It’s Getting Hot In Here

Cross-posted from The Breakthrough Blog

Three weeks before the Senate is scheduled to vote on global warming legislation, presidential candidates John McCain and Hilary Clinton have both called for temporarily suspending the 18-cent gasoline tax. The proposal is anathema to anyone who is pushing for disincentives on dirty energy. But instead of just railing against political pandering, we should take this as an opportunity to rethink our politics. The big question is: how do we finance the transition to a clean energy economy?

The Center for Climate Progess’s Joe Romm answers that a carbon price is not enough. Environmentalists often look to Europe - and its $38 per ton carbon dioxide price - as the gold standard of climate legislation. But Romm warns that the U.S. lacks the political will to reach that high of a carbon price anytime soon. What’s more, the New York Times reported last week that Europe has been experiencing a surge in new coal plant construction, despite its high carbon price.

Romm’s solution is an immediate moratorium on the construction of new coal plants while we wait for the carbon price to render coal economically irrelevant. But a moratorium on coal would increase energy prices - a tough sell politically during a recession. So how do we motivate people to pay more?

Continue reading ‘What the Gas Tax Holiday Should Teach Us’

Russia is backing out of a revised Kyoto that would put binding caps on its greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent report from Reuters.

Under the current protocol, Russia is well within its emissions targets. Kyoto mandates reductions from 1990 emissions levels, and due to economic collapse of most former Soviet Union economies, growth and energy use have remained relatively low.

But Russia brusquely rejected any change in the framework that would put a check on its economic growth:

Asked if Russia would resist capping the use of fossil fuels, which emit the planet-warming gas carbon dioxide when burned, under a new climate deal after 2012, [Russian official Vsevolod Gavrilov] said:”In the foreseeable future, this will not be our model, no.”

Supporting the rise of Russia’s middle class is a more pressing concern for the country than staving off global climate change. Said Gavrilov,

Energy must not be a barrier to our comfort. Our emerging middle class… demands lots of energy and it is our job to ensure comfortable supply.

Sound familiar? It should. A Chinese official recently reminded us, “You cannot tell people who struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.” Russia’s people may not be starving, but for both the developing and the developed world, the economy is the bottom line.

Continue reading ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’

For a preview of what may happen when it comes time to pass federal cap and trade legislation, look to Maryland. A state bill calling for dramatic reductions in carbon emissions failed there last week because of worries it would cost jobs and hurt the economy:

Environmental activists couldn’t work out a compromise with unions and industry groups that feared the plan would cost jobs.

The sticking point was how Maryland would achieve reductions in greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. The bill called for dramatic reductions in carbon emissions — and a goal of slashing them 90 percent by 2050 - but the bill was vague about how that would happen.

The Department of Environment was charged with enforcing the cuts, and industry groups worried the enforcement could bring draconian measures that would put factories out of business.

More than 50 steelworkers wearing hardhats greeted lawmakers as they came to work Monday, and they whooped 12 hours later when they learned the bill was rejected.

–AP

Those 50 cheering steelworkers foreshadow the struggle we should anticipate when we try to pass cap and trade at the national level. Most major environmental groups have been calling for a bill that avoids giveaways to Big Oil and Big Coal, but the case in Maryland is a reminder that these monolithic bad guys aren’t the only things standing in the way of getting strong legislation on climate. What’s missing is a significant package to address the economy and energy prices — without it, this may turn into a fight between environmentalist elites and the working class. Continue reading ‘How not to Solve Climate Change’

A controversial commentary in last week’s Nature — arguing that the
IPCC greatly underestimated the emissions reductions challenge — immediately launched a heated debate among environmentalists. We had hoped for an open and productive exchange of ideas, but after the rude welcome the Nature piece got from Joe Romm, we braced ourselves for another round of low blow mud-slinging and ad hominem attack. The ugly battle wore on for a week before things took a turn for the better.

In the comments section of one of Romm’s posts yesterday, Ted pleaded to elevate the level dialogue:

If you would stop with the hysterical character assassination and slander, we might actually be able to have a serious debate about the proper mix of pricing, regulation, and public investment in U.S. climate policy - one that might actually contribute to the policies that the next president and the next congress might actually enact.

What ensued was the beginning of the level-headed, honest critique of each other’s ideas — what we had wanted to begin with. Romm responded,

I think I have stopped calling you two “delayers” a while back. If not, I’m sorry. Anybody who supports Obama’s plan is not a delayer. I disagree with some of the things you are doing — and plan to point that out.

It’s time for the folks at Grist, Climate Progress, and Breakthrough to realize that we all have the same end goal in mind: a livable climate that can support the aspirations of human civilization. We have different ideas about how to get there, but Breakthrough is the first to acknowledge that our way isn’t the one true way. There is no divine authority here, and an open conversation is the best chance we have at finding a way to success.

Pielke and his coauthors have presented a series of important, honest questions for the environmental movement to grapple with. Rather than “debunk” this effort, we need to start dealing with these questions:

Will carbon pricing be able to reduce emissions enough?
Do we have all the technology we need?
How much should we invest in clean energy?
How much should go to development/demonstration/deployment?

Here’s hoping that we can put behind us the destructive attacks on the credibility and character of those who, in good faith and with the goal of protecting humanity and the planet, ask hard questions about how we are attempting to address the problem. We commend Romm’s shift in tone and appreciate his apology and look forward to an open debate that focuses on these challenges.

For two decades, the big challenge of global warming was getting people to realize that it existed. “Deniers” were once a force to be reckoned with, but through the hard work of the environmental movement, they’ve now been relegated to the ideological fringe. Even conservatives talk about investing in clean energy and the need to reduce our carbon emissions, with Republican presidential candidate John McCain saying global warming would be one of three key issues of his presidency. We’ve crossed item #1 off the to-do list, and now a new task looms large on the horizon, no less challenging than the first: everyone knows that global warming is real, so what do we do about it?

Environmentalists have long believed that a price for carbon is the obvious answer to this question; “just pop in the economic incentives and watch them work their magic,” as Monica Prasad put it in the New York Times. The idea is that penalizing dirty energy will give clean energy enough of a push to topple the reign of the carbon-emitters. But it’s not that simple. A growing number of environmental thinkers are taking a critical look at the true impacts of Kyoto, the fast pace of international development, and the slow pace of clean energy development and deployment, and they’re asking a question that shakes the foundations of conventional climate policy wisdom: is a carbon price ecologically irrelevant? Continue reading ‘The Global Warming Debate Grows Up’

Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection just launched the We Campaign. With the Obama-esque tagline, “We can solve it,” and bright images of solar panels, wind turbines, and moon-walkers, the mood is hopeful and buoyant. With allusions to the invasion of Normandy and the Civil Rights Movement, Gore has finally figured out that the trope of American greatness is more powerful than the one of an empire in decline.

This is a big step in the right direction, but now Gore needs to come to terms with two more inconvenient truths about climate change: First, that trying to make Americans care more about global warming is a losing battle — with the ailing health care system, the slumping economy, and the Iraq war, there simply isn’t room to prioritize everything, especially when ecologic issues are pitted against economic and social ones. Second, a price for carbon alone is ecologically irrelevant. We need a policy agenda that includes a government investment commensurate to the monumental size of the challenge.

While he knows how to bring his cause into the limelight, Gore keeps missing the mark when it comes to an effective policy agenda. This year’s presidential campaign is focused on the concept of “empty” rhetoric, but it’s a charge that Gore deserves more than Obama. While this latest effort may come in different packaging than the gloomy Inconvenient Truth, the policy agenda is none changed. Nowhere in the extensive website literature is there a call to invest in clean energy R&D. What we get instead is the soothing mantra that we already have all the technology we need: Continue reading ‘More Inconvenient Truths’

Among policy makers, environmentalists, and the general public, the syllogism goes that if you care about climate change, then you support a carbon price. Environmental groups devote their time and resources to achieving a price for carbon, either in the form of a direct carbon tax, or through cap-and-trade legislation. Investing in emerging technologies is seen as prudent complementary policy at best, and an unnecessary distraction at worst.

Then there are those of us who think technology development ought to be at the center of climate change policy. We think this problem is too big for our current energy system to handle, and we will need to devote tremendous resources to creating a new energy infrastructure that can one day support the aspirations of nine billion inhabitants of the planet. We believe that a carbon price can play a role in an R&D-driven agenda, but on it’s own, it will not be near enough.

Continue reading ‘The End of Carbon Price Orthodoxy’

Ever since unveiling “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore has become a symbol for the fight against climate change. The image of him standing on his pedestal, Earth in peril looming large in the background, has etched itself permanently on our minds. Gore’s film raised environmentalists’ whisper-warnings to shouts coming from the mouths of elites. Given his immense contribution of elevating the importance of the climate challenge, it’s easy to forget that Gore had a political career that predated his current one as environmentalist advocate.

Gore the environmentalist

But the former vice president has been many things over his political career, and one of those permutations is worth revisiting. Al Gore the high-tech aficionado may have been the butt of jokes for his claim that he “invented” the internet, but what he actually said was true:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our education system.

His 1991 High Performance Computing and Communications Act led to what is now known as the “Information Superhighway,” and was a springboard for the development of the commercial Internet. The “Gore Bill,” as it was often referred to, played a major role in helping to hoist an obscure military project across the technology valley of death, and Gore has been hailed as the first political leader to recognize the Internet’s importance. His early support of the Internet — which dates back to the 1970s — is evidence of wise foresight. Continue reading ‘The Many Sides of Al Gore’

One of the things we’re trying to get people to see at the Breakthrough Institute is that Kyoto isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it is probably ecologically irrelevant. Despite self-congratulatory claims otherwise, most nations in the EU have seen their emissions rise, not fall, under the protocols. We think it’s misguided, convoluted, and a regulatory nightmare — so we were, at first, pleased to see an opinion piece from Dieter Helm in the Wall Street Journal yesterday pointing out these failings.

He argues that any effort to reduce emissions must take into consideration consumption just as much — if not more than — production. Otherwise, we’ll wind up like the U.K., for whom, if you factor in carbon outsourcing to developing countries like China and India, emissions actually rose by 19 percent, rather than falling by 15 percent. Helm is absolutely right; it’s a mistake to put too much faith in the regulation-centered approach of cap-and-trade. It is so full of holes like these that it’s almost certain to descend into ecological oblivion, even as ratifying nations pat themselves on the back for reducing their carbon footprint.

What’s more, he points out, our technology isn’t up to scale, and any attempt to address the climate problem will need to focus heavily and getting it there, and fast. Helm sets himself apart from those environmentalists like Al Gore who would argue that we have all the technology we need to deal with climate change, and a regulation-centered approach is the way to go.

Continue reading ‘Where’s Your Better Plan?’