Climate Change

I touched on an important subject here earlier in the month when I mentioned a new study purporting that the spread of black carbon – or soot – from industrial and transportation sources, and from developing world cooking practices, is having a significantly more potent impact on climate change than previously thought. This release from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography discusses the work done by their highly regarded atmospheric scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael. They report that black carbon “… has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates.” What is also evident is that “Between 25 and 35 percent of black carbon in the global atmosphere comes from China and India, emitted from the burning of wood and cow dung in household cooking and through the use of coal to heat homes. Countries in Europe and elsewhere that rely heavily on diesel fuel for transportation also contribute large amounts.” This article, Dust plays huge role in climate change, from the “Christian Science Monitor,” explains it well. There’s an accompanying podcast here from the reporter as well.

See also The even darker side of brown clouds from “Nature Reports Climate Change” and the scientists’ report itself, Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon, in “Nature Geoscience.” They say here that “The interception of solar radiation by atmospheric brown clouds leads to dimming at the Earth’s surface with important implications for the hydrological cycle, and the deposition of black carbon darkens snow and ice surfaces, which can contribute to melting, in particular of Arctic sea ice.” This is true for the Himalayan region as well.  Ramanathan and Carmichael further say that since “… BC has a significant contribution to global radiative forcing, and a much shorter lifetime compared with carbon dioxide (which has a lifetime of 100 years or more), a major focus on decreasing BC emissions offers an opportunity to mitigate the effects of global warming trends in the short term. Reductions in BC are also warranted from considerations of regional climate change and human health.”

We have known for some time about the health effects of soot in urban environments and in rural villages where cooking accounts for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, mostly of women and young children, according to any number of studies. See this study from the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS), and an accompanying group of studies, for instance, on the disastrous health effects of biomass burning for cooking in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, “More than three billion people worldwide continue to depend on solid fuels, including biomass fuels (wood, dung, agricultural residues) and coal, for their energy needs.”

See this graphic from the Ramanathan and Carmichael report to illustrate the extent and the impact of the biomass burning.

[The polluting effects of cooking using biomass like wood or cow dung in South Asia are illustrated through a measurement of aerosol optical depth, a way of measuring the quantity of pollutants in the air by the relative ability of light to penetrate through them. The upper image is a representation showing reconstructed levels of pollution from 2004 and 2005. The bottom image is a representation with the effects of biofuel cooking removed.]

How do we address the soot from household use, thus radically reducing the human health impacts and the radiative forcing from the atmospheric brown clouds and the BC deposition? One way is to eliminate biomass from cooking. The use of solar cookers is one stunningly effective and, hopefully, burgeoning approach in the developing world. Solar Cookers International is the truly superb NGO that has been spreading the word and the technology both among international aid agencies and on the ground in the developing world for a number of years now. See this powerpoint show for an introduction and use their website to learn more. They are, as just one example of many, working with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to equip refugees from the fighting in Darfur with the equipment and the know-how to go nearly entirely solar for cooking. One of the strongest indications of the success of their approach is the near total acceptance of solar cookers by the women of these camps.

SCI is doing amazing, critically important work, and it is incumbent on those of us concerned about sustainable development to learn more and support exactly these sorts of efficient, cost-effective and easily deployable technologies. It’s not always all about the high tech, capital intensive projects.

Earth Day is this coming Tuesday, April 22. There’s an awful lot going on all over the world. Dating myself, I can tell you that my buddy, Donald, and I went to the first Earth Day in 1970 when we were teenagers. He claims it was primarily to meet girls. My rejoinder is “That’s natural.” Back in 1990, I was working in public affairs for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation and we had a great honkin’ Earth Day in New York City for the twentieth anniversary, with hundreds of thousands of folks out, including for a big concert in Central Park. Earth Day didn’t have much cachet during many of the off years since its founding and today, but it’s beginning to pick up steam again. Check out the Earth Day website and see what’s happening in your community. You can also go to Earth Day TV to see some great videos.

The “NY Times Magazine” has its Green Issue this week. “Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, Build” are the sections of the magazine. This is a terrific compendium of articles on what we can do to make a difference, including a compelling piece from the excellent and thoughtful writer, Michael Pollan, who asks: Why Bother?

I’ve been thinking more about meat and climate change, I have to tell you, these days, with the news about the pressures on grain and the soaring rise in food prices worldwide. The section on how we eat gets into this quite a bit. We learn, among other things, that in January “… Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: ‘Please eat less meat.’ He continued: ‘This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.’” I’ve written about this before, in an essay on how we treat animals – and ourselves. I’ll be writing more soon about animal agriculture and its implications for climate change.

You should also check out this terrific video on the Green Issue.

Echoing the “NYT” special section on the “Business of Green” that I wrote about on April 11 below, the “FT” (aka The Financial Times) had a special on Business and the Environment yesterday. This is pretty much about business in the UK, and it’s got some fascinating stuff, including an article on companies saving energy, Energy efficiency: Use less power to cut emissions, in which we learn the arresting news that “Dow Chemical claims to have reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. The group invested $1bn to meet this target but says the initiatives have resulted in $5bn of savings.” Get it?!

In another article on green building in France, Energy Plus: Paris building to set new standard, we are told that “…in France, buildings account for 45 per cent of French energy consumption and 16 per cent of water use, and generate 40 per cent of the country’s waste. Their carbon dioxide emissions amount to 25 per cent of the national total, second only to transport at 28 per cent.” I’ve written about Green Building a number of times here. It’s a fascinating and important subject. See this terrific slideshow too from the FT on green building.

“No good times, no bad times,
There’s no times at all,
Just The New York Times” 

Here’s some good, recent stuff from the venerable “New York Times.”

The “Business of Green” is a special section from a few weeks ago. (I wrote at some length over a year ago on their special of the same name.) This latest one’s got some great articles, including one on jobs: Millions of Jobs of a Different Collar. Here’s an audio slide show too on a “net zero energy” home. I mentioned an article in this vein, For Carbon Emissions, a Goal of Less Than Zero, by Matt Wald in my review of Earth: The Sequel from last week. 

Wald, in addition to being on the energy and environmental technology beat, has been the aviation industry reporter for years. Here’s A Cleaner, Leaner Jet Age Has Arrived from Wednesday. It’s about new materials, engines, and systems for safer, more fuel-efficient planes. Who could be against that? (I’ve also written about aviation a couple of times, here and here, and I had a great time this past summer writing about sustainability at airports for “Planning,” the magazine of the American Planning Association.) 

As further evidence of the strain that biofuels, among some other causes, are putting on the land, as I’ve reported on recently at Krugman on Food Prices and Biofuels and Are Biofuels A Bummer?, there was a front-page article the other day, As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program. The long and short of it is that farmers are taking millions of acres out of the hugely successful federal Conservation Reserve Program in order to cash in on profits that haven’t been available to them for years. Who can blame them? However, what’s driving so much of this is a biofuels policy that is, according to more and more food, energy and environmental experts, misguided. See more from the “NY Times” on “The Food Chain,” examining growing demands on, and changes in, the world’s production of food. This is an important series for any number of reasons and the paper is to be commended for being on it. 

Finally, I wrote about the failure of the NY State Assembly to bring New York City’s congestion pricing plan to a vote, let alone pass it. See “This is the way the world ends …” just below. Well, the paper, given the importance of the issue and the worldwide implications, has a special section, including this video from Andy Revkin on New York City and congestion pricing. Where do we go now that the Mayor’s plan has failed? Read the op-eds from Owen Gutfreund and Gene Russianoff.

I’ve written about the growing evidence that biofuels are becoming increasingly recognized as a menace to the environment, not the boon they were once thought to be.  In Are Biofuels A Bummer? in February, I reported on a couple of recent studies showing how pressure on land use from biofuel production was creating the deleterious effect of increasing GHG emissions. 

Yesterday, in Grains Gone Wild, the extraordinary economist and “NY Times” columnist Paul Krugman wrote that “…it turns out that even seemingly ‘good’ biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.”  Krugman’s analysis tracks that of the researchers I cited in February.  “We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake,” says Krugman, echoing what I heard Jeffrey Sachs say recently: EU and US biofuels policies are “misguided.”  There’s an eloquent letter from ten top scientists to policymakers in Washington that is a cry to change course. 

A truly classic quote, as reported in the Year in Review, came from Fred Krupp, influential president of the Environmental Defense Fund, in referring to the White House talks on climate change in September:  “It was a lost opportunity.  America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.” 

Krupp and EDF have been a powerful force in getting the mainstream environmental movement more in tune with the realities of the private sector.  Instead of always confronting big business on issues of energy and the environment, they have very often worked with business to effect positive change.  That does not mean, in any sense, that organizations as powerful as EDF, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which bears many of the same attributes as EDF, don’t take their shots at irresponsible and dangerous actions by industry in the courts and in the offices and lobbies of government when industry’s actions merit it.  It does mean that EDF recognizes the value of getting business to act responsibly in whatever ways are effective.  Hell, even Greenpeace works with Coca-Cola and Unilever these days.  (See that story toward the end of this from July.)

Krupp and EDF made an enormous breakthrough in February of 2007 when they negotiated the shelving of eight coal-fired power plants in Texas.  Former EPA administrator William Reilly and Krupp were the architects of a deal that permanently altered the map of power production in this country.  You can see this segment from Frontline’s “Hot Politics” to get a bigger picture.

Now Krupp and the journalist Miriam Horn have come out with a book, Earth: The Sequel – The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming.  It looks at some amazing initiatives that are being aggressively pursued:   the use of “concentrators” to intensify the sunlight directed at solar thermal arrays or photovoltaics, colocating solar and wind farms to get the maximum generating potential of those two, bottling heat in giant thermos-type containers as a storage mechanism, using biotechnology to produce biofuels and nanotechnology to radically improve the properties of silicon for use in PV cells, power-generating buoys, geothermal units that can be deployed all over the world to take advantage of the crust of the earth’s tremendous heat and also the hot water that comes up with oil at wellheads, and underground coal gasification, among many others.

My favorite is the pilot in Arizona that is using carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant stacks to feed algae which, in turn, can then be converted to a potent biofuel.  The process is water-intensive but it can tolerate wastewater so that is another waste stream that is incorporated.  This scheme would also use nitrogen from the emissions as fertilizer.  Eventually, the coal in the plant could be replaced by the algae, leading to a carbon-negative situation.  (See also this recent piece from Matt Wald at the “NY Times.”)  I’ve been writing about Renewable Energy since the beginning of this blog and I continue to find these ideas and initiatives, as Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

One of the leitmotifs of the book is the entrepreneurial, even frontier spirit of the innovators bringing some of these solutions into being.  Venture capitalists get their due here.  But what drives capital?  The promise of a return on its investment.  What then is the single-most important driver in the quest to realize a good “return on capital”?  Krupp and Horn iterate (and reiterate) it’s setting a price on carbon.  Why?  To “level the playing field” with the fossil fuel and nuclear suppliers of energy.  What’s the best mechanism for doing this?  A cap-and-trade system.  This brings us back to Krupp’s quote above regarding the necessity to institute “mandatory legal limits.”  That’s the cap.  The trade part is what you do when you’ve gone below your capped emission limit and can then sell the difference between what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been mandated to achieve.  (I’ve written about this mechanism a number of times at Carbon Markets.)

EDF, led by economist Dan Dudek, was one of the pioneers of cap-and-trade back in the 1980’s in order to effect dramatic reductions in acid rain precursors.  (I had the privilege of working with one of their senior scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, back then on the acid rain problem when I was an activist with the Sierra Club.  Michael has been a critical figure in bringing the science of global warming to the fore.  He was right there with James Hansen at that epic hearing in Washington in the summer of 1988 that brought global warming fully into view for the American public.  See from about 2:45 in this segment from “Hot Politics.”)

Energy:  The Sequel also discusses other critical approaches to confronting global warming such as halting tropical rainforest destruction.  A post-Kyoto international regime that set a reasonable price on carbon ($30 a ton) would allow Brazil alone to realize $168 billion profit from protecting its rainforests while preventing emissions of six billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Woods Hole Research Center.  (Pop quiz:  After the US and China, which two countries are the biggest contributors to global warming?  Brazil and Indonesia - because of rainforest destruction.)

The book also notes the critical importance of energy efficiency.  (See my post Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit.)

The book is engaging, informative, and hopeful.  It gives us the perspective of those scientists, policy innovators, entrepreneurs and, in some cases, visionaries, who are going to make the earth a safer, more prosperous, smarter, and more equitable place for us all to live.  It’s a stimulating read, to say the least.

For more, go to the book’s website and also see the trailer.

I headed up to Columbia University this past week to check out the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet 08 conference.  As usual, I couldn’t devote as much time as I would’ve liked to the conference sessions, but I came away with a few good insights nonetheless.  Thursday, I attended a press briefing with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the institute and a real force for fostering sustainable development; plus the very worthy Jan Egeland, former UN chief of humanitarian affairs; Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, the cell phone makers; and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a senior correspondent for “The Economist” and an expert on energy and automotives.

One of Ericsson’s emphases is on bringing mobile telephony to the developing world.  This was characterized as the “singlemost transformative technology in the developing world.”  See Ericsson’s CSR pages for a ton of information on how engaged they are.

The discussion came to climate change, not surprisingly, and Sachs emphasized the importance of an integrated approach that would create an “incentive” system (cap-and-trade) along with technology policy.  Egeland said that mitigation is important, but that adaptation is critical at this point.  There are extremely vulnerable populations that need to be buffered from the increasingly intense effects of storms and other climate-induced disasters.  Drought, of course, is another looming specter.  Vaitheeswaran, a compellingly intelligent speaker, has written a new book, ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, and he said we’re looking at a billion cars on the planet soon, with two billion not so far in the future.  That’s the bad news for global warming.  The good news is that the renewable energy revolution could well be driven (pun intended) by a new generation of cars.  (Sadly, I missed Vaitheeswaran moderating a formal debate – “Proposition:  “The United States will solve the climate change problem.”  It was, by all reports, lively and smart.  You and I can see it here though.) 

Well, at the press briefing, I was going to ask about biofuels but before I was called on, Sachs read my mind.  (As you may recall, I’ve been writing about this a fair bit, including this post from last month:  Are Biofuels A Bummer?)  Responding to a question about energy, Sachs quickly segued into a blistering critique of present biofuels policy.  He called US and EU policy in this area “misguided.”  He said that biofuel production is driving up food prices worldwide.  In his talk to the conference on Friday, he outlined a ten-point plan for the next President on sustainability and eliminating biofuel subsidies was one of the points.  Sachs also has a new book:  Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. 

I am forced to say that a talk given on Friday left me a little breathless.  Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, an American it turns out, is the Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  She gave a talk on the virtues of Nukes.  She trotted out a number of the same canards I’ve been hearing, on and off, for over thirty years:  Three Mile Island and Chernobyl weren’t so bad.  People want nuclear power plants in their communities.  You can’t rely on renewables because the power is intermittent and we haven’t learned how to store it.  A new take on the theme of the acceptable risk of nuclear power was the somewhat blithe statement:  “Life is about risk.” 

Another assertion was that 90% of nuclear waste comes from weapons production, not power production.  Sorry, Lady Judge, but that dog don’t hunt.  Here’s just one quote from the US DOE website:  “As of December 2005, the United States accumulated about 53,440 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository.” 

You can see Lady Judge’s talk here.  I had the opportunity to talk with her a little later.  I ventured that her pooh-poohing of the role of renewables was not correct.  I mentioned the recent analysis from Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Associates that there was $7 trillion in business looming just over the horizon.  (See my post here.)  She said that she very much supported renewables but that you needed nuclear power as well.  I said that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as ‘twere, of the renewables industry.  I pointed out that not a watt of electricity would be generated from nuclear power in this country were it not for the Price-Anderson Act that, for all intents and purposes, insulates the industry from liability.  The private insurance industry wouldn’t touch nuclear power with a ten-foot control rod.  Lady Judge was poised and gracious and I thanked her for entertaining my point of view.

The idea that nuclear power is something of a silver bullet for climate change certainly seems to be gaining traction, at least in the UK and in France.  I think that the Earth Institute’s embrace is more-than-a-little off from their prevailing theme of sustainability.  Part of the problem lies in the continuing overemphasis, in my opinion, on the central power generating paradigm.  I think that the world will profit, in every way, from a shift not only to renewables but to the distributed generation model that renewables can empower.

I had time to catch a bit of the panel on “Identifying Energy Solutions for Sustainable Development.”  Paula DiPerna of the Chicago Climate Exchange gave a lucid and illuminating talk on carbon finance.  (I’ve written about that a number of times under Carbon Markets.  This, of course, is a critical part of solving the climate change problem.)

The Earth Institute and many of the participants at this conference are doing groundbreaking work in sustainable development.  It’s exciting to hear so many of these initiatives discussed.  Check out the conference videos to catch some of the excitement.

I really do love the coverage in the “Financial Times.”  It goes deeper than a lot of sources to give you stories that really mean something, rather than just the latest media frenzy over some political brouhaha or celebrity gossip.  It also lives in the critical interface between commerce, public policy and international relations.  (You may need to register.  If so, go here.  You get 30 articles a month for free.)

Oil Sands – Here’s a bit of a bombshell:  The new energy law that the US passed in December may bar the US government’s purchase of petroleum from Canadian oil sands.  Canada warns US over oil sands is the recent “FT” headline.  The story says that a “narrow interpretation” of The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, section 526 to be precise, would limit government procurement of alternative fuels that have lifecycle GHG emissions greater than conventional fuels, as oil-sand derived petroleum clearly does.  (Elizabeth Kolbert, the pathbreaking “New Yorker” writer, had a characteristically great article, Unconventional Crude, on the Alberta tar sands in November.)  The “FT” has even given us a copy of the letter from the Canadian ambassador in Washington to DOD Secretary Robert Gates, cc:  the US secretaries of Energy and State.  One energy expert said:  “The Canadians do, in fact, have something to worry about, particularly from a Democratic administration.”  A Canadian authority said:  “Classifying fuel from the oil sands as non-conventional fuel … would unnecessarily complicate the integrated Canada-US energy relationship.”  Yeah, but it might improve the world’s chances of avoiding catastrophic climate change.  Does that count?

Jatropha – I’ve been pointing out studies that pinpoint biofuels as another badly misplaced priority – except, of course, for those making a great honking profit and the elected officials that profit politically from furthering bad policy.  (See any number of posts under Biofuels and Agriculture.)  The “FT” has a good piece on a non-edible plant that thrives on generally non-arable land:  India finds cheap energy may be an easy nut to crack.  (I wrote about jatropha’s promise here in September.)  India hopes to radically accelerate the cultivation of jatropha for biodiesel over the next several years.  The pilot projects they’ve been doing have been successful and, not surprisingly, they have no wish to displace food crops from productive land for biofuels cultivation, a strategy that has been increasingly identified as a recipe for disaster on several fronts.  Shailendra Shukla, director of Chhattisgarh Renewable Energy Development Authority, is quoted:  “If you’re growing soya for biodiesel, you’re wasting your time, money and land.”  The project is also about providing power to the countryside.  As the article says, “Alternative energy dovetails with the government’s aims to develop rural areas - including electrifying villages - to narrow a widening divide between rural and urban India.” 

Gas Flaring – This is nearly universally practiced in the oil industry, yet it wastes truly enormous amounts of energy and adds prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  ( I wrote about this in September here.  The post also includes a very instructive video from the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction.)  Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, according to the “FT” here, are getting on board the World Bank’s program.  The total annual loading worldwide is 150bn cubic meters, producing 400m tons of CO2.  “The three Gulf states set to join the World Bank’s partnership together contribute 7bn cubic metres a year …”  Not chopped liver. 

Sorry, dear readers, about not being on the blogwaves in the past few days.  I plead the press of work and beg your kind indulgence.  Here are a couple of quick hitters for now.  I do hope to have some heftier posts for you soon.

Biofuels and Food – Here’s a leader (Britspeak for editorial) from yesterday’s “Financial Times” that is hard-hitting and unequivocal:  In the face of world food shortages and rapidly escalating prices, “…producers should stop wasting food by subsidising biofuels…”  See Biofuels will not feed the hungry.  See also my post below, Are Biofuels A Bummer?, from February 15.

Tech Miracles? – See these two items for fun, and perhaps profit:  a compressed-air-powered car and nanotechnology that can provide personal hydrogen electrolyzers for all your needs.  First, Tata Motors looks at air-powered vehicle “that would use air as fuel and emit no pollutants in city driving.”  Works for me.  How about this then from “EETimes”?  Nanoparticles could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline.  QuantumSphere’s “nanoparticle coatings could make hydrogen easy to produce at home from distilled water, and ultimately bring the cost of hydrogen fuel cells in line with that of fossil fuels.”  See their succinct, convincing video.

Less Than Meets the Eye – This “Time/CNN” article, U.S. Remains Cool to Warming Pact, sums up the much-ballyhooed announcement the other day by a White House official that:  “The U.S. is prepared to enter into binding international obligations to reduce greenhouse gases as part of a global agreement in which all major economies similarly undertake binding international obligations.”  But as UNFCC executive secretary, Yvo de Boer, explains here (courtesy of AP), “If it’s a quid pro quo, then it’s a nonstarter.”  Let’s also wait to see what the present administration says or does further on the cap-and-trade legislation that is wending its way through Congress. 

I’ve written about biofuels a number of times.  You can check out the various posts under the category Biofuels and Agriculture.

Now two recent important studies, published in “Science,” are saying that biofuels are causing quite a bit more harm than good.  The A.P.’s H. Josef Hebert wrote this article (appearing in “USA Today”) on one of the studies.  “The researchers said that farmers under economic pressure to produce biofuels will increasingly ‘plow up more forest or grasslands,’ releasing much of the carbon formerly stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fires. Globally, more grasslands and forests will be converted to growing the crops to replace the loss of grains when U.S. farmers convert land to biofuels, the study said.”  The German Marshall Fund, one of the sponsors of the research, led by Tim Searchinger, one of their fellows and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has a link devoted to this research.  Searchinger says in a policy brief that “…switching from gasoline to corn ethanol doubles greenhouse gas emissions for every mile driven.”

The other study, “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” from The Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota, has similar and complementary conclusions.  It asserts, among other things, that “Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace.”  The Nature Conservancy has a lot of excellent material on this study here, including an interview with the lead scientist for the report, Joe Fargione, the report itself, and an arresting slide show depicting some stark scenes of lands burned out for biofuel crop cultivation.  Fargione tells us that “Most people don’t realize that globally there is almost three times as much carbon in the plants and soils as there is in the air. Our natural ecosystems provide an incredibly valuable service of carbon storage and climate stabilization if they are left intact.”  (A critical new initiative that came from the Bali talks in December was a new emphasis on protecting and enhancing forests.)

Christopher Flavin, president of the venerable Worldwatch Institute, had this take on the reports and work his institute has done:   Time to Move to a Second Generation of Biofuels.  WI and The Sierra Club issued a report last fall, Destination Iowa - Getting To A Sustainable Biofuels Future, in which they recommended a number of policy directions including (a) accelerating development of cellulosic biofuel technologies and the infrastructure to harvest, transport, and process the new crops, (b) supporting farmers who want to invest in sustainable fuel crops such as perennial grasses or fast-growing trees, and (c) reducing tax subsidies for food-based biofuels and increase subsidies for fuels with a low-carbon footprint, such as waste and cellulose-derived biofuels.  WI had another highly useful commentary in January in which they said, among other things, that “The benefits of biofuels can be many: reducing dependence on oil, keeping money and jobs in the local economy, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, to name a few. But not all biofuels are created equal, and their benefits in fact vary wildly depending on the feedstock, how it is grown and harvested, where it is grown, and how it is processed.”

An AFP story from January, courtesy of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s newsfeed, reports Internal EU report casts doubts on its biofuel strategy.  The article says that the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s in-house scientific body, “criticises an EU plan to boost the use of biofuels in transport, concluding that their costs outweigh the benefits.”

There’s a mountain of damning evidence piling up here.  Will policymakers heed it?  That’s always the $64,000 question on matters of energy, the environment and particularly climate change.  The “Washington Post” had a terrific article last week on these two analyses in which the reporter, Juliet Eilperin, notes that they “…could force policymakers in the United States and Europe to reevaluate incentives they have adopted to spur production of ethanol-based fuels.”  She references a letter sent by ten senior scientists working on climate change to President Bush and congressional leaders urging them to reconsider the present path in light of the new studies.  “There is an urgent need for policy that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forest, grassland or cropland,” the scientists wrote. 

The U.S. government seems to be making a truly constructive move on climate change for a change.  The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced an agreement today between the U.S. and the E.U. proposing “…eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services, particularly clean energy technologies.”  Trade Representative Susan Schwab will go to Bali to the Trade Ministers meeting there to recommend that the WTO incorporate this proposal.  According to “…data on environmental indicators available from the World Bank and World Resources Institute, countries that trade more environmental goods either have less pollution or consume energy more efficiently, or both.”

The proposal builds on the work of a new report from the World Bank:  International Trade and Climate Change: Economic, Legal, and Institutional Perspectives.  The report finds that “…a multilateral liberalization of renewable energy sources or an agreement to remove fossil fuel subsidies would equally serve climate change objectives.”

I would suggest the former idea is feasible, not the latter.  I don’t mean to suggest that we are entering the realm of political fantasy, at least as far as the United States goes, but if the WTO nations can’t find agreement on removing $300 billion in annual supports to the U.S., E.U., and Japan’s farmers – in order to free up a trillion dollars worth of agricultural output by the developing world – then how can anyone expect to close up the candy shop at the U.S. Treasury that the oil, gas and coal folks have been shopping from for many long years?  Witness the brouhaha that removing $16 billion in tax breaks the oil and gas industry are getting now – while oil’s selling at nearly $100 a barrel – then consider how easy it would be to knock even more of the subsidies they enjoy out of the picture.  (See “Denial Of Oil And Gas Tax Benefits” at the House of Representatives’ tax portion of the proposed congressional energy bill.  This good bit of legislation is under heavy fire, though, from the industry and the White House, so the Congressional leadership may jettison it.)

But more power to the U.S. and E.U. trade mandarins if they can, as the World Bank suggests, increase trade in climate and clean energy technologies an additional 7-14 percent annually by removing tariffs and non-tariff barriers.

Meanwhile, in what might be construed as a hopeful (but not necessarily realistic) headline, the “Environmental News Service” claims Fossil Fuels’ Free Ride Is Over.  The ENS reports that at the American Council On Renewable Energy’s fourth annual conference, participants all agreed that “the day of reckoning is long overdue” for a carbon price.  Conferees included a representative from British Petroleum, their Group VP for Alternative Energy.  She’s got a reasonable argument, but …. you can judge.  Go here for a number of the conferees’ presentations, including the one from the BP rep.