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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Obama going to Copenhagen

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

Fist things fist: If this section's heading doesn’t look quite right it’s because there are a few r’s missing. That was true this week of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, a panel of Democrats whose Republican sparring partners boycotted work on the climate bill co-sponsored by Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). The Republican senators criticized the majority for moving ahead without an EPA analysis of the bill, which is similar to one that the House approved in June. The bill passed out of the committee this morning by a vote of 11-1, with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) voting against it, and all the R’s abstaining.

Committee drama set the stage for Sens. Kerry, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to announce yesterday that they are pursuing parallel negotiations on a climate bill, and are in discussion with the administration, Senate colleagues, and outside interests, including the newly minted American Businesses for Clean Energy.

Expectations for the Copenhagen climate talks continue to drop so low that the conference might end up being declared a success solely on the basis of having enough folding chairs and scratch paper for attendees. Climate envoy Todd Stern told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that in Copenhagen the U.S. hopes to lay groundwork for agreements on contentious issues in the near future.

About our recent, unexcused absences … : What many Indians lack in understanding “global warming,” they make up for in knowledge that their climate is changing. That’s a central takeaway from Climate Post’s recent three-week voyage through India. It’s also the central problem in writing about climate change: Scientists commonly define “climate” as a statistical average of weather events, somewhere, over a long period of time. So personal observations, such as, the rainy season isn’t so rainy lately, are of limited scientific value. We can note that extreme events -- flooding, drought, erratic weather, coastal erosion, the rest–resemble predictions, if they do. But there’s “no man behind the curtain” of climate change.

These on-the-ground observations may be of limited scientific value. But what makes them tangible is the way that en masse they begin to shape the very non-scientific public awareness and politics. Krishnendu Bandyopadhyay, a Times of India special correspondent, told me that editors have focused attention on climate change prompted not by politics, as is frequently the case in the U.S., but with declining agricultural productivity. The eastern Indian state of Odisha (called Orissa until 2 weeks ago) has many concerns. If there is an environmental problem happening anywhere in India, or the world, it can also be found in Odisha. And climate risks in this region are halting. Last week marked the 10th anniversary of a supercyclone that killed 10,000 people and dislocated more than 1.5 million there. Poorer areas never recovered and fears linger. “They shouldn’t call [storms] ‘low-pressure systems,’” said Prafulla Kumar Dhal, who works for a local social welfare agency called BISWA. “They should call them ‘normal-pressure systems.’”

The U.S. climate debate often feels hollow (mostly–anyone remember Katrina?) because it is largely driven by political concerns and scientific data, not people experiencing the meteorological weirdness that, if nothing else, Occam’s Razor suggests may be partly influenced by climate change. It’s a common assertion in the climate community that poor and vulnerable nations will experience the severest dislocations. It’s a less common assertion that poor and vulnerable nations are already beginning to see strain, are aware of it, and are unhappy. In some ways I learned more about it my first two days in India than in the previous 10 years I’ve spent writing about it.

Beyond the foreign section: The trip to India was organized by the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Information Programs, though I traveled as a private citizen unencumbered by any official messages, tasks, or requests. Mostly, I was asked to go over and meet with Indian journalists so that we can compare notes about what works and doesn’t in climate coverage, and find ways to work together. The trip culminated in a New Delhi journalism conference, organized by the International Federation of Environmental Journalists, about bridging the gaps between climate change reporting in the North and South.

Discussions frequently turned to how difficult it is for Indians to see anything beyond Washington, and for Americans to see anything beyond Delhi. Some Indians I met tend to see America as monolithic or a cartoon. President Obama is seen by some as no different from President Bush on climate policy, even if he has the Senate to fault. Many Americans who think about it see India only as the first part of the phrase “India and China,” without recognizing the complexities, that 99 percent of Indians live below the U.S. poverty line or that there are 100 million-200 million more Indians without electricity than there are Americans in total. There is much work to do bringing Indians and Americans together electronically.

Now appearing on the international stage: India’s Minister of Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, is interesting to watch. He must balance the demands of his government, which is reluctant to amend its incalcitrant position in the climate negotiations, and his interlocutors in the West, who are reluctant to amend their incalcitrant positions in the climate negotiations. This week he is encouraging Indians to see climate change as a leadership opportunity -- and a responsibility to the future, and to internalize its meaning rather than play victim to a problem of the West’s creation.

The Obama administration appears poised to make more progress in its bilateral relationship with India than with any other nation. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will visit Washington this month and enjoy President Obama’s first state dinner. Trade and geopolitics are bringing the two nations together, cautiously.

Statistical threats leave no fingerprints: India may be more vulnerable to large-scale climate change than any other nation. Seventy percent of its rainfall comes during monsoon season. Unusual variability in the monsoon has led to drought and flooding. Melting Himalayan glaciers threaten fresh water supplies for hundreds of millions. The Bay of Bengal is eroding a string of Odisha villages I visited. BISWA’s Prafulla Kumar Dhal spoke of a well-known temple, the adjacent ponds to which had dried up. “The gods know that the climate is changing,” he said, seemingly incredulous. Maybe so, maybe not. Some weird stuff is happening in India. The question, what if anything will we do about it, remains unanswered -- in Washington, New Delhi, Copenhagen, and elsewhere.

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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In Chapter 7 of the recently released Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Lester Brown lays out the Plan B goals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population. Behind the scenes are a number of datasets and graphs that delve deeper into the trends discussed in the chapter. Here are some highlights from the Chapter 7 data:

World population has grown steadily over the past half century, increasing from 2.5 billion in 1950 to a projected 6.8 billion in 2009. The United Nations medium fertility level scenario projects that world population will grow to 9.2 billion in 2050. Their high projection takes the world to 10.5 billion in 2050. Under their low projection, which assumes rapid reductions in fertility rates, population peaks at just over 8 billion in 2042, then begins to decline.

Though life expectancies around the world have increased in the past half century, large discrepancies remain among different regions. Overall, world life expectancy increased from an average of 47 years in the mid-twentieth century to 68 years today. While life expectancy in 1950 hovered around 40 years in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it has since increased far more rapidly in Asia, reaching 69 years, compared to 51 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. On a regional basis, the United States and Canada top the world with an average life expectancy of 79 years. Leading causes of death also vary widely across regions. In low-income countries, 18 percent of deaths are caused by infectious or parasitic diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases. Such diseases cause only 2.5 percent of deaths in high-income countries.

Some progress, however, has been made in fighting infectious disease in low-income countries. Thanks to an international vaccine campaign, the number of polio cases worldwide has dropped from close to 400,000 in 1987 to fewer than 2,000 in 2008.

On the economic front, China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, have experienced significant economic growth over the past several decades. However, while India’s gross domestic product (GDP) of $363 per person in 1990 just barely exceeded China’s, since then, China’s per capita GDP has grown 10-fold, while India’s has grown only 3-fold.

As countries have experienced economic growth, poverty rates have declined, though discrepancies again exist between countries and regions. Poverty rates in China have declined significantly, from 60 percent of the population in 1990 to 16 percent in 2007. Brazil, another success story, has reduced poverty rates by two-thirds, from 15 percent to 5 percent over the same period. India’s poverty rate has declined more modestly, from slightly over half the population in 1990 to 42 percent in 2007. Sub-Saharan Africa has also made slow progress, with poverty rates declining from 58 percent to 51 percent over the same period.

These data highlights show that while there have been some successes in the fight to reduce poverty and improve quality of life around the world, many challenges remain, particularly in the face of continuing population growth. You can download our datasets to learn more about the Plan B proposals for eradicating poverty and stabilizing population -- goals that play an important role in the mobilization to save civilization.

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City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.Photo courtesy Matthew McDermott via Flickr India and China put aside a diplomatic spat to sign a five-year agreement Wednesday to cooperate on climate change leading up to crucial talks in Copenhagen.

The pact establishes a working group to exchange information on climate change ahead of a high-stakes summit in the Danish capital from Dec. 7-18 where nations will attempt to clinch a treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

"We regard India as a sincere, devoted friend and the MoU (memorandum of understanding) on climate change will take our cooperation on the issue to a new high," Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman and minister of China's National Development and Reforms Commission said at the signing in New Delhi.

India and China are among the world's biggest polluters and both have so far taken a united stand on rejecting binding emissions cuts, arguing that carbon caps will hinder them in their quest to alleviate poverty.

"There is no difference between the Indian and Chinese position (on climate change)," said Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, adding that their stance "fully protects and promotes the interests of developing nations."

The two nations traded jabs over a recent visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian border state at the core of a long-standing territorial dispute between the neighbors.

On Tuesday, China said it was "firmly opposed" to a planned visit by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama to the state, while India has recently complained about Chinese involvement in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Dow Jones Newswires contributed to this report.

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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: The U.S. Senate is looking at new climate change legislation as the COP-15 global talks in Copenhagen approach this December. These two stories have fed off and driven each other all year. That they are happening together offers a clear view of just how stark differences are on what the U.S. should do.

There’s money. Rich nations have it, but are reluctant to part with it. Poor nations want it, to gird climate adaptation strategies and to alleviate energy poverty with low-carbon systems. The U.S. dropped opposition to a new international organization that would oversee climate-related fund transfers from rich to poor countries.

There’s trade. U.S. states dependent on exports and energy-intensive manufacturing fear a loss in their economic competitiveness if the U.S. adopts a low-carbon strategy and key competitors don’t. The U.N.-mediated process in fact excludes developing nations from such a requirement. That’s not changing so quickly, even against the steady background hum that the two-tiered system, for rich and poor nations, is flawed, possibly by Western “sabotage.”

Fortunately, there are also the ministers of the Maldives, willing to inject gallows humor into the proceedings.

Dating advice for negotiators: President Obama is unlikely to receive as cool a reception in Copenhagen in December, if he goes, as he did last month when Chicago’s Olympic bid took him to, uh, Copenhagen. John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute muses in Politico about the differences in public opinion on climate change between the U.S. and Europe. His conclusion is the international climate negotiation version of, “He’s just not that into you.”

At least a handful of senators and executive branch officials are struggling daily to challenge that conclusion by making new policy. Democrats, particularly Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has discussed the inclusion of nuclear energy provisions in the climate bill with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (D-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). The bill is not expected to pass before the Copenhagen talks, Carol Browner, Obama’s chief climate adviser, said publicly this week.

The White House is expected to regulate heat-trapping gas emissions, despite its stated preference for legislation. A path through the Environmental Protection Agency may be fraught with domestic political risks for the administration and lawsuits over new rules.

Model universe?: A scientific paper [PDF] published last year by Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a team that includes several paleoclimatologists came to the tentative conclusion that the world should shoot for a climate stabilization target of 350 parts carbon dioxide for every million parts of air, or 350 ppm. (The preindustrial value was about 280 ppm. We’re currently near 390 ppm.)

A new study looks at economic implications. Frank Ackerman of Tufts University and the Stockholm Environmental Institute has led a team of economists in modeling economic scenarios by which the world stabilizes at 350 ppm by 2200. The researchers use the common Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (DICE), but make assumptions that treat the possibility of extreme climate change with greater emphasis. They assume a much higher value for the climate’s temperature sensitivity to increased carbon dioxide, a much lower value for the depreciation of the dollar over time, and vary the scale of climate damages.

Is seeing really believing?: A British environmentalist is suing his former employer, a major property company, on the grounds that it violated his religious or philosophical belief that climate change is real and people should alter their lifestyles to eliminate carbon pollution. This approach, that climate change is a belief system, must be maddening to scientists. After all, scientists make a living by collecting and explaining data. Science writers filter it for people less inclined to read peer-reviewed journals. So the notion of “believing” -- which is generally not driven by skeptical data collection -- runs in the opposite direction how scientists learned about climate change in the first place and how they keep tabs on it. On the other hand, unless you’re collecting and analyzing all the data yourself, which no human being possibly has time for, chances are that on some basic level you end up having to choose to “believe” somebody …

A passage to India: India has undergone a significant makeover on its public climate rhetoric in the last two months or so. Its central positions haven’t changed. The “per capita principle” remains in effect, the guarantee that Indian per capita emissions will never pass that of rich nations. U.S. emissions are on the order of 20 tons per person. In India that figure is just higher than one ton. India will not accept binding emission reduction targets. It will not abide U.S. protectionism in climate policy. There are at least 100 million more Indians without electricity than there are all Americans, in total.

The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledges that the climate threat is real, and is expected to introduce domestic legislation next month targeting fuel efficiency and building codes. India itself may be at risk for some of the most perilous regional changes, in the monsoon that brings the region 70 percent of its precipitation, and in the Himalayan glaciers that feed major rivers -- and provide drinking water to one billion people.

For the next three weeks, Climate Post will be traveling through India -- Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi -- speaking mostly with colleagues in journalism, but also with audiences at companies, universities, and NGOs to talk about what we can learn from each other on this global problem. Posts will come as close to their usual “Thursdays at three” as circumstances allow (Perhaps even closer than usual … ). Again, circumstances permitting, more frequent updates will come through CarbonNation, a (much-neglected) personal blog. The trip is sponsored by a U.S. State Department grant.

My goal for this trip is to help build a bridge between journalists and interested observers in the U.S. and India, some kind of electronic journalism “buddy system." Details TK. Feel free to help us out: Send questions and comments about all things India here. Let’s try to get them answered and addressed.

See you next week in Kolkata …

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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Leaders of the world's richest and fastest-growing economies are pushing for climate action even though their citizens have yet to wake up to the scale of the problem. Above, national leaders pose at the most recent G8 meeting last June in Italy. (White House Photo).Something unusual seems to be happening in the struggle to wake the world up to the reality of climate change. Almost unprecedented for an environmental issue, national leaders appear to be out ahead of public opinion in their respective countries.

President Obama has made climate action one of his top priorities after health care. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is spending much of his time trying to lay the grounds for a successful deal at December's climate conference in Copenhagen, while his chief rival, Conservative Party leader David Cameron (expected to succeed him after national elections in the spring) has made combatting global warming a signature issue.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, an unexpected environmentalist, is backing a carbon tax. The recently reelected German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has long been in the vanguard of moves to tackle climate change. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced a stringent target for carbon cuts as one of his first acts after being elected last month. And Kevin Rudd, Australia's leader, has likewise radically overturned the obstructionist position of his predecessor.

Yet not one of these leaders has been under great pressure from their citizens to get serious about global warming. Though there is plenty of evidence that the majority of people in their countries accept climate change as a reality and think that something should be done to tackle it, there is little sign of an overwhelming demand for urgent action. Indeed, Gordon Brown and his ministers have often privately urged green NGOs to mobilize a mass campaign so as to give them the "political space" to act.

The paradox is even more marked in some rapidly industrializing countries in the developing world, where there is even less sign of popular pressure. Yet, Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, is preparing a detailed offer to cut the growth in his country's carbon emissions to place on the table in Copenhagen. Hu Jintao, meanwhile, chose to make the first-ever speech by a Chinese president to the UN General Assembly at last month's climate summit.

Even Manmohan Singh, prime minister of the hitherto somewhat recalcitrant India, has ordered a more internationalist approach, telling ministers: "We may not have caused the problem, but we must be part of the solution."

This leadership of the leaders is welcome, but it has its limitations, most obviously in the United States where the constitutional separation of powers makes senators responding to their respective states' interests prove a powerful obstacle. But other countries are not immune from political inaction. The embattled Gordon Brown is getting no measurable political uplift from his work on climate change, while a sympathetic Conservative backbencher says that support for David Cameron's sincere concern is "paper thin" in his parliamentary party.

Yet the leaders surely need not be isolated, for despite a vocal skeptic minority, solid majorities in developed countries, at least, understand that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and requires action.

Eighty-five percent of Britons, polls show, are convinced that global warming is already a threat or will become so soon. Sixty-seven percent of Australians back their government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, even though it has run into trouble in parliament. And 83 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans in the United States have told pollsters that they believe global warning is already happening.

So why does this not turn into intense political pressure? One reason seems to be that much of the concern is still relatively soft and has not been translated into action even on a personal level. In the United States, one survey found that just 18 percent of respondents were alarmed enough to be doing something in their own lives to address climate change (not bad compared to the 7 percent of outright deniers, but far short of overwhelming). In Britain, only about a third of those concerned said that they thought they did enough personally to address global warming.

Experts point to two apparently contradictory, but not mutually exclusive, reasons for this. The first is that most people do not realize how serious things are, partly because the scientists have not been yelling. "For long we have been reluctant to spell out clearly the true implications of our analysis, instead couching out conclusions as challenging but politically palatable," says Prof. Kevin Anderson of Britain's blue-chip Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. Prof. Clive Hamilton of the Australian National University adds: "There is a widespread belief in the scientific community that the public cannot handle the truth, and so it has been pulling its punches."

