Climate Change

ICAP – An international coalition has “…announced the formation of the International Carbon Action Partnership to fight global warming.” Here’s the press release from two days ago in Lisbon.  ICAP’s founding membership includes, among others, New Jersey, California, New York, the European Commission, New Zealand, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.  They have come together to attempt to forge the foundations for a truly global carbon market structure.  The belief is that a post-Kyoto agreement will necessitate this international financial architecture and so those who are interested in setting up or furthering cap-and-trade regimes are clearing a path now.  See also this release from Cordis, the EU’s news service.

Business Gets Greener – “Fast Company,” a magazine focusing on business innovation and the people driving all that creative thinking and doing, has a great little article: 50 Ways to Green Your Business.  Two tidbits:  “Wal-Mart is providing funding to the biggest truck manufacturers–ArvinMeritor, Eaton, International, and Peterbilt–to develop the first heavy-duty diesel-hybrid 18-wheeler. Wal-Mart, which operates the second-largest truck fleet in the country, will test the prototypes next year.” and “The much-hyped Bank of America Tower, which will be the second-tallest building in New York when it’s finished next year, is the first skyscraper in America to pursue LEED Platinum certification. Our favorite innovation: a geothermal heat-exchange system that’s the first of its kind in a high-rise. In the winter, pumps will draw heat from groundwater to help warm the building; in the summer, the process will work in reverse, pumping excess heat into the bedrock beneath the tower. The system will contribute to the building’s goal of using just half the electricity of a conventional building its size.”  Check out the other 48 ideas at the link above, or see their slideshow.

Children and Climate Change – The American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization of 60,000 medical professionals, just issued a report saying, among other things, that “Direct health impacts from global warming include injury and death from more frequent extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and tornados. For children, this can mean post-traumatic stress, loss of caregivers, disrupted education and displacement. Increased climate-sensitive infectious diseases, air pollution-related illness, and heat-related illness and fatalities also are expected.”  Go here for the report and here for the policy statement.  This is comprehensive, responsible work and makes yet another important argument for getting our collective act together. 

Not incidentally, you can find out a great deal about initiatives having to do with children at the FPA’s blog on Children written by the estimable Cassandra Clifford.

“Dot Earth” – Andrew Revkin, the superb climate change reporter for the “NY Times” has a new blog examining “…efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.”  Revkin explains the rationale for his new effort in Why a Blog, and Why This Blog?  See also this slideshow from Revkin.  This will be a worthwhile site to visit for some time to come. 

“Biofuels - At What Cost?” – The International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) has added fuel to the fire on the debate about the choices that are being made on biofuels.  (See previous posts here on More on Biofuels and Biofuels – Boon or Bane?)  The GSI “…is concerned that many of the policies currently in place are ineffective [my emphasis] in achieving greater energy security and lower greenhouse gas emissions, the objectives which have officially been used to justify increasing subsidy levels.”  See their latest report, on the U.S. subsidy programs, and the other reports in the series, here.  

Coal Plants Blocked – In a somewhat extraordinary recent development, a proposal for two 700 MW coal-fired power plants to be built in Kansas was rejected by the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.  Roderick Bremby said in his decision:  “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.”  See this story from the Worldwatch Institute and the press release from Kansas.  Here’s Secretary Bremby in a concise and lucid statement on his decision.

Download link 

France’s Initiative – French President Sarkozy has pledged to fight global warming.  See this article from Reuters via the “Boston Globe.”  See also Sarkozy offers green bargain for reform from the “Financial Times.”  Sarkozy is reported as supporting a carbon tax “… as part of a wider overhaul of the tax system to favour employment.”  This echoes the proposals I referenced in “Oh, to be in England …” and Carbon Tax – Another Voice from mid-September.  (Beyond this article, the “FT” has a very informative special section on climate change with a ton of terrific, up-to-date coverage.)

Health Impacts - Concern Over Health Risks Posed By Climate Change reads the headline from Scoop, a New Zealand news service.  The U.S. Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works held hearings on October 23 on  “Examining the Human Health Impacts of Global Warming.”  The testimony given by Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, itself became a subject of controversy.  A couple of days after the hearing, Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said “It was brought to my attention that Dr. Gerberding’s written testimony was heavily edited during the review process coordinated by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, to remove most of the specific information about the health impacts of global warming.”

In remarks before the Committee on October 23, Dr. Michael McCally, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility,  said:  “Already we are seeing the symptoms of global warming in the form of heat waves, fires, flooding, hurricanes, drought and increases in pest and water borne diseases.”  PSR has a new report on the health consequences of global warming for the U.S.

On the same day as the hearing in Washington, the World Health Organization was announcing that its theme for World Health Day in 2008 will be “protecting health from climate change.”  See the WHO webpage on Climate Change and Human Health.

Energy Conference – In an update from the excellent blog, Hill Heat (“Science Policy Legislation Action”), we learn that we are going to a conference after all on the Senate and House energy bills. See this from my worthy fellow bloggers.  I was not reading the tea leaves correctly when I reported in my previous post (see below) that the conference was off and that the Democratic leadership was going to cobble a bill together and then submit it.  I should’ve been reading the “Congressional Quarterly” article on this.  “‘The Speaker wants to go to conference. I want to go to conference,’  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on the floor Friday. ‘We know we can’t do a bill unless we include the Republicans in it.’”  This is all good news I daresay.

Transition to Sustainable Energy – The InterAcademy Council (IAC) issued an important report this week:  Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future.  The IAC was created by all of the world’s science academies in 2000 “…to mobilize the best scientists and engineers worldwide to provide high quality advice to international bodies - such as the United Nations and the World Bank - as well as to other institutions.”  The report details the science and technology necessary “…for developing energy resources to drive economic growth in both industrialized and developing countries while also securing climate protection and global development goals.”  You can find the report itself here.  In an article from “Scientific American,” we hear from report co-chair Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel laureate, that developing countries, such as China and Brazil, need “to leapfrog well past what we did in the West, like in the U.S., where we have sprawling suburbia and long commutes.”  (I wrote about “leapfrog” technologies at my post, More Climate Summit, back in May.) 

Insurance Industry – If you’re still struggling to believe that we’re in the soup we’re in, and the pot’s getting hotter, then consider an industry that is as conservative as they get.  In my compendium of comments from people who are not generally known as ecofreaks (John McCain, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, the leader of the British Conservatives, among others), If You Don’t Like Al Gore, Then … from April, I quoted Lord Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyd’s of London:  “We cannot risk being in denial on catastrophe trends.” Levene said this January 12 in a speech to the World Affairs Council at the National Press Club. “We urgently need a radical rethink of public policy, and to build the facts into future planning.” See Lloyd’s webpage on climate change here.

Mea culpa.  Let me just here say that I’ve been behind the eight ball and I will continue to try to get out and get some more posts up and running here. 

Big News Item: Lawmakers propose bill on global warming from the AP, was the big story from last week.  Legislation introduced by Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) received the endorsement of the Senate Environment Committee Chair, Barbara Boxer (D-CA).  She said “… today will be remembered as a turning point in the fight against global warming.”  Warner said “Today we introduced a balanced bill. Senator Lieberman and I found a good, sound, starting point that sends a significant signal that the U.S. is serious about taking a leadership role in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.”  Steve Cochran, National Climate Campaign Director for Environmental Defense said “Lieberman and Warner have paved the way for a historic committee vote on a bill that promises to make great strides toward climate security and economic growth.”    

Where are we going with this?  Let’s hope that the energy legislation (see next item below) will fall into place, and then the House and Senate will follow through on the critical climate change legislation.  There are obstacles by the truckload in reaching a bill that will become law and be fully implemented, but we do seem to be grinding our way slowly forward.   

Energy Legislation Update – The Democratic leadership teams in Congress are going to short-circuit the traditional route to reconciling draft Senate and House legislation in a “conference committee” and are going to proceed with negotiations so that an energy bill can be put on the President’s desk for signature (or veto) before the end of the year.  You can refer to “Forbes” for this article, Dim Prospects, for some news on this.

Special interest groups such as the oil and gas industry, the auto industry, and the electric power industry have been fighting tooth and nail to block, respectively, in each group’s case, the rescission of $16 billion in tax breaks (see “Denial Of Oil And Gas Tax Benefits” at this House Ways & Means Committee document) that would be devoted to renewable energy development, the upgrading of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for motor vehicles, and the  creation of a 15% renewable energy portfolio for American power producers. 

See the blog posts Energy Bill Conference Committee from last month on this, And the Winner Is … on the House package from August, and The Morning After from June on the Senate package. 

Great news for the planet:  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore have won the Nobel Peace Prize for, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “… their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”  Go to the Nobel Committee for their announcement and related information or to any of the nearly 2,000 news items available on line at this point.  Try this from the AP or this really superb article from the BBC.

The movement to contain the worst effects of global warming and to reverse the trend toward catastrophic climate change is continuing to gain force.  We might even yet make our home, this fragile planet Earth, better by finally learning the lessons of sustainability.  (That’s what it is, folks:  our home.  It’s even, yes, Gaia, our mother.) 

I’ve written about the IPCC and its critical work this year, for example at “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change”.  I’ve also written about Al Gore at Al Gore, among other places.  I’ve noted that there’s been a palpable backlash against Gore – of course – and that people have liked to denigrate concern for climate change at the same time that they were running down Gore.  So I simply wanted to further note that there’s a whole world of worthy folks who are saying much of what the former Vice President has said, if not so eloquently and passionately:  If You Don’t Like Al Gore, Then … 

Last thought here:  You might think that the Peace Prize and saving ourselves from catastrophic climate change are not a natural fit.  Well they are.  In fact, Making Peace with the Planet, as the great Barry Commoner titled one of his books, may be the ultimate expression of creating and building peace.

Here’s a smattering of recent articles that are not uninteresting.

The estimable Fiona Harvey, on the environmental beat for the “FT,” has a good overview and analysis of the meetings last week in Washington on climate change - Yo, Kyoto.  She has some of the same sort of barbed quotes I referenced in my last post below.  Try this, for instance, from Phil Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust:  “There is about an ounce of action to every 200 pounds of rhetoric.”  Harvey however also noted “…even many of those sceptical of Mr Bush’s motives agreed that last week’s meetings at least marked a reversal of his attitude during his early period in office…”  This article is a good look at where we are internationally after last week’s cornucopia of climate change discussions and before Bali in December.  It’s definitely worth reading. 

In an over-pessimistic and somewhat loopy article, Why Climate Change Can’t Be Stopped from “Foreign Policy,” two veterans of the present Bush administration’s State Department assert that we’re too late.  It’s a new take on climate change “skepticism” – we’re past the “tipping point” and so we shouldn’t bother to spend too much on halting, and even perhaps reversing, the warming.  It’s time to spend money on mitigating the impacts.  Those damn hippie “…environmental advocates don’t like to concede this point.  Eager to force deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, many of them hype the consequences of climate change—in some cases, well beyond what is supported by the facts—to build political support.”  Okay, we’re past the point of no return on climate change, but the consequences are being hyped.  So, don’t try to deal with the problem of the emissions and the deforestation and other contributors because it’s too expensive, and besides it’s not going to be that bad anyway, so just build some levees and that’ll take care of that.

That’s enough time spent on that argument.

Andrew Revkin, equally as admirable as Fiona Harvey, and who has been covering global warming for the “NY Times” for a number of years, has an admittedly depressing but thoughtful and well-balanced take here - Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts.  (I wrote about the Arctic story back in August - The Arctic Heats Up in the News.)  “While experts debate details, many agree that the vanishing act of the sea ice this year was probably caused by superimposed forces including heat-trapping clouds and water vapor in the air, as well as the ocean-heating influence of unusually sunny skies in June and July.”  There’s a lot here to consider.  This is science reporting at its best.   

Finally, Tom Friedman also writing in the “NY Times,” describes how Toyota, who likes to bill itself as a very green company, and sells a lot of cars based on that image and, not incidentally, on the reality of the high MPG those cars get, is trying, along with the American car makers, to water down the CAFE upgrade in the draft energy legislation from the Senate.  See his Et Tu, Toyota?  In July, in Energy Legislation in the House, I wrote:  “Here’s my question?  Doesn’t anyone in Detroit think that they might sell more cars if they had better gas mileage performance?  It sure seems to work for the Japanese!”  Friedman’s theory seems to be that Toyota wants the American car industry to stay behind the eight ball.  “Toyota wants to keep its green halo and beat G.M. in the big trucks, too,” Friedman quotes an expert from NRDC.