Friday again already eh? Well that makes it Friday Factoids time...

We'll keep this one short, with just the graphic below comparing the levels of clean energy R&D funding included in the House and Senate climate and energy bills with the strong and growing consensus among energy innovation experts that $15 billion per year in additional funding is needed to achieve national climate, energy and economic objectives.

I've also included the boost in FY2009 Department of Energy (DOE) R&D budgets provided by the economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. As Google's Dan Reicher warned the Senate on Wednesday: when these temporary stimulus funds dry up, the U.S. could fall of a "funding cliff" unless significantly larger allocations are made for clean energy R&D in Congressional legislation.

(click to enlarge)

Continue reading "Friday Factoids: Climate Bills vs. Expert Consensus on R&D" »

Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins joined former Senator John Warner of Virginia on the KPFA Morning Show today to discuss Senate climate and energy legislation, the focus of hearings this week in the the Environment and Public Works Committee. (listen to the full interview below)

Senator Warner, a rare Republican champion of climate action, was the co-sponsor of the 2007 Lieberman-Warner "Climate Security Act." He retired in 2008 after thirty years in the Senate but remains an active advocate of Congressional climate legislation, and is working to convince his reluctant Republican former colleagues to embrace the climate and energy legislation authored by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Jenkins was honored to join the discussion with Senator Warner (who's spent more time in the Senate than Jenkins has on this warming planet). He was also pleased to find consensus with the veteran Republican on the need for final Senate climate legislation to include much greater investments to ensure U.S. innovators, entrepreneurs and businesses invent and commercialize clean energy technologies here in America.

Agreeing with the strong consensus of energy innovation experts, the former Senator said that the current Kerry-Boxer bill invested too little in clean energy R&D and did not provide enough proactive support for American firms commercializing, manufacturing and installing clean energy technologies, but he noted that final legislation is still taking shape. Hopefully his common-sense attitude on clean energy innovation and technology investment will prevail on Senate Republicans, who so far have resorted to threatening to boycott hearings on the Kerry-Boxer bill, rather than work constructively to ensure the bill includes more funding for American innovators and clean energy firms.

Senator Warner, the long-time Chairman or Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Secretary of the Navy, also highlighted the need to avert climate change in order to mitigate future conflicts and humanitarian crises that would sap the resources of the U.S. military. For more on the Senator's views on climate legislation, you can read his testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee on earlier this week here.

Listen to the full interview here or using the player below. The segment starts at 1:08:00 into the Morning Show.

$15 billion. That is the figure at the heart of a growing consensus of energy innovation experts, all calling for dramatically larger U.S. investment in clean energy research and development. Writing at theEnergyCollective.com, Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins highlights mounting calls to address what Google Director of Climate Change and Energy Dan Reicher called "a serious energy R&D short-fall" in the current House and Senate climate bills. As Congress debates energy and climate change legislation, a chorus of voices including policy think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute, as well as a collection of both the nation's top research universities and dozens of Nobel-prize winning scientists have joined leading businesses like Google to converge on a $15 billion increase in annual U.S. energy R&D budgets as a critical component of any final legislation.

Read the full post at theEnergyCollective.com here.

Continue reading "The Innovation Consensus: $15 Billion for Clean Energy R&D" »

Lending his voice to a growing consensus that congressional climate policy must make dramatically larger investments in energy R&D in order to accomplish its stated objectives, Google Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Dan Reicher, delivered the following message in testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (emphasis in original):

"Chairman Boxer, it is essential that Congress address this serious energy R&D short-fall by incorporating President Obama's goal of $15 billion per year in federal energy R&D spending in final climate legislation."

Reicher also highlighted the fact that a price on carbon will not be sufficient to position the U.S. competitively as a world leader in clean energy innovation.

"But let me emphasize that putting a price on carbon, while absolutely necessary, is not sufficient to address the climate problem and, importantly, will not put the US in the position to seize the extraordinary opportunities that will come with rebuilding the global energy economy."

Overall Reicher's commentary drew pointed attention to the need for direct public investment - on the order of $15 billion annually - in clean energy R&D to make up for a funding drop off in the sector over the last few decades, as well as to "nurture" basic R&D, a high risk step in the innovation process that is traditionally unattractive to private interests.

Continue reading "Google Calls for $15bn/year for R&D in Testimony Before Senate EPW Committee" »

Mark Muro, a fellow and director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, commented in The New Republic on the disappointingly low levels of clean energy R&D investments allocated by the latest draft of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill, the Senate version of House passed ACES. Muro, who has previously joined the Breakthrough Institute in writing about the need to make clean energy cheap, notes that while R&D investment under Kerry-Boxer is slightly higher than under Waxman-Markey's ACES, it still does not approach the $15 billion per year that Brookings, the Breakthrough Institute, and President Barack Obama have suggested is needed to transition to a clean energy economy.

Today, in The New Republic he writes:

Turning to investments in clean technology and energy innovation, the adjustments are minimal and quite disappointing. Looking broadly to clean tech, Boxer-Kerry would reserve some 12.6 percent of its permit value, or $8.6 billion a year at EPA-projected allowance prices, for clean tech purposes such as investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, clean vehicle technology, building codes and efficiency retrofit programs, and R&D. By contrast, the Waxman-Markey promises 13.8 percent for clean tech, or roughly $9.7 billion a year--a bit more. Focusing more narrowly on pure R&D, the comparison is a better--but not enough better. Boxer-Kerry on this front would reserve some 1.9 percent of the revenue it raises (or about $1.4 billion a year) for clean energy R&D pursuits, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-e) and what are termed "Clean Energy Innovation Centers," which is the latest moniker for the high-intensity energy innovation and commercialization institutes we and others have been proposing. These numbers compare favorably with the Waxman-Markey plan, which reserves just 1.5 percent of allowance revenue or just under $1 billion a year for R&D investments. However, in the larger scheme of things, they count as a major disappointment given that Metro Program analysis holds that the nation needs to be spending at least $15 billion a year on energy R&D, of which it least $10 billion a year might reasonably be expected to come out of the cap-trade system.

In sum, an only marginally different starting point in the Senate from where the House ended does not bode well for the changing the trajectory in Congress on the nation's energy and climate response. An acceptable regulatory response is falling badly short on applying sufficient quantities of revenues to the essential cause of energy innovation.

The nation's leading research universities are calling on the Senate to ensure dramatically more funding for clean energy R&D in the Senate climate and energy bill, investments they described as necessary to achieve the bill's targeted deep cuts in emissions.

In a letter delivered to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid earlier this month, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of American Universities (AAU) wrote:

"As the Senate moves forward with climate change legislation, we strongly urge you to ensure the amount of R&D funding designated for clean energy technologies is more in line with the President's proposal of $15 billion."

APLU and AAU collectively represent most of the nation's public and private research universities, and their letter imparts a pointed criticism of the House-passed ACES bill, calling for a frontloaded investment in research and development to kick-start critical clean energy innovation. The letter draws an apparent bottom line for the nation's top research universities, calling for dedicated R&D funding from the climate bill's cap and trade allowance revenues that totals at least one third of the $15 billion per year proposed by President Barack Obama.

Continue reading "Nation's Leading Universities Echo Calls for $15b/year in Clean Energy R&D; Draw $5b/year Bottom Line for Climate Bill" »

By Jesse Jenkins and Yael Borofsky

The latest draft of the Kerry-Boxer "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" would invest less than $10 billion of the bill's nearly $80 billion in annual cap and trade allowance revenue in clean energy technology, assuming EPA-projected allowance prices (note: all figures in 2009 constant dollars).

Over a range of likely allowance prices, the bill's clean energy investments could total as little as $8.6 billion and as much as $15.4 billion annually, a fraction of the at least $30-80 billion annually advocated by the Breakthrough Institute and an investment level dwarfed by the $44-66 billion annually China plans to invest in clean energy industries, infrastructure and technology over the next ten years (see graphic below).

Investments in the kind of clean energy research and development critical to make clean energy cheap and develop the low-cost, commercial clean energy technologies needed to drive deep emissions cuts and secure America's energy independence at an affordable cost will receive just $1.2-2.2 billion annually, over a range of likely allowance prices. That's just $200 million more than the House-passed Waxman-Markey "American Clean Energy and Security Act" (ACES) would invest in R&D at EPA-projected allowance prices. While this is a (very) small step in the right direction, the clean energy R&D investments in Kerry-Boxer still fall far short of filling the massive energy innovation gap and would boost R&D spending by as little as one-tenth of the $15 billion annually advocated by President Barack Obama - as well as a broad range of energy innovation experts, including a recent report by the Breakthrough Institute and Third Way. Funding for R&D under CEJAPA will be about a quarter to half as much as investments currently being made by the economic stimulus package, ARRA.

With more revenue devoted to ensuring deficit neutrality in the Senate bill, total investments in clean energy technology, broadly defined, are actually $1.2 billion less in Kerry-Boxer than in Waxman-Markey, at EPA-projected prices.

As the graphics below illustrate, the Kerry-Boxer climate and energy bill does not invest nearly as much as numerous experts have deemed necessary to make clean energy cheap and put us on the path to the clean energy economy, of which President Obama so eloquently speaks. Nor will this level of investment be sufficient to keep the U.S. competitive with Asian and European competitors, particularly China, who are surging past the United States with major direct investments to support their emerging clean energy technologies and industries.

The first graph focuses on investments in clean energy R&D, only. The second depicts investments in clean energy technology, broadly defined.

How do you think this draft of CEJAPA stacks up?

(click any of these to enlarge...)

Sources and Notes:
[1] See "Kerry-Boxer Climate Bill Allowance Allocation Breakdown," Breakthrough Institute (Oct. 26, 2009).
[2] See "Investing in the Next Generation of Energy Technologies," WhiteHouse.gov. President Obama pledges to "Invest $150 billion over ten years in energy research and development to transition to a clean energy economy."
[3] See "Jumpstarting a Clean Energy Revolution with a National Institutes of Energy," Breakthrough Institute and Third Way (Sept. 2009)
[4] See "34 Nobel Prize Winners Write President Obama Urging Support for Clean Energy R&D," Breakthrough Institute (July 2009)
[5] See "Top Energy Scientists Call for $30 Bi Annual Investment in Clean Energy," Breakthrough Institute (Dec. 2007). Call for $30 billion in clean energy technology RD&D investments
[6] See "Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes: A Step toward America's Energy Sustainability," Brookings Institution (Feb., 2009).
[7] See "Budget and Performance," U.S. Department of Energy.
[8] See "Detailed Summary of Energy Investments in Stimulus," Breakthrough Institute (Feb. 2009).
[9] See "R&D in the FY2009 Budget," American Association for the Advancement of Science (March 2009).
[10] See "New Apollo Program," Apollo Alliance (March 2009).
[11] See "Fast, Clean, & Cheap: Cutting Global Warming's Gordian Knot," Harvard Law and Policy Review. Breakthrough Institute (Jan. 2008).
[12] See "China's Big Plan to Win the Clean Energy Race," Breakthrough Institute (July 2009)

By Yael Borofsky and Jesse Jenkins

President Barack Obama spoke eloquently to an audience at MIT on Friday about clean energy, innovation, and the American entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, the masterful public speaker was disappointingly vague about supposedly "historic" climate and energy legislation now in front of the Senate; legislation too weak to make reality out of Obama's rhetoric.

In his speech, Obama touted the clean energy investments made by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) as the "largest investment in clean energy in history." He's right. Such investments are a prime example of the kind of proactive public investments that can transform the U.S. energy economy. That transformation is already underway, with these direct public investments expected to double U.S. renewable energy generation in the next three years and put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in an emerging clean energy sector.

Unfortunately, the President then turns right around, just a few breaths later, and claims "all of this must culminate in the passage of comprehensive legislation that will finally make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in America."

The irony is hard to miss. The House-passed "American Clean Energy and Security Act" (ACES) and its Senate sibling, the "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" (CEJAPA), as they currently stand, will provide a much smaller boost for clean energy than investments already underway in ARRA. Both bills would slash clean energy investments levels to just one third of the over $30 billion per year invested by ARRA, devoting just $10 billion annually to clean energy technology, broadly defined.

Continue reading "Turning Rhetoric to Reality?" »

Late Friday night, Senator Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee released a new draft of the Kerry-Boxer "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" (S.1733), the first version of the legislation to detail how emissions allowances created by the bill will be divvied up. These allowances, which give polluters the right to emit greenhouse gases under the bill's cap and trade program, will be worth nearly a trillion dollars over the first ten years of the program alone.

Breakthrough Institute staff worked over the weekend to dig through the new legislation and get an accurate picture of the allowance allocation pie [see summary tables and graphics below and click here to download a comprehensive spreadsheet (*also in xls format) of allowance allocations in both Kerry-Boxer and the House Waxman-Markey/ACES bill. Note: updated after initial posting to convert EPA forecasts to 2009 constant dollars. Hat tip to Jason at 1Sky for catch].

Overall, the allowance allocation scheme mirrors the bill's House-passed sibling, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), aka the Waxman-Markey bill (HR 2454) [for a side-by-side comparison of the two bills, click here].

Depending on the value of emissions allowances under the cap and trade program, an average of roughly $70 billion to $126 billion in emissions allowances will be created and distributed on each year under the first ten years of the bill's cap and trade program, 2012-2021.

Of that value, by far the largest share, roughly 64% of the total allowances, will be distributed for free to shield energy consumers and industry from the higher energy prices driven by the establishment of a price on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under a cap and trade system. This includes both direct rebates to end consumers and low-income energy assistance, as well as free allocations to electric and natural gas utilities (aka "distribution companies"), which they are directed to use "on behalf of" their customers. It also includes direct transfers of billions of dollars in free allowances to various industries, ranging from the relatively defensible (11.3% of allowances to heavy industries vulnerable to international competition), to the pretty indefensible, (e.g. a windfall-profit generating allocation of over 3% of the allowances -- worth at least $2 billion annually -- to the "merchant" operators of conventional coal plants).

By contrast, only about 13% of the value of allowances will be invested in various clean energy technologies, including incentives for the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology (aka CCS, given 2.2% of permits on average each year), federal, state and local government funds to incentivize renewable energy and energy efficiency (6.4%), and investments in advanced clean vehicle technologies (1.7%).

Just 1.9% of the allowances are dedicated to critical clean energy research and development (R&D) efforts, which amounts to an investment of just about $1.4 billion annually under EPA-projected allowance prices (in 2009 constant dollars).

Overall, the "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act's" investments in clean energy technologies will total under $9.5 billion per year under allowance prices projected by the EPA.

Continue reading "Kerry-Boxer Climate Bill Allowance Allocation Breakdown" »

Friday Factoids time again...

As President Obama challenges the U.S. to lead in the global clean energy race today, here's a quick comparison of methods that can drive clean energy deployment. Which do you think will be more effective...

• Average CO2 prices under the cap and trade system that would be implemented by the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill are expected to be roughly $15 per ton average through 2020.

  Ignoring for a moment free allocations that could undermine these permits, that will raise the price of coal-fired power plants and natural gas fired power plants against which clean energy must compete by roughly $15 per MWh and $8 per MWh respectively. A typical coal plant emits roughly 1 ton CO2 per MWh and a natural gas plant emits about 40% less.

• The production tax credit that has driven the rapid expansion of the wind industry (when it isn't expiring every other year...) drives down the cost of wind power by roughly $20 per MWh.


• Feed-in tariffs responsible for rapid growth of the solar industry in Germany lower the net cost of solar power by over 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, or $500 per MWh. In the U.S., an investment tax credit nocks off a full 30% of the cost of solar projects and state-level incentives offer even greater support in big solar states like California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The value of solar renewable energy credits (SRECs) supplied to solar energy generators in New Jersey has averaged well above $400 per MWh over the last few years.


• This year and next, new wind, solar and other renewable energy projects can enjoy a cash grant in lieu of these tax credits worth 30% of the total cost of the projects, funded through the stimulus bill. That incentive is expected to drive up to $10 billion in grants supporting over $33 billion in clean energy projects.

Click to enlarge

*All figures in this post are approximate and meant for comparison purposes only.

by Michael Shellenberger

A major report by New America Foundation's Peter Bergen and a long investigative piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker are raising questions about the efficacy of Predator assassinations of Taliban leaders in Pakistan.

Peter Bergen, CNN's top terrorist expert and Senior Fellow at New America Foundation did an analysis of Predators, which are unmanned aerial drones that are frequently equipped with missiles to shoot at alleged terrorist commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Bergen writes, "Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 750 and 1,000 people. Among them were about 20 leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.... of those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent... the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent."

The report and article raise questions about the efficacy and morality of the DoD and CIA using these robot planes to shoot missiles into commanders' houses. Lots of civilians die for every Taliban member they whack. They are clearly being used to good propaganda effect by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. David Rhode, the Times reporter who was kidnapped for 7 months earlier this year, wrote a remarkable five-part series in the Times that ended yesterday, confirming that.

Continue reading "Is Predator Assassination Program Helping or Hindering The War on Terrorists?" »

Climate change legislation recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now under consideration in the Senate will "succeed in perpetuating business as usual and fail to avert catastrophic climate change," according to a new Greenpeace report quietly released yesterday.

Titled "Business as Usual," the report was prepared on behalf of Greenpeace by David Sassoon, who publishes the climate news site, SolveClimate. It is written as a "plain-spoken" analysis meant to be "a call to action to the President of the United States," according to the document.

"In order for federal climate legislation worthy of this nation to pass Congress, we see no alternative to active and principled engagement from the Oval Office," Greenpeace writes.

The report levels five key criticisms of current Congressional legislation, calling attention to what Greenpeace describes as "five points of maximum danger" that the environmental group argues must be addressed to ensure climate legislation is capable of spurring "a swift transition to a clean energy future."

While we certainly don't share Greenpeace's position on all (most) climate matters, this new report levels a pointed and impassioned critique of current Congressional climate action well grounded in the details of the pending legislation. Here's a 'Cliffs notes' version of the full report below the fold...

Continue reading "Greenpeace: Climate Legislation More Likely to Perpetuate Fossil Fuel Economy than Spur Swift Transition to Clean Energy" »

Despite years of campaigning, documentaries, increasingly apocalyptic narratives and supposedly landmark climate and energy legislation awaiting Senate consideration, a recent Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll shows the majority of the public still ranks climate change last among important issues that affect the way it votes and ranks the economy before all else, even government spending.

According to Politico:

As the nation struggles to climb out of a recession, 45 percent rated the economy as the most important issue in deciding their vote if the congressional election were held today, followed by 21 percent who said government spending, 20 percent who chose health care reform and 9 percent who said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just 4 percent ranked climate change as the top issue.

This finding isn't new by any stretch. But it is significant news, given the heated debate on climate and energy policy that has passed through the House and is ongoing in the Senate.

Continue reading "Politico Poll Shows Climate Still Ranks Dead Last Among Voter Concerns" »

With the news outlets writing obituaries for the Kyoto Protocol framework, a leaked letter from Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh suggests that even tough-talking India may be prepared to move past the mourning stage and negotiate at upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen.

Although Ramesh denied that he was in favor of a Kyoto-alternative, according to the Times Online (UK), the letter reveals he is not averse to the "national schedules" concept proposed by Australia at climate talks in Bangkok earlier this month:

"We must welcome initiatives to bring the US into the mainstream if need be through a special mechanism," the letter reportedly said. "If the Australian proposal of a schedule maintains this basic distinction and nature of differential obligations we should have no great objections."

India and China represent the two largest developing nations in the G77, which continues to insist that a global climate agreement be based on the Kyoto framework, largely because it does not require such nations to make binding commitments to climate change mitigation. If these two leaders of the developing world shift stances, however, it would seal the fate of a framework whose failure was set in motion when the U.S. refused to sign on over a decade ago.

Continue reading "Leaked Letter Says India May Cooperate on Climate Without Kyoto" »

More than a year after Breakthrough's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger pronounced the Kyoto Protocol dead in "Scrap Kyoto," the rest of the world may be catching on as pressure mounts to produce a workable climate treaty that will encourage global action. National Public Radio wrote its own obituary, of sorts, with regard to international opinion on the framework last week:

"The landmark Kyoto climate treaty, a global warming pact negotiated 12 years ago, is unlikely to live on after its 2012 end date. During climate talks in Bangkok last week it became apparent that after the treaty's initial term ends, a new treaty will almost certainly take its place."

While developing countries have expressed anger that negotiations in Copenhagen may not focus on a Kyoto framework, the legitimacy of this anger is questionable. After all, a major reason that the Bush administration refused to sign the agreement was that Kyoto did not require participation from developing nations. Thus, while such countries are not wrong in arguing that they are not to blame for current carbon emissions levels, it still is illogical to build another treaty based on a dated framework that deals with only a subset of countries, instead of all of them, regardless of culpability. As top U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing told NPR:

"The notion that we should have an agreement which looks explicitly and exclusively at a handful of countries, doesn't seem right. The whole purpose of this is to move the world to a better place, not to move one set of countries down that road."

So, while Sudanese diplomat, Lumumba Di-Aping told NPR that scrapping Kyoto will be like "throwing away your baby and saying, 'No, I will have a new one," viewing the Kyoto Protocol as a so-called baby or brain-child is lip service to its creators, but not relevant to what will actually provide a foundation for an actionable global strategy to mitigate climate change. Not to harp, but legislation is not comparable to children in any way, since there is no obligation to remain loyal to a global treaty that not only failed to achieve global agreement, but also failed to achieve most of its desired results.

Continue reading "Kyoto Pronounced Dead, Makes Room for New Kaya-Direct Framework" »

Team Germany has emerged victorious from the three-week Solar Decathlon that overtook the National Mall in D.C., shedding a solar-powered spotlight on young clean technology innovators. But the German victory in a U.S. dominated competition may be a portent for the future of U.S. leadership in clean energy innovation.

The Solar Decathlon, in its fourth iteration, involved twenty teams of college students from all over the U.S. as well as Germany, Spain, and Canada. Each team submitted a solar-powered house for competition in 10 individual contests. Importantly, Team Germany succeeded in edging out the closest competition, Illinois and Team California in the net-metering contest, which a test to see how much power a house generates relative to how much it consumes (see the winning abode below the fold).

Continue reading "Symbolism? German Solar Team Bests U.S. In Shadow of U.S. Capitol" »

By Charles Kleecamp and Breakthrough Senior Fellow Barbara Hill. Originally published in Oct. 18th's Boston Globe.

The Waxman-Markey bill on climate change that recently passed the House is a train wreck waiting to happen. Intended to reduce global warming and achieve energy independence, it is totally inadequate in its reliance on a flawed cap and trade system, and the recently released Senate version called the Kerry-Boxer bill follows the same track. Like the House bill, the Senate version represents the further transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the nuclear and fossil-fuel industries - a result of their immense power and influence.

Both bills impose a legal limit or "cap'' on greenhouse gasses emitted each year. The trading part is based on issuing emission allowances, or permits, to various industries for each ton of greenhouse gas they emit. However, the fatal flaw in Waxman-Markey is the misguided government giveaway, for free, of 85 percent of all allowances, particularly to coal-related industries. For example, the most egregious source of carbon dioxide emissions is coal-fired electrical generating plants, which account for one-third of all such emissions. To mollify the powerful coal lobby and coal state representatives, this government giveaway provides little or no incentive to phase out old coal-fired plants anytime soon, and may diabolically increase their profits.

A lesson is to be learned from the 2005 European Union Emissions Trading Scheme that likewise gave away 95 percent of its emission allowances. The result was that EU electric utilities earned windfall profits while continuing to pass on higher energy costs to industrial and residential consumers. The EU told the US Government Accountability Office that "it could not be certain [the trading scheme] resulted in any reduction of emissions.''

To successfully confront the climate change crisis and the nation's addiction to fossil fuels, we at Clean Power Now endorse a straightforward carbon tax instead of the cap and trade schemes. To neutralize the impact on consumers, revenue from the carbon tax would be used to reduce payroll taxes, increase Social Security benefits, and fund renewable energy efforts that create new jobs and new industries particularly in the wind and solar sectors. This would amount to a tax shift with enormous societal benefits.

Others are supporting this as well. Elaine Kamarck, chairwoman of the US Climate Task Force and a former adviser to Al Gore, recently said in Politico, "Congress can go back to Al Gore's original idea about how to deal with climate change: Raise taxes on carbon, and cut taxes on work. A carbon tax shift is one of those rare ideas that can take a political liability and turn it into a political asset; it allows Congress to vote for a tax cut and a tax increase while putting into place the financial incentives we need to transition to a noncarbon future.''

A carbon tax is aimed at taxing the upstream source of carbon where it is produced, like coal mines, oil and natural gas wells, as well as shipping terminals and pipelines for imported fuel. Each pound of carbon embedded in the fuel would be taxed based on the fact that every pound of carbon consumed as fuel results in the emission of 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide. Starting at a tax rate of $15 per ton of emitted carbon dioxide and progressively increasing until the goal of 80 percent reduction is achieved by 2050 is a good place to start.

The senators and representatives who are charged with leading the nation's energy policy should remember that politics is first the art of the possible and secondly the art of compromise. That means that starting from an already compromised position leads only to deeper compromises.

Chuck Kleekamp is the president and Barbara Hill the executive director of Hyannis-based Clean Power Now.

As climate negotiations in Copenhagen rapidly approach, it seems the road is paved with good intentions - and potholes. While wealthy nations, like the United States and the EU, are willing to provide financial and technology aid to developing nations, at this point such countries have a will but not a way to offer the predicted $100 billion annually by 2020 to ensure that developing nations build their economies on efficient and clean energy technologies.

As recent New York Times coverage points out, the challenge of backing up commitments with actual money has proven a "blind spot" in preliminary talks:

"But to date there is no concrete strategy to raise such huge sums. There is not even agreement about which nations should pay or in what proportion...

Perhaps even more troublesome, the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which officially began operating in 2008 to help poor countries finance projects to blunt the effects of global warming, remains an empty shell, largely because rich nations have failed to come through with the donations they promised. The fund now holds about $18 million, a tiny fraction of what it was supposed to have, according to fund officials."

While even more cliches about unsubstantiated claims come to mind, this situation could create a serious negotiating challenge come December. Regardless of willingness, developing countries absolutely need the support of richer nations if the world will ever realize a clean energy future and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Continue reading "Preliminary Climate Talks Stumble Over Available Finances for Developing Nations" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

In my latest Bridges column I read the climate tea leaves to give my best guess as to what we should expect. Here is an excerpt:

Even with all the policy complexity and political noise, it has not been difficult for anyone paying attention to realize that climate policies are in deep trouble. So what has been the primary response of governments? The tried-and-true strategy is to identify an enemy and focus attention on anything but the failing climate policies. In this case, the enemies identified by the rich, Western countries are India and China, with their huge populations, rapid economic growth, and increasing carbon footprints to match. Repeating a refrain heard in 1997 during negotiations that resulted in the largely ineffectual Kyoto Protocol, we again hear that without action from India and China, the climate policies of the developed countries will all be for naught.

Please have a look, comments welcomed.

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

I have been asked by a reporter how to explain how much of the 2008 reduction in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions is due to changes in energy intensity and carbon intensity versus the slowdown in economic growth. The answer can be determined from the graph and figures above.

In 2008 year-over-year improvements (i.e., a smaller number is a larger improvement) in carbon intensity and energy intensity were slightly greater than the 10-year averages, but no where close to record levels. For instance, improvements were both smaller than in 2006, which had much higher economic growth and decreasing emissions. The data show that there is no evidence that there has been any departure from business-as-usual behavior of carbon intensity and energy intensity, and thus the overall decarbonization of the U.S. economy. Couple this with the fact that some of the changes in energy intensity and carbon intensity in 2008 were likely motivated by the state of the economy, there is no evidence of shifts in the U.S. economy that would lead to anything other than increasing emissions at business-as-usual levels (which was an 0.7% annual increase 1999-2007) as the economy recovers.

The calculations above come from the Kaya Identity, which says that:

Carbon Dioxide Emissions = GDP * Energy Intensity (TEC/GDP) * Carbon Intensity (CO2/TEC)

Sources:

GDP
CO2
Total Energy Consumption (TEC)

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

Several days ago the NYT had an interesting article about methane explaining that,

. . . some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the United States the leading sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's official estimate. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.)

According to NaturalGas.org "In its purest form, such as the natural gas that is delivered to your home, it is almost pure methane." Natural gas has an energy content of about 1 QUAD (quadrillion BTU) per trillion cubic feet. This means that the three trillion cubic feet referenced in the New York Times story is equal to about 3 QUADs. In 2008 the US consumed about 24 QUADs of natural gas, so the escaped methane worldwide is about 10-15% of total US consumption (domestic methane escape as a percentage of US consumption is about 1-1.5%).

At $8 per 1,000 cubic feet three QUADs of natural gas equates to about $24 billion. So if I've done my math right, uncaptured methane globally is like letting $24 billion float up into the air. How high would the price have to increase before eliminating that 1-1.5% inefficiency in the US becomes economically desirable? Or are there other obstacles than cost? If it was dollar bills floating away rather than methane molecules I'd have to think that somebody would be building a big net.

by Michael Shellenberger

The contemporary historian Vaclav Smil has written a major new work on the world's greatest threats, "Global Catastrophes and Trends" (MIT Press 2008), which assesses the threat of terrorism and war in the context of other global threats. Smil is a major global energy analyst, the author of a key textbook on the subject and numerous specialty papers, and the author of 20 significant works in his field, many of which are large overviews and summaries of a vast specialized literatures, from oil supplies to resource wars to the earth's chemical and biological processes. So this book has been greeted by the New York Review of Books and others as a major new entrant in a field marked by overstatement, hysteria, and poor analysis.

Because he wants us to appreciate the complexity and unreliability of any assessment of such a magnitude, Smil makes readers wait until page 245, eight pages from the finale, before ranking threats of "fatal discontinuities." He ranks them in order of risk, which he defines as probability/fatality, as the following: megawars, influenza, volcanoes, tsunamis, and asteroids. Smil actually considers global warming to be one of the biggest threats, but he doesn't count it as a fatal discontinuity because its effects would be gradual and dispersed and not easily tied to its causes. Terrorism isn't on the list because it affects so few people (unless it triggers a megawar, in which case it's no longer terrorism per se).

Smil considers terrorism in a larger discussion of violent conflicts. Only a few very big wars change the direction of human development and history, WWI, WWII, the American Civil War, and the Taiping war (1851-1864) -- which I had barely remembered from school, but which was significant for ending the royal order and killing 20 million Chinese, more than the total death toll of WWI. Great wars have killed about 95 million over the last 200 years. They occur about once every 35 years, and from this Smil concludes the probability of another great war at 20 percent over the next 50 years, which Smil notes is 1 - 2 orders of magnitude (OM) higher than global natural disasters.

Smil notes that the greatest episodes of human violence occurred outside of war -- Stalin and Mao's combined killing of 70 million people between 1929 and 1953 in Russia and 1949 and 1976 in China -- as these nations created modern albeit Communist states. In the 200 years before 1980, the number of wars increased each decade, a remarkable pattern, and these wars became of an increasingly short duration. But the 1990s may have been a turning point. Between 1992 and 2003, armed conflicts declined by 40 percent, and wars with more than 1,000 battle deaths dropped by 80 percent, a remarkable and hugely positive trend reversal. There is debate over whether this is momentary or a sign of a new trend.

Major researchers have concluded that wars are largely random and unpredictable even if they are understandable and explainable ex post facto. Warring nations, in the words of one of them, "bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in overheated gas." But other theorists say that rising global interdependence is behind the decline of wars, "greatly reducing the density and the pressure of the gas," writes Smil, extending the metaphor. Still, Smil notes, history is full of "fatal discontinuities," among them Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, and Chavez, all back-benching military officials who nobody expected to transform their countries.

Meanwhile, nuclear war remains a grave threat, but one that has been declining, even with the threat of nuclear terrorism, which Smil considers quite low. The greatest risks were during the Cold War, in particular the Cuban Missile Crisis. Deterrence still works.

Continue reading "Vaclav Smil on Terrorism, and the Hierarchy of Catastrophe" »

Serious doubts about the efficacy of carbon offsets projects to produce real, verifiable emissions reductions have been validated by a Greenpeace report, released this week, that exposes a prominent sub-national forest offset project as a "carbon scam."

The Noel Kempff Climate Action Project (NKCAP) has been underway in Bolivia since 1997 thanks to a coalition that involves the Bolivian government, concerned environmentalists and sponsorship from oil major BP and U.S. utilities American Electric Power and PacifiCorp. Originally designed to protect a 6,000 square mile section of the Bolivian rainforest while simultaneously allowing its sponsors to offset carbon emissions, the project was supposed to be a win-win-win for the rainforest, climate change advocates, and private utilities.

But according to the Greenpeace report, entitled Carbon Scam: Noel Kempff Climate Action Project and the Push for Sub-national Forest Offsets, the original goal to avoid emitting 55 million metric tons of carbon has not been met. The project had to recalculate its estimates, concluding it will prevent just 5.8 million metric tons from entering the atmosphere - an order of magnitude less. Furthermore, Greenpeace uncovered evidence that the project sponsors - AEP, BP and PacifiCorp - misreported the project's efficacy to the EPA, telling the agency it kept 7.4 million tons from entering the atmosphere between 1997 and 2009.

Continue reading "Forest Offsets Scam Exposed, Not a Strategy to Mitigate Climate Change" »

The United States may be stuck in the middle of a climate conundrum. A proposal to establish border tariffs to account for the carbon associated with the imported manufactured products, like steel, looks critical to securing the support of key swing Senators interested in protecting the competitive position of American manufacturing. Without these key swing votes, including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and at least nine of his Democratic colleagues, a Senate climate bill has little hope of passing, which climate advocates argue would hamstring U.S. negotiators trying to forge an international climate agreement in Copenhagen this December.

Yet according to the New Scientist, those same tariff provisions that could win passage of a U.S. climate bill are firmly opposed by China and other developing nations and could both damage Sino-American trade relations and fissure international climate negotiations:

"Following lobbying by heavy industries, the US Congress is considering imposing tariffs on imports from China and other developing nations. That could be a deal-breaker for poor nations at December's climate change talks in Copenhagen.

If Congress passes laws imposing a limit on US greenhouse gas emissions, energy-intensive sectors such as steel-making and cement manufacture would almost certainly face increased costs. Competitors in China and other developing nations not subject to similar restrictions - and China has said that it will not set itself an emissions target - might be able to produce steel more cheaply, and take business away from US firms."

With critical Senate Democrats demanding border tariffs, there is no chance the bill will pass without their inclusion. Alternately, China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and India will not be inclined to cooperate on an international agreement if they think the final legislation will include border tariffs.

Continue reading "Carbon Border Tariffs Put U.S. In Climate Conundrum" »

by Michael Shellenberger

In his speech announcing his new climate initiative, George Soros criticized emissions trading because it allows financial firms to manipulate the process. He announced a policy advocacy center, funded at $10 million per year, to be headed by Thomas Heller, a legal scholar who wrote a long critique, 'Beyond Kyoto,' criticizing the treaty framework as largely unworkable for Pew in 2003.

Heller criticizes the framework for being inadequate to engage developing countries, faults offsets as unable to solve the additionality problem, and promotes a sector-based alternative similar to the one advocated by Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado. Such an approach arrives at a time when negotiators are looking to a different set of metrics for developing nations -- emissions reductions equivalents like investments in technology -- to shape the Copenhagen agreement.

Soros' speech and Heller's role give new momentum to those who have argued that the focus on emissions targets and timetables is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to recognize the development needs of poor countries and the lack of cheap clean energy technology to replace fossil fuels.

Heller writes:

"In summary, the present climate regime adopts an architecture centered on emission outputs, with little consideration of inputs closely tied with fundamental development needs; creates a market-based mechanism with only limited potential to channel private investment toward large-scale climate-friendly endeavors; and provides no assurance of significant or stable assistance from developed country governments. In these circumstances, it is understandable if there is little sentiment or incentive among developing countries to expend serious effort in exploring the road beyond Kyoto."

Heller recognizes climate will not be a top priority for developing nations:

"However, to the extent that developing nations regard climate concerns as no more than potential barriers to their ability to reduce poverty and increase income levels, climate issues will not command the attention of core political actors."

Continue reading "Soros Slams Emissions Trading, Hires Kyoto Critic" »

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she's ready to green light debate by month's end on the Senate climate bill she has co-authored with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair John Kerry (D-MA). According to Politico:

A major Senate climate change bill is written and ready to be debated before the Environment and Public Works committee, the chairwoman of the panel said Tuesday.

Sen. Barbara Boxer's legislation would distribution of tens of billions of dollars of pollution allowances to power plants, manufacturing, and other industries. It will mirror cap and trade legislation passed by the House in late June with, she noted, "a few tweaks."

For a summary of those "tweaks" - at least as of the discussion draft version circulated by Kerry and Boxer two weeks ago, see my post "Anatomy of a Bill: Key Features of Kerry-Boxer Senate Climate Bill" over at theEnergyCollective.com.

Continue reading "Sen. Boxer Green Lights Senate Climate Debate" »

By Yael Borofsky and Jesse Jenkins

Initial modeling of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill (full text), the Senate sibling of the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill (aka ACES), reveals that carbon prices are likely to remain at the floor price set by the legislation through at least 2019, averaging just $15 per ton (in nominal dollars) through that period. According to E&E (subscription req'd), Point Carbon, the Norwegian consulting and carbon market analytics firm that released the analysis, was the first firm to model and analyze future carbon prices under the proposed legislation, and their findings corroborate Breakthrough's own analysis of Congressional climate legislation (see full series here).

In the Senate version of the bill, the Point Carbon model, which the firm dubs its "holistic" model because it accounts for major policy pieces within the legislation, identifies supply of domestic and international offsets as a major carbon price driver:

"Point Carbon analysts identified what they see as the major price drivers, including the supply of domestic and international offsets. The Senate bill, compared to the House version, includes more domestic offsets and allows fewer international credits into the system. Offsets are credits companies can buy for emissions reductions they contribute to in other parts of the country or globally."

Point Carbon concludes that the supply of permits and offsets will be sufficient to hold market prices for carbon to the lowest levels permitted by the legislation, a $10 per ton (in 2005 dollars) floor price, rising each year at 5% above inflation.

"The price of carbon emissions permits is expected to stay at the price floor through 2019. A price floor, if adopted, would provide an incentive for industrial plants and utilities to save, or "bank," their pollution permits in the early years, so they can be used in the later years as prices rise."(emphasis added)

As Breakthrough has shown in a series of analyses on the emissions cap under House climate legislation, banking of excess permits during early years helps delay required emissions reductions under the cap and trade program for many years into the future.

Continue reading "Kerry-Boxer Carbon Price Will Remain at Price Floor According to First Modeling of Draft Bill" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s blog

The UK Committee on Climate Change has issued it first progress report (here in PDF), and here is the bottom line:

Emissions reductions in recent years have been very modest. Going forward, a step change is required if carbon budgets are to be achieved.

The report also acknowledges indirectly that looking only at emissions is misleading, because it is easy to see the recent economic slump as being some sort of success in emissions reductions, however, sometimes a slump is just a slump:

Where CO2 emissions have fallen, the extent to which this has been through implementation of measures to improve energy or carbon efficiency is very limited.

In other words, nothing has really happened in the UK economy yet to accelerate decarbonization the UK economy. My analysis of the policy implications of the emissions reduction targets of the UK Climate Change Act and its implications for the rate of decarbonization of the UK economy can be found in this paper.

"If you had to explain America's economic success with one word, that word would be "education" ... Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process."

Friday factoids time: The U.S. biomedical and pharmaceutical industry invests between 10-20 percent of revenues in R&D and new product development, spending $58.8b on R&D in 2007. The U.S. government adds an additional $30 billion per year investment in biomedical R&D through the National Institutes of Health.

In contrast, the U.S. energy sector invests well below $3 billion annually in R&D in an industry with well over a trillion dollars in annual revenue. The energy sector's R&D spending as a percent of revenues - call that figure the industry's innovation intensity - is just 0.23%. That compares to a national average innovation intensity across all industries of 2.6%, or ten-times greater than the energy-sector's innovation intensity. And it pale sin comparison with the innovation intensity of leading technology and innovation-intensive sectors including biomedical technology (10-20%), information technology (10-15%), and semiconductors (16%).

This downright paltry private-sector energy innovation spending leaves a massive energy innovation gap that the U.S. government barely begins to fill, investing only about $5 billion annually in energy R&D. That's barely more than half the levels spent on public research to pursue clean and affordable energy alternatives during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The scale and urgency of our national energy challenges have clearly grown since then, yet the national commitment to energy innovation has moved in the wrong direction. Public R&D spending on health care ($30b) and defense ($80b) signal the scale of true national innovation priorities and begs the question: when will the U.S. get serious about investments in clean energy innovation? When we do, a new National Institutes of Energy and a major increase in federal energy R&D investments are needed to fill the energy innovation gap and spur a clean energy revolution.

Continue reading "National Institutes of Energy Needed to Fill Energy R&D Gap" »

On Tuesday, Breakthrough reported that a leaked draft of the European Commission's (EC) Strategic Energy Technology plan (SET) revealed plans for the European Union (EU) to invest $73 billion in clean energy technology. The official communication, released on Wednesday, was not a budget appropriation, but it was, however, a proactive clean energy investment "roadmap" of the next decade for the EU, Member states, and the private sector.

In the report, the European Commission acknowledged that the EU faced a critical challenge: reinventing its energy system. Towards that goal, the EC designated a role for the public sector explaining that the market was not capable, on its own, of ensuring a rapid transition to a clean energy economy:

"Markets and energy companies acting on their own are unlikely to be able to deliver the needed technological breakthroughs within a sufficiently short time span to meet the EU's energy and climate policy goals...Public policy and public investment partnering with the private sector is the only credible route to meet our goals, established for the public good."

The proposal was designed to demonstrate how much clean energy funding is necessary in order to realize the EC's "vision of a Europe with...a diverse portfolio of clean, efficient, and low-carbon energy technologies as a motor for prosperity," and the sources where such monies might be obtained.

Continue reading "European Commission Creates Roadmap, Not Budget for Clean Energy Investment" »

A week of preliminary UN climate talks in Bangkok come to a close today with little concrete progress to show for it. With just two months left until much-anticipated negotiations in Copenhagen, it will be "extraordinarily difficult" for the U.S. to agree to specific emissions reduction targets in an international climate treaty, warns the United States' deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing.

E&E News's ClimateWire reports (sub. required):

[T]he chief U.S. negotiator acknowledged that the United States may not agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a treaty this year until Congress passes its climate legislation.

"It will be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S. to commit to a specific number in the absence of action from Congress," State Department deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing said. "The question is open as to how much we can do. It's not really possible to answer."

Some progress was made in Bangkok, said Kim Carstensen, leader of the global climate initiative at WWF. But "on issues that require political breakthroughs, they've not made any real progress," she said. "That means targets, finance, institutions and the legal form of the outcome in Copenhagen."

While efforts to drive towards global agreement on binding emissions targets stall and both the United States and key developing nations, including China and India, balk at such proposals, a series of recent recommendations are establishing a growing consensus for an alternative to the targets and timetables approach that has repeatedly failed to make either political or substantive progress.

This emerging climate consensus would scrap the Kyoto Protocol's focus largely-symbolic emissions targets and timetables in favor of specific, actionable national commitments to the two things that actually drive down global emissions: accelerating the deployment of clean energy and the improvement of energy intensity in key sectors of the economy.

Alongside real commitments from the world's rich nations to help provide financial and technical support to speed the diffusion of clean technologies to the world's poorer nations, this more direct framework can build off of policies already underway in key nations, including the U.S., China and India, and result in far more concrete climate action than the empty commitments to symbolic emissions targets.

Continue reading "Climate Envoy: U.S. Unlikely to Commit to Emissions Target This Year" »

Massive investment in clean energy technology, to the tune of approximately $10 trillion over the next two decades, is needed to combat climate change, according to the International Energy Agency's early release of the World Energy Outlook 2009.

The new IEA report argues that the focal point for global climate and clean energy policy should center on three key "opportunities:" (1) accelerating the deployment of clean energy and the decarbonization of the global energy system; (2) improving the energy intensity of national economies; and (3) providing the financing and technology support necessary for clean and sustainable economic growth in the world's developing nations. That advice should be a lesson to negotiators preparing for climate talks this December, where in order to succeed, international policy must focus on concrete and actionable commitments to spur investment in climate change mitigation and clean energy technology, not symbolic and ultimately empty carbon emissions targets.

The truncated report, released on Tuesday, is designed to inform the international climate debate leading up to Copenhagen, and uses two scenarios, the Reference Scenario (no change to existing policies) and the 450 ppm scenario (necessary measures to achieve stability at 450 ppm CO2-e ) to demonstrate the scale of the technology and infrastructure challenges the world faces and the level of action necessary to overcome such obstacles.

Continue reading "IEA Sends Message to Copenhagen Delegates: $10 tn Needed to Combat Climate Change" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke, JR.'s Blog

I raised this question in an earlier post, suggesting from international statistics that China's energy intensity has improved only by 7.4% since 2005, rather than larger figures more commonly referenced based on data from the Chinese government.

Now, Julian Wong from the Center for American Progress points us to an analysis that he published on his blog showing substantially similar figures using another set of data. With that data the analysis concludes that:

[China's] energy intensity drop for the three year period 2006-2008 is only 7.7%, not the 10% commonly reported.

Before pointing us to the guest post Julian tells us in the comments that:

China's goal is to reduce energy intensity (energy consumption per unit of GDP) by 20% of 2005 levels by 2010. According to its own reports, China has made steady progress in achieving that (it is now at -13.4% of 2005 levels), but because GDP has continued to grow by 8 to 10% over the last few years, absolute emissions have increased.. . the main implication of my point is that while China has done a lot, it will need to do more going forward.

I responded by encouraging Julian to share the broader context of China's "fuzzy math" with his readers over at CAP, it seems like an important part of the story that is too often left out of CAP analyses.

By Yael Borofsky and Jesse Jenkins

Europe is planning to stage a grand entrance into the clean energy race by investing approximately $73 billion in clean energy research, according to Reuters, which has obtained an early draft of the European Commission's Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET Plan) scheduled for release Wednesday.

Until now, the race to lead the world in clean energy technology has largely involved competition between the United States, East Asia's "clean tech tigers" - China, Japan, and South Korea - and up-and-coming challenger, India. With the U.S. wavering for the better part of a year on how best to enact climate and energy legislation, the Breakthrough Institute and others have called on the U.S. to include large-scale investments in clean energy technology if it wants to remain a world leader in innovation and corner what could be a market worth trillions.

But it seems that Europe has beaten the U.S. to the punch. If the draft is any indication, the EU will triple funding in energy research in order to bring suite of clean energy technologies to market and achieve its 80% reduction in greenhouse gas target by 2050. Europe at least, has realized the urgency of the clean energy race and that investment in clean energy innovation is the only way to compete. As an EU official told Reuters:

"We know that low-carbon technology will one day become cost-competitive with fossil fuels, and the question then is whether the EU will be an importer or an exporter of that technology...We have to be in pole position."

Although it is not possible to verify the exact details of the plan until the report is released on Wednesday (stay tuned for future coverage), the draft is a reliable indication of the types of investments Europe has in store, including EU16 billion (US$23.5 billion) for solar power, EU6 billion (US$8.8 billion) for wind power, EU7 billion (US$10.3 billion) for nuclear, and EU13 billion (US$19 billion)for carbon capture and storage technology, all over the next ten years.

Continue reading "EU Set To Enter Clean Energy Race with $73 billion for R&D" »

On whether or not the Obama administration has the political will to bring about financial reform:

"The rhetoric is starting to come around, but the proposals are still designed to create the status quo before the crisis. It's analytically bankrupt. Nothing they're trying for would have prevented the current crisis had it been in place, and it's very unlikely that it will prevent crisis in the future...

In particular, the administration want to create the secondary market that caused trillions of dollars of losses. They still want a massively, too-large financial structure -- so large that it clearly harms the economy."

- William Black, a former federal regulator during the Savings & Loan crisis and currently, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as quoted in Newsweek, "Financial Follies 2.0," October 6th, 2009

Here is Joseph Romm of ClimateProgress writing about the United States Climate Action Partnership proposal in January 2009. Despite Romm's assertions that this proposal was a "dead end ... obsolete and irrelevant," the Blueprint for Legislation Action developed by USCAP, a coalition of major corporations and DC-based green groups, went on to form the framework of the Waxman-Markey climate bill. That bill went on to pass the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009 with all of the features Romm criticized here still intact: a "lame" 2020 emissions target of 83% of 2005 levels undermined by 2 billion tons of "rip-offsets" permitted each year; new conventional coal plants permitted if they are "capture ready" and able to install CCS technology by 2025; and the majority of cap and trade allowances given away for free. Joe Romm went on to be one of the Waxman-Markey bill's loudest champions. But here's a 'blast from the past' to consider as we take a look at a new bill emerging in the U.S. Senate. (emphasis in the original).

I think it is absurd for any serious environmental group to support permitting new coal plants that don't capture and store the vast majority of their emissions. Yet as the WashPost reports:

"The plan would also require any coal plant permitted after Jan. 1, 2015, to emit no more than half the carbon dioxide emissions now considered normal and require any newly permitted plant today to have the ability to be retrofitted to meet that standard."

These are bogus provisions. Nobody really knows what a capture-ready plant design is -- this is the climate equivalent of "the check is in the mail." ...

But it is the 2020 target and the issue of rip-offsets that make this proposal truly untenable. The Blueprint calls for requiring that U.S. greenhouse gases (GHGs) return to "80%-86% of 2005 levels by 2020." That is essentially returning to 1990 levels, which the science clearly says is inadequate to stabilizing at 450 ppm, let alone the 350 ppm target that environmental groups should be seriously considering ...

But the already-lame USCAP proposal shoots itself in the (other) foot with its embrace of a staggering amount of rip-offsets. ...

Shame on my NRDC and EDF and WRI friends for signing on to such nonsense. . .

But the unconscionable amount of rip-offsets USCAP embraces guts the entire effort. ...

The USCAP plan would call for a reduction of 1.0 to 1.4 billion tons of U.S. GHGs in 2020, while allowing 2 billion or more tons of offsets, at least half of which don't even have to be in this country. When would US carbon dioxide emissions see serious reductions under this plan? Who knows? It's déja vu all over again (see "Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025").

Let me repeat once more, as a major 2008 analysis from Stanford found

... "between a third and two thirds" of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) -- set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations -- do not represent actual emission cuts."

And this led to the study's stark conclusion:

"... any offset market of sufficient scale to provide substantial cost-control for a cap-and-trade program will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions....."

...The USCAP proposal has other features that are problematic. For instance, "USCAP recommends that a significant portion of allowances should be initially distributed free to capped entities...." Again, Obama himself has called for a 100% auction. As the Friends of the Earth response to USCAP says:

"Put simply, the proposal would reward corporate polluters with hundreds of billions of dollars of giveaways, and its near-term pollution reduction targets are far weaker than what scientists have called for. The proposal is further weakened by its massive carbon offset loopholes. Were such a proposal to be enacted into law, it would fail to achieve the emission reductions we need in the U.S. and would undermine our ability to meaningfully and credibly engage in international climate negotiations. This is a dead-end approach that policymakers should reject."

Precisely.

This proposal is a dead end -- and an even deader starting point. Shame on NRDC, EDF, and WRI for backing it.

To head-off concerns that Joe Romm's comments have been taken out of context, we encourage readers to view Romm's full critique of the USCAP proposal here.

"Copenhagen climate talks are in trouble," say Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in their new piece for the Washington Post's "Planet Panel", and the solution is to desert "unenforceable emissions targets and timetables," in favor of a new framework built on "technology investment, innovation, and deployment."

You can read an excerpt from the piece below or access the full article here.

Here's the problem in a nutshell. The world will roughly double its consumption of energy by 2050. Reducing emissions by half of today's levels before then will require inventing and deploying low-carbon sources of power that are far cheaper than today's alternatives. That's because no nation will implement pollution controls that raise the price of fossil fuel energy by very much -- certainly not enough for clean power sources to become cost-competitive.

Just as no government will make fossil fuels as expensive as today's low-carbon power sources, no private investors will make the large (multi-billion) investments needed to accelerate energy technology innovation. Only governments can do this. Happily, they have a long track record supporting private sector innovation through R&D and procurement. Examples include agricultural crops, radios, jet airplanes, microchips, computers, the Internet, solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear plants and pharmaceutical drugs.

A new treaty focused on technology investment, innovation, and deployment should include rather than exclude China and other large developing nations. China is already poised to massively out-spend -- and out-compete -- the U.S. in investments in everything from solar panels to nuclear reactors to electric cars.

No treaty can work that is against the economic self-interest of nations. Economic development through new technology has the potential to bring them together. After World War II, the European Coal and Steel Partnership did just that. Through coal and steel the continent was rebuilt, in part with U.S. investments. That partnership was so successful that it is today simply known as the European Union.

It is the creation of the EU -- not national air pollution laws -- that should be the basis for a new agreement in Copenhagen.

Continue reading "Only Technology Policy, Not More Targets and Timetables, Can Save Copenhagen" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke, Jr.'s Blog

Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, knows a good negotiating position when he has one. So India now ups the pressure on the United States in order to ensure that India is not tagged as the global bad guy of climate policy. In the Guardian he refers to the Kerry-Boxer Bill in the Senate as not really up to the task:

"The bill that was with the Senate yesterday talks about a 20% cut on 2005 levels, which is really only a measly 5% reduction on 1990 levels," Ramesh told a US-Indian energy conference in Washington, put on by Yale University and The Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi.

He added that America and other developed countries had to commit to deep emissions cuts in the next decade - not by 2050 - if they wanted to see India and China take serious action to contain the rise in their future emissions, as their surging economies expand.

"If we are serious about climate change we should stop talking about 2050. I laugh when countries put up numbers for 2050," Ramesh said.

However, he was almost immediately rebuffed by Obama's climate change envoy, Todd Stern, who said that such a narrow focus on 2020 actions could wreck the prospects of reaching a deal at Copenhagen. "We can talk about that all the way to Copenhagen and for the next two or three years and get nothing done," Stern said. "We have to be practical."

India has categorically stated that they will not commit to limit emissions, and in that they have the support of the chairman of the "policy neutral" IPCC:

. . . Ramesh ruled out any possibility that India would agree to an absolute cap on emissions in the future. "N-O, No," he said. The position was endorsed by RK Pachauri, who heads the IPCC. "Obviously you are not going to ask a country that has 400 million people without a lightbulb in their homes to do the same as a country that has splurge of energy," he told the conference."

And if the US doesn't like it, then its just tough luck, as India has the upper hand here.

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke, Jr.'s Blog

Nature asked Mike Hulme, Tony Juniper, Mark Lynas, Oliver Morton, Ron Oxburgh, Rajendra K. Pachauri, Roger Pielke, Jr., Andrew Revkin & Joseph Romm for a recommendation for a single book to read leading up to Copenhagen, and then to provide a capsule review of that book. You can see what resulted here and offer your own thoughts at the Nature Climate Feedback blog.

As the time for developed and developing nations to come to a global agreement on climate change mitigation and pave the way for productive climate negotiations in Copenhagen dwindles, Australian climate change ambassador Louise Hand proposed an idea that could potentially bring the ongoing stalemate to an end, just in time.

According to Reuter's coverage of the climate talks taking place in Bangkok, Thailand, Hand pitched the delegates on the concept of a national schedule, which, instead of stubbornly insisting on binding emissions targets, commits developing countries to a series of climate mitigation steps that are both economically and realistically feasible. Rich countries would still be free to agree to the targets most of them are so insistent upon.

In this way, all countries involved are demonstrating a commitment to climate change mitigation without putting their growing economies at risk. As Hand remarked, the concept is relatively simple:

"At its core it is a simple idea...Each party would have a national schedule attached to the treaty. In the schedule would be parties' mitigation actions -- economy-wide targets for developed countries; a suite of actions for developing countries."

While some environmentalists are concerned that allowing developing nations to sidestep binding targets represents backsliding from the Kyoto framework, this concept of national schedules may actually prove more effective at reducing emissions than targets, which are typically "magical" climate change solutions rather than specific, achievable action plans.

Continue reading "New "National Schedules" Proposal Could Change International Strategy in Time for Copenhagen" »

Yesterday, the tiny window of opportunity for President Obama's national energy education initiative, RE-ENERGYSE (Regaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge), unceremoniously vanished, at least for FY2010, when House and Senate Conferees on the Energy and Water Appropriations bill completed the final conference agreement and provided no funding for RE-ENERGYSE.

This isn't a total surprise. RE-ENERGYSE - originally a $115 billion initiative designed to support the education of the next generation of scientists, engineers, and energy innovators - was allocated only $7.5 million by the House appropriations committee and then subsequently slashed by the Senate committee earlier this summer. Not surprising, maybe, but certainly disappointing and representative of a larger lack of support for American clean energy competitiveness at a time when energy and climate change is a top national policy priority and several Asian nations are aggressively positioning themselves to corner burgeoning clean energy technology markets.

After both the House and Senate appropriations were announced in July, the Breakthrough Institute's Jesse Jenkins and Teryn Norris penned an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle comparing the number of science, math, and engineering undergraduates in the U.S. to those in China.

"Only 15 percent of undergraduate degrees earned in the United States are in science and engineering, compared with 50 percent in China, according to the National Academies... If the United States had responded to the Soviet launch of Sputnik the way today's Congress is responding to the Asian energy challenge, America would have lost the space race and been left behind in the industries that fueled a half century of economic progress."

Perhaps even more disheartening, is that more than 100 universities, professionals, and youth groups - in other words those individuals most cognizant of the need for an education program focused on building American competitiveness - submitted a letter urging Congress to fully fund RE-ENERGYSE, which it appears was roundly ignored.

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