The second reason is that people are not sure what they can do, or if any actions will actually make a difference. But there is mounting evidence that changes in behavior come when people get information from a trusted source on what needs to be done, and why it is worthwhile.

National leaders, of course, do know they can make a difference and have been briefed on the true extent of the climate crisis. That may explain why they have leapt out front on this issue. Their countrymen now urgently need to be brought up to speed.

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China, India, U.S. commit to seal Copenhagen deal

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Cross-posted from Wind-Works.

The world's largest single political jurisdiction to date, India, has made a strategic move to use a comprehensive system of feed-in tariffs to develop its renewable energy potential.

China had previously announced feed-in tariffs for wind energy only. The country is expected to reveal feed-in tariffs for solar energy later this year.

India's Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) in New Delhi announced Sept. 17 new regulations launching a system of feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, including both wind and solar energy.

India's 1.1 billion people together with China's 1.3 billion and the bulk of Europe's 300 million inhabitants -- about one-third of the world's population -- have committed to developing renewable energy with feed-in tariffs.

It was not clear from CERC's press release [PDF] that the feed-in tariff regulations were in response to the National Action Plan on Climate Change. The action plan calls for five percent of electricity generation in India to be from renewable sources by 2010 and to increase one percent per year for the next ten years. Yet, the move by CERC on feed-in tariffs strengthens India's position in the run up to the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

China's introduction of feed-in tariffs this year and recent pronouncements by the government are also seen as positioning the developing world, especially Asia's two economic powerhouses as taking action in regard to laggards in the developed world, such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

Neither the U.S. nor Canada has a climate change action plan nor a national goal of renewable energy in either nation's electricity supply.

However, it remains uncertain whether CERC would set specific tariffs or whether each project would apply for tariffs individually. In most jurisdictions, feed-in tariffs are specified for each technology or application.

CERC's regulations are a merely a primer on how to calculate tariffs for each technology. CERC said they focused on setting preferential tariffs for the period of debt repayment while maintaining an "adequate IRR" or internal rate of return. Yet there are no tariffs in CERC's published documents.

Interestingly, CERC specifies the tariffs before tax. Unlike the practice in the U.S., where federal tax subsidies play such an important part in project finance, the Indians specify a "normative return on equity" used in the calculations of 19 percent pre-tax during the first 10 years, and 24 percent after 10 years. This is comparable to the method used in Europe.

CERC also said that developers can approach the commission for project-specific tariffs as well as take the posted tariffs.

If Indian practice follows that in North America, CERC will open a regulatory docket to determine specific tariffs. And in fact, CERC has posted a public notice on its web site dated September 23, 2009 calling for comments on the regulations.

The new regulations spell out what assumptions need to be made to calculate the tariffs. For example, the regulations say that the discount rate used in determining the tariff will be the average weighted cost of capital. Further, the tariffs, defined as the levelized cost of energy, are derived from the specific "useful life" of each technology.

Wind projects will only receive the tariffs if they are located on sites with a minimum of 200 W/m² at 50 m. This is equivalent to a Class 2 or 5.5 m/s wind resource in the Battelle system of wind classes.

As successfully used in Germany and France and now proposed in China, India's new regulations will vary the tariff for wind energy based on resource intensity. CERC does this in an unusual way. They specify the capacity factor, or Capacity Utilization Factor in Indian English, to be used in four bands of wind power density in watts/m&sup2.

The first band represents Class 2 wind resources, the second band is between Class 2 and Class 3, the third band is in Class 3, and the final band is greater than Class 3 in the Battelle system.

Below is a summary of key elements in the Indian program.

In an unusual degree of synchronicity, the contract term for small hydro projects less than 3 MW is 35 years. Ontario's new feed-in tariffs for small hydro are for a contract term of a remarkably similar 40 years.

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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: The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a regulation that if approved would force the largest industrial emitters, including utilities, energy-intensive manufacturing, and refineries, to invest in the cleanest available technology for new projects or major renovations. The announcement’s potential importance overshadowed the nearly simultaneous official release of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, the latest “climate” bill that dare not speak its name. These twin events occur as global climate negotiators meet in Bangkok to shrink the disagreements now widely expected to eclipse a comprehensive deal in the Copenhagen talks in December.

Zero to 60 (Votes) in Seconds?: The EPA’s proposed regulation imposes restrictions on industrial facilities that emit more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. This threshold exempts small businesses and other concerned institutions (i.e., large new schools). The Los Angeles Times characterizes the move as a “warning shot to Congress” that the EPA is ready to move if lawmakers are not. The Washington Post lede looks outward, suggesting that the EPA action and Senate bill could influence the COP-15talks. The rules apply to as many as 7,500 industrial facilities, including 4,000 power plants, all of which under the Clean Air Act must meet requirements for emissions of a registered pollutant. They could take effect in 2011, although legal challenges are expected.

The Senate climate bill tweaks the legislation that barely passed the House of Representatives in late June. The bill, sponsored by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), would lead to 20 percent emissions cuts below 2005 levels by 2020. It girds against disruptive price swings in the market for greenhouse gas emission permits by letting the EPA auction credits to dampen demand. [For relevant Nicholas Institute policy material, click here.] The new bill also empowers a single federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with preventing fraud and “excessive speculation,” an important consideration after last year’s Wall Street shenanigans and consequent chaos. The key Senate committee, Environment and Public Works, has internal rifts far more serious than anything in memory.

The government has been presenting a menu of options increasingly unattractive to private stakeholders opposing national climate policy. And lately it seems like one option is less desirable than the next, particularly to business interests. Enter the climate lawsuit: A court ruling of potentially great consequence snuck under many newspaper editors’ radar. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of eight states, New York City, and green NGOs, allowing lawsuits charging emissions from coal-burning utilities as a public nuisance.

Drip, Drip, Drip…: Three companies have quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in recent weeks, charging the influential voice of business with retarding the national climate debate. Nike’s exodus follows PNM Resources, PG&E’s, and Excelon’s, which also came this week. General Electric remains in the Chamber, the world’s largest business association, but a GE spokesman said, “The Chamber does not speak for us on climate legislation.” The Chamber and many members, along with the National Association of Manufacturers, are key voices of opposition to climate legislation that has been proposed. (Duke Energy quit the NAM in August.) The big question is, would a larger exodus send a political signal to the Senate that industrial opposition to a U.S. carbon program has eroded to the point where lawmakers can strike the deals necessary to put one in place?

However the voices of business organize themselves in the climate debate over the next few months, longer term trends are much clearer. Business schools around the world are internalizing carbon-constrained business and building curricula accordingly [including Duke].

Not So Radioactive Abroad: Nuclear power remains a sticking point in the U.S., but not in India and China. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged to boost India’s nuclear capacity 100-fold by 2050, to 470 gigawatts, with ("untested”) fast breeder reactors. A longtime nuclear power supporter, China would like to increase its nuclear energy production 10 times by 2020, from 11 plants now in operation.

China may announce in Copenhagen its intention to establish a cap-and-trade system. The Guardian cites Philippe Chauvancy, the head of climate exchange at BlueNext, which is working with China to develop standards for voluntary emission reduction products. The article might overstate the speed at which this system might get up and running, given the complexity of building standards and acquiring know-how to certify carbon credits. More likely, China may run pilot emissions trading systems on sulfur dioxide and water pollution.

Desktop Climate Change: If the major economies enacted the most aggressive suite of climate proposals, how might they soften climate change by 2050? A new climate model attempts to bridge the gap between discussions on the international stage and scientific predictions about the mitigating effects of aggressive energy policy. C-ROADS started as an MIT doctoral dissertation in 1997, and has been developed into a tool that can project, in real time, the climate results of a given suite of policy. The model’s developers have been shopping it around the world, recently introducing it to Chinese climate experts, so that policymakers can better understand the potential implications of plans and decisions at moments in time up to 2100. The Climate Interactive Web site offers “Climate Bathtub Animation” for viewers playing the home game.

What life in the U.S. might look like in 2050 is hard to say, even with a nimble new climate model. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s business section grapples with this statement, prompted by a chat with Steven Koonin, undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy. John Funk’s article points out the proverbial elephant in the room of climate politics: the risks and cost of inaction. the Nature blog Climate Feedback frames the question as an either-or, asking, “If we are trying to keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less but 4 degrees is possible even within some of our lifetimes, which world do we prepare for?”

