Sitting Down With Politicians and Getting Your Hands Dirty

Last week, I wrote about the release of President Barack Obama's proposed FY2010 budget, which included revenue from carbon credits auctioned under a cap-and-trade system beginning in 2012. Also included were greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets – 14% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

The ingenuousness with which these numbers were delivered was welcomed this week by European environment ministers in Brussels for a day-long meeting on March 3 and those visiting Washington, D.C., in the days immediately after. That's not to say the Europeans were entirely pleased.

In Brussels, E.U. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said, "Although President Obama is speaking about leadership, leadership without an ambitious mid-term target cannot be achieved." In Washington, Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard said much the same: "It's always easy for politicians to set targets that are 41 years away. We also need ambitious action by the United States in the short- to medium-term."

Comments from U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern on Tuesday surely left European officials flummoxed. At a climate change conference organized by a group of U.S. senators, Stern started by acknowledging that "nothing would give a more powerful signal to other countries than to see a significant, major, mandatory plan" from the U.S. before negotiations begin in Copenhagen.

Stern then added that the U.S. would not meet the emissions reductions targets for developed countries – 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020 – as detailed in the Bali Roadmap. "We need to be very mindful of what the dictates of science are, and of the art of the possible." On the U.S.' ability to hit the Bali targets Stern said, "It's not possible to get to that kind of number. It's not going to happen."

Stern's comments received a lot of attention, primarily because they were seen as a softening of the U.S. position. Stern also suggested, however, that the 1990 base year favors Europe – because the decline of heavy industry in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union set GHG emissions plummeting. Wolfgang Sterk, a researcher with the German think tank the Wuppertal Institute, agrees.

In an interview with Point Carbon (subscription required), Sterk said expansion of the European Union to include the former communist states, as well as declining population in the bloc, make it easier for Europe to reach its targets than the United States, where population is increasing. In fact, Sterk notes that U.S. target mentioned above – a return to 1990 levels by 2020 – is stronger, at a 16% cut of current levels, than the E.U. target of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of 11% compared to current levels.

Toward a green recovery

Much of the rancor in the fight to mandate GHG emissions cuts comes from the perception that reaching emissions reductions targets will cripple industry. But does that really have to be so? At Environmental Capital, Keith Johnson recounts how, at the Wall Street Journal's annual ECO:nomics conference in California, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if the company's recent focus on alternative energy was hurting shareholders. "Money we save on energy goes straight to the bottom line. Lower costs mean higher earnings. Green energy done right is more profitable than old energy," he said. To allay any confusion, he added: "Is that a crisp enough answer for you?"

The importance of enlisting business leaders like Schmidt in the fight against climate change was a guiding tenet espoused by writer and Copenhagen Climate Council Chairman Tim Flannery in profile published (registration required) last Saturday in the Financial Times. "I think I now understand a little bit better how to actually do something about the problem," he reflected. "It's not the scattergun approach of dealing with every sceptic that turns up in the local papers or magazines – you waste your time chasing your tail doing that. If you can get business acceptance for the need for change, then you've really done something."

And what business needs most, argued Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern in a commentary published on Monday (registration required) in the Financial Times, is a clear market signal, namely a "strong, stable carbon price." Market signals have been distorted, they wrote, "because we have been pricing one of the world's scarcest resources – a 'good' atmosphere; or the societal cost of emissions, which lead to a 'bad' atmosphere – at zero."

Clarity on policy and prices is all the more important now, Stiglitz and Stern argue, because companies face a second crisis in a worldwide financial meltdown that is stifling investment. One method to unleash and direct capital toward green investments that will cut greenhouse gas emissions was proposed by Climate Change Capital Vice Chairman and Copenhagen Climate Council member James Cameron in an Op-Ed that ran in the London Times on Monday. Cameron calls for governments to issue "climate bonds," purchased by individuals and institutions, with the proceeds ring-fenced for long-term investments in green infrastructure.

Cameron's climate bonds proposal and other methods to loosen capital flows toward carbon-cutting projects are given further attention in Catalyzing Capital Towards the Low-Carbon Economy, the third essay in the Council's Thought Leadership Series. Look for Cameron's essay, co-authored with fellow Council member David Blood, at the Climate Community on Monday at this link.

Another way to funnel capital toward green projects is direct investment from governments themselves. HSCB Bank recently published what Geoffrey Lean at the U.K. Independent calls the most comprehensive study yet of "green stimuli" being introduced around the world. The report, A Climate for Recovery, found that China devoted more than a hundred times as much money to green projects in its stimulus as Britain has proposed it its own. A mere 6% of Britain's stimulus is devoted to green aims such as energy efficiency and renewable energy; in South Korea, by contrast, the figure is 81%.

Some of this is unstoppable

While we can deploy money to bail out banks and try to counteract economic recession, we won't be so fortunate with impacts triggered by climate change, Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, warned in a commentary published Tuesday in The Guardian. The problem, wrote Rahmstorf, is the inertia of climactic events, once triggered: "Even after we have stopped global warming, sea level rise set in motion by our emissions of the coming decades will continue for centuries. Such is the inertia in the response of the deep ocean and the ice sheets to warming. While we can bail out banks, there is no way to turn back sea level – our only chance is to stop the warming soon enough to keep it within manageable limits."

Events linked to warming are already manifest and growing in number, as recent warnings remind us. Giles Tremlett, writing in The Guardian, reported that 90% of the glacial ice in the Pyrenees mountains has been lost over the past century. Experts now predict that glaciers might disappear altogether from the mountain range in as little as 10 to 20 years.

A draft report from the European Commission reported on by Reuters, "Adapting to Climate Change," warns that heat waves and wildfires linked to warming could mean an economic impact of €6.2 billion by 2020 if the European Union does nothing to adapt. Especially hard hit will be Spain, Italy, and Greece, where rising temperatures are forecast to impact crop yields and availability of fresh water.

A similar fate awaits much of the Southwestern United States, scientists warned recently in testimony before the U.S. Senate. The testimony was the first Congress had heard on the growing evidence that climate changes will be more severe than the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report predicted; and it was the first time senators had been permitted to hear about  dangers to human health from climate change. The scientists predicted increased drought and heat waves, especially in urban areas. "We are close to a threshold in a very large number or American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable," Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, said.

In the Arctic, of course, rising temperatures ineluctably lead to disappearing ice. On Wednesday, at Climate Progress, Joe Romm reported on conclusions from a new International Polar Year study. The researchers' main conclusions indicated that "there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover." That finding is buttressed by comments Warwick Vincent, a polar researcher with Quebec's Laval University, recently gave to Reuters. Vincent predicted that Arctic sea ice cover in summer could vanish as soon as 2013. "Some of this is unstoppable," he said. "We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse."

What the grim litany of findings I just covered suggests is that scientists need be more vocal lobbyists, and they must demand to be heard by the decision-makers who will negotiate the treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

I'm not the only one who has concluded this. A new report from the U.S. National Research Council, Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change, found that "demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change." The report also says that climate scientists need to emphasize the connection between a changing climate and its influence on food, economics, and public health.

Rising to meet this challenge are the climate scientists from around the world who will gather in Copenhagen next week for the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change. More than 1,600 abstracts from 70 countries were submitted for the event, whose aim is to update existing knowledge of climate change.

In an interview with Nature Reports Climate Change, Katherine Richardson, the chair of the Congress, says unabashedly that the intent of the conference is to influence policy. "To solve the climate problem you need to have industry, the research community and the political system working together, and I see them converging on this. I was trained as a scientist never to sit down with politicians – to throw your results down and run away, and not to get your hands dirty. But there's general acceptance now among really good scientists that this problem is so serious that we need to work together. And that gives me hope."

Justin Gerdes,

Web Editor