Coal use will rise an estimated 13.5 percent in Germany this year, resulting in at least 14 million metric tons of additional carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, even as the nation continues to idle two-fifths of its nuclear power fleet.
The major reduction in European energy demand and industrial output caused by the global recession has led CO2 emissions to slide faster than the emissions reductions mandated by either the Emissions Trading Scheme or the EU's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Yet instead of accelerating emissions cuts, the ironic economics of the carbon trading system have justified a return to coal in Germany and elsewhere, as a glut of emissions permits drives down the cost of carbon pollution and makes coal highly profitable once again.
The odd logic of the emissions targets and timetables has even been used by German greens (and their defenders internationally) to justify trading zero carbon nuclear for greater coal combustion. Germany's decision last year to power down eight of its 17 nuclear reactors leaves idle enough zero carbon power to drive down the country's CO2 emissions another 21 percent from 2008 levels. Yet instead of sounding the alarm at this huge missed opportunity as the nation instead turns back towards coal, some German greens have gone so far as to claim Germany literally "has the right" to eschew nuclear in favor of much greater emissions levels than necessary.
So much for the extreme urgency of climate mitigation...
State-led investments in energy technology are the best way to reduce economic dependence on dirty fossil fuels, according to a new Breakthrough Institute analysis of 26 developed countries.
National Decarbonization, 1971 - 2006 An Original Breakthrough Institute Investigation
Introduction
Driving down global emissions of climate destabilizing carbon dioxide by at least 50 percent by 2050 may be necessary to avoid the most dangerous impacts of global climate change (IEA 2010). To achieve these deep emissions declines while supporting continued economic growth and expanded energy access, particularly in the world's emerging economies, the world's economies must rapidly decarbonize, reducing the amount of CO2 produced for each unit of economic activity at greater than 4 percent per year (IEA 2010).
That may not sound like much, but such rates are more than three times greater than the 1.3 percent per year global average rate sustained since the 1860s (Nakicenovic 1997).
Even at a national scale, achieving a 4 percent per year or greater rate of decarbonization is unprecedented in recent history, according to new analysis from the Breakthrough Institute, which examines historic decarbonization rates among developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD).
Nonetheless, by examining the rates of decarbonization among these OECD nations, this analysis provides historic evidence regarding the fastest sustained rates of decarbonization achieved by developed economies to date, while shedding light on key drivers of decarbonization. Insights from the nations that have achieved the fastest reductions in carbon intensity will be critical to formulate effective policies to accelerate global decarbonization and climate mitigation.
What does energy have to do with ending poverty? Bill Gates -- whose philanthropic largesse has made him one of the most prominent advocates for the world's poor -- should know.
At the recent Wall Street JournalECO:nomics forum, Gates made a pitch for making energy cheap and clean around the world.
"If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially is about the best thing you could do for them," Gates said. "Energy is the thing that allowed civilization over the last 220 years to dramatically change everything."
Leading environmental organizations "re-brand" climate mitigation efforts as key to reducing public health risks, embracing recommendations of a Hartwell Group report.
Leading green groups, including the National Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club, are embracinga pragmatic approach to advance climate mitigation efforts by refocusing public outreach efforts around the near-term health benefits associated with reducing reliance on coal-fired power plants and increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.
"We're going to talk a lot about the health implications of dirty air," Heather Taylor, director of NRDC's political arm told Politico.
That's a smart move, says climate change communication expert and American University professor Matthew Nisbet.
While efforts to tackle climate change will avoid potentially significant long-term damages, to secure broad public support, those efforts must be linked to more salient and immediate public concerns while delivering near-term benefits. As Nisbet explains:
"In a polarized America, if you are going to build support for candidates in the Midwest and other battleground states that will back legislation on climate change during the next Congress, you have to switch focus to emphasize public health and economic resilience, goals realized through incremental actions like eliminating coal plants and boosting fuel efficiency."
Nisbet's observations echo the recommendations outlined in Climate Pragmatism, a July 2011 report authored by an international group of 14 scholars and analysts representing a diverse range of political and ideological positions -- from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to moderate Democratic think tank Third Way and the liberal Breakthrough Institute.
NPR's Christopher Joyce reports on the energy, economic, and climate challenges now facing Japan as its fleet of nuclear power plants sits idle following the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns suffered one year ago.
For the first time in decades, the nation's treasured trade surplus is gone, eroded by soaring imports of fossil fuels needed to replace the 30 percent of the nation's electricity once supplied by more than 50 nuclear reactors idled since last March's disaster.
Joyce interviews Breakthrough Institute's Jesse Jenkins, who notes the economic and climate costs facing Japan as it turns away from nuclear energy:
For the first time in decades, Japan's vaunted trade surplus is gone. The country now spends more on imports than it earns from exports. What is Japan buying? Fuel.
"The major utilities in Japan have increased their consumption of fuel oil by more than double," says Jesse Jenkins, an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a research group. The institute is in favor of nuclear power as a hedge against climate warming. Japan, says Jenkins, "has increased their use of liquefied natural gas by about 27 percent and relied more heavily on coal as a share of their energy use."
And that's expensive. One analysis by the International Energy Agency in Paris says replacing the electricity from idled nuclear plants is costing Japan an extra $100 million a day.
Then there are the climate effects. The nuclear reactors were not emitting carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Oil, coal and natural gas do.
Jenkins says Japan's goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is now shelved. In fact, emissions are going up. "They're swapping fossil fuels for nuclear and that's driving up their CO2 emissions and the carbon intensity of their electricity supply," he says.
With essentially no domestic fossil fuel resources and a renewable energy sector that provides just about 2 percent of the nation's electricity supply today, there are no easy choices as Japan contemplates its energy future.
Japan's nuclear power fleet has sat idle since a powerful earthquake struck the nation in March 2011, driving a sharp increase in fossil fuel imports and a spike in the nation's carbon intensity.
Japan's nuclear power fleet has sat idle since a powerful earthquake struck the nation in March 2011, driving a sharp increase in fossil fuel imports and a spike in the nation's carbon intensity, new data shows. Together, these changes have battered Japan's trade balance, increased the carbon intensity of its energy supply, and raised important questions about its future CO2 emissions trajectory.
Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster have exerted substantial impacts on the nation's economy and energy system. Given Japan's reliance on nuclear power, its lack of domestic fossil resources, the magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami, and the technical and political implications of a major nuclear crisis, these impacts were largely predictable.
But although it was clear early on that Japan's triple disaster signalled major economic and technical changes in Japan, only recently has good data become available to shed light on the specifics of the changes underway.*
Two notable trends emerge from this data, both relating to Japanese energy supply. Together, these trends are exerting profound impacts on Japan's trade balance, the carbon intensity of its energy supply, and its future CO2 emission trajectory.
Economist: I think you are way too optimistic that investments in technological innovation funded by a low carbon tax can lead to accelerated decarbonization of the economy. That is why I favor a high carbon price.
Me: But isn't the point of the high carbon price to stimulate innovation? The question is thus how to stimulate or motivate that innovation. I think a high carbon price is politically impossible, which is why I argue for starting low with investments in innovation as part of the package.
A pair of new federal air pollution regulations could result in the closure of up to 69 aging, inefficient coal-fired power plants, simultaneously reducing both harmful air pollutants and driving a 1.4 to 4.4 percent reduction in total US electric power sector CO2 emissions, according to a Breakthrough Institute analysis.
Updated: This post was originally published on January 1, 2012. It was updated on January 27, 2012 to reflect the announced closure of six coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
Two new federal air pollution regulations are expected to spur the closure of up to 69 aging, inefficient, coal-fired power plants, reducing both harmful air pollutants and emissions of the climate destabilizing greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), according to an AP survey of US power plant operators and a preliminary Breakthrough Institute analysis of the likely impacts on CO2 emissions.
According to the AP survey, 31 coal-fired electricity generating units at power plants in a dozen states are expected to close rather than face costly upgrades to comply with a pair of new EPA regulations designed to curb emissions of smog-forming pollutants and toxic smoke stack emissions. These plants are joined by four plants in Ohio that were formerly classified by the AP survey as "at risk for closure" and two plants in Pennsylvania and Maryland that were not on AP's list. These units have a combined nameplate capacity of 15,532 megawatts.*
Up to 32 additional coal-fired units with a combined 9,714 megawatts of capacity may also decide to close, as the costs of compliance with the EPA's recently enacted Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, designed to curb air pollution in states downwind from coal-fired power stations, and the new Mercury and Air Toxics Rule announced this week both take effect.
While the purpose of these regulations is to reduce harmful pollutants and improve public health, closure of these aging plants will also lead to a 1.4 to 4.4 percent reduction in US electric power sector emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to an analysis completed by the Breakthrough Institute. These air pollution regulations are thus a prime example of the ongoing success of pragmatic, "oblique" strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A "no regrets" climate strategy: cutting non-CO2 contributors to climate change may be the fastest way to slow warming, while yielding significant, near-term co-benefits.
It is time to take stock of our current climate trajectory, and consider what it means for climate policy. In Part 1 of this week long series, we argued that our current climate trajectory means we must 1) redouble efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and 2) we must proactively build resilience to the uncertain impacts of a changing climate. Part 2 examined why voluntary economic contraction is a not a viable strategy for reducing emissions “as quickly as possible.” Part 3 explained why implementing a robust clean energy innovation strategy is the key way to making clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, thus enabling the rapid adoption of low-carbon energy sources and drastically reducing CO2 as quickly as possible. Part 4 discussed why adaptation through innovation is central to preparing for the impacts of a warmer world. Finally, Part 5 discusses how reducing a set of non-CO2 pollutants and greenhouse gases can make a significant, near-term dent in warming and buy time to decarbonize the energy system.
As we have argued previously in this series, averting as much dangerous climate change impacts as possible hinges on our efforts to drive innovation and make clean energy cost competitive with fossil fuels. The cost of decarbonization is the key moderating force affecting the pace of carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions, and innovation is the key to lowering these costs and accelerating climate progress. However, CO2 isn’t the only powerful contributor to global warming, and scientists have identified opportunities to make a significant, near-term dent in warming by tackling other greenhouse gases and pollutants.
While we cannot effectively manage human impact on the climate over the long-run without decarbonizing the global energy system — a task that hinges on the energy innovation efforts described in Part 3 of this series — in the short term, we would do well to seize opportunities to reduce non-CO2 emissions, particularly those with immediate co-benefits (e.g. profitable byproducts, improved public health, or better agricultural yields) that align incentives for rapid action.
It is time to take stock of our current climate trajectory, and consider what it means for climate policy. In Part 1 of this week long series, we argued that our current climate trajectory means we must 1) redouble efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and 2) we must proactively build resilience to the uncertain impacts of a changing climate. Part 2 examined why voluntary economic contraction is a not a viable strategy for reducing emissions “as quickly as possible.” Part 3 explained why implementing a robust clean energy innovation strategy is the key way to making clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, thus enabling the rapid adoption of low-carbon energy sources and drastically reducing CO2 as quickly as possible. Part 4 discusses why adaptation through innovation is central to preparing for the impacts of a warmer world and buying us time to drastically cut emissions.
The door is closed to mitigating away all of the potentially dangerous impacts of climate change. We’ve simply waited too long to take sweeping action and provide a cheap and viable clean energy substitute to fossil fuels. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed that even so, the key objective of climate mitigation efforts is still the same – we must drastically cut emissions as quickly as possible (and Part 2 and Part 3 discussed how).
Yet the warmer world we have locked ourselves into does inform other policy choices. In particular, building our resilience to extreme weather and increasing our adaptive capacity is now equally as important as mitigation and should be treated as such. Advocating for adaptation and mitigation is nothing new – in fact it’s common place. The argument here is that adaptation must now be a cornerstone of all climate policy choices – domestic or otherwise.
When it comes to climate adaptation policymaking, a lot of work needs to be done, as it’s still a topic that has been largely ignored by U.S. decision makers. In fact, the most immediate hurdle is for decision makers to stop paying lip-service to the need for an adaptation policy and begin aggressively implementing real resilience efforts.
It is time to take stock of our current climate trajectory, and consider what it means for climate policy. In Part 1 of this week long series, we argued that our current climate trajectory means we must 1) redouble efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and 2) we must proactively build resilience to the uncertain impacts of a changing climate. Part 2 examined why voluntary economic contraction is a not a viable strategy for reducing emissions “as quickly as possible.” Part 3 explains why implementing a robust clean energy innovation strategy is the key way to making clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, thus enable rapid adoption of low-carbon energy sources and drastically reducing CO2 as quickly as possible.
As we wrote in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, our current climate trajectory and global political economy dictates that the only way we can limit potentially dangerous climate change impacts, above the dangerous impacts we’re already locked into, is to redouble efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. To rapidly decarbonize the economy requires greatly accelerating the replacement of fossil fuels with low or zero-carbon clean energy substitutes. Implementing the right strategies to do so raises numerous stark policy choices and issues.
The most fundamental issue is that energy is largely a fungible commodity – the electricity coming out of your wall socket doesn’t have any immediately tangible differences whether it comes from a coal plant or a wind farm. The only immediate difference is cost. This key reality means that the rate of adoption for new clean energy technologies is largely moderated by two principal levers:
(1) The level of public tolerance for paying for the cost of cleaner energy in the form of higher energy costs, subsidies, or reduced economic welfare; and
(2) The cost competitiveness of clean energy compared to fossil fuels.
David Roberts at Grist.org argues that the "brutal logic" of climate change demands we trade economic growth in the world's developed nations for a little more climate breathing room. Is voluntary economic contraction a viable climate solution?
It is time to take stock of our current climate trajectory, and consider what it means for climate policy. In Part 1 of this week long series, we argued that our current climate trajectory means we must 1) redouble efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and 2) we must proactively build resilience to the uncertain impacts of a changing climate. Part 2 in this series examines whether voluntary economic contraction is a key strategy in reducing emissions “as quickly as possible.”
In a recent commentary, Grist’s David Roberts notes that our current climate trajectory puts us on a path to dangerous climate impacts, demanding that we must reduce emissions dramatically over the near-term. His proposed strategy to reduce emissions as quickly as possible constitutes an “all-hands-on-deck mobilization” (including a carbon tax, efficiency standards, subsidies, tech development). He also argues that the time has come to consider “shared sacrifice” in the world’s wealthiest nations: a course of voluntary economic contraction in developed economies (thus reducing fossil energy consumption), while allowing developing nations time to shift from dirty to clean energy.
As we wrote in Part 1 of this series, we firmly agree that our climate trajectory demands that we redouble efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. They key question remains: what levers or strategies are central to determining how quickly we can reduce emissions. Is voluntary economic contraction a key climate strategy?
By Dr. Harry Saunders, Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow
Recent posts by the CO2 Scorecard group claim to have discredited the analysis on rebound effects in industrial sectors of the US economy presented in one of my recent papers--let me here call it "Saunders." The authors offer an analysis of their own said to "devastate" the results I have reported there. Herewith is my response.
The Stakes
It is worth reminding readers of the stakes here. The energy consumption forecasts relied on by the IPCC, the IEA and McKinsey ignore rebound effects, or--to be maximally generous--treat them very inadequately. To the extent ignoring rebound effects results in underestimates of future energy use, it means we have less time than is generally believed to devise climate change solutions. This is surely problematic, but no serious individual would dispute the contention that uncomfortable reality must always trump wishful thinking. I believe rebound effects are significant and quite large, and I believe the peer-reviewed literature, including my own extensive contributions to that literature, supports this view. Unfortunately.
And to be absolutely clear: energy efficiency is a good thing (for one thing increasing economic welfare) and must be aggressively pursued; this has always been my position. It's just that it may not deliver the large reductions in energy use many (including myself) would hope for.
Editors note: for more background and reading on rebound effects see...
In light of the above, the CO2 Scorecard posts on this subject (1 and 2) are disappointing and disheartening. But they require a response, even if only to defend the honor of my fellow scholars in this field. A complete dissection of the CO2 Scorecard analysis would make this post too long. Rebound analysis, done properly, is a highly technical undertaking. The approach here is to show a handful of the serious problems with the authors' analysis by way of listing five points, with links to an appendix containing the technical foundation for these points. Those interested in further evaluating this foundation can link to the technical discussion; those interested only in the claims made here can skip the full technicalities. Either way, as you will see, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the authors of the CO2 Scorecard analysis are guessing at what they hope are problems with the Saunders analysis but then have not bothered to check if their guesses are actually right...
Recognition is setting in that the current trajectory of global emissions will almosts certainly lead us to a world of dangerous climate impacts. Is this a game changer for our climate policy strategies?
Significantly limiting humanity’s impact on the global climate is quite simply an enormous task. Unfortunately, thanks to budget austerity and federal gridlock, any hope of implementing sweeping U.S. climate/energy policy has been optimistically pushed back to 2013 or beyond (though some incremental improvement is possible). And even the most hopeful observers of the recent global climate negotiations in Durban find little real progress towards reducing emissions. Now more than ever, it is time to take a hard look at where we stand and figure out how to match our policies to our climate goals.
Amongst climate scientists and advocates of climate policy, a growing recognition is taking hold that the current trajectory of global emissions will almost certainly lead us to a world of dangerous climate change impacts. For some, this means coming to terms with the fact that holding total global warming to less than 2°C, a commonly adopted “line in the sand” drawn by many climate advocates, has become nigh-impossible.
As a number of scientific articles have shown, most recently by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in the Journal of the Royal Society, limiting the world to 2°C warming most likely requires peaking total global carbon emissions in the next 5-10 years followed by immediate reductions to near-zero by 2050 (see Anderson and Bows emission trajectory options here, via David Roberts, and by David Hone here). It is now fairly obvious that the lack of global progress on decarbonization has likely pushed this timetable out of reach, prompting some recent soul searching amongst many climate advocates (the two of us included).
Is this realization a game changer for climate policy? Yes and no.
Oblique strategies appear to be working to reduce CO2 emissions. New rules from the EPA to limit emissions of the neurotoxin mercury and other toxic and carcinogenic pollutants from the nation's coal-fired power plants represents a small, but real, step forward toward a cleaner, healthier, and lower-carbon energy system.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled new (and long-overdue) regulations today to rein in mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal and oil-fired power plants. The new mercury rules, designed to save lives and protect children from the potent neurotoxin, are likely to trigger the closure of many of America's oldest, dirtiest coal-fired power plants over the next decade.
If and when the new rule takes effect, it will be the first time the federal government has enforced limits on mercury, arsenic, acid gases and other poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals emitted by the burning of fossil fuels.
Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said that the regulations, which have taken more than 20 years to formulate, will save thousands of lives and return financial benefits many times their estimated $11 billion annual cost. ...
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, harming the nervous systems of fetuses and young children and causing lifelong developmental problems. Other pollutants covered by the new rule, including dioxin, can cause cancer, premature death, heart disease, and asthma.
Power plants generally will have up to four years to comply, although waivers can be granted in individual cases to ensure that the lights stay on. The EPA estimates that utilities will be forced to retire plants that currently provide less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation's total generating capacity.
In this sense, the EPA's new pollution rules appear to be another example of the ongoing success of "oblique" strategies to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. While the new rules may only force the closure of 0.5 percent of the nation's electricity generating fleet, those plants will be among the least efficient and most carbon-intensive power plants in the nation. The coal-fired power plants most likely to be retired in the face of new pollution regulations emit at least twice as much CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity as the national average.
This is a small step forward on climate, but a real one, strongly justified on public health grounds alone, even before any climate benefits are considered. The new rules will eliminate "up to 17,000 premature deaths" per year, along with thousands of heart attacks, asthma attacks and emergency room visits, according to EPA estimates.
Now, new studies .. are again suggesting that modern efforts to improve energy efficiency could lead to big rebound effects; they're touching a nerve and prompting debate in energy and climate circles. Governments and think tanks have launched studies of the paradox, and stories in the New Yorker and New York Times have even suggested that energy efficiency, far from being a savior, could actually be bad for the environment. "The stakes are actually pretty high," says Roland Geyer, professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of a recent review of the rebound literature.
Dr. Geyer is right: the stakes are quite high.
As Breakthrough Institute documents in our comprehensive review of the academic literature on energy efficiency and rebound effects, "Energy Emergence" (February 2011), most climate mitigation strategies and national energy policies assume that significant gains can be made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and national energy imports at little to no cost or even positive economic gain, chiefly by pursuing "below-cost" energy efficiency measures -- improvements that more than pay for themselves through energy savings over time. The International Energy Agency, for example, counsels global policy makers that energy efficiency can accomplish more than half (58 percent) of all global greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed by 2050 in order to put the world on track to a stable climate (see image at right).
Yet rebound effects mean that for every two steps forward we take towards climate mitigation via below-cost efficiency measures, we take one or more steps backwards through rebound effects. And conventional climate mitigation scenarios, including the IEA's and IPCC's, ignore or incompletely and improperly consider rebound effects in their analysis.
If we follow such a course, and ignore rebound effects, the globe will be dangerously over-reliant on energy efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even if rebound effects erode just one-third to one-half of the initially expected savings, the globe could fall 20 to 30 percent short of needed emissions cuts, if the IEA's mitigation plan is followed. Further, such a shortfall means the time available to devise additional remedies is reduced, increasing the urgency of the clean energy supply-side challenge.
In an all-to-predictable swipe at new fuel economy standards currently being negotiated by the White House and the auto industry, the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation invokes rebound effects as the latest reason to oppose increased auto efficiency:
When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, The Atlantic's Megan McArdle notes that fuel efficiency standards will reduce carbon dioxide emissions, "but not by as much as advertised, because more fuel efficient cars make driving cheaper, so people will do more of it. This 'rebound' effect robs about 25% of gains, and also means more congestion, and more wear-and-tear on roads." The rebound effect also takes away some of the estimated cost savings and oil reduction.
Let's ignore for a moment the rich irony inherent in the Heritage Foundation expressing any concern about the efficacy of auto efficiency standards in cutting carbon emissions...
Rather, let's focus on the economic implications of rebound effects, which Heritage gets exactly backwards here. If improved vehicle efficiency triggers a rebound in demand for the energy services derived from personal transportation, that rebound represents an unequivocal improvement in economic welfare at the individual level and a sign of improved productivity and growth at the economy-wide level. Last we checked, Heritage was all for economic growth and improved individual welfare.
A pragmatic strategy to restart stalled global climate efforts through the pursuit of energy innovation, climate resilience, and no regrets pollution reduction (Report Overview)
Climate Pragmatism, a new policy report released July 26th by the Hartwell group, details an innovative strategy to restart global climate efforts after the collapse of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. This pragmatic strategy centers on efforts to accelerate energy innovation, build resilience to extreme weather, and pursue no regrets pollution reduction measures -- three efforts that each have their own diverse justifications independent of their benefits for climate mitigation and adaptation. As such, Climate Pragmatism offers a framework for renewed American leadership on climate change that's effectiveness, paradoxically, does not depend on any agreement about climate science or the risks posed by uncontrolled greenhouse gases.
The new report brings the Hartwell framework into an American perspective, and it is authored by a broad group of 14 international scholars and analysts representing a diverse range of political and ideological positions -- from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to moderate Democratic think tank Third Way and the liberal Breakthrough Institute.
Climate Pragmatism is the third paper released by the Hartwell group, an informal international network of scholars and analysts dedicated to innovative strategies that uplift human dignity through mitigation of climate risk, enhancement of disaster resilience, improvement of public health, and the provision of universal energy access. Previous publications include The Hartwell Paper (May 2010) and How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course (July 2009).
Climate Pragmatism also builds on the limited and direct energy technology innovation strategy outlined by the Breakthrough Institute along with scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution in the October 2010 policy report, Post-Partisan Power.
As the report's authors explain:
The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future -- benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.
The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.
Phasing out the United States' entire nuclear power supply by 2030 would increase the country's carbon dioxide emissions by at least 5% and as much as 13%, depending on what mix of power plants replace the aging nuclear units. If the United States phased out the twenty-three nuclear power plants with the same design as Japan's troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex by 2030, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would increase overall by at least 1 percent.
As the crisis at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex continues to captivate global media attention, President Obama's domestic energy plans, which have long-included a push for the construction of new nuclear reactors, are beginning to be called into question. Two days ago, Senate Democrats demanded a broad review of the safety of the country's nuclear plants, with nine Democrats even seeking to delay legislation to allow the construction of a new plant in Iowa.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that, by 2030, nuclear power will supply about 18% of the nation's electricity, as compared to roughly 20% in 2011.
Below, we illustrate the consequences for overall United States carbon dioxide emissions if the United States phases out its entire nuclear fleet. Three scenarios project the effect of replacing lost generation either entirely by coal generation, entirely by natural gas generation, or by an equal split of both.
If nuclear power were to be completely taken out of the United States' power supply by 2030, United States carbon emissions would rise by at least 300 million tons over baseline scenarios. Carbon emissions would increase by at least 5% and as much as 13% across the entire economy, while power-sector emissions would soar by 12% to 33%, depending on the mix of replacement power.
The lowest value corresponds to a scenario in which the nuclear plants are replaced by new natural gas-fired units, perhaps the most likely scenario given recent discovery of plentiful new natural gas supplies in North America.
China is on a roaring path towards single-handedly swamping any hopes of climate stability. The nation's current climate pledges appear lackadaisical rather than ambitious and just as likely to trigger significant rebounds in energy use than real CO2 reductions. The only way to avert potential climate catastrophe is to de-link economic growth from carbon emissions by fueling China -- and the world -- with clean, affordable, and massively scalable energy technologies. Our current menu of technological options is dangerously short, and there's no time to waste: we must make clean energy cheap, and fast.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: when it comes to the global climate challenge, as goes China, so goes the world.
Driving that aphorism home, co2scorecard.org, a not-for-profit project that closely tracks global greenhouse gas emissions, now reports that China's CO2 emissions increased by 906 million tons in 2009 -- the second largest annual increase for any country in recorded history. China's soaring emissions were enough to completely offset the drop in emissions wrought by the economic havoc plaguing much of the Western world (see graphic below).
China's unprecedented surge in CO2
As Goes China, So Goes the World: Soaring CO2 emissions from energy use in China drive global greenhouse gas trends (click image to enlarge; source: co2scorecard.org)
Over the last decade, China's annual emissions of climate destabilizing CO2 jumped by 5 billion tons per year. According to Shakeb Afsah, President and CEO of co2scorecard.org, that's "the highest [increase in annual CO2 output] for a single country in recorded history, representing an average annual emissions increase of almost 12%--more than four times the rate observed [for China] the previous decade."
To put this unprecedented 5 billion ton increase in annual CO2 emissions in context, Mr Afsah and colleague Kendyl Salcito note that during the 14-year long post-war boom period of 1959-1973, during which U.S. CO2 emissions rose each year, America's annual output of CO2 jumped by only 2 billion tons.
This set of frequently asked questions accompanies a new Breakthrough Institute report, "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena." That report surveys the relevant academic literature and finds extensive evidence that a large amount of the energy savings from below-cost energy efficiency are eroded by demand 'rebound effects.'
On February 17th, Breakthrough Institute released a new, comprehensive survey of the literature and evidence concerning the rebound effects triggered by many energy efficiency improvements.
"Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" explains why energy efficiency measures that truly 'pay for themselves' will lower the cost of energy services -- heating, transportation, industrial processes, etc. -- driving a rebound in energy demand that can erode a significant portion of the expected energy savings and climate benefits of these measures.
This new set of Frequently Asked Questions explains rebound effects, how they operate, what kinds of energy efficiency improvements trigger bigger or smaller rebounds, and why coming to terms with the full scale of rebound challenges the heart of many contemporary climate mitigation strategies.
A: Increasing the efficiency of an energy consumptive activity will lower the cost of the services derived from that activity - that is, it will change the price of the "energy services" derived from the fuels, such as lighting, transportation goods or services, heating or cooling, industrial processes, etc.
Economic actors respond to price changes in two general ways:
Increasing the utilization of that energy service to increase outputs or incomes. For example, a low-income resident may now heat his or her home more often or heat more areas of the home after weatherizing their home, because it is now far more affordable to heat. (In economics speak, this involves 'elasticities of demand,' or the responsiveness of demand to changes in the price of goods and services)
Re-arranging the factors of production or goods and services consumed to substitute now-cheaper energy services for other goods or services (maintaining the same level of output or income). For example, a more efficient heat plant may enable a chemicals plant or metals smelter to raise temperatures in industrial processes to extract high quality product from poorer quality inputs (substituting energy for materials) or to reduce process times (substituting energy for labor). (In economic terms, this involves 'substitution elasticities,' or the ability of firms or consumers to take advantage of lower prices to productively re-arrange the production inputs or consumer goods they utilize).
Both of these dynamics are "rebound effects," a term for any economic mechanism that leads to a rebound, or increase, in demand for energy following an improvement in energy efficiency that lowers the effective cost of that energy service.
There are other rebound effects as well (for a quick description of each, see the summary here). Our report, "Energy Emergence" surveys more than half a dozen distinct rebound mechanisms, some of which are fairly direct (like the two above), others that are more indirect (like the impact of money saved through efficiency measures as it is re-spent in the economy on other goods or services that in turn require energy to produce). Still more effects are only visible in the aggregate, at the macro-economic scale, as economies respond in a variety of ways to widespread improvements in energy efficiency.
A: No, not always. Although in some cases, it is possible that efficiency improvements will "backfire," driving a rebound in energy that fully compensate for the initial energy savings, increasing energy demand overall. While backfire is by no means the norm, it is possible in some cases (we'll explore conditions that are likely to lead to backfire in a later question).
As "Energy Emergence" concludes, "Rebound effects are real and significant, and combine to drive total economy-wide rebound in energy demand with the potential to erode much (and in some cases all) of the reductions in energy consumption expected to arise from below-cost efficiency improvements."
Think of it this way: rebound effects mean that for every two steps forward we take in energy savings through efficiency, rebound effects take us one (and sometimes more) steps backwards. We may still move forward, but not as much as we initially expected.
A: Rebound matters because the magnitude of rebound effects determines how effective below-cost efficiency improvements are at contributing to lasting reductions in total energy use and therefore greenhouse gas emissions.
Energy efficiency has frequently been cited as the single greatest contributor to emissions reduction and climate mitigation strategies, by everyone from the International Energy Agency and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to consultants like Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute and McKinsey to efficiency advocates and environmental NGOs. The IEA counts on efficiency for roughly half of the emissions reductions needed in their "Blue Map" climate stabilization scenario (graphic below), for example, while President Obama told reporters in 2009 that with efficiency, "we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage."
So we're counting on energy efficiency to do quite a bit of "climate mitigation work," so to speak.
The problem is that all of these estimates are based on an assumption: that energy efficiency reduces energy demand in a linear, direct, and one-for-one manner. An X% gain in efficiency leads to an equivalent X% reduction in total energy use.
But the economy is anything but direct, linear, and simple, especially when responding to changes in the relative price of goods and services. When a good or service or input to production gets cheaper, consumers and firms use more of it, find new cost-effective uses for it, re-invest any savings in other productive activities, and the economy overall gets more productive overall, driving economic growth and activity.
That's the rebound effect, and it means that we can't assume that improving energy efficiency by 20%, for example, will reduce energy demand by 20%.
If we don't accurately and rigorously account for rebound effects, we risk over-relying on energy efficiency to deliver lasting reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and we will fall dangerously short of climate mitigation goals.
A: Rebound effects differ in scale, depending on the type of energy efficiency improvements we're talking about, and where in the economy we look. In very few cases are rebound effects "very small" or insignificant.
Dozens of academic studies have examined the empirical evidence, conducted modeling inquiries, and otherwise tested the scale of rebound effects. While there is much more work to be done to determine the precise scale and impact of rebound effects in different circumstances, the conclusion is that rebound effects are significant and cannot be ignored in energy and climate analysis and policymaking. See the following three questions for summaries of the scale of rebound in different circumstances...
A: In rich, developed nations, if we improve the efficiency of end-use consumer energy services, like cars, home heating and cooling, or appliances, the literature indicates that direct rebound effects alone are typically on the scale of 10-30% of the initial energy savings. Additional indirect and macroeconomic effects may mean total rebound erodes roughly one quarter to one third of expected energy savings in these situations.
Rebound here is smallest in cases when demand for the energy service in question is already saturated (that is, we use as much of it as we would care to use), and highest in cases where the cost of the energy service is a key constraint on fulfilling demand for that service. For example, if a wealthy homeowner already reliably heats all the rooms in his or her house to 70 degrees, he/she wouldn't increase the thermostat to 77 degrees just because our heating system got 10% more efficient. But if a poorer household can't afford to turn the thermostat up, or only heats one room of the house with a small space heater, because the house is too drafty, then if the house gets weatherized and more efficient, that household is likely to use more energy to heat their home. In general, end-use consumer efficiency improvements in rich, developed economies will still lead to a net savings in energy, although rebound effects shouldn't be ignored even here.
A: No, rebound effects are almost certainly larger in poorer, developing nations.
For efficiency in end-use consumer energy services in developing nations, direct rebound effects alone are likely to be much higher than in richer nations, on the order of 40-80%. Rebound is higher here because demand for energy services is far from saturated, demand is far more elastic (responsive to changes in price), and the cost of energy services is often a key constraint on the enjoyment of energy services. This is important, because growing demand in developing nations is the principal driver of energy demand growth worldwide.
We should be very careful in generalizing our experiences or intuitions about rebound effects in rich, developed nations to the larger bulk of the global population living in developing economies. As Lee Schipper and Michael Grubb wrote in 2000:
"[I]n low-income economies, energy and energy costs are often a constraint on economic activity. ... In short, the shadow of Jevons lurks [in developing nations] for precisely the same reason that more efficient use of coal [in Jevons' Britain] did not save coal: the combined effects of different rebounds are very important when energy availability, energy efficiency, and energy costs are a significant constraint to activity and therefore energy use."
Since expanding the supply of energy services is a key constraint on economic activity in developing nations, the macro-economic impact of efficiency improvements in developing economies is also likely to be more significant, helping developing economies grow faster (and thus consume more energy).
A: While more study of rebound effects for efficiency improvements at producing firms (e.g. industry and commerce) is needed, the literature to date indicates that direct rebound effects may be on the order of 20-70% for these sectors, with additional rebound due to indirect and macroeconomic effects.
Rebound effects in firms depend principally on the ability of firms to rearrange their factors of production (labor, capital, energy, and various materials) to better take advantage of now-cheaper energy services. This is especially true for new productive capacity. If long-term substitution is high, rebound effects can be substantial. In addition, output effects contribute to rebound for energy intensive firms with a high elasticity of demand for their products (that is, where consumers are very responsive to changes in the price of their products and demand more product as the price falls).
Improvements in energy productivity at firms can also contribute to greater economic activity and growth, driving up energy demand overall. In general, rebound effects are higher for efficiency in productive sectors of the economy than for end-use consumer efficiency. This is notable, because two-thirds of the energy consumed in the U.S. is consumed in the productive sectors of the economy and "embedded" in the non-energy goods and services purchased by consumers.
A: Yes. At the economy-wide, macro-economic scale, the aggregate impacts of widespread energy efficiency improvements can lead to substantial rebound effects, as producers and consumers respond in turn to various cascading changes in the price of goods and services, the pace of economic growth quickens, and market prices for fuels may fall, driving a further rebound due to market price effects. Since these economic responses are complex and varied, economic modeling is most often used to estimate the scale of macroeconomic rebound due to aggregate efficiency improvements.
A number of 'Computable General Equilibrium' models (see page 34 of the study) generally show rebound at the scale of a national economy of 30-50% or greater, with a surprising number predicting rebound greater than 100% (aka 'backfire'). These studies look at national economies and thus ignore global, macro-economic impacts beyond national boarders, which can add additional rebound in energy consumption.
'Integrative modeling,' a more detailed approach utilized by energy analysts at Cambridge, found that if the world adopted all of the "no regrets" energy efficiency policies suggested by the International Energy Agency, then rebounds effects would erode more than half of expected savings (52%) in the long-term. There are also several reasons to think this is may be a conservative estimate (see pages 39-40 of the study).
At the macro-economic, global scale most relevant to climate change mitigation efforts, then, rebound effects can be substantial, and erode much (if not all) of the expected energy savings and climate benefits.
A: Rebound is likely to be particularly acute and is most likely to trigger backfire (rebound >100% of initially expected energy savings) in the following cases:
If the supply of energy services is a key constraint on economic activity and growth (as it is in much of the developing world), then improvements in energy efficiency are likely to trigger acute rebound or even backfire. In a world where roughly 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and 2.5 billion rely primarily on primitive biomass (e.g., wood and dung) for cooking and heating, huge pent-up demand for energy services persists and the availability of energy services will be a major determinant of future rates of economic growth and progress. This in turn indicates potential for very large rebounds for efficiency improvements in developing nations.
When more efficient (and thus lower cost) energy services open up new markets or enable widespread new energy-using applications, products, or even entire new industries to emerge. We dub this dynamic a 'frontier effect' in our report, because in these cases, the 'production-possibility frontier' for an energy-using technology expands significantly, opening up unforeseen opportunities for substitution and potentially significant impacts on economic activity and the composition of the economy. In such cases, backfire is the most likely outcome.
Backfire due to this 'frontier effect' dynamic is most likely to arise for 'general-purpose technologies' that have a wide scope for improvement and elaboration, have potential for use in a wide variety of products and processes, and have strong complementarities with existing or potential new technologies. Examples of 'general-purpose technologies' could include steam engines, electric motors, lighting, gas turbines, semiconductors and computing technologies, lasers, robotics, radio transmitters, and perhaps many others. Backfire is most likely to result after energy efficiency improvements in these general-purpose technologies. (See p. 47-8 of the report.)
These emergent 'frontier effect' dynamics may prove particularly challenging for energy analysts to forecast or account for in modeling efforts, as they necessarily involve unforeseen and unpredictable applications of new and improved technologies. This means that forecasts of rebound can easily underestimate eventual rebound due to frontier effects triggered by sustained efficiency gains.
When energy efficiency improvements not only improve the productivity of energy, but also result in simultaneous improvements in other factors of production, such as labor or capital (a 'multi-factor productivity improvement'), an outsized impact on economic output and significant rebound in energy demand can arise.
Very large rebound or backfire is likely the norm in cases of 'win-win' efficiency opportunities, where energy-saving technical changes simultaneously improve the productivity of other factors of production, multiplying the impacts on output, economic growth and energy demand.
For example, in a 2005 paper, efficiency consultant Amory Lovins writes:
"Improved energy efficiency, especially end-use efficiency, often delivers better services. Efficient houses are more comfortable; efficient lighting systems can look better and help you see better; efficiency motors can be more quiet, reliable, and controllable; efficient refrigerators can keep food fresher for longer; efficient cleanrooms can improve the yield, flexibility, throughput, and setup time of microchip fabrication plants; ... retail sales pressure can rise 40% in well-daylit stores ... Such side- benefits can be one or even two orders of magnitude more valuable than the energy directly saved. ...[I]n efficient buildings, ... labor productivity typically rises by about 6-16%. Since office workers in industrialized countries cost ~100x more than office energy, a 1% increase in labor productivity has the same bottom-line effect as eliminating the energy bill - and the actual gain in labor productivity is ~6-16x bigger than that."
