Glenn Hurowitz 
More About Me
Glenn Hurowitz is the Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners (www.adpartners.org), an organization dedicated to protecting tropical forests as part of the solution to climate change. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and many other publications. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party and has worked in a variety of senior positions in the environmental movement and on political campaigns. All his writing at Grist represents his own opinions and no organization should be held responsible for it!
Glenn Hurowitz’s Posts
Hey, Look, a Forest!
Report: Forest conservation can be as reliable as other ways of reducing pollution 2
Posted 1 month agoExperts increasingly agree that pollution reductions from forest conservation are as easy or easier to track than those from other sources, such as energy.Not your daddy's offsets 6
Posted 2 months agoA new report, "Forging the Climate Consensus: Domestic and International Offsets" makes clear exactly how important a role high-quality offsets play in maintaining the integrity of climate legislation -- and how they could allow an international climate agreement to achieve far stronger emissions reductions targets than would otherwise be possible.
The Negotiators
The Non-Concession concession? 1
Posted 4 months, 4 weeks agoHenry Waxman and Ed Markey seem to have mastered the art of the non-concession concession: striking deals with potential opponents in ways that meet their needs while minimizing (though not entirely eliminating) the negative impacts.
How Waxman-Markey tackles climate change by saving forests 1
Posted 4 months, 4 weeks agoOne of the little-known ingredients of the deal that allowed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454 to pass the Energy and Commerce committee was a breakthrough on protections for the world's vanishing tropical forests.
The political economy of climate policy
Understanding offsets 6
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks agoCarbon offsets have come under fire from critics who believe the Waxman-Markey climate bill is too weak.
Glenn Hurowitz’s Recent Comments
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It would be great if Obama did more arm twisting and making speeches in favor of clean energy jobs. And there is lots he can do that he's not doing. Every senator wants something, and I haven't seen much evidence that Obama is willing to punish senators who don't give him what HE wants. But Obama doesn't need to make dramatic statements. He just needs to be clearer about what he's pushing for in regulation under the Clean Air Act. He really just has to say one sentence: "My administration will use its regulatory authority through the Clean Air Act and other mechanisms to achieve emissions reductions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. I'm happy to sign a climate bill that provides more flexibility to US companies than regulation, but if that doesn't happen, we're going to do everything we can to switch America to a clean energy jobs economy as quickly as possible." Then, the burden is on the polluters to pass a bill. Game over. Hell, he could even have EPA administrator Lisa Jackson say it. More: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090511/radford?rel=hp_currentlyOn Is Bill McKibben right to be angry with Obama? posted 3 days, 5 hours ago 34 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
The fact that they're suspending auditors for inadequate resources suggests to me that there is real policing of the market. Having said that, you will find no argument from me that we have to dramatically improve the CDM. There has to be rigorous certification and oversight. One of the challenges has been the expense and time required to get CDM projects verified. As methodologies become standardized, these costs are going down, making projects more efficient and helping with staffing problems. There will also be economies of scale. Of course, as I wrote in the post, I believe CDM currently credits some inappropriate projects, but doesn't credit others (like forest conservation) that are essential. UPDATE: Joe Romm at Climate Progress has an excellent discussion of how the CDM needs to be improved here -and how the problems with it are, in some respects, overblown (http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/13/clean-development-mechanism-cdm-auditor-copenhagen-international-offsets/). Of note especially: "For all the lame and/or insufficiently audited CDM projects that became certified emissions reduction (CER) credits for the Europeans to buy instead of actual emissions reductions, they only bought about 80 million in 2008 and the average price was about $25/ton."On Not your daddy's offsets posted 2 months ago 6 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
I agree (duh!) that we need a strong carbon price to achieve the transformations we need across the economy. That's why we need to work towards the strongest possible targets we can get. But that doesn't mean we should leave low-cost ways to reduce climate pollution on the table just because they're low-cost.
On Understanding offsets posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago 6 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
How long should we wait until someone invents an alternative, politically viable means of ending deforestation and the 20 percent of climate pollution it causes and improving agriculture and the 15 percent of climate pollution it causes? We've needlessly lost more than 300 million acres of tropical forests since the Kyoto Protocol was signed. 30 million acres disappear every year, sending about 6 billion tons of carbon into the air. We've got to address that or we won't solve the climate crisis. We can't just focus on the 50 percent of climate pollution that comes from energy. Great New York Times editorial on this topic from Friday: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opinion/29fri2.html?ref=opinion
On Offsets are still counterfeit carbon credits posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago 3 ResponsesClick here to view comment in original post
A close reading of the Waxman-Markey legislation should address most or all these concerns. You can't just get credit for conservation willy-nilly and the accreditation process doesn't just rely on satellites. Even the existing standards like VCS and CCBA require serious involvement from on-the-ground scientists and others monitoring each site to meet even the existing high-quality voluntary standards like the VCS and CCBA. That will continue. Although we are talking about large areas in this bill, we are also talking about the kinds of resources that will be able to support that on-the-ground monitoring (creating lots of jobs along the way). Perhaps most importantly, in order to get credit under the bill, international forest projects will, within a few years, only get credit if the country as a whole reduces deforestation from a fixed baseline. Based on the strict protections in the bill, other kinds of offsets will have to meet similarly strict requirements. Finally, if something goes wrong, the bill makes provision for reversals by reserving allowances to compensate for them. This bill represents huge advances in offset integrity and it's essential to understand the multiple protections that exist before evaluating them.
On Understanding offsets posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago 6 Responses