Climate Change

Bonn - The UNFCC has big meetings going on now in Bonn.  The scientific and technological advice wizards as well as the policy wonks, aka the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI), have been hard at work since May 7.  There are 2,000 participants from governments, business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions.  Next week, along with the other meetings and workshops, delegates will convene to talk about further commitments under the Kyoto Protocols.  Today, there are in-depth presentations from the three working groups of the IPCC that have been promulgating their Fourth Assessment Report this year. (If you haven’t done so, you should consider reading the Summary for Policymakers on the “Mitigation of Climate Change.”  I reported on this last week.)  Anyway, here’s a good story from the “Washington Post” on these meetings.

A workshop has taken place on urban planning and development, including transportation, and there will be ones next week on energy efficiency and power generation. There are some cool powerpoint slides on the “ecocycle model” (#20 through 34) at “The Sustainable City” presentation from Sweden. This is very green building.  (Check back next week for the completed powerpoint and pdf versions of all of these workshops’ presentations.)

This coming December, in Bali, a further major international meeting will be held on what happens after Kyoto expires in 2012.  See this and this from Reuters.

New York – The UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) concluded its fifteenth meeting yesterday.  Again, about 2,000 worthy delegates convened over the course of two weeks to “focus on energy solutions that can fuel development and cut poverty, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.”  You can find a wealth of information on the CSD and these meetings here, including fact sheets and links on such topics as cleaner cooling and cleaner energy for poor households.  The emphasis in the latter subject is on switching from firewood and charcoal to liquefied petroleum gas for cooking and heating.  On this, I have been wondering for years why solar cookers haven’t taken off.  They seem to be an ideal solution for many environments and eminently practicable.  See this powerpoint show.  For more information, go to Solar Cookers International.  They’ve got everything there, including their excellent Solar Cooking Archive.

Heligendamm - June 6-8, this German seaside resort will host the G-8 meetings. Climate change is going to be a big-ticket item on the agenda.  There’s a lot of buzz now about how the U.S. is going to try to dilute any pronouncements on climate change at these important meetings. Stay tuned.

Further, Japan has announced that they’ll host a major climate change meeting of the G-20 major nations next year.

Plus New York, Again – I’ve been noting that I’ll be covering the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit this coming week.  Also, if you’re interested in carbon finance and investment in this area, you might want to come to this event, May 21-23.

I touched on hydrogen vehicles in my post from April 30.  I noted a comparison in the “NY Times” of several approaches. Here’s a video.  Well, I was at the Tribeca Film Festival’s concluding street fair on Saturday and GM had some vehicles on display.  I talked a bit with Raj Choudhury, a project manager for GM.  Here’s a link to their website’s discussion of advanced technologies, including electric and hybrid vehicles.

These technologies are pretty critical.  I heard Jim Gordon, president of the Cape Wind project, say at the RPA conference last week (see post immediately below) that, after you supplied the needs for household and commercial electricity, with the excess from wind, you could power most of the surface transportation on Cape Cod and the islands if you were using plug-in hybrids.  I’ve been dreaming about just that sort of thing for 30 years.  Sweet.

Meanwhile, I’m a nut for windmills so I couldn’t resist having this picture taken.  It’s not as cool as the one of Stavros Dimas from my recent post on Carbon Expo, but it’s fun.

The big news from GM this week was that they joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the tremendously influential group of major American companies that have been driving for action on climate change.  They’re the first automaker to join and that’s, as Bernie Sanders might say, “Yoog.”  See this story from Reuters and the press release from GM.  I noted a while back that Congressman John Dingell, chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, was on board for tough legislation.  He’s been Detroit’s most important champion in Congress for many years and if GM and Dingell are on board, then that’s good news for those pushing for effective federal legislation.  I wrote about Dingell and his critical role here on March 30.

Since billions of people live in cities, with more coming every day, the infrastructure needed to support them needs building, rebuilding and rehabilitation, expansion and enhancement. There’s power generation and transmission, the delivery of drinking water and the treatment of waste water, housing and parks, schools and hospitals, transportation, and commercial and industrial development. All this activity requires energy and energy, as we know, is primarily carbon-based throughout the world. As I pointed out in my post, “Mike Bloomberg’s Earth Day,” the Big Apple’s carbon dioxide output is on a par with that of Switzerland, Norway and Ireland. New York City has 8.2 million folks with probably 800,000 more on the way in the next several years. The OECD reports that “60-80% of worldwide energy consumption occurs in urban areas.”

The fascinating event I attended yesterday, the Regional Plan Association’s annual assembly, focused on the problem of global climate change and how to address it. Robert D. Yaro, RPA’s president, said that climate change will influence planning for the foreseeable future. Former New Jersey Governor Jim Florio spoke about the imperatives of minimizing our carbon footprint and said that economic advancement and environmental sensitivity were not incompatible. The present N.J. Governor, Jon Corzine, was to have given the morning’s keynote address but, because of a recent terrible car accident in which he was involved, was replaced by Gary D. Rose, the Chief of N.J.’s Office of Economic Development. Corzine has an ambitious energy master plan that’s being developed now that will require a 20% increase in energy efficiency and 20% of electricity from renewables. This echoes the plan proposed by N.Y. Governor Eliot Spitzer recently. Rose, like Florio, emphasized the opportunity in developing a “clean and green tech economy” and that this sort of activity could “support the next great wave of economic growth.”  (See my last post - opportunity is what I’m seeing, and I’m sure glad that I’m in the company of folks who know their way around high finance, venture capital, and economic development. See also my post from March 9 on “The Business of Green,” and the mention of venture capitalists and their enthusiasm for renewables.)

The Assembly Chairman, Theodore Roosevelt IV, is an investment banker and certainly knows his way around these matters. He’s also the Chairman of the Lehman Brothers’ Council on Climate Change. John Llewellyn, a Kiwi with an impressive track record as an economist at the OECD, and now the Senior Economic Policy Advisor to Lehman Brothers, gave a stunning presentation on the realities of climate change and their implications for corporations. Llewellyn tells CEOs that the science is sound, the climatology is too, that the economic analysis shows that no matter how bravely and well we address global warming, we are going to have impacts:  2 to 3% of global GDP is going to be destroyed by the impacts of climate change annually. (See the Stern Review from the U.K. and its analysis of economic consequences as referenced in my post from March 30.) You can find much of Dr. Llewellyn’s compelling presentation on The Business Of Climate Change - Challenges and Opportunities here. (There’s that word “opportunity” again.)

There were six breakout sessions:  on carbon markets, protecting water resources under the pressures of climate change, transportation options, siting, green building, and the one I attended, “Tilting at Windmills? Opportunities for Green Power Generation.” One of the panelists was Jim Gordon, President of the Cape Wind project. He reported that NRDC has characterized Cape Wind as the largest single GHG reduction project in the U.S. He also reported that in the six years that the project has been going through the regulatory process, 20 offshore projects have been built in Europe and 25 more have been approved. He gave us a heads up too to a book that’s coming out next week:  Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound.

Another panelist was Dr. Stephen Hammer from Columbia University’s Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy. He’s been running the Urban Energy Project there and they’ve been looking at the renewable energy potential for New York City and have found four main sources:  landfill gas, tidal, wind, and solar photovoltaic. I asked him after the session about whether or not they’d been looking at distributed generation, fuel cells, microturbines and the like, and he said they were working on this now. He further mentioned “microgrids” – “Small networks of power generators in ‘microgrids’ could transform the electricity network in the way that the net changed distributed communication.” See this from the BBC. Finally, I asked him if they were looking at geothermal and he said no. I mentioned this new report on geothermal from M.I.T. and the fact of a landmark geothermal project in downtown Manhattan. Maybe I’ve put a bee in his bonnet.

Mike Bloomberg was the luncheon keynote speaker, promoting PLANYC, and he promised that New York City was going to become the first truly sustainable American city in the new century. He said the stars were aligned and that it was time for action. As I said once before here, quoting Winston Churchill:  “I never worry about action, but only inaction.”

Cities for Climate Change is doing a lot of important work. I think this is a compelling thought from the mayor of Charlotte, N.C.:  “We are the ones building roads, designing mass transit, buying the police cars and dump trucks and earth-movers. We’re the ones lighting up the earth when you look at those maps from space. Together we have huge purchasing power and if we invest wisely, that can have huge implications for the environment.”

I’m going to another exciting event in ten days:  the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. Much more soon on how cities are approaching the climate change crisis.      

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as I write, is finalizing its report, “Mitigation of Climate Change.” (You can watch the webcast of the press conference from Bangkok when it goes online on Friday, and read the summary for policymakers and the speech from the IPCC’s head.) There will be a ton of news stories, neither will we lack for analysis and spin.

What we’ve been hearing all week from the closed-door sessions of the scientists and governmental envoys who’ve been meeting to finalize the draft report is that, for one thing, China, and its partners in the developing world, are fighting strong language on the requirements for action. See this story from the “L.A. Times.”  This is a replay of the recent UN Security Council debate – see my post from April 21 on this. The developing world actors, India, Brazil and China, chief among them, make the argument that the industrialized world has caused the havoc and it should bear the brunt of the costs for the solutions. I have to wonder at this, not only because the developing world but also countries like the U.S. and Australia are missing the boat, or at least the point:  opportunity abounds here, there’s fruit begging to be picked and eaten. We can make money, jobs, and save the natural environment – it’s been proven over and over again. Why would we want to squander the opportunity to live smarter?  Okay, there, I’ve gotten a little of it out of my system. (Actually, I am a pretty serious student of psychohistory and political psychology and have all sorts of thoughts regarding why societies injure themselves and others. But that’s for another venue.) 

There are, of course, vital issues of costs – those to be incurred and those to be avoided by mitigating global climate change. If you look at the outline for the report, you will see that economic considerations are front and center. Sections have been written on “cost and benefit concepts,” macroeconomic effects,” and “economic and other generic policy instruments.”  There is some very heavy economic lifting indeed in this report.

The IPCC’s judgment is, in the end, a critically important factor but not the final word in any of this. There are, as has been pointed out here, many factors including national and local government actions, the role of business and finance, how science and technology are brought to bear, and public opinion for that matter. These reports this year from the IPCC are, however, a great body of information, nutrient solution for growing good policy at the international level. How the various national actors play all this out bears considerable further attention. This blog will necessarily delve into the roles that China, India, Brazil and other important developing world countries will play. Let’s see how tomorrow plays out in Bangkok and pick up the thread again soon on what we are likely to see from these massively important countries.

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Media Notes:

Betsy Kolbert, the eminently eloquent author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, writing in “The New Yorker” about New York City’s proposed congestion pricing plan, reports, among other things:  “The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually. When expenses like wasted fuel, lost revenue, and the increased cost of doing business are added in, that figure rises to thirteen billion dollars.”

“Sierra” (from the Sierra Club, of course), has a special section in their latest issue:  “Climate Exchange.”  In it, a panel of top experts and policy makers discuss where we are in grappling with the challenges of global warming. The worthies assembled by the Sierra Club include one of the founders of Sun Microsystems; one of the world’s leading climatologists; Sen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; as well as her senior advisor on climate change; and some others. Coverage at the website includes video clips from the panel discussion.

See this video from the BBC on HRH the Prince of Wales’s “mayday” alert on the climate crisis. “The crisis of climate change is far too urgent and discussion simply isn’t enough,” said Britain’s Prince Charles at the first May Day Business Summit on Climate Change. More than 1,000 businesses, convened by Prince Charles, made concrete commitments to reduce carbon emissions. He gave several speeches at the event. Here’s the welcome, given on the first day of the summit. (Links are here also to other of Charles’s speeches and articles, including on organic farming, historic preservation, and sustainable business.) Charles has been a quiet, forceful, progressive voice in Britain for years. He’s also hugely influential. We don’t have anyone like him in the
U.S. In any event, it’s great to see him so outspoken on climate change.