While the multi-factor productivity improvements Lovins describes greatly improve the economic case for energy efficiency upgrades, they simultaneously raise the specter of significantly greater rebound in energy demand than if the improvement in energy productivity were considered alone (as is common in the inquiries discussed in prior sections). If the economic impact of labor productivity improvements from efficient buildings is several orders of magnitude greater than the simultaneous savings in energy consumption, for example, then the rebound due to economic growth/output effects alone should also be several orders of magnitude greater than would be predicted if the energy savings were considered alone.
A: Most certainly not! Truly cost-effective energy efficiency improvements make great economic sense and improved energy efficiency may be a key determinant of future economic welfare. In this sense, it may also contribute indirectly to climate mitigation and decarbonization objectives (see "Discussion and Implications" section of our report).
As Skip Laitner of the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy writes, "our lagging efforts on efficiency may actually constrain our larger economic productivity."
As we note in our report, this is often the case, particularly in the developing world. Pursuing cost effective energy efficiency opportunities makes great sense then from an economic development and human welfare perspective. At the same time, however, this is precisely why energy efficiency can trigger significant rebound effects that reduce the ability of efficiency to drive down total greenhouse gas emissions, even as efficiency contributes significantly to greater economic growth.
In short, unlocking the full potential of efficiency may mean the difference between a richer, more efficient world, and a poorer, less efficient world. The former is clearly the desirable case, and the one we should all strive for! But in either case, the world will use more or less the same amount of energy. In some parts of the economy, efficiency may reduce overall energy use, while in others it may increase it. The net effect, after accounting for efficiency's role in unlocking economic growth (among other rebound effects) is far from a linear and direct reduction in energy use.
We therefore argue that we should continue to pursue any cost-effective efficiency opportunities on economic grounds, even as we reconsider the degree to which these measures will contribute to climate mitigation efforts.
"In any case, truly cost-effective energy efficiency measures should be vigorously pursued, as they will lead to an improvement in general welfare (at least narrowly construed in economic terms). However, from a climate mitigation perspective, we must be keenly aware of the precise, macroeconomic impacts of energy efficiency improvements, since only a reduction in total aggregate energy consumption will directly contribute to emissions reduction objectives. This in turn requires an understanding and analysis of the non-linear combination of impacts on economic activity, demand for energy as a factor of production, and other macroeconomic factors that are together summed up in the term 'rebound effect.'"
A: Rebound effects are part of the reason that energy use is still growing, even as the economy gets more and more efficient. True, economic growth drives up energy use, even as we get more efficient. But those two terms - economic growth, and energy efficiency - are not unrelated, and rebound effects describe the relationship between the two.
Part of the reason the economy continues to grow is because below-cost energy efficiency improvements grow the supply of energy services and increase the productivity of the economy - we get more economic activity and income and welfare out of the same amount of energy - and productivity improvements are a key driver of economic growth.
Some economists argue that the supply of energy services is a key enabling force in economic growth: think about the impact of electric motors, industrial lasers, computing, automation, and all of the other ways in which we use energy - often quite efficiently - to greatly improve the productivity of our economy. Think about how important energy services - lighting, efficient cooking stoves, electricity - are to development outcomes in the emerging economies of the world. Efficiently expanding the supply of energy services may thus be one of the principal factors determining the rate of economic growth in rich and poor nations alike (see the previous question for more).
That said, there are definitely other factors driving economic growth, including improvements in the productivity of other inputs to the economy, such as labor, capital, and other materials. Rebound effects and energy productivity improvements aren't the only driver of economy growth by any means.
A: Overall, the global economy has been growing at the rate of roughly 3% per year. Historically, we've only seen a roughly 1-1.5% improvement in energy use per unit of economic output (energy intensity or productivity) each year.
For energy efficiency gains to outstrip the increase in energy demand driven by the growing economy, the economy must improve energy intensity/productivity by at least 3% per year, roughly double or triple the historic rate of improvement.
So economic growth continues to out-pace energy efficiency improvements, and energy use continues to grow overall.
Efficiency advocates argue that if we work harder at capturing energy efficiency opportunities, we can more than double or triple this rate of efficiency improvement and bend global energy use downwards.
That's a big task already, but at least two factors make this challenge even harder:
First, a large portion of changes in energy intensity over time can be attributed to structural changes in the economy (Baksi and Green 2007), as economies shift from agricultural to industrial to services-oriented over time. These aren't the technical improvements in transportation, lighting, buildings, or industrial efficiency that energy efficiency policies are concerned with, and these trends are hard to accelerate or effect through policy. They may not continue indefinitely either, so there are limits to gains here.
If, for example, one-half or two-thirds of the historic rate in energy intensity improvements are due to sectoral transitions and structural changes in the economy, then efforts to increase the rate of technical efficiency improvement must work two or three times harder to succeed. Instead of a more than doubling or tripling of our efforts, we must achieve a more than four to nine-fold increase in technical efficiency improvements.
Second, that estimate does not account for rebound effects. Rebound makes the goal even more challenging, as it means efficiency feeds back into energy consumption and economic growth increasing both and making the horizon we're reaching towards recede even further. For every two steps forward we take with below-cost energy efficiency, rebound effects take us roughly one (or more) steps backwards.
For these reasons, we think it is prudent to revisit the ability of below-cost energy efficiency to decouple the economy from growing energy use and drive lasting reductions in climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases. While we should continue to pursue cost-effective energy efficiency measures improvements wherever they may be found, as we write in the report (p. 52):
"Efforts to reliably reduce greenhouse gas emissions or dependence on depleting fossil fuels would be prudent to avoid the risk of overreliance on energy efficiency measures. Such efforts should therefore focus primarily on shifting the means of energy production (rather than end use), relying on zero-carbon and renewable energy sources to diversify and decarbonize the global energy supply system."
A: While the term 'rebound effect' is generally used by energy economists to talk about rebounds after energy efficiency, the basic economic mechanisms - elasticity of demand and substitution, re-spending effects, and the contribution of productivity to economic growth - are well-understood economic phenomena relevant to improvements in the price or productivity of any factor of production, be it capital, materials, or labor.
Let's consider labor, for example. Economists would never assume that a 20% improvement in labor productivity - aka a "labor efficiency" improvement - would reduce overall demand for labor in the economy by 20%.
Everyone knows that improving labor productivity drives economic growth, creates new profitable ways to utilize labor, and overall generally increases employment at the macroeconomic scope, not decreases it.
Even at the scope of the individual factory or assembly line, improving labor productivity may mean the plant can get by with fewer laborers on the shop floor, but even there, the net effects on demand for labor are far from linear and direct. Higher labor productivity lowers product costs and increase demand for those products and opens up new markets that weren't profitable before. It frees up money to re-invest in other areas of production, and it creates new jobs in other areas of business. Even at the firm level, a 20% improvement in labor productivity won't mean 20% of the company's staff is laid off.
Yet this is precisely the simplified, linear assumption that is routinely made in energy and climate forecasting and scenario planning. A 20% improvement in energy efficiency = a direct, 20% net reduction in energy demand, relative to business as usual.
"Rebound effects" are what energy economists call the same, common sense story we just went over for labor, when we're talking about energy productivity or efficiency rather than labor productivity.
The reality is that energy isn't different from labor, or materials, or capital, and a whole field of academic work has gone on - largely out of notice of mainstream energy analysis and policy making - to explore and illustrate how energy efficiency leads to a series of complex, non-linear response throughout the economy that drive a rebound in demand for energy services and thus a rebound in consumption of energy itself. Our "Energy Emergence" report surveys this evidence and presents key implications for climate mitigation efforts.
A: More or less, yes. This basic but somewhat paradoxical dynamic - that energy efficiency lowers the price of energy services, leading to a rebound in consumption of those services - was first thoroughly discussed by British Economist William Stanley Jevons in an 1865 book, The Coal Question. He famously wrote, "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."
Some people define this so-called "Jevons Paradox" more strictly, saying that the Paradox refers only to cases when the rebound effects triggered by efficiency measures drives more demand for energy than was originally saved by the efficiency improvements. That's a scenario known in the rebound literature as "backfire," a special kind of severe rebound effect that is greater than 100% of the initially expected energy savings. Backfire means improving energy efficiency actually increases energy demand overall, relative to what it would have been if the efficiency measures hadn't been pursued at all. This is precisely what Jevons observed when he noted that the much more efficient steam engine developed by James Watt led to a huge increase in coal consumption during the 19th century, rather than the conservation of Britain's dwindling coal resources.
However, the generalized dynamic Jevons observed: that efficiency lowers the cost of energy services, driving a rebound in demand for those services, not a direct linear reduction in demand or conservation of fuels, is equivalent to what energy economists now call "rebound effects."
A: No, not all energy efficiency measures trigger rebound effects. Rebound effects are concerned with the response to below-cost efficiency improvements. That's the "low-hanging fruit" we always hear about, the efficiency measures that pay back more in avoided energy use than they cost to install. These are also the ones "below zero" on the often-cited McKinsey and Co. greenhouse gas abatement cost curve seen below. Below-cost efficiency measures always reduce the implicit price of energy services - the useful work provided by energy consumption, be it heating a home, transporting people or goods some distance, powering a production facility, or lighting a work space - and thus always trigger a rebound in demand for those services (see the first question in this series above). It's not a question of whether efficiency measures that truly "pay for themselves" will trigger rebound - they will - the question is how large that rebound will be?
Not all energy efficiency measures are below cost though (the graphic above has arrows pointing to a couple of 'above-cost' efficiency measures, according to McKinsey: plug-in hybrid electric cars, and efficient building design for new buildings). While they incur an economic cost, these efficiency measures should not trigger rebound effects and may still prove effective at reducing energy demand. As we wrote in the report (p. 52):
There is no shortage of opportunities to improve energy efficiency that are not cost-neutral or below-cost. While these measures come with a price tag, in many cases the costs are reasonable and such efforts may be well justified given the long-term threat, economic and otherwise, that global climate change represents.
A: Technically, yes. Price-induced efficiency improvements, whether in response to exogenous energy price increases (changes not caused by policy that is) or successful policy efforts to price carbon emissions or impose energy taxes, should not be expected to result in significant rebound. However, as we write in the report (p. 53), "to fully avoid rebound effects, energy price increases must be sufficient to keep the final price of energy services constant despite improvements in energy efficiency, eliminating any net productivity gains from the efficiency measures." That is, in rough terms, if energy efficiency drives down the price of energy services by 30% or 50%, then energy prices would have to increase through carbon taxes or fees by an equivalent 30% or 50%.
Achievement of deep reductions in energy demand and associated carbon emissions through price induced efficiency will therefore require substantial and rising energy prices over time and sustained over the multi-decadal periods relevant to climate policy, such that rising energy prices keep pace with the improvements in energy productivity.
Furthermore, if revenues collected through carbon pricing, energy taxes, or other efforts to raise energy prices are reinvested into economically productive ends, macroeconomic rebound effects may result, so the precise use of revenues will determine the efficacy of these policies in curbing rebound.
As we conclude in the report:
"Thus, carbon pricing policies (e.g., carbon taxes or cap and trade systems) and energy taxes offer potential tools to mitigate some or all of the energy demand rebound resulting from efficiency improvement - although implementing such policies faces practical challenges and will invariably encounter the political difficulties inherent to policy efforts that seek to impose energy price increases that will result in loss of economic welfare (ignoring potential benefits of avoided economic externalities).
A: Dr. Koomey has done no such thing, as he clarifies in a post at his own blog here. Koomey writes, "It will take time to review the technical questions in the detail this issue deserves, so I'll hold off on stating any conclusions until that work is done."
Joseph Romm of Climate Progress has misrepresented Koomey's work, claiming that "Some of the nation's top energy experts have debunked" our report, linking to a memo from Koomey as his sole evidence. There has been no "debunking" of the the Breakthrough Institute report surveying that literature nor even a serious attempt to debunk it.
A more up to date and unedited compilation of the key emails in that dialog can be read here, if the reader cares to delve deeply into this discussion and see for themselves. Note that the discussion is ongoing.
No. Far from blaming below-cost efficiency for "evils" we praise it as good for economic growth and welfare. However, we do point out that it can increase energy consumption, and that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions cannot rely, as many leading analysts to, on simplistic claims that energy efficiency results in direct energy consumption declines.
Steven Sorrell of the University of Sussex in England headed up a similarly comprehensive review of the evidence for rebound effects published by the UK Energy Research Center in 2007 and originally commissioned by the UK government. In reply to NRDC's David Goldstein and Ralph Cavanagh, he wrote:
"[T]he claim that the Breakthrough Institute "fails to back up its accusations with facts" is plain wrong. Their report is based upon a large volume of empirical evidence in the academic literature. I reviewed this a few years ago - [link] - and the Breakthrough report brings this up to date."
As Mr. Sorrell cautious, "[T]his topic [rebound effects] needs intelligent and careful research to help us understand it better, to improve the quantitative estimates, to reduce the uncertainties and to figure out what we can do in response. Simply dismissing it out of hand," as Goldstein and Cavanagh have tried to do, "will get us nowhere."
Do you have your own questions that aren't answered here? Please leave your question in the comments and we'll do our best to answer.
Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and "An Inconvenient Truth." The latter backfired -- more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out -- the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.
It is a great pleasure to be here at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for this retrospective on "The Death of Environmentalism." In early 2005 Yale invited us to debate that essay, and since then the School has continued to demonstrate a genuine interest in what our friend and colleague Peter Teague has taken to calling ecological innovation. You train your students to ask hard questions -- we saw this first hand in 2010 Breakthrough Fellow and Yale School Masters candidate David Mitchell -- and your flagship publication, Yale360, is publishing some of the most interesting green thinkers today. We are grateful once again for this opportunity to reflect on the nearly seven years since we wrote our essay, and make some new arguments about what the green movement must do now.
Seven years ago the two of us started interviewing America's environmental leaders with the intention of writing a report on the politics of global warming for the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We came away from the experience deeply disappointed. Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge. None expressed much interest in rethinking their assumptions about the problem or the solutions. What we heard again and again during our interviews were the same old riffs that green leaders had been repeating since the late 1980's. Global warming would be solved through the same kinds of policies that we had used to address past pollution problems such as acid rain. Most were confident that John Kerry was, with their help, about to be elected president, and the biggest funders in the movement told us they were just a few steps away from passing cap and trade legislation.
That October we delivered our paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. While leaders at environmental philanthropies and national green groups hoped that the debate the essay started would just go away, "The Death of Environmentalism" struck a cord with many others and sparked a spirited debate. Many took the paper's arguments personally and, without question, the most common reaction to our essay was "I'm not dead." Our friend Adam Werbach gave a speech called "Is Environmentalism Dead," wherein he suggested that environmentalists make common cause with a broader coalition of progressive interests in hopes of building a broader and more diverse movement. And Yale's own Gus Speth questioned whether capitalism itself was compatible with ecological sustainability and suggested a radical shift in values was required to deal with the problem.
In the wake of serial disappointments, a new consensus is beginning to emerge that may guide climate and energy policy into a new and more constructive phase, with philanthropy poised to play a key role.
From the Chronicle of Philanthropy, February 20, 2011
By Lance Lindblom and Peter Teague
In the wake of serial disappointments, a new consensus is beginning to emerge that may guide climate and energy policy into a new and more constructive phase, with philanthropy poised to play a key role.
Environmental groups--and the foundations that support them--spent the past decade pressing a single approach to global-warming policy.
The problem was defined narrowly--if accurately--as the emission of too much heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere from the burning of oil, coal, and gas.
The solution was to reduce those emissions by making conventional energy expensive enough to change how individuals and corporations consume energy and, most important, to drive massive levels of private investment into energy efficiency and clean-energy alternatives.
The events of the past two years, however, with the failure of the environmentalists' strategy in the U.S. Senate and the collapse of international climate talks in Copenhagen, made it clear that substantially raising the price of fossil fuels is not a viable option.
Recognizing the need to rethink the problem and to open the conversation to a larger set of solutions, philanthropy has begun to support the development of new approaches focused on making clean energy cheap in absolute terms.
"Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" finds extensive evidence and a strong expert consensus that a large amount of the energy savings from below-cost energy efficiency are eroded by demand 'rebound effects,' and that in some cases the rebound exceeds the savings, resulting in increased energy consumption from efficiency, known as backfire. The report contains a comprehensive review of the expert literature.
There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date.
In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.
The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.
Seems it might be about as easy to convince someone global warming is fake by pointing to the serial nor'easters slamming the east coast as it is to persuade an individual that global warming is fact by placing them in a warm room, reports the NYT:
The study, by Jane Risen, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, and Clayton Critcher, a marketing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that university students placed in a heated room expressed higher confidence that global warming was a proven fact than those placed in a neutral control room...
"These results suggest that the mere experience of heat influenced belief in global warming," the researchers wrote...
Liberals and conservatives were similarly influenced by the raised temperatures, and the effect was present even when attention was drawn to the temperature of the room.
As Ryan Avent writes: "economics is clearly moving beyond the carbon-tax-alone position on climate change, which is a good thing. If the world is to reduce emissions, it needs technologies that are both green and cheap enough to be attractive to economically-stressed countries and people. And a carbon tax alone may not generate the necessary innovation."
Over at the Economist, Ryan Avent notes that economists are beginning to move beyond a simple reliance on carbon pricing as the sine qua non of climate policy:
The typical baseline economist response to the problem of global warming is a very simple and straightforward one. Climate change is a negative externality, and the carbon emissions that generate it are easily targetable. The clear thing to do, then, is to place a tax on carbon emissions which will lead economic actors to internalise the cost of the warming they create with their decisions. This will discourage carbon-intensive activities and contribute to the development of clean alternative, reducing emissions and climate change.
Easy enough. Unfortunately, this strategy quickly runs into difficulty. One big problem is political. It's very difficult to convince people to accept higher energy costs, and it's very difficult to coordinate policy across countries, which is necessary to ensure that the policy works correctly. But there are also economic challenges. ... Economies are good at finding substitutes for key technologies, but it does take some time. And so because the world has waited so long to act, it now seems that the disaster-avoiding carbon tax path may itself be too economically damaging. So what's an economist to advocate?
Here's an intriguing story to kick off the new year with a little retrospection...
Flash back to 2008, and nearly all of the top GOP contenders for a 2012 presidential run were taking global warming pretty seriously and offering real, if measured, endorsements of Congressional or state action to curb pollution and GHGs.
On the campaign stump, in books, speeches and nationally-televised commercials, aspiring GOP White House candidates such as Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have warned in recent years about the threats from climate change and pledged to limit greenhouse gases. Some have even committed the ultimate sin, endorsing the controversial cap-and-trade concept that was eventually branded "cap and tax."
Back in 2008, Newt Gingrich took to a couch next to the Right's current-day arch-nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, to endorse Congressional climate action in an ad sponsored by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.
And as Politico notes, even Sarah Palin has flip flopped on the issue:
Just days after McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin told ABC News she believes human activities "certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change" and that "we've got to do something about it, and we have to make sure that we're doing all we can to cut down on pollution."
Politico's Darren Samuelsohn calls it the McCain effect, with John McCain's prominent endorsement of cap and trade legislation making it safe for GOPers to talk about climate.
"I think McCain is moving in a responsible direction," then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told E&E News in May 2008. "Clearly the issue of climate change is on the minds of a lot of people. Humans clearly contribute to this. It just really depends on what kind of a cap-and-trade system, what kind of safety valves are in there."
Flash forward just a few years and each of these prominent GOPers are likely running for an excuse, a mea culpa, or another way to distance themselves from green records that are now liabilities with a Republican base strongly influenced by the Tea Party movement.
So what happened? Was it simply the polarizing direction of the cap and trade debate? The shift in the economic winds? The rise of the Tea Party? The inherent politics of a proposal centered on making our current base of energy sources more expensive, rather than making the cleaner alternatives cheaper?
Whatever the constellation of causes, the change is quite stark. Looking ahead to 2011 and beyond, can we build a new and enduring consensus around an innovation-centered approach to energy reform, building a clean economy, and responsibly reducing pollution? And can we make it sustained enough to avoid the factors that turned the endorsements of prominent GOP leaders into liabilities just a few years later?
On December 15th 2010, hundreds of leading thinkers, scientists, public officials, and innovators gathered in Washington, DC for the Energy Innovation 2010 Conference to initiate a new conversation on a new energy policy paradigm for the 21st century
For 35 years, government and the market have been trying and failing to get energy policy right. Congress has failed to pass large-scale clean energy and climate legislation, while China and other competitors are moving aggressively to take the lead in new energy technology. And the market has failed to create needed low-carbon technology on its own. Meanwhile, the nation's dependence on oil and coal deepens and global temperatures continue to rise. To address these issues, we need to get past the old energy policy paradigm - and we just may be turning the corner.
On December 15th 2010, hundreds of leading thinkers, scientists, public officials, and innovators gathered in Washington, DC for the Energy Innovation 2010 Conference to initiate a new conversation on a new energy policy paradigm: one that recognizes the central role of innovation in resolving the world's looming energy challenges and boosting American competitiveness. Climate change aside, we can't rely on carbon-based fuels for the next 150 years the way we did for the last 150. And we can't create the transformational energy innovations we need without putting innovation front and center.
"Energy Innovation 2010" merely begins a new national energy dialog that must continue well into the coming years. Breakthrough Institute and our partners will continue to spearhead this conversation as we seek new strategies to address the multifaceted energy challenges facing America and the world.
In case you missed the conference, held before a packed house at the National Press Club, or if you simply want to revisit the top notch presentations delivered throughout the packed day, videos from the full conference can be viewed below.
Starting in the 1970s green groups helped kill new nuclear plants by claiming greater energy efficiency would slash energy consumption. It didn't. Energy demand rose 40 percent more than Amory Lovins predicted. The result? A coal-plant building boom. Time to rethink the role of energy efficiency.
By Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Jesse Jenkins
If there's one thing everyone knows for certain, it's that energy efficiency reduces energy consumption. President Obama, Steven Chu, Fortune 500 chieftains, Silicon Valley VCs, the U.N. and McKinsey all say it.
Why, then, does ever-greater efficiency go hand-in-hand with ever-greater energy consumption? In this week's New Yorker, journalist David Owen explains this apparent paradox. The essay (excerpted below) is as fascinating as anything written by Malcolm Gladwell. And the implications for energy and climate policy are of great significance.
Breakthrough Institute and other leading think tanks sponsor day-long conference rethinking energy innovation in the United States: getting to scale, making clean energy cheap, securing American leadership.
After
two years of often-tumultuous debate in Congress, the national debate
over energy and climate change policy has now been altered: cap and
trade policy efforts have run aground in Congress, perhaps fatally, and
Republicans are ascendant, reshaping the national political landscape.
Meanwhile, with economic recovery the top priority for the public and
policymakers alike, America's clean tech competitors are surging ahead,
raising the stakes for energy policy.
Against this backdrop,
support is growing on both right and left for new national investments
in energy innovation that can help address some of the most urgent
imperatives of our time - renewing the economy, improving energy
security and public health, and overcoming key environmental challenges.
A growing chorus of voices thus counsels a renewed national commitment to develop breakthrough energy technologies - and to the reform of America's energy innovation system itself.
In
recent months, energy experts have advised policymakers to: take a page
from the nation's long history of successful military research and
procurement; build on the success of agricultural research stations and
the National Institutes of Health by establishing new innovation
institutes and clusters nationwide; promote the right mix of both
competition and collaboration to spur innovation and productive
knowledge spillover; reform energy subsidies to reward innovation; and
restructure business taxes to promote investment in the building blocks
of an innovation economy.
On December 15th, a group of America's leading policy think tanks will host a day-long conference in Washington D.C. to rethink energy innovation.
Energy Innovation 2010,
held at the National Press Club, will bring together leading experts
from government, think tanks, academia, and business to ask hard
questions about how energy innovation efforts can be brought to scale,
how the innovation system must be restructured and reformed, and how to
renew the kind of active partnerships between the public and private
sectors that were responsible for so much of America's prior
technological innovation and economic strength.
Breakthrough Institute is proud to organize and sponsor this free, day-long conference, along with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and with sponsoring partners the American Enterprise Institute, Third Way, Clean Air Task
Force, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Securing
America's Future Energy, and the Brookings Institution. We are pleased to
welcome TheEnergyCollective.com and Yale Environment 360 as media sponsors for the event.
Forcing countries to agree to emissions caps will never work, argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. The duo argues in a special Wall Street Journal column that the global community should think past U.N. climate talks in Cancun and focus instead on energy innovation, adaptation, and no regrets policies that do not require agreement about global warming.
The failure of the U.N. climate process is proof that shared economic sacrifice cannot be the basis of global action. Nations will not scale up clean energy as long as it remains so much more expensive than fossil fuels. Thinking past talks in Cancun, nations should focus instead on energy innovation, adaptation, and no regrets policies that do not require agreement about global warming. The first step is recognizing that the global market for clean energy exists only thanks to government subsidies and mandates. Instead of imposing emissions controls and subsidizing existing technologies, nations should use competitive deployment to purchase advanced energy technologies, benchmark the winners, and allow intellectual property to spill-over between firms and nations.
This is the framework we propose for pragmatic global climate action in the cover story for a special energy section in today's Wall Street Journal, pegged to the start of U.N. climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. Today also marks the launch of a new web site, Breakthrough Europe, and its kick-off post, "Cancun Can't: The Twilight of European Climate Leadership," which documents the failure of Europe's cap and trade system to reduce emissions.
Our Wall St. Journal essay, "How to Change the Global Energy Conversation," builds on Breakthrough Institute's thinking about the failure of the UN process ("Scrap Kyoto," Democracy Journal), the clean tech intellectual property illusion ("The Revolution Will Not Be Patented," Slate), the green Keynesianism and neoliberalism behind Obama's green jobs fiasco ("Green Jobs for Janitors," The New Republic), and our proposal to make clean energy cheap through technology innovation ("Fast, Clean & Cheap," Harvard Law and Policy Review, Feb 2008).
Gains from a stronger proposed EU emissions target will be swamped by two weeks of emissions growth in China, according to the International Energy Agency.
Were the European Union to call for a deeper cut in carbon dioxide emissions, it would do little to stem the unrelenting increase in global emissions and is unlikely to have any effect on the international climate negotiations, according to the International Energy Agency.
While Europe's negotiating position in international climate talks remains a target of 20 percent emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2020, some have pushed it to target an additional ten percent reduction. The EU has long maintained that it would boost its target to 30 percent if other industrialized countries followed suit.
"We estimate extending Europe's plan to cut emissions from 20 to 30 percent would roughly equal China's two-week gas output."
Could the 10 percent EU additional emissions cut really equal only two weeks of emissions in China? We checked the numbers on that (h/t Roger Pielke, Jr.), and Mr. Birol is indeed correct.
There will be no cap-and-trade climate bill considered in the next Congress, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) promised a colleague today.
Newly sworn-in Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said today that Reid made a "total commitment" to him that there would be no cap and trade next session.
Reid's office confirmed the promise. "Given the election results, there is no chance we can deal with cap and trade," Reid spokesman Jim Manley told E&ENews PM.
New ideas will clearly be needed to make clean energy progress in the next Congress and beyond.
For more on that, see the "Climate Next" series now underway at the Atlantic, Slate, Mother Jones and the other participating partners in the Climate Desk project. Breakthrough's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus kick off the series with their essay, "Innovate First, Regulate Later."
Despite rising national debts, would national governments be wise to borrow today to fund investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and innovation to be enjoyed by -- and paid back by -- a richer, more well-off generation tomorrow?
Here's an interesting argument from our friends across the pond at the UK-focused Political Climate blog, making the case that despite rising deficit concerns and austerity measures in the UK and elsewhere, borrowing from the future may still actually be an appropriate way to pay for clean energy innovation today:
Against this background, it may sound mad to argue for more public borrowing in order to pay for investments in low carbon technologies and infrastructure, but that is what I am going to do in this post.
Let's start with the rationale. ... The starting point is that in advanced economies successive generations tend to get better off over time. For example, at the depths of the 1930s depression Keynes observed that despite the general gloom, he was confident that 100 years in the future, people might be eight times better off in real terms. And indeed average GDP per capita in the UK is now already about 5 times what it was in the 1930s. By extension, we would normally expect future generations to be better off than us in GDP terms.
... [Furthermore, if] we in this generation mitigate climate change, we will allow future generations to have a higher standard of living than they would have if we did nothing. We are very slowly beginning to do this, with policies being introduced to encourage us to invest less in conventional capital (e.g. fossil fuel power stations) and more in investments that effectively maintain natural capital (like renewable energy).
At the moment we are paying for these more expensive investments through reduced consumption, in the form of higher energy bills. If instead we were to borrow a certain amount of money from future generations (who will have to repay through their taxes) and use this money to pay the extra cost of renewables, carbon capture and storage and so on, then the theory says it should be possible to make both our generation and future generations better off. ...
Support for a technology-first approach to America's energy and climate needs is rapidly growing in the wake of the October 14 release of the "Post-Partisan Power" proposal by scholars at the Brookings Institution, AEI and Breakthrough Institute. Here is a sampling of the many reactions and widespread discussion generated by the report...
Joshua Green, Atlantic Monthly & Boston Globe: "Unlike most of what gets introduced just before an election, this was not a soon-to-be-forgotten political ploy, but a long-term project to accomplish what Congress and the president could not: put the country on the path to a clean energy future."
David Leonhardt, New York Times: [T]he death of cap and trade doesn't have to mean the death of climate policy. The alternative revolves around much more, and much better organized, financing for clean energy research. It's an idea with a growing list of supporters, a list that even includes conservatives -- most of whom opposed cap and trade."
Tim Mak, Frum Forum (a site started by former Bush speechwriter David Frum): "If Americans want to fight the challenges of climate change and reduce their dependence on foreign oil, this piece sets a good baseline for discussion."
Ezra Klein, Washington Post: "It's not that PPP is a sure thing, nor that it will pass Congress anytime soon. The Tea Party Republicans will need to sow their wild and crazy oats for awhile before they feel any need to tack to the center. But when they do, they aren't going to embrace cap and trade. They might, on the other hand, embrace a limited and direct approach to energy innovation."
Michael Levi, Council on Foreign Relations: [T]his idea may well make a lot of sense... most of the paper is actually a smart and thoughtful discussion of how to do energy innovation policy right".
Kirsten Powers, New York Post: " If America wants to remain the leader of the world economy, Washington has to attack this issue."
Bryan Walsh, TIME Magazine: "A truly bipartisan approach on energy and climate won't be easy--sometimes, especially right before an election, it seems completely impossible--but it's the only approach we can hope for, if we still hope."
Nature: "[G]iven the lack of consensus in other areas, long-term R&D intended to bring the cost of clean energy down might well be one area where lawmakers will be able to agree."
Case Western professor Jonathan Adler writes: "While not without flaws, the proposal represents a serious alternative to politically-moribund cap-and-trade proposals and the regulate-everything mindset that produced the Waxman-Markey bill."
Newsweek: "Cap-and-trade is on life support, but its weakness is giving other ideas room to breathe. Emerging proposals focus on investment in clean energy, pitched to the public with a narrative that omits a doomsday point of view about global warming and instead focuses on more practical considerations like job creation or the need to stop certain types of pollution."
All that convergence around a politically centrist, technology-first approach alarmed some climate warriors on left and right.
Climate skeptic Steven Milloy of Green Hell blog (and Junkscience.com) wrote: "The left isn't oscillating at all. They are focused on establishing a one-world socialist paradise. Whatever path gets the comrades there, they'll follow. Global warming has just been there most successful gambit to date."
Said Grist.org's David Roberts: "The Republican Party don't want to spend government money on clean energy, Hayward notwithstanding."
Joe Romm, ClimateProgress.org: [It] should also be obvious we're not going to get a massive federal clean energy program either."
Not all long-time climate warriors were sour on the proposal.
While EDF chief economist Nathaniel Keohane reiterates that "we need both cap and trade and sustained investment in clean energy R&D," he went on to tell the New York Times' David Leonhardt, "if it turns out that we can't get cap and trade in the near term, we need R&D investment all the more."
Harvard's Robert Stavins still insists "there is no other feasible approach that can provide meaningful emissions reductions" beyond cap and trade, but he acknowledges: "New path-breaking technologies will be needed to address climate change, and public support for private-sector or public-sector R&D will be crucial to meet this need."
MIT's Michael Greenstone, a long-time cap and trade supporter, isn't so sure about the real-world viability of the policy he once advocated. "The first best hope was getting a world price for carbon, and that now looks remote in the coming years," he told Leonhardt. "But there are ways in which the other options may be preferable to a price only in the U.S." Greenstone endorses the need for $25 billion in clean energy R&D investments and rightly explains, "All the action is really going to be occurring in developing countries" who will need clean and affordable energy to power their economic growth.
In a second post, Washington Post's Ezra Klein looks the realpolitik in the face as well and concludes: "The best of all worlds would've been a price on carbon married to a big investment in clean-energy research. But this is not the best of all worlds. This is our world. And this [technology-first proposal] ... might be our last, best chance to protect it."
Update The Washington Post editorial page endorses Post-Partisan Power's call for a bipartisan energy innovation strategy, noting: "Even if cap-and-trade had passed, the logic goes, the government would still have had to invest in scientific research to make green energy affordable; might as well make those investments, anyway ... incremental action is better than none."
The new report calls for increasing federal innovation investment from roughly $4 today to $25 billion annually, and using military procurement, new, disciplined deployment incentives, and public-private hubs to achieve both incremental improvements and breakthroughs in clean energy technologies. The authors point to America's long-history of bi-partisan support for innovation.
Writes David Leonhardt in today's New York Times, "the death of cap and trade doesn't have to mean the death of climate policy. The alternative revolves around much more, and much better organized, financing for clean energy research. It's an idea with a growing list of supporters, a list that even includes conservatives -- most of whom opposed cap and trade."
Mark Muro of Brookings tells Politico the proposal's four parts "are broadly popular, provide a very broad and appealing American vision of economic transformation and are certainly far more doable than a global pricing system at this point." Added Steve Hayward of American Enterprise Institute, "The entire climate and energy agenda that we've been talking about for several years now has hit a dead end, so it's time to hit the reset button."
Breaking against conventional wisdom, SolveClimate's Elizabeth McGowan takes a fresh look at what a GOP win in November could mean for clean energy progress, noting that new political dynamics in a Washington under divided rule could actually improve chances for bipartisan energy legislation.
According to most electoral prognosticators, Republicans are poised to win major victories in the upcoming November midterm elections, with control of both the House and Senate within their reach. That should spell the end for climate and clean energy legislation, according to many observers, at least for the next Congressional cycle.
But what if it doesn't? Over at SolveClimate, Elizabeth McGowan takes a fresh look at what a GOP win in November could mean for clean energy progress, noting that split control in Washington could actually improve chances for bipartisan energy legislation.
In another clear sign of the steadily unraveling pollution paradigm, Yvo De Boer, the former head of the UN climate negotiations, has acknowledged that the long debate over targets and timetables for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is irrelevant. Asked by Bloomberg about emissions reductions targets in the context of the upcoming climate negotiations in Cancun, De Boer replied:
"Discussions about targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome. I don't think that we're going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition."
De Boer was singing a different tune in the run up to last year's Copenhagen climate negotiations, which ended, predictably, without a comprehensive and legally binding emissions treaty. In August 2009, de Boer told TIME Magazine that even if the U.S. didn't show up to Copenhagen with a new climate change law in hand, an ambitious target would be enough to placate the international community:
"The international community is keenly interested in seeing what steps America is making at home to get its emissions under control, but it also wants to see what the Administration says it will do. If the Administration in Copenhagen commits to a target that is good enough for the international community, that will work. It's up to the U.S. to see how the target will be implemented nationally."
The simple mathematics are that the world needs one nuclear-plant equivalent of carbon-free energy coming on line every day between now and midcentury. The reality is that scaling clean energy sources at that pace is going to require serious technological innovation and sustained commitment to fielding and improving clean energy technologies.
Pacala and Socolow (8) analyzed a scenario that envisioned stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 500 ppm within 50 years. They found that reaching that goal required the deployment of seven existing or nearly existing groups of technologies, such as more fuel-efficient vehicles, to remove seven "wedges" of predicted future emissions (the wedge image coming from the shape created by graphing each increment of avoided future emissions). Those seven wedges, each of which represents 25 gigatons of avoided carbon emissions by 2054, are cited by some as sufficient to "solve" climate change for 50 years (9).
Unfortunately, the original wedges approach greatly underestimates needed reductions. In part, that is because Pacala and Socolow built their scenario on a business as usual (BAU) emissions baseline based on assumptions that do not appear to be coming true. For instance, the scenario assumes that a shift in the mix of fossil fuels will reduce the amount of carbon released per unit of energy. This carbon-to-energy ratio did decline during prior shifts from coal to oil, and then from oil to natural gas. Now, however, the ratio is increasing as natural gas and oil approach peak production, coal production rises, and new coal-fired power plants are built in China, India, and the United States (10).
The enormous challenge of making the transition to carbon-neutral power sources becomes even clearer when emissions-reduction scenarios are based on arguably more realistic baselines, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "frozen technology" scenario ( 11, 12). Capturing all alternate energy technologies, including those assumed within this BAU scenario, means that a total of ~18 of Pacala and Socolow's wedges would be needed to curb emissions (13) (see the figure). And to keep future warming below 2°C, even under the Davis et al. age-out scenario, an additional 7 wedges of emissions reductions would be needed-- for a total of 25 wedges (see the figure).
If support for cap and trade is perceived as a key contributor to the political demise of vulnerable moderate Democrats, count it as yet another nail in the coffin for the repeatedly-failed policy.
If you live in states like Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Kentucky, you may have already seen them: new political hatchet ads attacking Democrats and even some moderate Republicans for support of Congressional cap and trade bills.
According to E&E News ($usbcription required), the climate policy, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year before stalling in the Senate, is the latest weapon wielded by conservative Republican Congressional candidates across the country, who are trying to ride a wave of anger over perceived, out-of-control big government policies into office.
Instead of raising the price of fossil fuels, Gates argues that the time has come to shift our attention to raising the revenues necessary to fuel innovation and make clean energy cheap.
In a new interview with Technology Review, Bill Gates nails the global energy and climate challenge and discusses the need for dramatic increases in energy innovation funding to make clean energy cheap.
In a climate discourse dominated by emissions targets and carbon caps, Gates has provided a refreshing and clear-eyed look at the first-order importance of direct public investment to develop clean, affordable technologies to replace fossil fuels on a global scale.
In this new interview, Gates discusses why dismissing the difficulty of the challenge is counter-productive, and argues that carbon pricing can never drive the dramatic innovation required to transform the global energy system. Instead of raising the price of fossil fuels, Gates argues that the time has come to shift our attention to raising the revenues necessary to fuel innovation and make clean energy cheap.
Below the fold, you can find excerpts from Gates' interview, which can be read in full here.
For more, the NYTimesAndy Revkin and TIME magazine's Bryan Walsh each spotlight the interview here and here, respectively.
