporting on external security threats to the US. Even if that’s still not nearly as high as we’d like.

The article is a novelty story, but is not presented as such.

What Seems to Be the Problem?: The problem seems to be that credibility-killing IPCC errors and the University of East Anglia e-mails easily cause confusion among things that should not be confused. Climate science, most visibly in the IPCC reports, might be thought of as cascading tiers of knowledge, arranged from scientists’ high to low confidence in it. It is a vast enterprise, and not all observations have equal weight. The Journal gives equal weight to all things climate science. This sounds like a benign mistake, but given what these misunderstandings (disunderstandings?) are doing to our ability to have a rational policy discussion, it’s potentially dangerous.

The WSJ piece looks at four familiar voices—Bjorn Lomborg, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, and Willie Soon—plus a retired Columbia University climatology professor whose last name means “puppet” in Russian. They each dispute either that global warming is mostly manmade or that cutting emissions is a way to respond. (Lomborg, the only person quoted who is not a research scientist, says, “It’s important to say that the scandals we’ve had don’t change the fundamental point that global warming is man-made and we need to tackle it.”) The story is pegged to Texas’ decision to challenge the US Environmental Protection Agency’s move to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The article’s logical fallacy is the hasty generalization, with a smattering of the slippery slope, and some straw men thrown in for good measure. Now don’t get me wrong. The IPCC’s error about the Himalayan glaciers is horrifying generally and to an extent personally embarrassing. An elementary mistake about Dutch geography undermines the IPCC’s credibility on other unfamiliar simple things. The UEA emails have shown that there needs to be more openness in scientific research. But check out the key line in the article:

It’s too soon to tell whether the critics’ views will force the scientific community to revisit the prevailing view of man-made climate change. Many of their colleagues remain resolute in their stance that global warming is caused mainly by humankind.

It’s fallacious to construct an article on the premise that Lomborg, Christy, Lindzen, Soon, and Kukla have data or ideas that could wipe out the basic physics and environmental science that underpin manmade climate change. The question is wrong. There are no dumb questions, perhaps, but there are wrong questions and this is one of them. The reason that “colleagues remain resolute” is because they have so much data to support their arguments. Could they be wrong? Of course they could be wrong (kind of…). Is that a Mack truck accelerating toward us on the highway? Of course it might not be. But let’s get out of the way until whatever it is passes, shall we?

The media privileges virtually anything anyone says over what the data say. But the data matta! This creates a stylistic conundrum for writers. No sane publication would ever start an article on this topic thusly: “This week in Washington, atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed and emitted electromagnetic radiation at wavelengths between, roughly, 12 to 15 microns. That’s the reliably demonstrated fact from which science’s robust understanding of manmade climate change flows, an understanding challenged by the same four people whose views are contradicted by the evidence in geophysics…”

Zzzzzzzz. The media’s bias isn’t against a political faction, but against boredom.

Punchline: The headline of the story is correct: “Climate-Research Controversies Create Opening for Critics.” They are creating openings. It’s true–but only because editors and reporters are showing at best a lack of rigor.

Winds of Change at Wall Street Journal?: The Wall Street Journal‘s ownership has transferred to News Corps, which owns and operates Fox News and other politically charged news outlets in the U.S. and other parts of the Anglo-speaking world. The paper recently shut down its “Environmental Capital” blog, for the stated reason, one WSJ staff member told me, that it wasn’t getting enough page hits.

There are still, thankfully, at least a handful of prominent reporters who understand climate change from soup to nuts. Their work, and quite frankly, their jobs, becomes more significant as widespread, impoverished mass communication dramatically and rapidly undermines climate policy of any kind at home and abroad.

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. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

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The documents … they are … Alive! Alive!

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: With the electorate angry and frustrated, President Obama delivered a State of the Union address last night that articulated his goals for, among other things, modernizing the U.S. energy system and infrastructure, and addressing climate change. The president called for “a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America,” including nuclear power. New Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the Republican response, imploring the nation that, “Advances in technology can unleash more natural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, and alternative energy to lower your utility bills.”

The speech punctuated a week where everything in the climate-and-energy space appeared to be in motion. The troika of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) pressed ahead developing their legislation. Kerry shouted down the New York Times for an article suggesting the legislators had scaled back their goals. Graham told the Clean Energy, Jobs and Security Forum that “There will never be 60 votes for climate change legislation as it exists today. And it would be a shame if that is the end of the story.” Todd Wooten, director of the Nicholas Institute’s Southeast Climate Resources Center, spoke on a climate, security, and agriculture panel with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union.

The BASIC countries–Brazil, South Africa, India, and China–met this week in advance of the Jan. 31 Copenhagen Accord soft deadline for submitting descriptions of their greenhouse gas  mitigation actions to the UNFCC. They also called on developed nations to distribute their $10 billion in pledged adaptation aid to poor countries.

