Dan writes immediately below about Obama’s announcement that he’ll attend the talks in Copenhagen in two weeks, and with a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of the 17% below 2005 levels found in the House bill. 

At the press conference on this announcement, a little more was said about the kind of agreement the White House is now hoping to acheive in Copehagen.  In recent weeks, much has been written about the tamping down of expectations for a legally binding agreement this year.  The recent watchphrase has been “politically binding” rather than legally binding, which not many people seem able or eager to define.  

In this morning’s press event, Deputy Nat’l Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs Mike Froman described the aim this way:

At this point, with two weeks left before Copenhagen, the focus is on how to create an accord that has immediate operational effect and covers all the major areas of the negotiation. It’s a comprehensive accord that can get a quick start at dealing with the climate change issues. We’re working very closely with Prime Minister Rasmussen of Denmark, the chairman of the conference, and his team toward that end, and we’ll be working with other countries as well to maximize the chances that the negotiations can make progress towards an accord in Copenhagen.

“Immediate operational effect” seems still vague (effect for whom?  some countries only?  on which deal points? and how is that possible for the U.S., before congressional action?), but better than “politically binding,” to the extent that these words matter.

Greenwire reports;

President Obama will attend U.N. global warming negotiations in Copenhagen on Dec. 9, according to a White House aide.

The White House also confirmed today that Obama will propose that the United States plans to curb its emissions by 2020 in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels — which is the same as the thresholds in the House-passed climate bill.

The question of what percentage to embrace is a tricky one.  Anything lower than the House version would be seen as a betrayal by House members; while Senate members may bridle if they feel that negotiations over the amount are being foreclosed.  “In the range of 17 percent” seems like a carefully diplomatic solution.

By agreeing to attend, Obama has also raised the ante.  The U.S. will be under increased pressure to make sure that something significant comes out of the meeting.

At least that’s what the White House is calling it.  (Okay, okay: technically, the White House calls it the “Green Partnership to Address Energy Security, Climate Change, and Food Security.”). 

Does it mean anything?  Maybe.

Essentially, it provides for some technical assistance to improve governance capacity and scientific knowledge, and some new initiatives to foster R & D.  It also takes the sensible position that the developed countries will adopt emissions reductions targets while the developing countries will adopt “nationally appropriate mitigation measures.”  The White House press release states in boldface that both President Obama and Prime Minister Singh “resolved to take significant mitigation actions and to stand by these commitments.” In other words, neither side is going to insist on the other doing the politically impossible.

Perhaps the most intriguing initiative in the whole thing appears to be a series of bilateral institutions: the US-India Climate Dialogue, the US-India Energy Dialogue, and the US-India Agriculture Dialogue.  Who knows what these things mean. 

But they reflect a realism in the Obama Administration’s climate diplomacy, namely, that putting all their eggs in the Kyoto/UNFCC basket makes little sense.  These institutions might mean nothing, but one could have said the same thing about the UNFCC at the beginning.  They open up space for the two nations to start discussing ways to take reciprocal and constructive steps to reduce emissions.

Early jobs for the Climate Dialogue might be the discussion of international intellectual property rules that inhibit technology transfer.  Another role might be fostering the creation of international sectoral agreements in certain high-emissions industries such as aluminum, steel, and cement.

Obama likes to play a long game, a pattern that the media has proved itself completely incapable of recognizing.  And with climate, the game will have to be very long.  He has damped down expectations for Copenhagen, and is beginning to build more solid foundations.  I hope we have enough time.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) today released the preliminary draft cap-and-trade regulation. CARB staff would like to have comments by January 11th of next year. A new proposal based on the comments will then be issued in Spring 2010.

Some quick key points:

1) The proposal limits a covered entity’s use of offsets to a maximum of four percent of the allowances that the entity surrenders at the end of a compliance period.
2) CARB staff are considering shortening the compliance period from three years to one year.
3) Cement manufacturers are covered under this proposal.
4) CARB will continue public discussion about the co-pollutant issue and release a white paper on this subject in the coming year. Environmental justice (EJ) advocates are concerned that allowing regulated entities under cap-and-trade to pay to emit greenhouse gases (GHG) will mean allowing them to continue emitting hazardous co-pollutants associated with the GHG emissions. These emissions often disproportionately impact low-income communities of color. EJ groups sued CARB earlier this year (Sean posted about it here) over the disproportionate impact that the cap-and-trade program, as outlined in the CARB scoping plan, would have. This debate will be one of the more interesting to watch in the coming months.

Game on!

Oil fires in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm

Congressman David Obey yesterday called for a war tax to pay for troops in Afghanistan. While the idea of a war tax makes all the sense in the world (if health care can’t add to the deficit, why should our wars?), Obey’s proposed tax on upper-income earners is aimed at the wrong source. Instead of an income tax, why not a carbon tax to pay for our wars in the Middle East? After all, much of the reason for our military involvement in that region comes from our desire to protect and exploit its rich oil and natural gas resources.  A carbon tax to pay for our involvement there would only be fitting.  And if the carbon tax is so politically unpalatable in its pure form, perhaps marrying it to a patriotic, heartland-type cause would boost support.  We’ll need to pay for these wars somehow, and the tax would help wean us from the product that got us into this mess.  And it would also provide substantial environmental benefits: less driving, less energy consumption, and more energy efficiency and clean tech innovation.

The title is a play on a great paper of Holly’s about the converse challenge of saving the ordinary.  Whether the ordinary is good or bad, however, it tends to escape our interest and attention because it’s so darn . . . ordinary.

Case in point: nitrogen pollution.   We emit a lot of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, while dumping a lot of nitrogen into rivers and streams because of excessive fertilizer use by farmers.  Sounds like it could be a problem, but not that serious.  Yet, this could be one of the ways that we’re pushing the planet’s systems beyond recovery (not in the sense that the world will be destroyed but in the sense that the new equilibrium may be really different and worse for us.)

According to an article in Environment360,

Nitrogen affects more parts of the planet’s life-support systems than almost any other element, says James Galloway of the University of Virginia, who predicts: “In the worst-case scenario, we will move towards a nitrogen-saturated planet, with polluted and reduced biodiversity, increased human health risks and an even more perturbed greenhouse gas balance.”

Where does the problem come from?

Most of the man-made nitrogen fertilizer ever produced has been applied to fields in the last quarter-century. Nature has some ability to reverse man-made fixing of nitrogen, converting it back into an inert gas — a process called denitrification. But last year, Patrick Mulholland of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee reported that the system is being overwhelmed. Many rivers in the U.S. are now so nitrogen-saturated that they are losing their ability to denitrify pollution.

Most of this excess nitrogen ends up in the oceans, where it is killing whole ecosystems. Excess nitrogen is the cause of the growing number of oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in the oceans, says Mulholland.

Part of the answer is better farm management; part of it is better plants.  Don’t tell anyone I said this, but we might need a bit of genetic engineering here so more plants would be able to fix their own nitrogen like legumes.

Sea Turtle at the Houston Zoo; Photo courtesy of Mauno Luna

Nov 19 Polar Bears. Wolves. Sea Turtles.
The most popular posts on our blogs feature those subjects, along with fetching pictures.  Some people dismissively refer to such creatures as charismatic… [read more]

Nov 19 A Lot of Hot Air
One of the arguments that pro-”cap and traders” like to make against a carbon tax is that the outcome of a tax is too uncertain.  Like Goldilocks… [read more]

Nov 18 China’s Problems, Our Problems
President Obama’s trip to China (noted here yesterday by Dan Farber) refocused world attention on China’s mushrooming contributions to global warming… [read more]

Nov 18 Can You Teach an Old Corps New Tricks?
Five years of Katrina, the Corps may be trying to mend its ways — but is it succeeding? [read more]

Nov 17 Remembering Tom Graff
Last week, California and the nation lost a true giant of water law and policy, Tom Graff, who founded the California office of the Environmental Defense… [read more]

Nov 17 The multiple values of nature
Two interesting storylines came together last week about what nature does for people. The first has to do with economic value, the second with non-economic… [read more]

Nov 17 Update on DeChristopher trial
U.S. District Judge Dee Benson has ruled that Tim DeChristopher, the student who bid on federal oil and gas leases to protest global warming, cannot present… [read more]

Nov 15 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About China But Were Afraid to Ask
As President Obama heads to China, the World Resource Institute has launched a very interesting new website devoted to China, energy, and climate change… [read more]

Polar Bears.  Wolves.  Sea turtles.

Did I mention polar bears, wolves, and sea turtles?

The most popular posts on our blogs feature those subjects, along with fetching pictures.  Some people dismissively refer to such creatures as charismatic megafauna, as if there were something wrong with people being attracted to some of nature’s coolest denizens.  But the attraction people feel to parts of nature is important — and most of the people who are dismissive and proclaim that they love only lichen and annelids actually have the same affection for the megafauna.   Of course, these aren’t all of nature, and they can’t survive without ecosystems containing much humbler creatures.  Just picture a polar bear saying, “I really want to thank the Academy  and all the little creatures that made it possible . . . “

Just as movies need stars, ecosystems may need iconic inhabitants if they want to survive in a human dominated world.

Oh, and did I mention polar bears, wolves, and sea turtles?

One of the arguments that pro-”cap and traders” like to make against a carbon tax is that the outcome of a tax is too uncertain.  Like Goldilocks, you may end up with a tax that is too weak or too strong.  If it’s too weak, the desired environmental emissions targets may not be met; too strong, and we crush the economy like Goldilocks sitting on the little bear’s chair.  But this argument is pretty weak coming from advocates of a cap-and-trade plan.  After all, what makes cap-and-trade so likely to result in certain outcomes?

There are two fundamental flaws with the federal cap-and-trade plan, as it is currently constituted, that make the outcome of the program look about as certain as George W. Bush trying to answer a question at a press conference.  First, the offsets.  Simply put, there are way too many of them (Ann has discussed this issue on this blog). With over two billion offsets allowed, they will almost certainly undermine the integrity of the program by allowing polluters to pay their way out of emissions reduction through largely unverifiable reductions elsewhere.

But even if we assume the offset problem won’t materialize, there is a second and more important flaw in the system: the cap itself will probably be sky high.  Why?  Because in order to set the cap, we need a baseline as to what the emissions are today from the 7400-odd sources that will be regulated.  And how do we get that baseline?  Well, we’ll just ask the regulated companies how much they currently emit.  They won’t overestimate, will they?  Of course not.  That never happens.  Except in every cap and trade program we’ve seen, from RECLAIM to the EU.

Let’s look at the EU: the New York Times Green Blog describes the problems that the EU program is now facing due to a glut of pollution credits. The EU cap-and-trade meltdown is attributed to “accounting rules” rather than actual emissions reductions.  The glut has resulted in “hot air” credits that were essentially meaningless. So GHG emitters under the EU plan can now pay quite cheaply for their pollution with little incentive to reduce them.

The same problem occurred with the RECLAIM program in L.A., an unmitigated disaster that rarely gets mentioned by cap-and-trade boosters so mesmerized by the so-called success story of the acid rain program.  With RECLAIM, the program relied on self-reporting to establish the baseline and the subsequent cap.  The result was a sky-high cap that led to low initial prices and non-compliance once the cap ratcheted down to adjust. That program has since been abandoned in favor of regulations.

My prediction for the federal plan?  We’ll have a ton of hot air with a sky-high cap, and it will take years to realize the full extent of the problem. Once the cap comes down (IF it comes down), like with RECLAIM, businesses will be unprepared for it and unable to comply. Oh well. By the time we get this sorted out, it may already be 2020 and we’ll have lost valuable time.

There are better options. First, environmental advocates can admit what many of them say privately, which is that a carbon tax makes a lot more sense. It would be easier to implement than cap-and-trade (although it would contain some of the same monitoring and enforcement problem, but not on nearly as big a scale). And it would lead to actual results, particularly if we did a slow-phase in. Plus, imagine the kind of investment in renewable technology we could do with the revenue. But, as everyone seems to say, it’s politically unrealistic. Well, is there a harm in at least trying for the better policy and admitting this cap-and-trade emperor has no clothes?

Second, we could focus on policy efforts that actually will result in GHG reductions. That includes a strong federal renewable portfolio standard, and not the watered down one in the federal versions now under debate in the Congress. These policy efforts should also include a focus on the transportation reauthorization bill next year, which gives us an opportunity to stop subsidizing highways and instead invest in mass transit and compact real estate development. Clean energy, less driving, and more compact development will take us a long way toward getting out of this climate mess. Intricate, opaque, and ineffective cap-and-trade programs, filled with hot air, ain’t gonna do it.