The latest death of cap and trade demands a fundamentally new clean energy strategy designed to overcome political obstacles to carbon pricing and simultaneously achieve the primary objective upon which our climate future hinges: making clean energy cheap.
Reports put the time of death at 1 P.M. EST, July 22nd, 2010. That is when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from a meeting of the Democratic Caucus without enough support for even a severely weakened and scaled-back emissions cap on the utility sector.
With that, recognition has finallyset ineverywhere: the United States Senate is not going to enact any form of cap and trade. Not this year. And probably not any time in the foreseeable future.
Worse yet, clean energy progress this year has gone down with the long-sinking cap and trade ship.
The ascension of Julia Gillard provides an opportunity for Labor to reorient its climate change policy agenda.
Contrary to what its proponents have argued for years, emissions trading has not been as politically feasible as initially thought. Labor's inability to pass a market-based mechanism in its first term not only brings into question the political palatability of neoliberal-inspired policy, but also draws attention to the need for alternative approaches.
With the national climate change debate focused solely on capping and trading carbon, policymakers have forgotten that there are many paths to reduce Australia's emissions and transition to a clean energy economy.
The launch of Beyond Zero Emissions'Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy report is an attempt to push back against narrow-minded policymaking. It details a path for Australia to meet 100 per cent of its energy needs with renewable energy by the end of the decade. Making the plan a reality will require a radical shift in climate policy.
Julie Gillard, who replaced Australia's Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, has expressed interest in pursuing climate and energy policy, just not the rickety carbon emissions trading scheme proposal that ultimately cost Rudd his job.
Julia Gillard has declared she is the woman to back if voters want action on climate change, despite confirming she will not reverse the government decision to shelve the emissions trading scheme until 2013...
Ms Gillard is preparing to announce new policies to address climate change - including an energy-efficiency program and new renewable energy projects - to fill the gap left by the decision to shelve its trading scheme.
The government allocated $652.5 million in the budget to new renewable energy and energy-efficiency programs...
We will as a nation need a price on carbon; to get there we need community consensus,'' Ms Gillard said.
Gillard's focus on a carbon price - a policy that continues to be embattled in the U.S. and ineffective in the EU - raises plenty of skeptical eyebrows as to whether climate and energy policy will prove to be her undoing, as well.
Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins offers his recommendations for clean energy policy and strategy in a panel format at online environmental magazine, Grist.org.
Over at online environmental magazine Grist.org, I've been featured among a panel of "seven of Grist's favorite journos and wonks" each offering their two cents on what (if any) changes to climate and clean energy strategy should be made now that cap and trade is on the ropes.
Part 1 focuses on what to do with the remainder if this quickly-waning Congressional year, while Part 2 focuses on longer-term strategy. Here's my response to each question:
Update (Jul 16, 2010): Expanding on a Washington Post op-ed, Vinod Khosla delineates his argument "about the deficiencies of an isolated cap-and-trade or carbon-pricing bill," and joins the climate technology consensus. Khosla writes, "If we want to make a significant difference, we need to get on the path to reducing carbon worldwide by 80 percent now by focusing on what I call "carbon reduction capacity building" -- in other words, we need to develop radical carbon-reduction technologies. A utility cap (or a carbon price) won't build capacity -- it will just increase our utility costs and decrease our manufacturing competitiveness without any increase in our technological competitiveness. On the other hand, although a policy that promotes capacity building will increase research investments in the short term, it will likely decrease overall electricity costs in the medium to long run (through the magic of competition, technology and regulatory certainty), while simultaneously reducing carbon. Disruptive technologies require investment; they don't come from the status quo."
Update (Jul 14, 2010): Other observers have reached similar conclusions about the faltering pollution paradigm. Walter Russell Mead and Clive Crook weigh in on "The Big Green Lie" but can't agree on what it is. Mead argues that it is "that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do" while Crook argues that "it's the diminished credibility of the claim that we have a problem in the first place." But both agree that cap and trade and the effort to establish a global carbon pollution regime are dead. Meanwhile, Newsweek's Stefan Theil observes that "the whole concept of radical, top-down global targets is coming under scrutiny" and suggests that the "new climate realism" will "look at other options beyond the current set of targets" and "include a broader mix of policies" including "a shift of subsidies into research and development" and "greater efforts to adapt society to a warmer climate."
Update (Jul 10, 2010): See Andrew Pendleton and Matthew Lockwood of the UK-based IPPR think tank response to Alex Evans' contention that real action on climate will only occur after a major global warming disaster. "There is simply no reason to believe that a climate shock big enough to bring about major changes in thinking will come along before we reach a tipping point (how would we know?)" they write. "Climate change is by its nature long-term and insidious, more like a frog in a warming pot than a sudden Anschluss."
The twenty-year effort to create a single global pollution framework to reduce carbon emissions is in a state of collapse. Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation to make clean energy cheap. The new framework begins from the understanding that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. But hard and important questions are being asked of the new investment-and-innovation paradigm. How is it different from just increasing subsidies for clean energy? How can we be sure it will reduce emissions? What role should carbon pricing play? Here Breakthrough Institute answers frequently asked questions of the climate technology paradigm and responds to challenges raised by Alex Evans on the left and Robert Michaels on the right, among others, who have taken aim at Breakthrough's and Bill Gates' proposals, respectively.
By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The twenty-year effort to create a single global pollution framework to reduce carbon emissions is in a state of collapse. Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has not reduced emissions and is quickly fading as the central effort to decarbonize European economies. The UN process is becoming a forum for nations to compare and coordinate national policies and measures, not create or enforce a binding global treaty. And it is now clear that, if energy legislation passes the U.S. Senate, it will not create an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, nor will it increase the deployment of clean energy.
Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation. This consensus begins with the recognition that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. No nation -- not even the wealthiest in Europe -- is willing to price carbon enough to cover the difference. Until the technology gap is closed, little will be done to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
The truth is that we've never been debating a real, binding "cap" on greenhouse gas emissions, just an emissions target and a (pretty modest) carbon price signal. With that as the bar set by "cap" and trade legislation, it is certainly possible to get even better outcomes -- faster transformation of the U.S. energy sector, faster clean energy innovation, and even faster emissions cuts -- with a new clean energy strategy.
Unfortunately, Doniger, NRDC (and EDF) wind up clinging onto a "cap" on carbon they have already given away while at the same time standing opposed to a new clean energy strategy that could still salvage a substantive win despite what little time remains on the Congressional clock.
In a new IEA report intended to inform and guide climate and energy policy decision makers, the Energy Technology Perspective 2010 (Exec. Summary; full report purchase required) demonstrates that the clean technology revolution will require an additional $46 trillion investment (beyond energy infrastructure investment expected in BAU scenarios) if we intend to halve carbon emissions by 2050 (from 2005 levels). And, the IEA adds, a carbon price alone will not be sufficient to drive that level of investment.
With the final seconds ticking down on the Congressional clock, President Obama and Senate Democrats face a choice: waste what time remains convincing supporters they haven't abandoned cap and trade, or call a new play and build upon substantive Republican proposals to score a real clean energy win this year.
With the final seconds ticking down on the Congressional clock, President Obama and Senate Democrats emerged from a White House summit with Republican moderates Tuesday still lacking any plan to score a last minute win for clean energy.
Wasted opportunity
Establishing a price (any price) on carbon pollution through a(n increasingly weak) cap and trade system continues to be the the preferred climate and energy approach of environmental advocacy groups and Democratic leadership. This preference holds despite the fact that for at least three years, that plan has consistently failed to uncover any route to securing the sixty votes necessary for passage in the Senate (a similar bill narrowly passed the House last June).
Heading into the Tuesday morning White House summit, Republicans eyed as key swing votes for any clean energy or climate bill telegraphed clear intentions: cap and trade would be a practical non-starter, but they were ready to act with the President on measures to promote zero-carbon electricity, electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and greater energy technology innovation, clean up dirty coal plants, and improve energy efficiency.
The summit offered President Obama a prime opportunity to reset the Senate energy debate by calling a new play: take up the energy provisions Republicans have offered, counter with a more aggressive proposal on similar fronts, and begin earnest negotiations with GOP swing votes to ensure passage of a final bill that could move America towards a clean energy economy before the Congressional clock expires.
Unfortunately, President Obama let this chance to break from the failed and increasingly desperate cap and trade agenda slip by, using the meeting, instead, to reiterate to the assembled Senators - and greens watching from the sidelines - that "he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is ... by putting a price on [carbon] pollution."
At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin discusses why we should stop waiting for the "fog of misinformation and disinformation on climate" to dissipate from the public mindset and instead focus on the developing "energy consensus" that we need clean, cheap energy to meet the expanding energy needs of quickly growing global population.
Reflecting on lawmakers' struggles over climate bills through most of the last decade, it seems clear that insistence on comprehensive one-step legislation including firm, declining caps on emissions from the get-go -- before building confidence and momentum around the new direction -- is a path to nowhere...
Given the stasis in the Senate, even with the "external" costs of fossil fuels on glaring display in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time to start listening more to those proposing this more stepwise route forward. Such an approach would better reflect an unbending reality: A quest for new energy choices that advance human lives while limiting conflict and climate risks will require sustained work by a generation or more -- not just one Congress or president.
Christiana Figueres startled delegates when she addressed the United Nations climate conference in Bonn last week: "I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime," the Costa Rican diplomat told them.
"If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement, then we will have solved this problem. I don't think that's on the cards." Addressing the issue successfully would "require the sustained effort of those who will be here for the next 20, 30, 40 years".
Her words count, and not only because of her 15-year involvement in tackling global warming. Next month, Ms Figueres takes over from the Netherlands' Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the UN's climate change secretariat, based in the former west German capital.
As Bonn's low, heavy skies pelted delegates with rain, much of the rest of the talk during the long sessions was of technical matters such as the measurement of greenhouse gases. But in quiet conversations in the corridors, in cafes over hurried coffees or while scurrying between thunderstorms, the deeper question some officials were asking was whether there was indeed any point in continuing with this type of negotiation, which had failed for 20 years. Could the UN climate talks be reformed - or were they just too broken to fix?
Update (6/30/10):Andrew Revkin highlighted the ITIF report today on his blog, Dot Earth, noting that "the report is a healthy challenge to anyone, including me, with ingrained views on how to propel an "energy quest." Breakthrough has consistently worked to debunk many of the myths highlighted in ITIF's report. For additional reading, click the links in the list below.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has released a new report dismantling the top ten myths in the climate change debate, including the claim that "we have all the technologies we need" and that carbon prices are enough to drive a transition to a clean energy economy. The full report is well worth the read, but here's a summary from ITIF:
The debate on policy responses to climate change is fueled by myths ranging from assumptions that high carbon taxes will alter behavior significantly to overconfidence that green energy is poised to restore our economic prosperity overnight. What's more, many analysts are glossing over the complexity and possible unfairness of cap-and-trade and underestimating just how big a dent we have to make in our greenhouse gas production. What is missing is an understanding that innovation in the energy sector is essential to the transformation in how we produce and consume energy that we want and need. ITIF dismantles the top ten myths in this debate in a new report.
The majority of Americans do believe that Earth's climate is warming and they want the government to take action, according to Stanford Professor Jon Krosnick and his Political Psychology Research Group, but they still don't want to pay higher taxes. These findings echo Breakthrough's own social values research demonstrating strong public support for large-scale federal investment in clean energy R&D and greater support for carbon limits when they are coupled with policies, like public investment, that make clean energy cheaper.
Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business's emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent -- but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.
And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.
At the weekend, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed called for increased direct action campaigning to encourage governments to act on climate change. "What we really need is a huge social 60s-style catalystic, dynamic street action," said Nasheed in the Guardian.
If the people in the US wish to change, it can happen. In the 60s and 70s, they've done that.
President Nasheed emerged from the last year's Copenhagen Climate Conference with considerable clout among climate change campaigners, and rightly so. In the process of drawing attention to the plight of his homeland, the Maldives, a chain of small islands threatened by rising sea levels and storm surges, Nasheed became a leading voice for the vulnerable and poor in the international negotiations. Nasheed has since received several awards for his commendable efforts.
The Maldivian President's comments will no doubt be music to the ears of some climate advocates in Australia, however, the merits of such an approach should be carefully considered. Is direct action likely to be as effective for climate change as it was for social issues in the 1960s? Is Nasheed's optimism that renewed grassroots action will compel governments to implement effective climate policies well-founded?
In part 2, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome expounds on the scientific and anti-scientific basis of environmentalism, explaining the role of morality in the effort to mitigate climate change.
GE Food for Thought On climate, Greens point to the science, but on GE crops, many find science unconvincing.
By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Siddhartha Shome
The Scientific Basis of Environmentalism
Modern American environmentalism was born in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson was a scientist and much of the book is a scientific argument about the harmful effects of chemical pesticides.
The book is replete with scientific data, quotes from scientists, and scientific reasoning. In fact, the entire concluding chapter is an impassioned plea to adopt new biology based breakthrough technologies to replace chemical pesticides.
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing - entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists - all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.
Carson characterized chemical pesticides of the time as "Neanderthal" technologies, belonging to the "stone age of science". Clearly, the implication was not that we should replace chemical pesticides with even more ancient Jurassic-era technologies, but rather that we supplant them with advanced biology-based breakthrough technologies that are more environmentally friendly.
Global climate policy should be radically overhauled in the wake of the failure of the United Nations process, an international group of 14 climate policy experts and scientists argue in the "Hartwell Paper." Instead of the failed Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables, what's needed is a focus on expanding access to energy for the poor, quickly reducing non-CO2 climate forcings, and adaptation to changing climate.
Global climate policy should be radically overhauled in the wake of the failure of the United Nations process, an international group of 14 climate policy experts and scientists argue in a new paper. The Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables was bound to fail because it proposed a single over-arching framework to deal with a "wickedly' complex problem. Instead what's needed is a focus on expanding access to energy for the poor, quickly reducing non-CO2 climate forcings, and adaptation to changing climate.
The paper brings together a set of ideas that have been developing over the last decade. The meeting was convened by Gwyn Prins of London School of Ecomomics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who wrote "The Wrong Trousers," a 2007 critique of Kyoto. The group included, among others, East Anglia University climate scientist Mike Hulme, author of "Why We Disagree About Climate Change," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, the economist Chris Green, co-author of a 2002 Science article calling for advanced energy research to stabilize climate emissions, and University of Colorado's Roger Pielke and Arizona State's Dan Sarewitz, authors of a 2000 Atlantic magazine story arguing climate policy to shift focus to technology innovation and adaptation. Green, Pielke, and Sarewitz are all Breakthrough Senior Fellows.
The bottom line: putting a price on carbon or regulating emissions is not sufficient to address the nation's climate problem or seize the economic opportunities in the fast-growing clean energy sector. Any Senate climate bill worth it's salt must clear the critical clean energy innovation threshold: $15-25 billion a year invested in clean energy technology innovation.
What is clear, though, is this: To get to a good bill senators need to deal properly with the revenue--whether from offshore oil drilling or pollution allowance auctions or whatever else is in the bill. And to do that they need to make sure a huge chunk of it gets applied to clean-energy research and development. Get that right and much else needn't be perfect. Blow that, and the bill is likely not worth it.
... The bottom line is this: Putting a price on carbon, or regulating emissions, ... while absolutely necessary, will not be sufficient to address the nation's climate problem and will, importantly, not put the U.S. in the position to seize the extraordinary opportunities that will come with rebuilding to global energy economy. Also necessary, as we keep saying, will be a major drive to promote large-scale technology breakthroughs. No matter how you measure it, U.S. government investment in clean energy R&D remains grossly inadequate. Right now clean energy R&D accounts for only around $3 billion a year. But if we're going to see real progress in de-carbonizing the present economy and creating the next one this number should be closer to $15 billion and probably as much as $25 billion per year.
So that's the target: $15 to $25 billion a year is "the number"--the critical investment threshold for federal clean energy investment that must become a core benchmark for evaluating any and all federal climate, energy, or indeed appropriations deal making.
Mark notes the rumors and reports of the still-not-yet-public drafts of the K-G-L bill do not bode well for the bill's ability to clear this critical clean energy innovation threshold...
Cape Wind was a momentous clean energy victory but if climate change advocates truly take the immense scale of the energy and climate challenge seriously, we must ensure that this is the last time that a new zero-carbon energy source faces such prolonged NIMBY opposition.
Al Gore has called on the U.S. to "commit to producing 100% of electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon free sources within ten years." But the ten-year hard-fought battle to secure approval for Cape Wind shows that we cannot come close to meeting even a fraction of his goal if we do not appreciate the scale of energy challenge and the incredible pace of clean energy innovation and deployment required to truly reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change.
First, let's put Cape Wind in perspective. A $1 billion dollar project, America's first offshore wind farm will consist of 130 turbines that can produce roughly 1.6 billion kWh of electricity annually, enough to power three-quarters of the homes on Nantucket and surrounding islands. But on a national scale, this iconic project will only meet about 0.04% of the total (forecasted) U.S electricity demand in 2010, expected to be about 3,784 billion kWh.
In spite of endless NIMBY opposition Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has handed a big win to Cape Wind. The triumph of this level-headed decision over continued efforts to block the project in the name of the "natural" or "sacred" provides a humbling lesson for opponents of Cape Wind and future clean energy projects.
Defining Sacred Compare for yourself the destruction of the sacred rainforest by oil drilling to the modest development of this region (right) by wind turbines.
After almost a decade of NIMBY opposition Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has handed a big win to Cape Wind -- what will become the country's first offshore wind farm -- and the future of offshore wind in the U.S.
Yet, environmentalists are bitterly divided over support for Cape Wind -- a 130 turbine, 430 megawatt clean energy project that is scheduled for siting about six miles offshore and could meet up to 75% of Cape Cod's power needs. The conflict between those who see Cape Wind as a step towards a clean energy future and those who consider it a "corporate giveaway to private industrial energy developers" says much about the scale of the challenges to clean energy adoption in the U.S.
The Breakthrough Institute has advocated for the project since 2005, when Robert Kennedy Jr. led a public fight to block the wind farm. Breakthrough's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle and organized an open letter with other global warming writers, including Bill McKibben, Ross Gelbspan, and Jon Isham, calling on Kennedy to support the project. Over 150 other global warming writers and activists signed the letter. Nordhaus and Shellenberger continued their critique in a chapter of their 2007 book, Break Through, writing about Cape Wind as a cautionary tale against green NIMBYism.
The Copenhagen climate talks may have been a symbolic success according to some, but the Accord won't mitigate climate change and the forthcoming Kerry/Graham/Lieberman climate bill will not lead to technology innovation. These failures, notes Michael Lind in a new white paper, show the collapse of the climate paradigm and the need to redefine our approach to climate change in terms of technology
The climate negotiations in Copenhagen resulted in a 193-nation agreement that included 154 policy commitments -- "the highest number of new government initiatives ever recorded . . . in a four-month period," according to Deutsche Bank -- but do they really matter?
In the months since the frenetic, and at times, apoplectic UNFCCC meeting, two conflicting views have emerged.
A report released earlier this month by Deutsche Bank (DB) presented analysis like those from Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) showing the talks were "no failure."
The transportation sector is responsible for roughly one-third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet as we await the release of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman senate climate bill next Monday, there's little clarity about how, if at all, transportation sector emissions will fall under the bill's carbon regulations.
According to severalreports, the trio of senators leading the effort to craft a climate and energy bill for release next Monday are back-peddling from earlier plans to implement a new fee on petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline amidst concerns that any new "gas tax" would trigger voter backlash.
Earlier reports of ongoing, private negotiations on a Senate climate and energy bill led by Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) indicated that the trio were planning to drop the 'economy-wide' cap and trade plan included in the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill in favor of a 'three sector' approach to regulating emissions from power plants, industry, and petroleum-based fuels.
A cap would be implemented on the power sector to begin with, with industry phased in at a later date, while the oil sector would be exempted from the plan. Instead, petroleum-based fuels, including gasoline and diesel fuel, would be subject to a "linked fee" that would be tied somehow to the price of carbon pollution credits under the power sector cap and trade program -- in effect, a variable tax on gasoline and other petroleum products.
Now however, the Wall Street Journal reports that Sen. Kerry vehemently declares, "There is no gas tax, there was no gas tax and there will never be a gas tax."
Two new posts for Earth Day argue that we need to move from nature protection to tech innovation. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are in Slate and Mother Jones arguing that the focus on technology transfer as part of a global climate agreement is a distraction: clean tech IP has already been rapidly transferred to China -- soon it will be transferred back here.
The Breakthrough Institute team works to publish quantitative analysis of Congressional climate and clean energy legislation, often working to publish a series of analyses "in real time" as the Congressional debate unfolds. Here is our collection of analysis of climate bills in the current Congress:
When I saw this graph it brought to mind a very similar graph of media attention from about 15 years ago, shown below from a paper that I did with Mickey Glantz in 1995 (on how to "sell" scientific programs to policy makers, PDF). Notice any similarities?
Obama invokes this classic imagery in his video message explaining the history of Earth Day.
Forty-one years ago, in the city of Cleveland, people watched in horror as the Cuyahoga river, choked with debris and covered in oil, caught on fire. Images of the burning Cuyahoga shocked the nation and it led one Wisconsin senator, the following year, to organize the first Earth Day to call attention to the dangers of ignoring our environment.
But as Michael and Ted wrote in Break Through in 2007, the image of the burning river that purportedly catalyzed Earth Day and the modern environmental movement was actually taken in 1952, not 1969, because the "historic" latter fire didn't even burn long enough to be photographed.
A secret White House strategy memo on how to spin reporters and activists in the run-up to talks in Mexico later this year reveals that climate officials were coordinating public relations efforts last fall with the Center for American Progress.
But apparently the White House realized that CAP's help wasn't good enough, since now the memo says that "intimate meetings" between administration staff with "some of the harsher critics" are needed:
Larger group sessions, similar to the one held at CAP prior to Copenhagen, will be useful down the line, but more intimate meetings in the spring are essential to building the foundation of support. Or at the very least, disarming some of the harsher critics.
In their final post on the Climate McCarthyism last fall, Ted and Michael referred to CAP as "the headquarters in Washington," and worried that CAP's influence over the White House would cause Obama to follow in the footsteps of Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, in labeling green critics of cap and trade "global warming deniers." Let's hope that influence is now waning in light of the rapidly failing push for cap and trade in the U.S. and a global climate agreement from the U.N.
Last month, Ted and I argued in Yale e360 that there were reasons for decarbonization other than climate change -- many commenters were incredulous. For example: "Although, fwiw, the content of their message is wrong and frankly stupid as well -- what 'bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy' exists that is divorced from climate change concerns?"
"America's 250-year supply of coal will be an important source of energy. But even people not much worried about the supposed climate damage done by carbon emissions should see the wisdom--cheaper electricity, less dependence on foreign sources of energy--of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander's campaign to commit the country to building 100 more nuclear power plants in 20 years."
I have been having an interesting debate with a few economists in a previous thread about Paul Krugman's views of climate policy. I read his latest piece as emphasizing energy conservation and de-emphasizing technology. A few economists write in the comments that my reading is "absurd." This matters of course because anyone who thinks that we can stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at a low level via conservation while de-emphasizing technology just doesn't have a good grasp of the problem.
So I Googled around a bit to see what Krugman has said in the past. And guess what? He advocates energy conservation and de-emphasizes technology! Here are some of his earlier statements that are unambiguous on these matters and consistent with how I interpret his latest piece.
"More than 125,000 years ago, your ancestors discovered fire. With it came a source of heat, warmth, and light. Unfortunately, for 1 in 3 people living today, very little has changed. This is energy poverty. Really let that sink in - one third of the world's population lives like this."
Andy Revkin has posted several commenter responses to his great piece at the new Dot Earth 2.0,declaring that a global, "sustained energy quest" should be "an organizing principle if humanity wants to avoid hard knocks in the next few decades."
One response, from Hugh Whalan of New York provides a powerful way to envision the realities of energy poverty and it's central importance to the global energy quest of the 21st century:
More than 125,000 years ago, your ancestors discovered fire. With it came a source of heat, warmth, and light. Unfortunately, for 1 in 3 people living today, very little has changed. This is energy poverty.
Really let that sink in - one third of the world's population lives like this.
Addressing energy poverty is a key step to alleviating poverty - with the IEA noting that an additional 700 million people need to gain access to modern energy services by 2015 if the UN's millennium development poverty alleviation goal is to be met (halving world poverty).
Just as importantly, energy poverty is a huge contributor to climate change, as those stuck in energy poverty are forced to rely on fuels like kerosene and firewood which caused enormous amounts of pollution.
Significantly expanding green energy access to developing countries is a simple solution - addressing poverty and reducing emissions - with the possibility that we can set developing countries on a 'clean energy' path to development.
It won't be easy. It won't be cheap. But importantly companies are starting to show that delivering clean energy to billions of poor can be profitable.
Energy is important to everything. Policy makers, governments and the general public need to be more aware of this because we all too easily take access to energy for granted.
Andrew Revkin's well-regarded Dot Earth blog has moved to the Opinion page, now that he has moved on from his staff position at the New York Times. As Curtis Brainerd notes at the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Revkin "has expressed a desire to move even farther beyond the constraints of traditional news reporting."
To kick off the "new iteration" of his blog, Revkin has an excellent post laying bare his thoughts on the "climate crisis" and the "energy quest" - specifically what we need to do fill the global energy gap and mitigate climate change:
"I'm talking about a sustained [energy] quest, from the household light socket to the boardroom, the laboratory to the classroom, the smart post-industrial American city to the struggling, (literally) powerless sub-Saharan village. This is not some onerous task, but an active, positive assertion that the ways we harvest and use energy -- an asset long taken for granted and priced in ways that mask its broader costs -- really do matter. Dry places do this with water all the time. In Israel, there is no toilet without two flush options. It's not some goofball green concept; it's just the way things are done.
You've heard a lot about an energy revolution of late, involving a (temporary) burst of spending from the stimulus legislation. But it's building from a paltry base of both public and private investment in the energy arenas where breakthroughs could really expand the menu of energy options required to sustain a prospering, healthy planet as the human growth spurt crests. I'm not saying that a sustained investment in scientific research is remotely sufficient, on its own, to drive an energy transformation. But I do see levels of investment in such inquiry as a proxy for our overall interest in this issue."
The Guardian has the full transcript of an interview with James Lovelock's opinions on the tribalism of some climate scientists -- as well as the role skeptics should play in the debate. Strong stuff coming from the founder of Gaia theory and a long-time advocate of aggressive action on global warming.
"We're very tribal. You're either a goodie or a baddie. I've got quite a few friends among the sceptics, as well as among the "angels" of climate science. I've got more angels as friends than sceptics, I have to say, but there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well. He raises questions. I find him an interesting sceptic. What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: "Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?" If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours. Some of them, of course, are corrupted and employed by oil companies and things like that. Some even work for governments. For example, I wouldn't put it past the Russians to be behind some of the disinformation to help further their energy interests. But you need sceptics especially when the science gets very big and monolithic."
Until clean and cheap energy sources are available for deployment on a massive scale, developing nations like South Africa will remain stuck in the Development Trap: forced to either sacrifice climate and ecological security in the name of development and poverty alleviation or to condemn countless millions of citizens to energy poverty in the name of climate protection. Breaking out of this untenable position is the urgent challenge of the century. It's time to make clean energy cheap.
[Update, 4/9/10: According to E&E News ($ubcr. required), the 24 member World Bank board voted to approve the $3.75 billion loan to South Africa, including $3.05 billion to construct a new 4.8 GW supercritical coal-fired power station and additional funding to construct 100 MW of utility-scale wind power and 100 MW of concentrating solar power with energy storage capability.
The United States' representative on the World Bank board abstained from the vote, and the explanation is the clearest example of the multi-faceted challenges of global development and the ways in which energy poverty and climate change objectives remain largely opposed in the absence of clean, affordable, and rapidly scalable energy technology options. According to E&E:
In a statement released just as the 24-member World Bank board started to debate the Eskom loan behind closed doors, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement saying its abstention "reflects concerns about the climate impact of the project and its incompatibility with the World Bank's commitment to be a leader in climate change mitigation and adaptation."
Still, the United States noted, it "recognizes South Africa's pressing energy needs and the lack of near-term feasible low-carbon alternatives."
Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, roundly condemned the World Bank decision, and chastised the U.S. for not voting in opposition. However, there is no indication that viable alternative plans to expand energy access in South Africa without exacerbating the nation's greenhouse emissions were proposed. ]
South Africa's finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives and simultaneous concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of energy development.
With South Africa's economy growing rapidly - it's expanded by two-thirds since 1994, when Nelson Mandela first took office - the nation's demand for energy has grown apace. As Gordhan notes, "Millions of previously marginalized South Africans are now on the grid." And that's a very good thing.
Consider that not having access to affordable, modern energy sources, particularly electricity, means no access to potable, running water; it means having to burn dung and wood and other primitive biofuels to provide cooking and indoor heating; and it means sputtering kerosene lamps as the only source of light after the sun goes down.
The human toll of such energy poverty is incredible. According to the World Health Organization, solid fuel use causes 1.6 million excess deaths per year globally, especially among women and children, while waterborne disease is one of the leading global killers, ending the lives of over 3 million annually - again, many of them young children - who lack access to clean and safe water supplies.
Discover illuminates the differing perspectives of climate scientists, Judith Curry (Georgia Tech) and Michael Mann (Penn State), on the implications of ClimateGate and the state of climate science, in general. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. has excerpts from the interview on his blog.
Here's Judith Curry in response to the question: "So where does climate research go from here?"
"I personally don't support cap-and-trade. It makes economic sense but not political sense. You're just going to see all the loopholes and the offsets. I think you're going to see a massive redistribution of wealth to Wall Street, and we're not going to reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We need a massive investment in technology. We do need to help the developing world that is most vulnerable now to the impacts of climate variability, not even the stuff that's related to carbon dioxide. There are a lot of things going on--floods, hurricanes, droughts, and whatever--that can't even be attributed to global warming right now. By reducing the vulnerability of the developing world to these extreme events, we'll have gone a long way to helping them adapt to the more serious things that might come about from global warming."
Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. reviews four books on climate change for Nature and concludes that asserting the scientific high ground and demanding action on that premise won't make better climate policy--"admitting the limitations of science in compelling political agreements," he says, is the critical step towards that end.
"If science leads inexorably to particular political outcomes, then it would seem to favour autocratic forms of governance. The middle man -- the general public -- is easily ignored if heads of state need only hear the expert voice of science. Schneider worries that democracy finds it hard to deal with complex issues: if only the public understood the real risks, he explains, they would be "much more likely to send strong signals to their representatives". He bemoans a public debate that includes the participation of "special interests" and that is filtered through an inept media, a perspective echoed by Hansen."
A recent Gallup Poll shows American concerns about eight major environmental issues are the lowest they've been for 20 years - including worry about climate change.
One of the country's most respected liberal foreign policy voices, Walter Russell Mead, blames Al Gore for the magical climate thinking that led to the contrivance and ultimate failure of Copenhagen:
"Environmentalists are still trying to avoid pulling the plug, but the corpse is already cool to the touch and soon it will begin to smell. As the global greens move from the denial stage of the grief process, brace yourself for some eloquent, petulant and arrogant rage. Tears will be shed and hands will be wrung. The world is stupid, uncaring, unworthy to be saved. Horrible Republicans, evil Chinese, demented know-nothing climate skeptics have ruined the world and condemned our grandchildren to lives of sorrow and pain. Messengers will be shot; skeptics will be blamed for asking questions and the media (and the internet) will be blamed for reporting the answers.
....
The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault. This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive. It was poorly organized and foolishly led. It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements. It lacked the most elementary level of political realism-all the more egregious given the movement's politically sophisticated and very rich opponents. Foundation staff, activists and sympathetic journalists cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of comfortable group-think, and as they toasted one another in green Kool-Aid they thought they were making progress when actually they were slowly and painfully digging themselves into an ever-deeper hole."
The growing movement to make clean energy cheap, and to deliver that energy globally, has the potential to alleviate as much human suffering and injustice as some of the largest, concerted social movements in history.
"If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years," declared the world's wealthiest man during last week's TED 2010 conference, "I can pick who is president, I can pick a vaccine - or I can pick that an [energy technology] at half the cost with no carbon emissions gets invented, this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact."
Bill Gates is right. And he is not just talking about the impact on climate change, which does of course present a major threat. He is also talking about one of the most critical global imperatives to make poverty history: making clean energy cheap.
"If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy," said Gates in his introduction. Gates should know as well as any development expert, since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - the world's largest transparent private foundation - has invested billions of dollars in extreme poverty alleviation since 1994.
Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people - over one third of global population - meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. "Without access to modern, commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, social instability and underdevelopment," concludes the International Energy Agency.
Mike Riggs at the Daily Caller include several quotes from me in an article about climate skepticism. So as to avoid any confusion about my views on the subject, I post below the full text of the extended email correspondence from which Riggs pulled the quotes:
Mike Riggs: Do you see skepticism as a rational reaction to recent news about "climategate," inaccurate studies in the 2007 IPCC report, or criticisms of Dr. Phil Jones?
Ted Nordhaus: You have to ask yourself what you mean by skepticism. Are you talking about skepticism about the relationship between CO2 and global temperatures? Skepticism about whether temperature trends over the last decade are consistent with the predictions of climate models? Skepticism about the relationship between present day natural disasters and global warming? These skepticisms are not the same thing. One can accept the relationship between CO2 and global temperature increases and be skeptical of the predictions of climate models. One can accept that CO2 is warming the planet and even accept many of the predictions of climate models and still be skeptical of the claims that global warming is driving rising disaster losses in the present.
Simplicity and transparency are the strengths of the new CLEAR Act, a climate bill recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
In Part 1 of our analysis of the new Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, we demonstrated how the bill fails to make the investments needed to jumpstart a competitive American clean energy economy and fund the technology innovation and deployment needed to affordably secure deep cuts in U.S. carbon emissions. In Part 2, we focus on several important structural advantages of CLEAR that open the door to a more transparent debate about the costs and benefits of climate action in Congress.
Simplicity and transparency are the strengths of the CLEAR Act, a climate bill recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
In contrast to competing climate proposals, which weigh in at several hundred pages in length, CLEAR contains just under 40 pages of text. Some of this brevity is achieved by punting on the development of a clean technology investment and competitiveness strategy (see more in Part 3, forthcoming), but much of the bill's simplicity comes from avoiding many of the complex and opaque measures in competing bills, creating new opportunities for transparent and open debate of climate action that may prove critical to securing real political consensus.
CLEAR does not allow offsets, is transparent about emissions reductions carbon cap will drive
Fossil fuel importers and producers regulated under CLEAR are not permitted to use emissions offsets to prove compliance with the bill's emissions cap. Unlike otherclimate bills, CLEAR keeps emissions reductions in non-capped sectors strictly separate from efforts to transform the U.S. energy system through the bill's carbon cap.
This enables a transparent debate over how quickly the U.S. energy sector can (or must) transition away from fossil fuels towards cleaner alternatives (and there will surely be much debate on that subject). Avoiding offsets also ensures that emissions reduction efforts in other sectors, including agriculture and forestry, are pursued in conjunction with, rather than instead of, the critical transformation of the energy system.
CLEAR's transparent cap on energy-related CO2 emissions is thus much better than competing climate bills at providing the kind of certainty that energy sector players need to plan investments in technology and infrastructure.
As the dust settles from the remarkable Copenhagen meeting observers are presenting vastly different messages about what has happened and what it means, raising many questions and few answers...
As the dust settles from the remarkable Copenhagen meeting observers are presenting vastly different messages about what has happened and what it means. Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel, warns that anyone who criticizes Copenhagen is simply trying to stop action from moving forward: "anyone who just badmouths Copenhagen now is engaging in the business of those who are applying the brakes rather than moving forward." However, efforts to shut down debate are not going to work, as people are engaged in the very useful exercise of sorting out the meaning of Copenhagen.
Here are a few examples from the United States on the left side of the political spectrum:
Declaring "Good Riddance to Copenhagen," Newsweek's Sharon Begley writes: "The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of." Is this another cogent call for a new Climate Realpolitik?
That sound you'll hear in 2010 is a can being kicked down the road. Again. In the wake of the failure of the international negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, you'll hear a lot of talk about how the world has two good chances in the new year to achieve what it failed to do at Copenhagen. Don't believe it. ...
The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of.
That's because developed countries are no more likely to work out their differences with developing countries before those 2010 meetings than they did before Copenhagen. Must China, India, and Brazil agree to legally binding, verifiable cuts in their carbon-dioxide emissions? How much will rich countries ante up to help poorer ones segue to noncarbon renewable-energy sources and adapt to rising seas, droughts, dwindling water supplies, and crop failures? Will countries have to accept international monitoring of their emissions, which drives China crazy? Rather than repeating the Copenhagen charade in 2010, then, it's time for creative destruction.
Accept that the 192 nations roped together by the U.N. will not agree on a meaningful climate treaty next year either. Drop the pretense that every country matters equally. Instead, set up bilateral talks and a "club" of the countries that do matter: a mere dozen account for almost all greenhouse emissions.
Sounds like another cogent call for a new Climate Realpolitik actually capable of bending the course of global emissions downwards and putting the world on a clean development path.
In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined.
In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined...
Breaking free from the auspices of the UN's 190+ nation negotiating framework, major emitters, including the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, appear poised to move forward with or without the rest of the UNFCCC nations.
According to a flurry of tweets and reports from observers on the ground in Copenhagen, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese chairman of the "G77," a large group of developing nations, is crying bloody murder, declaring that the deal "locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever" and saying "Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush." The EU is grudgingly signing on to the accord "as better than no accord." And protestors, led by increasingly radical activist Bill McKibben, are gathering outside the Bella Center hoisting images of President Obama and crying "shame on you."
"The President has wrecked the UN (and the planet)," declared a press release from McKibben's 350.org.
A new climate bill, introduced Friday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), would invest only a tiny fraction of the bill's revenues to catalyze clean energy technology innovation while implementing an emissions cap that requires CO2 emissions to fall roughly 5% below 2012 levels.
A new climate bill, introduced Friday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), would invest only a tiny fraction of the bill's revenues to catalyze clean energy technology innovation while implementing an emissions cap that requires CO2 emissions to fall roughly 5% below 2012 levels.
[Note: post updated 12/17/09 with a correction and additional information]
At least $15 billion must be invested annually to boost federal R&D budgets and jumpstart clean energy innovation to improve the price and performance of clean technologies, according to a wide consensus of energy experts, along with additional investments in clean energy demonstration, deployment, manufacturing and infrastructure.
In contrast, the Cantwell-Collins bill would initially direct just $2.5-8 billion annually to support U.S. clean energy technologies and industries, the Breakthrough Institute estimates based on the bill's supporting documents.
The Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal, or CLEAR Act proposes to limit U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases through a simplified cap and trade system that auctions permits to polluters and rebates the majority of revenues directly to households through monthly, per capita dividend checks.
The legislation targets a 20 percent, economy-wide cut in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, relative to a 2005 benchmark.
To achieve this target, the bill sets an upstream cap on importers and producers of fossil fuels that would require CO2 emissions to fall just over 5 percent relative to 2012 levels. If the most recent EIA projections of depressed emissions levels due to the economic recession prove accurate, those cuts could be in the range of 9% below the 2005 benchmark. [Note: post updated with correction on 12/17/09; rate at which emissions cap declines was misreported in prior version.]
That falls short of the bill's 20% by 2020 target and the CLEAR Act's emissions cap covers CO2 only, which is responsible for roughly 85 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases when each gas is weighted by their impact on global warming.
To fill this gap, the legislation directs the President to achieve additional emissions reductions in non-capped sectors of the U.S. economy by directly funding programs to encourage land-use changes that sequester carbon in forestry and agriculture or reduce emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane. The bill sets aside a portion of the cap and auction revenues in a trust fund that prioritizes spending on these additional reductions, but precise uses of that fund is subject to Congressional appropriations.
While it offers several structural advantages over competingcap and trade proposals (discussed in Part 2, forthcoming), CLEAR is principally focused on pollution reduction and does not implement a clean economy strategy sufficient to keep the U.S. competitive in the global clean energy race (see forthcoming Part 3).
One might argue that global treaty negotiations should be explicitly focused on shared support for sustainable global development, rather than on emissions cuts. Developing and deploying the technologies and tools needed to fuel sustainable development at a global scale is the task of the 21st century. It's time the international community focused squarely on that task, for without solutions to this key challenge, no effort to stabilize the climate will succeed.
Some food for thought here: Nathan Wyeth pens a very thoughtful column on the Copenhagen climate summit focused on the key challenges of fueling sustainable global development and expanded energy-access to the billions of energy poor worldwide, via the new WRI-affiliated blog, NextBillion.net:
Promising "we can and will pass climate change and energy independence legislation this Congress," Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) unveiled a new framework intended to form the core of a "compromise" climate and energy bill capable of clearing the 60-vote hurdle needed to secure passage. Details are still vague, but here's a run-down of where that framework is headed...
Promising "we can and will pass climate change and energy independence legislation this Congress," Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) unveiled a new framework intended to form the core of a "compromise" climate and energy bill capable of clearing the 60-vote hurdle needed to secure passage.
The framework aims to cut U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases by 17% below 2005 levels in the "near-term," by which the senators apparently mean the year 2020. The three senators brand such a target "achievable and reasonable" and also declare their support for "a long term target of approximately 80 percent below 2005 levels," presumably by 2050.
Details of the new proposal are still scant, in an apparent nod to several Senate committee chairs -- and the numerous swing votes -- who will no doubt shape the final legislation.
Sen. Liberman told reporters today "there are well over 60 votes in play in the Senate, not that we have 60 votes yet." He'll have a steep hill to climb by all accounts.
Will details still vague, we can only get a sense of where the new Kerry-Graham-Lieberman framework is headed, but here's a run-down of notable passages...
John Cowgill, an AP Environmental Science student in Lexington, Kentucky writes that the solution to global warming ultimately lies in creating a viable solution to fossil fuels.
"I am somewhat of a cornucopianist. Although I don't think ALL of the world's ecological problems can be solved with technology, I do believe that the solution to global warming ultimately lies in creating a viable solution to fossil fuels and not waiting on people to stop driving cars. As the [TIME] article itself explicitly states "...while global politics may shape how quickly and appropriately we structure our response to climate change, the actual work of reducing carbon emissions will ultimately be a technological problem." Thus, I am amazed that countries are not doing more to invest in green technology research. No nation is anywhere close to putting adequate funds into green technology research, and I believe the first nation to start research will put itself in a fantastic position economically, socially, and, of course, technologically."
-John Cowgill, AP Environmental Science student at Henry Clay High School, Lexington, KY.
Forget 80% by 2050 and 450ppm. Stop fixating on emissions reduction targets and timetables. As UN climate negotiations begin today in Copenhagen, there is only one number that deserves the world's attention: $10.5 trillion. That is the scale of shared investment that the International Energy Agency says is necessary over the next two decades to bring about a clean energy revolution and enable the global community to meet its climate goals. For years, climate activists and government leaders have continued to obsess about emissions reduction targets, while paying short shrift to the critical clean technology investments that we will need to get us there. If Copenhagen doesn't get us closer to closing the massive clean technology investment gap, it will have failed the global community.
Forget 80% by 2050 and 450ppm. Stop fixating on emissions reduction targets and timetables. As UN climate talks kick off in Copenhagen, Denmark, if you want a number to focus the world's attention on, try this one: $10.5 trillion.
That's the scale of additional investment required between now and 2030 to put the world's energy system on a lower-carbon path, according to the world energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency.
Without measurable progress that dramatically increases global investments in clean energy, we can forget stabilizing global temperatures or atmospheric carbon dioxide at any level. And as the IEA makes clear, the world's governments must lead the way in making massive public investments to rapidly develop and deploy an array of clean energy technologies capable of sustainably and affordably powering the planet.
So for those following the progress in Copenhagen, keep that sense of scale -- $10.5 trillion -- and just one phrase on your mind: Show me the money!
Enough With the Targets and Timetables
In the days leading up to the UN climate summit beginning today in Copenhagen, the focus has been on pronouncements from world leaders establishing various national targets to reduce or curb the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions principally driving global warming.
In July of this year, the world's 17 largest economies declared support for "an aspirational global goal" to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. Then, the world watched in recent weeks as first the United States, then China and most recently Brazil and India put their emissions pledges on the table. Each would cut their emissions some amount by some date, with the developed countries outlining targets for absolute cuts to CO2 emissions and most developing countries, including China and India, announcing reductions in the carbon intensity of their economies (aka CO2 per GDP).
As the Times info-graphic clearly illustrates, the "Lessons from Kyoto" are clear: economic trajectories, and little else, determined emissions outcomes under the targets and timetables focused Kyoto Protocol. Without a proactive and massive shared global effort to sever economic growth from emissions by accelerating clean technology innovation and deployment, the Copenhagen summit now underway shouldn't be expected to produce a dramatically different outcome than it's Kyoto predecessor, despite likely "participation" from the U.S. and big developing nations like China this time around.
A new info-graphic from the New York Times, released today as UN climate talks begin in Copenhagen, looks at the "Lessons from Kyoto," the global treaty that's ongoing fate will be the focus of UN climate negotiations beginning today in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The graphic gets the lessons pretty much dead-on, including how little actual progress any nations have made towards meeting their Kyoto "obligations." As the Times notes, "The legacy of the Kyoto Protocol is mixed." Of the 36 wealthy nations who agreed under the 1997 treaty to cut their emissions by an average of 5% below historic 1990 levels, just 18 are on track to meet their targets, almost all of them in Europe.
As the graphic illustrates, the bulk of these "successful" nations are former members of the Soviet bloc, and almost all saw deep economic declines after the fall of the Soviet Union, which conveniently occurred after the 1990 emissions baseline year used in the Kyoto treaty. Deindustrializing Eastern bloc nations, including East Germany, saw big cuts in their emissions and made compliance with the Kyoto protocol easy. Better yet, for these nations, exceeding their Kyoto "obligations" left them with excess credits under the treaty framework that they could sell to other nations struggling to cut their own emissions.
A recent Nature article by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Christopher Green and co-author Isabel Galiana explains why a technology-led policy is the best way to achieve climate stabilization and transition to a future fueled by clean energy technology.
"The fixation on near-term targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions at the climate meeting in Copenhagen has resulted in insufficient attention towards the technological means of achieving them."
So begins "Let the Global Technology Race Begin," an article in Nature by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Christopher Green and co-author Isabel Galiana explaining the need for a technology-led approach to mitigating climate change instead of the emissions reductions target approach that is the hallmark of conventional climate policy.
The authors' focus on a technology builds on the findings of a 2008 Nature article entitled, "Dangerous Assumptions," co-authored by Green, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, Jr., and Tom Wigley. They found that the IPCC had significantly underestimated the emissions reductions necessary to achieve climate stabilization and thus, had seriously underestimated the scale of the technology challenge, concluding:
"enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at levels that are currently considered acceptable... In the end, there is no question whether technological innovation is necessary -- it is. The question is, to what degree should policy focus explicitly on motivating such innovation?"
Here, Green and Galiana answer this question. Their analysis shows:
"cumulative emissions consistent with minimizing the rise in global temperature (climate stabilization) can be achieved by investing US$100 billion a year for the rest of the century in global energy R&D, testing, demonstration, and infrastructure."
The two experts offer three suggestions for how a technology-led approach to policy would work to catalyze the research, development, and deployment of a steady stream of clean energy technologies:
1) Instead of emissions targets, governments would agree to "credible long-term global commitments to invest in energy R&D," technology and infrastructure financed by "a low carbon price of $5 per tonne of emitted carbon dioxide, which would raise almost $150 billion per year globally and $30 billion in the United States alone."
2) The carbon price would "send a forward pricing signal to deploy new or improved low-carbon technologies" by rising gradually over time "doubling, say, every 10 years."
"These would span the technology spectrum: basic R&D in breakthrough technologies, 'enabling' R&D that allows scale-up of existing technologies (such as utility-scale storage for intermittent solar and wind energy); testing and demonstration projects; end energy-related infrastructure, such as 'smart grid' that help to manage intermittent energy sources."
3) Dedicated trust funds should be created to isolate R&D monies from "political interference." These funds would be overseen "by independent committees drawn from the public and private sectors." Countries that do not engage in R&D could use their portion of the funds "to purchase successfully developed technologies from those that do participate [in R&D]."
Galiana and Green explain how a technology-led policy "inverts the usual relationship between carbon pricing and technology, whereby carbon pricing is naively expected to induce fundamental technological innovation."
Climategate and Climate McCarthyism are both symptomatic of efforts to narrow the public debate. Now that such heavy-handed efforts have narrowed the scientific debate and may have seriously damaged the credibility of climate science, prominent climate scientists and others are beginning to speak out against the politicization of climate science and Climate McCarthyism.
Climategate and Climate McCarthyism are both symptomatic of efforts to narrow the public debate. For twenty years these efforts have backfired. Narrowing the policy debate has fed political polarization, making political action increasingly difficult.
Now, heavy-handed efforts to narrow the scientific debate have seriously damaged the credibility of climate science. In simplistically imagining, first, that climate science could speak with a single voice and, second, trump all other considerations about how to deal with a complicated technological, economic, environmental and social problem, hyper-partisan environmental advocates and sympathetic scientists have set back efforts to address global warming.
Happily, other prominent climate scientists and researchers are beginning to speak out against the bad behavior by other climate scientists in ClimateGate.
Global trade issues continue to put the U.S. in a climate conundrum, presenting perhaps the thorniest negotiating point as world leaders prepare to meet for international climate talks in Copenhagen next week. Indeed, on the eve of the global climate talks, the negotiating positions of the United States and major developing economies, including China and India, appear to remain at loggerheads. Here's why...
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. ... Yet ... 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.
Breakthrough's Yael Borofsky wrote that back in October, and this climate conundrum continues to present perhaps the thorniest negotiating point as world leaders prepare to meet for international climate talks in Copenhagen next week. Indeed, on the eve of the global climate talks, the negotiating positions of the United States and major developing economies, including China and India, appear to remain at loggerheads.
In a letter to President Obama today, nine moderate Democratic Senators, all key swings for climate legislation or ratification of any international climate treaty, reiterated their demands that any international climate framework U.S. negotiators sign in Copenhagen must include comparable action from all major economies and allow tariffs to adjust prices on imports from any nation that does not agree to bindings agreements to reduce emissions "in specific trade- and energy-intensive economic sectors."
"Climate change is a serious and growing threat to the United States and the world," the Senators wrote. "Smart climate change policies would guard against these risks while also spurring clean energy investments that promote economic growth and create good domestic jobs."
"Importantly, however, poorly designed climate policies could also jeopardize U.S. national interest," the Senators warned, "by imposing burdens on U.S. consumers, companies and workers without solving the climate challenge."
To address these challenges, the U.S. should seek to negotiate a new international climate agreement under which, "All major economies should adopt ambitious, quantifiable, measurable, reportable and verifiable national actions" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Furthermore, U.S. climate policy, the Senators wrote, should include provisions to implement border adjustment tariffs if necessary to help shield domestic industries facing international competition from countries that have not implemented carbon reduction requirements for their industrial sectors.
Here's the key excerpt from the letter, signed by Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Begich of Alaska:
Joe Romm became America's most influential climate blogger by presenting himself as a straight-talking, independent expert. But the truth was always quite different. As an employee of the Center for American Progress (CAP) Romm was hired to defend and serve the Democratic agenda. In our fourth and final post in this series, we show that when it came time to get behind the same climate proposal he had savaged just a month earlier, Romm embraced the Party line without hesitation. And when it came time for Romm to attack liberal critics of climate legislation as "global warming deniers," the most powerful think tank in Washington -- and its head, John Podesta, President Obama's transition chief -- had his back.
Over the last three years Joe Romm has won the trust of American liberals and greens through his apparently unvarnished take on climate science, technology, and policy. Everyone from Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman to grassroots activists with 350.org to green leaders like Al Gore have come to see Romm as someone they could rely on to give it to them straight.
But they confused Romm's confidence for courage, and his volume for veracity. For even though Romm has branded himself a renegade truth-teller he has long been a Democratic Party insider. During the Clinton years he was a senior administrator at the Department of Energy. Today he acts as chief spokesperson for climate science and policy at the Center for American Progress, Washington's most powerful Democratic think tank.
And so when it came time for Romm to abruptly reverse his position on climate legislation, his change of heart was as predictable as it was inevitable.
In our last post we saw that one of the forces behind Climate McCarthyism is growing hyper-partisanship. America today is more divided along partisan lines than it has been since the Civil War Reconstruction. Romm rose to power and influence by feeding red meat to the liberal and green base of the Democratic Party. In this post we will see how ideological hyper-partisanship has been institutionalized at the Center for American Progress (CAP), Romm's employer.
Founded in 2003 by President Clinton's last chief of staff, John Podesta, the $29 million a year organization is not so much a think tank as a war room. While in the White House Podesta experienced first-hand the combined power that conservative think tanks like Heritage Foundation and right-wing media have over the public debate. Respected but staid liberal think tanks like Brookings were no match for the pugilistic posture of the New Right.
And so Podesta sought to create a more aggressive and partisan think tank in the mold of Heritage, which had famously delivered a thick briefing book of policy recommendations to Ronald Reagan before the President-elect took office and then engaged in ideological combat to defend it. And he has done precisely that. After the 2008 elections, Podesta oversaw President Obama's transition into office.
Like Heritage, CAP is more explicitly ideological than traditional Washington think tanks and invests substantially more money in media and marketing. It still produces reports and white papers to provide a substantive justification for the Democratic agenda, but the heart and soul of the operation are CAP's blogs. Their purpose is to wage ideological warfare with Republicans and enforce ideological discipline among Democrats.
In recent months, as Joe Romm has stepped up his attacks in defense of a climate proposal he once opposed, some commenters have openly wondered how it is that an ostensibly liberal think tank could countenance such behavior. But they miss the point of both Romm and CAP.
In denouncing a former senior editor of Audubon Magazine as a "trash journalist," framing non-skeptical scientists as "global warming deniers," and attempting to link independent academics to fossil-fuel interests, Romm has not gone off-the-reservation. Rather, he's doing precisely the job he was hired to do.
Daily Show host Jon Stewart challenged Al Gore's assertion that we have all the technology we need to solve climate change and questioned whether the urgent and apocalyptic tone in Gore's newest book, "Our Choice," precludes the solution to global warming
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart strongly challenged Al Gore last Wednesday on the former Vice President's contention that "we have all the tools we need" to solve global warming. Said Stewart:
"It is a much more fundamental shift than I think environmentalists realize. It's not just about sorting plastic and paper. It's about how the life that humans have carved out was from burning things we found. You say, let's do a different thing, but you haven't given us that thing...It's very frustrating to me to keep hearing about this and not seeing hover cars."
Stewart also questioned the effectiveness of Al Gore's apocalyptic climate change messaging in Gore's new book, "Our Choice." Stewart balks at a line in the book's opening page:
"I'm offering you the choice of life or death, you can choose either blessings or curses."
While Gore is quick to attribute inaction on global warming to lack of political will, Stewart questions whether we can solve global warming by merely making a choice to do so. Gore's apocalyptic discourse does not resonate with Stewart and other concerned people like him, however, and Stewart says he's frustrated not inspired.
Joe Romm's recent attack on an independent journalist is further proof of his intimidation campaign aimed at squashing the debate over climate solutions. But bullying only works when nobody stands up to the bully. Jon Stewart has indirectly challenged the climate of intolerance. Will others?
Update 2 (Nov 6, 2009 8:30 am PDT) Joe Romm has surreptitiously changed the headline to his attack on journalist Keith Kloor, from "Meet Trash Journalist Keith Kloor" to "Meet Blogger Keith Kloor." In the comments below, Brad Plumer retracts his misrepresentation of our views on geo-engineering and Superfreakonomics while continuing to downplay his role in hyping Romm's misrepresentations of the views of Stanford scientist Ken Caldeira, and refusing to acknowledge that he has done little to correct the record or rebuke Romm's McCarthyite tactics on his New Republic blog.
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has weighed in. It's been heartening to receive so many emails from activists and reporters thanking us for standing up to a bully. Yesterday, Center for Environmental Journalism Director Tom Yulsman affirmed our defense of journalists and weighed in on the importance of standing up against McCarthyite attacks. In the comments below, The New Republic's environment blogger, Brad Plumer distances himself from Romm's McCarthyite tactics - but then he insists that we agree with Superfreakonomics, even though we had made clear our disagreements with Levitt and Dubner in our original post below. Howard University Chemistry Professor Joshua Halpern comments below under a pseudonym, "Eli Rabbett," and claims that we are supported by a right-wing foundation and organization -- a smear we have repeatedly corrected throughout the blogosphere. Readers can decide for themselves whether the comments Plummer and Rabbett/Halpern are consistent with the pattern of behavior we describe below.
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
If you want to understand how it is that the debate over global warming policies became so shrill, consider the recent pattern of behavior by the country's second-most read most-read climate blogger, Joe Romm.
Last month Romm emailed Stanford scientist Ken Caldeira for a quote so he could, in Romm's words, "trash" the authors of the new book, Superfreakonomics, which includes a discussion of a climate solutions that Romm hates.
"I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance."
The reason we know this is because Caldeira forwarded the whole awkward interaction to the authors of Superfreakonomics, who had run the relevant sections of their book by Caldeira twice before publication for his approval.
Romm wanted to make sure Caldeira understood the impact his trashing of Superfreakonomics would have:
"My blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media."
Romm then added:
"I'd like a quote like 'The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,' plus whatever else you want to say."
"[The Freakonomics authors] sent me the draft and I approved it without reading it carefully and I just missed it. ... I think everyone operated in good faith, and this was just a mistake that got by my inadequate editing."
Senator Warner, a rare Republican champion of climate action, found common ground with Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins on the need for much greater investment in clean energy technology in final Congressional climate legislation. Is this the sign of a possible bipartisan consensus on clean energy R&D funding?
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.
Like its House sibling, the Senate's Kerry-Boxer climate bill allocates the vast majority (64%) of the tens of billions annually in emissions allowances created by the bill's cap and trade program to shield energy consumers and industry from the impacts of carbon prices. Just 13% of the value of allowances in the "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" are invested in clean energy technologies.
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].
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.
Pulling no punches, Greenpeace writes: "There is all manner of spinning--well-intentioned, disingenuous, self-serving--among supporters of climate action, and it has become almost impossible to separate political calculus from scientific necessity. ... Many supporters of climate action find themselves forced to grasp a flimsy hope--that we just need to get something started--anything--and strengthen it later. And so we witness the cheerleading to which we cannot lend our voice. ... Politics as usual will only produce its corollary, business as usual."
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...
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.
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.
Environment Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer says the Senate climate policy debate is on by month's end. Meanwhile, Republican Lindsey Graham, the new hope for a bipartisan bill in the Senate, tells us he's trying make sure the House's Waxman-Markey bill is dead.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
As the Senate's climate and energy bill takes shape, it looks broadly similar to the House-passed Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, with a couple exceptions.
As the Senate's climate and energy bill takes shape, it looks broadly similar to the House-passed Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, with a couple key exceptions, according to E&E News' ClimateWire service.
ClimateWire has obtained an early version of the bill (pdf) being written by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA). Key sections are still under development as Senate staffers put the finishing touches on the discussion draft version of the bill scheduled for public release tomorrow, but the early draft appears to mirror closely the structure and content of its House sibling.
Emissions targets in 2020 are stronger than the House-passed version (20% below 2005 levels instead of 17%) and the EPA's authority to separately regulate greenhouse gas emissions from major sources is reportedly preserved. A modest new nuclear title has been added as well. Other major provisions, including the extensive permitted use off offsets and a strategic reserve pool to control allowance prices, appear consistent with the House climate bill.
[Update, 9/29/09, 5:33 PST: additional details are emerging as successive drafts of the legislation are leaked to reporters and bloggers. An 801-page draft bill was leaked this afternoon, which is reportedly more current than the 684-page draft reported by ClimateWire earlier today. This version is still not the final, which we'll have to wait until tomorrow for.
The current draft apparently contains a cost collar on emissions allowance prices backed up by the same kind of strategic allowance reserve in the House bill. The floor price begins at $11 per ton in 2012 and the ceiling at $28 per ton, both rising steadily each year. The House version had a $10 floor price in 2012 and a ceiling that floated at 60% above a rolling average of market prices for allowances, providing little certainty of an upper price on carbon under the bill. E&E News also reports that the new bill contains greater support for research and commercialization of advanced biofuels and greater incentives to replace coal-fired power plants with new natural gas plants.]
Key sections on how the climate bill will divvy up hundreds of billions of dollars in allowance allocation revenue will remain blank, to be filled in later when Senator Boxer releases a "chairmans mark" before formal markup of the bill in the Environment and Public Works Committer, likely sometime in October. However, if theHill.com's observations are accurate, as in the House bill, these billions in new revenue will likely be considered "chits to use to negotiate support for their bill as they attempt to form a winning coalition," rather than a funding source for critical, proactive investments to spur clean energy technologies, industries and jobs.
Joseph Romm warns on ClimateProgress.org that the House's Waxman-Markey climate bill is poised to over-allocate emissions permits, collapsing the carbon price and undermining emissions caps.
For readers of Climate Progress looking for some help sorting through Joe Romm's latest vituperation, here's a cliff-notes version: he agrees with our conclusions showing that climate legislation passed by the House in June would over-allocate emissions permits in the early years of the program, resulting in a collapse of carbon prices to the bill's $10 floor and the banking of excess permits that will undermine the stringency of the emissions cap in future years. He warns readers about precisely the same likely outcomes here.
Breakthrough conducted analysis of the implications of the economic recession and lower-than-expected emissions levels, concluding that the House climate bill would not require regulated firms to reduce emissions at all, either through offsets or actual reductions in their own emissions, until as late as 2018 under likely economic recovery scenarios. With offsets utilized at just 6 to 25 percent of the maximum levels permitted, the bill's cap and trade program would not require any actual reductions in emissions from regulated firms until 2020 or later.
Romm doesn't like these conclusions because it challenges his contention that Waxman-Markey is a strong bill. So, unable to actually challenge our analysis, Romm calls our analysis "crap" -- and then says we "glommed" it from him. He then quotes at length from an egregiously unbalanced E&E article about our analysis.
The global recession is likely to drive an oversupply of emissions permits in the early years of the House cap and trade program, collapsing carbon prices and allowing regulated firms to continue business as usual without cutting their own emissions or purchasing any offsets through as late as 2018. With only a fraction of the offset utilization permitted by the bill, U.S. emissions in capped sectors could rise for much--if not all--of the next two decades.
By Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The large decline in U.S. emissions in 2008 and 2009 due to the economic recession ensures that if the House-passed Waxman-Markey climate legislation becomes law, the bill's emissions reduction cap will require no reduction of carbon emissions over the first two to five years of the program. The resulting oversupply of emissions permits will allow regulated firms to continue business as usual emissions through as late as 2018, according to a new analysis by Breakthrough Institute based on new Energy Information Administration emissions projections that take into account the impacts of the global recession.
The analysis further establishes that very modest utilization of the offset provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill, as little as one-tenth to one-quarter of the levels of offset utilization projected by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency respectively, will allow emissions in regulated sectors of the U.S. economy to proceed at business as usual levels through 2020 or beyond. Depending upon how quickly U.S. emissions recover over the next decade, firms would need to purchase on average as few as 124 million tons of offsets annually in order to comply with the emissions reduction caps through 2020, substantially less than the 526 million and 1,223 million tons of average annual offset utilization between 2012 and 2020 projected this summer by CBO and EPA respectively.
In conjunction with the free allocation of a high percentage of emissions allowances under Waxman-Markey, and lower global demand for offsets from recession-hit EU and U.S. firms, substantial over-allocation of emission allowances in the early years of the program will likely lead to a cap and trade program awash in both cheap emissions allowances and offsets during at least the first decade of implementation. Under such conditions, the functional carbon prices for the first decade or more under Waxman-Markey are likely to hover at or even below the $10 per ton floor on allowance auction prices (rising slowly each year) established by the bill.
International leaders were anxious for the U.S. and China to announce binding emissions targets at the UN Climate Summit, but critics of both countries may be seeking "magical" solutions instead of acknowledging that both countries' clean energy investments are direct action in the fight against climate change
Speeches made today at the UN's climate summit may have left much to be desired in the eyes of countries eagerly hoping for the U.S. and China to make specific commitments to emissions reductions in the run-up to climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Yet, willingness on the part of both nations to invest in clean energy technology may signify more direct action to mitigate climate change than any potentially empty emissions promises.
In his speech this morning, China's President Hu Jintao did not agree to binding carbon emissions targets, however, according to the New York Times, he did outline a four step plan that includes reducing the carbon intensity of the economy to 2005 levels by 2020, boosting nuclear and renewables to account for 15% of China's power, increasing forest cover, and furthering action to develop a green economy. According to the UN Climate Change Conference website, Hu promised to cooperate on climate change efforts so long as they aligned with China's ambitious development goals:
"Climate change is an environment issue, but also, and more importantly, a development issue. We should and can only advance efforts to address climate change in the course of development...Out of a sense of responsibility to the world...China has taken and will continue to take determined and practical steps to tackle this challenge,"
While international leaders have put considerable effort into cajoling China, not to mention India, to accept binding emissions reductions targets by the time climate negotiations commence in Copenhagen this December, China's planned stimulus investment of $440-$660 billion in clean energy over the next ten years is far more indicative of China's willingness to mitigate climate change as it simultaneously grows its own economy.
With just ten weeks until the world's nations meet in Copenhagen this December to try to hammer out a global consensus on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build a global clean energy economy, Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins returned to KPFA radio Monday to discuss the coming climate and energy policy debates in the U.S. Senate and on the international stage. Jenkins joined host Mitch Jeserich and Dan Jacobson of Environment California on this week's segment of "Letters to Washington," which aired Monday on KPFA radio in the Bay Area and was syndicated throughout the country this week.
You can listen to the segment below, which begins at 1:25:25...
Letters to Washington - September 21, 2009 at 10:00am
The dispute between the US and Europe is over the way national carbon reduction targets would be counted. Europe has been pushing to retain structures and systems set up under the Kyoto protocol, the existing global treaty on climate change. US negotiators have told European counterparts that the Obama administration intends to sweep away almost all of the Kyoto architecture and replace it with a system of its own design.
The US distanced itself from Kyoto under President Bush because it made no demands on China, and the treaty remains political poison in Washington. European negotiators knew the US would be reluctant to embrace Kyoto, but they hoped they would be able to use it as a foundation for a new agreement.
If Kyoto is scrapped, it could take several years to negotiate a replacement framework, the source added, a delay that could strike a terminal blow at efforts to prevent dangerous climate change. "In Europe we want to build on Kyoto, but the US proposal would in effect kill it off. If we have to start from scratch then it all takes time. It could be 2015 or 2016 before something is in place, who knows."
The goal for the climate conference in Copenhagen is to reach a deal that can actually be implemented, rather than agreeing on binding high targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday in Vienna. The United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is calling for countries to make firm commitments to reduce emissions that cause global warming by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels.
"Let's not make that one particular time the be-all and end-all, and if it doesn't happen, oh, we are doomed," Chu told reporters in Vienna, where he was attending the International Atomic Energy Agency's annual general conference.
Expect more trial balloons, pronouncements of negotiating doom and confusing reports in the months ahead.
Not a day goes by that I read something I cannot believe has been said in the debate over global warming. It makes blogging easy, but it sure cannot help the case of climate policy making. In an interview, Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas Schelling explains to The Atlantic why politicians need to exaggerate the threat of global warming and why he hopes for massive disasters.
When asked how policies get put in place that mainly benefit people far into the future he explains that:
It's a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there's a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale -- even though methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long -- it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.
A fair share of the global climate investments called for the UNFCC Secretariat would imply a commitment of $75-99 billion annually from the United States. The Waxman-Markey climate bill leaves us far short of that mark. Will that picture change before the Copenhagen climate negotiations this December?
The global community should be investing $300 billion annually to combat global warming, according to UN climate chief Yvo de Boer (pictured). De Boer, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change, says the world needs to be spending $100 billion annually to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate change, and another $200 billion each year to shift the global energy mix away from fossil fuels.
"The world will need a phenomenal amount of money to change its energy supply from fossil fuels to cleaner sources and to adapt to climate change," de Boer said Friday.
Recently, Senator Sherrod Brown refused to accept a climate bill that would simply send both emissions and U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas - inaccurately earning him a label as a "threat" to the passage of federal energy and climate legislation. This week, the Ohio Democrat formally introduced legislation to strengthen America's efforts to both cut emissions and build a prosperous clean energy economy: the Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act of 2009.
"We can revive American manufacturing through investments in clean energy," Brown said. "This bill will help our manufacturers retool, put our auto suppliers back to work, and produce clean energy technologies."
The bill would create a two-year, $30 billion revolving loan fund to help small and medium-sized American manufacturers to improve the manufacturing process and increase their production of clean energy parts and systems. The IMPACT Act would also directly invest $1.5 billion over five years to help guide manufacturers into clean energy markets and streamline their implementation of new manufacturing technologies and methods through the Manufacturing Extension Program, a division of the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Two new studies published last month -- one by the Office of Tony Blair and the Climate Group, the other by the Global Climate Network and Center for American Progress (CAP) -- strongly advocate a climate policy strategy based on direct government investment in energy technology development and deployment.
The studies independently reach conclusions similar to the Breakthrough Institute's and are yet another indication of "The Emerging Climate Consensus," which recognizes the limits of carbon pricing and advocates major increases in federal funding to deploy low-carbon energy technologies and drive down their costs through direct public investment in RD&D (research, development, and demonstration), deployment, and supporting infrastructure.
"Governments should adopt a strategic top-down approach to ensure that critical technologies arrive on time and provide investment in disruptive options to allow radical transformation in the future... The reality is that carbon pricing does not address many other market failures along the innovation chain."
The study argues that direct public support is crucial to develop and deploy new technologies: "Market failures along the innovation chain require public spending to drive technologies down their cost curve to a point where the carbon price can take over and accelerate their deployment." Echoing the Breakthrough Institute, International Energy Agency, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu (and defying critics like Joseph Romm), the report once again concludes that energy technologies must undergo major developments to meet emission reduction targets:
"Although we have the technologies we need through to 2020, new technologies -- many available but not yet commercially proven -- will be needed to meet the more challenging long-term goals. Therefore, at the same time as we deploy existing solutions, we must invest in future options."
Breakthrough Institute believes the clean energy race demands a vigorous federal investment of at least $30-50 billion per year in clean energy. In contrast, Romm ardently supports weaker legislation that would invest just $10 billion per year, less than one quarter of China's planned investments. That may be acceptable to Joe Romm -- but it is no way to win the clean energy race.
Romm asserted that our op-ed "attacks" President Obama and Democratic leaders, when in fact it calls on Congress to support Obama's RE-ENERGYSE energy education program
and urges greater public investment in clean energy to compete with
Asian challengers. Yet Romm never mentioned the central focus of the
op-ed -- RE-ENERGYSE and our efforts to rally support behind it,
including a recent sign-on letter with over 100 organizations
-- and instead criticized us for what he called "willfully misleading
nonsense" about Asian countries' planned investments in clean energy.
Romm also criticized us for asserting that Congress must strengthen
the Waxman-Markey bill with greater investments in clean energy to
compete with Asian challengers and accelerate our transition to a clean
energy economy. Why? Because Romm apparently believes the Waxman-Markey
proposal -- which would invest only $10 billion per year in clean
energy and energy efficiency, less than 0.1% of U.S GDP -- is sufficient to win the clean energy
race. It is not.
"Waxman-Markey would complete America's transition to a clean energy economy, which started with the stimulus bill," reads the title of a prominently featured post
on Romm's website, a claim he has repeated multiple times.
"Waxman-Markey would generate more clean energy action than any piece
of legislation passed by any country in the history of the world!" exclaimed Romm in another recent post as part of his consistent and ongoing cheer-leading for the legislation.
A group of over 100 universities, professional associations, and student groups joined the Breakthrough Institute yesterday in submitting a letter urging the U.S. Senate to fully support the Obama administration's RE-ENERGYSE initiative.
PRESS CONTACT:
Jesse Jenkins (510-550-8930 x465 or 503-333-1737)
jesse@thebreakthrough.org
Teryn Norris (510-550-8930 x464 or 510-593-3716)
teryn@thebreakthrough.org
A group of over 100 universities, professional associations, and student groups joined the Breakthrough Institute Tuesday in submitting a letter urging the U.S. Senate to fully support the Obama administration's national energy education initiative. The initiative, named "RE-ENERGYSE" (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge), would produce thousands of highly-skilled U.S. energy workers and develop new energy education programs at American universities and K-12 schools.
The Senate is poised to reject the proposal in its FY2010 Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill by cutting the RE-ENERGYSE program's funding to $0 from the $115 million requested in President Obama's FY2010 budget. Mr. Obama announced the initiative in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences in April, stating, "The nation that leads the world in 21st century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st century global economy... [RE-ENERGYSE] will prepare a generation of Americans to meet this generational challenge."
According to the Department of Energy, the program would develop between 5,000 and 8,500 highly educated scientists, engineers, and other professionals to enter the clean energy field by 2015, which would rise to 10,000 -17,000 professionals by 2020. The Technical Training and K-12 Education subprogram would create between 200 to 300 community college and other training programs to prepare thousands of technically skilled workers for clean energy jobs.
The letter, which was distributed to every Senate office on Tuesday, urged lawmakers to fund RE-ENERGYSE at the full $115 million request. "America is in danger of losing its global competitiveness and the [global] clean energy race without substantial new investments in STEM education," wrote the signatories, which included 53 colleges and universities and dozens of student and youth groups. "RE-ENERGYSE... will train America's future energy workforce, accelerate our transition to a prosperous clean energy economy, and ensure that we lead the world's burgeoning clean technology industries."
The 40th anniversary of the US moon landing highlights lessons for the emerging clean energy race. While there are key similarities and differences between the space race of the Cold War era and clean energy race of today, one thing is certain: the need for vigorous and sustained public investment to drive dramatic technological innovation.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, the event which made the US the first and only nation to accomplish one of the greatest technological feats in human history. While space-race aficionados will argue that US-Soviet competition continued beyond the 1969 moon landing, for the layperson, Armstrong's 'small step' marked the end of the space race.
In 2009, the United States faces a new global competition, one that will have far greater implications for the future of our nation and the world: the clean energy race
The dual challenges of climate change and increased economic competitiveness are driving nations to develop new energy technologies that harness earth's abundant renewable resources. This technology is increasingly viewed as central to our economic fortunes with renewable energy and other clean technologies poised to be the next big growth sector. On several occasions President Obama has acknowledged that:
'The nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.'
We've heard calls for a New Apollo project for renewable energy before, and I will not discuss the merits of such a scheme here. Instead, on this historic anniversary, I will compare the space race of the Cold War era and the clean energy race of today--both similarities and differences are apparent, and both offer insights into America's current standing in today's clean energy race.
As Congress debates climate and energy legislation, Asia is moving rapidly to win the clean energy race. So warns a new article in the Washington Post that should serve as a wake-up call to America's leadership at the highest level.
Despite Obama's intentions to increase America's international competitiveness, the article reports that the amount and scale of investments in renewable energy programs coupled with ambitious renewable energy use targets are putting these Asian nations on pace to surpass programs set forth by both the U.S. economic stimulus package and the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the massive climate and energy bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Citing Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins, the article warns:
"If the Waxman-Markey climate bill is the United States' entry into the clean energy race, we'll be left in the dust by Asia's clean-tech tigers," said Jesse Jenkins, director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, Calif.-based think tank that favors massive government spending to address global warming.
I was interviewed on a radio show this morning about our new climate "super lobby" analysis with Burt Cohen, former State Senator from New Hampshire and host of the radio show Port Side:
A joint London School of Economics / University of Oxford report published today presents a new approach to post-Kyoto climate change policy. The report, How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course, coincides with this week's G8 summit and Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, and calls on policy makers to abandon the failed Kyoto-style framework and instead focus directly on decarbonizing global energy systems.
On the road to Copenhagen, international climate negotiations remain plagued by the same (intractable?) challenges they have faced for decades. Will negotiators and nations find a new framework that can break old impasses and pave the way for global cooperation before it's too late?
By Johanna Peace, Devon Swezey, and Leigh Ewbank, Breakthrough Fellows
It's official: India won't accept binding caps on its emissions of greenhouse gases. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh made the case clear last Thursday:
"India will not accept any emission-reduction target--period," Ramesh said. "This is a non-negotiable stand."
India's announcement is the latest frustrating news for those following the efforts of climate negotiators as they struggle to eke out an international agreement by this December's UN summit in Copenhagen. It's frustrating because the fundamental dissonance between what developed countries demand and what developing countries are willing to give appears to be the single most intractable roadblock standing in the way of a successful treaty. In fact, this very problem has impeded progress on international climate negotiations for decades.
Building on the $30b down payment made in their stimulus, South Korea plans to surge ahead in the clean energy race with a $85 billion, five year public investment in clean energy technology and innovation.
This week, South Korea has upped the ante for green public investment as it continues to make swift progress toward becoming a clean-tech economy. Already, a staggering 80% of South Korea's $38 billion stimulus package has been earmarked for green investments.
And today, the South Korean government announced that it will invest $85 billion more over 5 years to encourage the growth of green industries and technologies. That's more than doubling South Korea's recent promise to invest $40 billion over five years in a "Green New Deal," and the equivalent of 2% of the East Asian nation's total GDP. If the United States were to invest a comparable share of it's national wealth in clean energy technology, the sum would total over $275 billion annually.
China's massive public investments in wind and other renewable energy technologies are edging the rapidly developing nation into the lead in the global clean energy race.
By mid-July, China will begin construction of a massive wind farm project in the northwestern Gansu province, at a total cost of US $17.6 billion. It will be China's biggest wind power station yet; according to local Development and Reform Commission official Wu Shengxue, it will reach an installed capacity of 20 GW by 2020. Eventually, the wind power capacity of the area is projected to reach 40 GW.
This development is the latest in what has recently been a major push by the Chinese to expand renewable energy use. Soon, Chinese officials are expected to reveal a new renewable energy stimulus plan of US $44-$66 billion per year over ten years, which will focus much of its resources on wind power. Under the plan, China will be on track to reach 100 GW of wind power capacity by 2020--more than eight times its current level.
By contrast, the American Clean Energy and Security Act invests only $6-12 billion per year in clean energy. As for the US "green stimulus," it includes a one-time clean energy spending boost of $112 billion--just half of China's $221 billion stimulus investment in green initiatives. Here's a sense of scale: If US investments in clean energy were on par with the Chinese in terms of percent GDP, we'd be spending $140-210 billion per year.
The U.S. EPA projects renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biomass will generate just 9% of U.S. electricity by 2020 under the Waxman-Markey renewable electricity standard.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency projects renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biomass will generate just 9% of U.S. electricity by 2020 under the Waxman-Markey renewable electricity standard (RES). This contrasts with the bill's nominal 20% combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard due to numerous exemptions in the standard. Total renewable electricity generation under EPA's modeling of Waxman-Markey with the renewable electricity standard is just 41 terawatt-hours (or 7%) higher than the Agency's business as usual projections.
As we reported, EPA concludes that the expansion of new wind farms, solar arrays and other renewable energy power plants will actually be somewhat slower under their core scenario for Waxman-Markey than under their BAU projections [p. 27]. Total renewable electricity generation under their core scenario is somewhat higher (3%) in 2025 under Waxman-Markey than in their BAU scenario, but this extra generation comes in the form of biomass co-firing at existing coal-fired power plants, EPA predicts [p. 26].
However, EPA's core scenario does not attempt to model the impacts of the Waxman-Markey bill's RES. EPA apparently decided they were not confident enough in their results to include the effects of the RES in their core scenario and chose to model it instead as a "sensitivity analysis" for the power sector only. Here we look at their projections for the impacts of the bill's RES.
Waxman-Markey would reduce the amount of renewable energy deployed in the United States relative to business-as-usual, increase the amount of coal-fired electricity generation relative to 2005 levels, and provide no incentive for a move to cleaner cars, according to a new analysis by the U.S. EPA
The Waxman-Markey climate bill (AKA the American Clean Energy and Security Act) would reduce the amount of renewable energy deployed in the United States relative to business-as-usual, increase the amount of coal-fired electricity generation relative to 2005 levels, and provide no incentive for a move to cleaner cars, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
We certainly can't vouch for EPA's methodology or assumptions. However, with EPA's conclusions about the likely cost of the Waxman-Markey bill on U.S. Households and the broader economy being widely cited, the surprising and even counter-intuitive projections that underlie EPA's cost estimates are worth a close look. In this post we dig passed the EPA's executive summary to take a closer look at their modeling and projections.
The climate bill is now poised for a vote on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as soon as Friday, following a deal struck late yesterday between the bill's champion and Energy Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN). Waxman agreed to further concessions to secure the support of agricultural interests and their Congressional champions, including agreeing to strip EPA of primary oversight over the domestic carbon offsets market, giving the US Department of Agriculture jurisdiction over these programs instead, provide additional free allowances for rural electric co-operatives, and place a moratorium on new EPA rules to strengthen the environmental integrity of biofuels like corn ethanol.
The segment with Morning Show host Amy Allison begins at 1:10:00 into the show which you can listen to below or click here to download an mp3 of the segment and listen on your computer:
The Los Angeles Timesreports that the Environmental Protection Agency projects coal plant electricity generation would grow through 2020 if Waxman-Markey climate legislation becomes law.
Electricity generation from coal will grow if Waxman-Markey climate legislation becomes law, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation. The Times notes that "coal-fired power plants are the largest source of heat-trapping gases that cause global warming," and yet the EPA projects [pdf] (p. 23) that conventional (not CCS) coal power generation will increase from 2013 TWh in the year 2005 to 2030 TWh in 2020.
According to a new analysis by Public Citizen, Waxman-Markey (W-M) climate legislation would inadequately protect American consumers from electricity price increases, despite claims by the bill's authors that the value of the free pollution allowances allocated to utilities would be returned to consumers.
According to a new analysis [pdf] by Public Citizen, the Waxman-Markey (W-M) climate legislation would inadequately protect American consumers from electricity price increases, despite claims by the bill's authors that the value of the free pollution allowances allocated to utilities would be returned to consumers. W-M grants 30 percent of all of the emission allowances to local distribution companies (LDCs) -- otherwise known as regulated utilities. The bill's authors suggest that 50 different state utility regulators will ensure that the benefits will be passed onto consumers.
Robert Atkinson argues in BusinessWeek that both neoclassical and Keynesian economics are misguided on climate policy -- innovation economics and public investments in technology should lead the way.
Robert Atkinson, one of the leading experts on technology policy and President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, published an article in BusinessWeek yesterday explaining how conventional economic doctrines led to the Waxman-Markey climate bill and why innovation economics offers a better climate strategy:
While the so-called cap-and-trade mechanism (or some kind of carbon pricing) is needed, it isn't enough. To really avert climate change, the government needs to adopt an explicitly green innovation policy. Unfortunately, green innovation is getting short shrift in this bill and in Washington generally...
Both conservative and liberal neoclassicists oppose any government allocation of scarce goods and services. They prefer a market tool such as emissions trading that would set a price for carbon pollution, believing -- incorrectly -- that companies seeing potential profits would then develop needed technologies. The two camps differ slightly in how to determine a carbon price. In line with their faith in markets, most supply siders who worry about global warming favor carbon taxes, while liberal neoclassicists favor cap and trade...
Innovation economists see efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as fundamentally an innovation challenge. They are less sanguine than neoclassicists about the power of price signals alone to bring about a solution, believing that the profit motive works only when there are adequate alternatives to shift to. Without viable electric cars, for example, people will still drive gasoline-powered cars, no matter how much fuel costs, although they might switch to more fuel-efficient models.
Moreover, they believe that even if the price signal is "correct," the innovation that's needed is often delayed because of market failures such as externalities -- situations where innovators can't get the full reward from their innovations. Consequently, adherents of innovation economics say that the government must spend more on research and development to develop cost-effective noncarbon or low-carbon energy alternatives.
EPA analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act projects that firms regulated under the bill's cap and trade program will opt to purchase over one billion tons of offsets each year from 2012-2020 rather than reduce their own emissions.
[Updated 6/18/09 with graphics that more clearly reflect banking of offsets under EPA's projected offsets scenario.]
The Waxman-Markey climate bill (HR 2454) will not require emissions reductions below projected business as usual (BAU) growth in emissions for at least a decade ahead, according to an EPA analysis [pdf]. EPA projects that firms covered under the bill's cap and trade program will opt to purchase over one billion tons of offsets each year from 2012-2020 rather than reduce their own emissions.
EPA predicts that firms would use 110 - 120 million metric tons (mmt) of available domestic offsets each year between 2012 and 2020 [see graphic, p. 6] and the full 1 billion mmt of international offsets permitted under the cap and trade program [p. 5].
If offsets are utilized at the levels projected by EPA, cumulative emissions in the sectors of the U.S. economy covered by the Waxman-Markey cap and trade program will be legally permitted to exceed EPA's business as usual emissions rates from 2012-2020 by nearly five billion mmt. If emissions in covered sectors were actually required to fall to the 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 targeted by the legislation, cumulative emissions would be just 49.5 billion mmt, 10.1 billion mmt lower than the levels legally permitted under EPA's projections for offsets utilization.
In the first projections from a government agency of the likely impacts of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the legislation will cut cumulative emissions in supposedly capped sectors of the economy by just 2% through 2020. Economy-wide emissions would fall just 5%, CBO projects.
[Updated with correction, 6/18/09: Thanks to John Larson at WRI for alerting us to an error in our data. Our data is now corrected and impacted figures and conclusions have been bolded in the text below so readers can see what has changed. An updated spreadsheet has been uploaded.
In summary: a smaller portion of economy-wide emissions were included in the emissions profile for sectors that fall under the cap starting in 2012 and a larger portion was included in the sectors that are phased into the cap starting in 2014. The result is slightly lower emissions under the ACES target scenario and CBO projected offsets scenario for the years 2012 and 2013 and slightly lower cumulative emissions between 2012-2020.
This effects the post's key result: assuming offsets are utilized at CBO's projected levels, cumulative emissions from 2012-2020 are 2.0% below BAU levels , not 0.5% as originally posted. This change has no effect on other years, on the difference between emissions at the CBO projected offsets scenario and emissions at the ACES target scenario, or on the BAU scenario. As always, we will continue to publish all of our assumptions and calculations and invite readers to look at the data and our analysis themselves. - Jesse Jenkins, Director of Energy and Climate Policy]
The Waxman-Markey climate bill (HR 2454 or the American Clean Energy and Security Act) would reduce cumulative emissions by just 2% between 2012 and 2020 in the sectors of the U.S. economy regulated under the bill's cap and trade program, according to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the legislation.
The CBO analysis is significant in that it is the first published predictions from a government agency about the likely actual impact on U.S. emissions resulting from the version of Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee and now heading towards debate on the House floor.
According to a new, as-yet-unpublished analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard (CERES -- formerly RES) in the Waxman-Markey climate legislation will not increase renewable electricity generation and might actually reduce it.
UCS concludes:
"Bottom line: The Waxman-Markey RES does not ensure that any new renewable electricity will be developed beyond the renewables that are already projected to occur under the business as usual forecast by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)."
UCS created a high-deployment and a low-deployment scenario to predict the impact of the CERES provision in Waxman-Markey, as compared to the EIA's business-as-usual (BAU) baseline projections of renewable electricity generation. Under the high-deployment scenario, the Waxman-Markey CERES provision "would lead to slightly more renewable energy to be developed than business as usual" -- but only starting in 2020.
The Breakthrough Institute joins the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation to discuss the need for a explicit innovation policy to discuss the price gap between fossil fuels and clean energy, and what innovation policies are needed to overcome it.
As the House considers climate legislation, many have come to believe that regulations alone will result in a reduction of emissions. But energy and technology experts say a more explicit federal investment in technology is needed. Please join the Brookings Institution, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and the Breakthrough Institute to discuss the need for a explicit innovation policy to address the challenge of global climate change. At the event, policy experts will discuss the price gap between fossil fuels and clean energy, and what innovation policies are needed to overcome it.
Robert Atkinson
President, The Information and Innovation Foundation
Speakers
The Honorable Jay Inslee (D-WA), United States House of Representatives
The Honorable David Wu (D-OR), United States House of Representatives
"The Technological Barriers to Climate Mitigation"
Nate Lewis
George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, Caltech
"Climate Policy Requires Making Clean Energy Cheap"
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
President, The Breakthrough Institute and Chairman, The Breakthrough Institute
"The Case for Energy Discovery Institutes"
Mark Muro
Fellow and Policy Director, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution
William B. Bonvillian
Director, Masschussettes Institute of Technology, D.C. Office
"If China is going to put in $440-660 billion [in clean energy development investments this year], how will $190 billion (actually under $130 billion) over 20 years put us in the leadership position?"
Effective climate policy must include a proactive strategy to spur clean energy technology development and deployment. The Waxman-Markey climate bill contains several smart provisions that could be key components of an effective clean technology strategy -- but only if they are adequately funded.
Several of the bill's provisions aim to do that, but we conclude that most are currently either completely unfunded or critically underfunded. Here we take a look at three smart provisions in the ACES bill that could be key components of a proactive clean energy technology strategy -- but only if they are adequately funded.
Clean Energy Deployment Administration: this provision would establish a sort of public clean energy bank charged with creating an attractive investment environment for the widespread deployment of a suite of advanced clean energy technologies. Notable for being a deployment policy explicitly dedicated to advancing technology development goals, this provision also enjoys strong bipartisan support on both the House and Senate. However, ACES provides zero funding for this critical component of a proactive clean energy technology strategy. At least $16 billion in initial seed funding should be provided for CEDA, consistent with the Senate version of this provision.
Energy Innovation Institutes: largely consistent with the recommendations of the Brookings Institution, Breakthrough Institute, Third Way and others, ACES establishes new "Clean Energy Innovation Centers" at research universities, national labs and private research facilities, creating new cross-sector and multi-disciplinary hubs for applied research and development on clean energy technologies. However, these energy innovation institutes are critically underfunded, receiving less than $1 billion/year in funding from the bill's cap and trade allowance value. To bring federal energy R&D programs to a scale sufficient to address the urgent energy innovation imperative and address the needs of a $1.5 trillion annual industry, at least $15 billion in new annual funding should be dedicated to energy R&D, with a significant portion of this new funding dedicated to establishing a robust nationwide network of energy innovation institutes.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration Demonstration and Early Deployment Program: financed by a micro-carbon fee on all electricity sold in the United States, this program would dedicate $10 billion over the next ten years to promote the commercialization and large-scale demonstration of carbon capture and sequestration technologies for coal plants and other major point-source emitters of CO2. This program is a good example of the kind of direct public investment necessary to bring down capital and technology risk barriers and accelerate clean technology commercialization. But a much better-funded and technology neutral program that would provide competitively awarded funding for the demonstration of a whole suite of first-of-their-kind clean energy technologies is needed, and would be vastly superior to this technology-specific, industry-managed program.
We delve into each of these programs in more detail after the break...
In new independent analysis released yesterday, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy concludes, as Breakthrough earlier analysis has, that the the impact of the now severely-weakened Waxman-Markey renewable electricity standard on U.S. renewable electricity generation will be "effectively zero."
SACE also looks at the likely impact of the efficiency requirements in the now combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard (which the Alliance refers to using yet another new acronym: "CERES") and concludes it falls far short of President Obama's campaign pledge to reduce U.S. electricity consumption 15% by 2020 (below business as usual projections).
As debate moves on around the Waxman-Markey climate bill, there seems to be no one contesting the conclusion that the legislation notably does not establish a binding cap on U.S. emissions.
But whether or not you believe the legislation would result in lower emissions, there appears to be universal acknowledgment that various provisions in Waxman-Markey -- including but not limited to the extensive number of offsets permitted and the strategic reserve pool -- prevent the "cap" from being binding. Given this, Waxman-Markey cannot be accurately referred to as establishing a "cap" on U.S. emissions, much less a "binding cap." Probably the most accurate term is "non-binding cap."
[M]ore importantly, if the best that the US can bring to the negotiating table ahead of the talks on a new post-Kyoto emissions treaty, is a 3% cut in emissions versus 1990 baseline, then this may not be enough to tickle out an agreement from China and India [at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, December 2009.]
-Global investment firm HSBC on the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (via WSJ.com's Environmental Capital blog). We note that HSBC's conclusions about the Waxman-Markey climate bill strongly echo Breakthrough's own (see links in quote above).
VoteSolar is "skeptical that current versions of either the RES or a carbon cap and trade policy will lead to significant solar deployment" and thinks it will fail to make solar energy cheap and abundant.
The solar energy advocacy organization VoteSolar issued a pretty clear verdict on whether or not the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act will effectively make solar energy cheap and abundant: "The accurate answer is nuanced, but the short answer is no."
New Breakthrough analysis concludes that the national renewable electricity standard (RES) established by the American Clean Energy and Security Act has been severely weakened since initially proposed; as it now stands, the RES may barely increase U.S. renewable electricity generation compared to business as usual projections.
Advocates of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454, or "ACES" for short) argue that the bill is far more than just a climate bill. It's a comprehensive piece of clean energy, efficiency and climate legislation, and taken as a whole, they argue, it should be considered transformational -- even if the cap and trade portion of the bill may have been significantly weakened (see Breakthrough's detailed analysis of the ACES cap and trade program here).
The ACES bill does indeed include many provisions to set a new course for our nation's energy policy, including efficiency standards and regulations, authorization for new programs aimed at modernizing the nation's electricity infrastructure and paving the way for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles, and a national renewable electricity standard. Many of these will move America in the right direction.
But the question remains: will ACES really be transformational? And will it propel American quickly away from business as usual and towards the prosperous clean energy economy and dramatic emissions reductions we need?
Here we examine one of the other major provisions of the ACES bill, the national renewable electricity standard (RES) established by Title I of the bill. Unfortunately, our analysis concludes that the RES has been severely weakened since initially proposed in the discussion draft version of the ACES bill; as it now stands, the RES may barely increase U.S. renewable electricity generation compared to business as usual projections.
Driven largely by strong economic growth in developing nations, world energy consumption will grow 44% between 2006 and 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Developing nations will demand cheap, abundant energy. The question remains: will it be clean?
World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2006 and 2030, driven by strong long-term economic growth in the developing nations of the world, according to the reference case projection from the International Energy Outlook 2009 (IEO2009) released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The current global economic downturn will dampen world energy demand in the near term, as manufacturing and consumer demand for goods and services slows. However, with economic recovery anticipated to begin within the next 12 to 24 months, most nations are expected to see energy consumption growth at rates anticipated prior to the recession. Total world energy use rises from 472 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) in 2006 to 552 quadrillion Btu in 2015 and then to 678 quadrillion Btu in 2030.
Momentum is now behind a serious effort to address climate change, and that itself is cause for celebration. However, knowing how much is at stake, we must also take a close look at whether or not the bill lives up to its promises. Unfortunately, after spending all last week digging through the 1,000 page ACES bill, I'm left worried, very worried. Find out why...
Late last Thursday night, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 33-25 to pass landmark legislation that promises to address our nation's urgent energy challenges and help avert potentially catastrophic climate change. The legislation, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (or ACES), also presents an unprecedented opportunity to renew our economy and position the United States at the forefront of a burgeoning global market for clean and affordable energy technology.
Momentum is now behind a serious effort to address climate change, and that itself is cause for celebration. The bill's champion's - notably Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and Jay Inslee and their dogged staff - deserve praise for bringing the bill through some pretty hostile territory in the Energy and Commerce Committee, and for their tireless efforts during the marathon sessions of the past week.
However, knowing how much is at stake, we must also take a close look at whether or not the bill lives up to its promises.
Speaking in London, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday that climate policy debates may be "over-obsessed" with emissions reduction targets and timetables, echoing a long-standing Breakthrough Institute argument that we must focus more on effective mechanisms to drive technology transformation, energy modernization and emissions reductions, not haggle over long-term targets.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday that the long-standing focus of climate policy on setting precise emissions reductions targets and timetables has led to an "over-obsession" with numbers, according to Reuters.
Reuters reports:
The comment came less than a week after a congressional panel
approved President Barack Obama's landmark draft bill on climate
change [see Breakthrough's analysis of the bill here], bringing it closer to debate in Congress.
"There was a great deal of discussion on the Kyoto targets, and I'm
not really sure which fraction of the countries that took part in that
actually met their targets," Chu, a Nobel laureate for physics, said at
a conference in London. "In terms of the targets, whether it's 17
percent or 20 or 25 percent, I think there's perhaps ... an
over-obsession on these percentages."
If fully utilized, the emissions "offset" provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security Act would allow continued business as usual growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions until 2030, leading one to wonder: where's the cap in the "cap" and trade?
[Updated 6/18/09 to more clearly explain and depict the potential banking of offsets.]
At the heart of the nearly thousand page long climate change and clean energy bill being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives this week is a "cap and trade" mechanism aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
However, a provision in the bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454 or "ACES"), allows polluting firms in the U.S. to finance emissions reductions overseas in lieu of reducing their own global warming pollution and may allow American emissions to continue to rise for up to twenty years, according to new analysis from the Breakthrough Institute.
The provision allows power plants, oil refiners, and other polluters regulated under the bill's cap and trade program to use up to one billion tons of international emissions reductions, or "offsets," to be used instead of reducing their own emissions each year. The bill also allows up to one billion tons of additional offsets each year, sourced from sectors of the U.S. economy that do not fall under the pollution cap, such as forestry and agriculture. If a suitable supply of domestic emissions offsets are unavailable, the limit on the use of international offsets may be raised to 1.5 billion tons annually at the discretion of the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The extensive use of these international and domestic offsets would effectively allow U.S. firms in capped sectors to continue emitting global warming pollution at levels well above the reductions supposedly driven by the emissions cap. New analysis from the Breakthrough Institute reveals that if fully utilized, the offset provisions in the ACES bill would allow continued business as usual growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions until 2030. Emissions in supposedly sectors of the economy supposedly "capped" by ACES could continue to grow at BAU rates until as late as 2037.
Driven by record-high gas prices in the first half of the year and the economic crisis that hit in the later half of the year, United States greenhouse gas emissions plunged by the largest amount in decades, according to preliminary data released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global climate change, fell to 2.8% in 2008 to 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e), the lowest level of emissions in any year since 2000. Total U.S. energy consumption also fell 2.2% in 2008, the EIA reports.
Compared to President Obama's promises and the recommendations of a variety of energy experts alike, the ACES climate and clean energy bill's investments in clean energy are an order of magnitude too small.
[Updated 5/22/09: the ACES bill now includes a $10/ton price floor for auctioned pollution permits. The analysis below has been updated to reflect that change in the legislation]
Today, the House Energy and Commerce Committee began markup of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). The bill promises to cap and reduce carbon pollution, create clean energy jobs, and spur technology innovation. Unfortunately, as our analysis of the use of carbon pollution allowances in the ACES bill revealed, the bill is on course to invest very little of the hundreds of billions of dollars in value created by the bill's cap-and-trade program over the coming years towards those objectives.
Most of the allowance value (74 percent) created by the ACES cap and trade program is dedicated to blunting the impact of the carbon price established by the program on industries and consumers (and securing the critical swing votes on the committee representing these entrenched energy and industry interests). In contrast, just 12 percent of the allowance value is dedicated to clean energy investments, broadly defined.
At an average allowance price of $10 to $20 dollars per ton of CO2 between 2012-2025, that would amount to clean energy investments of just $6-12 billion per year, and just $490-980 million for clean energy R&D (see our full analysis of the allowance allocations in ACES for more).
President Obama has repeatedly promised to, "Invest $150 billion over ten years in energy research and development to transition to a clean energy economy" (from WhiteHouse.gov). The President's 2010 Budget Outline specifically dedicated $15 billion per year in new revenue generated by a cap and trade program to this purpose. Yet the bill before us, depending on the allowance value it establishes, would invest just one-fifteenth to one-thirtieth of the $15 billion President Obama has pledged -- and specifically requested from Congress. Furthermore, this new energy R&D spending may amount to just a ten percent increase in current federal energy R&D budgets.
Likewise, the total investments in a new clean energy economy, more broadly defined, are an order of magnitude smaller than proposals advanced by the Breakthrough Institute, Apollo Alliance and others have deemed necessary to drive clean energy innovation, create millions of new energy jobs, and jump-start a prosperous, clean energy economy.
Below the fold, you can see how the clean energy investments made by the ACES bill compare with what a range of proposals and current R&D funding levels...
The landmark Waxman-Markey 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act was introduced in the House this afternoon (May 15, download PDF here), and the Breakthrough Institute has performed a preliminary analysis of how it would invest over $1 trillion in cap and trade revenue between 2012-2025. Our key findings for this period include (all numbers are approximate -- download spreadsheet here):
Polluting industries: 57.3% of allowances would be freely distributed to polluting industries, including 36.7% for the electricity sector, 12.3% for energy-intensive industries, 6.5% for local natural gas distribution companies, and 1.8% for oil refiners
Direct consumer protection: 16.5% of allowances would be used for direct consumer protection , including 15% for low and moderate-income families and 1.5% to benefit users of home heating oil and propane
Energy efficiency and clean energy technology: 12.2% of allowances would be used to fund energy efficiency and clean energy technology development and deployment
Adaptation and technology transfer: 4.7% of allowances would be used for domestic and global climate adaptation and technology transfer
Workforce development: 0.6% of allowances would be used to fund worker assistance and job training
Deficit reduction and other: 8.6% of allowances would be used to fund deficit reduction and other public purposes
How much money would these allocations translate into? That depends on the average price for each pollution allowance. The EPA's initial price estimate was $13-22 per allowance between 2015 and 2020, and has since revised that downward by at least 10% (to $12-20 per allowance) as the bill was weakened and additional offsets were permitted. We will assume here an average price of $15 per allowance. In that case, the allocation would look like this (click images to magnify):
The American Clean Energy and Security Act is poised to give hundreds of billions of dollars in free pollution permits to the entrenched interests of the dirty energy past. Will climate advocates rally to ensure the value of the remaining permits is invested to create a clean, prosperous energy future?
As sweeping climate and clean energy legislation is readied for debate in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, detailsareemerging on the deals and compromises struck between the bill's architects, Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) and the group of reluctant swing members of the committee who hail largely from states reliant on coal and heavy industry.
The "breakthrough deal" struck between Waxman, Markey and the swing E&C Committee Dems will enable a full subcommittee markup of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) beginning Thursday and likely proceeding through next week (markup = votes on a series of amendments on the proposed bill followed vote to pass the bill out of (sub)committee). The deal apparently involves a series of concessions that either incrementally weaken the objectives of the bill or give free greenhouse gas pollution permits to utilities and heavy industry in order to blunt the impact of the proposed cap and trade program on these sectors of the economy.
Two graphics illustrate why pollution regulation like the cap and trade program that reduced acid rain-forming SO2 emissions at coal plants is not a real parallel for the global climate challenge.
One of the most often-repeated assumptions in the climate policy debate is that cap and trade, the preferred mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, worked for SO2 and acid rain, so it will work for GHGs. Sounds good. Until you take a second to think about the comparison.
Dealing with GHGs is a challenge of an order of magnitude greater scale and complexity. To see why, see the two graphics below:
First, here's a graphical representation of the Acid Rain cap and trade challenge:
Below the fold, you'll see a graphic representation of the global flow of greenhouse gas emissions, the challenge we have to deal with to avert potentially catastrophic climate change...
Results of a Rasmussen poll asking voters to identify (between the three options above) what cap and trade policy has to do with (correct answer: a regulation on greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming, aka "The environment"). Graphic via Andrew Sullivan.
Australia shelves Cap and Trade until 2011. ABC's Peter Mares asks David Spratt of Climate Code Red and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute for their take on the need for a government supported clean energy push.
Stream it directly from the ABC News Australia site, or download the mp3 here(particularly if you're a Mac/Linux user).
From Peter Mares at ABC Australia National Radio:
"This week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced changes to the Australian federal government's planned emissions trading scheme, postponing the start date, increasing the compensation for big polluters and promising deeper cuts to Australia's greenhouse gases (with the proviso that the rest of the world does the right thing). The result is a scheme that's both greener and browner - if such a thing were possible. But as we examine the pros and the cons of the decision, some argue it's all pointless anyway. Climate change sceptics dispute the need for any reductions at all; then there's the critique from sections of the environmental movement that an emissions trading scheme is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titantic: far too little, far too late. On the program today, we're going to hear the case for state intervention - the idea of a Marshall Plan for alternative energy in which public money is used to solve the global warming problem."
Bjorn Lomborg wants to make clean energy cheap. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to understand that making clean energy cheap is about far more than R&D.
Bjorn Lomborg wants to make clean energy cheap. Unfortunately, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It doesn't seem to understand that making clean energy cheap is about much more than R&D.
"I love this thought--it comes from the Breakthrough Institute. Basically, the idea is that everyone seems to be trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that we won't use them. But that's never going to happen. So why don't we try to make green energy so cheap that everyone will want to use it?"
He then argues, "We should spend vastly more on research and development."
Lomborg get's that part right. As we've long argued, today's paltry investments in clean energy R&D -- from both public and private sectors alike -- is woefully inadequate to the energy innovation imperative we face today. With a broad expert consensus making the case and politicians from President Obama to Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) calling for more public investment in clean energy R&D, we seem to be approaching the political 'critical mass' necessary for real change on that front.
But for Lomborg, clean energy R&D is something you do instead of deploying clean energy technology available today, and that's where we part ways with "the Skeptical Environmentalist."
What Lomborg apparently doesn't understand is that efforts to truly "make green energy so cheap that everyone will want to use it" will necessarily involve major direct public investments to spur the rapid deployment of emerging clean energy technologies. Far from something that just occurs in the lab, the innovation process extends well beyond R&D.
Geoengineering is the idea that we as humans can somehow "hack the planet" and to control (i.e. engineer) climate systems on a large-scale and counteract the potentially disastrous impacts of global climate change. Once considered the realm of kooks, crackpots and science fiction writers, the idea was given a recent push towards legitimacy when none other than John Holdren, the White House's science advisor, mentioned that no option, no matter how farfetched, is off the table as far as climate change was concerned.
Holdren later clarified that this was only his own personal opinion and not that of the current administration, but when Obama's science chief admits to considering something it does add a note of credibility to the argument.
Breakthrough Senior Fellow, Roger Pielke Jr., was recently asked by Seed magazine to throw in his own two cents on the issue. Along with four other writers, scientists and environmental advocates, Pielke had this to say:
Writing in Nature last December, Dan Sarewitz and Dick Nelson offer three criteria by which to distinguish "problems amenable to technological fixes from those that are not." Here I apply these criteria to the technology of geo-engineering the climate system, defined by the American Meteorological Society as an effort to "deliberately manipulate large-scale physical, chemical, or biological aspects of the climate system to counteract the climate effects of increasing greenhouse gas emissions." Examples of geo-engineering thus include injecting aerosols into the stratosphere or seeding the ocean with iron, but would not include capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants or the ambient air.
Geo-engineering falls well short of all three of the criteria that Sarewitz/Nelson present as guidelines for when to employ a technological fix."
Already packed full of polluter giveaways, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised to shelve the implementation of his proposed cap and trade system until July 2011 to quell concerns that it'll impact the Aussie economy. Is this a portent of things to come for cap and trade in the United States?
As we predicted back in March, Cap and Trade is going under Down Undah. Severaloutletsarereporting that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised to shelve the implementation of his proposed cap and trade system until 2011 in an apparent effort to quell concerns that the carbon pricing plan will impact the Aussie economy and shore up support for the controversial proposal in the testy Australian Senate.
To date, Rudd and his center-left Labor Party have already offered numerous industry-friendly concessions, including free allowances for major polluters as part of a so-called "global recession buffer." It wasn't enough to find the necessary votes, so today, Rudd announced even more concessions, including: more polluter giveaways; a delayed start for the program's cap and trade scheme, which won't go into effect until July 2011; and a fixed price for carbon emissions permits of just $10 (AUS) per ton of CO2 for the first full year of the program after that (through July 2012).
New social values research offers insights into the challenges facing carbon taxes, cap and trade, congestion pricing and other "environmental pricing reform" proposals.
American climate policy advocates should watch our neighbor to the north closely. With social and political values not too distant from our own and an economic makeup broadly similar, Canada's experiments with climate policy - particularly carbon pricing schemes - offer a real-world laboratory we would be wise not to ignore. While Canadians are broadly supportive of actions to address climate change, proposals at both the federal and provincial levels to establish a price on global warming pollution have met with difficulty. We covered the failure of the national Liberal Party's "Green Shift" carbon tax proposal in the October 2008 elections here, and have watched closely as British Columbia battles over their controversial, first-in-North American carbon tax system. Now, social values research firm Environics (the sister firm to our colleagues at American Environics) has new research findings that shed light on the difficulties facing 'environmental pricing reform' proposals like carbon taxes, cap and trade, and congestion pricing. Environics' Keith Neuman presents their findings in this piece, originally posted at Green Business...
By Keith Neuman, Ph.D.
Environmental pricing reform (or EPR) is the term now used to describe the various types of market mechanisms (e.g. carbon pricing, cap and trade, congestion fees) which are now being given serious attention as the most promising strategy for addressing climate change and other pressing environmental challenges such as water scarcity and traffic congestion. This concept has been around for some time, and is now finally receiving serious attention on the North American policy agenda. Economists have long been making a persuasive case for harnessing market forces to achieve environmental objectives, but only recently has this cause been adopted by major players, such as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy. The idea that society puts a monetary price on environmental "goods" and "bads", and then letting market forces do their work (as they do with most other forms of business and consumer behavior) is compelling.
Governments and industry now seem ready to move forward with environmental pricing strategies, but is the Canadian public ready to buy in? The limited experience to date is hardly promising. Over the past year, the B.C. provincial carbon tax has been implemented but remains highly controversial (it has become a major issue in the current provincial election), and the Federal Liberal Party's touted "Green Shift" election platform failed spectacularly with the electorate. These early examples suggest there is sufficient citizen resistance to make EPR a difficult political sell. Why should this be the case, given the clear evidence that EPR can be an effective environmental policy? There are three central reasons.
First, is it axiomatic that consumers prefer not to pay more for goods and services, and will resist at varying levels when asked to do so. This is the most commonly understood basis for resistance to EPR, and many policy makers mistakenly believe it is the overriding obstacle. But in fact this dilemma is by no means limited to environmental policy, and has not prevented other successful economic policy measures that shifted costs to consumption, such as the GST and the Ontario Health Premiums. Such measures do not succeed because they are popular, but when they are deemed acceptable given their purpose by a sufficiently critical mass of relevant constituents.
Second, the public is skeptical about the effectiveness of EPR, in terms of how paying more for gasoline, water or consumer goods will actually benefit the environment. Research has shown that public resistance to B.C.'s carbon tax has as much to do with doubts about its effectiveness in reducing the province's greenhouse gas emissions as it does with paying a few more cents per litre at the pump. Consumers can readily understand how stiffer regulations or new technologies can make a difference in cleaning up pollution, but it requires a greater act of faith to believe that higher prices or trading systems will accomplish the same goals. Such faith requires confidence in both the intentions and efficacy of governments and industry, and neither has been seen to have done much to justify this level of confidence. Moreover, there continues to be a widely-held public sentiment that market-based environmental policies, such as cap and trade systems, favour industry by giving it a "license to pollute."
Third, at a deeper level environmental pricing reform is not currently well-positioned in terms of how it fits within Canadians' social values and broad world views. This conclusion comes from a research study Environics recently completed for Sustainable Prosperity, a multi-stakeholder non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting EPR policy in Canada (www.sustainableprosperity.ca). This research revealed that Canadians generally view environmental pricing mechanisms in narrow economic terms (akin to other conventional financial levers), without much appreciation of the broader principles of "polluter pays" and the positive force of the market to achieve important social goals.
The research identified distinct segments or groups of the Canadian population, based on their orientation to EPR and their broader social values. It found that among supporters of EPR, there is only a very small group (4%) who understand and support EPR in the same way as the economists and policy-makers who promote it. Most of the Canadians who express support for EPR (13% of the population) do so for very different reasons - they put much less priority on environmental solutions but rather are pro-market enthusiasts who accept the inevitability of market forces whatever their effect (e.g. they are very strong on a social value Environics defines as "social darwinism", and weak on one called "primacy of environmental protection"). While this latter group is on-side with environmental pricing, they are hardly the kind of supporters sought by EPR advocates.
On the opposite side of the issue, the strongest opponents of EPR are those Canadians who make up the most vulnerable parts of society, including women, older Canadians, and those with the lowest levels of education. This group (21% of the population) sees EPR more as a threat than as a solution to anything. They may care about the environment, but tend to be more focused on day-to-day concerns. There is little potential for building support for environmental pricing initiatives within this group, but it is hardly one that can be ignored if EPR policy is to succeed in Canada.
In the middle is a sizeable group (33%) which is on the fence about EPR. This group (we call them "responsible citizens") has a high degree of social responsibility and concern about the environment. These Canadians are open to the potential of market mechanisms to offer solutions to issues like climate change because they are truly worried about these issues and feel strongly that progress is essential. But they are also concerned about how EPR might affect those more vulnerable than themselves; they are unlikely to support pricing policies that do not treat everyone fairly and make provisions for those who are disadvantaged. The size and composition of this group makes it a critical constituency for building public support for broad-based environmental pricing initiatives, and attracting its support will require demonstrating how such initiatives address social and economic equity issues.
What does this research tell us about what it will take to build the necessary public support in Canada to move forward with environmental pricing reform? EPR will continue to be a tough sell to consumers until such market mechanisms are framed in ways that are more in tune with Canadians' social values, and in particular address the discomfort many citizens have with using market forces to address environmental objectives. This cannot be accomplished through facts and arguments alone (which rarely sway established public attitudes), but through developing a new narrative that more effectively defines EPR in what it will accomplish, in meeting broadly held environmental, economic and social aspirations.
Keith Neuman (keith.neuman@environics.ca) is Group Vice-President, Public Affairs, for Environics Research Group Ltd.
The more things change, the more things stay the same: Senator Arlen Specter announced today he would be switching party allegiance and running for re-election as a Democrat in 2010. Unfortunately, the new "D" next to his name is unlikely to change the policy positions of this free-thinking Senator from Pennsylvania - especially when it comes to climate legislation.
The 'interwebs' are abuzz today with the surprise announcement that moderate Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is switching parties and plans to run as a Democrat when he makes his 2010 re-election bid.
The move is clearly a powerful symbol of how far to the right the Republican Party has moved in recent years. What it means for policy is less clear.
Senator Specter's membership in the Democrat ranks would nominally give the party the sixty votes necessary to overcome the near-constant threat of Republican filibuster in the Senate (assuming Democrat Al Franken wins the contested court battle that will decide Minnesota's senate seat). That has prompted a sudden burst of optimism about the prospects of contentious Democratic policy priorities, including health care reform and climate change legislation.
ClimateProgress's Joe Romm blithely asserts, for example, that Senator Specter's new party allegiance will mean he'll change his stance on climate legislation. "One assumes that if he is going to seriously run as a Democrat, he'll support an energy and climate bill," Romm wrote today.
More astuteobservers, however, quickly recognize that Senator Specter's move changes little in the landscape of climate politics. For serious advocates of urgently needed and effective climate legislation, it's not hard to see why. We simply have to ask ourselves: does the "D" next to this free-thinking Senator's name suddenly change his vote on climate legislation? Of course not.
Today, President Obama announced a new national energy education initiative to inspire and train tens of thousands of young Americans "to tackle the single most important challenge of their generation -- the need to develop cheap, abundant, clean energy and accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy."
President Obama's new energy education initiative, announced today at the National Academy of Sciences, takes a very similar approach. As he declared today:
"There will be no single Sputnik moment for this generation's challenges to break our dependence on fossil fuels... But energy is our great project, this generation's great project... the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation will be launching a joint initiative to inspire tens of thousands of American students to pursue these very same careers, particularly in clean energy. It will support an educational campaign to capture the imagination of young people who can help us meet the energy challenge... And it will support fellowships and interdisciplinary graduate programs and partnerships between academic institutions and innovative companies to prepare a generation of Americans to meet this generational challenge."
This new initiative is a big step in the right direction, and we applaud President Obama and his administration for their commitment to inspiring and training the next generation of clean energy innovators. As we wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle last July:
"It is imperative that we transform our nation's universities, colleges and vocational schools into multidisciplinary hubs of clean energy innovation... Today, a National Energy Education Act would equip a new generation of Americans with the highest-caliber human capital, inspire them to tackle energy as their generational undertaking, and pave the way for new industries and technologies that will drive the U.S. economy for decades to come."
The carbon offset provisions in the House Energy and Climate Bill could sap half a trillion dollars out of the U.S. economy between 2012 and 2030 and over $2 trillion between now and 2050, according to Breakthrough Senior Fellow David Douglas.
In my role of Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun, I take part in an annual discussion of whether the company should purchase carbon offsets as part of our GHG reduction plan. Since we can buy carbon offsets at a price which is lower than what it costs us to reduce our GHG directly, we have four different approaches available to us:
use offsets to report a greater emissions reduction at the same price as if we only did internal projects
use offsets to report the same emissions as internal projects, but at a lower price
ignore offsets and just do internal projects
some mix of offsets and internal projects
So far, each year we have elected to only invest in internal projects. Our rationale is that we can help the company and the environment with that choice -- the company gets more efficient and the we lower our direct GHG emissions. Furthermore we find that this rationale is applicable to each marginal dollar of investment, so that we end up only investing in internal projects as opposed to a mix. This means that the emissions reductions that we report aren't as low as they theoretically could be, but that's a tradeoff that we think makes sense for us, since we keep reducing our own emissions instead of paying others to reduce theirs.
As it thinks about creating a cap and trade system, the US Government faces the same decision: do we allow international offsets in order to keep costs down and/or make the results look better, or do we stick to investing within the country?
The United States will restore its standing as the most innovative nation in the world, President Obama declared at a major speech on science, innovation, and education policy. He pledged an order of magnitude increase in federal energy R&D spending and promised to support a new generation of young scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs as they help overcome pressing innovation challenges, secure the nation's prosperity and restore our economic competitiveness.
The United States will restore its standing as the most innovative nation in the world, President Obama declared at a major speech on science, innovation, and education policy delivered today at the National Academies of Science in Washington D.C.
The President pledged to implement policies that will dramatically ramp up the United States' overall spending (both public and private) on innovation and R&D, bringing it up to three percent of the nation's total economic output (GDP). President Obama also declared that it was his goal to see the nation once again have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020.
The stimulus bill's $21.5 billion investment in science and technology was the largest investment in R&D in the nation's history, Obama said. He promised that his administration would build on these investments by continuing to expand budgets for key agencies funding science and research (DOE, NSF, NIST), making permanent the federal R&D tax credit to encourage private-sector investment in innovation, and launching a major increase in funding to support the transformative innovation necessary to overcome the nation's energy and climate challenges.
The President's speech was also laden with references to the critical role innovation plays in securing the nation's prosperity and economic competitiveness and said he was committed to expanding science and innovation funding, in spite of (and even because of) the current economic crisis:
"At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science. That support for research is somehow a luxury at a moment defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been. And if there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it's today.
If we want to pass policies that will truly catapult the United States into a clean and prosperous energy economy, slash global warming pollution, and make clean energy cheap and abundant, we need to pass the "Sherrod Brown Test."
For advocates of immediate and strong climate and clean energy legislation, there's one man we should all be paying close attention to: Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
Senator Brown has spoken eloquently on multiple occasions about the power of clean energy technologies to revitalize the hard-hit industrial communities of Ohio and other Heartland states. Just this week, the Ohio Senator penned an op ed in the Capitol Hill paper Roll Call declaring that the time is now to enact strong climate policy:
"If we care about the world in which we live and the generations that will follow us, then we must no longer dismiss the lethal risks global warming poses to our planet. We must craft an aggressive strategy to combat global warming, and we must do it now. ... Inaction is not an option."
Senator Brown is still on the fence, and as the old saying goes, 'the devil is truly in the details:' if the details of climate and clean energy legislation make it something Senator Brown can support and even champion, then there's a decent shot of seeing the remaining swing Senators jump on board, putting 60 votes within reach. On the other hand, if Senator Brown can't support the proposal because he's not convinced it's in the best interests of Ohio or the nation, then kiss hopes of climate action this year good bye.
It's simple: if we want to pass policies that will truly catapult the United States into a clean and prosperous energy economy, slash global warming pollution, and make clean energy cheap and abundant, we need to pass the "Sherrod Brown Test."
We have a post up at Salon today that criticizes cap and trade legislation in the House (Waxman-Markey). We argue that it cannot achieve the clean energy revolution we need. Compromises will no doubt be necessary to pass climate legislation in Congress, but as currently drafted, Waxman-Markey looks like it will make all the wrong compromises, allowing firms to buy dubious and sometimes phony carbon offsets rather than invest in clean energy, giving away billions of pollution allocations to incumbent energy interests for free, and committing a fraction of the funds needed for direct public investments in clean energy research, development, and deployment.
We propose an alternative cap and trade, which would explicitly cap the price of carbon dioxide pollution at roughly $10 per ton, rising over time, would auction all pollution allowances with no free giveaways and no offsetting, and would use the vast majority of the revenues, about $60 billion a year, to fund the accelerated development and deployment of clean energy technologies. We believe that such a solution would more rapidly achieve the technological innovations we need at a lower cost. It is also great politics, given strong public support for government investment in clean energy technology. This is the same position we have held since 2007, when we laid out this basic approach in Break Through and other writings.
The United Kingdom will release this week plans for building new coal plants:
Mounting fears within government circles that Britain's utilities are poised for a new dash for gas - increasing the country's future power dependence on fuel imports from Russia - has persuaded Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, to back funding for a second clean coal demonstration power plant.
In an attempt to ensure that coal remains part of the UK energy mix, he will also set out licensing conditions for more coal power stations.
Mr Miliband's renewed pitch for clean coal, which could be timed to coincide with the Budget on Wednesday, is to be pushed out quickly to counter scepticism in the power industry that the Government has a viable strategy to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
Congressman Henry Waxman, Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee says, "by and large," the revenues from climate and clean energy legislation should be reinvested in clean energy technologies; openly critiques President Obama's plan to return 80% of carbon revenues to taxpayers.
Congressman Henry Waxman says, "by and large," the revenues from climate and clean energy legislation should be reinvested in clean energy technologies, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
The statement is a marked improvement over Congressman Waxman's appearance on PBS' Tavis Smiley show last Monday, when he seemed to indicate that the primary driver of clean energy technology innovation and deployment would be the higher prices on dirty fuels set by proposed cap and trade legislation and made little mention of the critical role public investments in clean energy can and must play in accelerating the birth of a clean, prosperous energy economy.
Like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's prior statements that cap and trade is designed to "pay for some of these investments in energy independence and renewables," Waxman's latest remarks could indicate a growing consensus among House leadership that carbon revenues should be primarily used to spur clean energy technologies and accelerate the transition to a clean, new energy economy.
Congressman Waxman, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee set to draft climate and clean energy legislation over the coming weeks, was also openly critical of President Obama's proposal to send the bulk of revenues raised from a proposed cap and trade system back to taxpayers in the form of middle class tax cuts. Bloomberg quotes the Congressman as saying:
"I don't think that's the best use of it [carbon revenues]," Waxman said. "By and large" it should be spent on green technologies, he said, and part of it could be used to "help consumers with higher energy costs" and hard-hit industries, "especially coal."
The draft climate and clean energy bill circulated three weeks ago by Congressman Waxman and Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) (who chairs the subcommittee taking the first crack at the bill beginning this week) made little commitment to the public investments necessary to spur clean energy innovation and accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies. Waxman's statements last week indicate that commitment may be coming soon, as Markey and Waxman begin the real work of drawing up the climate and energy legislation they hope to send to the House floor by Memorial Day.
In a new draft report, the advisory board to the National Science Foundation calls on the government to "develop and lead a nationally coordinated research, development demonstration, deployment, and education (RD3E) strategy to advance a sustainable energy economy."
Much as the Breakthrough Institute has long advocated, the National Science Board calls for a major increase in federal funding to "[s]upport a range of sustainable energy alternatives, their enabling infrastructure, and their effective demonstration and deployment." The report calls for a ramp-up in clean energy "RD3E" activities - research, development, demonstration and deployment as well as education.
While it does not include a specific funding level recommendation, the National Science Board calls on the federal government to "support a national sustainable energy R&D program at a greatly increased and appropriate scale to meet sustainable energy technological and deployment challenges necessary to reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity in a timely manner."
Cries of alarm from the environmental left warn that offset provisions in cap-and-trade legislation "blow to pieces" the supposedly hard caps on global warming pollution at the heart of the proposal.
Is the cap and trade system at the core of the draft Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill full of hot air? That's what a new report from two environmental organizations warns.
Rainforest Action Network and International Rivers released an initial analysis (pdf) of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy discussion draft yesterday. The two environmental groups conclude that the cap and trade regulations established by the bill would be "blown to pieces" by the up to two billion metric tons of carbon offsets the bill allows polluters to use in lieu of pollution permits.
Despite all of the talk of establishing hard caps on global warming pollution, the use of so many offsets would stuff the cap full of hot air, making it not much of a cap at all. The report concludes:
Unfortunately the "firm" caps exist only on paper. In reality, the caps will be blown to pieces by allowing polluters to meet their emission reduction responsibilities through buying offset credits rather than reducing their emissions.
If the full amount of offsets allowed by the Waxman-Markey draft legislation were utilized by polluters, the report concludes that any actual emissions reductions in capped sectors of the U.S. economy would be delayed until 2026, allowing a full seventeen years of continued business as usual. (See figure below...)
Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. Time to get serious about adaptation, geoengineering, air capture and transformational innovation.
Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.
Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.
The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.
A new study concludes that California's energy efficient economy offers less of a model for the nation than many advocates assert. What's driving the Golden State's efficient electricity use and what does it say about our efforts to build a sustainable and prosperous 21st century energy economy?
Kate Galbraith at the NYTimes' Green Inc. blog dives into that question in a recent post, "Deciphering California's Energy Efficiency Success." Galbraith looks at a new study critical of the attempts frequently made by climate and energy efficiency advocates to hold up California's low per-capita electricity use as proof that cutting carbon emissions won't be all that hard.
Talk to any California utility or environmental advocate, and at some point they are bound to cite - with pride - the flattening out of the state's per-capita electricity use.
Since 1975, the amount of electricity per person has grown by almost 50 percent in the rest of the country, but California's numbers have stayed nearly level.
Advocates often credit energy-efficiency measures taken by utilities, at the behest of the state.
Unfortunately, matters aren't that simple it seems, according to a new study from Cynthia Mitchel and two colleagues at Energy Economics, which suggests that many of the drivers behind California's low per-capita electricity consumption have nothing to do with the state's battery of policies encouraging energy efficiency.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman criticizes cap and trade as politically unworkable and suggests that greens shouldn't be the spokespersons for the climate agenda.
In his column today, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman criticized cap and trade as politically unworkable and suggested that greens shouldn't be the spokespersons for the climate agenda. This comes on the heels of an interview with Newsweek's Sharon Begley where he attributes the increase in Americans who say news of global warming is being exaggerated to Al Gore.
The mood must be transatlantic, as British environmentalist Stephan Hale has also published an op-ed piece in the Guardian titled "Climate change is too big a problem to be left to the environmentalists," which makes many similar points.
In the Newsweek interview, Friedman claims that polling by the Times shows that while voters oppose taxes, they support them if you target the money for action on global warming and energy independence. But Friedman has mis-remembered the Times poll in ways that support his policy agenda of a high carbon tax. The difference has significant policy implications
I went back and read the 2007 Times/CBS poll Friedman is referring to. Voters told pollsters they would pay more in taxes or for electricity from solar and wind and would pay more for gasoline to reduce oil dependency. But they said they would NOT want to pay higher taxes if it 'combats climate change' or 'relieves us from living under the thumb of petro-dictators,' as Friedman claimed to Begley. The difference is critical.
Here are the questions that Friedman is mis-remembering. Voters told the pollsters that they:
* Would be willing to pay more in taxes on gasoline and other fuels if money went to research for renewables like solar and wind (64-33)
* Would pay more for electricity if it came from solar or wind (75-20)
* Oppose raising gasoline taxes to deal with global warming (58Â38)
* Support a gasoline tax to reduce dependence on foreign oil (64-30)
* Oppose a gasoline tax to pay for war on terrorism (49-44)
* Oppose a gasoline tax if it was $2/gallon, or $1/gallon (76-20, 70-27)
Contrary to Friedman's claim, voters in the Times/CBS survey support paying more in taxes or for electricity for solar and wind for reasons that are independent of their concern over global warming. Indeed, what this survey found is that voters oppose paying more in gasoline taxes to deal with global warming or the war on terror.
This is consistent with other polls, and is the reason that we have long encouraged a policy agenda focused on increasing investment in clean energy for economic and energy independence reasons, rather than increasing the price of fossil fuels for global warming reasons. If the money for investment comes from a modest carbon tax, all the better. But the public has clearly and repeatedly stated it would only support a tax or higher fossil fuel prices if it used for clean energy investments.
ClimateProgress blogger Joseph Romm flat out ignores (some might say, denies) a wide body of expert consensus on energy innovation, including the positions of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.
Is it just me, or is ClimateProgress blogger Joseph Romm working hard to marginalize himself as he reinforces an increasingly nonsensical position on energy innovation?
Yet again, Romm has recycled his assertions that no new technological development (beyond very minor improvements to existing technologies) is necessary to tackle the massive global energy and climate challenge. He repeats his efforts to label those who call attention to the scale and urgency of our energy innovation challenge and advocate major investments in energy technology as "climate delayer-equivalents." And Romm does so at the exact same time as he plainly ignores -- one might say, denies -- the wide body of evidence and expert consensus that dramatic innovation to spur both incremental and transformative developments in a whole suite of clean energy technologies is critical if we hope to overcome the climate and energy challenge and preserve a prosperous global society.
Perhaps the most striking indication of how at odds Joe Romm's "breakthrough's are totally irrelevant" position is with expert consensus is this: it directly contradicts the public statements of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (who Romm lavished praise on when he was selected by Obama).
The single greatest solution to the world's interlinking energy, economic and climate crises is to once again harness America's forces of innovation to make clean energy technology both cheap and abundant. To harness this solution we must take a new look at the process of innovation and determine the best mechanisms to catalyze and accelerate technology development.
"It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to a low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply."
Technology is a cornerstone of American prosperity, the primary source of our economic competitiveness, and a constant presence in our everyday lives. From the 19th century's advances in manufacturing and transportation to today's cutting-edge developments in biotechnology and computer science, Americans have been world leaders in creating, producing, and deploying innovative technology. Nobel Laureate Robert Solow's classic 1956 economic model of productivity growth demonstrated that technological progress drove at least 80% of economic growth in the United States between 1909 to 19491, and innovation continues to be perhaps the most powerful engine of our prosperity.
Today, America and the world are in energy crisis. Energy prices are escalating, foreign energy dependency is increasing, global warming continues unabated, and all across the world there are billions of people who continue to live without access to energy. The single greatest solution to these crises is to once again harness America's forces of innovation to make clean energy technology both cheap and abundant.
But to harness this solution we must take a new look at the process of innovation and determine the best mechanisms to catalyze and accelerate technology development. This requires looking beyond both the mythos of the lone American inventor and the market fundamentalist ideology that has dominated American politics in recent decades. Instead, we must look closely at several key American technologies and unearth the historic and seemingly ubiquitous government investments that fueled their development.
Democrats should quickly follow President Obama's lead by shifting the focus of climate legislation from pollution regulation to bold government investment in the clean energy economy.
If Democrats want to win on climate policy, they must think fast and move quickly to regain control of the debate. Last week was the opening round of the national climate fight, and the Democratic Congress was nearly knocked out.
It began on Tuesday with the introduction of a major climate bill by Democratic Congressmen Waxman and Markey. The proposal made a fateful choice: it threw out President Obama's "Apollo" plan for investing $150 billion in clean energy and focused instead on meeting the demands of leading environmental organizations, emphasizing cap and trade regulation and a laundry list of electricity and efficiency standards.
Meanwhile, the response to climate legislation in the Senate was swift and harsh, with Republicans deftly maneuvering to secure the political high ground. Senator Thune (R-SD) introduced an amendment to the budget (which as originally proposed had included revenues from carbon cap and trade) declaring that any climate legislation should "not increase electricity or gasoline prices," which quickly passed 89 to 8. Senator Ensign (R-NV) then proposed an amendment stating that climate policy should not result in higher taxes on the middle class, passing unanimously (98-0). These votes effectively put all but a handful of Democratic Senators on the record opposing policies to raise the price of dirty energy -- the central purpose of cap and trade regulation, including the provisions at the heart of the Waxman-Markey bill.
What went wrong? The Democratic Congress made a critical mistake in following the direction of leading green groups like Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. By tossing out Obama's energy investment plan and focusing on carbon pricing and regulation, Democrats allowed Republicans to quickly and easily frame the entire debate around increased energy prices and economic costs. That's a fight Republicans take up with relish -- and one they will surely win.
"Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.
Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions--through tradable permits or a carbon tax--will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions. This is not true. Europe's carbon-trading system has not shown much capacity to generate large-scale research nor to develop, demonstrate and deploy breakthrough technologies. A trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems.
For that, we will need much more than a price on carbon. ...
Economists like to set corrective prices and then be done with it, leaving the rest of household and business decisions to the magic of the market. This hands-off approach will not work in the case of a major overhaul of energy technology. We will need large-scale public funding of research, development and demonstration projects; intellectual property policies to promote rapid dissemination to poor countries; and the promotion of public debate and acceptance of new options. We will need to back winners, at least provisionally, to get new systems moving. "
An oldie but a goody from well-known economist and direct of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs, April 2008 in Scientific American, "Keys to Climate Protection."
A major new climate bill hit the House of Representatives this week and was met with deft political maneuverings from Senate Republicans that could render cap and trade dead on arrival. The Breakthrough Institute team has the angles covered:
Jesse Jenkins says this new climate bill is proof of misplaced priorities as the leading green groups setting the climate agenda walk away from billions of dollars in critical clean energy investments in favor of regulations, standards and carbon pricing. See also "Climate Bill is All About the Coal Hard Cash" at Huffington Post and listen to Jenkins talk about the Markey-Waxmen bill on KPFA radio.
Meanwhile in the Senate, two Republican amendments may leave cap and trade with no where to go. In reaction to the House climate bill, the Senate this week voted 89-8 to preemptively reject any cap and trade bill that increases consumer energy prices and voted 98-0 to ensure that any climate bill protects middle-income taxpayers from any tax increases.
Michael Shellenberger sees these votes as the clearest rejection yet of the pollution pricing paradigm and examines the artful political maneuverings at play.
Ted Nordhaus is left worrying that the climate bill is on a crash course for compromise that will leave us stuck with the worst of both worlds: a climate policy lacking both a price signal sufficient to drive private investment anywhere near the scale we need and NO money for public investments in an RD&D strategy sufficient to make clean energy cheap.
Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins outline what Democrats can do to regain the political high ground and win the climate debate in this op ed, featured at Huffington Post. If Democrats want to win, they should quickly follow President Obama's lead by shifting the focus of climate legislation from pollution regulation to bold government investment in the clean energy economy.
While Congressional Democrats and leading green groups insist that what the public wants is cap and trade to deal with climate change, yet another poll was released today showing voters want investments in clean energy, not new taxes or regulations.
If I were a Republican, I'd be relieved to have climate legislation to attack right about now...
We are nowwitnessing the inevitable entailment of putting pollution caps and climate at the center of the political proposition.
Everyone is all for capping carbon until it comes time to pay for it. Then it is a consumption tax and few politicians and voters are prepared to support it. It inevitably leads to a debate centered on the costs and regulations, not the social benefits of the policy.
The Apollo approach, which puts the immediate social and economic benefits - a clean energy economy, energy independence, new industries that can create good jobs - at the center of the debate and uses modest carbon price revenues to pay for it has always been vastly more robust to the kinds of political attacks that we are seeing this week. The debate becomes about whether or not we are going to make these investments in America's future - not whether or not we are willing to take our medicine in order to avoid the end of the world. But making this move requires more than simply swapping out the picture of the polar bear on the front page of your newsletter for a picture of a construction worker. It requires taking the investment agenda seriously and making it the central objective of policy.
The choice that greens and sympathetic policy makers will have in the coming months will be whether to move to this kind of plan B or accept a cap and trade bill that is likely to provide neither a very significant price signal nor any serious money for RD&D.
As I mentioned yesterday, some stark political lines are being drawn in the Senate on cap and trade legislation. The Thune Amendment had 89 members of the Senate going on record opposing any increases to electricity or gasoline prices as a result of cap and trade legislation. In the Senate yesterday another important amendment to the Budget Resolution was approved unanimously, 98-0, sponsored by Senator Ensign (R-NV), chair of the Republican Policy Committee. Here is its text:
To protect middle-income taxpayers from tax increases by providing a point of order against legislation that increase taxes on them, including taxes that arise, directly or indirectly, from Federal revenues derived from climate change or similar legislation.
What does this amendment mean?
It means that money raised from cap and trade (or even a carbon tax) cannot lead to a net increase in the overall tax burden on the "middle class." What is "middle class"? According to Senator Ensign in a press release trumpeting the amendment, it includes those households earning less than $250,000 per year. Senator Ensign cites the President on this point, referring back to his campaign promises not to raise taxes on this group.
Politically and practically, this amendment could then mean that proponents of cap and trade will need to pursue an explicit "cap and dividend" approach with any such policy being tax neutral for those earning less than $250,000 per year. In other words, the costs of cap and trade will have to be fully borne by those earning above $250,000 per year. Some of the challenges of the distributional effects of cap and trade are discussed in recent CBO testimony (PDF). Whether or not legislation can be written that allows supporters to claim to have met the spirit of the Ensign Amendment, it is clear that the Amendment makes the political challenge that much more difficult.
The ability of Congressional legislation on cap and trade to result in actual emissions reductions was dealt a serious blow yesterday. An Amendment was introduced by Senator John Thune (R-SD) on the Budget Resolution and its text is as follows:
To amend the deficit-neutral reserve fund for climate change legislation to require that such legislation does not increase electricity or gasoline prices.
What is this? Climate change legislation cannot increase electricity or gasoline prices? The entire purpose of cap and trade is in fact to increase the costs of carbon-emitting sources of energy, which dominate US energy consumption. The Thune Amendment thus undercuts the entire purpose of cap and trade.
The draft Markey-Waxman climate bill is proof that the green groups leading the climate charge won't fight for investments in clean energy technologies and a new energy economy. Instead, they'll throw these critical investments overboard to preserve precious regulations and an increasingly compromised "cap" on carbon.
As Beltway insiders have repeatedly "reminded" me, this is "just
a discussion draft," and its final form may be much different. But just
looking at what's in this bill so far -- and just as important, what's not -- paints a clear picture of misplaced priorities and a bill in critical need of some "course correction."
Even a cursory read of this "American Clean Energy and Security Act" (ACES) -- and I've read far more of this 648 page bill than I'd like! -- speaks volumes to the priorities of the various parties driving this debate so far - namely the greengroups and big industry players already cutting deals as part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. This bill should be proof, once and for all, these leading greens will throw clean energy investments overboard to preserve precious regulations and an increasingly compromised "cap" on carbon.
In the clearest indication yet that a climate strategy requiring a high price on carbon is doomed to political failure, the Senate voted 89-8 to preemptively reject any cap and trade bill that increases consumer energy prices.
Republicans deftly succeeded in calling greens and Democrats on their bluff that cap and trade won't cost anything, winning yesterday an 89 to 8 vote on a resolution stating that any climate legislation must not raise gasoline or electricity prices. The Senate vote is timed to coincide with yesterday's release of a climate bill "discussion draft" in the House (more on that bill from the Breakthrough Blog coming soon).
The implications of this vote are that just eight out of 100 senators believe, and have the courage of their convictions, to openly state that fossil fuel prices should rise to deal with climate change. That is to say, there are only eight senators who agree with Thomas Friedman, EDF, NRDC, David Leonhardt, AEI, and all the others who believe that the most important, and perhaps only thing we should do to combat climate change and drive clean energy innovation is to set a price on carbon.
In 2006 a retired software executive insisted to me that we had only 10 years to do something dramatic about climate change (because that's what James Hansen had told him). When I gently suggested that 10 years was not a scientific number but rather an arbitrarily political one, the executive accused me of being anti-science. But the funny thing is that in January of this year Hansen told the Guardian that we have only four years left for the U.S. to act -- coincidentally, the same length of time in Obama's first term in office.
The assumption behind all of it is that throwing out these numbers -- four years, 10 years, 350 ppm, etc. -- will provide the public and policy makers with a sense of urgency that global warming as an issue currently lacks. But there's no evidence to back up that assumptions. If any correlation were to be drawn, it would likely be the opposite, that the increasingly apocalyptic tone of those seeking action on climate change has resulted in an increasing number of voters (according to Gallup) who believe that the threat of global warming is being exaggerated.
Breakthrough's director of energy and climate policy, Jesse Jenkins, speaks about climate policy and politics on a half hour radio segment that aired March 27th on KPFA radio in the Bay Area. Jenkins joins Clear Air Watch's Frank O'Donnell to discuss the hard realities of climate politics and outline a policy strategy to make clean energy cheap that can overcome these realities.
Listen to the archived segment as streaming audio here (only available through April 10, 2009):
Obama continues to hone his post-environmental case for an investment and innovation-focused clean energy agenda. Speaking today at the White House, the President again pledged major investments to spur the development of clean energy technologies, a call echoed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu at a separate event today at a national laboratory in New York.
Both speaking to the public today at separate events, President Barack Obama and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu highlighted the administration's plans to make unprecedented investments in clean energy innovation.
Obama also promised a ten-year commitment to make the federal Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent in order to encourage greater private sector investment in the kind of innovation that truly drives long-term economic growth.
Investments in clean energy innovation offer the nation's "best strategy" for economic recovery and "the only route to the breakthrough technologies we need" to tackle the nation's pressing energy and climate challenge, says MIT President Susan Hockfield today, speaking at the White House
Investments in clean energy innovation offer the nation's "best strategy" for economic recovery and "the only route to the breakthrough technologies we need" to tackle the nation's pressing energy and climate challenge, said MIT President Susan Hockfield today at a speech delivered at the White House.
Hockfield, an outspokenchampion of clean energy innovation, spoke at the invitation of President Obama, who followed Hockfield's remarks with a speech outlining his plans to make unprecedented investments in clean energy technology and innovation.
"[S]ince World War II, by far the largest and most important source of US economic growth has been technological innovation, much of it springing from federally funded ... research," Hockfield said, echoing much of the work we've done at the Breakthrough Institute to advance public investments in clean energy innovation.
Facing both economic recession and pressing energy and climate challenges, clean energy innovation is critical, Hockfield argued:
"The R&D and technology investments that President Obama proposes have equally profound potential as an economic catalyst. That would be good news in any economy. But today, it provides a lifeline. ...
Not incidentally, these same investments [in energy innovation] also offer the only route to the breakthrough technologies we need to address the daunting challenges of energy security, rapidly accelerating energy demand and climate change."
In January, Teryn Norris and I cautioned about the "Danger of Green Stimulus" and called for "a shift from green jobs to a broader focus on green technology," a called echoed by Dr. Hockfield in the inspirational conclusion of her remarks:
"In hard times, America always invents its way to a brighter future. We have done it before, and we can do it again. For Americans out of work today, new "green jobs" will help. But for tomorrow, we need new green industries. And the only way to build those industries is by investing ambitiously now in basic and applied research."
Couldn't have said it better myself, Dr. Hockfield.
Since this is the thirdtime now we've highlighted Susan Hockfield's spot-on remarks at the Breakthrough Blog, I think it's time she joins Energy Secretary and Nobel laureate Dr. Stephen Chu and dons the (entirely unofficial) mantle of "Honorary Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow." Read on for her full remarks...
A high hurdle: of the 37 Senators identified as swing votes, all but seven must be convinced to vote "Yes" in order to secure passage of any climate policy in the U.S. Senate.
There's been a spate of recentpublicannouncements from moderate Democrats and Republicans alike, voicing caution about a proposed cap and trade program to place a price on carbon dioxide and cut global warming pollution. More than one third of the U.S. Senate now joins the fifteen moderate Democratic Senators we've dubbed the "Technology Fifteen" as vocal swing votes in the upcoming debate on climate policy.
Below the fold is an updated tally of where the Senate stands on climate policy by my assessment, based on recent public announcements and past voting histories. With using budget reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote filibuster hurdle off the table, to secure passage of any climate policy in the U.S. Senate, all but seven of the 37 Senators I identify as swing votes must be convinced to support the proposal (joining the 30 Senators I classify as "Assumed Yes" votes).
I provide the vote count below without further comment, and will delve into the implications of this tally in further detail in an upcoming post...
In a preview of the coming fight over cap and trade in Congress, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's carbon pricing plans are under fire from both Right and Left. He's stuck in a political dilemma that should be familiar to carbon pricing proponents everywhere: weaken his plan to secure passage but sacrifice environmental objectives, or strengthen it in line with Green demands and guarantee the plan's political failure. If only there were a way out of this dilemma...
It was with much fanfare and bravado that then-newly-elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia announced at the 2007 Bali climate talks that his nation would abandon opposition to climate action and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Better late than never, Rudd said and bravely declared, "I can unite the world on climate."
To deliver on that bold promise, Rudd directed his ministers to put together a cap and trade program to limit greenhouse gas emissions and put a price on CO2. The outline of an Australian "Emissions Trading Scheme" was rolled out last week with plans to implement a cap and trade program in June 2010 aimed at cutting emissions 5 to 15 percent below 2000 levels by 2020.
Now, the Australian Prime Minister's efforts to put a price on carbon and cap emissions are under fire from both Right and Left, and cap and trade is going under Down Undah.
With scientific reports on climate change getting more and more dire and a major top-to-bottom reorganization of the entire massive global energy system needed to overcome the climate/energy challenge, it may be high time we invest in an insurance policy...
In a thought-provoking piece at the Energy Collective (registration req'd) and Huffington Post Green, Marc Gunther interviews geoengineering expert David Victor and asks us to look hard at potential options to save the climate.
With scientific reports on climate change getting more and more dire and a major top-to-bottom reorganization of the entire massive global energy system needed to overcome the climate/energy challenge, it may be high time we invest in an insurance policy, including R&D in geoengineering and new carbon capture technologies (like biochar) that may offer new options to help mitigate the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Still, there are tough questions ahead, which Gunther takes a crack at in his post. You can read it below the fold....
Shellenberger interviews with Planet Forward TV and argues that rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels in the 21st century demands large-scale public investment in technology innovation to make clean energy cheap. See the clip here, and look for this new show which premieres at 8 p.m. April 15, 2009 on PBS.
"Political will and a price on CO2 won't be enough to bring about low-carbon energy sources" needed to overcome the global energy and climate challenge, concludes Sharon Begley in an upcoming piece in Newsweek. Major investments to accelerate energy innovation are much needed, and "the clock is ticking" she writes.
"Political will and a price on CO2 won't be enough to bring about low-carbon energy sources" needed to overcome the global energy and climate challenge, concludes Sharon Begley in an excellent piece, "We Can't Get There from Here," due out in the upcoming issue of Newsweek (and online now here).
Begley puts the spotlight on Nate Lewis of CalTech and Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution who succinctly explain the massive scale of the challenge and why we currently lack the full portfolio of energy technologies necessary to overcome it. "The clock is ticking," Begley concludes, and investments to accelerate energy innovation are much needed.
"Rather than seeing public opinion as a something to move as a prerequisite to action on certain climate policies, perhaps it is time for the experts to instead shape climate policies to fit the realities of public opinion. To paraphrase Walter Lippmann, the goal of politics is not to get everyone to think alike, but rather, to get people who think differently to act alike."
-- Roger Pielke, on Prometheus, responding to a Gallup poll that the American public increasingly views media representations of climate science to be exaggerated.
As we wrote in Break Through, global warming is a very serious, even existential threat. But exaggerated, apocalyptic, and unscientific claims make political action to deal with it harder, not easier. Apocalypse talk is great red meat for the green base, but as Gallup shows, it is backfiring even among Democrats.
Two weeks ago Andrew Revkin of the New York Times wrote an article with the headline, "In Climate Debate, Exaggeration is Common Pitfall." In it he pointed to Washington Post columnist, George Will, on the right, who claimed global warming is not happening by drawing unscientific conclusions from sea ice data, and to Al Gore, on the left, for claiming that increased hurricane damage is due to global warming. There is not scientific evidence for either claim, Revkin noted.
Revkin quoted American University communications professor, Matthew Nisbet, who studies the social science of global warming communications. Nisbet said:
Mr. Gore's approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight.
"There is little evidence to suggest that it is effective at building broad-based support for policy action," Dr. Nisbet said. "Perhaps worse, his message is very easily countered by people such as Will as global-warming alarmism, shifting the focus back to their preferred emphasis on scientific uncertainty and dueling expert views."
The article inspired Media Matters and Center for American Progress to level harsh attacks on Revkin, claiming that while Will's statements were gross lies, Gore's statements were mere exaggerations.
But now there is new empirical evidence to support Revkin's claim that hyping the threat of global warming is actually hurting public support for action.
UN Climate Czar Yvo de Boer joins IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri and Obama Climate Envoy Todd Stern to offer a "reality check" before upcoming international climate negotiations.
It appears that there is an effort underway (whether coordinated or just coincident) from the Obama Administration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nations to place a reality check on expectations for United States climate policy progress in advance of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
Yesterday, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told UK newspapers that Barack Obama would have a "revolution on his hands" if he tried to implement binding cuts in emissions on the scale that the IPCC's scientific consensus recommends.
"He [Obama] is not going to say by 2020 I'm going to reduce emissions by 30 per cent," Pachauri said. "He'll have a revolution on his hands. He has to do it step by step."
Pachauri's word's echo those of U.S. special climate envoy, Todd Stern, who recently stated that the 25-40% emissions cuts called for by the IPCC are "beyond the realm of the feasible" in the U.S. Congress. Stern called for a focus on "the art of the possible," saying "we need to be guided both by science and by common sense."
For the activists and advocates of my generation, the 2008 election was possibly our first taste of political success. And despite the daunting task of starting our careers in a plummeting economy, there is a sense of hope for those of us who eventually plan to make a living off clean energy, sustainable development, environmental design, and other green jobs.
But between today and the clean energy economy of tomorrow, we still have a lot to do. After witnessing Obama's election and inauguration, and after Power Shift 2009 (the party of the year for the youth climate movement), what can the youth movement do to sustain momentum and advance energy and environmental solutions? It has become clear that the traditional model of youth activism must be improved upon. Although canvassing, rallying, and subscribing to a larger movement can be important political tools, the problems we face today demand more from this generation of activists. On Tuesday, Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins called for an "innovation-centric approach" to climate and energy, urging the youth of today to use their strengths and passions to solve the challenge of making clean energy cheap. The new model for youth activism should empower individuals to rise to this challenge.
written by David Douglas and cross-posted from Near Walden
Roger Pielke Jr. has an outstanding post titled US Mitigation Math where he shows the general sources and sinks of US energy and resulting GHG emissions. He also throws out some reduction scenarios and concludes that they cannot come close to meeting an emissions reductions goal of 14% below 2005 levels by 2020.
So he closes with a challenge: "... present a scenario combining decarbonization of the energy supply and efficiency gain that has a realistic chance of succeeding in meeting a 14% emissions reduction (below 2005) by 2020."
Since I'm living in a hypothetical world, I'm going to take a couple of liberties. First, I'm going to assume that I've either got access to all of the money on the first day of 2012, or I can get the average amount of $80B/year for a long time to come. Second, I'm going to ignore the physical and temporal realities of implementing my solutions - in my world I've got the full support of the nation and they'll do everything they can to implement these ideas. Finally, I'm going to conveniently ignore the emissions required to implement these solutions.
Solution 1: Buy Lots of Prius's
In this scenario I'm going to buy 25.6M Prius cars at an estimated 45MPG and replace 25.6M gas guzzlers at an average of 15MPG. At 12K miles/year each, we'll save 533 gallons of gas per car per year, and at about 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon, that's about 4.8 metric tons of CO2 per car per year. Grand total savings: 122MMt/year, or a 2% savings from 5991 MMt.
"I challenge readers to present a scenario combining decarbonization of the energy supply and efficiency gain that has a realistic chance of succeeding in meeting a 14% emissions reduction (below 2005) by 2020."
The mathematics of United States carbon dioxide emissions are not actually that complicated. The figure below from the U.S. Energy Information Agency shows that the 5,991 million metric tonnes (MMt) of carbon dioxide emitted by the U.S. came from 3 sources: coal, natural gas, and petroleum (see three inputs in the upper left of the graph).
Each of these fossil fuels, plus renewables and nuclear power make up the total energy consumption in the United States. Energy consumption is measured using a unit call a "quad" which means a quadrillion BTUs (British Thermal Units). In 2007 the United States used 101.4 quads of energy (data). This amount of energy can be broken down by source as follows.
The 15.2 quads of energy from nuclear and renewable sources resulted in negligible carbon dioxide emissions. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to each quad of fossil fuel energy depends upon the source, as their carbon intensities differ. For the analysis that follows I use the following values, distilled from the EIA information provided here in .xls.
Coal = 94 MMt Carbon Dioxide per Quad
Natural Gas = 53 MMt Carbon Dioxide per Quad
Petroleum = 65 MMt Carbon Dioxide per Quad
Thus, to calculate total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions simply requires multiplying quads of energy by carbon dioxide per quad and summing across the three fuels. This simple math results in the following:
This total compares quite well with the total of 5,991 MMt carbon dioxide reported for 2007 by EIA (see figure above). We can use this information to ask some straightforward questions about how an emissions reduction target of 14% below 2005 levels (5,095 MMt carbon dioxide) might be reached by 2020.
We can do a bit of hypothetical "stress testing" of these numbers, by asking, in theory, what sort of actions might lead to reaching the emissions reductions target. Before we do this, we do need to make a guess as to 2020 US energy consumption. The EIA projects that energy consumption will grow at a rate of 0.5% per year (calculated from information here). Because GDP growth is expected to be higher than this rate, it already builds in an assumption of gains in energy efficiency. But let's use the EIA estimate, which suggests that US energy consumption in 2020 will be 108.6 quads, of which 21 quads will come from renewables plus nuclear energy, representing a growth of about 40% on top of 2007 values. This leaves 87.2 quads to be produced by fossil fuels.
Here are a few examples of the effects of different hypothetical strategies:
1) What would happen if all coal consumption were to be replaced with natural gas?
Answer: In 2020 total emissions would be 5,110 MMt carbon dioxide, very close to the 2020 target.
2) By how much would renewables plus nuclear have to displace coal to reach the target?
Answer: The target could be reached if coal consumption were reduced by about 42%, and the displaced 9.2 quads of energy were replaced by renewables plus nuclear, implying more than doubling of renewable plus nuclear energy supply, to comprise 30% of all energy consumption.
If renewables alone (i.e., non-nuclear) are to carry the weight of displacing coal, then they would have to increase their role in consumption by a factor of 4.7 over 2007 values. If growth in renewable energy supply is restricted to solar and wind only, then these sources would have to increase their role in consumption by a factor of 80 (that is, e-i-g-h-t-y). The reason for this big difference is that biomass and geothermal provided about 6.4 quads of energy in 2007, whereas wind and solar only 0.4 quads. The Obama Administration's goal of doubling wind, solar, and biofuels production within 3 years may indeed be a worthwhile policy, but it is not consistent with a goal of displacing sufficient coal to reach the 14% 2020 target using wind and solar (and while biofuels have their own complexities as a policy issue, they are not really a substitute for coal in any case).
3) By how much would energy consumption have to be reduced to meet the target assuming no changes in the energy consumption mix?
Answer: Energy consumption would have to be about 85.5 quads in 2020, about equal to 1992 values when the US economy was 35% smaller than in 2007.
Some Comments on the Stress Tests
First, number (1) above is really not desirable if the goal of mitigation policy is ultimately a reduction in emission of 80% or more. The reason for this is that while natural gas is less carbon intensive than goal, it is still carbon intensive. Locking in a large natural gas infrastructure is not compatible with large emissions reductions. Consider that in the hypothetical case that all US fossil fuel needs were to be met by natural gas, then 2007 carbon dioxide emission would have been 5,375 MMt, less than observed in 2007, but not consistent with any low stabilization target.
Second, number (2) is theoretically promising but practically daunting. The following is worth repeating -- for wind and solar to displace enough coal to reach the 14% target by 2020 would require that it increase by a factor of 80 in absolute terms from 2007 production. President Obama's policy of a tripling in wind and solar energy supply in the next three years would leave a need for another increase by a factor of about 25 over the next 8 years if wind and solar are to displace sufficent coal to meet the target.
Third, with respect to number (3), while there is a lot of potential to exploit in increasing energy efficiency, to reach the 14% would require a reduction of US energy use by about 2 quads per year for the next decade. Assuming that policy makers and citizens want economic growth to resume, this is a Herculean task. If you factor in that the EIA estimates to 2020 already include a good bit of efficiency gain in the BAU scenario, the task could be even larger if these assumed gains do not occur or if economic growth happens at a faster rate than assumed.
In reality, of course, none of these "stress tests" would be applied alone; there would be a combination of all three approaches discussed above. However, I challenge readers to present a scenario combining decarbonization of the energy supply and efficiency gain that has a realistic chance of succeeding in meeting a 14% emissions reduction (below 2005) by 2020. I am not saying that it can't be done, but I am saying that I don't see how it can be done. The comments are open, have at it.
Setting an emissions target and timetable, allocating emissions permits, and then saying that the magic of the market will efficiently take care of the task is exactly the answer I'd expect if one doesn't have an answer. Markets can't make the impossible possible, and when they are used in such a manner, often have undesirable results.
Just like the "Sputnik" generation committed itself to the Cold War and led the information technology revolution, today's generation must commit itself to the Terawatt Challenge and lead the global energy revolution.
The opportunity to advance transformative, progressive change has never been greater. Now, in the wake of the 2008 election and the historic Power Shift summit, young progressives have a unique opportunity to take a step back and look at the big picture: How can the we continue advancing bold solutions on energy and climate? What can young people do beyond energy and climate? And if national climate legislation succeeds, what's the next "Big Idea" for the progressive youth movement?
These are just some of the ideas we're exploring in a Special Breakthrough Issue - "After Power Shift: What's Next?" - to examine the next steps for the progressive youth movement. The issue will include contributions from some of the country's top young leaders throughout the week, and we hope you'll join the discussion. Here's our first piece to kick it off.
Over 12,000 young adults attended the recent Power Shift 2009 summit in Washington, DC. Their goal? Building the largest youth movement in decades to save the world from global warming.
Largely missing from Power Shift, however, was a critical group: young scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Maybe it was mid-terms. Perhaps the event seemed too political. Or maybe the summit recruited too many traditionally-defined "activists."
Whatever the cause, we have very little chance of overcoming climate change without enlisting young innovators at a drastically greater scale. Simply put, they represent one of the most important catalysts for creating a clean energy economy and achieving long-term prosperity.
The reason is this: at its core, climate change is a challenge of technology innovation. Over the next four decades, global energy demand will approximately double. Most of this growth will happen in developing nations as they continue lifting their citizens out of poverty and building modern societies. But over the same period, global greenhouse gas emissions must fall dramatically to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
Breakthrough Senior Fellow Marty Hoffert joins panel of experts calling for major, direct government investments and targeted public policies designed to spur high-risk, high-reward energy innovation.
Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Marty Hoffert joined a panel of energy experts from both industry and academia at an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel on energy innovation held in Washington D.C. this week. The panel of experts called for major, direct government investments and targeted public policies designed to spur high-risk, high-reward energy innovation.
Businesses and the private sector are ill-suited to perform the kind of critical, long-term energy research needed to solve national energy challenges, panelists said, calling for targeted public policies and investments designed to drive improvements and lower costs of clean energy technologies.
They also encouraged federal energy R&D initiatives to not overlook some of the more outlandish proposals for new energy and climate technologies, including space-based solar power and geoengineering techniques. With early-stage R&D a low-cost investment, putting money behind these potentially high-payoff technologies has no downside, they say.
Read on for excerpts from Energy and Environment Daily's coverage of the AAAS panel...
Obama needs to break with neoliberalism and embrace the public provision of public goods like Roosevelt and Eisenhower once did -- from energy and infrastructure to education and healthcare.
Obama has already been compared to FDR. But do his proposals really measure up?
No, says Michael Lind from the New America Foundation in today's Salon. In a fantastic critique of Obama's budget, Lind argues that his proposal reflects the ongoing dominance of market fundamentalism. If Obama is to recreate liberalism and achieve a transformational presidency, Lind argues, he must break with this ideology and embrace the public provision of public goods -- just like Roosevelt and Eisenhower once did -- from energy and infrastructure to education and healthcare.
Lind echoes my recent call in the Huffington Post for Obama to put forth a new economic philosophy, and he cites Breakthrough's Shellenberger and Nordhaus as offering "the Roosevelt approach" on energy:
The problem with alternative energy sources like solar power and wind power is that they are still too expensive, compared to coal, natural gas and nuclear energy. The answer, according to a minority of enviromentalists like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, should be massive, Manhattan-style public sector R&D to discover ways to bring alternative energy prices down -- in absolute, not just relative, terms, to maintain cheap electricity for American industry and American households. That would be the Roosevelt approach. But the Obama approach is to use a cap-and-trade system to artificially raise the prices of conventional energy, in the hope that private capital (with modest help from public capital) will pay for efforts to invent a cheaper solar cell or wind turbine. The fact that most of the left embraces cap-and-trade should not blind us to the fact that cap-and-trade is a classic example of an indirect, overly complicated, "market-friendly" neoliberal approach, touted originally by conservatives and neoliberals as an alternative to the allegedly discredited "top-down, command-and-control" approach that gave us, among other things, the TVA, the Manhattan Project and the Internet.
Todd Stern, chief US climate negotiator in the State Department, gave a speech two days ago in which he laid out some of the principles that will guide the Obama Administration's approach to climate policy. In it he recognizes that what is politically possible will be the most important factor guiding the pace of policy implementation. He says the following:
. . . at the same time we are being guided by the science and doing the math, we cannot forget that we are engaged in a political process and that politics, in the classic formulation, is the art of the possible. Of course we cannot afford to be passive in our understanding of that principle - we need always to push the envelope of what is possible. But we ignore the principle at our peril.
Let me apply this principle in a couple of ways. Some assert that the United States can only meet its responsibility if it agrees to reduce emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, equivalent to at least a 40% reduction below where we are right now (a much deeper cut than the EU would have to make compared to where they are now). But, first, as a matter of substance, this is not necessary. What counts is getting on a viable path between now and 2050. Reducing 25-40% below 1990 levels would be a good idea if it were doable, since it would allow a less steep reduction path in the 2020-2050 time period. But it is not independently necessary; a somewhat steeper path in the latter period could make up for the slightly slower start.
In addition, a 25-40% requirement for the United States would garner very little support here, because it would appear both unnecessary, for the reasons I just noted, and beyond the realm of the feasible. The most ambitious proposals that have been seriously considered here, both those introduced in Congress last year and the objective that President Obama has endorsed, call for reductions equivalent to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. These would equate to around 15% below 2005 levels by 2020, and over 80% below those levels by 2050. So insisting on a 25-40% cut below 1990 for the United States is a prescription not for progress but for stalemate. Again, we need to be guided both by science and by common sense.
There are two important points to make about this passage.
First, in rejecting a 25-40% emissions reduction by 2020 target as unnecessary and unachievable Stern is openly departing from the both the conclusions and implications that many have taken from the 2007 IPCC report, including its head, Rajendra Pachauri:
We [in the IPCC] have estimated that to stabilize global temperature increases at just 2° to 2.4° Celsius, we have only about seven years to turn around global emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. By 2015 they'll have to peak. By 2020, we'll need to put in place a 25 to 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
While many people have pointed to the fact that the science of climate change has advanced since the 2007 IPCC report, far more importantly, the ongoing discussion of policy options has rendered the IPCC obsolete. Pachauri has criticized the Obama Administration for its climate policies, so it will be interesting to see how the broader IPCC community reacts to the scaling back of expectations being set forth. This will be especially interesting as many IPCC scientists gather in Copenhagen later this month to "influence policy." Will the Obama Administration be criticized by the scientists?
The second important point to take from this passage is a realization that climate policy must be governed by common sense and what is politically "possible" and "feasible." This realpolitik approach is a healthy one for climate policy as it moves debate beyond aspirations and exhortations to what can actually be accomplished. However, at the same time it is also a slippery slope, as what is politically possible at present is, to be honest, not much. What will the Obama Administration do if it learns that a 15% reduction by 2020 is not possible or feasible?
A new, Post-Kyoto international climate treaty needs to take a radical new approach that focuses less on binding emissions targets and more on technology innovation, economic development, and adaptation. That's what the Breakthrough Institute has argued for years (e.g. see "Scrap Kyoto"), and that's the message coming from an increasing number of experts, according to the New York Times:
If you're looking closely at the public investments Obama plans to pair with his carbon pricing proposals, you've got to start worrying: if Obama remains committed to spending just $15 billion per year to spur a new energy economy, America will fail in that endeavor.
The public is overwhelmingly behind President Obama right now, and if he was elected with a mandate to do anything beyond stem the economic crisis, it was a mandate to build a new, clean energy economy that finally secures America's energy independence and averts potentially catastrophic climate change.
Yet once you start looking at the critical areas for public investment - research, development and demonstration, or RD&D; critical infrastructure, like a modernized electrical grid; deployment incentives to spur emerging technologies; and efficiency incentives, financing and other investments to retrofit American homes, businesses and factories - it's not hard to see why $15 billion per year is simply not up to the task.
Kudos to Al Gore who has demonstrated a commitment to scientific accuracy in his presentation. However there are still some issues with their response. Here is how Gore's office responded to Revkin as related at Dot Earth (please visit their for embedded links):
"If the U.S. is to invent its way out of climate change, which some suggest is our only hope, it will need to spend [a] lot more and a lot more wisely on basic energy research."
In his latest piece, Time magazine's energy and climate writer Bryan Walsh takes readers beyond carbon pricing, to look at the more active government engagement in energy innovation necessary in the race against climate change.
"[A] growing chorus of experts is beginning to doubt whether cap-and-trade alone will reduce CO2 enough to curb runaway climate change," Walsh writes, before turning to the need for new energy innovation on an unprecedented scale. As Walsh writes, "If the U.S. is to invent its way out of climate change, which some suggest is our only hope, it will need to spend [a] lot more and a lot more wisely on basic energy research."
At a public event at an efficient co-generation power plant in China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Todd Stern both discuss the importance of partnership and collaboration to develop and deploy clean, cheap energy technologies to power sustainable development in China.
Are these the first signs of a new Obama Administration strategy for U.S.-China engagement on climate change? Are Clinton and Stern preparing to embark on a strategy focused explicitly on harnessing the best and brightest researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses and leveraging major investments on both sides of the Pacific to develop and deploy clean, cheap and scalable energy sources?
I'll be writing more about this tomorrow, but for now, the full transcript of their remarks are below. I'm interested in your reaction to these remarks and your thoughts on how the United States and the Obama Administration should engage China to ensure a climate stability and to help drive sustainable development in China?
A few years ago, on this blog and at Climate Audit, there was a healthy discussion of a paper by Greg Holland and Peter Webster that claimed definitive attribution of hurricane activity to greenhouse gas emissions (PDF). Now a paper by Sim Aberson is out in the current issue of BAMS (PDF) which uses the Holland/Webster paper as a good example of how not to do statistics.
The Aberson paper is summarized as:
A cautionary tale in which previously published results are shown to be invalid due to the lack of statistical analyses in the original work.
The American Recovery and Investment Act agreed upon by the Senate and House Conference Committee contains $61.9 billion in energy-related public spending as well as tax credits and bond provisions expected to cost $20 billion over ten years.
The House of Representatives approved the conference report of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today, by a vote of 246-186. Not a single Republican joined Democrats in approving this version of the bill, which was the product of long negotiations between leadership in both the House and Senate, as well as a block of centrist Senate Democrats and Republicans who have taken control of much of the debate on the stimulus.
The public investment numbers in the stimulus have bounced around during the countless negotiations, so if you've been following this crazy game at home (all twelve of you), here's our detailed summary, provided without further comment, of the energy-related investments and tax provisions in the conference version of the stimulus.
Assuming the block of centrist Senators remains supportive, this will be the version passed into law by the Senate soon, as early as later this evening. Keep in mind that all spending will be spread out over roughly two years.
Chu says "second industrial revolution" needed in energy technology. Calls for Nobel-level "breakthroughs" in biomass, batteries and solar power to offer "better choices" in fight to overcome energy and climate challenges.
In a candid conversation with reporters yesterday, newly-confirmed Energy Secretary Dr. Stephen Chu called for "a second industrial revolution" in energy technology to overcome the world's energy and climate challenges.
Sounding like an honorary Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Chu said solving these pressing challenges would require Nobel-level "breakthroughs" in at least three core energy technologies: advanced batteries for vehicles, new crops for biomass energy, and solar panels cheap enough to deploy without subsidy.
The following is a question and answer question with Breakthrough Institute friend and ally Dr. Dan Sarewitz. Dr. Sarewitz is the co-Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. His thinking about how innovation happens, and how government and society can best foster technology innovation makes his insights invaluable to policymakers, engineers and others who seek to transform's America's energy system from its current fossil-fuel dependent form into a clean, low carbon system that utilizes a myriad of new technologies.
Adam: Dr. Sarewitz, your work on innovation policy has forced you to confront some hard truths about the limits of policy in driving technology innovation and deployment. Would you say that we know how to properly draft policy that stimulates the proper technology innovation necessary to transition to a low-carbon energy system in America?
Dr. Sarewitz: In fact we do understand how to stimulate innovation. What we don't understand is how to drive innovation down particular social paths to yield particular society-wide outcomes over particular time frames.
Adam: So setting a goal like "80 percent emissions reduction by 2050"--deciding on an outcome and a time frame--aren't exactly helpful to the job of decarbonizing an energy system?
Not in Europe it doesn't, according to this article in Der Spiegel (thanks RG and BP for the link):
Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.
But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.
We must work hard to turn centrism from a refuge for misers and penny pinchers into a platform for those who believe in good returns on wise investments.
After the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in the lower chamber of Congress with absolutely no support from House Republicans two weeks ago, it was hard to predict what shape the debate would take in the Senate. But with perspective, the course of the Senate debate offers lessons for how we could secure investments in making clean energy cheap, and transform American politics in the process.
Just as it seemed that debate over the stimulus might stall, Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, and Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine took the lead in an effort to bring a centrist approach to the bill in order to secure bipartisan support. What came out of this effort is a bill that slashes necessary and fast acting stimulus in the form of aid for state budgets and money for education, among other spending measures, while expanding tax cuts that will help the more affluent disproportionately to middle and lower class Americans.
In an in-depth proposal for new energy innovation, the Brookings Institution calls for an "order of magnitude increase" in federal energy R&D and the establishment of a new network of regionally-based "Energy Discovery Innovation Institutes."
The Brookings Institution officially unveiled a new proposal yesterday calling for "a new paradigm in energy innovation" at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The proposal, which was developed for over a year and is one of the most in-depth proposals for new energy R&D out there, calls for an "order of magnitude" increase in federal energy R&D investment and proposes a new model for clean energy technology research and commercialization: establishing a national network of regionally-based "Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes" (e-DIIs) to serve as hubs of distributed research linking the nation's best scientists, engineers, and facilities and effectively combining the forces of academia, government and industry.
The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon. The collapse is not due to the cold winter in places you may live or see on the news. It is not due to years without an increase in global temperature. It is not due to the overturning of the scientific consensus on the role of human activity in the global climate system.
It is due to the fact that policy makers and their political advisors (some trained as scientists) can no longer avoid the reality that targets for stabilization such as 450 ppm (or even less realistic targets) are simply not achievable with the approach to climate change that has been at the focus of policy for over a decade. Policies that are obviously fictional and fantasy are frequently subject to a rapid collapse.
The current shrillness that has been put on display by many politically-active climate scientists and the feeding-frenzy among their skeptical political opposition can be explained as a result of this looming collapse, though many will confuse the shrillness and feeding-frenzy as a cause of the collapse. Let me explain.
What does the report mean by "reduce"? It means that some future emissions that might have occurred will be avoided. Emissions will therefore increase, just not as much as under some other scenario. The difference between that other scenario and the scenario implied by the stimulus package represents a "reduction" in emissions. Yes, you are reading that right.
President Barack Obama has called for a global coalition on climate change mitigation:
To protect our climate and our collective security, we must call together a truly global coalition. I've made it clear that we will act, but so too must the world. That's how we will deny leverage to dictators and dollars to terrorists. And that's how we will ensure that nations like China and India are doing their part, just as we are now willing to do ours.
President Obama's call for nation's like "China and India" to "do their part" is sufficiently ambiguous to allow for some diplomatic interpretations, however, Obama's remarks probably best interpreted as a continuation of the long-standing US position on the inclusion of developing countries in any international mitigation agreement.
In the stimulus, Obama is essentially pledging to simply maintain business-as-usual growth in alternative energy production -- far from the transformative vision of his rhetoric.
By Adam Solomon Zemel and Jesse Jenkins. Also posted at HuffingtonPost
Barack Obama's stance on energy issues is not the easiest to discern. While Obama the orator's language regarding energy has been inspiring - he's eloquently spoken of the need take bold steps and transform America's energy system - it is still not clear that Obama the President's policy ideas are similarly transformative. For a perfect case study, let's look at the seemingly ambitious goal to double renewable energy announced as part of President Obama's stimulus and recovery plan.
Early on, before the Inauguration, Obama gave his address announcing the key components of his stimulus plan. For clean energy, the big punch line was this:
"To finally spark the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years."
On the surface, this sounds like an ambitious and transformative goal. Doubling alternative energy production in just three years sounds like quite a feat. But, as usual, the devil is in the details, and it all depends on what Obama actually means when he says "double alternative energy production."
Stern seems to acknowledge that the technology price gap creates real problems for driving the deployment of clean and low carbon technologies both in America and abroad.
Last week, reporting on Hilary Clinton's appointment of Todd Stern as chief envoy on climate change, we raised questions about whether or not Stern, a former Clinton administration negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol climate talks, would be able to offer a fresh, new direction at the Copenhagen negotiations this December.
However, it seems that we missed an important piece that Stern last year published in the Washington Quarterly's Winter 08 edition. A picture in broad strokes of how Stern and his co-author William Antholis would construct an international framework for emissions reductions, the report shows how Stern's views have evolved since the Kyoto negotiations. He writes:
"This is no time to indulge in orthodoxies or in the kind of overextended discussion that marked too much of the six-year Kyoto Protocol negotiation."
A strategy aimed at making clean energy cheap in real, unsubsidized returns through strategic investments could generate the kind of growth the economy needs not just for the next 2 but 20 years.
There's an interesting, if frustrating, piece by David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine this week on the need for a strategy for long-term growth, not just short term stimulus. In it he makes a critique of green jobs -- and offers up pollution pricing orthodoxy.
"Green jobs can certainly provide stimulus. Obama's proposal includes subsidies for companies that make wind turbines, solar power and other alternative energy sources, and these subsidies will create some jobs. But the subsidies will not be nearly enough to eliminate the gap between the cost of dirty, carbon-based energy and clean energy. Dirty-energy sources -- oil, gas and coal -- are cheap. That's why we have become so dependent on them.
The only way to create huge numbers of clean-energy jobs would be to raise the cost of dirty-energy sources, as Obama's proposed cap-and-trade carbon-reduction program would do, to make them more expensive than clean energy. This is where the green-jobs dream gets complicated."
That 1,200 MW of electricity that Kenya consumes represents the sum total energy use of the 40 million inhabitants of Kenya. This translates to just 30 average watts of electrical power per Kenyan
Environmental News Network reports that a Kenyan power firm is planning on building a 300 MW wind farm, which will open in 2011 and reach full capacity at 2012. On the one hand, this news has some environmentalists celebrating Kenya's new clean energy plans and touting the fact that the wind farm will provide 30% of the nation's electricity (in reality, a 300 MW wind farm will provide more like 8% of the nation's demand, since it will only operate at about 30% of capacity on average). Perhaps more importantly though, this news throws into stark relief the energy poverty that pervades much of the developing world.
That 1,200 MW of energy that Kenya consumes represents the sum total electricity use of the 40 million inhabitants of Kenya. This translates to just 30 average watts of electrical power per Kenyan, disregarding the disparity between haves and have-nots that exists even in this East African nation. Contrast this to California, a state with a population comparable to Kenya's which has approximate 30,000 MW of average electricity demand, almost thirty times Kenya's total electricity demand. And California is the most electricity-efficient state in the country.
Some folks are surprised to learn that market mechanisms for carbon trading allow both the buying and selling of emissions permits. Clearly this sort of capitalistic behavior must be stopped if carbon markets are to work. The Guardian has the details:
Britain's biggest polluting companies are abusing a European emissions trading scheme (ETS) designed to tackle global warming by cashing in their carbon credits in order to bolster ailing balance sheets.
The sell-off has helped trigger a collapse in the price of carbon, making it cheaper to burn high-carbon fossil fuels and leading to a fall in the number of clean energy projects. The moves were seized on by environmentalists and other critics who have previously criticised the European Union's ETS for delivering more windfall profits for business than climate change.
So, for those who care about the future of the climate, that's our test: if we want climate policy passed in the US, we need to convince the "Technology Fifteen" that (a) our policy proposal is actually good for their states' economies (rhetoric aside), (b) the costs of compliance are manageable and contained, (c) it will invest heavily in clean energy technology development and deployment, and (d) it will not disproportionately impact different states.
When it comes to the geography of climate politics, it doesn't break down along the much-ballyhooed "red state/blue state" divide. It's really more about coal states vs. clean states, as John Broder reports in yesterday's New York Times. That's a rift that risks dividing Senate Democrats as climate policies move forward in the 111th Congress.
Will US "Climate Envoy" Todd Stern be prepared to advocate a fresh start on a new international climate framework, or will he dust off his old play book and continue to work towards an ineffective and illusory "hard" cap on emissions and a global emissions trading scheme?
Todd Stern will be named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the U.S. State Department's special "Climate Envoy," news outlets reported today. Stern's climate credentials include a stint as a senior negotiator representing Bill Clinton's White House at the Kyoto Protocol talks, a role he'll likely reprise at the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks this December.
As a high level negotiator at Kyoto in 1997, Stern helped forge an international climate reduction framework that has been largely ineffective (see Michael and Ted's essay, "Scrap Kyoto", here [pdf]). Stern's appointment thus makes one wonder: has the Clinton-era negotiator learned the lessons of the past 12 years and is now prepared to offer a new direction at the Copenhagen talks? Or does Stern's appointment signal that the Obama administration's official thinking on international climate policy is still stuck in the winter of 1997?
Pelosi's remarks seem to point to a new frame for energy politics which is focused on driving technology innovation and deploying low-carbon technologies.
Yesterday, in an article in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's hometown paper, the San lFrancisco Chronicle, arguably the second-most-powerful person in the country made a significant break from carbon pricing orthodoxy in remarks she made on future cap-and-trade legislation.
"I believe we have to [pass a cap-and-trade bill] because we see that as a source of revenue," she said, noting that proposed cap-and-trade bills would raise billions of dollars by forcing major emitters to buy credits to release greenhouse gases. "Cap-and-trade is there for a reason. You cap and you trade so you can pay for some of these investments in energy independence and renewables."
This description of the reasons for enacting a cap-and-trade scheme is a remarkable--and laudable--shift in climate legislation discourse. Speaker Pelosi's remarks show an increased understanding of the importance of technology investment in reducing carbon emissions and securing energy independence.
Obama and other leaders beware: these numbers would seem to point to a very uphill battle for any proposal framed centrally or primarily as a "climate bill," ... Perhaps more crucially, any proposal that can be painted as bad for the economy will also most certainly run right into a brick wall of public opposition.
Public opinion on global warming lags far behind the rhetoric and apparent commitment shown by President Obama and other elected officials, according to reports today from Andy Revkin at the New York Times (in print and on his DotEarth blog).
"The latest in an annual series of polls from the Pew Research Center on people's top priorities for their elected leaders shows that America and President Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming," Revkin writes, pointing out that "Mr. Obama stressed the [global warming] issue throughout his campaign and several times in his inaugural speech, mentioning stabilizing climate in the same breath as preventing nuclear conflict at one point."
If lawmakers who care about climate change want to achieve anything meaningful politically this year, they must ask themselves one fundamental question: will it pass the Recovery Test?
According to Talking Points Memo, GOP lawmakers are already laying the groundwork for efforts to delay climate legislation that could be introduced into Congress in 2009. As the GOP's strategy becomes clearer, so to do certain fundamental political truths likely to rule Washington politics for the coming year and beyond.
According to TPM, Republicans are laying seeds of dissent and dissatisfaction regarding Obama's new senior aide for energy and the environment, former Clinton-era EPA head Carol Browner:
"By holding up Jackson and Sutley [Obama's nominees for EPA chief and head of the Council on Environmental Quality], Senate Republicans are doing more than just signaling their discontent that they won't get to question and vote on Browner -- although Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) suggests to the Times that Browner be called in for a "quasi-confirmation" hearing. They're previewing their strategy to knock down the climate regulation bill that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), environment committee chairman, will release later this year.
Here's how it might look: After Boxer's climate bill emerges, Republicans would immediately protest the involvement of Browner, a White House adviser who was never fully vetted by the Senate."
If you accept that making clean energy cheap should be the primary objective for climate policy, you become largely indifferent about the revenue stream for public technology investments.
As the prospects for high carbon pricing and cap and trade continue to diminish in the midst of a severe economic recession, some climate advocates are beginning to wonder: is there any alternative? In a recent op-ed we wrote for the Huffington Post, we argued:
Despite Obama's appointments, climate advocates are thus left to worry: is Obama really prepared to expend his political capital championing a policy that will increase U.S. energy prices in the midst of a recession?
Not likely. Until recently Obama voiced support for carbon regulation, declaring at a governors' climate conference in mid-November that his climate agenda "will start with a federal cap and trade system." But since then, as the recession has deepened, he has said little to nothing about cap and trade...
A serious alternative to cap and trade would focus on making clean energy cheap, prioritizing major, sustained public investments to drive down the price of green technologies as quickly as possible. This would require federal investments on the scale of $500 billion over the next decade to support and accelerate each stage of the energy innovation pipeline: research, development, demonstration, and deployment.
Matthew Yglesias, an author and writer at the Center for American Progress, addressed this issue directly in a post yesterday titled "No Alternative," where he argued there is no better alternative to carbon pricing:
Yesterday's Financial Times reported
the results of a new poll that asked people in a number of countries
about what priorities they'd like to see President Obama take on in the
international arena. There is a remarkable degree of congruence across
countries, with (no surprise) the economy in first place everywhere.
Climate change receives considerable support as well, certainly enough
for action to occur. Of course the key question is, what action?
Today's New York Times has an editorial in which it claims that:
The plain truth is that the United States is an
inefficient user of energy. For each dollar of economic product, the
United States spews more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than 75 of
107 countries tracked in the indicators of the International Energy
Agency. Those doing better include not only cutting-edge nations like
Japan but low-tech countries like Thailand and Mexico.
The Council on Foreign Relations ran a top story on their homepage today, "Climate Policy in the Age of Obama," that mentioned a recent op-ed by Jesse Jenkins and me in the opening paragraph.
The global economic decline has tempered hopes of swift international action on climate change, yet many climate advocates do expect the Obama administration to help boost long-stalled international climate talks (PDF). The announcement of the president-elect's energy and environment team (WSJ) last month reinforced this belief. Among the nominees is Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, a Nobel-winning physicist and advocate for alternative energy. Chu underscored his concern about climate change and the need for energy efficiency in Senate testimony on January 13. Yet some advocates are worried. "All is well on the climate front, it seems. Except that it's not," write Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank. They warn that President-elect Barack Obama could take the "politically expedient route of short-term green stimulus while ignoring serious climate policy." During the campaign, Obama pledged to use green technologies and renewable energy as a jobs engine, but he also has pledged to mandate a cap-and-trade program.
As it becomes clear that chasing an illusory "hard" cap on carbon emissions is a losing proposition, green groups must turn to new strategies to address the urgent threat of climate change.
The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of corporations including General Electric and Duke Energy in addition to environmental groups such as the Natural Resource Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, released a "blueprint" for climate legislation today. Essentially a Cap-and-Trade system, the legislative recommendation reads like a sequel to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.
The report was released today, and already the fallout has perfectly captured the existential moment that the major green groups are experiencing right now in their increasingly urgent efforts to address climate change on a national and global scale.
The defeat of Lieberman-Warner, the oil drilling debate, and global recession have awakened the greens to the immovable political truth that politicians will never enact, and the public will always reject climate legislation that significantly increases energy prices. This truth undermines the power and attraction to cap and trade that has made it the preferred legislation of climate activists for two decades.
As if you needed another sign of the political challenges facing a climate strategy centered around dramatically increasing the price of fossil fuels, here you have Dr. Chu, who understands the urgency of the climate challenge better than just about anyone, apparently recognizing that increasing energy prices during a recession just isn't going to happen.
Confirmations were held today for Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL). Chu, a clean energy expert, is well known for turning the Berkeley Lab into a center of clean energy and efficiency innovation, forging the Berkeley Lab-British Petroleum partnership, sitting on the Copenhagen Climate Council, and winning a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.
Suffice it to say that Chu has a deep and nuanced grasp of the many variables and drivers that contribute to global warming and he understands the scale of the challenge as well as anyone. As an administrator at LBNL, Dr. Chu worked to secure increased funding for research in clean energy and efficiency. And as an academic, Chu was able to speak candidly--and in fact, quite bluntly--about energy and climate issues.
Not any more! Dr. Chu has arrived inside the Beltway now, and already his tone is changing...
Clean energy advocates who are motivated to transition from oil for reasons of national security have a new reason to lobby for clean technology innovation in America:
"[E]ven as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America's route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy."
It seems that Middle Eastern states that enjoy a high standard of living due to their thriving oil industries have recognized that due to rising population, societal change and global warming, oil will not be the fuel of the future. And they are taking steps to build new energy industries. The Times article reports that entities in Middle East petro-states are investing in things like alternative energy, carbon capture and low carbon cement on the order billions of dollars:
The graph below shows relative improvements in carbon dioxide emissions for four countries (from the U.S. Energy Information Agency) per national GDP (as measured in PPP terms and reported by Maddison). The data starts in 1991, selected because it is the first year that the EIA reports total emissions for reunified Germany.
The figure below shows the relationship of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (with data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency) with global GDP (as measured in PPP terms and reported by Maddison).
In Northern Virginia today, President-elect Barack Obama addressed the nation, introducing a few basic goals and guidelines for an economic stimulus package that could cost as much as a trillion dollars.
Well aware that the large price tag on the stimulus, referred to as the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," Obama included language about setting a foundation for economic growth now in order to return to a place of fiscal responsibility as the economy gets back on its feet. However, Obama was not shy about the need for the government to step in and spend, now:
"It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy - where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending; where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit."
A cautionary note about losing sight of climate objectives amidst all the fervor about green jobs and green stimulus. ... Jesse Jenkins and Teryn Norris in the Huffington Post.
The Huffington Post has featured an op-ed by me and Jesse Jenkins, "The Danger of Green Stimulus," which issues a cautionary note about losing sight of climate objectives amidst all the fervor about green jobs and green stimulus:
Barack Obama's final appointments in December indicate a strong commitment to action on climate change. Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, Carol Browner as Energy & Climate Czar, John Holdren as Assistant for Science and Technology -- just to name a few recent selections -- are all proponents of vigorous action to cut U.S. global warming pollution and take leadership on a new international climate treaty. And Hilda Solis, Obama's new Labor Secretary, is a champion of "green jobs."
All is well on the climate front, it seems. Except that it's not.
Carbon cap and trade regulation remains the top federal policy priority for the majority of environmental groups. But in June, cap and trade legislation failed in the Senate, and sixteen Democratic Senators from coal and manufacturing-heavy states voiced their opposition to high carbon pricing. The policy faces even greater obstacles in today's economic climate, since it would increase the energy bills of the American public.
On January 21st, immediately after assuming office, Barack Obama's first priority will be passing an economic stimulus package that will provide the economic kick-in-the-pants necessary to avoid the next Great Depression. There's nearly unanimous consensus that a major stimulus investment is needed to stave off economic disaster. How the next administration plans to fit this stimulus into a larger economic revitalization plan, however, is still unclear.
So far, there's plenty of focus on traditional methods of stimulus: tax cuts to spur consumer spending and traditional infrastructure investments to rebuild roads and bridges. Unfortunately, a short-term focus on roads and rebates won't be enough to stave off a new depression or put our economy back on track. Instead, we must focus on investments that can both act as short-term stimulus and improve the long-term productivity of the US economy. And that means investing in innovation.
As Janet Rae-Dupree wrote in the New York Times on Saturday:
The Efficiency Trap will be easy to fall into--it is politically expedient and it lies at the intersection of energy and economic issues that propelled voters to pull the lever for Barack Obama in the first place.
An efficiency stimulus plan seems at first glance to be an unadulterated good: it puts Americans to work, saves energy and money, and cuts greenhouse gas emissions, all with investments that should pay for themselves. But there are reasons to be nervous about the overwhelming focus on energy efficiency by green leaders and Obama's top energy and climate advisors. This narrow focus threatens to distract from the critical work ahead: overcoming the technology gap that exists between the current state (and cost) of today's clean energy technologies and fossil fuels.
An efficiency program will not create the new industries that the American economy needs to increase employment and productivity in the long term. An efficiency program will not create new exports that will bring global capital in to the American economy. And, equally as important as short term stimulus, America needs to have a plan to achieve those objectives as quickly as possible as well.
Obama's primary focus must be on making clean energy cheap -- what Google calls RE<C, renewable energy cheaper than coal -- not on reducing energy consumption.
"Energy efficiency cannot be seen as Job 1 and the other stuff Job 2. You've got to do them all as Job 1 because they all have to work."
-Dr. Nathan Lewis, California Institute of Technology, in today's New York Times piece, "Hard Task for New Team on Energy and Climate. Dr. Lewis explains why any program on climate-friendly energy must move forward on three prongs simultaneously: increasing efficiency, moving existing nonpolluting energy technologies more rapidly into the market, and advancing on the frontiers of energy science in search of radical breakthroughs.
It is heartening to see the New York Times leading the way in this shifting discourse while placing public investment in its rightful place as a core solution to climate change.
The New York Times editorial board, including respected environmental writer Bob Semple, broke from its past focus on carbon pricing as the primary solution to climate change in an editorial about Obama's newly announced energy and climate team. The piece praised Energy Secretary-designate Dr. Steven Chu for his views on the climate challenge:
"What sets [Chu] apart is his fierce conviction that innovation is just as important as regulation, and that big energy problems, like climate change and the world's dependency on fossil fuels, will not be solved without major private and public investment in the development and deployment of nonpolluting technologies."
The article demonstrates the enormous challenges policymakers face in attempting to raise energy prices for industry and consumers, as well as the corruption and unintended consequences that could plague a similar policy system here in the United States.
The New York Times ran a landmark article today, "Money and Lobbyists Hurt European Efforts to Curb Gases," about the failure of cap and trade in Europe. It should be required reading for anyone concerned about climate change policy in the United States and abroad. It opens with this:
The European Union started with a high-minded ecological goal: encouraging companies to cut their greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton of carbon dioxide they emitted into the atmosphere.
But that plan unleashed a lobbying free-for-all that led politicians to dole out favors to various industries, undermining the environmental goals. Four years later, it is becoming clear that system has so far produced little noticeable benefit to the climate -- but generated a multibillion-dollar windfall for some of the Continent's biggest polluters.
As President-elect Barack Obama considers how to curb the gases that contribute to global warming, Europe's struggle with the problem illustrates the momentous task ahead for the United States.
The piece comes after the GAO just released a highly critical study of the use of offsets in Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme and amidst the chaotic climate negotiations at Poznan, where several European nations are balking at strict emissions caps. It also comes only a few weeks after President-elect Barack Obama pledged his support for cap and trade at a major climate conference in California.
"The framework of the European system put governments in the position of behaving like 'a grandfather with a large family deciding what to give his favorite grandchildren for Christmas,' Mr. Trittin said in an interview."
-From this New York Times article about the pitfalls and failures of cap and trade in Europe.
Barack Obama made public today his intentions to appoint Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as Secretary of Energy and Carol Browner, former EPA Administrator and current transition team advisor for energy and environment, as the administration's new "Energy and Climate Czar."
Breakthrough gives Obama's selection of Dr. Steven Chu a preliminary thumbs up, while the selection of Browner - who seems to see regulations as the primary driver of innovation - raises concerns about the kind of counsel Obama will receive from his new point person on energy and climate change.
Last week in response to Michael and Ted's piece in The American Prospect, Bradford Plumer at The New Republic's "The Vine" wrote a piece called "Should We Forget About Carbon Pricing? (No.)" The post, which mischaracterizes the stances Michael and Ted take in the Prospect piece, also propagates the myth of successful emissions reductions in Europe.
"Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have yet another essay arguing that environmentalists should abandon all hope of trying to cap or tax carbon emissions, and instead focus solely on subsidizing clean-energy sources if they want to avert drastic global warming.
...Simply having the Energy Department dole out $50 billion per year to clean-energy producers (as Nordhaus and Shellenberger suggest) will pale beside the amount of private-sector money that will flow to alternative energy and efficiency improvements if carbon is priced properly."
This characterization of S&N's positions in The American Prospect and the Breakthrough Institute in general is a strawman.
"The truth, however, is that Kyoto, as a means to reduce carbon emissions, has been like Monty Python's parrot, long dead, despite all the protestations to the contrary by its salesmen."
Dominic Lawson, columnist for the British newspaper "The Independent," issued a scathing condemnation of the Poznan Climate Talks aimed at renewing the Kyoto Protocol after 2012:
The truth, however, is that Kyoto, as a means to reduce carbon emissions, has been like Monty Python's parrot, long dead, despite all the protestations to the contrary by its salesmen.
You don't have to be a "climate change sceptic" to assert this unwelcome fact. Professor Gwyn Prins, Director of the LSE's Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events, has been advocating measures to reduce what he sees as man-made climate change since 1986. He was a lead author on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the Advisory Board of Friends of the Earth UK. For some years now, Prof Prins has been warning that the Kyoto approach is hopelessly flawed - and his unpopularity in the environment ministries of Europe has grown, precisely as his criticisms of their approach have been vindicated.
The US Government Accountability Office released an analysis of the Europe's cap-and-trade program, the ETS, noting that there were more efficient and cost-effective ways to drive the deployment of clean energy than cap and trade and carbon offsets.
Last week the United States Government Accountability Office released its evaluation of Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme, the European Union's cap and trade program designed to control greenhouse gas emissions. The GAO was asked to investigate the effectiveness and outcomes of the ETS in order to inform the ongoing debate on emissions reduction strategies in the United States.
A carbon pricing scheme has two basic purposes: to reduce carbon emissions and to drive private investment in low carbon technologies. However, according to the GAO, the ETS has failed to accomplish either objective in any measurable way:
"Against the background of the tempestuous year just reviewed, the European Union's climate policy steamed serenely on, like the Titanic towards the iceberg."
Towards the end (pdf), Prins summarizes his point about a new direction for an international agreement on climate change:
"Poznan has an opportunity to... put in place the foundations and essential architecture for a radically re-engineered climate policy for adoption at the Copenhagen meeting next...That architecture will not depend upon carbon trading in the present form; it will not lead with emissions targets tied to specific dates (although benchmarks are part of the sectoral strategy for reducing energy intensity); it will not focus upon international legal agreements that are dubiously enforceable, if at all."
Greens have begun to truly embrace investment in clean energy as a major piece of the agenda, but there is also a lot in the report that gives reason for pause.
Last week a coalition of the big green groups released a 400 page report recommending the actions that President Obama should take in regard to climate change. It is the first time that greens have all truly embraced investing in a clean energy economy, which is a positive step; but there is also a lot in the report that gives reason for pause.
Although the report's first recommendation is for a carbon cap and auction, it states that the revenue from this system should be used for investment and not for rebates. At the same time, the report names cutting pollution as a higher priority than the two other goals of the President's economic recovery strategy: "repowering America with clean energy" and "ending our dependence on oil ."
In the end, we'll have a new kind of American auto company - leaner and nimbler, and under a new class of managers - and a new kind of America auto industry.
The executives of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler made yet another trek to Washington DC this week - this time ditching the corporate jets to drive hybrid cars - and once again pled for a federal bailout to prop up their struggling companies. Up to $34 billion taxpayer dollars are apparently all that stands between at least two of the "Big Three" automakers and bankruptcy.
GM's executives told Congress the company will fail very, very soon unless it receives at least $12 billion in loans in the coming months. Chrysler warned they could go belly up by year's end without $7 billion in government aid. Even Ford, which is doing a bit better than its two Detroit brethren, is asking for an open, taxpayer-funded line of credit of up to $9 billion dollars.
All this means its time for Congress and the American public to face two basic facts.
The UK auctioned the first four million allowances to emit greenhouse gases under the EU's Emissions Trading System, but will not earmark auction revenues for investment in clean energy.
The UK Government auctioned the first four million allowances to emit greenhouse gases under their portion of the European Union's Emissions Trading System this week, raising 54m British pounds ($80.9m). However, the government is drawing fire for failing to earmark the auction revenues to investments in clean energy and energy efficiency that could further cut emissions and help reduce the costs of compliance with the cap and trade program. Instead of reinvesting the revenues in clean energy ventures, the government is reportedly planning to add revenues to the general budget.
Henry Waxman (D-CA) defeated long-time Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, John Dingell (D-MI), winning the gavel of the influential committee in a 137-122 vote of the House Democratic Caucus.
Representative Henry Waxman of California defeated Representative John Dingell of Michigan in the battle for the gavel of the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee today.
Over the past two weeks, the two senior Democrats waged one of the most hotly contested challenges for committee chairmanship in recent Congressional history. Waxman was announced the victor today after a 137-122 vote of the full House Democratic Caucus, ending Dingell's nearly 28 year reign as Chair of the committee, which has jurisdiction over several key issues, including energy, interstate commerce and health care.
President-elect Barack Obama's incoming Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, called for major reforms to our nation's health care, financial, and energy systems at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council today, challenging CEOs to embrace an ambitious reform agenda.
"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking at a forum convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.
The soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff said the Obama Administration sees the economic crisis as an opportunity to advance a suite of bold solutions that would put America back on track. "You never want a crisis to go to waste," Mr Emanuel said, before continuing, "and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
Mr Emanuel said the incoming administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to advance wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," he said.
Without clean, affordable and massively scalable energy sources, the world will be stuck in the Development Trap: we'll be forced to either sacrifice our climate and ecological security in the name of global development or condemn billions of global citizens to poverty in the name of climate protection.
The stark tone of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2008 is a dramatic departure from their normally staid and frequently rosy projections about the world's energy future (I presented highlights from the piece in this proceeding post). The report's opening statement that current world energy trends are "patently unsustainable" will no doubt receive the most attention in headlines across the blogosphere and mainstream news. But in this post, I want to delve deeper into the key statement that follows it:
"It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply."
While the environmental community focuses primarily on the latter of those two concerns, the IEA appropriately recognizes that the future of human prosperity depends on our ability to tackle both challenges: decarbonizing the energy supply and providing ample and affordable energy supplies to power global development.
In short, the IEA confirms what is perhaps the central challenge of the 21st century: developing clean and affordable energy sources to power the globe.
Breakthrough Senior Fellow and Climate Science Expert Roger Pielke, jr., published an article in Nature explaining how the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consistently and significantly underestimate greenhouse gas emission predictions. Here he explains how the same inaccuracies show up in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook, released yesterday.
Last spring along with Tom Wigley and Chris Green we published an article in Nature (PDF) arguing that the IPCC had underestimated the magnitude of the mitigation challenge. Today I'd like to illustrate how the IEA's World Energy Outlook, published yesterday, also dramatically underestimates the magnitude of the mitigation challenge.
The figure below is taken from the IEA's publicly-available packet of key graphs (here in PDF). I have annotated it as follows to illustrate how the IEA has significantly underestimated the mitigation challenge.
Japan's carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of 1.37 billion tons in the year to March 2008, well above the target set by the Kyoto Protocol, the environment ministry said Wednesday.
The figure, which marked a 2.3 percent rise from the previous fiscal year, was mainly the result of more polluting energy production following the closure of the world's biggest nuclear power plant after it was damaged in an earthquake that struck northern Japan.
As the parties to the United Nation's Kyoto Protocol on global warming prepare to meet in Poznan, Poland next month, India's Minister of Science and Technology weighed in today to voice little interest in a global action plan on climate change.
In a statement that strongly favored initiatives tailored to suit local needs, Minister Kapil Sibal told attendees at a climate change conference, "You cannot have a global action plan on climate change. You can only have a global commitment."
Minister Sibal, who been representing India at international climate negotiations, said the issue of climate change has to be addressed at national, regional and local levels as each part has different sets of problems.
On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to reduce U.S. emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020, with a midcentury 80 percent cut. Yet Obama has not stated a timetable for actually moving global warming legislation to implement those goals, and congressional leaders are likely to hold off in pushing the issue until all of the complex details have been worked out.
"It's not a first 100 days priority," Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said today of cap-and-trade legislation. "It'll take longer to come together."
This is the second post in a continuing series delving into Barack Obama's opportunity to capture this political moment and provide a direction for energy policy and economic growth in the 21st century.Part 1 is here.
As Barack Obama assumes the mantle of President-elect of the United
States of America, we are witnessing an historic realignment of the
American political landscape. With the election of our nation's first
African-American president, record voter turnout, and a dramatically
redrawn electoral map, it seems that anything is possible now.
However, while Obama clearly has a new mandate to lead our nation,
electoral mandates are fickle and even this one could fade in time.
President-elect Obama has just 76 days to prepare for his inauguration.
Then the real work of governing will begin, and what Obama decides to
do in his first 100 days will either cement or erase the wave of
popular support the President-elect rides today.
His job won't be easy. On January 20th, President-elect Obama will
inherit the White House along with a plethora of pressing challenges
all competing for his attention. There will be no time for baby steps,
and President Obama must show bold and effective leadership right out
of the gate. Furthermore, while the economic crisis will remain his top
concern in the short-run, Obama cannot afford to ignore longer-term
challenges and must develop synergistic solutions that can tackle
multiple problems at once.
Thankfully, Barack Obama has stated that building a new energy
economy will be his top priority upon assuming office. If he fully
integrates this effort with his shorter-term economic stimulus plans,
Obama could effectively tackle several priorities - economy recovery,
energy security, and global warming - simultaneously. And getting this
job done right could cement Obama's electoral mandate and pave the way
for a truly transcendent presidency.
Michael D. Mastrandrea and Stephen H. Schneider, both of Stanford and the IPCC, in an article titled "The Rising Tide" in the current issue of The Boston Review argue that adaptation now needs to be part of the discussion of climate change:
Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) plans to challenge venerable
Representative John Dingell (D-MI) for chairmanship of the influential
House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to a report from Roll Call.
"The move marks a major showdown between two Democratic
powerhouses, with implications for a host of major legislation next
year from health care to global warming to renewable energy. Waxman
currently chairs the Oversight and Government Reform panel."
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over a wide
range of critical issues, including energy policy, health care,
interstate commerce issues and most likely global warming policy as
well. The committee will no doubt be a critical player in the
legislative implementation of President-elect Obama's policy agenda.
MIT's Technology Review has a very interesting article on the sequestration of carbon dioxide exploiting natural geologic processes as reported today in a paper paper from Columbia University, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (full paper available here).
Technology Review writes of the paper:
The researchers have shown that rock formations called peridotite, which are found in Oman and several other places worldwide, including California and New Guinea, produce calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate rock when they come into contact with carbon dioxide. The scientists found that such formations in Oman naturally sequester hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a year. Based on those findings, the researchers, writing in the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calculate that the carbon-sequestration rate in rock formations in Oman could be increased to billions of tons a year-more than the carbon emissions in the United States from coal-burning power plants, which come to 1.5 billion tons per year. . .
What happens when targets for carbon dioxide reduction run up against economic realities? A decision by the EU last week provides one answer:
EU member states are ready to grant automakers a three-year delay until 2015 to reduce the CO2 emissions of their new vehicles, in light of the global economic crisis, negotiators said Saturday.
China's greenhouse gas emissions could more than double by 2020, according to a new report released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Beijing has been reluctant to release official data on greenhouse gas from the nation's fast-growing use of coal, oil and gas. This new study from the state-run institute breaks that reticence and sends another clear reminder that China is where our quest for climate stability will be won or lost.
"To a significant degree, our planet's energy and environmental future is now being written in China," says the study's authors. And the only way that story has a happy ending is if China has access to clean and cheap energy sources to power its sustainable development.
The Breakthrough Institutes' position on carbon pricing and cap and trade is frequently mischaracterized. As sometimes vocal critics of cap and trade and regulation-centric approaches to climate solutions, we're all too often thrown together with realopponentsof serious action that misuse similar arguments to sow confusion and inaction.
In stark contrast, the Breakthrough Institutes' criticism and concerns about cap and trade are motivated by the desire to see advocates and policymakers adopt successful strategies and policies that can truly put our nation and our planet on a path to climate stability and sustained prosperity. With the climate crisis increasingly urgent, our economy heading south, and a new president and congress soon to be elected, climate and clean energy advocates face a critical moment to re-evaluate our strategies and policies and ensure that we can successfully advance climate solutions in the coming year. In that context in particular, we remain steadfast in the position that our efforts are ill-served by continuing forward with a blinding focus on cap and trade that frequently obscures the critical technology innovation challenge at the true heart of our quest for climate stability (and continued and expanded global prosperity).
In a recent discussion with Eric Pooley, I tried to set the record straight and articulate as clearly as possible where the Breakthrough Institute stands on emissions caps and carbon prices and why. Since that piece was long and covered several subjects, I've reposted and reprised the section on cap and trade and carbon pricing here. So, let the record stand...
In the coming weeks a monumental decision will be made that will influence the future evolution of global climate policies. A single country has in its power the ability to alter the course of global negotiations and change the dynamics of a political debate characterized by gridlock. That country is . . .
In
the coming weeks a monumental decision will be made that will influence
the future evolution of global climate policies. A single country has
in its power the ability to alter the course of global negotiations and
change the dynamics of a political debate characterized by gridlock.
That country is . . .
Poland. Yes, Poland. (It is not the U.S. presidential
election.) Over the next 6 weeks, the EU, with France taking the lead,
must convince Poland (plus other Eastern European countries and Italy)
to fall in line with (i.e., not veto) its ambitious climate policies or
else see them utterly fall apart. The following graph helps to explain
the political dynamics...
Our sometimes blinding focus on emissions caps and carbon prices can obscure the critical technology innovation challenge that lies at the heart of our quest for climate stability (and continued and expanded global prosperity). In the face of a rapidly shifting political climate, it would be a tragedy to hold any one solution to this core challenge hostage to any other.
Eric Pooley's recent piece in Slate, "Save the Economy, Save the Planet," sparked a lot of discussion and thought here at Breakthrough. Pooley is right that climate advocates would be best served finding a "Trojan horse" to advance climate solutions within an economic recovery framework. But his recommendations that the next president advance a cap and trade program sparked both my response, "Can Cap and Dividend Really Save the Economy or the Planet?" and a round table discussion with several climate and policy experts on the opportunities and challenges for new U.S. administration.
I invited Pooley to respond to my post, which was highly critical of the political chances of a Cap and Dividend scheme in today's political and economic climate. Below the fold you'll find our continued dialog on the political challenges and opportunities facing climate advocates in the coming year.
Policy analysis is not laboratory science. But fortunately, the real world is full of "experiments" that while not conducted in the controlled conditions that researchers like, nevertheless provide much useful knowledge. On climate policy, this week Canada and the EU provide some interesting lessons for understanding global climate policy focused on decarbonization. The main lesson, which seems inescapable is the following- policies that lead to increased costs of energy are politically doomed. Here is some of the reporting from Canada and the EU:
Breakthrough Senior Fellow Marty Hoffert explains about how to create the conditions in the Executive Branch of Federal Government for a quick transition to a clean energy system.
When it comes to creating a clean energy system in America, Presidential leadership is key, but a re-organization at the White House will also be necessary to move things effectively. America must upgrade the Secretary of Energy position to cabinet level equivalent to Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, in recognition of the international issues such as the rapid pace of coal plant construction in places like China and the need for a post-Kyoto international treaty and of the national security dimensions of energy such as the concentration of remaining oil deposits in unstable countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, and weapons proliferation among terrorists from nuclear reactors and processing plants.
Yesterday was election day in Canada, a fact that I hope I'll be forgiven for missing amidst the frenzy of election politics here in the States. However, this stunning headline from the UK Telegraph grabbed my attention:
"Canadian election: Carbon tax proposals sealed Liberal defeat"
That's right, the opposition Liberal party was just dealt a stunning defeat, and their Achilles heal turned out to be their proposal to enact a carbon tax on coal, natural gas, gasoline and home heating fuels.
The leaders of eight Eastern European countries said the EU must balance the wish for cleaner air against "the need for sustainable economic growth" at a time of "serious economic and financial uncertainties."
In yet another sign of the political challenges carbon pricing faces in times of economic insecurity, AP reports that leaders from eight Eastern European countries are calling on the European Union to ease up on greenhouse gas reduction targets under the EU's cap and trade program, arguing that it would be too much of a burden on their nation's already stressed economies.
Since all 27 EU member nations must approve a proposal for it to become law, the eight European nations could derail efforts to enact the next phase of the EU's Emissions Trading System. If the EU can't bring these eight nations back to the table, forcing the Europeans to back off on their emissions reduction program, it could be a major blow to the United Nations climate talks scheduled to continue in December in Poland.
As responses to Michael and Ted's LA Times op-ed surface, it is clear that the climate change community is in a state of denial and ignorance about the import of the summer's energy debate, and the challenges and opportunities it has created.
In response to Michael and Ted's op-ed in the LA Times, the New Republic's environment and energy blog, The Vine published a post entitled, "The Green Bubble Hasn't Burst," by Dayo Olopade. This piece misses the thrust of Ted and Michael's argument, and, in an effort to counter it, proves them right.
Working backwards, my first objections with this post come at the end:
"I've argued that the derided June bill [the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act], which won 48 votes in the Senate, was clearly a two steps forward, one step back situation, and a good step forward at that."
A clean energy economic stimulus plan could truly be climate advocates' "Trojan horse," as columnist Eric Pooley writes. But NOT if they follow Pooley's advice about how to formulate that plan and advance a full-on, economy-wide Cap and Dividend program next year.
The economy is all that matters now, and climate advocates - and the
next President - would be wise to develop a strategic "Trojan horse" to
advance their ecological goals within the framework of economic
recovery. That's the thesis of "Save the Economy, Save the Planet," an article appearing in Slate last week by Eric Pooley.Â
Pooley gets the political analysis right, accurately diagnosing the
potentially incurable political malady that dooms the chances of expansive
carbon regulation in today's economic climate. But when it comes time
to prescribe the remedy, Pooley is off-the-mark, arguing that a Cap and Dividend proposal is just what the doctor ordered.Â
Sorry, but that's the wrong answer. Unfortunately, Pooley is not alone in his
prescribed solution, and it's time we took a close look at the
obstacles to climate action and see just how far Cap and Dividend gets
us (hint: it's not very far...)
A relatively small percentage of Americans strongly believe that climate change requires urgent action, according to a comprehensive survey conducted by a coalition of environmental groups, and opinion is strongly split along party lines.
Yesterday's E&E News PM (subscription) has an interesting article
about a new poll out on U.S. view of climate change, sponsored by a set
of environmental groups and consultants. It supports many arguments
that we have made here at Prometheus, such as the fact that support for
action on climate change is broad but shallow, the public generally
accepts a significant human role in climate change, and Al Gore has
played a big role in making the issue partisan (an even more
interesting finding because Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is a
sponsor of the poll). I don't have the poll yet, but have requested it.
Meantime, here is an excerpt from the E&E News PM story:
A group of moderate Democratic senators is organizing into a force to be reckoned with on climate legislation. Climate and energy advocates should be advised: climate legislation could be controlled by centrists in the 111th Congress, and real issues around cost-containment and tech deployment are far from resolved.
A group of moderate Senate Democrats are joining forces to take the lead in climate legislation next year. We originally dubbed the group the "Technology Ten" in June, when the centrist Democrats sent a letter (pdf) to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Environment Committee Chair Barbara Boxer indicating their reservations about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act that had just been voted down on the Senate floor.
The groups' concerns revolved around the effect of expansive climate change legislation on energy prices, and hence on energy consumers, businesses and manufacturing and the letter centered around the need for stronger cost-containment measures and greater investment in technology innovation and deployment -- hence the moniker "Technology Ten." That group has now grown to include sixteen Democratic senators, and they are redoubling their efforts to take charge of the global warming debate next year, according to a recent article in E&E Daily (via Climate Progress; $ubs required for E&E Daily).
Given the fact that the new gang of senators represents almost one third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, the "Technology Sixteen" will be a force to be reckoned with in the coming year.
Europe is planning on building more coal plants in the coming years, and are talking a great game about carbon capture and storage. But when push comes to shove, will the Europeans be willing to make the extra capital outlay?
Yesterday, I mentioned a set of important environmental votes taking place in the EU Parliament (pictured). One of these votes involved the future of coal with carbon capture and storage with the result being that the EU is betting big on this technology. The vote is very important because it provides justification for building new coal-fired plants to meet Europe's growing energy needs. Building coal-fired plants will ensure that coal will for many decades play a prominent role in EU energy supply. And if coal has a big future in Europe, then it is safe to say that it has a big future everywhere. Thus emissions reductions from the power generation sector will all but certainly now depend up the capture and storage of carbon dioxide, a technology that is not yet in wide deployment. Like it or not, a winner has been picked.
Scientific, economic and political realities at the end of 2008 fly in the faces of carbon-price advocates. As 2009 approaches, we must learn how to reduce carbon emsissions in a post-pricing world by learning what killed it in the first place.
Next January there will be a new President and Congress, and the American public will have at least a somewhat better idea of the success or failure of the bailout that passed last week. A multiplicity of variables, from the state of our economy, to the outcome of the election, to the nuclear program of Iran will affect the American political landscape heading into 2009. Over the next few months, tons of organizations and movements will begin to take stock of how these shifting variables might affect their missions and objectives. Few could benefit from this self-evaluation more than groups demanding federal action on climate change. The long time standard of these organizations, cap-and-trade, is becoming increasingly less relevant to today's political world.
The quest for a carbon price by these green groups met abject failure back in June with the failure of Lieberman Warner. As energy prices rise, our economy stumbles and credit shrinks, it seems less and less likely that hard caps on carbon will be a viable political vehicle. Carbon pricing orthodoxy has run headlong into political and economic realities in at least three major ways.
Real Climate is a popular blog that advocates action on climate change. Its authors often uses bullying tactics to enforce a view that their views on science are the sole authoritative basis for judging political action. In turn, here at Prometheus I've occasionally used the actions of Real Climate as excellent illustrations of how climate science becomes so politicized and partisan by activist scientists. In this way the skeptics and the activist scientists engage in a dance that requires both to participate to reinforce the belief that science provides the basis for political action. So both have an interest in keeping debate on matters of science, rather than more explicitly on the far more important questions of policy and politics.
Lucky for us, the best example yet of these dynamics can be found in the post that Real Climate have put up today on Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Real Climate post seeks to elevate the importance of skepticism in the climate debate (yes, you read that right) so that it can knock it down, while at the same time ignoring far more meaningful issues related to climate policy, like whether a cap and trade program has any chance whatsoever of actually succeeding. In this way Real Climate serves to politicize climate science, make climate policy an even more partisan issue, and draw attention away from the policy questions that really matter most.
By Roger Pielke, jr., cross posted from his blog, Prometheus.
From the University of Calgary, this news release:
In research conducted at the U of C, Keith and a team of researchers showed it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming - using a relatively simple machine that can capture the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.
Ted and Michael's latest op-ed from the LA Times, "The Green Bubble Bursts," makes the argument that the Democrats lost control of the energy issue when they tried to pass the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would raise energy prices at a time when anxiety over energy prices was at an all time high because of four dollar a gallon gas. Republicans hammered them on the floor of the Senate, and then picked up on drilling and took ownership of energy in their biggest victory since they lost both houses in 2006.
Here are some responses to the LA Times piece:
At Daily Kos, Meteor Blades recaps the need for an investment-centered energy agenda in a post called "Making Clean Energy Cheap".
On The New Republic's environment and energy blog, Day Olopade has taken issue with Ted and Michael in her post, "The Green Bubble Hasn't Burst."
And over at Climate Progress, our colleague Joe Romm has rolled out this.
I will be updating this post as more responses surface. Stay tuned.
In response to Michael and Ted's op-ed in the LA Times, Joe Romm criticized Michael, Ted and Breakthrough on his blog. This post is an open letter from Michael to Joe Romm, dated October 1, 2008.
Your strategy, as usual, is to shoot the messenger rather than confront the facts. This is what you did when you attacked Nature for publishing Roger Pielke, Chris Greene, and Tom Wigley’s “Dangerous Assumptions” about faster-than-expected emissions increases. This is what you did when the International Energy Agency came out and said that stabilization requires technology “breakthroughs” (their word). This is what you did when you attacked those of us who support adaptation as “delayers.” And this is what you are doing in response to the accumulating evidence that governments won’t raise the price of dirty energy to deal with global warming.
Carbon emission levels are rising faster than most scientists had predicted. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr. explains why the current approach to predicting CO2 emissions leads to bad predictions and failed analyses.
By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr., cross posted fromPrometheus
The AP covers the new reports of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere:
The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.
The new numbers, called "scary" by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.
That's an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.
Financial meltdown is nearing the end of its first week and Congress is poised to consider $700 billion in emergency legislation. What are the implications for clean energy and climate? Here's my best guess.
1. Automakers will get their bail-out. The automakers want $25 billion, which looks like chump change against the $1 trillion bailout. It looks very much like they'll get it. The question is, what will we get for our $25 billion?
On September 24th, power companies with carbon emitting plants in ten states up the northeast will participate in the first Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auction for carbon credits. However, the price of carbon will probably not rise above the absolute floor price of $1.86. This effectively means that the "market signal" which will demonstrate the time to pour money into clean energy industries and technology will never arrive.
On September 25th, power companies with carbon emitting plants in ten states up the northeast (Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine), along with financial institutions, environmental and other groups will participate in the first Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auction for carbon credits. This regional cap-and-trade program will go into effect on January 1st of next year, holding carbon emissions to 188 million tons annually until 2014, and then scaling emissions back 2.5 percent every year until 2018.
However, it seems that the forces behind RGGI have learned little from Europe's three year old Emission Trading Scheme. Unlike the ETS, RGGI will be auctioning almost all permits, instead of issuing the vast majority, as the ETS did. However, RGGI has its own pitfalls. The cap of 188 million tons was set in 2004, based on projections by energy experts and political pressure from utilities to keep the cap at or above current emissions levels. However, the projected 188 million tons was based on assumptions that carbon emissions would increase, but after 2006 they actually began to decrease due to more mild weather and a slowing economy.
When Nancy Pelosi's Democratic House passes a pro-drilling bill, you're looking at nothing less than a political earthquake. We're witnessing a fundamental realignment of the energy debate. Energy policy is now about bread and butter issues: jobs, economic growth and energy prices. Can clean energy and climate advocates adapt to the new political landscape?
Republicans successfully capitalized on the changing energy landscape to advance an expanded oil drilling agenda, pushing Democrats back with cries of "Drill Baby, Drill!" and seizing control of the energy debate for the first time since the 2006 election.
Democrats won a tactical victory yesterday, passing a true "all of the above" energy bill out of the House that authorizes expanded oil drilling and creates new renewable energy production requirements for electric utilities. Pelosi and the House Democrats forced all but 15 Republicans to vote No on a pro-drilling bill, calling their empty "we support an all of the above energy strategy" bluff.
But make no mistake: while this was a tactical win, when Nancy Pelosi's Democratic House passes a pro-drilling bill, you're looking at nothing less than a political earthquake. We're witnessing a fundamental realignment of the energy debate.
In the early months of 2006, support for action on global warming amongst evangelicals garnered media attention nationwide. But when Pat Robertson appears on CNN and states that he is not completely convinced of the scientific evidence for human caused climate change, what does that mean for support on climate action from the evangelical community?
In the first half of 2006, momentum was building up towards a "tipping point" of public perception on climate change. In January, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" had debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, and that summer, it would become the (at the time) third highest grossest documentary film in the United States.
Also in the early months of 2006, support for action on global warming amongst evangelicals garnered media attention nationwide. 86 Evangelical leaders had signed on as charter signatories to the "Evangelical Climate Initiative," including such influential leaders as Reverend Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life."
Cross posted fromPrometheus, by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr.
This week's issue of The Economist has an interesting quote from Al Gore in an article about how environmentalists are coming to embrace adaptation:
"I USED to think adaptation subtracted from our efforts on prevention. But I've changed my mind," says Al Gore, a former American vice-president and Nobel prize-winner. "Poor countries are vulnerable and need our help." His words reflect a shift in the priorities of environmentalists and economists.
For years, greens said adaptation--coping with climate change, rather than stopping it--was a bit like putting out a fire on the Titanic: desirable, no doubt, but the main thing was to change course.
The new political realities surrounding energy in Washington have bred new skepticism on Wall Street that significant carbon pricing will happen in under five years.
Breakthrough Senior Fellow and climate science and policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. weighs in on a lecture by Michael Celia, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton about carbon capture and geological sequestration.
I just heard an interesting talk by Michael Celia, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton. The talk (abstract in PDF) was remarkably bullish on the idea of geologic sequestration, even though Prof. Celia emphasized that he did not see his role as an advocate for CCS. Points that I took from the lecture:
1. Storage reservoirs are not an issue for CCS to make a major contribution to the problem. Celia spoke of 2-3 "wedges" but this was not expressed as a ceiling.
2. Leakage seems to be a non-issue, in some respects, but a lot hinges on how the policy process defines "leakage". From the standpoint of contributing to less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leakage appears to be rather small, based on his research.
Four years ago we argued in "The Death of Environmentalism" that greens didn't need to win the debate over the relative seriousness of global warming in order to enact policies capable of dealing with it. At the time, that claim was viewed as paradoxical and even heretical.
Breakthrough founders Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus have been engaged in a discussion at Cato Unbound on what to do about climate change. The lead essay, written by conservative libertarian Jim Manzi, argues that global warming, while real, is a problem of limited magnitude, deserving a proportional response, not overreaction. Coverage of the debate here.
With Americans focused on energy prices as never before, a game-changing shift is occurring in the American political climate. The time has come for climate and clean energy advocates to adopt a new strategy and policy agenda. Next year will see the inauguration of a new president, a new Congress, and a new international agreement on global warming. The moment is far too urgent to fall on our swords for a cap-and-trade agenda developed in an entirely different political environment.
All of this paints a very clear picture of where Americans are at: they
are focused on their pocketbooks, grimacing every time they head to the
gas station to fill 'er up.
This new focus on energy prices is a game changer for the world of energy and climate policy.
In a debate at the Cato Institute, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that liberals and conservatives don't need to agree about the seriousness of global warming. We can all embrace investment in energy infrastructure, technology, and education for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change.
For 20 years, liberals and conservatives have been locked in a debate about the relative seriousness of climate change. Conservatives have either denied that it was happening or played down its significance, while liberals and environmentalists have tended to see it as ecological apocalypse meriting either extreme personal sacrifice or a supposed cost-free regulatory fix.
That debate is now undergoing a major shift. Conservatives like Jim Manzi, Newt Gingrich and others recognize that humans are affecting the climate and that something should be done about it. Liberals and environmentalists, like Joe Romm and most recently Al Gore, are beginning to recognize the political futility of peddling sacrifice, and have started emphasizing the need to make clean energy cheap. To be sure, both camps are still far apart in their view of global warming, with Romm seeing it as a future hell on earth and Manzi viewing it as little more than a rounding error. But if we fixate on these radically divergent views of the problem we risk missing some signs of agreement over what should be done about it.
There's a simple relationship between energy and civilization: more
energy means more activity, growth, and prosperity. The defining
challenge of our era is to think responsibly about how we use energy,
as we strive to meet the demands of developing nations, struggle with a
failing economy, and mitigate climate change.
Part of the problem is that we've taken energy for granted. Energy
fuels everything we do. But we've outgrown our youthful years of
abundant oil, as a nation and as a planet. Richard Smalley estimated in 2004
that if the world population were to stabilize at 10 billion people,
they would demand 60 terawatts of energy in order to live prosperous,
secure lives--more than four times what we currently use. At the same
time, the oil that drove America's progress is becoming less and less
viable as an energy source. It is becoming increasingly clear that
the most sophisticated and effective option is not to simply throw more
energy, any energy, at the problem(s). So what now?
Written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold
We're all used to the sense of ecological urgency that accompanies the climate debate. Green activists work with the knowledge that the time for action is limited, as rising emissions push the global climate toward irreversible changes.But there's another ticking clock out there, one that may be about to run out: while the U.S. drags its feet, our competitors abroad are poised to wrest the upper hand in the new energy economy. And as usual, no competitor looms larger than China.
Last week, I blogged about China's wind economy, which is currently expanding at a pace somewhere between mind-boggling and out of control. Yesterday, the Climate Group released some highlights from their upcoming report on China's renewable economy. To wit:
China is already the world's largest producer of renewable energy, with 152 GW of capacity already in place in 2007 (although I imagine that may take into account some mixed-bag projects - e.g., Three Gorges)
As a percentage of GDP, China's annual investment in renewables is second only to Germany
China is set to become the world's largest exporter of wind turbines sometime in the next year
China's largest solar firms have a total value of over $15 billion
China has the world's second-largest installed solar PV capacity (820 MW)
Impressive figures, although of course, they pale in comparison to China's far larger fossil fuel numbers. 820 MW of solar power? China adds that much capacity in coal literally every few days. Nonetheless, what we're seeing now in China are the vital first stirrings of a new sort of energy. Renewable sources are finally coming into their own as substantial additions to the grid, and massive development is only going to speed the advent of clean tech, as turbines and PV panels become cheaper and faster to produce with every new factory that goes online.
I discussed several of the factors behind China's wind rush in my post last week, and most of them apply to clean tech efforts in general (although efficiency regulations, as I discussed, are an entirely different story). With China's strong, pro-renewable government incentives and breakneck pace of development, it's entirely plausible that China will become the world leader in renewables development sooner rather than later, gaining the upper hand in a lucrative and quickly growing global industry - especially considering that China's only potential major opponent is busy bickering over offshore drilling...
With the standing ovation long over and the media for now satiated, it seems appropriate to take a look at how Gore's speech was received. In the applause and critique, I find the kernels of that elusive narrative that will somehow galvanize the nation into bold action on energy.
By Lindsey Franklin, Breakthrough Generation Fellow
Over a week has passed since Al Gore made his bold call for 100% renewable energy in the next 10 years, initiating a wave of response. Conservatives called him crazy--ridiculous, even. Enviros applauded his vision and bold determination. Some Democrats cringed at his timing, afraid of the response of gas-sensitive voters. Some media barely covered him.
With the standing ovation long over and the media for now satiated, it seems appropriate to take a look at how Gore's speech was received and what its initial reception means for the story we must tell about the energy challenge. In the applause and critique, I find the kernels of that elusive narrative that will somehow galvanize the nation into bold action on energy.
There’s really only one option - bring more price-competitive clean technologies into the global marketplace (surprise!), and put policies in place to facilitate their diffusion into China and elsewhere.
Written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold
Over at the Environment and Energy blog, Bradford Plumer points the way to a great Guardianarticle on the Chinese wind boom. Wind installation there has been surpassing projections for some time, blowing through 6 GW earlier this year, and by year’s end China should lead the world in capacity. By 2010, one wind farm will add 3.8 GW - i.e., one third of total current US capacity - in its first phase of expansion. In other words, T. Boone Pickens has nothing on Chinese entrepreneurs (does anyone?).
In the real world, the American polity and the American market are not ready for a tough carbon price. The best way to respond to the climate challenge right now is to massively expand the role of the federal government in researching, developing, and deploying clean technology.
This is a response to Max Epstein's guest post, "In Defense of Carbon Pricing: Why Clean Energy RD&D Isn't Enough." Our response is written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold.
Before anything else, I want to thank Max for his thoughtful post. His arguments have been a big help in clarifying our own thinking.
In my response, I'm going to try to define the problem we're trying to solve, and clarify the differences I see between a carbon price driven regime (as Max advocates) and an investment-led regime (as we're more fond of at Breakthrough). I'm then going to explore the political feasibility of a carbon price, and what a politically sustainable carbon price can and can't do to address climate change. In doing so, I hope to show that, for now, we can't rely on carbon pricing to drive the shift to a clean energy economy.
We've asked our friend, UMD student, and occasional Washington Post editorialist Max Epstein to contribute his thoughts on carbon pricing to the blog. Our response, by Breakthrough Generation Fellow Zach Arnold, is here.
In the wake of the failed Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, there has been a widespread reevaluation of whether Cap & Trade is the most effective strategy to avert catastrophic climate change. At first many promoted a carbon tax instead, but recently there has been a call to reconsider the central focus on pricing carbon itself. Following Lieberman-Warner's abrupt death in the Senate, Michael Shellenberger wrote that the new way forward should focus on making renewable energy cheap, not polluting sources expensive. In "Scrap Kyoto," Shellenberger and Nordhaus call for a massive public investment in clean technology research and deployment. Joseph Romm in Nature calls for massive subsidized deployment of existing renewable technology, relegating R&D to the "longer-term effort aimed at a new generation of technologies for the emissions reduction effort after 2040." However, such efforts would be insufficient without a price on carbon as well.
Al Gore has finally embraced large public investments in clean energy, after years of insisting on a paradigm focused centrally on pollution regulation. Unfortunately, he doesn't address how to deal with the energy tech (and price) gap between dirty energy sources like coal and clean energy sources like solar. The question is: will the Google Gore be able to trump the Gaia Gore?
In his first major speech on global warming since he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore today finally acknowledged the need for major public investments to make clean energy cheap, rather than simply increase the cost of dirty energy through pollution regulation. This represents a major step forward in his own thinking, and a break from the dominant environmental approach to global warming.
At the same time, Gore failed to address the central concern of policymakers in Washington: what to do about rising energy prices.
The NYTimes' Andy Revkin debates Joe Romm who claims the time for R&D has passed. But as Revkin knows, any push to transition to a clean energy future must put money across the board into Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment.
Andy Revkin has blogged today on a debate he is engaged in on the threads of Joe Romm's climateprogress.org.
It's almost unclear what they are debating over before I remember that
Joe Romm categorically rejects any calls for public investment in
energy technology R&D as the machinations of climate
deniers/delayers -- or at least as "misguided" efforts.
Romm is probably right that this is the Debate of the Decade as it concerns the best way to transition to
a clean energy system. Revkin posits that we need public investment in
R&D in order to make scalable and bring down the price of clean
energy. Romm himself admits that he has called for R&D for the past
twenty years, but claims that the time when this research would have
helped has passed. It is now time to focus primarily (if not entirely) on deploying the technologies currently on
hand.
Market Fundamentalism has infected both sides of the debate on climate change. It's time to move past the myth of "the Free Market" when it comes to energy technology and recognize the role of government leadership and investment in history's successful innovations.
A paper by political scientist Glenn Fong starts out with a 1998 quote by Bill Gates:
"The PC industry is leading our nation's economy in to the 21st century...There isn't an industry in America that is more creative, more alive and more competitive. And the amazing thing is, all this happened without any government involvement."
Fong goes to on describe the myriad ways the federal government--mostly through its Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) --was involved in nearly every aspect of the development of the personal computer, from the human-computer interface (HCI) to the graphical user interface (GUI), to picture icons, to computer networking. Bill Gates, brilliant as he might be, seems deluded about the history of the computer.
At the latest round negotiations, the G8 nations are at a classic standstill over a post-Kyoto international climate agreement framework. The United States does not want to commit to anything serious unless China and India also do so, and China and India won't move until the United States does. So what will break through the stalemate?
"There is chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent."
-Duke in Doonesbury, doing a parody of Mao
NPR reports this morning that negotiations at the G-8 over climate
change are stalled. The United States does not want to commit to
anything serious unless China and India also do so, and China and India
won't move until the United States does, a classic stalemate.
The temptation, of course, is to just wait until the next
administration takes office, on the hope they will be more
accommodating in reaching an international agreement and committing the
United States the major cuts in greenhouse gases. Most climate
watchers assume that is why the Conference of the Parties want to wait
until the negotiations scheduled for Copenhagen in December 2009 for
reaching a post-Kyoto climate agreement. But if the negotiations are
just trying to create another Kyoto-type treaty, their wait may be in
vain.
The Environmental Protection Agency 
