Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr's Blog.

The Financial Times has a realistic and sobering article [subs. req'd] on the state on international climate negotiations:

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?

Continue reading "Realpolitik Goes Mainstream" »

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.

Continue reading "A New Approach on Global Climate Policy" »

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."

Originally at Roger Pielke Jr's Blog

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:

Continue reading "Roger Pielke Jr: Post-Copenhagen, More Questions Than Answers" »

Newsweek's senior science writer Sharon Begley doesn't mince words in her post-mortem on Copenhagen. Declaring "Good Riddance to Copenhagen," Begley writes:

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.

Continue reading "Newsweek: Copenhagen R.I.P" »

By Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey and Yael Borofsky

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.

Continue reading "Obama Announces Climate Deal, UNFCCC Crumbles?" »

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:

Excerpts below with emphasis added:

Copenhagen Climate Summit: The Missing Billions

Continue reading "Thoughts on Ending Energy Poverty and Copenhagen's Zero-Sum Game" »

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.

Continue reading "NYTimes Gets "Lessons from Kyoto" Right" »

Updated 12/7/2009

"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."

Continue reading "Nature: Technology-Led Policy Needed for Climate Success in Copenhagen and Beyond" »

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:

Continue reading "Climate Conundrum Continues in Run-up to Copenhagen" »

Touted as a model for future U.S. cap and trade policy, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is on track to help the EU comply with their Kyoto Protocol obligations, according to a recently released EEA report and liberal climate bloggers. But a recent story by E&E News Greenwire published in the New York Times checked the fine print, and gets at the truth behind this "success" story: creative accounting.

Current greenhouse gas emissions from Western Europe still exceed their U.N. commitments, the report says, and 10 countries will have to rely on emissions trading, land-use changes or carbon offsets to meet their legally binding levels. In general, Mediterranean countries like Spain and Italy have been most delinquent about meeting their targets, the agency said.

Of the wealthy, older E.U. members, only France, Germany, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom are currently below their Kyoto agreements, the report says...

A close reading of the report reveals that European ambitions have only begun to catch up with the bloc's commitments, with many of the greenhouse reductions achieved by countries partially derived from secondary benefits, like the gasification of the energy industry in Britain or the economic collapse of the former East Germany.

The 15 Western European nations that accepted a joint target as part of the last U.N. climate deal -- which covers 2008 to 2012 -- committed to cutting emissions on average 8 percent below Kyoto's baseline, typically set at 1990 levels. Even with the help of the recession, emissions for the region sat at 6.2 percent below this baseline in 2008, and the most recent five-year average was 3.9 percent.

The gap is especially pronounced because of the inability of several southern countries to meet the reductions promised as part of the bloc's burden-sharing agreement, which divvied up the bloc's emission commitment in the late 1990s.

"This [emissions] average would have been substantially lower without the large absolute gaps observed between actual domestic emission levels and burden-sharing targets in Italy and Spain," the report says.

These countries will be joined by Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal in using Kyoto accounting mechanisms to close their emissions gap.

Some additional emission credits -- enough to increase the E.U. average by 1.4 percentage points -- will come from financing clean energy projects in the developing world. Improved forest management and other land-use changes will account for an additional percentage point, the report estimated.

Another 2.2 percent will come from excess emission credits purchased from other Kyoto members. Already, a host of European countries have purchased these credits from flush post-communist nations, largely through what are called green investment schemes, which seek to mollify criticisms that the emission credits amount to "hot air" (Greenwire, Nov. 9).

By using these accounting schemes, only Austria will be projected to be above its Kyoto commitments. Excess Kyoto credits from Germany, France and Britain will be essential for the region meeting its overall target, the report adds.

Continue reading "Fine Print: Greenwire finds the truth about the EU Cap and Trade "Success Story" " »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Continue reading "UN Climate Summit: U.S., China Emphasize Clean Energy Investment, Not Binding Emissions Targets" »

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...

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

In New Delhi today, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that India must invest in both new and existing clean energy technologies in order to develop sustainably over the coming decades. This comes as the latest indication of India's progress on building a domestic clean energy economy through investment--a strategy that could also serve as a new approach to international climate policy. Unfortunately, Western nations that stall climate negotiations with their insistence on setting carbon caps continue to miss the world's best chance at forging a global agreement.

Continue reading "Indian Prime Minister Says India Must Invest in Clean Energy Technology" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

Here's the current climate stalemate: While US and EU negotiators keep pushing for an international treaty based on cutting emissions, developing nations like China and India keep refusing to adopt hard emissions caps. But according to a new report by the Center for Clean Air Policy, those emission caps are too hard to measure and monitor in developing nations, anyway. Instead, the report concludes, developing countries should adopt a new approach to increase efficiency in their most energy-intensive industries by setting measurable clean energy technology targets.

Dan Klein of CCAP, a co-author of the report, explained:

"To be able to say we're going to improve our emissions intensity by 5 percent, that's a nice concept. But to be able to actually do that means ... you have the ability to measure industrywide what you're doing now and what you're doing after."

On the other hand, "It's not such a difficult thing to count the number of plants that have a certain technology," Klein said.

Continue reading "New Report Recommends Technology Deployment Targets to Decarbonize Industry" »

A quick post this morning...

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.

Continue reading "UN Climate Chief: Global Community Needs to Invest $300b Annually in Climate Fight" »

By William Oman & Teryn Norris

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.

The Tony Blair and Climate Group report, titled "Breaking the Climate Deadlock: Technology for a Low Carbon Future (PDF)," provides a comprehensive sector-based analysis and concludes:

"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."

Continue reading "Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for public investment and technology-centric climate policy" »

By Yael Borofsky, Breakthrough Fellow

As Congress debates the Waxman-Markey climate bill, Asia is moving rapidly to win the clean energy race. So warns a new article in the Washington Post today that should serve as a wake-up call to America's leadership at the highest level.

The new investigative article by Steven Mufson, entitled "Asian Nations Could Outpace U.S. in Developing Clean Energy," confirms increasingly urgent warnings issued by many, including the Breakthrough Institute, that the United States must dramatically increase direct investments in a clean energy technology push, or be quickly left behind by China, South Korea, India, Japan and others.

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.

Much of the G8 climate discussions last week were stymied by China and India's outright refusal to accept an international (or any) ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports, both countries, as well as South Korea, are forging ahead with dramatic steps to ramp up their renewable industries in ways that will reduce their emissions while flexing their strengthening clean-tech R&D muscles.

The full article can be read below...

Continue reading "Washington Post: Asia's Clean Tech Tigers Surging Ahead in Clean Energy Race" »

By Leigh Ewbank, Breakthrough Fellow

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.

The new report builds on Professor Gwyn Prins' and Professor Steve Rayner's influential critique of the Kyoto Protocol, The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy, and adds further weight to calls to scrap Kyoto.

Continue reading "How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course: New Report Proposes Post-Kyoto Framework for Copenhagen" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

While the US mires itself in controversy over the weakened cap-and-trade bill working its way through Congress, China and India have begun to look ahead with new government investment policies that rapidly expand solar power capacity in each country.

China recently announced a dramatic increase in its expected solar capacity target for 2011, planning to reach 2 GW within the next two years. Already, China has expanded its 2020 target from 1.8 GW to 20 GW-that's more than triple the amount of PV solar power installed in the entire world during 2008, the industry's best year ever. (Since details of China's planned $440-$660 billion renewable energy stimulus package have not yet been released, the precise figure for China's new 2020 solar target remains uncertain. Some Chinese reports put the number at 20 GW, while other experts say this is an upper-bound of estimate of what China expects to achieve with its new massive investments in renewable technology.)

Continue reading "China and India Launch New Solar Energy Projects" »

By Johanna Peace, with Leigh Ewbank and Devon Swezey, Breakthrough Fellows

Historically, the United States has been the nation with the capacity and determination for large-scale investments in promising new technologies--but not this time. Now it's China's turn. In the coming weeks, China will unveil an unprecedented multi-billion dollar investment in renewable energy.

The details are sketchy, but China is reportedly developing a massive renewable energy investment plan. While little is known about the precise level of expenditure the Chinese will commit to research, development and deployment (RD&D), if it's anywhere between the US $440-660 billion over ten years reported by AFP and the Center for American Progress then it'll be an unprecedented investment in the new energy economy.

What Do We Know About China's Investment Plan?

A Chinese Energy Administration official has confirmed that the investments will number at least $440 billion over 10 years. However, there is still uncertainty about the range of investments and the date when the Chinese Government's renewable energy plan will be revealed. A report by the state-run news service Xinhua identified China's top economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission, as responsible for drafting and implementing the plan. According to Shi Dinghuan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, NDRC has already produced a draft of the renewable energy stimulus, though Breakthrough research has turned up no publicly available copy.

Continue reading "China's Big Plan to Win the Clean Energy Race" »

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.

Continue reading "Road to Copenhagen: The Need for a New Framework" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

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.

Continue reading "South Korea to Invest $85 billion in Green New Deal" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

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.

Continue reading "China to Build World's Largest Wind Project" »

Importantly [the Waxman-Markey ACES climate bill] falls a long way short of Obama's election promises on most scores: the [renewable electricity standard], CO2 emission reductions and allocations. The expected price of carbon will therefore in all likelihood be too low (USD13-17) to really drive the change that's needed, resulting in no clean energy fund versus the USD150bn fund that we would have expected to have been raised from 100% auctioning of permits. This in our opinion makes the clean energy mandates ever more important. This is an area which, despite some progress, remains weaker than initial expectations. ...

[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).

See Breakthrough's original analysis of the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill here.

Driven largely by strong economic growth in developing nations, world energy consumption will grow 44% between 2006 and 2030, according to updated projections released Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The EIA reports:

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.

In the decades ahead, the world's rapidly developing nations will clearly demand abundant and affordable energy to power their economic growth. The question remains: what will the nations of the world do to ensure that demand is met by clean and cheap energy technologies?

Continue reading "EIA: World Energy Use Will Rise 44% By 2030; Developing Nations Demand Abundant, Affordable Energy" »

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."

Continue reading "Secretary Chu: Climate Debate May Have "Over-Obssession" With Emissions Targets" »

File this under "D" for "Depressing" and "G" for time to "Get Serious" about adaptation, geoengineering, biochar and air capture technologies and transformational clean energy innovation. Because if what these scientists say is true, we're going to need a healthy dose of each to mitigate and adapt to the warming likely to hit populations across the planet over the coming century and beyond.

According to a survey from the UK Guardian:

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.

Continue reading "Scientists Say Don't Bet on Holding Warming to 2C" »

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.

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."

Now, UN climate czar, Yvo de Boer tells Bryan Walsh in a TIME interview that he doesn't expect cap and trade from the U.S. before Copenhagen either.

Continue reading "Playing the Expectations Game as Copenhagen Looms" »

cross posted from Prometheus, the Science Policy Blog

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:

Continue reading "Post-Kyoto treaty demands radical new approach" »

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?

Continue reading "Sec. of State Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Discuss U.S.-China Clean Energy Collaboration" »

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.

Continue reading "Obama vs. IPCC" »

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."

Continue reading "Todd Stern: A Renewed Chance for Global Cooperation" »

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.

Continue reading "Apparently Markets Allow Buying and Selling" »

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?

Continue reading "Will New "Climate Envoy" Bring More of the Same for the US in Copenhagen?" »

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?

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.

Plumer writes:

"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.

Continue reading "In "Vine" Veritas? (No.)" »

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.

Continue reading "Kyoto: Like A Parrot Long Dead" »

Gwin Pryns, author of "The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy (pdf)," recently published "Time to Ditch Kyoto: the Sequel." The short pamphlet was handed out at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.

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."

Continue reading "Prins to Poznan: Seriously, Time to Ditch Kyoto" »

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.

Continue reading "IEA Report Confirms Clean and Cheap Energy Needed to Power Global Development" »

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.

Continue reading "Indian Official Rules Out Global Action Plan on Climate Change" »

Cross posted from Prometheus

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.

Continue reading "Buying Time" »

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.

Continue reading "China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Double in Coming Decade" »

By Roger Pielke, Jr.  Cross-posted from Prometheus

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...

Continue reading "The Future of Climate Policy Depends Upon A Single Country . . ." »

By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr., cross-posted from Prometheus

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:

Continue reading "Climate Policy Lessons from Around the World" »

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.

More from AP below the fold...

Continue reading "Eastern European Leaders Say EU Must Ease Climate Targets Due to Economic Crisis" »

By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr., cross posted from Prometheus

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.

Continue reading "Coal Secures a Future in the EU" »

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.

Continue reading "What Killed Carbon-Pricing?" »

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.

Continue reading "Breakthrough Responds: Why Carbon Pricing Won't Cut It" »

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.

Continue reading "Guest Post: In Defense of Carbon Pricing: Why Clean RD&D Isn't Enough" »

By Frank N. Laird, Breakthrough Senior Fellow

"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.   

Continue reading "Breaking Through the Stalemate" »