Business as Usual?: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will issue interpretive guidance to help companies evaluate in disclosure documents the risks and opportunities they face from climate legislation, treaties, and other developments–including potential global change itself. The move comes the same week that the CEOs of 83 companies sent a letter to Obama asking him to push for major legislation.

The five commissioners voted along party lines. Their statements provide an interesting snapshot of competing thought on how our venerable institutions are responding to climate risk (Schapiro; Casey; Walter; Paredes; Aguilar). Chairman Mary Schapiro emphasized that the guidance is neither commentary on the vast topic “climate change” nor a set of new rules for businesses to follow. Rather, the rules should help bring consistency to reporting on an emerging public concern. Dissenting commissioners (Casey and Paredes) questioned assigning SEC resources to the fruits of social and environmental advocacy when investors and markets require so much attention elsewhere.

These competing views encapsulate Washington’s two minds on the issues: One view, going forward and in the long term, the U.S. can not assume without risk that the relative climate stability it has enjoyed for 233 years will continue for, say, another 233 years; and a second view, that existing regulations cover what’s needed for climate disclosure, and the SEC should attend to immediate matters. (The actual guidance has not yet been published.)

Global Uncertainty: The SEC refrained from comment on climate change itself, or came close. Commissioner Kathleen Casey added this sentence to her critique of the interpretive guidance: “This guidance is premature at best, as the science surrounding global warming remains far from settled.” [Emphasis added.] Certainly, that’s an easy conclusion to come to, looking at headlines. A new poll shows that Americans concern about climate change has dropped 14 points, to 57 percent, since 2008. It also shows that people trust their local weather forecasters more than traditional reporting outlets (although weather forecasters disproportionately resist global warming). Casey isn’t alone. Some legislators vocalized discomfort with Obama’s mention of climate science in his address. China’s top climate negotiator said he is unready to attribute observed warming to human activity.

IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri has come under fire for the body’s mistaken prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, and for potential business conflicts with his IPCC work. The highest-profile all for his resignation came from the German newsmagazine Spiegel, where Richard Tol, Roger Pielke Jr, and Hans von Storch write, “Astoundingly, it appears that Pachauri has not broken any rules for the simple reason that there is no code of conduct governing conflicts of interest for IPCC participants and leaders.” Pachauri has defended himself and vowed to stay put. The IPCC has responded aggressively to [pdf] a Sunday Times (U.K.) article about climate change and extreme weather events.

Don’t Forget to Check Your Work: Last week, a reader wrote in for more information about which 2007 IPCC predictions have proven to be too modest. One of the sources I suggested as reference was the UNEP’s Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, a review of the professional literature for policymakers in advance of the Copenhagen meeting. The next day, thinking about the recently exposed IPCC error, I started checking through the footnotes. In the opening few pages of my hard copy, there’s a reproduction of the famous “hockey stick” graph, showing proxy evidence for temperature and CO2 over the last 1,000 years or so. I saw the reference, to “Hanno 2009,” and looked it up in the bibliography, but it wasn’t there. Another boneheaded fact-checking mistake, I thought. It’s actually worse than that. “Hanno 2009” isn’t a peer-reviewed journal article at all but a Wikipedia entry (!). Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org had found it last September and written about it here.

The Himalayan 2035 error returned to the conversation the phrase “gray literature” — science writing that has not been peer-reviewed and published in professional journals. But I was surprised and dismayed to see the UNEP rely on a source that wouldn’t pass muster in a descent high school composition class — and then not share the source.

The UNEP in October deleted the “Hanno 2009” graph and replaced it with a graph from this peer-reviewed paper, and a note that says, in part, “UNEP welcomes further constructive comments so that the report evolves as a living document containing the latest peer-reviewed science.” Would I recommend the report again? Probably, keeping in mind that everything said on the topic is one or another kind of “living document.” If something else smells fishy, follow the notes. The ultimate value in these review reports isn’t the actual assembled narrative but in the bibliography of primary research papers. You just have to have time and patience to fall down the rabbit hole, which few people have. And there’s always plenty of other interesting material around to consider. Here’s the Wikipedia page with a history of Hanno 2009, clearly written by someone angry about the matter.

So, is the science unsettled? There are a lot of things we’d like to know better (Nature, sub. req.). But when it comes down to atmospheric physics, it sure seems like a lot of smart people have been working hard and coming up with the same answers for quite some time now. What to do about it is currently up to the Senate, in part. If you have any thoughts feel free to contribute to the comments section or e-mail since Climate Post is a living document.

About the Future…: There’s a tendency among probably all the interest-group silos in Washington, whichever one you choose, to think that policymakers, by not doing specifically what it is advocates want, are ruining the future. There’s also a tendency to lose track of other policy issues given the focus on one’s own. With that in mind, consider David Broder’s Washington Post op-ed this morning about the U.S.’s fiscal health, upon which so many of these silo’ed policy discussions depend on for resolution.

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. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

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New Strategery?

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: The White House, senators, businesses, environmental NGOs, lobbying groups, and the international community conspired this week to shred any discernible central narrative in the climate story. While this situation might be easily recognized as a normal state of affairs–coming after the singular focus on Copenhagen, and then the singular focus on the holiday break–the diversity and scale of disagreements over how to respond to climate risk are striking. (Caveat: News media are biased toward reporting conflict.)

China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (the BASIC bloc) plan to meet in New Delhi this month, ahead of the Jan. 31 deadline to submit their “mitigating actions” to the U.N. climate change secretariat. The Obama administration and key senators reiterated their support for comprehensive legislation to set a market price for industrial dumping of carbon dioxide emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency found itself the target of criticism from the American Farm Bureau Federation over its new carbon-dioxide regulations. North Dakota is threatening to sue Minnesota over the latter’s new climate policy.

Looking forward to Copenhagen was more fun than looking back is. And looking forward to Cancun (!) isn’t necessarily something everyone is looking forward to. Oh, how to make sense of it all?

“Strategy” Session: Good questions came in after last week’s ruminations, none more fundamental than this: What does “climate strategy” mean after Copenhagen? Let’s take a look.

Abroad: Judging by the proliferation of tactical and other variety disputes this week, it’s clear that there is no dominant strategy at the moment. The UNFCC process had the veneer of dominance, but behind that it seems like it’s just every carbon-polluting entity for itself. What we’re looking at now is something of a reversion to (or progression toward!) the marketplace of ideas, where plans to address climate change will compete for attention from the politicians and policymakers who decide on courses of action.

Say what you want about the Copenhagen Accord hammered out by the BASIC countries and the U.S.: It’s organic and lays bare observations whispered about for some time. Robert Stavins of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs writes, “The two weeks of COP-15 illustrated four specific problems, most of which were apparent long before the Copenhagen meetings.”

A snub to the European Union, the Accord was produced by a small group of nations self-selecting, on the spot, based on geopolitics and economic scale and perceived vulnerability. Perhaps this is a signal that the new strategy is “anyone who can work together should work together.” Perhaps this is a signal that China has enough influence to almost unilaterally dictate the terms of international agreement. The confusion is epitomized by U.S. deputy special envoy Jonathan Pershing and U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband:

Pershing: “It is impossible to imagine a global agreement in place that doesn’t essentially have a global buy-in. There aren’t other institutions beside the UN that have that… We are going to have a very, very difficult time moving forward and it will be a combination of small and larger processes.”

Miliband: “I am confident we can get an agreement as we have made a lot of progress over the last year… We are trying to get consensus from 192 countries from very different places to be part of an agreement. That is tough and that’s what Copenhagen showed.”

At Home: ­­ This week’s Senate intrigue concerned whether legislators might scoop the cap-and-trade system out of climate legislation and run with a scaled-down energy bill.  Conflict-monger Politico glazes over the dispute and the Wall Street Journal‘s Environmental Capital blog concludes its “Scrap-and-Trade” post by saying that “[t]here’s reason to think a clean-energy future could still be in the offing even if Congress does take the path of least resistance and scraps plans for cap-and-trade this year.”

The WSJ article looks at the Senate, but just down the street the EPA advances its plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. The farm lobby’s vocal opposition was met by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is threatening a lawsuit in language less incendiary than its call for climate science hearings last August. States are asking for more time and small businesses are opposing the policy. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). put off introduction of an amendment that would nix the EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. The move came after the Washington Post reported that two lobbyists “helped craft” the measure.

Conventional wisdom holds that failure in the U.N. arena and potential failure on Capitol Hill will push market-based program out to the states. But if cash-strapped California is any indication, a cold economy can cool interest in climate policy. The LA Times reports a decline in public interest in air pollution and related issues. Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has suggested the state hold off on implementing its new rules on the emission of heat-trapping gases. So much for carbon-credit auctions on eBay…

The first big legal skirmish over a climate law could come between North Dakota and Minnesota. The latter has put in place regulations that could raise the cost of electricity in that state–even electrons transmitted from neighboring North Dakota. N.D. Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem threatened in late December to file a lawsuit, probably over the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. [Nicholas Institute Director Tim Profeta has written about the issues involved in the Environmental Law Reporter. Pdf here.]

Mailbag (Send Your Questions Here!): Another reader asked last week, Can the USCAP model apply to the global climate framework? How do boundary-spanning entities like leading NGOs, global business, and religious communities engage in a meaningful, constructive way?

Respondents essentially answered the question with another question:  How has USCAP’s position emerged and evolved in the domestic debate? The US Climate Action Partnership is the group of more than two dozen companies and several environmental NGOs. A year ago USCAP released an influential blueprint for climate legislation, which was largely adopted by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) in what became the House climate bill. However, as debate over legislative details has become higher-pitched, there’s no public indication that USCAP ever re-reached its initial escape velocity.

A USCAP-like group focused on an international climate agreement would likely experience similar pressures. The big ideas are hard, but easier than the fine print. Another issue appears to be the structure of the UNFCC events itself, which makes it difficult or impossible for corporations to register and take part. The Major Economies Forum may be a more receptive place for businesses who want to register their voices.

The Haitian Earthquake: There’s no direct tie-in to this week’s tragedy, except this: The climate debates are largely driven by our drives for lasting security and prosperity, and the avoidance of human suffering.

Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead addressed students, faculty, and staff in a public letter, and directed attention to relief efforts posted here and here.

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.

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A Sleepy Start for 2010

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Our story left off at the COP-15 negotiations, minutes after world leaders released their three-page Copenhagen Accord [pdf], a broad statement of political intent to address the issues that–according to the (old) UN schedule–should have been addressed by now. This result begs the question: Did 2009 end with more or with less ambiguity about how to address climate change? The potential answers feel more like a Rorschach test than points of debate.

We do know certain things: No one has any illusions about the difficulty of bringing the community of nations to agreement on how to rebuild the global energy economy.  We know that the United Nations process failed to produce a legally binding emissions-reduction and sustainable-development treaty. Or even a political agreement that offers clear guidance to a treaty. We know that China frustrated European and American leaders at key moments, even blocking discussion of national efforts in the Accord, a move that caused German Chancellor Angela German Merkel to demand, “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” It will be interesting to watch the build-up to COP-16, in Mexico City this November, given the certainly dramatic, inevitably anti-climactic (anti-climatic?), year-long sprint to Copenhagen.

We are confident that we have very little idea what course the U.S. Senate will take in coming weeks and months. The leadership troika of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) appears to be pushing ahead, despite the pessimism engulfing much of the chattering class. Political intrigue erupted this week when two Democratic senators, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, announced their retirements, putting at risk the majority’s ability to maintain a filibuster-defeating voting block. We continue to expect global media interest in geo-engineering to vary inversely with media interest in emissions reductions. And we know that observable phenomena consistent with warming predictions continue to emerge.

Continued international and U.S. policy uncertainty puts renewed spotlight on nascent regional programs, and on the private sector. Companies making up the FTSE 100 are, on average, projecting that they will meet the U.K.’s target of a two-to-three percent reduction annually, according to a new Carbon Disclosure Project report. Global investment managers (not, of course, compelled to act, as FTSE firms are, by a new U.K. law) have yet to substantially incorporate climate risk assessments into their portfolios. Perhaps Google will find a way to solve some of the complications involved in the struggle toward carbon neutrality.

The Center for Public Integrity prefaces the coming activity on climate legislation with a deep dive into lobbying records. The number of registered businesses and groups hovered steadily, around 1,160. But that number conceals about 140 newcomers to the debate, including highly visible consumer firms, such as Campbell Soup Company, Kellogg Company, and Del Monte Foods. “[T]he domestic politics are only growing ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ as Alice might say from Wonderland,” report Marianne Lavelle and M.B. Pell.

New Year’s Resolutions: The holiday break gave Climate Post some time to think about this project, the year passed, and the year ahead (and, for a goof, to begin reading the “climategate” e-mails). And a slow news week opens up space to share thoughts.

The conceit of traditional news-gathering, and by extension, this blog,  is that what just happened is more important than anything else. After all, it is called “the news,” and not “the recentlies” or “the interestings.” But given the sweep of information available to each of us with the touch of a key, there’s no longer a reason to limit ourselves to the news, when “the recentlies” and “the interestings” can really enrich the conversation.

So, how can we enrich the conversation? First, by acknowledging that it’s a conversation. Climate Post is a community, a smallish, newish one, and I’m curious about how to make this fact a little bit more visible. This missive goes out to friends of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and Duke University, and is reproduced at the environmental magazine, Grist.org.

Energy and climate change, and all they encompass–economics, policy, science, business, competing values–are extraordinarily complicated, hence the initial idea for Climate Post to begin with. So, other than what’s “news” in a given week, what can we help you with? What came up at a dinner party over the holidays that no one could answer, or that sparked an hour-long discussion, or is reported in contradictory ways? There’s an opportunity here for Climate Post to become something of an information or research concierge, particularly in regard to policy and the work of my colleagues at the Institute. Again, in policy, science, business, behavior, it takes a lot of listening and learning just to become comfortable with what the solutions are.

Space restraints being what they are (ie, restraining), we won’t be able to hit every desirable topic every week. But hopefully the swarm will guide us all toward engaging, informative, and productive conversation, while still flying close to the original mission. This blog is my blog. This blog is your blog. This blog was made for you and me.

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.