Along with other big environmental groups and such businesses as Duke Energy and El Paso Corp., they are part of a coalition that wants to use markets to protect the world’s forests and curb climate change.
Jeff Horowitz
The coalition—called Avoided Deforestation Partners, a name that will never win a branding contest—is the brainchild of Jeff Horowitz, a 58-year-old architect and newcomer to the environmental movement who has quietly become an influential player as climate change legislation inches its way through a divided Congress.
Protecting forests “is our single most important strategy, with respect to solving the climate crisis,” Horowitz says. “If we don’t tackle forestry immediately, we can’t buy enough time to get at the technological advances we need and scale them.”
I met Jeff in December at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, and visited him last week at his office in a lovely, hilly neighborhood of Berkeley. A mechanism to protect forests by steering millions of dollars from the developed world to poor countries, known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), was endorsed by governments in Copenhagen, so Horowitz felt good about the climate talks. “As far as we’re concerned, Copenhagen was a tremendous victory,” he told me.
Now he wants to make sure that forestry offsets are part of a U.S. climate bill. That will enable regulated polluters in the U.S. to offset their carbon emissions by paying to protect forests elsewhere. Protecting forests is a cheaper and quicker way to curb emissions than by switching from coal or natural gas to low-carbon energy sources like nuclear, wind or solar power. (more…)
So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:
Carl Pope, Sierra Club: The world’s nations have concluded a historic–if incomplete–agreement to begin tackling global warming. Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done.
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council: We have taken a vital first step toward curbing climate change for the sake of our planet, our country and our children…. There’s still more work to be done.
Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund: A lot of hard work remains, but a lot of hard work is finished. The new positive steps taken here…president the U.S Senate and President Obama with a n historic opportunity.
Jonathan Lash, World Resources Institute: “Much more is needed, but today marks a foundation for a global effort to fight climate change.
Elliot Diringer, Pew Center for Global Climate Change: The Copenhagen Accord is an important step forward in the international climate effort…it lays the foundation for a system to hold countries accountable. …Much remains to be negotiated.
Hmm.. I thought the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 2007 Bali Roadmap were first steps. Shouldn’t we be taking the second, third or fourth steps by now? Or, if you prefer the foundation metaphor, shouldn’t we hurry up and build the house, before sea levels rise and storms intensify?
This isn’t to suggest that the 15,000 or 20,000 people who descended on Copenhagen during the last two weeks wasted their time. What is being called the Copenhagen Accord sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. It promises billions of dollars of aid for poor countries. It points the way towards a resolution of the fundamental conflict between U.S. and China over their so-called “common but differentiated” responsibilities to deal with global warming. That’s important–when it comes to climate and the global economy, the G-2 of the U.S. and China tower over the rest of the world. The leaders of Europe, Japan and other countries at the summit were largely left to rubber-stamp the deal, as The Washington Post reported.
The trouble is, none of this is good enough. Nations can now set own emission reduction targets. (Earlier versions of a political agreement being discussed in Copenhagen had called for specific reductions by 2020 and 2050.) It does not set a deadline for signing and binding treaty. (Until fairly recently, that deadline was supposed to be now.) Sure, aid is promised to poor countries, but aside from some token amounts, no one can be sure where the money will come from.
This isn’t a strong deal. It isn’t a weak deal. It’s not a deal at all.
It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Having said that, I understand the thinking behind the first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done analysis coming from the inside the Beltway environmental groups. With the climate debate now shifting from Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate, they need to tread carefully. They can’t be overly critical of President Obama or undecided senators; they need to suggest that something real was accomplished in Copenhagen, to help persuade legislators that the U.S. can enact strong climate regulation without giving a competitive edge to China or India. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club made this argument explicitly, saying: “Now that the rest of the world–including countries like China and India–has made clear that it is willing to take action, the Senate must pass domestic legislation…”
But, again, the rest of the world has not committed to anything.
For a reality check on where we stand, let me refer you to the Climate Scoreboard put together by scientists at MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana Partners, with the support of Nike, Citigroup, Fidelity Investments and others, which uses computer simulations to model the long-term climate impacts of decisions being undertaken today. Please see the Climate Interactive blog for more detail.
Put simply, we’re not going where we need to go.
A big part of the problem here, as Bill McKibben has written eloquently, is that the world’s governments treat climate change as just another political problem–and it’s not.
Think about the health-care agreement reached this weekend. It’s the product of a series of compromises, some of them quite ugly, but it has the support of President Obama and Democrats in Congress because they believe it’s the best they can do, for now. Maybe they’ll come back to “reform” health care again in a few years. It’s a step, even a big step, in the right direction.
This is how politics usually works. It’s incremental. Even on great moral issues like civil rights, governments move piece by piece–first the military was desegregated, then came schools, then voting rights, finally housing and employment bias were barred, if I remember my history right. This approach gives people time to get used to change. It’s the mindset behind first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done.
But incrementalism isn’t going to do the job when it comes to climate change. Every day that goes by when we emit more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than nature can take out, the job gets harder to do. So a small but inadequate step, even one in the right direction, can actually leave us worse off than before.
One metaphor that helped me understand this is a bathtub: The faucet (industry, transportation, deforestation) is pouring more water in to the tub than the drain (nature’s ability to absorb CO2) can take away, and there’s no way to make the drain any bigger. Just turning down the faucet a little doesn’t help; the water level in the tub can keep rising, albeit not as fast as before. The longer the faucet pours in more water than the drain can take away, the more radically we have to turn it down to stop the tub from overflowing.
McKibben explains it this way:
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble—because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.
Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already. We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.
There’s the argument for Flopenhagen.
As for Hopenhagen, well, I saw a lot of things to get excited about during my week in Copenhagen.
Denmark itself, for one: The nation gets 20% of its energy from wind, it’s rolling out a national system for charging all-electric cars and roughly 55% of the people of Copenhagen ride a bike every day, most to go to work. You won’t be surprised to hear that they are thinner as a group than those of us in the U.S.
Speaking of wind, Tulsi Tanti, the founder of Suzlon Energy, told me that China is the world’s biggest and fastest growing market for win energy. His company is manufacturing turbines in China, and he says the government there is committed in a serious way to clean energy — even if it doesn’t want to be held to absolute limits on emissions.
Finally, the kids. There were thousands of them in Copenhagen. They are committed to organizing to stop climate change, they are smart, they are idealistic, they are not pragmatic and they are not fans of the first-step-much-work-needs-to-done approach. For more, check out 350.org or Avaaz or the Youth Climate Movement.
You know how people say we need to save the earth for our kids? I’m starting to think that it’s the other way round, that they are going to have to save it for us.
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.
The debate over clean coal has come to Washington in a big way. Specifically, you can see it in Metro Center, D.C.’s busiest subway stop, where millions of people, including those headed to town for President-elect Obama’s inauguration, will see walls of posters and banners saying that “clean coal” is a myth.
The ad campaign comes courtesy of a coalition called This is Reality. Behind it are enviros including the Alliance for Climate Protection (Al Gore’s group), the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council (disclosure: they’re a client for whom I do some writing) and the National Wildlife Federation. The “reality” coalition says
In reality, there is no such thing as “clean” coal in America today. Coal cannot be called ‘clean’ until its CO2 emissions are captured and stored safely.
Let’s be clear: there are no US homes, factories, shopping centers or churches powered by coal plants that capture and store their global warming pollution.
Today, coal power plants emit carbon dioxide (CO2), the pollutant causing the climate crisis. A third of the America’s carbon pollution now comes from about 600 coal-fired power plants. And of the more than 70 proposed new coal power plants, barely a handful have plans to capture and store their CO2 emissions. If these dirty plants are allowed to be built, this will mean an additional 200 million tons of global warming pollution will be emitted in America each year. Until coal power plants no longer release CO2 to the atmosphere, coal will remain a major contributor to the climate crisis.
As you might have guess, we are pro-coal and proud of it. Not only does coal keep America’s lights on, it keeps everything else that needs electricity running.
ACCCE believes that the robust utilization of coal – America’s most abundant energy resource – is essential to providing affordable, reliable electricity for millions of U.S. consumers and a growing domestic economy. Further, ACCCE is committed to continued and enhanced U.S. leadership in developing and deploying new, advanced clean coal technologies that protect and improve the environment.
The truth is, both the anti-coal and pro-coal forces have a point.
There is, today, no such thing as clean coal—not even close. And there is, today, no way to power the slumping U.S. economy without coal. If you hate coal, then turn off your TV, iPod, refrigerator, air conditioning, etc, for 12 out of every 24 hours – because half of America’s electricity comes from coal.
The reason that the debate is getting so heated is that coal, and clean coal, will be at the center of the debate over greenhouse gas regulation in Congress this year. Environmental groups, scientists and some big companies will argue for a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas pollution—saying that a tight cap will be the only way to stimulate innovation, including the technology breakthroughs needed to capture and store the C02 created when coal is burned. Coal-industry types and utilities will argue that the regulation can’t get too far ahead of clean coal technology or it will wreck the economy by driving up electricity costs.
This morning, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of environmental groups and big companies, will unveil it latest climate change proposals. Here’s a preview from the WSJ’s Environmental Capital Blog.
Six weeks from now, coal will again make headlines. As Bill McKibben writes in Grist, environmentalists are planning a day of protest and civil disobedience at the coal-fired plant that powers the Congress. He writes:
There are moments in a nation’s — and a planet’s — history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction.
So those posters in the metro are just the opening shots in the coal wars.
Only a mindless anti-business zealot (and unfortunately there are still too many of those) would argue that environmental groups should not cooperate with big business when they have shared interests. Even activist groups like Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace work closely with big companies like Citigroup and Coca-Cola, to help them make their operations more efficient or their strategy more environmentally friendly.
But there’s lots of debate about whether NGOs should accept money from their corporate partners. Does it compromise their independence? Threaten their credibility? Or enable them to bring in more money, and therefore have a bigger impact? That’s the topic of today’s Sustainability column.
By coincidence, I spent the day at the Net Impact conference in Philadelphia where corporate-NGO partnerships were one topic on the agenda. (Net Impact is an organization of business students and young business people who are committed to using business to make the world a better place. Some 2,400 people attended the very impressive event at Wharton.) I moderated a conversation about a corporate-NGO alliance with John Brock, CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises and Carter Roberts, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, and then listened to another where Ken Mehlman of private-equity firm KKR and Elizabeth Seeger of Environmental Defense Fund talked about their work together. CCE’s Brock and KKR’s Mehlman both said their firms got real value out of the partnerships—in terms of advice on how to better manage their operations, and from the public-relations value of the association with a green group. ”If we’re going to save the plant, we’re going to do it by making a profit,” says Mehlman. “That is the only way tit will be truly sustainable.” (When private equity firms, which are notoriously unsentimental, get serious about “going green,’ then you know the business case has become truly compelling.)
Interestingly, CCE and its sister company, Coca Cola, pay the WWF for its advice, and make donations to the group to help restore rivers and streams. But no money changes hands between KKR and EDF.
There are good arguments for both models, and you can read them in the column. My belief is that the NGOs, at a minimum, need to be transparent about their dealings with business. That is, they need to disclose how much money they are taking from their corporate partner over what period of time, and what services they are providing in return. One controversial partnership, a deal between the Sierra Club and Clorox, fails to meet this test. Here’s how the column begins:
Some environmentalists attack bottled water. Not Conservation International, a Virginia-based nonprofit that aims to protect the earth’s biodiversity.
When Fiji Water announced a sustainability initiative last spring to help protect forests on the remote Pacific Island of Fiji, Conservation International Peter Seligmann praised the move.
“We applaud Fiji Water for offsetting the climate impact of its products, reducing the impact of its operations, and funding crucial conservation efforts that support local communities and protect some of the last remaining forests in the South Pacific,” he said in a Fiji Water press release.
The endorsement didn’t surprise anyone who understands the relationships between Fiji Water and Conservation International. The privately-owned bottled water company pays Conservation International – neither party would say how much – to finance the work they do together. Stewart Resnick, who owns Fiji Water with his wife, Lynda, sits on Conservation International’s board and donates to the group.
Such cozy arrangements are increasingly common as big companies work side-by-side with big NGOs (non-government organizations). Clorox secured the endorsement of the Sierra Club – and the use of its logo — for a line of eco-friendly cleaning products, called GreenWorks that the company introduced late last year. Neither will disclose how much cash is involved.
I’m writing this post on my Apple PowerBook G4, which ordinarily does very well what I need it to do—except that right now it is sitting on my lap and giving off enough heat to keep me warm on a cool day.
That might be welcome if today were a February day in Denver. But it’s August.
I’m in the mile-high city where the sun always seems to shine to moderate a discussion on sustainability for Coca Cola Enterprises, the big bottling company; to attend a bunch of events on the environment and energy; and to soak up the atmosphere as the Democrats and thousands of hangers-on here to nominate Barack Obama.
The Coke discussion went well, I thought—participants included the major of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, who talked about the drought and water conservation, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer who said that a climate-change bill could get enacted in Congress by a year from now, author-consultant Dan Esty of Yale and Joe Nation, a Stanford lecturer, economist and former California legislator who was a leading backer of that state’s revolutionary law to regulate greenhouse gases. Others who I heard or spoke with during my brief visit include Sir Nicholas Stern, the British author of the well-known report forecasting the economic impact of global warming, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, former EPA chief Carol Browner, Tim Wirth of the UN Foundation (back in the state that elected him a U.S. Senator) and too many governors, members of Congress and mayors to list. Energy and the environment were very big on the agenda here, if not on prime time TV.
Which brings me back to my laptop. Because while much of the conversation revolved around government policy, and offshore drilling, and the differences between McCain and Obama, I also kept hearing reminders about how much energy we continue to waste in America.
The heat given off by laptops, TVs, DVD players and incandescent light bulbs is wasted energy. So is the AC or heat that escape through the walls and windows of leaky office buildings and homes. Then there’s the gasoline we burn by driving cars that are bigger than we need. The energy wasted in heating and cooling rooms of housings that are too big. And so forth.
The economic and environmental costs of all that waste are substantial. The question is, why do we continue to pay them?
Much as I’m a believer in markets, I’m increasingly coming to think that markets don’t do a very good job of driving efficiency when it comes to energy consumption.
If you doubt it, let me pose a few questions.
1. When you bought (or rented) your home, how important were the insulation, the thickness of the windows and the efficiency of the furnace or refrigerator to your decision? Not very, I’d bet.
2. Is your TV/dvd player/cable box hooked up to a surge protector so you can turn them all off with one click when you are not watching? If not, you are writing a bigger monthly check than necessary for your electricity.
3. And why do so many people continue to buy incandescent bulbs when their lifetime costs are much higher than the costs of CFLs?
One problem here is lack of information—people may not be aware that their electronic appliances consume power even when they are turned off. Or they don’t know the lifecyle costs of different light bulbs.
Another obstacle is that builders, say, who make decisions about insulation or what appliances to install in a new home or apartment have to spend more for efficiency upfront, but the resulting savings go to the buyer of the home.
Still another example: Retrofitting existing office buildings could save an enormous amount of money and generate thousands of so-called green jobs. But getting landlords and tenants and their lenders together to figure out how to do so, who pays and who benefits is enormously complex.
All this would argue for government action—beyond the obvious need to put a price on carbon emissions—to require products to be more efficient. We do that already—there are efficiency standards for air conditioning, appliances and cars—but they are not very stringent, and so we use considerably more energy per capita than Europe or Japan.
You may recall that a very thorough McKinsey & Co. report last year found that about 40% of the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed to curb global warming can be achieved through energy-efficiency measures with a reasonable payback time that would save money.
You’d think that rising energy costs would take care of this problem, and they will help, but they are unlikely to work on their own. Consider my laptop—when I bought it, its energy usage never entered my mind, and probably wouldn’t even if electricity cost 25 cents per hwk.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope argued that markets sometimes don’t even do their fundamental job of creating products people want. He said an owner of a small business, who needs a truck to haul stuff around and drives 100,000 miles a year, and pays $20,000 or more a year for gas, might want to save money. But how?
“The Ford Econoline van has not been redesigned in 27 years. It gets 13 miles to the gallon,” Pope said. “He’d rather have a more efficient Econoline. It doesn’t exist. It should.”
Then there is the vexing problem of showers. “The average American teenager takes 45 minutes worth of hot showers every day,” said Brian Keane, president of an NGO called SmartPower that promotes clean energy. “That’s an efficiency problem we must address.”
Well, sure—although that may be the one form of waste that neither markets not the government can eliminate.
So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:
