The U.S. Climate Action Partnership—a coalition of businesses and enviros once thought to be important—have released their wimpy Blueprint for Legislative Action.
I can sort of understand why, say, Duke Energy, signed on to this, but NRDC, EDF, and WRI have a lot of explaining to do. As we will see, this proposal would be wholly inadequate as a final piece of legislation. As a starting point it is unilateral disarmament to the conservative politicians and big fossil fuel companies who will be working hard to gut any bill. Kudos to the National Wildlife Federation for withdrawing from USCAP rather than signing on.
I think it is absurd for any serious environmental group to support permitting new coal plants that don’t capture and store the vast majority of their emissions. Yet as the WashPost reports:
The plan would also require any coal plant permitted after Jan. 1, 2015, to emit no more than half the carbon dioxide emissions now considered normal and require any newly permitted plant today to have the ability to be retrofitted to meet that standard.
These are bogus provisions. Nobody really knows what a capture-ready plant design is—this is the climate equivalent of “the check is in the mail.” Any significant number of such new coal plants will simply make it much harder to meet the 2020 target, at a time when we have more than enough low carbon technologies today to meet any such target affordably.
But it is the 2020 target and the issue of rip-offsets that make this proposal truly untenable. The Blueprint calls for requiring that U.S. greenhouse gases (GHGs) return to “80%‐86% of 2005 levels by 2020.” That is essentially returning to 1990 levels, which the science clearly says is inadequate to stabilizing at 450 ppm, let alone the 350 ppm target that environmental groups should be seriously considering.
Worse, the science makes clear that you need a target below 1990 levels without allowing fossil fuel companies to offset their emissions—i.e. continue releasing CO2 into the atmosphere where it will linger with a mean atmospheric lifetime of 30,000 years.
But the already-lame USCAP proposal shoots itself in the (other) foot with its embrace of a staggering amount of rip-offsets.
Since USCAP is recommending a stringent emission target, we also recommend generous limits on the use of offsets to help moderate compliance costs, especially during the period when low carbon technologies are still achieving the economies of scale and commercial maturity that many currently lack.
Shame on my NRDC, EDF, and WRI friends for signing on to such nonsense. The emission target is most certainly not “stringent” as I have discussed at length here. It doesn’t even match the target recommended in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report—and that report certainly underestimated the speed and scale of climate impacts.
The final clause is both wrong and irrelevant— energy efficiency is a fully mature technology, as is biomass cofiring in coal plants as is cogeneration. Wind is ramping up at an astonishing pace, and solar thermal baseload can deliver large amount of affordable power by 2020. For a full discussion, see “An introduction to the core climate solutions.”
(Note to NRDC and EDF and WRI: Obama has committed, “We will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years.” If the President thinks alternative energy is ready to ramp up rapidly starting now, why don’t you? You are supposed to be pushing the administration to do more than they plan to, not less!)
But the unconscionable amount of rip-offsets USCAP embraces guts the entire effort:
• Congress should set an overall upper level limit on the use of offsets for compliance in any year of 1.5 billion metric tons domestic and 1.5 billion metric tons international offsets.
• Congress should establish a Carbon Market Board (CMB) and give it the authority to set annual limits on the level of domestic and international offsets within the range of 2-3 billion metric tons total ...
• Congress should specify that the initial annual limit on offsets will be 2 billion metric tons. CMB should have the authority to increase the annual limit to avoid undue economic harm from excessively high allowance prices ...
You cannot be serious.
Remember, total U.S. GHGs in 2005 were about 7.2 billion tons.
The USCAP plan would call for a reduction of 1.0 to 1.4 billion tons of U.S. GHGs in 2020, while allowing 2 billion or more tons of offsets, at least half of which don’t even have to be in this country. When would U.S. carbon dioxide emissions see serious reductions under this plan? Who knows? It’s déja vu all over again.
Let me repeat once more, as a major 2008 analysis from Stanford found:
... “between a third and two thirds” of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)—set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations—do not represent actual emission cuts.
And this led to the study’s stark conclusion:
... any offset market of sufficient scale to provide substantial cost-control for a cap-and-trade program will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions.
The Government Accountability Office recently ripped rip-offsets: “The use of carbon offsets in a cap-and-trade system can undermine the system’s integrity.”
Also, the CDM is filled with fraud. Let’s remember that the West got suckered into giving China some $6 billion to destroy greenhouse gas refrigerants that probably cost Chinese companies $100 million to capture and destroy (for more details, see “Kyoto’s Great Carbon Offset Swindle”). Let’s remember:
U.N. regulators are also concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value ...
In a presentation to U.N. officials last fall, the head of Tüv Süd’s carbon business told U.N. officials that the quality of projects the auditors are receiving from carbon brokers is “going down,” according to the U.N. panel’s Mr. Schmidt, who was at the meeting ...
“There is a high incentive” for companies to put together environmentally questionable carbon-credit projects, “because there is a lot of money that can be earned,” he said. “People are getting more inventive, so it’s getting harder to detect the black sheep.”
Let’s remember that instead of using the money to fund the transition to a sustainable economy, the World Bank “has loaned $1.5 billion to fossil-fuel companies to make minor greenhouse-gas reductions,” and “then sells carbon credits for those reductions,” and “takes its 13 percent cut”?
Let’s remember that “The vast majority of schemes that sell carbon credits to offset pollution are delivering 30% less than they promise”?
No serious environmental group—no person or group serious about keeping total global warming as close as possible to 2°C, no one who endorses a target of 450 ppm or lower, should endorse a final climate bill with more than, say, 5 percent very high quality offsets allowed.
The USCAP proposal has other features that are problematic. For instance, “USCAP recommends that a significant portion of allowances should be initially distributed free to capped entities ... ” Again, Obama himself has called for a 100 percent auction. As the Friends of the Earth response to USCAP says:
Put simply, the proposal would reward corporate polluters with hundreds of billions of dollars of giveaways, and its near-term pollution reduction targets are far weaker than what scientists have called for. The proposal is further weakened by its massive carbon offset loopholes. Were such a proposal to be enacted into law, it would fail to achieve the emission reductions we need in the U.S. and would undermine our ability to meaningfully and credibly engage in international climate negotiations. This is a dead-end approach that policymakers should reject.
Precisely.
This proposal is a dead end—and an even deader starting point. Shame on NRDC, EDF, and WRI for backing it.
With this proposal, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership has officially made itself obsolete and irrelevant.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles
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Curtis Moore Posted 2:01 am
16 Jan 2009
The study results are posted below. For those interested in reading the entire report, about 140 pages, go to http://www.healthandcleanair.org/emissions/index.html.
And as you read this summary, remember there will b e no second chance to get it right with global warming. WSe stop it, or we die.
Study Results
Comparing and contrasting these programs revealed grave flaws common to all of them. Finding the same failings in all trading programs--as well as evidence of the emergence of these failings in smaller or younger programs, even though they are for different pollutants, time frames and circumstances--suggests that the deficiencies are intrinsic to trading itself, not the result of faulty program design or implementation.
Some of these failings have seldom, if ever, been discussed. These failings will be explored in greater detail below, but briefly, they include the following:
* Abandoning Protection of Health. Implicit in trading of the "criteria" pollutants that cause sickness and death is the abandonment of protection of health as the single overriding objective of the U.S. Clean Air Act and air pollution regulation generally. Instead of reducing pollution as fast as technologically achievable, trading allows it--and the illness and death that it causes--to continue for the express purpose of saving money for polluters.
Trading Removes the Stigma of Pollution. Air pollution kills and injures. The stigma associated with such harmful action often acts as a powerful deterrent. Trading affirmatively sanctions pollution, thus removing the stigma.
* Killing Environmental Innovation. Because trading focuses solely on reducing a single pollutant by an exact date and a precise amount at least cost, technologies and practices that deliver multiple benefits--new ways of burning coal, for example, as well as conservation and renewable forms of energy--are frozen out of the market. While trading stimulates cost innovation, it has the opposite effect on environmental innovation, suffocating emerging technologies.
* Trading Rigidity Bars Mid-Course Adjustments. Trading provides polluters with a degree of flexibility in choosing the means by which to reduce a pollutant and, to some degree, the timing. It is otherwise rigid, however, so as a practical matter it becomes impossible to adjust goals based on new information--new technology, for example, or the discovery of more substantial injuries.
* Delay and Under-Control. Emission reductions under trading regimes are uniformly smaller and later than they otherwise would be. In the case of leaded gasoline, for example, the United States required 23 years to eliminate the fuel, which China accomplished in three.
* Fraud, Malfeasance and Secrecy. While emissions allocations are public, trades and prices are not. As a result, fraud is a constant threat. In two of three trading programs examined, there was documented fraud, while the third has not been officially scrutinized.
* Converting a public good to private property. The effect of trading is to convert a common good--clean air--into a sump for waste by creating and then conferring on polluters the right to use it to dispose of their pollution. Thus, what once belonged to all--air quality--is converted to private property. The explanatory language accompanying one program, acid rain, characterizes this property as "right," while in others it is an undefined privilege conferred on polluters.
* Health and Environmental Objectives Are Not Achieved. In every case, trading failed to produce reductions required to protect the resource in question, requiring recourse to the very command and control mechanisms crafters had sought to avoid.
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Curtis Moore Posted 2:05 am
16 Jan 2009
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JMG Posted 2:40 am
16 Jan 2009
Look at Jon Rynn's tables and what you immediately realize is that even the most aggressive traders only propose involving a tiny fraction of emitters, and that every one of them will justly be able to howl about how they are "only a small contributor." And so we're going to see lots of dodges like circuit breakers that will relax standards if prices go too high.
Obama told the WAPost yesterday that he's going to go after "entitlements" reform, which is a terrible sign unless he is ready to pull a rabbit out of his hat and propose carbon-tax-and-rebate, because otherwise the bloodshed caused by fighting over social security and medicare --- in the wake of having shoveled trillion of dollars at business with no strings or accountability --- will consume them. The climate response will become just another policy initiative and we'll be toast.
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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Curtis Moore Posted 9:19 am
16 Jan 2009
Example 1: When the the world banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) because they destroy stratospheric ozone, industry switched to hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC)-22. (This was made possible because DuPont, NRDC and EPA went behind closed doors and renamed the chemical from CFC-22 to HCFC-22, subject of a piece I wrote in 1989 for The Washington Post, "McTruth: Fast Food for Thought," but that's another story.)
Making -22 produces HFC-23 as a waste byproduct. It's a very, very powerful cause of global warming. No big deal; just incinerate the -23. But if the incinerator is installed when the -22 plant is built, it costs about $5 million and is worth nothing as a trade. Build the plant without an incinerator, however, then retrofit it with one, and the destroyed -23 can be traded for $500 million. Not surprisingly, the Chinese build their -22 plants initially without an incinerator, cut a deal to install one and voila! somebody makes a $495 million profit.
Example 2: one of the Kyoto gases, SF6, is used as an insulating fluid for circuit breakers, switchgear, and other electrical equipment. Old equipment may contain 100 pounds of SF6, but new versions have only, say, 1 pound. SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 22,200 times that of CO2 when compared over a 100 year period.
So your local utility has an asset that could easily be drained and destroyed at very little cost. But if it is drained and destroyed as part of a cap and trade system, and a ton of CO2 is worth $10, a ton of SF6 is worth $222,000.
There are many, many more examples of how cap and trade makes polluters rich. If you were them, wouldn't you support cap and trade? Maybe that helps explain why DuPont, which invented and made the CFCs and HCFCs that not only destroy strat ozone, but cause global warmin g supports cap and trade. Maybe it also explains why several utilities support cap and trade.
What it fails to explain, however, why the people being appointed by Obama; and the Chairs of the respective House and Senate Committees; and some environmental organizations like NRDC and ED; and California politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger, all support trading.
For more information on how companies plan to profit from our deaths from global warming, go to http://www.saving-ourselves.com/. We can save ourselves, but only if we act now--and screw cap and trade.
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wedjr Posted 11:59 pm
17 Jan 2009
"I also support exploring the concept of a carbon tax that returns all generated revenue to the American people as a more efficient and transparent way to address carbon emissions." Delay tactic? Seen the light?
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F James Handley Posted 1:54 pm
20 Jan 2009
Most (but not all) politicians like cap-and-trade, because it hides the price from the public. The word's getting out that cap-and-trade is really a tax; maybe now we can listen to what the economists are saying and compare the two approaches without hiding. See http://www.carbontax.org.
And if we just have to do cap-and-trade, what about a price floor? With a sagging economy driving down carbon emissions, the cap isn't likely to be a real restriction for several years. A price floor, like a carbon tax, would create incentives for innovation and conservation measures now, even before economic growth resumes and we approach cap limits.
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F James Handley Posted 1:58 pm
20 Jan 2009
Most (but not all) politicians like cap-and-trade, because it hides the price from the public. The word's getting out that cap-and-trade is really a tax; maybe now we can listen to what the economists are saying and compare the two approaches without hiding. See http://www.carbontax.org.
And if we just have to do cap-and-trade, what about a price floor? With a sagging economy driving down carbon emissions, the cap isn't likely to be a real restriction for several years. A price floor, like a carbon tax, would create incentives for innovation and conservation measures now, even before economic growth resumes and we approach cap limits.
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