SINGAPORE -- The United States called Wednesday for a compromise at next month's global climate talks in Copenhagen and vowed to support a fund to help developing countries cope with emissions cuts.

"We cannot let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a news conference in Singapore ahead of a weekend Pacific Rim summit to be attended by President Obama.

Photo courtesy US Mission Canada via Flickr Clinton said she had "fruitful discussions" on climate issues earlier Wednesday with counterparts from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which includes China, Russia, and Japan.

The Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen talks are aimed at achieving a global deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions and ease the impact of climate change before the 2012 expiry of the Kyoto Protocol, which excludes the United States.

Obama has brought the United States back into the climate discussions after his predecessor George W. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto pact.

"If we all exert maximum effort and embrace the right blend of pragmatism and principle, I believe we can secure a strong outcome at Copenhagen," Clinton told the news conference.

Beyond Copenhagen, "we are committed to reaching the goal of a global, legally binding climate agreement, and will continue working vigorously with the international community towards that end."

Earlier, in prepared remarks to a closed-door gathering of APEC foreign ministers, Clinton said the group's members account for 60 percent of global emissions and their efforts to cut them can have a "transformative impact".

She called for a trade-off between raising global living standards and strong action on climate change, and acknowledged the United States' "historical responsibility" for climate change, according to the official text.

Clinton reiterated U.S. support for a fund aimed at helping developing countries reduce emissions, but gave no details.

"We are prepared to support a Global Climate Fund that will support adaptation and mitigation efforts and a matching entity to help developing countries match needs with available resources," she said.

European Union leaders agreed last month that developing nations will need 100 billion euros ($150 billion) by 2020 to tackle climate change but failed to nail down the group's share.

Finance ministers from the G20, which includes the United States and E.U., were also unable to make headway on how to finance the climate fund when they met in Scotland last week.

There has been a long-running dispute between industrialized and developing countries over their role in the fight to slash global emissions.

Countries like China and India blame western nations for producing most of the emissions in their drive to industrialization and feel that drastic emission caps would hamper their own development.

Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and 18 other APEC leaders are expected to call for sharp cuts in global emissions at the end of their summit on Sunday.

"We believe that global emissions will need to peak over the next few years and be reduced to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries," a draft declaration said.

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First Things First: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India last weekend to inch forward collaboration on regional security, global business, nuclear power, and climate change. U.S. papers played up the real-time meltdown between Clinton and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.

The two appeared before cameras on a trip to a new, energy-efficient office building in New Delhi, a scene in which Ramesh excoriated Western pressure on India to reduce emissions: "If this pressure is not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours"--a reference to a trade provision in the climate bill narrowly voted out of the House of Representatives last month. The New York Times and the Washington Post note the eyebrows raised by U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern, who traveled with Clinton. The Times of India apparently headlined a story, "Climate man's visit shocks India." Indian leaders say they will not accept legally binding carbon cuts, unless the nation's per capita emissions reach that of the West, an argument analyzed in this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Spending to put India on a low-carbon trajectory might run $7 billion to $12 trillion in 35 years, according to a projection by The Energy and Resources Institute.

Mean temperatures in India have risen by 0.52 degrees Celsius over the last century, lower than the roughly 0.78 degree global average rise (The Earth is warming faster at the poles than at the equator).

"The single biggest investment opportunity of the 21st century": India's private sector increasingly sees value in "clean tech." Witness Reva Electric Car's plans to mass produce $12,000 electric vehicles for sale in the West. Ajit Nazre, the KPCB partner in charge of India investments, gave an overview of trends there to VC Circle, which follows the venture capital community in India. Nazre, who lauds clean tech in the quotation atop this paragraph, recounts the motivations for change there, which are far from unique: the worldwide discussion about mitigating against dangerous climate change; fossil fuel price volatility; clean tech entrepreneurship. Add to that mix, India is home to one-third of the world's poor, in desperate need of electricity.

Cities cover two percent of humans' land footprint--but are responsible for three-quarters of emissions. The Secretary of State isn't the only Clinton interested in India. The Clinton Global Initiative, run by the former President, has teamed up with Microsoft to provide Indian cities with a free, Web-based tool, called Project 2 Degrees, to monitor their greenhouse gas emissions.

Attention to "geo-engineering" has grown in legitimacy this year, and research investment ideas range from the simple and mundane to the beautifully illustrated. The American Meteorological Society gave its (meticulously worded) blessing for research into re-engineering the global climate. Ideas abound. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu elaborated on why the world should paint its roofs white, in a TV interview with what a poll of dubious trustworthiness calls "the most trusted newscaster in America." Scientists and engineers speculate on the effectiveness of shooting disks into strategic position between the Earth and Sun, to block light.

Many of the 21st century's big investments will be small steps, and unfortunately difficult for media to recklessly dramaticize. Climate change begins at home, according to a British report on energy inefficiency in the U.K. Such mundane "climate solutions" as installing replacement pipes and water-saving faucets could reduce the carbon emissions from water heating by 30 percent. Why aren't home-improvement experts in the forefront of lobbying in every national capital?

All Politics Is Vocal: International preparations for the Copenhagen talks step up, as U.S. senators prepare to step out for their August recess.

Some observers are more sanguine than others about the prospects of an international climate agreement this year. Hopeful is the chairman of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Michael Zammit. AFP files a brief interview with Zammit, who says he is emboldened by the new U.S. administration's shift in climate policy. Note the last line, which makes this report a textbook example of how to bury the lede. Also upbeat, sort of, is tiny Tuvalu, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2020.

The U.S. Senate will come back to a hyper-busy fall schedule, with Barbara Boxer expected to introduce the climate bill around Sept. 8 and the nation groping its way through the health care debate. Battle lines are growing firmer.  The NYT suggests in an editorial that the Senate close two loopholes in the House bill, one that grandfathers existing power plants out of the Clean Air Act, and another that, the paper says, weakens offsets. Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) suggested that climate legislation have an "off-ramp," should regulations become too onerous for the economy; the administration stepped up its arguments for how farmers will thrive under a climate program.

California farmers have a bright future, according to a new report by the Pacific Institute, which DotEarth takes to task for not taking political realities into account, particularly amid predicted droughts in the West.

Will-ing Won't Make It So: If a rank-and-file reporter--that large mammal species nearly as close to extinction as polar bears--showed the aloofness toward facts displayed by WP columnist George Will now four times this year, he would be asked to clean out his desk. The Post has already printed several corrective responses to Will: an op-ed piece by science journalist Chris Mooney; a letter by Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization; an editorial plausibly inspired by Will's errors; and a news article--in the Washington Post--that explicitly smacks down his errors on Arctic Sea ice melt. Today, Will's column pokes fun at the international climate negotiation process, which comes naturally if you believe that atmospheric monitoring is a religious activity. Will doesn't veer off into fact-checking slumber until the end of the piece, when he cites the scientific reasoning Mark Steyn, a National Review writer who determined that global warming halted in 1998. Science journalist Carl Zimmer, who has swept up after Will all year, turns in this fine response.

Still No Operating Manual: Futurist thinkers, such as R. Buckminster Fuller, laid down ideas for what eventually became the environmental movement, by applying thoughts about space flight to the Earth itself. If three people, say, can fit in a tin can flung at the Moon, as they did 40 years ago this week, how many people can the Earth hold? Writers of all stripes are returning to that basic question.

Politicians and advocates routinely call for an "Apollo program for climate change," often without evaluating the aptness of the comparison. With Apollo, the federal government was the entrepreneur, inventor, engineer, and customer. That's a small step compared with the suggested task at hand--slowly reconfiguring a global economy powered largely by fossil fuels, with millions of entrepreneurs and billions of customers. Now, that's a "mission." That'll keep everyone busy. That'd be--if we get there--a giant leap for mankind.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist.

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Is organic farming productive enough to feed billions of people--or will it always be a yuppie niche in a food system increasingly dependent on agrichemicals, massive animal factories, synthetic fertilizers, and biotechnology?

Nina Fedoroff, the State Department's chief technology adviser, propounds the latter view. A trained scientist with ties to the biotech industry, Fedoroff thinks organic is a fraud. (She attained her current positon during the Bush Adminsration in Condoleeza Rice's State Department; SecretaryNina Fedoroff, with her previous employer. Clinton has elected to keep her on.) In a recent forum on biotech  in Seed Magazine (in which I also participated), Hillary Clinton's science czar had this to say:

Then there are the romantic agri-myths, like the "organic" one, which lots of people have bought into. It goes like this: Organic food, farmed using manure instead of chemicals, is better for you and better for the land. None of that's true-nitrogen is nitrogen-but it's pretty good marketing if you're selling poor produce at exorbitant prices. (Organic farming is inefficient, so production costs are generally higher.)

I'll leave aside for this post the "nitrogen is nitrogen" claim--whether synthetic nitrogen delivers the organic matter, micronutrient, or microbiological benefits to soil that compost and green manure do. (It's sort of like debating whether consuming a balanced, diverse diet is any different from living on sugar water and vitamin pills. Oops--guess I couldn't leave it aside.) Let's focus on the value of organic--a key question for Fedoroff, since she will help shape U.S. foreign policy toward ag development in the global south.

She dismisses organic agriculture as a "myth"--an inefficient farming system that delivers "poor produce": surely not something one should go around trying to "feed the world" with. And she does so with an air of "case closed"; she is, after all, a scientist, so whatever she says must be true.

Right? Nah. In fact, she's using her high position in government as a megaphone to amplify and legitimize a bunch of industry-friendly nonsense. (The fact that she enjoys direct access to our top foreign-policy official should give us all pause.)

In fact, a paper (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems by a bunch of University of Michigan ecologists cogently challenges Fedoroff's view. They compare studies that gauge yields of organic and conventionally grown crops, and find that organic competes quite well. As a result, they conclude:

Our results suggest that organic methods of food production can contribute substantially to feeding the current an future human population on the current agricultural land base, while maintaining soil fertility.

Moreover, they indirectly address an old slur against organic promoted by Normon Borlaug, industrial agriculture's greatest apologist. In a notorious 2000 interview with Reason Magazine, the great man declared that "if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests." That's bunkum, according to the Michigan researchers. They write:

In fact, the models suggest the possibility that the agricultural land base could eventually be reduced if organic production methods were employed, although additional intensification via conventional methods in the tropics would have the same effect.

Crucially, the researchers acknowledge that a large-scale conversion to organic would be difficult--a fact that pro-organic enthusiasts often forget. They write: "In spite of our optimistic prognosis for organic agriculture, we recognize that the transition to and practice of organic agriculture contain numerous challenges-agronomically, economically, and educationally."

And getting there would require serious government action:

The practice of organic agriculture on a large scale requires support from research institutions dedicated to agro-ecological methods of fertility and pest management, a strong extension system, and a committed public.

Let's not forget, though, that our government for decades has been shoveling billions of dollars into subsidies and research for chemical ag--and paying little more than lip service to organic. Meanwhile, regulators have looked the other way while the food and industries consolidated into a few giant companies--ones that contribute lavishly to candidates and run well-funded lobbying operations. Fedoroff's lofty position proves that they still wield plenty of power--let's hope not sufficient power to make her vision of perpetual industrial-ag dominance self-fulfilling.

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In a rousing speech endorsing Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton said her erstwhile rival would "transform our energy agenda by creating millions of green jobs and building a new, clean energy future." Virginia Senate candidate Mark Warner also addressed energy and climate (as he told Grist he would): "If we actually got ourselves off foreign oil, we can make our country safer," he said in his keynote address. "We'll start to solve global warming, and with the right policies, within 24 months, we'll be building 100-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrid vehicles right here, with American technology and with American workers." And Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer bashed John McCain's record on energy: "At a time when American families are struggling to keep their gas tanks full, john McCain voted 25 times against renewable energy, biofuels, solar energy ... wind energy." Read more Grist coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

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Former presidential hopeful John Edwards has at long last endorsed a candidate: Barack Obama. Edwards, whose strong stances on the environment pushed his Democratic rivals to toughen their green proposals, said of his choice, "Democratic voters in America have made their choice and so have I." Hillary Clinton's campaign, which had also pursued Edwards' endorsement, chose to take a different view, stating, "We respect John Edwards, but as the voters of West Virginia showed last night, this thing is far from over."

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