The Climate Archipelago: The many specialities and sub-specialities, topics and subtopics within the climate change conversation really might be imagined as a vast group of islands, each not always audible from the others. Residents of one island might know their own really, really well, but not others’. The several islands of climate skepticism are well-represented in the blogosphere.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit is one of the few rigorous skeptic sites that actually scrutinizes scientific statistical data, searching, it appears, for malfeasance and incompetence. McIntyre has earned headlines over the last few years by raising questions about some prominent studies, and laudably forcing a correction or two. But it’s good to keep in mind that disputing one line of evidence of global warming -- kicking it out of the climate archipelago -- still leaves all the other islands untouched: There are many, many lines of evidence suggesting that human industrial activity is changing the climate. The scientists at RealClimate.org, often the target of Climate Audit’s audits, respond to McIntyre’s recent work, pointing out that climate change is sufficiently well-documented that even “a statistical quirk or mistake” doesn’t erase climate risk -- or reduce the size of the archipelago.

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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The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

Norman Borlaug (Photo courtesy FAO)In the early 1940s, Mexico was a fraught region for U.S. geopolitical strategists. Not so long before -- 1939 -- a revolutionary government had nationalized the Mexican oil supply, dealing a sharp blow to U.S. oil interests, especially the Rockefeller family's dominant Standard Oil. Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, there was doubt about which side the Mexican government would take -- the Allies or the Axis. What if Mexico chose to supply the Germans with oil?

Into that tense milieu, the Rockefeller family's foundation dispatched a team of agricultural scientists into the Mexican countryside on a mission of goodwill: to bring Mexican farmers the seed varieties, knowledge, and inputs necessary to "modernize" crop production.

As the University of Texas economist Harry Cleaver put it in a 1972 paper in American Economic Review, "The friendly gesture of a development project would not only help soften rising nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends."

One of the junior scientists on that mission would become the best known, eventually netting a Nobel Peace Prize for his work: Norman Borlaug, who died Sunday at the age of 95.

Borlaug is widely hailed as the father of the Green Revolution -- the grand effort, which started in Mexican wheat and corn fields in the 1940s, to bring industrial agriculture to the global South.

There's no evidence that Borlaug thought much about geopolitics during his career as a plant pathologist and evangelist for industrial agriculture. In their book Enough -- largely a Borlaug hagiography--the Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman portray him as a man almost innocent of politics: He started out with a narrow scientific interest in wheat rust and a desire to "secure a steady job where he could work outdoors"; by the '60s and for the rest of his long life, he wanted merely to "do what was best for the hungry," the authors write.

Rather than focusing on the social relations around agriculture, Borlaug honed in on one thing: increasing yield. For him, the complexities of poverty and hunger could be reduced to a single problem: not enough food. From there, the answer was simple: grow as much as possible, using whatever technology available.

For Thurow and Kilman, Borlaug stands as an "international hero, an example of what an individual can accomplish in the quest to end hunger." That view is conventional, nearly universal. Borlaug's accomplishments inspire a kind of awe -- and rhetorical flights. "A towering scientist" and a "great benefactor of humankind," declared the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in a communique after Borlaug's death. The New York Times called him "the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives."

But it may be that Borlaug's blindness to politics -- his refusal to consider the power relations at work in the countries whose hungry he set out to save -- undermined his legacy. His tireless effort to boost grain yields, while no doubt resulting in a flood of cheap grain, created all manner of problems that won't be easily solved.

In Mexico, to be sure, yields of corn and wheat rose dramatically in the areas where Borlaug's techniques took hold. But while Thurow and Kilman convincingly argue that Borlaug's main intent was to "help poor farmers," Mexico's smallholders have been in a state of severe crisis for more than a generation. The so-called "immigrant crisis" here in the United States is better viewed as an agrarian crisis in Mexico. Since the the advent of NAFTA alone, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers have been forced off of their land. Since the Mexican manufacturing economy has been nowhere near robust enough to absorb them, a huge portion of one-time Mexican farmers now wash our dishes and harvest our crops.

While the factors contributing to Mexico's agrarian disaster are multiple and complex -- including neoliberal trade policy and U.S. crop subsidies -- the zeal to increase yield certainly factors in. In Borlaug's Green Revolution paradigm, farmers are urged to specialize in one or two commodity crops -- say, corn or wheat. To grow them, they were to buy hybridized seeds and ample doses of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. (Borlaug's celebrated "dwarf" varieties can thrive only with plenty of water and lots of synthetic nitrogen, and face serious pest pressure, requiring heavy pesticide doses.) The award for buying into the "Green Revolution package" was a bumper crop. The problem was that when everyone did the same thing and yields spiked, the price farmers received for their crops plunged.

The result is a kind of vicious cycle: farmers scramble to produce more to offset losses, leading to yet more downward pressure on prices. Of course, there's the temptation to boost yields with yet more inputs like fertilizer -- meaning that farmers' costs could continue creeping up even as the prices they received in the marketplace fell steadily. The result is a kind of structural economic crisis in farming.

The winners in the game are not farmers, but rather the buyers of the cheap commodities (mainly transnational grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) as well as input suppliers (like Monsanto, Dupont, and, again, Cargill) that sell the needed seeds and agrichemicals. As I've written before, Mexico's grain trade -- both corn and wheat -- has fallen largely under the control of U.S. agribusiness giants, and its culinary staple, the tortilla, has succumbed to a kind of vapid industrialization.

Urban residents do benefit from cheaper food prices, to be sure; but it's worth emphasizing that in post-Green Revolution Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition has remained stubbornly persistent, as anyone who has visited Mexico City in the past 20 years can verify.

One of the most ironic things I see in Borlaug obits is the idea that his innovations made countries like Mexico and India "self-sufficient" in food production. Actually, these nations became perilously dependent on foreign input suppliers for their food security. 

In India, site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative triumph, the legacy is even more mixed.

Today in India's grain belt, less than 40 years after Borlaug's Nobel triumph, the water table has been nearly completely tapped out by massive irrigation projects, farmers are in severe economic crisis, and cancer rates, seemingly related to agrichemical use, are tragically high.

In other words, to generate the massive yield gains that won Borlaug his Nobel, the nation sacrificed its most productive farmland and a generation of farmers. Meanwhile, as in Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition in India's urban centers remained stubbornly persistent.
 
For me, the point isn't that Borlaug is a villain and that crop yields don't matter; rather, it's that boosting yield alone can't solve hunger problems in any but the most fleeting way. Farmers' economic well-being; biodiversity; ecology; local knowledge, buy-in, and food traditions -- all of these things matter, too.

As the U.S. and European governments, along with the Gates Foundation, turn their attention to Africa's hunger crisis, I hope those lessons are heeded -- despite Borlaug's near-canonization as a modern-day saint.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)

Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can!

NEW DELHI - India's environment minister said the country will not agree to binding emission targets and that it would not be a disaster if global climate change talks in December fail.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said India could not compromise on its domestic commitments by agreeing to binding emissions cuts, which it has rejected on the grounds that they hamper economic growth.

"It is possible for us to identify quantifiable commitments that India voluntarily and unilaterally takes as part of its domestic political agenda," Ramesh said. "The problem arises when you want to transplant these domestic commitments to binding international targets and I think that distance has to be bridged."

But "if we don't bridge it at Copenhagen now let's not believe that the world will come to a halt," Ramesh told a gathering of business leaders in the capital New Delhi.

Developing countries such as India and China say rich countries ought to shoulder the main responsibility for mitigating global warming as they have historically emitted most of the greenhouse gases at the root of the problem.

Ramesh's remarks came a day after British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told reporters in Copenhagen that the deal was "hanging in the balance."

The December 7-18 talks in Copenhagen, under the 192-nation U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), aim to craft a post-2012 pact for curbing the heat-trapping gases that drive perilous global warming.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

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: The American “century” began 150 years ago today, when a salt water drill slipped into a crevice 69 feet below the surface, essentially striking oil for “Colonel” Edward Drake and the backers of his unlikely expedition. The find made Titusville, Penn., the first global capital of the oil industry.

After Drake & Co., the earliest winners in the rise of the oil industry were, of course, the whales, who had always selfishly preferred to use their illuminating oil as a buoyancy-control mechanism. But after them, hundreds of millions of people, billions, would win with oil. The small decisions of individuals, families, and businesses lifted many from subsistence agriculture to lives better than much of history’s royalty. In the process, it created what may be our thorniest “tragedy of the commons,” as Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz writes in his recent essay, “Tyranny for the Commons Man.”

Many solutions to the “tragedy” are well known and often discussed, such as the transition from oil addiction to “energy independence.” That medicine goes down only with heavy swallowing in the original Saudi Arabia of energy: Saudi Arabia. Former U.S. and U.K. ambassador Prince Turki al-Faisal pens a defense of his nation during the price escalations of recent years, instead blaming, “civil strife, failed investments, or in the case of Iraq, a U.S. invasion,” and hedge fund managers. Production trends in 1998 suggested that by 2008, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela would together produce 18.4 million barrels per day. Last year, they managed 10.2 million barrels. Parts of his essay resonate with U.S. energy pundits, who point out that what’s attainable is “energy security,” not “energy independence,” which is much harder.

Hello, Goodbye: The article appears amid a star-studded lineup in Foreign Policy’s Special Report, “Oil: The Long Goodbye.” Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of The Prize, writes the magazine’s lead piece, and looks at new trends in the oil industry since the early 90s. Two developments dominate: the rise of oil not only as a commodity, but as a financial instrument; and the challenge of climate change.

The U.S. energy industry continues to gird for a fight in the Senate. The American Petroleum Institute funded a study [slide show PDF] that concluded climate legislation would shrink jobs and U.S. investment in the sector, which famously hasn’t built a new refinery in 30 years. These effects would cause the U.S. to demand more, not less, oil from foreign producers. In Brazil, modern wildcatters celebrated the approach of the Drake anniversary by making the biggest Western Hemisphere oil discovery in 30 years.

Look Who’s Talking: “Oil is not even the most important energy issue between China and the United States. It is coal,” Yergin says in his FP story. In a carbon-constrained global economy, the two largest polluters must find a way out of their own prisoner’s dilemma. They are working hard at it.

China and the U.S. may be tip-toeing toward some kind of deal, though it likely wouldn’t be as monumental as environmentalists hope. Developing nations are extremely unlikely to cap their greenhouse gas emissions, but might take on stronger efficiency and renewable power standards. Domestically, some Chinese firms are taking their own baby steps. This month saw the first time a Chinese company bought carbon credits, a laudable, but not earth-shattering development. (More than half of the offsets that feed into the Kyoto carbon trading system originate in China.)

China is investing in renewables at an accelerating rate, even as it builds coal-burning power plants and cars. Keith Bradsher of the New York Times continues to document these trends, this week with a look at how China is running ahead in solar power. Many news gathering operations can no longer afford to staff overseas offices, and many lack the interest in foreign news if they could. This means that there are fewer “eyes on the ground” competing with each other to explain what’s going on. In their absence, blogging observers can fill in gaps.

In international talks, as in physics, a three-body problem is always much harder than a two-body problem. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, announced in Beijing–after the two nations’ first ministerial climate talks–that he and his counterparts agreed to coordinate their positions before major climate negotiations. They also admonished against trade protectionism of the sort included in the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed the House in June. The Hindu notes that the only conciliatory flicker toward the West was a reference to “looking at peaking [of emissions] some time in the future.”

The international conversation is heard in Washington. Two U.S. Cabinet secretaries, Gary Locke at Commerce and Tom Vilsack at Agriculture, told visiting groups that the U.S. needs a climate bill to take to the Copenhagen negotiations in December. The administration sent a confusing signal this week to legislators. The president’s revised budget proposal maintained a line for $627 billion in income from 2012 to 2019 from the auctioning of greenhouse gas emission permits. During his presidential campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama pledged to sell all carbon credits at auction. That proved too difficult a goal for Democratic legislators in the House to meet, and the Waxman-Markey climate bill freely allocates about 85 percent of the credits.

Mmmmm… Biodiesel: During these hot summer weeks, nothing could be more refreshing than plunging our choppers into a juicy slice of thick, pink watermelon. And now, cars can enjoy the same simple pleasures of summer. Sort of. Perhaps watermelon diesel can be more successful than salmon diesel. Perhaps not. Either way, let’s hope fuel crops don’t take over every inch of earth, as the farmers would have to cut down their apparently still-sizable tree cover.

Inherit the Trade Wind: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing about its proposed finding that greenhouse gas accumulation presents a mortal danger to Americans. If the agency fails to do so, the Chamber is threatening “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century,” according to William Kovacs, senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. The case would put climate science on trial in a fashion as spectacular as the proceedings that inspired the play and movie Inherit the Wind. In 1925, school instructor John Scopes was put on trial for violating a prohibition on teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow unsuccessfully defended Scopes against William Jennings Bryan, who demonstrated to the court that evolution is Biblically false.

Credit where credit is due. With this lawsuit threat, the Chamber has opened a door not only to greater public understanding of global warming, but to a greater understanding of humanity as evolution’s current greatest show on Earth. Scientists are only beginning to understand how changing living conditions, on land, in the sea and air, could affect many of the world’s 1.8 million or so known species, for better and for worse. Arthur Weis of the University of California, Irvine, has shown that mustard seeds gathered in 1997 and preserved grow more robustly than seeds from 2004 grown under the same conditions. His conclusion: Some organisms might be able to evolve more quickly than others to changing conditions.

Let’s hope our economy is one of them.

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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The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Last fall, Tom Zeller at the New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines.

And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament from various political parties in the eastern part of the state of Maharashtra put aside their differences and called on the Prime Minister to stop a coal mine in a forest reserve. The politicians declared: "Adani Power Ltd has been allocated 1,750 hectares of rich forest land having coal reserves at Lohara neat Tadoba. We are of the considered view, based on incontrovertible information, that operation of the proposed opencast coal mine will cause irreparable damage to the rich biodiversity in and around TATR [Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve] and seriously endanger the very existence of the tiger."

For more information on India and coal, check here.

For Carl Pope's own dispatches from India this summer, go here.

Back in Appalachia: Over the past year, demanding a sustainable economy, green jobs and an end to the destruction of their mountain communities and watersheds, an uprising against government-sanctioned mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachian coalfields by residents and national environmental organizations has emerged as one of the most powerful social justice movements in the country.

A movement against a massive bauxite strip mine in the mountains of Orissa, in India, has now made international headlines. Last week in London, mountain villagers from the Dongria Kondh tribe converged on the British finance center to demand a halt to British mining company Vedanta's intent to destroy their sacred mountain and community.

Joining up with the international human rights organization, Survival, and best-selling author Arundhati Roy and various London celebrities, the Dongria Kondh have emerged as a fearless and inspiring example of local resistance against the hell-bent ways of absentee mining companies.

Roy declared: "If Vedanta is allowed to go ahead with its plans for mining the Niyamgiri Hills for bauxite it will lead to the devastation of a whole ecosystem, and the destruction of not just the Dongria Kondh tribal community, but eventually all those whose livelihoods depend on that ecosystem."

With the blessing of the Indian Supreme Court, Vedanta plans to launch its own version of mountaintop removal on the Niyamgiri mountain, which the Dongria Kondh worship as their god. According to Survival: "The mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area."

The Dongria Kondh, though, aren't surrendering to the huge multinational company. Hardly. The mountain community has set up road blocks, organized human chains to stop the incoming bulldozers, and reached out to the international community to bring pressure on the British mining company.

The Survival organization has done a great job at debunking the mining company's bogus claims of jobs, environmental protection, community support or the even more despicable disregard for human habitation in the proposed blasting area.

Sound familiar? These are the talking points of Big Coal and its mountaintop removal campaign in Appalachia.

Here is a link to Survival's debunking of the corporate lies.

And here's a trailer for the film on the egregious situation, Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain:

For more information, go here.

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Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.)

On Monday he wrote about India and China's agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from seasonal snow and glacier melt is finally seeping into the consciousness of policymakers outside the climate world, including the diplomatic and security communities. Lamont frames the step as a rare instance of cooperation in a strategically sensitive area at the center of a 1962 territorial war between the countries.

While it would be easy to make too much of such an agreement, it is a tangible recognition of the importance of the ecological unit rather than the national one. It highlights how environmental interdependence across national boundaries can force cooperation in the face of politically difficult relations.

On Wednesday Lamont used cheetah diplomacy between India and Iran as an entry point for his story on international attempts to address Iran’s nuclear proliferation threat. India is asking Iran to help reintroduce cheetahs on the subcontinent, where they are now extinct. In what Lamont said would be an "unusual" example of "high-profile cooperation" for the two countries, diplomats are arranging for talks ahead of a regional wildlife conference. This baby step in relations could be even more significant since the United States publicly acknowledged that India may be able to play an interlocutor role with Iran on the hot button nuclear program question.

While both of these developments are relatively small in the scheme of the larger strategic relationships, they are fundamentally aimed at (re)building relationships between countries by establishing patterns of cooperation where interdependence is obvious and necessary. Such efforts are just one tool in the often-neglected toolbox of environmental peacebuilding.

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The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Here’s one thing citizens of the United States, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories have in common: According to a new 19-country public opinion poll on climate change, they’re the least likely to want more action on the issue from their governments.

American citizens showed the least interest of all the countries in response to this question: “How high a priority do you think the government should place on addressing climate change?”

The poll released today by WorldPublicOpinion.org covered 19 nations that include the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters and together comprise 60 percent of the world’s population. A total of 18,578 respondents were asked about what their government is already doing, what it should be doing, and how high a priority their fellow citizens consider addressing climate change to be.

The U.S. respondents also scored lowest when they were asked to rank from 1 to 10, “How high a priority does the government [currently] place on addressing climate change?”

Taken together, the two questions suggest that 52 percent of Americans want their government to do more than it currently is on the issue. In 15 of the 19 nations, majorities said their government should make addressing climate change a higher priority.

The survey also found most people underestimate the amount of support their peers have for addressing the shared threat of climate change. In other words, your neighbors are probably more willing than you think to support a climate plan. Respondents across all countries estimated that their peers gave climate change a 6.42 priority (10 being the highest priority). In fact, the average priority was higher—7.33.

Worldpublicopinion.org director Steven Kull says the sociological term for this common phenomenon is “pluralistic ignorance.”

“This is a sort of general tendency people have to underestimate others in terms of readiness to take action to address collective problems” said Kull, a political psychologist who leads the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. “It makes people feel good to think that they are more advanced than others, socially and intellectually. That they can better see the need for addressing long-term problems.”

While this poll focused on average citizens (see the full results methodology [PDF]), previous polls found that political leaders consistently underestimate the support of their citizens for addressing complex, long-term problems such as climate change. The same group’s 2004 Hall of Mirrors study [PDF] found that 71 percent of the public favored ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. However, only 38 percents of U.S. leaders (senior congressional staffers, Bush administration officials, and leaders in business, labor, and media) estimated that a majority of the public would support it. Only 28 percent of leaders estimated that it would be a large majority.

Leaders may be making the same miscalculation about this year’s climate and energy debate, Kull said. He took issue with polls that ask participants to rank a series of issues from most to least important, such as a Pew Research Center project in January.

“Americans consistently say that more should be done [on climate change],” he said. “At the same time if you give them a list of priorities [to rank] climate tends not to be one that they rank as one of the most important.”

Prioritization polls don’t account for the fact that Americans may want significant action on a lot of issues, he said.

China’s strong interest in government climate action is consistent with the findings of other research, said Kull, who has conducted focus-group polling in the country. Even when told by their government that climate change is the responsibility of industrialized nations, Chinese tend to support national action, he said.

“They generally have a kind of can-do attitude,” he said. “They also perceive that their economy is growing so much that they feel like they can afford the costs related to addressing climate change.”

Mexico’s position as the most supportive of government action surprised Kull, and he said he didn’t have a ready interpretation for it.

German participants had the strongest perception that their government was doing a lot on climate. Only 46 percent of Germans wanted their government to do more. Respondents from two other leading emitters--India and Russia--fell in the middle on support for government action.

Polls were conducted by different research centers in each country, and Kull cautioned against making too much of country-to-country comparisons. “We can’t exactly say that everybody relates to this 0-10 scale in the same way,” he said.

The survey relied on respondents’ current knowledge of the issue--each of the three questions used the phrase “addressing climate change” without explaining the threats of climate change or the benefits of stopping it. The survey was conducted from April to early July and had a margin of error of 3 to 4 percentage points.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

This past weekend, while traveling in India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received the message, courteous but firm, that India has no intention of capping carbon.  The rationale provided is that India has low per capita emissions.  This is, to be sure, India's best argument.  Her overall emissions are soaring as her population spirals upward--India, only two thirds as populous as China a decade ago, will pass China to become the world's most populous country, with almost 1.5 billion people in 2030.  India's per capita emissions are rising too from industrialization.  But they remain below those in developed countries.  China, the other key holdout on capping emissions, can make a similar per capita argument, though it recently passed the U.S. to become the world's largest emitter, and its emissions are soaring as it develops.

While the posture of India and China are problematic on their own, they make it harder for other countries to take action.  After all, if the world's two most populous and dynamic economies, growing at about 7 percent (although down from China's 13 percent growth in 2007), won't opt in, why should the U.S., which contracted last quarter at a 5.5 percent rate?  With America's standard of living under siege, putting America at a further competitive disadvantage--no matter how much carbon we emit per capita--is a tough sell to voters.  And what emerges is a classic collective action stalemate.

This dilemna highlights one of the diferences between greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental issues. Unlike cleaning the air or water, where the benefits are realized locally, keeping costs and benefits within one country, reducing emissions benefits the entire planet, but costs whomever does it growth.  This is what makes a global solution--such as that promoted by the UN through the Kyoto and now Copenhagen process--so attractive.  However, if China and India won't come to the table, what should the U.S. do?

One solution attracting interest of late is the use of trade policy to punish carbon havens. Indeed, at the last minute, the House inserted into the Waxman-Markey bill a provision to impose tariffs on countries that do not take action to limit emissions.  In announcing his support for the House bill after its passage, President Obama flagged the provision as troubling insofar as it runs counter to free trade principles.

So is trade policy a valid tool in climate policy?  The New York Times recently argued that it is if enacted multilaterally, but not if it's enacted unilaterally.  Paul Krugman, my professor of trade policy at Princeton, has endorsed the idea in theory.  My view is that trade policy is a problematic tool from a practical standpoint that would require significant new infrastructure to work at all.

The problem with using trade policy for an environmental purposes are fourfold.

First, trade actions have an unfortunate tendency to invite retaliation and provoke trade wars even in a multilateral context.  No matter how good your case, other countries can respond in kind.  The result is then a lengthy negotiation or WTO process that ultimately harms both parties.

Second, while the temptation to use trade policy to protect clean domestic industries against dirty foreign ones may be great, the track record for mixing the environment with trade is poor.  More often than not, environmental regulations have functioned as non-tariff trade barriers.  Domestic companies claim them when threatened economically, and verifying them becomes a political football. 

Third, as with food safety regulations, labor regulations, and other hard to measure quantities, measurement is labor intensive and becomes an impediment to good regulation.  This would complicate administering any tariff.  It might overwhelm the WTO.

Fourth, increasing the price of an import to protect a domestic industry can have the adverse consequence of increasing the price of inputs for other domestic products.  A classic example is that when the U.S. slapped a tariff on LCDs to protect LCD domestic manufacturers in the 1980s, it drove American laptop manufacturing offshore.  Taxing imports from carbon havens to protect domestic industries could raise manufacturing costs for other companies, causing the latter to shift their production to carbon havens. 

Those are the arguments against. On the other hand, giving imports a total pass not only harms domestic producers, but is tantamount to a cordial invitation to domestic companies to shift production--and jobs--offshore.  This issue came up, of course, in the NAFTA debate.  Ideally, there ought to be some middle ground.

To view how a tariff might succeed or not, consider the case of electricity-intensive aluminum production.  Rio Tinto, as one example, produces aluminum using hydro power in Canada but coal-based power in Australia.  Were the U.S. to slap a tariff on aluminum produced with coal-based power (hard enough to determine in and of itself), aluminum produced with hydro power would be cheaper. One outcome would be for Rio Tinto to phase out coal in favor of hydro in the production of aluminum.  Were that to occur, one might call a US tariff an environmental and economic success.

Another possible outcome, however, would be for Rio Tinto to fulfill U.S. demand with an unchanged mix of product that would cost buyers more due to the tariff.  In that case, U.S. companies might decide to shift the production of products using aluminum overseas.  This would be an environmental and economic failure.  The deciding factors between the two outcomes would probably be Rio Tinto's ease of substituting a zero carbon energy source for coal, and the domesic companies' difficulty of moving production of products using aluminum overseas.

In short, it is hard to predict in advance just how the tariff would impact the market, but it is clear that the more carbon havens that exist, the greater the likelihood that production will seek them out.

Currently a workable regime is not readily at hand.  Were a trade regime to ultimately be invoked, here are some thoughts to guide its development.

First, as with the capping of carbon emissions themselves, putting a price on emissions in imports should be pushed as far up the value chain as possible. This is because as products grow more complex, tracking their carbon footprint becomes more difficult and trade restrictions multiply.  Any trade-based taxes on carbon intensive goods should be directed upstream at basic goods such as steel or aluminum, not at finished products made from those commodities.  While this could drive downstream industries overseas, on balance, I think, it would be far less distortionary to address a few commodities than many products.

Second, some sort of standardized process for measuring carbon footprints needs to be devised.  However, it would be preferable for some private body to administer standards, rather than a governmental organization.  A number of creative startups are trying to devise novel ways of tracking carbon.  One such venture is Greenerone.com which uses crowd sourced information--or information gleaned for free by numerous reporters to track the environmental profile of products.  Others are working on more industry-focused products.  Whatever system is used should involve as little bureaucracy as possible, consistent with being stable and standardized. 

Another idea, admittedly bold, would be to devise some sort of average duty--product independent--to penalize countries that choose not to limit their emissions during production.  Such an approach would have to be administered multilaterally, lest it lead to an immediate trade war, thus it is not something the U.S. could do in and of itself.

The very complexity of using a trade hammer shows that it is far preferable to develop a coordinated multilateral regime than to use trade policy.  Free trade has created wealth since the days of the Minoans and since then for the Athenians, Carthaginians, Romans, Indians, Venetians, Portuguese, Spanish, British and yes, Americans, to name only a few.  It is, in contrast, a clumsy tool for achieving environmental goals.  Nonetheless, if India and China--and for that matter the U.S.,  refuse to address the problem of a changing climate, the pressure to use trade policy to achieve those goals will only increase.

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The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

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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Photo: Elizabeth Thomsen

Today, in global talks, in the Senate, on the street, you still hear a murmur here and there about "not doing anything until India and China sign on." And this previously pervasive attitude, however obsolete, may already be coming back to bite industrialized nations. Indeed, the big honchos in the West may find themselves borrowing and begging for new technologies that China has been busy perfecting all along.

Or maybe we'll just be sulking about the fact that China's economy is happily unhitched from the fossil fuel rollercoaster long before ours...

Could it be that China is winning the clean energy race? Here are some tidbits gathered by MicCheck Radio and Sightline that make the case:

Some promising news: China and the United States recently announced a joint project to develop a clean energy research center. With initial financing of $15 million and headquarters in both countries, the center will focus on coal, clean buildings, and efficient vehicles, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced yesterday. Still, the race is on!

As Washington's former governor, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, put it, "The Chinese are taking unprecedented action. They are a model for developing countries around the world." But maybe they're also a model for the developed countries.

Venture capitalist John Doerr, testifying before the US Senate, put it this way, referring to America’s place in the clean-energy race: “We barely got a dog in the fight; we’re barely in the game right now.”

 This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

First Things First: The Washington-to-Beijing diplomatic shuttle shows no sign of slowing down. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visited China this week to prod collaboration on clean energy technology. Chu announced the U.S. would contribute $15 million to a partnership that will study how to capture carbon dioxide emissions and trap them underground. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blogger Keith Johnson sums up mutual perceptions nicely by citing headlines in his paper (“Chu Warns China on Emissions”) and the China Daily (”Steven Chu: U.S. Ready to Lead on Climate Change”).

The New York Times reports that China is taking the lead on clean energy. The Washington Post surveys business trends there and in other Asian nations, places that “could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill.” A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory official agrees that the U.S. is already left behind in some areas. And the number of U.S. “green jobs” is on the uptick–thanks to enterprising foreign firms.

The U.S. energy industry delivered a surprise this week. Exxon announced a plan to spend $600 million on research into fuel manufactured from algae. These simple plants, which include pond scum and seaweed, are a darling of many scientists and venture capital firms. Exxon’s investment further boosts the fortunes of maverick scientist Craig Venter, whose Synthetic Genomics is a partner in the project. Just a few years ago, Exxon’s previous CEO called ethanol “moonshine,” denigrating such projects, although it should be pointed out that moonshine is largely ethanol.

Count your carbs, count your carbon: Sweden assumed the presidency of the European Union earlier this month. The nation has had a carbon tax since the early 1990s, and continues to take the climate initiative, which now extends to food labeling.

With food or anything else, counting carbs is tricky business. Every facet of the climate story this week demonstrates why. In perhaps the most direct example, the Securities and Exchange Commission will take “a very serious look” at if or how to mandate that publicly traded companies disclose their climate risks.

Elsewhere, economic modeling spats continue. In California, small-business groups funded a study that suggests that, uh, small businesses will lose more than $180 billion in output –10 percent of the total–as a result of the state’s climate law. The California Air Resources Board says the study posits the climate law would bring no savings from increased efficiency or benefits from innovation and entrepreneurship, a supposition that “contradicts the track record of three decades” of state history.

Scientists are in the profession of keeping other scientists honest, theoretically. Computer simulations are such an easy activity to squawk at, scientists themselves do, in the most rarefied places, when they see less-than-rigorous studies published. As commentary on niche modeling, Nature publishes this paper that simulates the effects of climate change on Bigfoot habitats in North America.

The Washington Post runs another op-ed that pretends that climate change does not exist. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pens this op-ed. She writes, “Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas.” Climate Post usually thinks of mountains as solid, oil as liquid, and gas as gas. The latter two phases of matter seem harder to sit on.

Palin quotes Warren Buffett, the famed investor, describing predicted burdens the bill will have on low-income Americans. Buffett himself comes under scrutiny elsewhere. Bloomberg Columnist Eric Pooley untangles the assumptions in Buffett’s statements and those of David Sokol, chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

The next day, the WP ran an editorial supportive of the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last week, possibly to balance the decision to run Palin’s op-ed the day before.  Guardian columnist, and now backseat economist, George Monbiot takes a calculator to the aspirational agreements struck last week among G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and prevent more than two degrees C of warming. The developed world would meet their targets in part by offseting their emissions with credits generated by projects in the developing world. To generate enough offset credits, Monbiot calculates, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions by 125 percent.

Climate legislation allows regulated firms to meet their carbon caps by “offsetting” emissions–buying pollution credits generated by (mostly) forestry and agriculture projects. A comprehensive Greenwire article places offsets within the wider context of how markets can find efficient ways to protect ecosystem services–the many natural processes that clean water, or air, shuttle nutrients about, or cool the climate. Two Nicholas Institute colleagues are cited in the piece.

Summer Days: “Exceptional drought” sears central and southern Texas, draining crops and straining herds. Just one of 12 boat ramps at Lake Travis, near Austin, can reach water, which is down 40 feet. Plus side: Young children can wade safely in nearby river.

Officials, scientists, and at least one reporter in Macon, Georgia, have read the White House’s June report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which predicts a future of twice as many 90-degree days, with the hottest days 10 degrees hotter than usual. “When I read those numbers, I think about what that means to me and my family and my lifestyle, and that’s a very different picture of the South than what I grew up with,” a Georgia Tech scientist said.

The summer sun has desiccated San Joaquin Valley in California, and the U.S. need only look south to consider the effects of poorly managed water.

Dryness is crippling farming in India’s massive farming sector. Bhopal residents, all 1.8 million of them, are allowed 30 minutes of water every other day, in rationing undertaken in October. Downpours and flooding in Mumbai couldn’t help Mumbai, where officials cut water use by 30 percent given a drop in lake levels.

BBC reports from Char Atra, a beleaguered island in the Ganges, where “hardcore poor” residents cope as they can with natural hydrology. Villagers have rebuilt one woman’s home because last year, “there was so much water in her hut that she had to tie her children to their bed at night to stop them from rolling and drowning.”

Does he still count?: Love him or hate him, leading NASA climatologist James Hansen has become an embattled figure. ClimateWire turns in a thoughtful analysis of just how relevant the grandfather of global warming is or isn’t in his activist period, a skeptical complement to the lighter fare published by the New Yorker recently.

Hansen and Al Gore held a colloquium in Hell, which itself, apparently, has seen a 3.8 degree average temperature rise since 1955. “[O]ccupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons,” writes Ian Frazier, a satirist, the New Yorker’s tongue-in-cheek “Shouts and Murmurs column.”

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City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

International climate negotiations often seem like some sort of cosmic science fair project -- an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors. There's a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light.

Faith in the UN climate process has dimmed. Joe Romm calls it a "dead man walking." The Copenhagen talks in December are generally discussed with the same dissonant mixture of urgency ("You have to do it in Copenhagen," says UNFCCC chair Yvo de Boer) and fatalism ("There is no movement," says German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel) as the last dozen rounds of international talks.

The Obama administration knows the danger of sclerosis and is working on several fronts to regain a sense of momentum. A good bit of that work will happen during this busy week, which will take the president to Russia to meet with President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin; he'll deliver a major speech on U.S.-Russia relations today. On Wednesday, he heads to Italy for the latest meeting of the G8 countries (US, France, UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada). On Thursday, on the sidelines of the G8, Obama will convene a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (the G8 plus Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa). On Friday he'll head to Ghana and on Saturday he'll deliver a major speech on development and democracy.

At all these events the issue of climate change will play a role. All will reveal something about the Obama administration's approach to international climate negotiations.

The Grand Plan

International climate negotiations have primarily been channeled through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but many in the international community are losing faith in that process, or at least in its monopoly on negotiations. Getting 192 countries to sign on to a meaningful treaty is nigh impossible; the lowest common denominator among 192 wildly diverse countries turns out to be pretty damn low.

Oddly, it was the Bush administration that first saw a way around the thicket. In May 2007 it announced a series of Major Economies Meetings on climate and energy security. The idea was that the largest greenhouse gas emitters could more easily find areas of agreement working directly with one another, and that what consensus they could find would help break the logjam in the UNFCCC process.

The sincerity of Bush's effort was widely doubted -- he (in)famously advocated for purely voluntary measures -- but the basic wisdom of the strategy is apparent to, among others, the Obama administration. In fact Obama seems to be taking it even farther, working not only with smaller groups like the Major Economies Forum (MEF) and the G8, but bilaterally with other large emitters. What shape these smaller deals take could vary, from shared targets to technology R&D agreements, but again, the idea is to show that big emitters are finally acting, taking real steps. This will, it is hoped, cut through the Gordian you-go-first knot sure to bedevil the Copenhagen climate talks.

The strategy began with Todd Stern's initial efforts in China, but "you can definitely say we are looking for other partners," an administration official said.

Russia

Most members of the international community had written Russia off when it comes to climate change. It grudgingly ratified Kyoto back in 2004, serving as the crucial final signatory needed to put the treaty into effect. But since then it's focused on nothing but often dirty and inefficient means of expanding its economy. Just last month, in what many interpreted as a thumb in the eye of the UN process, it announced a "climate plan" that would increase its greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020.

The reason Russia, a Kyoto signatory, can grow its emissions so heedlessly is that emission baselines for the UN process were set at 1990 levels. Of course in 1992 Russia's economy cratered, and with it the country's emissions. The damage was so great that the economy would need to grow substantially to meet a target of 10-15% below 1990 levels by 2020 -- and that's what it plans to do.

Most observers expected Obama to focus exclusively on arms control and the financial crisis when he goes to Russia, since progress on climate seems so hopeless. But as The Guardian reports, the administration fully intends to forge a deal on joint climate action. It's been pulling its ideas from a new report from the Center on American Progress.

The goal is to coax Russia into accepting strong sticks (mandatory targets at the Copenhagen talks) by offering it carrots. One is help entering carbon trading markets. The country is thought to be sitting on some 1.9 billion euros worth of carbon credits -- one of the main reasons it signed Kyoto -- but the government does not have the capacity or infrastructure to monitor emissions and approve projects. The U.S. could help with that, since it has considerable experience with such markets.

The other carrot is efficiency. Russia's energy intensity -- energy use per unit of GDP -- is twice America's, and the highest among the world's high energy consuming countries. Targeted exchange of efficiency technology and know-how could not only bend Russia's emissions curve but make its economy more productive. It's a win-win, but again, the government needs help. (Interestingly, Russia just announced that it will ban some incandescent lights by 2011.)

No big U.S.-Russia agreements on climate are expected this week, but Monday saw the introduction of a working group on energy, formed as part of a high-level bilateral commission created out of the summit. Steven Chu will chair the group on the US side.

G8 + MEF

The MEF is a smaller group of countries than the full UNFCCC, but it's still large and diverse, and there are enormous challenges in the way of getting a substantive agreement this week. Here are a few:

China + India

The overwhelming short-term priorities for developing countries are poverty reduction and economic development, driven in part by coal-based power. That's why China and India have both recently signaled that they will not commit to any binding GHG reduction targets. No, seriously, they won't. Says Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh, “India will not accept any emissions targets -- period. It is the bottom line; a non-negotiable stand. This is not something that India is going to budge on, under any circumstances." OK then!

Both countries (India; China) have also recently expressed ostentatious outrage about the possibility that the United States will impose "carbon tariffs" on imported goods. (A border adjustment provision was inserted in the Waxman-Markey bill before it passed the House.) Developing countries warn of an incipient trade war. Of course, as John Kemp points out, the provisions in the bill are not actually carbon tariffs but "carefully structured as import permits specifically to ensure they are consistent with World Trade Organisation rules." And sure enough, the WTO has signaled that the import permits are legal. China and India fear them.

Obama has spoken publicly against the border adjustments, but as Brad Plumer notes, it's helpful to have that stick in hand to make the carrots look better. (Todd Stern didn't have it when he went to China early last month.)

Of course China is hardly sitting on its hands. It's green stimulus package was both larger and greener than America's. Just this month it boosted its renewable energy targets to 15% by 2020. It looks set to swamp the U.S. in both wind and solar investment this year; between now and 2020, it's expected to spend more on renewables and nuclear than on oil and coal.

The central government has established the State Council's Expert Panel on Climate Change Policy to work on energy development plans that will involve trillions in investment. "Roughly, we need to spend an extra 1 trillion yuan every year to raise energy efficiency," said panel member Bai Quan. Just as importantly, maybe more so, it announced that regional government officials will be judged by reductions in carbon intensity instead of purely by economic growth. Getting career bureaucrats on board is essential to making sure the central planners' schemes become reality. The green shift is dispersing into rural areas as well.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will head to China later this month to talk turkey. Says Chu, "It's in our interest and China's to explore ways to cooperate for our mutual benefit--by promoting renewable energy, encouraging energy efficiency and cutting pollution." Chu's assistant secretary David Sandalow is hosting a high-level discussion on engaging China on CCS this Thursday in D.C.; a second, focused on finance and political barriers, will happen soon thereafter.

You can imagine Chu announcing a splashy post-combustion CCS development project, or an investment in solar thermal projects, in exchange for back-channel agreements on a timeline for the country to accept hard emission reductions targets (and back off on border adjustment fussing).

What's next

Japan and Brazil are among the other countries with which Obama may pursue bilateral deals, possibly before Copenhagen. The big sticking point with Brazil is avoided deforestation. They don't want it paid for via carbon credits, through the Reduced Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program -- they want it paid for with cold hard cash (so old-fashioned!). So far, no one except Norway is biting.

If all goes well -- an enormous if, of course -- the U.S. negotiating team arrive at Copenhagen with a web of bi- and multi-lateral side deals on clean energy technology sharing, adaptation research, development assistance, trade deals, and more. The world's biggest polluters will arrive with agreements in hand. Developing countries will see signs of real movement on the part of developed nations and soften their rigid opposition to targets.

And out of it all will come a stronger, more robust climate treaty, scaffolded by the self-interest of the many countries invested in side deals premised on continued international action.

That's the hope anyway. Needless to say: domestic achievements notwithstanding, if Obama can pull it off he'll be assured of a place in history.

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Fair, Ambitious & Binding: Essentials for a Successful Climate Deal

Back in 2008, Christina Archer and Mark Z Jacobson published data (PDF)[1] showing worldwide commercial wind potential exceeded world energy use by many times. A new peer reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences now confirms (PDF)[2] this, and further shows that this potential is not limited to a lucky few. Most of the world's continents and nations could provide all their energy from wind, including China, the UK, Russia and India. Nations (such as Korea) which lack wind resources have neighbors with spare potential. While wind is only one source of clean energy, this helps emphasize that we have the technical capacity to replace dirty power. The obstacles are political; we have the means if we choose to use them.

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[1] Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobson, "Evaluation of Global Wind Power,". Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres 110, no. D12 30-Jun 2005, American Geophysical Union, 20-Jan-2008

[2] Xi Lua, Michael B. McElroy, and Juha Kiviluomac; "Global potential for wind-generated electricity"; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; June 22, 2009

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City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks