Climate Change

COP15: Low-carbon Copenhagen

December 11, 2009

Just arrived in Copenhagen, and it was immediately evident why annual carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Denmark (9.9 metric tons) are just about half of those in the United States (19 metric tons).

First I took train from the airport to downtown Copenhagen. You can’t do that from Dulles Airport to D.C.

Then I hopped into a tax where this sign was pasted on the back of the front seat.

taxi

After checking into the small but perfectly comfortable apartment where I’ll be staying, I walked to a nearby train station. Bike lanes were everywhere and here are just a few of those parked outside the station. It’s about 40 degrees here, by the way.

bikes

A 5-minute train ride connected me to the sleek modern metro which whisked me to the Bella Center, site of the UN negotiations.

metro

This is the low-carbon lifestyle. It sure beats siting in traffic.

{ 1 comment }

Let’s talk (carefully) about climate and population

November 17, 2009

Have you heard that we’re getting new neighbors? Demographers expect that the number of people living on earth—now about 6.8 billion—will grow to between 8 and 11 billion by 2050.

Whether population tops out at the high or the low end of those projections will have a huge impact on climate change. So population control is again claiming a place on the environmental agenda.

Nairobi slums

Nairobi slums

Oops! Did I say “population control”? I should have said “addressing population growth” or “assuring reproductive rights for women” or even “securing population justice” — because some people get very nervous when environmentalists start talking about population, and for good reason.

Yet the conversation is worth having, which is why I went to a discussion today at the Center for American Progress in Washington featuring Laurie Mazur, the editor of a new book called A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice & The Environmental Challenge (Island Press, $30).

Mazur argues that we are at a pivotal moment, not just environmentally, because of the lethal overheating of the planet, but demographically, because, as she writes,

the ultimate size of the human population will be decided in the next decade or so.

That’s because right now the largest generation of young people in human history is coming of age. Nearly half the world’s population—some 3 billion people—is under the age of twenty-five. Those young people will, quite literally, shape the future. [click to continue…]

{ 8 comments }

What’s for lunch? Behaviorial economics meets climate change

November 16, 2009

vegetarian-foodAt the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.

This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10% will request it.

But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began today in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.

Some 80% went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83% to 17% margin.

More than lunch is at stake here. “Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans,” says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which “green” marketing messages work, and which don’t? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?

Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. [click to continue…]

{ 15 comments }

The nerd in the cabinet

November 5, 2009

Steven_Chu_official_portraitOnce a professor, always a professor.

Steven Chu, the energy secretary, winner of the Nobel Prize and former physics teacher at Berkeley, spoke tonight at a Washington fundraising dinner for Conservation International, the global NGO.

Actually, he delivered a lecture, deploying a long, detailed PowerPoint presentation, with charts and graphs explaining temperature fluctuations over decades, rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 800,000 years, changes in sea levels, payback for investments in energy efficiency, even a diagram of a new battery technology that included this caption:

Battery about to charged: Positive Mg ions and negative Sb ions are dissolved in electrolyte (green)

Battery fully charged: Mg (blue) and SB (yellow) become the anode and cathode

It was another one of those all-too-frequent moments when I wish I had taken more science classes in college. And remembered why I hadn’t.

By coincidence, Michele Obama visited the energy department earlier in the day and said:

My husband loves his Cabinet.  He was extremely excited that he had a real nerd on his team.  He talked about it for weeks on end.

It’s easy to see why the cerebral president and his brainy energy secretary would bond.

Chu wasn’t spellbinding at the CI dinner but in this city of politicians and special interest groups, with climate change legislation again on the front burner, it was actually refreshing to study a Power Point instead of being bombarded with talking points. Spin doctors marshall facts to support their arguments. Chu starts with the science and works his way from there to solutions.

He argued for three broad approaches to the climate crisis – a major commitment to energy efficiency requiring government regulations and financing, changes in forestry and agricultural practices and still-to-be-discovered breakthroughs in clean energy technology. Some highlights:

Energy efficiency: Chu said market failures – among them lack of knowledge and lack of financing – stand in the way of efficiency to commercial and industrial buildings and to homes which deliver relatively quick paybacks.

“How many University of Chicago economists does it take to change a light bulb?” he asked.

“None,” he replied. “If the light bulb needed changing, the free market would have done it.”

Calling himself “an energy conservation nut,” Chu displayed a chart showing that efficiency standards for refrigerators adopted years ago in California had reduced annual energy costs, on average, from $1272 to $462 a year. “Even though refrigerators have gone up in size, energy usage has gone down by 70%,” he said.

The simple step of painting roofs white could cut air conditioning costs by 15% in warm weather regions, he noted.

Forestry and agriculture: Together, deforestation and agriculture account for about 31% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, Chu (and his pie chart) said. “To achieve our energy and climate goals,” he said. “We’ve got to solve deforestation and change our agricultural practices.”

Some of this can be quite complicated: Rich countries, rather than cutting their own emissions, could finance alternative livelihoods for people in the tropics so they don’t cut down trees. Other ideas are simpler: If you provide poor people in the global south with solar or highly-efficient cook stoves, then they don’t have to burn as much wood to heat their homes or cook food.  An efficient stove avoidsthe equivalent of two tons of carbon emissions, about half the amount emitted by a typical car in a year.

Protecting forests is ”the least expensive way to decrease carbon emissions,” Chu said.

Technology breakthroughs: The energy department recently announced $151 million in grants for transformative technology under a program called ARPA-E, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and is modeled after the federal defense spending project that led to the invention of the Internet.  “We don’t have all the technologies we need,” Chu said.

Interestingly, I listened to Chu chat with several venture capitalists  just before the dinner in Union Station and he asked them how they thought his  department was doing at reviewing grant applications from startup fims. He said he had a feeling that the DOE staffers who review the grants might be too conservative and risk-averse, and that he intended to urge them to take more chances on long-shot ideas that could deliver big breakthroughs.

Only near the end of his talk did Chu revealed a bit of the passion that he brings to the topic of climate change.

The costs of enacting climate-change legislation, he said, are about 45 cents a day for a family of four.

And the cost of doing nothing?

One is that the U.S., which recently fell behind China in high-tech manufacturing, will fall even farther behind. “Very recently, China turned a corner,” he said. “China and other countries will pass us by.”

“And the other cost,” he said, “is that we will expose our children and grandchildren to unconscionable risk.”

No PowerPoint slide was required to explain that.

{ 1 comment }

A bipartisan breakthrough on climate

October 12, 2009

Kudos to John Kerry and Lindsey Graham. Their op-ed in Sunday’s Times points the way to a breakthrough in the climate change debate that’s desperately needed.

john-kerry_0Their proposal has six elements. (1) Aggressive reductions in emissions. (2) Support for nuclear power. (3) Financial incentives for so-called clean coal. (4) More domestic oil and gas production. (5) Trade barriers to protect U.S. industry from competition from places that don’t regulate greenhouse gases. (6) Cost controls.

Each one of those ideas is controversial. Environmentalists, for the most part, oppose nukes. Some are skeptical about clean coal. Protectionism raises thorny issues. So does the idea of trying to protect businesses and consumers from the rising cost of electricity sincethe economic rationale for putting a price on carbon is to capture the social and environmental cost of global warming pollutants.Lindsey_Graham_Official_Portraitweb

Still, Kerry and Graham have pointed the way forward. Now it’s up to other Washington politicians–the president, Barbara Boxer, John McCain–to get behind this bipartisan approach to climate change legislation. Big business and big green groups, organized as the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, have key roles to play, too.

Initial reaction to the Kerry-Graham blueprint has been favorable, at least from the left. Dan Lashof, director of the climate center at NRDC, calls it a “game-changer” and writes: [click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

The U.S. Chamber’s climate blunders

October 6, 2009

So now America’s biggest business lobby and late-night comic David Letterman have something in common: They have really, really embarrassed themselves.

Of course, there are significant differences between Letterman’s womanizing and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s backward-looking opposition to climate-change legislation, which is causing the chamber to lose members, prestige and, worst of all, clout.

For one thing, the chamber’s blunder was entirely unnecessary.

For another, the chamber has yet to apologize.

CBS's Letterman

CBS's Letterman

But the bottom line is that the chamber is embarrassed, or should be. It has lost a number of high profile members – utility companies Exelon, PG&E and PNM Resources and, most recently, Apple, whose image as a forward-looking company left the chamber looking stuck in the past. (One clever headline put it, Apple, citing climate, tells U.S. Chamber iQuit) A Nike executive resigned from the chamber board. Today’s New York Times and Washington Post featured full-page ads from big companies and environmentalists calling upon the U.S. Senate to “pass clean energy legislation with a cap on greenhouse gas emissions this year.” The ads were signed by, among others, Dow, Exelon, United Technologies, Duke Energy, GE, Weyerhauser, Constellation Energy, Interface, PSEG, Deutsche Bank, Entergy, Johnson Controls and NRG. That was a direct slap at the chamber, too.

The Chamber's Donahue

The Chamber's Donahue

Chamber CEO Tom Donahue can’t say he wasn’t warned.

Consider the fact that more than two and half years ago–on January 22, 2007, to be precise—the CEOS of some of the chamber’s most important, high-profile members—GE’s Jeff Immelt, DuPont’s Chad Holliday, Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers, among them—stood besides some of America’s most important environmentalists, including Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund and Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute, to declare that anthropogenic global warming is a problem and

to call on the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

[click to continue…]

{ 9 comments }

How to talk about climate change

August 26, 2009

First, the good news: A vast majority of Americans–as many 90%, depending on how you phrase the question–think the U.S. should act to curb global warming. Most expect the benefits of a national response to outweigh the costs.

Now, the bad news: Very few have acted on those beliefs. Only about 10 to 12% have contacted government officials, given money or volunteered with an organization working to reduce global warming.

So we’re concerned, but apathetic.

Those are among the findings of an exceptionally detailed public opinion study called Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis. The 132-page study breaks down the populace into six groups, which it calls Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful and Dismissive, and analyzes each of their views. It was conducted by the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, which is led by Ed Maibach.

Global Warming's Six Americas

Global Warming's Six Americas

[click to continue…]

{ 7 comments }

Climate Change Schizophrenia

April 22, 2009

logo

I’ve been a fan of Slate since the Microsoft/Michael Kinsley days and more recently I’ve been enjoying The Big Money, Slate’s business and economics site, featuring the amazingly prolific Dan Gross. So I’m pleased today to make my first contribution to Slate and The Big Money. It’s a story about climate change politics.

The story asks: Why do corporations support regulating greenhouse gases also fund the most important lobby that opposes it?

You may be surprised to hear that dozens of big companies (GE, Ford, Nike, Alcoa, PepsiCo, DuPont, Xerox, Nike, many others) that advocate for climate change legislation in Congress also help finance the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a tough and important opponent. Why? Well, the companies support the chamber because it acts on behalf of business on many other issues. But the chamber’s position on climate change is a bit of a mystery. Read the story to learn more. And check out the cool cartoon below

tbm_090422_schizo

{ 1 comment }

The phony green jobs debate

April 14, 2009

As the battle over climate change legislation heats up, several Big Green groups–the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club–are rolling out TV and Internet ads designed to persuade voters that regulating greenhouse gas emissions will create green jobs. David Yarnold, the president of EDF’s Action Fund, sums up the message in an email: “Carbon Caps = Hard Hats.” Clever. Here’s an ad from EDF’s campaign, launched in partnership with the United Steelworkers union and the Blue Green alliance, a group of enviromental groups and unions.
Think of this ad, and the one below, as the “Harry and Louise” ads of the campaign to pass global warming legislation. You remember Harry and Louise, right? They were the couple who turned a devilishly complicated issue, health care reform, into a soundbite (“If we let the government choose, we lose”) and helped kill the 1994 Clinton health plan. These ads take what may be an even more devilishly complicated issue, climate change regulation, and use images of brawny construction workers to turn it into an even shorter soundbite: “Green jobs.” Take a look at this spot from The Blue Green Alliance:

Maybe I missed it, but did you hear an environmental message in either of those ads?

Of course, there’s research to support the claims about green jobs. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say here that I’ve been doing some freelance work for EDF and NRDC—organizations I admire a great deal. But these claims about green jobs deserve greater scrutiny.

Last June, for example, the Blue Green Alliance, Sierra Club, NRDC and the steelworkers issued a green jobs report from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It said:

…millions of U.S. workers—across a wide range of familiar occupations, states, and income and skill levels—will benefit from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the United States into a green economy.

A second report from PERI, issued last September under the auspices of the Center for American Progress, got more granular. In my home state of Maryland, for example, the authors project that a $100 billion green economic recovery program would create 36,739 jobs. They would be created in such industries as building retrofitting, mass transit and freight rail, smart grid, wind power, solar power and advanced biofuels.

It sounds great, doesn’t it?

Not according to the four lawyers and economists who produced “7 Myths About Green Jobs,” a 97-page report published by the University of Illinois College of Law.  They argue that “the green jobs literature is rife with internal contradictions, vague terminology, dubious science, and ignorance of basic economic principles.” Studies by conservative think tanks go further, claiming that climate legislation will destroy millions of jobs. A 2008 Heritage Foundation study claimed that passage of last year’s Lieberman-Warner bill would create “extraordinary perils for the American economy” and cause annual job losses of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 after a few years of job gains. (This report was pretty thoroughly discredited by NRDC.) The best thing I’ve read about this debate (and one of the most balanced) is this fine Slate article by Eric Pooley, my former editor at FORTUNE, who finds that there’s an emerging economic consensus that the costs of dealing with climate change are significant but manageable–and that given the risks, those costs are likely worth paying.

My point here is not that economists disagree. My point is that the climate change debate shouldn’t be about green jobs. It’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that we can forecast, with any degree of accuracy, the impact of a complicated government policy on a dynamic global economy decades into the future. Both sides know that their projections are based on a host of assumptions which may or may not come true. What if we decide as a nation to turn to nuclear energy as a source of low-carbon power? That probably won’t create many long-term jobs. What if there’s a breakthrough in the solar PV business in China? That may not bring green jobs here. Are farmers who grow corn for ethanol doing green jobs? That hasn’t turned out so well.

Let’s get real: We can’t predict oil prices 12 months out. Last spring, virtually no one anticipated the global financial crisis of last fall. And we are projecting the number of green jobs that will be created or lost on a state-by-state basis by a law that won’t take effect until 2012? Who are we kidding?

I called Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University who hosts the fine EconTalk podcast, for some guidance on how to think about green jobs and the economics of climate regulation.  “Creating green jobs is easy,” he told me. “We could employ millions of people picking up litter, and we could make them very good-paying jobs if we want. But of course that would make us poorer as a nation. There’s a cost to providing those jobs that would have to be borne by other people in the economy.”

It’s not just the cost of higher taxes that needs to be factored into the equation, he noted. To the degree that the government makes policy that favors, say, vast construction of wind turbines throughout the upper Midwest, the people doing those jobs will be drawn from somewhere else, maybe even from more productive work. If policy leads to the hiring of  thousands of contractors to do energy efficiency, the cost of building a new home or renovating your basement may go up because many of the good construction workers are busy.

“As voters and citizens and readers, what we want to think about is the big picture—are we moving in the right direction when it comes to environmental policy?” Roberts says. Put another way, are we spending enough money today to head off the threat of global warming in the future? Because if anyone tells you that we can deal with climate change at no cost, they probably shouldn’t be trusted.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about the green jobs ads. They’re like political campaign ads. They promise something for nothing. They treat the voters like children. They’re emotional and not educational. And they’re not helping to build a movement around climate change.

Other than that, they’re fine.

And I do hope they work.

{ 13 comments }

Hank Paulson on climate: Regulate!

January 12, 2009

Hank Paulson was relaxed, and why not? For a change, the treasury secretary wasn’t on the defensive about failing to save Lehman Brothers, or changing direction on TARP. Instead, he was expounding on a favorite topic: saving the planet from the threat of climate change.

Ever the loyalist, he praised President Bush for insisting that any solution to the climate change problem be global, including China, India and the rest of the developing world.

But in his last week in office, he also broke with the Bush administration to say that the U.S. needs a regulatory scheme that will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. The Bush team has argued that voluntary actions will do the job.

“I’m a big believer in price signals,” Paulson said. “This will lead to the development of new technologies.”

Accompanied by his wife, Wendy, Paulson spoke this afternoon at Resources for the Future, a widely-respected nonprofit research outfit that analyzes environmental and energy policy. He knows the group well and, in fact, last year hired one of its top economists, Billy Pizer, to lead environmental initiatives at treasury.

Phil Sharp, a former congressman who’s now president of RFF, interviewed Paulson. He asked whether Paulson favored a carbon tax to regulate GHG emissions or a cap-and-trade system that would auction or allocate permits to pollute. Paulson declined to say, although he did allow that he had told government officials in China that cap-and-trade has been an effective way from the U.S. to regulate other pollutants, like SOX and NOX from coal plants.

“All you’re going to get from me at this juncture is that you need clear price signals that are predictable and gradual,” Paulson said. “I want something that’s fair, credible, efficient and transparent.”

“Depending on how things get done, it may be a distinction without a difference,” he added, referring to the choice between a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.

Of course, the Bush administration and outgoing Congress gave us neither.

Still, as Paulson noted, the administration has shifted the global debate over climate change in a useful way, persuading other western countries that the developing world – China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and the rest – needs to sign onto a global treaty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The failure of poor countries to sign onto the Kyoto treaty is one reason why it was rejected by Congress a decade ago.

Developing countries need to be part of a post-Kyoto treaty, he argued, even though they emit much less CO2 on a per capita basis than do the U.S., the EU and Japan.

Developing countries can be asked to slow the rate by which they increase emissions, even as wealthy countries are required to reduce emissions, dramatically but gradually, on an absolute basis.

“Anything we do, it needs to be global,” Paulson said. “Otherwise we’re going to export our emissions (actually, the industries that generate the emissions) to other countries.”

Paulson also gave the administration credit for supporting a global clean technology fund, administered by the World Bank, that will help poor countries afford clean technology. The fund, for example, would subsidize clean energy projects so they would be no more expensive that conventional fossil fuel projects.

“There is no way that we are going to solve the enormous problems we have before us without the deployment of a great deal of new technology,” Paulson said, meaning many billions of dollars of new investment are needed.

The former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Paulson has long been an environmentalist. He’s an avid bird watcher and the former chair of The Nature Conservancy, and his wife runs a small environmental NGO. I profiled him last September for FORTUNE and came away impressed by his energy, brainpower and courage. Whatever you say about his handling of the financial meltdown—and it will take time to arrive at a measured judgment—I think he’s always acted with the best interests of the populace in mind, despite the criticism that he’s been too quick to bail out Wall Streets and too slow to help the little guy.

What’s next for Paulson? He wouldn’t say, other than to suggest that he’ll be spending a good chunk of his time on the environment.

“All I can is I’m going to take some time and plan the next steps,” Paulson said, glancing towards his wife. “Wendy’s been not just a partner but the leader here. The two of us will figure out what the next step will be when it comes to conservation and the environment.”

{ 3 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →