On November 4th 2008, I was an American in Brussels as I watched Barack Obama turn red states blue and win the Presidency of the United States (not to worry, I waited in a two-hour line to vote absentee before I left the States!).

I'll never forget the next morning, having coffee with a close friend from Trinidad who has spent her adult life in Europe.  She and I sat and beamed, uncontrollably giddy and excited, having stayed up all night watching the returns.  After eight long years, the nightmare was over.  And I'll always remember what she said to me as we sat in her kitchen that morning:

"I forgot how great America can be."

It was an amazing experience being in Europe for the historic election last year.  Sure, it would have been fun to roam the streets of DC or join the thousands celebrating in Chicago, but being in Europe was special in its own way.  Walking the streets of Brussels on the 5th, it might as well have been any city in America considering how much people were talking about the election.  And I was proud.  Really proud.  I wore my Obama button for days, no longer envious of the Canadian flags Americans had been sewing on their backpacks for years.  Obama was MY President and I was perfectly fine with all these Europeans being jealous.

But that one statement from my friend hit me more than any other experience during the election last year, and has stuck with me ever since.  American can be great.  It has been great.  And on November 4th, 2008, so many of us around the world knew America could be great again.

Now, after a long year of challenges ranging from efforts to save the economy, reform health care, and deal with troubled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, people all over the world are beginning to take stock of the President's first year in office and consider what he's achieved in light of the great expectations held on his first day in office.

Well, at least in one policy area, when he comes to Copenhagen for the climate talks next week, the President has an incredible opportunity to show the world how great America can be.

Speculation has begun in earnest as to what he might say, and of course a lot seems obvious. But what should he say?  Well, to start, I'd offer a few points that might personally make me proud:

He could surely say a lot more, and I hope he does, but these four elements might help make this trip to Copenhagen a successful one, in my view.

A plea to my President: Please, President Obama, when you come to Copenhagen, help us remember once again how great America can be.

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Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

December 19—the day after COP15

The Washington Times is the other DC newspaper, the “conservative” one.  That’s assuming you can call the primary DC paper — the one that loves un-fact-checked op-ed pieces attacking climate science and clean energy and that is now run by former Wall Street Journal editors — not conservative (see “Washington Post recycles another disinformation-filled WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ).

Still, as Wikipedia notes, The WashTimes was “founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and is subsidized by the Unification Church community. The Times is known for its conservative stance on political and social issues.”

The WT puts out a very useful daily Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req’d), which gives another perspective on inside-the-beltway analysis.  As was widely reported last week, Obama to attend Copenhagen, announces “a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020.″

Now, much of the status quo media remains stuck in an everything-progressives-are-doing-will-fail bandwagon, so they missed the key implications of that amazing announcement — Obama just doubled down on a domestic climate bill.  Yes, I know, you keep reading stories about how the administration is walking away from the bipartisan climate and clean bill.  Not.   As the WT put it last Wednesday:

President Obama’s decision to attend the Copenhagen climate summit next month is an indication of how seriously he takes the fight against global warming.

He could have allowed the conference to happen without his presence. It had already been downgraded to a political meeting from its original purpose of finalizing a world treaty.

In addition, his administration has been working long hours on health care reform, the economy and a new Afghanistan war strategy. All three are more pressing to the public.

Yet those who thought Obama might pass on Copenhagen were not watching closely.

And were not reading Climate Progress.

Over the last two weeks, he won climate cooperation agreements with the leaders of China and India — the two major developing nations needed to make a global plan a success. What’s more, Obama aides confirmed this week that he would propose a specific U.S. emissions cut at Copenhagen.

The cut he will take to Copenhagen turns out to be the same 17 percent, by 2020, that the House included in the bill it passed in June.

Much remains to happen in Washington and in Copenhagen to turn Obama’s hope into action. But he appears to be confident that with his direct involvement, something useful will happen. In any case, he clearly is putting the Senate on notice that he will not let the chamber slough off the climate bill expected soon from Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman.

Environmental groups were relieved Wednesday that Obama had scheduled the trip. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, called the decision “an important statement of his deep personal commitment to addressing this issue.”

His opponents should take heed as well. The president will take every opportunity he can to press for an issue that remains a priority: reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Precisely.

There is going to be a bipartisan climate and clean energy bill voted on by the Senate in the spring — and with the President pushing for it, I expect it will pass.

WT also has some comments today on the scandal-known-as-climategate, noting in a headline “… stolen e-mails mean less than they seem“:

… it would be a mistake to believe that decades of scientific consensus that the planet is warming largely due to human activities will be erased or reversed by the disclosure of a few e-mails….

The world’s major political leaders … accept without reservation that global warming is a problem that must be addressed and are moving, though slowly, to do so. The saga of the purloined e-mails may be red meat to the anti-climate-change faithful, but it is nothing more than a sideshow in the grand scheme….

In summary, the stolen e-mails will not end the quest to reduce global warming….

And so, the WT concludes, they are not “game changing.”

Duh.

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Prelude to COP15: Climate justice actions sweep the U.S. before Copenhagen talks

Where is all the damn climate data?

Photo: www.chucknorris.comA lot of dreck comes across my desktop. I'm even on a list called "ennui mail," and some of it is utterly irredeemable. But still I took notice when Chuck Norris: Copenhagen Talks To Forge "One World Order" blew in.  

I especially like this bit:

In this conference, they're going to try to take our money and send it to third-world countries because of, since we spend so much oil and these other countries have suffered, then we're going to give our money to these third-world countries.

But then there's this:

"Neil, we have people here starving in our own country," Norris said. "You know, my foundation, I have families, who are making $9,000 a year -- the kids I'm teaching. Why aren't we trying to help the poverty in our own country?"

... which demands to be taken a bit more seriously.  

I mean, how can it be that Chuck Norris, for crying out loud, is trumpeting his populist, pro-poor creds as a way of opposing international climate action? And why is the U.S. climate movement not widely seen as standing up for the American poor? And why is it so damn easy to paint greens as elitists? And is it not the case that, having gotten themselves typecast as middle-cast wonks, U.S. greens are now afraid to state the obvious truth -- that it is only fair, as well as necessary, for the U.S. to pick up its share of the internation tab.

I posted the Chuck Norris question on the U.S. Climate Action Network list, which, by the way, can also engender a bit of ennui from time to time. Quick to respond was a fella who's pretty well known up in Cascadia, though he wasn't speaking on the record, so I won't ID him:

This has gone badly sideways on us. I battled a group of teabaggers at a Gore book tour lecture in Portland last week. The class undertones were brutal: well-dressed, comfortable, calm people with their $60 tix filing inside the venue; struggling, ragged-looking people outside SCREAMING about the green fatcats and their grand climate conspiracy.

In response, Paddy McCully, the Executive Director of the Berkeley-based International Rivers (who's entirely willing to go on the record) took the occasion to model a bit of snarky realism:

I think we can expect the 'why are we sending money overseas when we aren't helping the poor here' rhetoric to be seriously ramped up by the tea-baggers. It's perfect for them -- xenophobic, nationalistic, populist, self-interested, self-contradictory (they don't actually want money to be spent on the poor), anti-Obama, anti-Gore, anti-liberal elite, anti-science, anti-'pouring money down foreign rat holes,' anti-deficit increasing etc. etc.  And now Norris has caught onto it presumably Glenn Beck won't be far behind. And no amount of rational (or symbolic/emotional) argument will stop it. 

In terms of broader public messaging in the U.S. I don't think it's even worth engaging on the international financing issue. Much better to stick to green jobs, energy security, technological competitiveness, natural disasters hurt the poor etc.

Which, when to think about it, is a pretty strong claim!  Because if we don't "engage" on the international financing issue, there's basically zero chance that the international negotiations are going to pick up any real momentum anytime soon. Which, of course, means failure. Which is exactly what our friends on the lunatic right want.

Meanwhile, back in the White House, the Obama team is going to try to thread the needle. Unable to avoid Copenhagen, the U.S. is preparing a financing offer that, while entirely inadequate in global justice terms, and tragically weak in the face of the new scientific consensus, at least gets the ball rolling. Maybe a billion dollars a year in international mitigation and adaptation assistance, and maybe in a few years, if things go well, some creative international finance on top of that. Nothing much really, not anytime soon, though obviously, the tea-baggers are still going to go nuts.  

What's not obvious is what we're going to do in response.

One thing we could do is make rational arguments. They soon surfaced on the USCAN list. First up was NRDC, with "Poor energy policy and climate change hurt the poor in the U.S."  Lots of examples here, of course -- health costs, dangerous weather and storms, and failing to "tap into the green jobs potential." A nice pointer to a new study that with "strong implementation of energy efficiency measures the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) act, which passed the House in June, could create as many as 1.9 million jobs between 2010 and 2020." 

Then came Oxfam American, which noted another study, which "visually maps out climate impacts and vulnerable populations identified in 13 U.S. southeastern states (from Arkansas to Virginia)," and shows that "Acting on climate will benefit the poor in the U.S. because the poor in the U.S., just like the poor overseas, will be hit worst by the effects of climate change. Poor and vulnerable communities have little ability to prepare for and recover from climate-related disasters, no matter where they live."

Good stuff, no doubt about it. And there's no question that these arguments must absolutely be mainstreamed soon. "Green jobs" in particular, are critical, and the right knows it. Witness the sad tale of Van Jones. 

But I'm left feeling that something big is missing here. Something like populist rage. Something internationalist, but also exuberant in its eagerness to defend the not-so-rich people of the U.S. of A. Something that connects the dots, that does not hold climate protection apart, as if it were the proper concern of only those "well-dressed, comfortable, calm people with their $60 tix." 

How about a loud national movement for free public transportation, for example? One paid for by congestion pricing schemes? How about bringing back Cap and Dividend, or something like it? How about progressive tax reform designed to lift up the poor and fund the climate transition at the same time? How about Big Green starts talking about America's international responsibilities, in a way that vividly draws the link to our responsibilities to our own poor? How about we hear about unemployment in the third world from time to time? How about a new politics of solidarity, that refuses false distinctions between American needs and the needs of strangers? How about a class analysis of ecological footprints?

How about we step outside the climate sandbox, once and for all? 

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Singh of India walk along the Cross Hall of the White House towards the East Room for the arrival ceremony.Photo and caption: The White HouseAt 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 U.S.-India Climate Dialogue, the U.S.-India Energy Dialogue, and the U.S.-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.

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

President Obama announced today that he will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, raising the stakes for himself and all participating nations.

The initial goal for Copenhagen was to forge a binding treaty. But that ambitious goal has been scaled back. With American climate protection legislation bogged down in the Senate after clearing the House, Obama can't put enough commitments on the table to secure a final agreement. Division over how to financially help developing nations respond to global warming also remains far from resolved.

But the participating nations do not want Copenhagen to be an exercise in vague rhetoric and meaningless communiques. What would constitute a success? What could come out of Copenhagen that would help us avert a climate crisis?

President Obama laid down that marker yesterday, in his joint appearance with the Indian Prime Minister:

In other words, for Copenhagen to be a success, all nations have to get started on cutting actual greenhouse gas emissions.

We don't have to agree on the exact targets, timeframes and total financial assistance. But we have to get moving, because the planetary clock is ticking.

President Obama going is a sign of American commitment. Hopefully, before Copenhagen, Obama's decision will be backed up by a tripartisan deal from Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, so it will be fairly clear America is on the verge of acting, and not making excuses.

Control of Copenhagen's outcome is far from being solely in Obama's hands.

China and India, always using America as an excuse for irresponsible growth, need to step up on emissions targets.

The EU, always crowing about its emissions targets, needs to step up on financial assistance to developing nations.

Yet Obama has set the benchmark for success. And he has put his own national and international credibility on the line to achieve that success.

It's always a political risk to set goals that you can't achieve unilaterally. But that's what leaders do.

Originally posted at OurFuture.org

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

President Barack Obama will attend the climate summit in Copenhagen next month and offer to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, officials said Wednesday.

Obama hopes to "give momentum to the negotiations" on Dec. 9 when he attends part of the 12-day global summit aimed at finding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that expires in 2012, a senior official said.

The president will commit to the near-term U.S. emissions reduction target of 17 percent as long as China and other emerging nations made serious pledges of their own, a White House statement said.

"In light of the president's goal to reduce emissions 83 percent by 2050, the expected pathway set forth in this pending legislation would entail a 30 percent reduction below 2005 levels in 2025 and a 42 percent reduction below 2005 in 2030," it said.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is in charge of the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen conference, warmly welcomed Obama's decision to attend.

"I think it's critical that President Obama attends the climate change summit in Copenhagen," de Boer said in a telecast news conference from Bonn.

"The world is very much looking to the United States to come forward with an emission reduction target and to contribute international finance support to help developing countries adapt to the impact of climate change.

"I think that if he can deliver on his election campaign statements that Copenhagen needs to be a success by coming to Copenhagen himself, that I think will be critical to a good outcome."

When Obama goes to Copenhagen on Dec. 9, he is likely to be the only head of state or government there as the others are coming for the last three days of proceedings.

Obama sought Tuesday to boost hopes of a meaningful deal at the Copenhagen climate summit, saying recent progress after meetings with the leaders of key players like India and China meant serious progress was being made.

India, China and other developing nations have been pressing for Western nations to offer technology and other support to help them reduce the intensity of emissions blamed for global warming.

But the emerging economies have resisted legally binding requirements, saying that wealthy nations, not them, bear the historic responsibility for carbon emissions.

As the leader of one of the world's two biggest polluters, Obama had been under considerable pressure from U.S. allies to attend the conference.

The ambitions of any U.S. targets on greenhouse gas emissions are restricted by the fact that Congress is struggling to pass legislation for comparatively meager cuts.

Obama's position for Copenhagen exactly reflects a House of Representatives bill, passed in June, that also envisages cuts of 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by 83 percent by 2050.

A slightly more ambitious bill before the Senate, but not due to be debated again until early next year, talks of a 20 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020.

Compared to the 1990 benchmark used by almost every other country, the U.S. target only amounts to something like a four-percent reduction.

The European Union has vowed to reduce its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels before 2020, raising the target to 30 percent in the event of an international agreement. Japan has offered 25 percent, but attached conditions.

The United States was the world's biggest carbon emitter until it was overtaken by China in 2006, according to the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of leading climate scientists.

But Chinese officials point out that its per capita emissions are between one-third and one-fifth of developed countries.

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Will world leaders rocket at Copenhagen?Photo: jurvetson via Flickr Creative CommonsSuddenly -- and just in the nick of time -- next month's Copenhagen conference is starting to gain momentum. National leaders have rushed to say they are going, elevating it to the status of a major summit. More and more commitments to action are coming in, from both developed and developing countries. And there are signs that even the United States may put an, albeit provisional, offer on the table.

It has all been enough to cheer up the phlegmatic Yvo de Boer, who -- as  Executive Director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change -- is in charge of the talks. Last month he was sounding downbeat, but now he says: "There is no doubt in my mind that (the meeting) will yield a success."

"Almost every day now we see new commitments and pledges from both industrialized and developing countries," he added. "I am confident that the President of the United States can come to Copenhagen with targets and a financial commitment."

Maybe de Boer is now erring on the optimistic side, but there is no doubt that there is, at present at least, a new mood in the air. It is reflected in -- and partly caused by -- a stampede of heads of governments promising to come.

By the weekend, just a week after the Danish Government had sent out the formal invitations, 65 leaders had committed themselves to attend. They included such heavyweights as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown,  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Prime Ministers Yuki Hatoyama and Kevin Rudd of Japan and Australia, and Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia.

Several key leaders have yet to reply -- including President Hu Jintao of China, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, South African president Jacob Zuma and, of course, Barack Obama. But so far the Danes have not had a single refusal, and expect many more acceptances.

The promised turn-out is a big vindication for Gordon Brown, who was the first leader to commit to going -- as long ago as September. Brown insisted that only heads of governments would have the authority to negotiate and strike a deal. He has since spent much time telephoning and talking to other leaders face-to-face to persuade them to attend.

He will be at it again this weekend at the summit of leaders of the former colonial countries that belong to the British Commonwealth in Trinidad. Manmohan Singh and Jacob Zuma can expect to come under particular pressure if they have not accepted by then.

Meanwhile offers of emission reductions continue to come in. Russia has agreed at a summit with the E.U. last week to accept a 25 percent cut on 1990 levels by 2020, doubling its previous target. This is hardly ambitious because the collapse of its economy in the 1990s means its emissions are now much lower than they were at the start of that decade -- but it is important because it represents another developed country coming into the range which will trigger the big cuts promised by the E.U., Japan, and Australia if others followed suit.

South Korea offered a four percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020. Again, this may appear paltry, but is psychologically important because the country is (somewhat anomalously) classified as a developing one, making South Korea the first developing country to announce an absolute cut in emissions as opposed to just reducing its rate of growth.

Even more importantly, Brazilian officials made clear last week that the ambitious target of at least a 36.1 reduction in projected 2020 emissions, would involve an absolute cut of at least 10 percent from current levels.

The big questions are what the U.S. and China will offer. President Hu has promised a "notable" reduction in expected 2020 emissions, and is expected to attach a figure on it in Copenhagen. And Todd Stern, the chief U.S. negotiator indicated that  President Obama was considering going with a provisional number for emissions reduction even if the Senate had not voted on it by then.

There is also a growing consensus on the even more important -- and difficult -- issue of providing finance to the world's poorest countries to help them tackle their own pollution and adapt to the devastating impacts of climate change. This is settling out at an acceptance that about $100 billion a year will be needed by 2020 (a figure originally proposed by Gordon Brown last summer), that 22-50 billion euros of this would come from international aid, and that "fast-track finance" of 5-7 billion euros should be provided to finance immediate action.

Of course there will be many stomach-turning ups and downs before the leaders leave the Danish capital, and it could well all come unstuck. But the very fact that leaders are going makes that more unlikely, because the one thing that unites them is a determination to avoid being associated with failure.

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

Todd SternAs Dave lamented last week, most of the predicting and posturing preceding the Copenhagen climate talks amounts to little more than Some Person Guessing. You might consider the weekend news from the UK Observer -- which reported the Obama administration's intention to set a provisional target for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions -- to be more of the same, though it at least relies on the head of Obama’s climate negotiation team.

From the Observer:

President Barack Obama is considering setting a provisional target for cutting America's huge greenhouse gas emissions, removing the greatest single obstacle to a landmark global agreement to fight climate change.

The Observer has learnt that administration officials have been consulting international negotiators and key players on Capitol Hill about signing up to a provisional target at the UN global warming summit in Copenhagen, now less than three weeks away.

Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, said the administration recognised that America had to come forward with a target for cutting its emissions. The US, which with China is responsible for 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, is the only major developed nation yet to table an offer.

"What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation," Stern said from Copenhagen, where he was meeting Danish officials.

By doing so, the administration would get out ahead of Congress—pledging something that 67 senators may not be willing to ratify. It has so far refused to do that in its climate work, to the detriment of its international popularity. But this is what European Union countries do all the time, Rob Bradley, the World Resources Institute’s director of international climate policy, said on Friday. They make agreements at the international level, then pass national legislation to make good on their promises. And, said Bradley, they’ve grown tired of hearing why this doesn’t work in the United States.

Stern’s suggestion—a U.S. commitment contingent on Congress passing legislation—could help the administration work around that dilemma.

Finally, a bit more from Agence France-Presse:

The United States will present an emissions target at upcoming UN climate change talks in Copenhagen, a senior official said Monday, as President Barack Obama mulled whether to attend the conference.

The official refused to be drawn on what that target would be but indicated that Obama would announce it in the next few days along with a decision on whether he will fly to the Danish capital to give added impetus to proceedings.

Added impetus to proceedings--let's hope our inspirer-in-chief finds a more inspiring way to put it.

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

I had previously blogged on the anti-mature (ante-mature?) antics of the Senator from Oklahoma (see Sen. Inhofe explains he’s going to Copenhagen so that when Sen. Kerry says “Yes. We’re going to pass a global warming bill” then “I will be able to stand up and say, ‘No, it’s over. Get a life. You lost. I won!’ ”).  Now this video has been posted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c93Fp_kmrz4&feature=player_embedded

Seemed like a fitting tribute to Friday’s big story, from the man who, just coincidentally, said on Wednesday in a lengthy speech on the Senate Floor, “I proudly declare 2009 as the ‘Year of the Skeptic,’ the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.”

While I hardly ever agree with Inhofe, there’s no denying that many scientists who question the consensus are finally being heard … thank goodness!

You can find some of those scientists in my category “Uncharacteristically Blunt Scientists.”  See also my 2008 post, “Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming.”  Certainly the majority of the scientific observations and studies since the 2007 IPCC report — which is typically labeled the “consensus” since every single member government must approve the summaries word for word, a process that inevitably waters down the language — makes clear global warming is coming faster and harder than the consensus had suggested.  You can find a variety of those studies here and below.

And, for clarity’s sake, yes, I draw a distinction between what I’d call the “basic scientific consensus” that the climate is changing and humans are the main cause and so on  — which is acknowledged by every major scientific body (click here for links) — and the “future impacts consensus” on what the world faces if we stay on our current emissions path, which recent analysis suggests has been underestimated and underanalyzed by the IPCC.   See, for instance, the presentations delivered at the recent “Four degrees and beyond” conference, one of which I blogged on here — UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

December 19—the day after COP15

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

As Copenhagen prepares for December, a strange combination of Christmas lights, clean energy expos, evergreen wreaths, and security barriers have begun to crop up around the city. It's an exciting time to be in Copenhagen reflecting on a year of intense pressure, activity, and engagement around the world.

Over the past several months (and years), a growing movement has coalesced around the conference here next month and it's hard to believe it's finally almost here. In June, the sleepy German town of Bonn saw hundreds of activists descend in the rain upon the normally quiet Subsidiary Bodies negotiations at the UNFCCC's home. Thousands around the world participated in the September 21 Global Wakeup Call. Then in Bangkok in October thousands marched outside the UNESCAP building calling for climate action. October 24th saw the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history, spearheaded by 350.org, with over 5,000 events in 181 countries around the world.

And now, rumors of tens of thousands are looming on Copenhagen, including, by my count so far, at least 15 Heads of State who have committed to attending the talks (although Yvo de Boer said in Barcelona that he expects at least 40). [UPDATE: The AP is reporting a Danish official has suggested 65 Heads of State are planning on attending as of Sunday the 22nd of November.]

The last time I wrote, it was a dark and gloomy day in Copenhagen. But today was beautiful -- the sun was out, the weather warm, and the bustle on the street was electric.

The last time I wrote, I was convincing myself, and others, that all was not lost for December. Now, on this bright and sunny day, I'm as convinced as ever that world leaders can achieve an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen if they try.

Even in the past week, we've seen movement around the world. The Alliance of Small Island states continue to raise its collective voice of conscience against a weak outcome in Copenhagen. We've heard that the Chinese would be willing to bring a number to the table in Copenhagen. We've seen South Korea confirm a voluntary emissions reduction target of 30 percent below business as usual by 2020. The European Union has said that it would like a binding agreement in Copenhagen. France and Brazil came out with a "climate bible" -- an agreement between two nations to work together on climate change. This follows Brazil's previous announcement of voluntary emissions cuts of 36-39% by 2020 below business as usual in a "political gesture" some weeks ago.

Even the Danish government, which had caused so many hearts to sink with its proposal of a "politically binding" outcome in Copenhagen, seemed to change its tune ... if only just a bit. The Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard (who will chair the negotiations in December), spoke in a press briefing at the close of the preparatory meeting last week, assuring the world that her aim is a legally binding outcome from the negotiations.

Finally, eyes continue to focus on the U.S. In the joint announcement between the U.S. and China, President Obama indicated his team could bring further commitments to the table in Copenhagen. As Copenhagen creeps towards December, the question remains, will Obama come to Copenhagen? And if so, will he come bearing gifts ... or a lump of coal?

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President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

First things first: A week of anticlimaxes saw President Barack Obama conducting a less-than-exuberant swing through China, the international community conceding a binding climate treaty at the COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen, and U.S. lawmakers postponing to the spring of 2010 consideration of climate policy -- even as talk of a legislative "plan B" surfaced. A Wall Street Journal piece on Obama's China visit characterizes how hemmed in the president is abroad and at home, balancing as complex a portfolio as any new president has faced in a century, at least.

Obama left China with seven commitments to work more closely on energy matters, particularly the development of an inventory for China's greenhouse gas emissions. This technical cooperation may have a political echo in Washington, where Senate Democrats making up their minds about climate change policy have expressed concern that the world's leading CO2 producer, China, is unable to quantify its pollution. A close read of language in the U.S.-China agreement reveals "subtle but important shift" in climate positions, writes NRDC's Jake Schmidt.

The call is (also) coming from inside the house: Other international voices sound increasingly nonplussed with U.S. performance in the global climate arena. Critics blame Obama, who personifies America abroad, for what they see as a continuation of President George W. Bush's policies against Kyoto-style international climate agreements. The German newsweekly Spiegel publishes a deeply critical view of Obama's young presidency. It echoes voices heard elsewhere, voices Climate Post heard a little bit in India last month and that he documented in a post this week over at the New York Times' DotEarth blog. The Catch-22: The U.S.'s critics abroad feel that their complaints will not be heard here, since, as Christian Schwägerl charges in Spiegel, "Americans do not look beyond their own borders."

Naomi Klein, the activist, globalization skeptic, and writer, provides a fine example in Rolling Stone of how some Americans do not look within their own borders. Klein's breathless call for climate reparations paid by rich nations to poor, vulnerable nations overlooks major and minor "real-world" issues, beginning with which bank account -- previously unrevealed -- is she writing her checks from? The piece makes a fine bookend with George Will's latest effort, as naive as Will's piece is ignorant. (Both writers seem equally angry.)

Thomas Friedman thumps opponents of measures to reduce national emissions of heat-trapping gases, condensing observations of his recent book into his New York Times column.

You heard it here first!: The COP-15 talks in Copenhagen were a cautious success. After months of increasingly dour headlines, 15,000 people (18 of them from the Nicholas Institute and Nicholas School) will have descended three weeks from now on this elegant Scandinavian capital and will have reached a political agreement, in a spirit of collaboration and goodwill that will be expected to lead to a binding legal treaty next year. Whatever will have happened in Copenhagen to make it a success -- after all, we just don't know -- it's likely that high-profile attendees will trumpet its successes, however defined. There has been too much anticipation, too much pre-game show, too many resources spent, to not produce something tangible, or at least argue that something tangible was produced. Even if it receives headlines similar in tone to Obama's China trip.

A casual observer to the now year-long run-up to next month's talks in Copenhagen might be forgiven for thinking that a treaty is an end in itself. The treaty is a means by which countries force themselves and each other to transform their economies toward non-polluting energy systems. The Guardian lassoes some top thinkers on climate policy, who emphasize the urgency to inject capital into energy technologies that do not emit heat-trapping gases. The public emphasis on a deal next month has overshadowed this urgency, the Guardian contents, and, unless investment picks up, nations will continue to build out fossil-fuel powered 20th-century-style infrastructure projects.

Without national or international guidance, businesses already working toward a clean tech economy face considerable uncertainty. Players in the $126 billion global carbon market -- concentrated in the European Union's emissions trading scheme -- are particularly exposed. The impetus for that market came after the Kyoto Protocol. Its 2012 expiration date threatens investments, money, and projects tied up in the system. Developing nations, particularly China and India, have made up to hundreds of millions of dollars executing carbon-reduction projects that generate emission credits that rich nations use to "offset" their pollution. The global market for carbon offsets traded under the current regime adds up to $6.5 billion.

The push for "green jobs" continues, even without an international mandate. Americans in green jobs needn't work for U.S. companies, it turns out. With Obama in China, Suntech, the world's largest maker of solar panels, announced it would build a factory near Phoenix. The Chinese company's move may ease some lawmakers' concerns that less expensive labor costs will push clean-energy manufacturing jobs overseas, BusinessWeek reports. That the profit motive is drawing a Chinese solar giant to the U.S. should fuel the ongoing confusion about whether solar energy is affordable or not.

Roger Pielke Jr, the University of Colorado Boulder political scientist who plays Ugolino to more liberal climate bloggers' Ruggieri (or vice versa), reminds us with a picture, and his own quick romp through the headlines, what's happening, and keeps happening, far beneath lofty discussions and aspirations of Copenhagen.

A day in the life: Washington's mystique might emerge in the contrast between the monumental things that occur here (and that are expected to but don't), and the patient, gradual, and frequently silent steps it takes to achieve them. It takes a piece like Barry Yeoman's profile of Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions (and Climate Post's "publisher") to add depth to the generally superficial headlines about events in Washington. The piece, just published in Duke magazine, lays out with dimension and color the Institute's mission and the way we do the things we do.

Climate Post will be off next week for Thanksgiving and will return Dec. 3.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

What is the best way to talk about those who are devoting their efforts to spread disinformation on climate science and/or climate legislation?  Recent speeches by President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Rudd, who represent the two biggest industrialized countries that have so far refused to take action, offer some suggestions.

Certainly, if you want to hear the best progressive messaging on energy and climate — if you want to know the best phrases and framing — listen to the President.  In two recent speeches Obama has gone out of his way to criticize the disinformers and delayers.

In Florida late last month, Obama said “The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition is going to fight, the more we’re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people.  Now, there are those who are also going to suggest that moving towards a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs.  And they’re going to argue that we should do nothing, stand pat, do less, or delay action yet again.”

A few days earlier, at M.I.T. he said:

The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim — make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.

Obama understands that our current economic system is dangerously unsustainable, and that the opposition is driven to a large extent by those who act out of narrow self-interest or ideology.  He doesn’t use the term “denier,” instead accusing those who spread anti-scientific disinformation of cynicism.  He does use the word “delay” in both speeches, focusing on the primary goal of the opposition.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what words the President uses — those who oppose his policies will misquote and misrepresent them.  One of the leading disinformers, Pat Michaels, made this absurd assertion on National Review Online:

He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree.

No, he didn’t say “any scientific debate” is unscrupulous.  He was just talking about those who “contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence.”  And no, he didn’t talk tough.  If you check the transcript as delivered (here), he said:

So we’re going to have to work on those folks.

Not really so threatening, even for a Chicagoan.  If anyone has a video of that segment of the speech, post a link in the comments.

The point is that it doesn’t matter what you say, the delayers (and deniers) will misrepresent you (and the science) and then attack the misrepresentation.  That’s what they do.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a much tougher speech on November 6, which I’m going to excerpt at length at the end because it is so astonishing.  Australia is the canary-in-the-coal-mine koala-in-the-bushfire for climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent (see “Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040” and “Global Boiling: Australia’s hellish black Saturday of extreme fire“ and “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”).  Rudd also faces a conservative opposition to climate action (see here) and an aggressive disinformation campaign, as he explained:

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.

Together, these groups, alive in every major country including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and they are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world.

I have never been a huge fan of the word “deniers,” as I explained in a March 2008 post:  Media enable denier spin 3: PLEASE stop calling them “skeptics.” But, as I wrote, I suspect future generations will call them “climate destroyers” or worse.  I noted that, “delayer” is a “far more accurate term,” since “They all want delay and delay is fatal.”  Delayers clearly encompasses all three of Rudd’s categories.  As the NYT’s Revkin explained about a 2008  skeptic denier delayer conference in New York, “The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases.”

But while I may be The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger,” I couldn’t get my preferred term — or its variants, like “delayer-1000,” widely accepted.  If you google, “Global warming delayer” [in quotes], you get some 2000 hits.  If you google, “Global warming delayer” [in quotes], you get over 430,000.  Climate science denial has actually flourished even as the evidence refuting it grows, which may not surprise some, but I confess I didn’t think so many seemingly serious people would double down on disinformation.

You can’t fight Google — and you can’t miss the in-your-face anti-scientific nature of the disinformers — so I ultimately ended up going back to the occasional use of the word “deniers” as I explained in this June post, Anti-science conservatives are stuck in denial but for climate science activists, the reverse is true:

And so, for better or worse, the word “deniers” stays with us.  As I’ve said, I will try to reserve that term for the professional disinformers and their work.  And I’ll try to remember to use the term delayers for those who have been misled.

I will still use “delayers,” sometimes in combination with “deniers,” and link back to this post for explanation.  I will also keep using the term “anti-scientific” and “disinformers” since I think they are also accurate.

Prime Minister Rudd makes the strongest case to date for using the strongest possible language to describe those who knowingly spread disinformation.  You can read Get Energy Smart Now on his speech, and I’m going to excerpt it at length below:

When you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices – action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear – we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action.

Action now. Not action delayed.

As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia’s environment and economy will be among the hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we do not act now. The scientific evidence from the CSIRO and other expert bodies have outlined the implications for Australia, in the absence of national and global action on climate change:

The Government took a plan to tackle climate change to the last election, to tackle the risks climate change poses to our planet, and especially to the health, lifestyle and livelihoods of our children.

That plan included two fundamental parts:

This was the platform we took to the Australian people at the election. This is the program of action we have been prosecuting over the past two years. Yet the cornerstone of this program of action, the CPRS, still lies stymied in the Senate.

Australia has certainly not been alone in our endeavours to tackle global climate change. At the same time, around the world we have seen nations of every political stripe take concrete action to work towards legislation in this critical area – actions which have been slowly building towards coordinated international action to tackle climate change. And most nations have been engaged in the multilateral process – through the Bali Roadmap two years ago, through the 14th Conference of the Parties in Poznan, Poland last year, and the intensifying global negotiations leading up to the 15th Conference of Parties in Copenhagen this year.

Today, the culmination of this domestic and global action is in sight. Much progress has been made, but, the truth is that there is still a long way to go. In fact, the hardest part of our journey is ahead of us over the next 31 days.

This is a profoundly important time for our nation, for our world and for our planet.

In Australia, we must pass our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – to deliver certainty for business at home and to play our part abroad in any global agreement to bring greenhouse gases down.

President Obama in the United States is also working hard so that he can take strong commitments to Copenhagen. And let us never forget that in the US, as in Australia, under both our respective previous governments, zero action was taken on bringing in cap and trade schemes meaning that the governments that replaced them began with a zero start.

Other countries are striving to build domestic political momentum in their own countries to take strong commitments into the global deal.

The challenge we face, and others around the world face, is to build momentum and overcome domestic political constraints.

The truth is this is hard, because the climate change skeptics, the climate change deniers, the opponents of climate change action are active in every country.

They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.

Powerful enough to so far block domestic legislation in Australia, powerful enough to so far slow down the passage of legislation through the US Congress. And ultimately – by limiting the ambition of national climate change commitments – they are powerful enough to threaten a deal on global climate change both in Copenhagen and beyond.

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.

Together, these groups, alive in every major country including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and they are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world.

As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom, provoking fear campaigns in every country they can, blocking or delaying domestic legislation in every country they can, with the objective of slowing and if possible destroying the momentum towards a global deal on climate change.

As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.

It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours – some more sophisticated than others.

It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.

It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.

The first category of those opposed to action is the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus. This group believes the science is inconclusive and does not provide an evidentiary basis for anthropogenic climate change.

In Australia, before the 2007 election, this group was thought to be relatively small. There appeared – for a time – to be bipartisan consensus on the need for action on climate change. In recent times, this bipartisan support has frayed.

As one Liberal Member of Parliament said to Phil Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald last year:
“[at the last election we supported an ETS because] we were staring at an electoral abyss. We had to pretend we cared.”
(SMH, 28 JULY 2008)

More recently that pretence has been increasingly cast aside. Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that “the science … is contentious to say the least”. (27 July 2009)

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said:
“I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth”.

Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said:
“Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year:
“CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant… This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey – who knows better – has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August:
“Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute.”
(12 AUGUST 2009)

Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB:
“I think most people have at least some doubts about the science.”
(19 JUNE 2009)

The tentacles of the climate change skeptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party, and once you add the National Party it’s plan the skeptics and the deniers are a major force.

Climate sceptics are also a powerful political lobby in the United States.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steel said on 6 March 2009:
“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner said on April 19 2009:
“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide.”

Republican Congressman John Shimkus said on 25 March 2009:
“If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?”

The legion of climate change skeptics are active across the world, and they happily play with our children’s future.

The clock is ticking for the planet, but the climate change skeptics simply do not care. The vested interests at work are simply too great.

It’s been more than 30 years since the first World Climate Conference called on governments to guard against potential climate hazards.

It’s been 20 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed and produced its first report.

17 years ago, in 1992, the international community acknowledged the importance of tackling climate change at the Rio Earth Summit and created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

And the most recent IPCC scientific conclusion in 2007 was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and the “increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world, and the term “very likely” is defined in the scientific conclusion of this report as being 90 per cent probable.

Attempts by politicians in this country and others to present what is an overwhelming global scientific consensus as little more than an unfolding debate, with two sides evenly represented in a legitimate scientific argument, are nothing short of intellectually dishonest. They are a political attempt to subvert what is now a longstanding scientific consensus, an attempt to twist the agreed science in the direction of a predetermined political agenda to kill climate change action.

It reminds me of the efforts of the smoking lobby decades ago as they tried for years to politically subvert by so-called scientific means that there was any link between smoking and lung cancer.

Put more simply: these climate change sceptics around the world would be laughable if they were not so politically powerful – particularly in the ranks of conservative parties.

The second group of do-nothing climate change skeptics are those who purport to accept the scientific consensus, but in the next breath are unwilling to support any of the practicable plans of action that would actually do something about climate change. This group plays lip service to the climate change science but when push comes to shove refuse to support climate change action. In Australia, these naysayers have successfully blocked the development of an emissions trading scheme for more than a decade.

After 12 years of inaction under the previous government, this government has worked to build a national consensus around our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We took the concept to the people at the 2007 election, and since then we have methodically, clearly and comprehensively worked towards passage of our scheme.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper was released on 16 June 2008.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review was released on 30 September 2008.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper was released on 15 December 2008.

The Draft Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation was released in March.

There have been numerous Senate Inquiries.

There have also been numerous industry consultations.

As of May 2009, the Government had built wide support for action on climate through a carbon pollution reduction scheme.

There was broad business, environmental and community support from:

Today, after so many reports, reviews, consultations, not to mention the small matter of an election – the overwhelming need for Australia to tackle the great challenge of our generation is being frustrated by the do-nothing climate change skeptics.

As recently as last year, the Leader of the Opposition was emphatic in his support for an emissions trading scheme. He said it was the “central mechanism” in the fight against climate change.

Speaking at the National Press Club in May last year, he stated:
“The Emissions Trading Scheme is the central mechanism to decarbonise our economy.”
(21 May 2008)

A few days later, he said:
“The biggest element in the fight against climate change has to be the emissions-trading scheme.”
(HANSARD – 26 MAY 2008)

But still today, after so many reports and consultations, the Liberal Party, the National Party and other opponents of action raise objections to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Their objections fall into three categories:

Let us take each of these in turn.

First is the cost to our economy and jobs.

This has been a constant theme of the Liberal and National Parties’ attacks on the CPRS. Mr Turnbull said the CPRS “is guaranteed to slow our economic recovery, cost us jobs.”

And the de facto leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce, refers to the emissions trading scheme as the “employment termination scheme” – whereas I thought any self-respecting National Party leader would be out there standing up for farmers facing 40 to 80 per cent more drought in the future, rather than betraying them.

The facts about the impact of unmitigated climate change on the one hand and the CPRS on the other tell a very different story, but that eternal motto of the Liberal and National Parties is never let the facts stand in the road of a good fear campaign – whether it’s debt, border security or climate change.

Here are the facts.

Treasury modelling done in 2008 demonstrates Australia can continue to achieve strong trend economic growth while making significant cuts in emissions through the CPRS. Treasury modelling also demonstrates that all major employment sectors grow over the years to 2020 – substantially increasing employment from today’s levels. Treasury modelling also projects that clean industries will create sustainable jobs of the future – in fact by 2050 the renewable electricity sector will be 30 times larger than it is today.

Another element of the Liberal and National fear campaign about the design of the CPRS is that it will impose unmanageable cost on households.

Again, Senator Joyce – fearmonger in chief on climate change, he who therefore betrays the real interests of Australian farmers – puts the position of the Liberal and National parties as follows:
“If you live in a cave with a candle you would probably be OK, but if your house is wired up for power then every electrical appliance will be attached to a power generator which in all likelihood will pay a tax and that tax will be passed on to you, the consumer.”
(Joyce – 27 JULY 2009)

Again, the facts on the true household costs and impacts of the CPRS tell a different story. Treasury modelling again demonstrates that the price impact of the CPRS is modest. The CPRS is expected to raise household prices by 0.4 per cent in 2011-12 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13, and the government has provided household compensation to help assist with these modest cost rises.

Pensioners, seniors, carers and people with disability and low-income households will receive additional support to fully meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme. Middle-income households will also receive additional support to help meet the expected overall increase in the cost of living flowing from the scheme.

A third argument from those who quibble with the design of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is that the international design aspects of the scheme are flawed.

Lord Christopher Monckton – a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher – was quoted this week in the Australian press by Janet Albrechtsen. Lord Monckton describes the potential Copenhagen agreement as a plan to set up a transnational “government” on a scale the world has never before seen. Enter the “world government” conspiracy theorists.

Lord Monckton also publicly warned Americans that “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever.”

Janet Albrechtsen, in her understated neo-conservative way, refers to the potential Copenhagen agreement as a UN “power grab”. This gaggle of world government conspiracy theorists are so far out there on the far right, that they rub up next to the global anarchists of the far left.

Those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil.

Those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure.

Those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem.

And that uncoordinated national actions will fix the problem.

Without answering the basic logical question of how can we deal with an existential challenge for the whole planet which lies beyond the capacity of any individual national action to address.

The climate change deniers now form the comfortable bedfellows of the global conspiracy theorists – in total bald-faced denial of global scientific, economic and environmental reality. These arguments – thinly veiled attempts to create a new climate change global conspiracy theory – are now being used in Australia.

Like the arguments from climate change deniers, these arguments have zero basis in evidence.

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change?

Where is their equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government on the cost impacts for households from the CPRS – and on the adequacy of the compensation arrangements put in place by the Government in our White Paper?

The answer once again is there is none.

Where is the evidence basis offered by the new league of world government conspiracy theorists that climate change can be effectively dealt with by market means or by uncoordinated national means?

Answer – there is none.

The truth is that the do-nothing climate change skeptics offer no alternative official body of evidence from any credible government in the world.

Absolutely none. The truth is they offer zero evidence.

Instead they offer maximum fear, the universal conservative stock in trade.

And by doing so, these do-nothing climate change skeptics are prepared to destroy our children’s future.

The third group of climate deniers are those who pretend to accept the science but then urge delay because they don’t want their country to be the first to act.

In Australia there was once a political consensus resisting this parochial view.

The Shergold Report commissioned by John Howard and written by the head of the Prime Minister’s department recommended that Australia should not wait for the rest of the world to act:

“… waiting until a truly global response emerges before imposing an emissions cap will place costs on Australia by increasing business uncertainty and delaying or losing investment.”
(Report of the Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, June 2007, p.6)

The current Leader of the Opposition also stated that a domestic ETS would help in international negotiations too:
“… our first hand experience in implementing … an emissions trading system would be of considerable assistance in our international discussions and negotiation aimed at achieving an effective global agreement.”
(Turnbull – SMH Opinion Piece – 9 July 2008)

Then the Leader of the Opposition stated he no longer supported domestic action before Copenhagen:
“I would not find, I would not support finalising the design this year. Even the best designed scheme in theory needs to have the input of the knowledge of what happens at Copenhagen and what the Americans will do.”
(AM – 16 MARCH 2009)

Seven times the Liberals and Nationals have promised to make a decision on their policy on climate change – and seven times they have delayed.

It is an endless cycle of delay – and I am sure that with December almost upon us, the eighth excuse cannot be far away – which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted at which time Australia will act.

What absolute political cowardice.

What an absolute failure of leadership.

What an absolute failure of logic.

The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act.

The immediate and inevitable consequence of this logic – if echoed in other countries – is that there will be no global deal as each nation says to its domestic constituencies that they cannot act because others have not acted.

The result is a negotiating stalemate. A permanent standoff.

And this of course is the consistent ambition of all three groups of do-nothing climate change deniers.

As we approach Copenhagen, it becomes clearer that the domestic political pressure produced by the climate change skeptics now has profound global consequences by reducing the momentum towards an ambitious global deal. The argument that we must not act until others do is an argument that has been used by political cowards since time immemorial – both of the left and the right.

To take just one example, it has been used as an argument to retain protectionism, stifling economic growth and global competition, and preventing the spread of global prosperity.

As many have noted, it is the international political version of the prisoner’s dilemma. If we allow our actions to be dictated by what we falsely conclude to be in our narrow self-interest, then we harm not just others but ourselves as well because climate change inaction harms us as well.

Climate change deniers are small in number, but they are too dangerous to be ignored. They are well resourced and well represented by political conservatives in many, many countries.

And the danger they pose is this – by collapsing political momentum towards national and global action on climate change, they collapse global political will to act at all. They are the stick that gets stuck in the wheel, that despite its size may yet bring the train to a complete stop.

And that is what they want, because they are driven by a narrowly defined self interest of the present and are utterly contemptuous towards our children’s interest in the future.

This brigade of do-nothing climate change skeptics are dangerous because if they succeed, then it is all of us who will suffer.

Our children.

And our grandchildren.

If we fail, then it will be a failure that will echo through future generations.

The consequences for Australia of failing to act domestically and internationally on climate change are severe. We know from formal global and national economic modelling that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting. Treasury modelling from October 2008 shows that economies that defer action on climate change face long-term costs around 15 per cent higher than those that take action now.

The sooner we act, the better placed our companies will be to benefit from new emerging global markets, and to benefit from the economic gains from improved efficiency. Moving to a low pollution economy will require significant investment in renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency and other low emissions technologies.

We need to start giving the signal to investors that they need to factor the price of carbon into their decisions to make the investments we need. Importantly, business needs certainty to make these investments.

As Greig Gailey, former President of the Business Council of Australia said:
“Only business can make the many investments needed to transition Australia to a low carbon economy. To do this business needs certainty.”

Without passage of the CPRS there will be no certainty for business. That is why business groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group want to see the major parties come together and vote on the CPRS this year.

Heather Ridout, Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group said:
“… many of our members are telling us that they are holding off making investments until there is a greater degree of clarity around domestic climate change legislation.”
(ADECCO Group Australia Breakfast – 15 October 2009)

Russell Caplan, Chairman of Shell Australia, said:
“… we believe a far greater risk is that Australia misses the opportunity to put a policy framework in place to deal with this issue. This would create a climate of continuing uncertainty for industry and potentially delay the massive investments required.”
(BRW – 6 August 2009)

These are the implications for Australia. These are the political challenges we now face both at home and abroad.

But my unequivocal message to the nation today is that this nation Australia will not be deterred.

Our course is clear.

That is why this government will press forward with our plan to tackle climate change domestically and globally.

Domestically we will press forward with the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

It will be voted on in the House in the week beginning Monday November 16.

It will be introduced into the Senate immediately after the vote in the House.

It will then be voted on in the Senate in the week beginning 23 November.

We welcome the Opposition’s recent cooperation and I’m pleased to hear from Minister Wong that negotiations are proceeding in good faith. I’d like to personally commend the Member for Groome for his genuine efforts to engage with the Government in good faith to reach a reasonable outcome with the Government that will finally deliver action on Climate Change.

We are of course concerned by the comments of the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate that “even if the government accepts all our amendments, we may well still vote against the bill.”
(NICK MINCHIN- 2UE- 30 OCTOBER 2009)

The do-nothing climate change skeptics are still alive and well in the Coalition. After 12 years of inaction, and after two years of preparation, the nation demands a genuine timetable and good faith negotiations to give business the certainty they need with climate change.

The Australian Government is also committed to intensively engaging to support an ambitious agreement in Copenhagen.

At Copenhagen we need an ambitious agreement on mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday, the formal UN negotiations are moving slowly.

The UN Secretary-General has said we must maximise the agreement we can reach in Copenhagen. They can resolve some issues, but not others.

Now is time for strenuous efforts by all leaders and ministers.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Rasmussen is engaging a growing number of leaders – in the Copenhagen Commitment Circle – to accelerate engagement by leaders.

Australia is committed to playing a leadership role and has joined Mexico and the UN Secretary-General in the initial group of ‘friends of the Chair’ to help build consensus and draw out concrete commitments from across the world.

In July this year at the G8 meetings in L’Aquila, Australia helped form a 2 degree Celsius 450 ppm ambition for global action on climate change, and it was at this meeting that Australia launched the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a concrete initiative to make CCS technology a reality.

Australia is currently chair of the Pacific Island Forum which this year delivered the Pacific Leaders’ Climate Change Call to Action demanding urgent action on a real threat to the viability of some Pacific communities.

In September, Australia at the request of the UN Secretary-General co-chaired a roundtable at the UN Special Session on Climate Change – with a view to driving a sense of political urgency with other leaders, and representing the views of the Pacific.

Australia has launched the Forest Carbon Partnerships with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea – an initiative providing policy and technical support to protect the great forests in our neighbourhood.

And Australia has established a $150 million Climate Change Adaptation Fund – supporting vulnerable nations dealing with the real impact of climate change, with a strong focus on the Pacific.

For years – and then, with increasing intensity, in recent months – do-nothing climate change skeptics have been mounting a systematic campaign against action on climate change.

Their aim is not to convince every person on earth of the follies of acting on climate change. Their aim is to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible.

By slowing the actions of each individual country, they aim to slowly drag global negotiations on climate change to a standstill. By hampering decisive action at a national level, they aim to make it impossible at an international level.

If Copenhagen does not deliver the outcome we so urgently need, no individual climate change skeptic will be responsible, but each of them will have played their part.

The corrosive effect of climate skeptics eroding the political will to act may be the disintegration of any possibility of meaningful action on climate change.

In this debate the climate change skeptics have erected an intellectual house of cards based on one simple premise: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

When you boil down their arguments, their world government conspiracy theories and their back of the envelope calculations – that in its starkest simplicity and entirety is what is left: that the cost of not acting is nothing.

That is the simplest premise upon which the scepticism of Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Alan, Janet and even Lord Monckton is based. They cling to that single premise like a polar bear clings to a melting iceberg.

Without that premise, their scepticism is sunk. Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet and the Thatcherite Lord Monckton are betting the house on that simple premise that the cost of not acting is nothing.

For people who claim to hold the conservative torch, their scepticism is in fact radical in its riskiness and recklessness. By deliberately undermining and eroding the capacity to achieve both domestic and international action on climate change the skeptics are attempting to force the world to take the single most reckless bet in our long history.

They are betting our future, the future of our children and our grandchildren, and they are doing so based on their own personal intuitions, their personal prejudices and their deeply ingrained political prejudices.

And they are doing so in the total absence of any genuine body of evidence.

Climate change skeptics in all their guises and disguises are not conservatives. They are radicals.

They are reckless gamblers who are betting all our futures on their arrogant assumption that their intuitions should triumph over the evidence.

The logic of these skeptics belongs in a casino, not a science lab, and not in the ranks of any responsible government.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet, even Lord Monckton shouldn’t even bother with the pretence of science and just admit the currency of their prescription for inaction has all the legitimacy of a roulette wheel.

Basically, let’s just sit back, do nothing and see what happens.

The alternative – our alternative – is to base policy on the evidence.

No responsible government confronted with the evidence delivered by the 4,000 scientists associated with the international panel could then in conscience choose not to act. In any public company, it would represent a gross contempt of the most basic fiduciary duty.

Malcolm and Barnaby might like to bet the future of Australia on the off chance of winning an election, but this Government will not.

A fairly well-known bloke once said that when gambling:

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.
Know when to walk away, know when to run.

My message to the climate change skeptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers is this:

You are betting our children’s future and the future of our grandchildren.

You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition – on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.

That is too big a risk, too radical a departure from the basic conservative principles of public policy.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future.

You’ve got to know when to fold ‘em – and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.

As always, comments welcome.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Science historian Weart on global warming

By Teryn Norris & Devon Swezey

You know the world is changing when the president’s first trip to Asia is defined by a new U.S. foreign policy dubbed “strategic reassurance” – convincing China that the United States has no intention of containing its growing power or endangering its foreign investments. As the New York Times put it, “When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay respects to his banker.”

You also know times are changing when China, the world’s greatest polluter, and other Asian nations are poised to dominate the burgeoning global clean-tech industry by out-investing the United States. That’s the conclusion of a large new report we co-authored called "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," released this week by the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (see coverage in Financial Times and Wall Street Journal). The report is the first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four nations – China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and finds the following:

“Asia’s rising ‘clean technology tigers’ – China, Japan, and South Korea – have already passed the United States in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies and over the next five years will out-invest the U.S. three-to-one in these sectors… While some U.S. firms will benefit from the establishment of joint ventures overseas, the jobs, tax revenues, and other benefits of clean tech growth will overwhelmingly accrue to Asian nations… Should the investment gap persist, the U.S. will import the overwhelming majority of clean energy technologies it deploys.”

What do these two changes have in common? They both reflect the accelerating shift of global power from America to Asia, caused in large part by the serious mismanagement of U.S. economic policy.

The Pacific power shift is not a new phenomenon, and the Obama administration is wise to seek stronger ties with the region. The U.S. should applaud Asia’s growth, which is partly an outcome of our own success at promoting economic liberalism and international development. This shift in power is not a zero-sum game, nor should it be: the U.S. and Asia should avoid trade wars at all costs, and we should seize opportunities for partnership on a range of issues, from climate change to nuclear proliferation.

But the growing pace of this power shift should be a cause of major concern for Americans, and it should raise serious questions about our economic policies at the highest level. While the U.S. economy has suffered greatly from a crisis produced by its own financial sector – losing millions of jobs, trillions in economic output, and demanding huge spending packages financed by borrowed money – China has shrugged off the global recession with high levels of growth and self-financed stimulus, all while purchasing billions of Treasury bills to fund a U.S. deficit that has reached historic highs.

Last November, addressing the nation on the evening of his election, President Obama declared that “a new era of American leadership is at hand.” And indeed, his new administration has taken significant steps to remake U.S. foreign policy. But unless the U.S. quickly improves its economic competitiveness, our global leadership will be severely damaged. What is demanded now is a major, coordinated national project to regain our economic competitiveness in strategic sectors while permanently correcting the imbalances that led to the Great Recession.

Correcting Imbalances & Fixing Finance

Speaking at the San Francisco Fed last month, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke declared it “extraordinarily urgent” that the U.S. and Asia take steps to prevent a revival of global economic imbalances. There is now broad consensus on how these imbalances – the huge gaps in trade deficits and surpluses, and the associated gaps in national savings, consumption, and investment rates – helped caused the housing bubble and the Great Recession. Alan Greenspan offered a concise explanation in a widely-read column this spring:

“The presumptive cause of the world-wide decline in long-term [mortgage] rates was the tectonic shift in the early 1990s by much of the developing world from heavy emphasis on central planning to increasingly dynamic, export-led market competition. The result was a surge in growth in China and a large number of other emerging market economies that led to an excess of global intended savings relative to intended capital investment.”

In other words, the U.S. housing bubble was caused in large part by the buildup of savings in emerging market economies, especially China, accumulated from their large trade surpluses. As this large “pool of money” was invested internationally, it drove down the costs of borrowing, drove up subprime lending, and created large demand for mortgage-backed securities. This era of easy credit – combined with the use of “innovative” financial instruments, which relaxed mortgage standards, concealed risk, and enabled the mass packaging and sale of these securities – gave rise to the U.S. housing bubble.

This “global pool of money” wouldn’t have existed without the U.S. running an enormous trade deficit, relying on imports and debt to support a high consumption rate – hence the global “imbalance” of high-saving versus high-consuming countries. The U.S. deficit in the trade of goods and services in 2008 was $695 billion, according to the Department of Commerce, compared to China’s surplus of $297 billion.

Speaking in Tokyo last week, President Obama extended this problem to its logical conclusion, calling for rebalanced growth and a new U.S. economic strategy based on exports: “One of the important lessons this recession has taught us is the limits of depending primarily on American consumers and Asian exports to drive growth… [our] new strategy will mean that we save more and spend less, reform our financial systems, reduce our long-term deficit and borrowing. It will also mean a greater emphasis on exports that we can build, produce, and sell all over the world.”

The implication is clear: the United States must shift away from a “financial” economy to an “innovation” economy, one that focuses on creating industries that produce real innovative products to sell around the world. After years of creating imaginary wealth on the pile of sand that was the U.S. financial sector, America must once again get into the business of producing real goods and services. This means reducing the size of the financial sector and the Wall Street “brain drain” – which has distracted the nation’s best and brightest minds from the work of real innovation and entrepreneurship – and refocusing on productive, export-oriented industries. And it means adopting a new era of innovation policies to ensure the U.S. economy is the most competitive in the world, directing targeted public investments into strategic technologies, infrastructure, and high-tech education programs.

This new economic strategy is necessary not just for short-term recovery, but for avoiding future credit bubbles and financial crises, slashing our trade and budget deficit, producing more innovative technologies to improve our everyday lives, and regaining our international leadership.

The Clean Energy Race

What’s the biggest new industry that can boost America’s exports, grow the economy, create better jobs, and tap our innovative potential? In a word, clean-tech.

Here’s why: Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously meeting the surging demand for energy in developing countries, requires the development and deployment of clean energy technologies on a massive scale. Indeed, while global energy demand is expected to double or even triple by 2050, emissions must fall by at least 80 percent over the same period to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Meeting this challenge requires nothing short of a revolutionary shift toward clean energy and a dramatically increased level of investment in these technologies. The International Energy Agency estimates that achieving a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2050 will require total additional global investments of $45 trillion. "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" notes that “global private investment in renewable energy and energy efficient technologies alone is estimated to reach $450 billion annually by 2012 and $600 billion by 2020, and much larger if recent market opportunity estimates are realized.” Recognizing these trends, an increasing number of analysts are calling the clean-tech industry a “guaranteed-growth” sector.

No wonder President Obama has made this his signature statement: “The nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.”

Make no mistake: healthy international competition in the clean-tech industry will not hinder the global transition to clean energy, but rather will act as one of the most powerful accelerators for clean energy development and deployment in the world. International collaboration, such as technology partnerships, will be important to promote clean energy development in China and other developing countries, but we also need to think about how to leverage competitive forces. International competition in the clean energy industry can improve technologies and reduce their price at a rapid pace, and governments can play a more active role in promoting these activities. For example, we should consider establishing an official “U.S.-China Clean Tech Competition” – jointly funded by each country – to promote competition between U.S. and Chinese firms in developing the most innovative technologies and business models.

Unfortunately, the United States is already falling behind its competitors in this critical industry. Just for starters, we rely on foreign companies for the majority of our wind turbines, produce less than 10 percent of the world’s solar cells, and we’re losing ground on hybrid and electric vehicle technology and manufacturing. China leads the global production of solar cells and wind turbines, and it is expected to become the number one solar market within five years. By 2012, China, Japan, and South Korea are expected to produce 1.6 million hybrid gas-electric or electric vehicles annually compared to North America, which is projected to produce 267,000, less than a fifth as many, according to industry forecasts.

China, Japan, and South Korea plan to gain even greater “first-mover” advantages and solidify this lead with coordinated and comprehensive policies based largely on direct government investment. These governments are expected to invest a total of $509 billion in clean technology over the next five years, compared to $172 billion in the United States, assuming passage of the proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act and including current budget appropriations and recently enacted stimulus measures. According to a recent Deutsche Bank report, “generous and well-targeted [clean-tech] incentives” backed by “comprehensive and integrated government plans” in China and Japan will create a low-risk environment for investors and stimulate high levels of private investment.

As John Doerr and Jeff Immelt, two of the country’s top business leaders, recently wrote in the Washington Post, “We are clearly not in the lead today. That position is held by China, which understands the importance of controlling its energy future. China's commitment to developing clean energy technologies and markets is breathtaking.”

A New Project for Energy Competitiveness

Without a large national project to regain competitiveness in the clean-tech sector, the United States will miss a major opportunity to grow our economy, correct our trade imbalance, and reduce our national deficit. Indeed, even if we transition to clean sources of energy, we risk trading our dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign clean energy.

Fortunately, the United States has a history of regaining competitiveness in strategic industries. Decades ago, after trailing Europe in aviation and aerospace, we raced ahead through sustained federal support for aviation technology development. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, we invested heavily in education, science, and technology, enabling us to put the first man on the moon and achieve breakthroughs in information-age technology. When the Japanese took the lead in the semiconductor industry in the 1980s, we formed SEMATECH, a public-private partnership that successfully repositioned the U.S. as the global market leader.

What each of these stories has in common is direct public investment in technology innovation and deployment, education, and infrastructure, aimed at generating competitive private industries. Fareed Zakaria explains the primary reasons for America’s previous innovation leadership in the current cover story of Newsweek: “The third tidal wave was massive government funding… After World War II, the Cold War drove this funding to new highs, so that by the 1950s, the United States was spending 3 percent of GDP on R&D, which amounted to a majority of the total spending on science on the planet. Government funding of basic research has been astonishingly productive.” (Zakaria cites a report that one of us co-authored called “Case Studies in American Innovation.”)

Indeed, the United States did not invent the Internet by enforcing a cap and trade system on fax machines, nor did we create the personal computer by taxing typewriters. Those who suggest we can simply rely on indirect, market-based mechanisms to achieve a clean energy revolution fail to understand the history of technology innovation and competitiveness, and they risk relegating our clean-tech industry to second-class status or worse. Indeed, the same Deutsche Bank report above noted that the U.S. is a “moderate-risk” country compared to the lower-risk environment of China and Japan, because we rely on “a more volatile market incentive approach and has suffered from a start-stop approach in some areas.”

What is demanded today is a national energy competitiveness project based on the success of past U.S. innovation policy, including targeted support for technology research, development, demonstration, deployment, education, infrastructure, and manufacturing. A large and growing group of energy experts, think tanks, and companies – including Google, Brookings Institution, dozens of Nobel Laureates, Association of American Universities, Breakthrough Institute, and Third Way – has united behind a target for federal clean energy R&D at $15 billion per year. Unfortunately, the climate bill under consideration in the Senate would only invest around $1.4 billion per year in energy R&D. Similarly, the bill would only offer a one-time capitalization of $10 billion for a Clean Energy Deployment Administration. Another good provision is the IMPACT Act, focused on clean technology manufacturing, but here again it is unclear whether it will be adequately funded.

As we conclude in “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant”: “If the United States hopes to compete for new clean energy industries it must close the widening gap between U.S. and Asian government investments in research and innovation, manufacturing, and domestic market demand. Small, indirect and uncoordinated incentives are not sufficient to outcompete Asia’s clean tech tigers. To regain economic leadership in the global clean energy industry, U.S. energy policy must include large, direct and coordinated investments in clean technology R&D, manufacturing, deployment, and infrastructure.”

The Energy Generation

The remaining piece is clean energy education. It is well known that America is falling behind in high-tech education. What’s less well understood is that nearly half the U.S. energy workforce is expected to retire over the next decade. Federal investment in education, from the G.I. Bill to the National Defense Education Act, was vital for U.S. competitiveness in the post-war era, and it will be vital for competing in the burgeoning clean energy industry. As Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently put it, “If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be ‘education.’”

In April, President Obama proposed an important initiative to inspire the next generation of clean energy innovators. The program, called RE-ENERGYSE (Regaining our Energy Science and Engineering Edge), would prepare thousands of highly skilled scientists and engineers to enter clean-energy fields by supporting energy education programs at universities, technical colleges, and K-12 schools. According to the Department of Energy, the program would educate between 5,000 and 8,500 energy scientists, engineers, and other professionals by 2015, rising to 10,000 to 17,000 professionals by 2020.

RE-ENERGYSE is critical for reclaiming U.S. leadership in the clean energy sector. As a group of over 100 universities, professional associations, and student groups stated in a recent letter to the Senate, “RE-ENERGYSE is an innovative program that will train America’s future energy workforce, accelerate our transition to a prosperous clean energy economy, and ensure that we lead the world’s burgeoning clean technology industries.”

Unfortunately, Congress failed to provide any funding for RE-ENERGYSE for 2010. But the administration is not giving up, and it intends to pursue funding for RE-ENERGYSE in its 2011 budget proposal. College students have a unique role to play in advancing this initiative and the broader energy competitiveness agenda. RE-ENERGYSE needs a much stronger base of support to pass Congress next year, and as the primary stakeholders in the program, students can be uniquely influential in organizing a coalition of supporters and directly voicing their concerns to members of Congress. That’s why students at Stanford University are currently launching a national effort called Americans for Energy Leadership, aimed at advancing RE-ENERGYSE and inspiring the next generation of energy innovators.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the launch of Sputnik, the United States launched a massive national effort to lead the space race and win the Cold War. Today, the clean energy race represents one of the greatest opportunities and challenges for American leadership in a generation. If we do not take immediate action to launch a national energy competitiveness project based on large, direct, and coordinated innovation policies, we will effectively cede the clean-energy industry to Asia and other competitors. The mass majority of exports, jobs, tax revenues, and other economic benefits will accrue to foreign countries, and we will miss a historic opportunity to achieve a new era of American leadership. The choice should be clear.

--
Originally published by The Stanford Review

Teryn Norris is a Senior Advisor at the Breakthrough Institute, Public Policy major at Stanford University, and Director of Americans for Energy Leadership. Devon Swezey is Project Director at the Breakthrough Institute and graduated from Stanford University in 2008. They are co-authors of the new report, “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States.”

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

How to make 1.7 million new clean energy jobs permanent

December 19—the day after COP15

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Co-written by Julian L. Wong of the Center for American Progress.

Obama and President Hu Jintao together at a reception before the formal state dinner in Beijing.Photo: whitehouse.govTuesday, a comprehensive plan for U.S.-China cooperation on clean energy and climate change was announced in Beijing by President Obama and President Hu Jintao. The overall plan is much more ambitious in scope and depth than we had anticipated and contains directives to create various institutions and programs addressing a wide array of cooperation on clean-energy technologies and capacity building, including very important efforts on helping China build a robust, transparent, and accurate inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions.

These efforts include cooperation in the following areas:

1. Greenhouse gas inventory. A memorandum of cooperation between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and China's National Development and Reform Commission sets out avenues for collaboration on capacity building in climate change, with an initial focus on helping China to develop a robust, transparent, and accurate greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

2. Joint clean energy research center. Originally announced this July, more details were provided on the joint center that will "facilitate joint research and development of clean energy technologies by teams of scientists and engineers from the United States and China, as well as serve as a clearinghouse to help researchers in each country."  Financial support from public and private sources of at least $150 million over five years, split evenly between the two countries, will be provided.  The Center's research will initially focus on building energy efficiency, clean coal including carbon capture and storage, and clean vehicles. (Factsheet)

3. Electric vehicles. Those initiatives will "include joint standards development, demonstration projects in more than a dozen cities, technical roadmapping and public education projects."  (Factsheet)

4. Energy efficiency. Building on the Ten Year Framework on Energy and Environment Cooperation, government officials of both countries will "work together and with the private sector to develop energy efficient building codes and rating systems, benchmark industrial energy efficiency, train building inspectors and energy efficiency auditors for industrial facilities, harmonize test procedures and performance metrics for energy efficient consumer products, [and] exchange best practices in energy efficient labeling systems." (Factsheet)

5. Renewable energy. The two countries will develop roadmaps for wide-spread renewable energy deployment in both countries.  The Partnership will also provide technical and analytical resources to states and regions in both countries to support renewable energy deployment and will facilitate state-to-state and region-to-region partnerships to share experience and best practices.  (Factsheet)

6. 21st century coal. The two countries will "launch a program of technical cooperation to bring teams of U.S. and Chinese scientists and engineers together in developing clean coal and carbon capture and storage technologies." The Presidents also welcomed a package of announcements on public-private partnerships in advanced coal technologies. (Factsheet)

7. Shale gas. Under a new Shale Gas Initiative, the U.S. and China will "use experience gained in the United States to assess China's shale gas potential, promote environmentally-sustainable development of shale gas resources, conduct joint technical studies to accelerate development of shale gas resources in China, and promote shale gas investment in China through the U.S.-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, study tours, and workshops." (Factsheet)

8. Nuclear. The two countries reaffirmed the goals of the recently-concluded Third Executive Committee Meeting of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership to promote the peaceful use of civilian nuclear energy, and " agreed to consult with one another in order to explore such approaches-including assurance of fuel supply and cradle-to-grave nuclear fuel management so that countries can access peaceful nuclear power while minimizing the risks of proliferation."

9. Public-private partnerships on clean energy. A new U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program (ECP) will "leverage private sector resources for project development work in China across a broad array of clean energy projects, to the benefit of both nations."  The ECP, consisting of at least 22 founding member companies, will work on collaborative projects in renewable energy, smart grid, clean transportation, green building, clean coal, combined heat and power, and energy efficiency.

In a joint statement, Obama and Jintao agreed on a common approach to achieve a successful outcome in international climate negotiations (emphasis added in bold):

Regarding the upcoming Copenhagen Conference, both sides agree on the importance of actively furthering the full, effective and sustained implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in accordance with the Bali Action Plan. The United States and China, consistent with their national circumstances, resolve to take significant mitigation actions and recognize the important role that their countries play in promoting a sustainable outcome that will strengthen the world's ability to combat climate change. The two sides resolve to stand behind these commitments.

In this context both sides believe that, while striving for final legal agreement, an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries. The outcome should also substantially scale up financial assistance to developing countries, promote technology development, dissemination and transfer, pay particular attention to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable to adapt to climate change, promote steps to preserve and enhance forests, and provide for full transparency with respect to the implementation of mitigation measures and provision of financial, technology, and capacity building support.

Taken together, these commitments and statements represent an important step forward towards agreeing on a protocol for accurate accounting and verification of China's policies for achieving the necessary emissions reductions that science requires. They will also hopefully start to satisfy those skeptical that China will agree to a protocol for accurate accounting and verification of its impressive array of policies for achieving emissions reductions.

The announcements also suggest that the United States and China are on the same page when it comes to both the necessity of aggressively moving forward on an affirmative agenda to reduce carbon pollution and create millions of new clean energy jobs. The agreement contains concrete measures for sustained and meaningful collaboration and demonstrates that the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases are prepared to move beyond the tired narrative of developed versus developing country responsibilities on climate action toward a more "positive, cooperative, and comprehensive" relationship on clean energy and climate change.

We hope that the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen will follow this example and focus as much on bottom-up technological strategies for achieving real reductions in emissions as it will on top-down targets for carbon caps.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

In his latest column, Bill McKibben lays a wide range of sins at the feet of Barack Obama, accusing him of "fibbing and spinning" on climate change. He says Obama is "not particularly focused" on climate (while linking to coverage of an Obama speech dedicated to climate). He says that by putting health care ahead of climate change, Obama "guarantee[d] that health care would occupy most of the year." He says that by focusing on green jobs and energy security rather than climate change, Obama has "left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day." Obama's administration is "spinning" by focusing on the still-common 450 ppm number for atmospheric CO2 rather than the 350 ppm favored by some activists and scientists.

I could not be more sincere when I say that I wish Obama were responsible for health care reform dragging on, for climate deniers and delayers, for the lack of ambition U.S. negotiators can promise the international community. If these things were a matter of Obama simply not trying hard enough, perhaps he could be persuaded to try harder. He's a reasonable guy!

Alas, despite the far-reaching powers people tend to ascribe to the U.S. presidency in general and Obama specifically, it seems to me the real culprit is -- yes, I'm going to say the same thing again, I'm boring! -- the U.S. Senate.

Bill says Obama is using the Senate like Bush used China, as an excuse for delay. The analogy is apt insofar as China was out of Bush's control and the Senate is out of Obama's. But it's inapt in that there's plenty Bush could have done without China and he didn't; there's plenty Obama can do outside the Senate and he's doing it. When it comes to matters under executive branch control, the progress over the last 10 months has been amazing -- new fuel-economy rules, new enforcement of efficiency standards, EPA moving forward on CO2 regulations, energy standards and goals for all federal departments, tons of green stimulus money, national retrofit programs, delay of mining and drilling permits, sustained bi- and multi-lateral international climate diplomacy ... the list goes on. Obama is doing what a president can do -- more than any president has ever done.

Ultimately, then, Bill's beef comes down to Obama's supposed refusal to "push the Senate as hard as [he] possibly can." Tellingly, there are no details offered on what this pushing might involve, just some handwaving at "spending political capital."

But how to push the Senate? That's the most important question! Surely it deserves a little more attention.

Bill Clinton tried getting out ahead of Congress to prod it to action. He sent Gore to Kyoto promising ambitious action on climate. He handed Congress a health care reform bill that he (or rather his wife) had hashed out behind closed doors in the White House, ready to go.

Conservative Democrats bridled; they felt no loyalty to his agenda; they rejected the Kyoto treaty; they picked at the health bill and were happy to let it die.

Obama has been trying the opposite strategy. He is very carefully instructing his international negotiators not to promise anything that the Senate hasn't already signed on to. (That means waiting for the Senate to pass a bill.) On both health care and clean energy, he has laid out a set of broad principles and let members of Congress work out their own bills, cheerleading occasionally from the sidelines. On health care, the progress has been impossibly slow, dragging out longer than anyone not totally cynical about the Senate could have predicted. But it's been progress. On clean energy, the strategy worked like a charm with the House clean energy bill. Obama mostly let Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) handle it, with some crucial behind-the-scenes help. The administration strongly endorsed the bill when it passed. A roughly similar bill got to the Senate and raced through Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-Calif.) progressive Environment and Public Works Committee.

And ... conservative Democrats bridled; they felt no loyalty to Obama's agenda; they're trash-talking Copenhagen; they're picking at the clean energy bill and are happy to let it die. (See: Jim Webb.)

That's two very different executive strategies that ran into similar wankery from conservative Senate Dems. Maybe our conclusion should be that the problem is conservative Senate Dems. Many such Dems come from states that voted for McCain and/or Bush. Obama has no leverage over them; support from Obama isn't important or necessarily helpful for their electoral prospects. Unless they feel constrained by party discipline like their colleagues on the other side of the aisle, or God forbid feel the pull of conscience, they have no incentive to work to pass the progressive agenda Obama campaigned on. Nor do they have reason to accept any treaty his administration signs that goes beyond what they've already agreed to. Dems desperately need their votes, but they don't desperately need other Dems, and there's just very little in Obama's arsenal with which to "push" them. The dysfunction of the Senate is structural; it's not in Obama's power to change, no matter how much he tries, no matter how much capital he spends.

The difference between Clinton's flamboyant rhetorical pushing and Obama's relatively laid-back style is this: Obama's still has a chance to work. However frustrating it may be to activists who want bigger words, bolder promises, and faster action, the fact remains that the Dems are within reach of passing a health care reform bill and have at least laid out a path to passing a clean energy bill and ratifying a binding international climate treaty in 2010. It's too early to deem Obama's leadership a failure.

Yes: political realities can be changed. The kind of broad grassroots movement that Bill McKibben himself has been so instrumental in creating can shift the tectonic plates. But a crucial step in that process is to accurately identify what and who is blocking progress. It's not Obama who deserves the ire of the 350 army. It's Max Baucus (D-Mont.). It's Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). It's Jim Webb (D-Vir.). It's Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). It's the filibuster! These targets are harder to reach and in many ways less satisfying to battle, but they are the real locus of delay and inaction.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

December 19—the day after COP15

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

This essay appeared first on MotherJones.com. Bill McKibben is chronicling his journey into climate activism with a series of columns leading up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen this December. You can find the others here. And you can put yourself on the cover of MoJo's special issue on climate change here.

Two caveats. First, early in the primary season, when I was asked to join Environmentalists for Obama, I signed on immediately. I knocked doors, made phone calls, gave money, and celebrated his victory--I think he's the best president of my lifetime.

Second, Obama has done much that's right about climate, including surround himself with a stellar staff of advisers. From auto mileage to green stimulus spending, he's done more to deal with global warming than all of the presidents combined in the 20 years that it's been an issue.

But that's a pretty low bar. And the announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle -- as it has been for the last two decades -- is the United States.

And in fact none of this should come as a surprise to anyone paying attention. For a year now it's been clear that the president is not particularly focused on applying the political pressure that would have been necessary to reach any kind of pact, much less one that approaches what the science demands. Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year. He talked very little about climate, tending instead to talk about green jobs and energy security, and in the process left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day. And then, as with health care, he left it pretty much entirely up to Congress to write the necessary legislation. That kept him from having to bear the blame for a Byzantine bill, but it also meant that the Senate -- the body from which he came, and whose culture he had to know -- could work in its usual style, without White House pressure. Which at the moment means that Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham are essentially rewriting the legislation, to what end no one really knows.

The real tip-off of Obama's unwillingness to lead, however, has been the endless spinning of his climate negotiators. For 12 months they have been fibbing about the science -- reiterating over and over again that their goal is the "scientific standard" of 450 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. That's no longer scientifically accurate -- in the last two years, since the rapid Arctic melt in the summer of 2007, scientists have made it clear that a treaty that aimed at 450 ppm would be a treaty that left the planet free of ice, a planet where many current nations would disappear beneath the waves. We're at 390 now -- we're already too high. The 450 number came from the various graphs and tables of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- but Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC, has said repeatedly in the last year that that science is out of date. Recently, asked why he'd endorsed a 350 target instead, he said: "As a human being, I just couldn't keep quiet in the face of all this overwhelming evidence. I know it's probably not right for me to take a position such as this, but on the other hand, I think it would be totally immoral on my part not to take a position, so I came out and said so."

By contrast, the Obama administration's position has been that a tough treaty is politically unrealistic -- that the Senate would never pass it. That's certainly true, at least for the moment. But the White House is starting to use the Senate in the same way that the Bush administration used China -- as a scapegoat for doing too little. You don't get to blame the Senate if you haven't pushed the Senate as hard as you possibly can. It would take a huge commitment of presidential leadership, the sacrifice of large amounts of political capital, to change political reality. It would also take a movement of citizens, which we've tried hard to build. Three weeks ago we at 350.org organized what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." Many prime ministers, environmental ministers, and foreign ministers participated -- heck, the president of the Maldives convened an underwater cabinet meeting to make the point about how desperate the situation was. We asked the White House if anyone -- some spare undersecretary of something -- might come to one of the 2,000 demonstrations across the United States. They couldn't find a soul.

They'll have another chance. With groups around the world, 350.org will help organize candlelight vigils around the world on the weekend of Dec. 12. Many will take place at American embassies and consulates. Not because anyone is anti-American. Because everyone remains hopeful that America will finally help lead to solve the problem that it, far more than any other nation, caused.

None of this is easy. (I haven't even mentioned the obscenely low amounts of money the administration and Congress are talking about appropriating for the foreign aid that will be required to help developing countries adapt to the global warming America has caused.) But all of it is easier than trying to deal with the world that's coming at us faster every day we don't act. Pressuring Senate Republicans (or coal-fired Democrats) is hard; pressuring physics and chemistry is harder still. In fact, it's impossible. That's why this is different than health-care reform or financial re-regulation. You have to actually meet the scientific standard, not just do better than George W. Bush.

And of course, politically, Obama doesn't need to do it. He doesn't need to worry about environmentalists abandoning him for someone else -- he'll always be the preferable choice, and I'll always be out there knocking on doors for him. But his legacy won't depend on the shiny medal the Norwegians hang around his neck next month; it will depend, more than anything else, on whether or not he really tackles the biggest problem the planet faces. There is still time for him to make the crucial difference, but not if his administration continues in fib-and-spin mode. At the same meeting in Singapore where he made it clear that Copenhagen would not negotiate a new climate treaty, he invited all the other APEC leaders to meet in 2011 in Hawaii, adding "I look forward to seeing you all decked out in flowered shirts and grass skirts."

Whatever -- that sounds more like his giggly, sophomoric predecessor than the leader we desperately need.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

One of my guilty pleasures is the CBS crime show, The Mentalist.  One-time fake psychic Patrick Jane uses his powers of observation and deduction to figure out the answer to the mystery before everyone else.

So here’s the contest for all you would-be environ-Mentalists.  Use your amazing powers of observation and deduction to figure out on what day Obama will sign the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill into law.  The winner gets to write a blog post for Climate Progress — woo hoo!

Remember, the bill has to pass the Senate, go into conference, pass the House and Senate again, and then a few days after that, Obama has the big signing ceremony.

Yes, you could pick “never” but, of course, you’d never collect!  Plus the bill remains a likely prospect since the breakthrough Senate climate partnership between Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kerry (D-MA) — see E&E News: “At least 67 senators are in play” on climate bill.

Indeed, with the addition of Sen Lieberman (I-CT) to the bipartisan (tripartisan?) team and the beginning of talks with White House “to discuss a possible compromise” the chances may be greater than ever.  Heck, even the moderate coal-state Democrat Sen. Baucus (D-MT) said last week, “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation.”

That said, it seems increasingly unlikely that the bill will get to Obama’s desk before the summer.  Indeed, The Washington Times Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req’d) has these remarkable prognosications from a former Senate majority leader and a leading industrial expert:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Friday that, judging by the past, Congress’s climate change bill will likely pass within months of next November’s general election.

Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, said big legislation has historically passed within a few months of a major election and he envisions the same will be true for climate legislation.

“Welfare reform passed within months of an election back in the 90s, so did Medicare Part D — it passed in September of an election year,” Daschle said on a conference call about clean energy and manufacturing. “There are a lot of other examples.”

… But even if the Senate doesn’t advance climate legislation before Copenhagen, that doesn’t mean the legislation won’t be a top priority in the Senate next year, Daschle said.“Contrary to conventional wisdom, a lot can be done in 2010,” he added.

Peter Molinaro, vice president of federal and state government affairs for Dow Chemical, said during the call that he agreed with Daschle’s predictions. Molinaro said that in the past, most major environmental legislation has also passed within 90 days on either side of a general election.

He added that ultimately the controversial legislation will pass just like the contentious amendments to the Clean Air Act did in 1990.

The climate legislation and Clean Air Act amendments are in “many ways a parallel — high complexity, strong regional differences and way beyond partisan differences — a lot of the same kinds of implications,” Molinaro said. “I don’t think there is anything novel about the situation we find ourselves in with [climate] legislation.

Here’s a little history on the bipartisan CAA amendments for all you enviro-Jane’s out there, courtesy of EPA:

In June 1989 President Bush proposed sweeping revisions to the Clean Air Act. Building on Congressional proposals advanced during the 1980s, the President proposed legislation designed to curb three major threats to the nation’s environment and to the health of millions of Americans: acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions….

By large votes, both the House of Representatives (401-21) and the Senate (89-11) passed Clean Air bills that contained the major components of the President’s proposals. Both bills also added provisions requiring the phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, roughly according to the schedule outlined in international negotiations (Revised Montreal Protocol)…..

Yes, life was different in Washington, DC two decades ago, a lot more moderates in those days…..

A joint conference committee met from July to October 1990 to iron out differences in the bills and both Houses overwhelmingly voted out the package recommended by the Conferees. The President received the Bill from Congress on November 14, 1990 and signed it on November 15,1990.

Conferences between the two Houses aren’t known for their speed.  And again that was two decades ago, when we had a moderate pro-environmental Republican president.

Based on my conservations with Hill experts, I tend to think the bill will hit the Senate floor in late February and the debate will last for a few weeks until it passes in late March or early April.  Then conference could take quite a while.  Still, I think the pressure will be to wrap this up before the late summer recess, and not take this right before the fall election.  I think Obama will sign the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill in early August, but I will say that at least one person with much more Hill experience than I have says it’ll be October.

But what do you think?

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

December 19—the day after COP15

It was less than a year ago, but everything seemed so different then. George W. Bush was still in the White House, but officials gathered at the annual international climate talks, held last December in Poznan, felt new hope in the chilly Polish air: President-elect Obama had, against many expectations, made it clear that combatting global warming was to be a priority for his incoming administration.

George W. Bush may no longer be president, but America is once again seen as the bad guy in the effort to negotiate a new climate change pact. Above, a gagged "Statue of Liberty" at a 2007 climate protest in Britain.jystewart via FlickrThe hope grew, if anything, in March when Obama's new climate envoy, Todd Stern, traveled to Bonn and addressed the first of this year's long series of climate negotiations. "We are very glad to be back, we want to make up for lost time, and we are seized with the urgency of the task before us," he told the delegates, promising to engage "powerfully, fervently" in the talks, which were tasked with preparing for the vital climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

Things look very different today. In the eyes of most of the world, the United States has again emerged as the principal obstacle to a new international climate agreement, in stark contrast to India, China and other rapidly industrializing developing countries that, despite the widely held view of a year ago that they would be unlikely to cooperate on drafting a new pact, have actually moved further and faster to address the climate crisis.

As the final preparatory talks wound up in Barcelona at the end of last week without finalizing a negotiating text for Copenhagen, almost everyone had accepted that a new agreement would not be finalized in the Danish capital, thanks to the United States' failure to deliver on last year's hopeful signals.

Martin Kaiser, Greenpeace's policy director, said U.S. intransigence was "threatening to kill the prospect of a legally binding Copenhagen treaty." Oxfam added: "The U.S. shadow is looming large over the climate talks."

Key delegates vented their frustration by breaking with protocol to point the finger towards Washington. "Clearly, the U.S. has been slowing things down," said Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Union's chief climate negotiator. Alicia Montalbo, chief negotiator for Spain (the next country to hold the rotating European Union presidency), echoed Kaiser's sentiments more indirectly, saying: "There's a certain level of frustration in seeing that not all countries share (the) vision." More of the same came from Denmark's climate minister, Connie Hedegaard: "We can't imagine having an agreement without the United States, they have to be a part of it," she told Agence France-Presse.

After visiting President Obama last week, Frederik Reinfeld, the Prime Minister of Sweden (and current EU president) said the slow progress of the U.S. Senate's climate bill made adopting a legally binding agreement in Copenhagen impossible. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, addressing both houses of Congress on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, devoted most of her speech to the need to address climate change, stressing: "We have no time to lose."

Leaders across the globe occupying different spots on the political spectrum are also committed to achieving a climate deal soon. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are on board, and they enjoy increasing support from such key developing country leaders as Hu Jintao of China, Manmohan Singh of India, Felipe Calderon of Mexico, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil. Given the broad coalition for climate action, the Obama administration risks running into its greatest foreign policy crisis to date if it continues to stand in the way of a strong, new agreement.

In a sense, this is not Obama's fault. He is the strongest advocate for action on climate change in the White House, just as his predecessor was its most fervent naysayer. He is personally as convinced of the importance of the issue as Merkel, Brown, Sarkozy, or any other leader -- even if his closest political aides are not. And there is insufficient understanding in the rest of the world of the constraints imposed by the U.S. system of governance.

Never before has such a vital, international treaty depended so crucially on the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. Even previous environmental breakthroughs, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer or the Washington Convention on Endangered Species, were preceded by U.S. legislation. As such, the rest of the world is experiencing for the first time how its vital interests can be affected by American politics, as senators from coal or oil states object to legislation that would curb emissions from fossil fuels.

There is only limited understanding of Obama's plight in the rest of the world, since in most countries the executive controls the legislature. It is understandable enough for a citizen of the Maldives, faced with the disappearance of his or her country due to rising sea levels, to become impatient that the "most powerful man on earth" is so constrained by his political system. But that is the fact of life, and the rest of the world needs to be careful not to make it more difficult to get the bill through Congress.

Mind you, the United States does not help when it attacks developing countries, as Stern did last week, for focusing "on citing chapter and verse of dubious interpretations…designed to prove that they don't have any responsibility for action now, rather than thinking through pragmatic ways to find common ground to start solving the problem." When those same countries have moved so much further on the climate issue over the last year than the Americans, this sort of rhetoric can only be seen as inflammatory.

Millions of words have been exchanged over the past year, but success at Copenhagen hangs on just one -- trust. If there was trust, Obama could get the space he needs to win the political fight he faces at home. Unfortunately, it is a scarce and diminishing commodity as Copenhagen approaches. The president and his fellow leaders need to focus in the next few weeks on building it.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

First things first: U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon expressed confidence that international negotiators can resolve impediments to a global climate agreement, and that Copenhagen will be a productive step in that process. Ban visited Washington, D.C., where he and climate adviser Janos Pasztor spoke with lawmakers about the international community’s expectations for U.S. leadership on global climate policy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation that the Copenhagen COP-15 talks can be a useful “stepping stone toward full agreement."

President Obama may visit Copenhagen in December if he can help clinch a deal, although his track record on visiting Copenhagen to clinch deals has a 100 percent fail rate (with a sample of one). A quiet-ish week for climate on Capitol Hill pushed news out to the states, where politicians and scientists are fighting what for a while it seemed like were yesterday’s battles.

Let’s call a spade a rake: Political speech sometimes has a duplicitous relationship to the record of observations and understanding that makes up what we know on any given day about “physical reality.” Few things highlight this duality quite like global warming, and no prominent columnist spends more energy prying climate rhetoric and understanding farther apart than Newsweek and Washington Post columnist George Will.

Will’s most recent column about climate change, “Everyone Out of the Water!”, makes a useful touchstone for a week marked by a widening gap between political rhetoric and scientific observation. Space limitations limit analysis of Will’s column to two points, a falsehood and a self-deflating contradiction.

Falsehood: Will dubs as “cooling” conditions that have conspired to make 10 of the hottest years on record all occur between 1997 and 2008, despite flat temperature readings. A recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report explains how it is possible to have a decade of sub-record breaking temperatures within a warming trend [see pp 23-24 here]. If Newsweek editors follow the lead of their Washington Post colleagues, the magazine will issue no correction, and in fact, allow him to repeat this in a later column. In April, Washington Post reporters went to the possibly unprecedented length of correcting him in a news article.

Self-Deflating Contradiction: Will questions whether “computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming.” This is a fine thing to question. In fact, the entire reason we have computer models is to question them. What they do, sometimes, is give us a sense of probabilities, and among them, a sense of the probability for catastrophic, non-catastrophic, and bearable global warming. Say that you aren’t interested in climate-model projections at all. Say you are interested in U.S. population growth. You might construct a scenario based on what we know of U.S. population growth and conditions for the next few decades. In fact, later in his column, Will writes of emissions targets in the recent House climate bill, "The last time this nation had that small an amount [of emissions] was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050." Interesting: Why should Will ask us to dismiss any value of climate modeling, and then build his argument for ignorance and inaction based on population modeling? Climate Post bets George Will would never say to a successful hedge fund, Well, you didn’t really make all of that money because you were just using computer models to project probabilities of market behavior and bet accordingly.

Will is only the most prominently published politico to distort scientific habits of mind and the results of vetted observation. In Illinois, five of seven Republican gubernatorial candidates have taken positions against documentation and observation. Utah’s governor and state legislators this week received a “stinging rebuke” from Brigham Young University scientists for privileging “fringe positions.” In this kind of environment, credit goes to the U.S. Senate House Republicans who are pushing back at the Interior Department’s recent move to set up a climate operation: Their letter appears to keep the conversation focused on “What to do” rather than “What’s going on.” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who signed the letter, is helping address a hole in science-and-technology research by co-sponsoring a bill that would set up awards for developers of technologies to gobble up airborne carbon dioxide economically and dispose of it.

What’s going on: Politics and scientific data have typically driven the climate conversation in the U.S. That’s changing, as, across the country, professionals are realizing that warming might challenge or change standard operating procedures. Western water managers face "a pretty daunting and disconcerting reality that we’re beginning to get our heads around," according to a Nevada official quoted in Climate Wire. The Army Corps of Engineers sees at least some benefit to projections of potential climate change so that “make stupid large investments that are difficult or impossible to undo." Observational data bear out their concern. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) announced this week for the last decade record-high temperatures have occurred twice as frequently as record-low ones.

Welcome to our growing Indian audience: Nothing could be less surprising than, even 14 years after a international scientific collaboration detected a “discernible human influence” on global warming, a writer as influential as George Will being allowed by editors to put forth demonstrable falsehoods about the topic. This criticism is not leveled on policy issues. Deciding to do nothing about warming is one reaction to the preponderance of evidence demonstrating the risks of change. Deciding to reduce U.S. emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 -- as developing nations argue we should -- is another take. The latter route might lead to an economic contraction worse than the Great Depression. The former might also lead to an economic contraction worse than the Great Depression -- just not in our lifetimes. Or it might not. That’s the charm of climate change: You really have to decide how much you want to jeopardize the future based on scientifically generated risk data. George Will might argue something like the former, if he would like. He might argue something like the latter, if he would like. But whatever he argues, he might help everyone involved by looking more deeply at his characterization of climate risk. There’s a big difference between “catastrophic global climate change” and “the risk of catastrophic global climate change.” (Climate Post called Will’s office earlier this year, proposing a year-long team climate reporting project, but never received a response.) After all, what difference can a few degrees make?

After a month spent talking in India in part about all the new, interesting, and productive climate-related developments occurring in the U.S, it’s a shame to have to spend time pushing back against mean-spirited factual incorrectness. To boot, our national conversation is no longer a national conversation. It’s “global” warming, not “America” warming. Many of the people who may live with the economic, social, political, and physical consequences of change are listening, looking to the U.S. for leadership, and disappointingly not finding it.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks

The ol' Merkel smirkel. Image by א, Wikimedia CommonsBERLIN -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday she would only attend the Copenhagen climate conference in December if the U.S., China, and India first make clear their negotiating positions.

"The European Union has developed clear and unambiguous negotiating positions. We now want contributions from the U.S. and from countries like China and India," Merkel said in the first major policy speech of her second term.

"I will make a special personal effort to achieve this. And of course if it is successful, yes, I will go to Copenhagen," Merkel said.

She added:

A failure of the world climate conference in Copenhagen in December would set international environmental efforts back by years. We cannot afford this.

A substantial political agreement is indispensable in order to create conditions for a binding international protocol for after 2013. Time is pressing.

The aim of the Copenhagen summit is to hammer out an accord for 2013 onwards that will include emission cuts and aid to help poorer countries develop low-carbon economies and deal with the ravages of climate change.

Forty heads of state or government, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have indicated they will attend the climax of the Dec. 7-18 talks in the Danish capital.

But with signs growing that the get-together will fall short of achieving a binding, historic pact, it is unclear whether other leaders, most notably President Obama, will show up.

Washington has been reluctant to declare its hand while a climate bill inches through Congress.

An E.U. summit in late October agreed that developing nations will need 100 billion euros ($146 billion) per year by 2020 to tackle climate change, but leaders from the 27 nation bloc failed to nail down how much it would give.

Related Links:

President Obama, give us hope again…this time in Copenhagen

Optimistic or pessimistic about the Copenhagen climate talks?

Copen-talkin’: Smarties offer their takes on COP15 climate talks