Welcome to COOL PLANET, the climate blog with a difference: The authors here have been providing solutions to climate change for years. There have been a lot of lessons learned. We look forward to sharing them – ours, and yours – here, as another step toward a COOL PLANET.
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By Bob Sheppard,
CFO and VP of the Business Program,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
While there is a great deal of flux in current discussions of federal climate policy, one thing is clear: the interests of businesses demand that businesses be heard.
Here’s why the business community should favor action now on climate:
What businesses need to know is that there are new, market-based approaches that will make our necessary energy transition less costly and more politically acceptable if we adopt a simple, transparent, and economically efficient strategy with the following components:
Efficient design
One tried-and-tested approach to emissions reductions sets a cap or upper limit on the amount of CO2 allowed by allocating a limited number of allowances, each equivalent to one ton of the pollutant.
A market is created through buying and selling these allowances. If initially allowances are auctioned rather than given away, the resulting revenue stream can be used to alleviate the effects of higher energy prices. If, in addition, you impose regulation where the carbon-emitting fuel enters the economy — at the refinery, the well head or the mine — you spread the cost over the whole economy with the costs efficiently distributed and therefore minimized for all who use energy.
Controlling costs
Probably there is no more valuable information for businesses on the energy front than what it’s going to cost. Another widely discussed innovation, now included in the new bill offered by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, (the Cantwell-Collins bill), is the “price collar,” which attaches a floor, a ceiling and a known price range for current and future allowances. A collar allows businesses to plan their energy purchases and investments without worrying about sudden price spikes or declines. The collar can be adjusted, if need be, by a combination of federal executive and legislative action.
Reducing economic impacts
Another concept gaining traction in Washington is recycling auction revenues through the tax code. Reducing corporate and payroll tax rates would put money back into the hands of those most affected by regulation. It also presents an unusual opportunity to link the interests of businesses and individual taxpayers. Special provisions could allow for greater distribution of revenues to lower-income individuals who would be especially vulnerable to increased costs. Funds could also be dedicated to technology research and development and to assist businesses disproportionately affected by increasing energy costs.Businesses will benefit in numerous ways
Businesses have much at stake in ensuring that climate policy is understandable, effective, and fair. Businesses need to keep abreast of the climate debate in Washington and advance the discussion of alternative approaches within the business community and through their elected representatives.
This blog originally appeared in the business section of the Portsmouth Herald, Feb. 1, 2010.
Bill Burtis
By Bill Burtis
Manager of Communications and Special Projects
Clean Air-Cool Planet
“…the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.” – Paul Krugman, “Cassandras of Climate”, New York Times, September 28, 2009.
Ross Gelbspan has a great way of talking about what we know about global warming, pointing out that it comes from the work of “2000 scientists from 100 countries in what is the largest, most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.”
That used to thrill me. Yeah, I thought, the argument is over, the world will hear this, and we will move forward to solve this problem. I envisioned this phalanx, comprising scientists marching together, slowly expanding as politicians and citizens joined, joyfully, in the solution.
Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, we still have choruses extolling the idea that global warming is a hoax, a ruse, a political game, being played for the money – all those green dollars. We’re down to that.
I started thinking about what kind of money it would take to get those 2000 scientists and all those government officials on board for this hoax. If we were to apply some kind of multiplier to the amount of money companies like Exxon and Peabody Coal have paid their band of mercenary “scientists” to create the disinformation campaign they’ve carried out over the past several years, we’d bankrupt science budgets globally.
It’s a silly claim, of course, once you stop to think about it. But the point is, people don’t stop to think about it. They hear Rush or O’Reilly or some other commentator say it and, POOF, it’s reality. I don’t know if they think Rush and Bill have checked the facts, done the math, understand the implications – or they are just too lazy or busy to bother.
My assumption is the latter.
So, in addition to the armies of lobbyists, deniers, and commentators plying their trade to convince the uninformed electorate that global warming is a hoax, we have the legion electorate, for whom it is, of course, vastly more convenient to believe this and do nothing than to believe the science and start to change.
Cut to the streets of Port au Prince. No, I’m not suggesting that earthquakes are caused by global warming. But my friend and colleague Anne Stephenson wisely commented (and perhaps will have more to say here, soon) that we’d be well advised as a world to get better at responding to disasters of this magnitude if we are going to continue down the path of fossil energy use and carbon emissions we are on now. And looking at the wreckage and the carnage in those Caribbean streets, it is easy to imagine the same results from hurricane winds and storm surge, tornadoes and floods – the kinds of events the science suggests we may have in store.
Today, the news is that people in Haiti are getting angry at the delays in reaching them with the aid that might save lives slipping away from injury, dehydration and starvation. I think that kind of anger, and the fear it accompanies, is one of the things the military and national security leaders in this country are concerned about when they talk about climate change as a national security issue.
As the drunken lawyer George Hanson observed (as played by Jack Nicholson in the 1969 classic Easy Rider), people are dangerous when they are afraid. The emotions of disaster will play out in Haiti; it would be wise to keep in mind what emotions might fuel armies of climate refugees.
Anne Stephenson
By Anne Stephenson,
Campus Outreach Coordinator,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
As you’ve discovered from Claire’s earlier post, she and I are in Taipei for climate action planning workshops for Taiwanese schools and universities. Our workshops went really well (more on that later) but first a post on Taipei in general…
At first glance, Taipei is a carbon management dream-city. It is unbelievably dense. It is 104.9 square miles, which is almost a 10th as big as the Greater Boston area. But its population is over 2.6 million, making its density per sq. mile almost double that of Boston. Its subway system (the MRT) is like a dream… quiet, clean, fast, with train after train after train. The MRT has a 94% satisfaction rate among its riders (Autopia Planes, Trains, Automobiles and the Future of Transportation All Subways Should be Like Taipei’s Marvel of Mass Transit), and is consistently rated one of the best in the world.
I arrived at our carbon management workshops totally jealous of the Taipei-based schools. Here, finally, were schools that didn’t have to convince their students to carpool or live on campus rather than drive alone. Alas, that was me seeing the MRT with the eyes of a tourist. Of course, the MRT doesn’t serve all of Taipei, or those students living in Taipei County. That, combined with low gas prices, makes scooters a popular option. While of course scooters are not as efficient as the MRT, they are pretty fuel efficient and therefore cheap to drive.
The challenge for schools and universities, like that of our host National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), is finding the space for students to park scooters. But the environmental cost is more than the simple math of the emissions factor of the MRT vs. that of gasoline, plus the carbon impact of paving parking lots. Taipei’s smog problem is almost entirely created from scooter emissions and the soot covers everything. Because two-stroke engines like those of Taipei’s scooters suffer from incomplete combustion, they have far more particulate emissions than the average car. In fact, according to the non-profit organization Envirofit, one carbureted two-stroke scooter engine produces the pollution output of 50 modern automobiles.
Thankfully my new obsession with scooters coincided with my friend Cayce’s trip to Italy, and he’s been able to brief me on the latest in scooter efficiency. Aprilia and Piaggio, two Italian scooter companies, are selling direct injection scooters, which are vastly cleaner and more fuel efficient due to how finely the fuel is atomized. According to Cayce, these newer scooters are capable of up to 120 mpg, with minimal emissions. Perhaps even more encouraging is the work done by Envirofit, which installs direct injection retrofit kits in older scooters in Southeast Asia.
As you’ve recently read in Brooks’s posts, we must focus our attention on buying time for the arctic by focusing on the reduction of short-lived pollutants like methane and black carbon for the recent agreement in Copenhagen will not save the arctic. Until this trip, I had trouble wrapping my mind around the significance of black carbon as a short-lived forcer. Sure, I understood the principle of albedo, but it seemed hard to imagine it was a big impact (sorry Brooks). I now get it. I see that the albedo of this city has changed — white buildings could be (charitably) described as gray but are more black than anything. I can see how a little scooter smog can go a long way in turning glaciers from white to gray.
As cities like Taipei grow warmer, the human health impacts of urban heat island effect will be far more deadly because of the poor air quality. Claire and I fly home tomorrow with new perspectives on climate impacts here – urban heat island being a big one. And our workshop was a great introduction to carbon management challenges here – but scooter retrofits isn’t one of them. The technology exists; the only challenge is the sheer number needed.
William Moomaw
By Bill Moomaw,
Director,
Center for International Environment and Resource Policy
The Fletcher School
Tufts University
The flailing around in Copenhagen has produced little in the way of a useful agreement. After wasting 15 years following the ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world discovered that an intensive two-year negotiations process has failed to bring about an effective solution even in an intense two-week finale.
The governments of the world have failed their citizens, and it will be up to non-state actors like Clean Air-Cool Planet, the private sector, civil society, individuals and subnational actors such as states, provinces, cities and towns, to continue taking the lead in making real emission reductions.
Governments have been acting like a group of lost children who have wandered onto a major highway where a truck is bearing down on them. Instead of agreeing to help each other to get out of the way, they argue about whose fault it is that they are there, and who should pay whom to get out of the way. Meanwhile the truck has accelerated.
Perhaps we are trying to negotiate the wrong treaty. No one seems to want it. The current discussion is about a “pollution control treaty.” It is all about what nations cannot do. The proposed solution is even less viable: an untried global cap-and-trade system that relatively few nations understand or see how they might participate.
While it is true that it is emissions of heat-trapping gases that are causing global warming and climate change, the underlying problem is the development path that all nations are on. It is literally fueled by fossil fuels that emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Developing countries mistakenly equate carbon dioxide emissions with energy and energy with a growing economy. Hence asking them to reduce their emissions is tantamount to restricting their development. Many in the US have the same flawed perspective. This has lead to absurd arguments about each individual having an equal right to pollute the atmosphere with the waste from combustion, transportation, industry and agriculture. No one is better off simply because he or she emits more carbon dioxide, and certainly the planet and all of human society is worse off from those emissions even if they are equitably distributed.
What is needed is a “development treaty” that assures every one access to energy and other services in a manner that does not threaten the climate system. Then the discussion will become about what can be done to improve the lives and well being of people and a debate about who will pay for the essential transition that inevitably awaits us as fossil fuels become less and less available. Then protocols could be written that introduce low emission vehicles, power plants and industrial and agricultural processes. Nations could also agree to raising the price of fossil fuels and other emissions to send a market signal that supports the specific policies and measures that are agreed upon. There would certainly be a need to assist developing countries in the transition, which would free them from the tyranny of rising and highly fluctuating fossil fuel prices. Helping to provide the technology to harvest the free renewable energy that rains down on all nations would be cheaper than continuing to chase rising fossil fuel prices with scarce hard currency.
It is not clear that it will be possible to shift the debate away from pollution and towards what can be done about it through a development treaty. However, it may well be simpler to design policies and measures that introduce low emission technologies than it will be to get agreement on taking specific targets and time tables that 193 countries can agree to. Moving from 19th century fuels and mid-20th century technologies is essential to meet the needs and improve the well being of nearly 7 (soon to be 9) billion people most of whom are poor.
Governments have failed to grasp the reality that the world must reduce emissions by close to 80% by 2050 to keep concentrations of carbon dioxide below 450 ppm and global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This requires an annual reduction of between 3 and 4% per year. It is important to note that this is about the rate at which the United States shifted from gas lights and horses and buggies to electric lights and automobiles in the first half of the 20th century. Currently the share of electricity production from renewable sources is about the same fraction as what US homes with electricity was 100 years ago. Why can’t we imagine a comparable transformation by 2050?
This transformation will require that a new development treaty places energy services into the hands of all in an efficient, clean, low-carbon manner. Maybe if we make this shift, we can get our leaders and all of us out of the way of the onrushing threat of uncontrolled climate change. Clean Air-Cool Planet will need to play a central role in this process. We certainly cannot wait for the US Senate or other governments to act.
Professor Moomaw is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a founding board member of Clean Air-Cool Planet.
By Brooks Yeager
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
It’s 11 at night in Copenhagen, and the word is that President Obama has finally sewn up a deal. It took more effort, of a more personal kind, than perhaps he might have expected. He had to scrap his schedule, stay longer than he planned, cajole Wen Jiabao one on one, and finally crash a private consultation among the leaders of China, India, and Brazil, but he got what he came for – a climate change accord with China and India included.
It’s not a deal that will make many happy. The goal of halving global emissions by 2050, reflecting the minimum cuts science says are necessary, is absent – a high price to pay to get a Chinese target that will be subject to international review. There is no schedule to make the accord legally binding. The American emissions target was not what the Europeans wanted, and even the European emissions target – the strongest laid down — failed to satisfy many advocates.
It appeared at the end, that the choice was between a weak deal with China and India included, or a stronger deal without them. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown talked openly about going without China as late as 5 p.m. this afternoon. Perhaps that helped soften the Chinese negotiating stance – we may never know the full answer.
What we do know is that this political accord has laid a new foundation for global action on climate change. It is the first time that all major emitters have articulated national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However halting and difficult this step has been, it is a turning point in the international community’s approach to what is now seen as the overriding global environmental issue of our time.
Claire Roby, Clean Air-Cool Planet
By Claire Roby
Carbon Accounting Coordinator
Clean Air-Cool Planet
I’ve returned to Taiwan after studying here five years ago to find an incredibly warm December, and it is not difficult to imagine that global climate change is in the forefront of many people’s minds. The Copenhagen talks have been featured prominently in the papers for the two weeks that I have been here. Each morning, the local English language paper has four to six articles on the progress of the talks and a discussion of either Taiwan’s contributions to the problem or the future impacts the island can expect. When I explain my work to old friends or people I meet on the street, they always know that the summit is happening.
That is interesting, since Taiwan has no seat at the negotiations. They are a top 25 emitter and the island will suffer dramatic impacts of rising sea levels, but they are not recognized as a sovereign state by the United Nations and thus are only visitors in Copenhagen. That also means that it is up for debate as to how negotiated agreements apply locally. The government has chosen to abide by any agreement and to adopt ISO 14064 as a standard for greenhouse gas quantification, reporting, and verification—a very promising start.
Yesterday afternoon, Anne Stephenson and I met with representatives of Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency and one of their primary consulting partners to learn about their inventory efforts and to offer our experience. They have developed a protocol and reporting registry, with 34 companies having completed inventories to date. While their system is currently voluntary, they are learning from international efforts so that they can move quickly. For example, they are already thinking about stringent verification mechanisms and provisions to count community based offsets.
Their progress is both admiral and quite understandable. Taiwan needs any diplomatic advantage it can leverage, regardless of the long term sovereignty debate. The more international appreciation we can offer any state that achieves reduction goals, the better outcome we can expect—particularly from historically sidelined states like Taiwan.
By Brooks B. Yeager
Executive Vice President for Policy
Clean Air-Cool Planet
It’s all come down to the wire. The possibility of a meaningful political deal, declared dead by Chinese negotiators as late as Wednesday night, has been given new life, but only just. The rescue began with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s news conference Thursday morning. Ms. Clinton announced the willingness of the U.S. to play its role in an effort to raise $100 billion per year in funds for adaptation and clean development in the poorer and most vulnerable countries of the world – an overall figure that, for the first time, matched the scale of the need articulated by developing country leaders.
The Clinton offer had the desired effect, with senior officials from Africa, the small island states, and even India calling it constructive and, in effect, looking towards China for the next move. Ms. Clinton had made clear that the U.S. offer could only be made good “in the context of a strong accord in which all major economies stand behind meaningful mitigation actions and provide full transparency as to their implementation,” a direct reference to the Chinese reluctance to have their emissions reduction progress reviewed internationally. The Chinese, in response, let it be known that there were a number of ways in which they could “enhance their regular national communications” under the framework convention to assure full transparency of their commitments.
These two offers, seemingly so pedestrian, are in fact what was necessary all along to unlock the basic political agreement that is possible here in Copenhagen. The U.S. financial commitment will require difficult political lifting at home, with a number of Senators already opposing any additional “foreign aid” for climate purposes. The Chinese offer, fully detailed, could be the breakthrough that Congress most passionately desires, locking China into an international network of emission reduction commitments for the first time.
There remains controversy about whether all this is enough. An internal U.N. analysis, leaked to the Guardian yesterday, indicates that the overall emissions path issuing from the various commitments of the major emitters would likely fail to keep the world below 2° warming, and might in fact result in a warming almost twice that high. The Arctic is melting at a total global warming of less than 1°.
President Obama, addressing the other Heads of State a few minutes ago, made it clear that, after 20 years of negotiations over climate change, the world faces a stark choice: “The reality of climate change is not in doubt, but our ability to take collective action to address climate change is in doubt. We can move forward together, or … we can have the same stale arguments, year after year, until the danger of climate change grows irreversible.” There are some who argue that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Others, this writer among them, believe that a long journey starts with a single step.
By Brooks Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy
Clean Air-Cool Planet
It’s going to be a long night. The veteran negotiators have that look of weary resignation that means they know what they have to do, even if they were much younger the last time they had to do it. But all the gauntlets have been thrown down, and the procedural moves have been made. The leaders have started to arrive, and they won’t want to go home with empty hands.
There are three major issues dogging the process. The first concerns the substance of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target put forward by the key nations – the major emitters. Are they ambitious enough, individually? And do they add up to enough to keep the world, as the Swedish Environment Minster, Andreas Karlgren put it, “well below 2° Celsius global warming?” Karlgren clearly thinks we’re not there yet – he directly challenged the U.S. and China to “unleash your full potential and allow the world to defeat the threat of climate change.”
The second concerns the form of the reduction targets. Even if China’s target is a reduction in energy intensity, allowing for further growth, while the U.S. and European targets call for absolute reductions, do they have the same legal form, and are they reviewable according to the same standard? The Chinese say no: their efforts are voluntary, and not subject to international verification. Fearful that Congress will demand nothing less, the U.S. negotiators want a standard that would justify a trade challenge if China fails to deliver on its commitments.
Finally, there is the issue of money, to help the developing world with adaptation and the development of low-carbon technology. This is much on the minds of the African Heads of State, among others. As the leaders rose to speak this afternoon, the theme that emerged was that climate change is already having a devastating impact on the lives of the poor, through drought, desertification, and storm surge. “Africans are already dying to pay for the carbon-intensive development enjoyed by the rich countries,” was the succinct view of Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, speaking for Africa. The developing countries, he pointed out, need to invest to make their population, their communities, and their agriculture sectors more resilient. In this respect, the offers from the developed world have so far been underwhelming. And as Zenawi concluded, “we will either all leave Copenhagen happy with the deal we have put together, or there will be no deal.”
By Brooks B. Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Today was the day that anything that could break down, did break down. This was true both inside the negotiations and out. First to go was the credentialling system. The problems with the lines of uncredentialled participants, which have been growing since late last week, finally overwhelmed the entrance area of the conference center, with the result that nobody, even those with full credentials and secondary badges, was getting in.
Next to go was the subway system. The crowd became so large – they’re now saying that 40,000 people pre-registered for a conference center that only fits 15,000 — that it backed up throughout the metro platform, with the result that the city authorities decreed that trains on the M1 line would no longer stop at the Bella Center. But even if you got off at an earlier stop, Sundby, and walked the ¾ of a mile to the Center, you still couldn’t get past the crowd. Buses were pulling up six at a time spilling loads of supplicants onto the street, as the ever-expanding crowd milled, stood, and chattered on cell phones in the cold.
Having disabled Copenhagen’s largest conference center and one of its two metro lines, this monster of a negotiation then turned on itself. A set of negotiators representing Africa, which is feeling neglected by the big powers, forced the suspension of the key contact groups as their way to highlight their demand that the Kyoto Protocol be extended. Europe and the U.S. have thrown their weight behind a new negotiating framework, which, unlike Kyoto, would include all parties. China and the U.S. attacked each others’ negotiating offers as weak and unhelpful. Developing countries and environmentalists challenged Europe and the U.S. to strengthen the ambition of their emissions reduction targets, and criticized the offer of $10 billion per year in aid for adaptation and technology development as far too little to meet the need.
With the few ongoing negotiating sessions increasingly off-limits to NGOs, the thousands of representatives of civil society in the halls are becoming increasingly restive and despondent. Having been a negotiator myself during the Clinton Administration, I’m one of the few NGOs who will admit to being glad that there are conversations in the back rooms to which we’re not invited. I only hope that what’s going on there is some serious dialogue on substance, and even some horse trading, as opposed to the hyperventilated rhetoric that passes for ‘position taking’ in the media. The problem outside is not a broken metro – it’s a broken climate system, and it won’t fix itself while we’re ‘taking positions’ in Copenhagen.
By Brooks B. Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
The world’s snow and ice took center stage at the Copenhagen climate conference today, as former Vice President Al Gore joined Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr-Store to raise the troubling specter of a world in which mountain glaciers are a distant memory and the Greenland ice sheet’s outlet glaciers have become giant ice rivers into the sea.
The Gore event was oversubscribed, with a big jostling crowd outside, as Gore events are these days. Two reports were released: “Melting Snow and Ice: A Call for Action” on behalf of Gore and Gahr-Store, and the drier, but equally disturbing “The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate,” the so-called SWIPA report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an arm of the Arctic Council.
The “Melting Ice” Report warns of the consequences of subjecting the world’s snow and ice to the kinds of global temperature increases predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), noting that “hundreds of millions of people… may lose their homes due to rising sea levels,” and that millions more “may be affected by freshwater availability decreases due to changes in snow and glacier reservoirs.”
The SWIPA report couches its warning in the neutral style of a scientific monograph, but it is equally chilling: “Recent projections for global sea level rise by 2100 that include the contributions from thermal expansion of the oceans and the rest of the world’s ice masses, in addition to meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet, are as high as 1.0 (+ or – 0.5) m.” In other words, somewhere between 2 and 5 feet, which is what Clean Air-Cool Planet has been telling people along the Eastern Seaboard this fall in our Hip-Boot Tour.
A little earlier in the day, Assistant Secretary Tom Strickland of the U.S. Interior Department showed maps prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey detailing the peculiar vulnerability to sea level rise of the eastern coast of the United States, which is also subsiding as a result of tectonic forces. He also discussed the unique vulnerability of communities in the U.S. Arctic, and showed a picture of a home in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, falling into the sea. That home used to be protected against the storms of the Chukchi Sea by shorefast ice. But now the ice is gone, and so, soon, will be the village.
Meanwhile, the people most directly affected by the changes in the Arctic, the Inuits of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, have joined with other northern peoples to set up an “Arctic venue” at which dozens of exhibits celebrate the sustainable life of the Arctic and also document the threats to it. I had dinner two nights ago with a number of the Arctic folks, including Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Canada and Patricia Cochran of Alaska. Sheila was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that was eventually given to Gore and Rajendra Pauchari, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Patricia has been a lead spokesperson for the Inuit at the Arctic Council and elsewhere. It was a joyous dinner, with lots of jokes aimed in the general direction of Paul Crowley, an attorney and long-time aide to Sheila, who lived for many years in Iqualuit but has now moved to Rome for work. Iqualuit, in the far north of the Nunavut First Nation of Canada, won’t soon have a climate like Rome. But its climate isn’t any longer like the Iqualuit of old, either.
