Climate Change

Not only is the planet heating up, but, as we’ve seen here, so is the intensity and the seriousness of the debate on how to get GHG’s down.  One persistent theme is the necessity of “setting a price on carbon.”  We’ve heard this from the Stern Review, the IPCC, Lehman Brothers in their reports on the Business of Climate Change, and numerous economists.  The US Senate will shortly begin debate – as early as next week – on a vehicle for a comprehensive federal approach, with a cap-and-trade system at its core.  (See A Summary of the Boxer Substitute Amendment To the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act and this look at the state of legislation in Congress from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.)  Realistically, nobody expects a bill to be passed by this Congress and signed into law by this President.  However, the lessons we will learn as legislation progresses this year in Congress will serve as the foundation for the law that will emerge from the next Congress and that will be signed by the next President.  Beyond an American cap-and-trade regime, of course, there is the international agreement that will be finalized in December of 2009 in Copenhagen.

So, as the pace quickens over the next few months and into next year, there will be more and more analysis emerging from various worthy think tanks and other keepers of the policy flames.  Here, for instance, is a paper on “Economic Incentives in a New Climate Agreement” from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.  The paper looks at the “… potential use of market-based or economic-incentive instruments to ensure that polluters face direct cost incentives to mitigate emissions at the lowest possible cost. The first section describes various economic-incentive policy instruments and the second section discusses their potential application in the design of an international climate policy agreement.”  This is the language that the international negotiators on the post-Kyoto agreement are speaking.  (For more on their activities, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has comprehensive coverage.) The Belfer Center paper is a good, digestible look at some of the basics of where we’re going.

Another approach to curbing GHG, particularly from newly and rapidly industrializing economies such as China’s and India’s, is to use trade instruments.  How do you do that?  One way was detailed by Yale professor Judith Chevalier in an op-ed from the “NY Times” in December:  a tax on carbon consumption.  I wrote about this here and described it thus:  “So, if you can’t get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies.”

“Policy Innovations,” a Carnegie Council online magazine, has this recent take:  Can Green Trade Tariffs Combat Climate Change?  The federal legislation under consideration “…would also levy punitive tariffs on greenhouse-gas-intensive products imported from countries that lack comparable action’ to that of the United States, starting in 2020.  Industrial lobbies and labor unions are pushing hard for these sanctions to take effect more quickly.”  So, this is not just some wonks pushing ideas around in space any longer.  This could become one of the keystones of an American approach to the global crisis.  And not just American.  The Carnegie Council article reports that “European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and industrial chambers of commerce strongly advocate a similar tariff system, leading many analysts to predict that the EU will also adopt some sort of green tariff system in the next few years.” 

I’ll give you one more tactic to consider:  feed-in tariffs.  What are FIT laws?  “They place a legal obligation on utilities to purchase electricity from renewable energy installations. The tariff rate is guaranteed, and in the best examples, for a long period — say 20 years. The tariff rate is scientifically determined for each technology, to ensure profitable operation of the installation.”  (This is from an excellent paper by an analyst from The World Future Council, courtesy of RenewableEnergyWorld.com.)  A new report from the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Energy in the USA - a Policy Update, looks at how FIT’s have driven growth in Europe, what the experience has been in the six US states where they’re on the books, and the proposal in Congress for a federal law.

Break out your old economics textbooks.  There’s going to be plenty to look at and analyze.

Cap-and-Trade Bonanza – “Fortune” has a Sustainability column authored by Marc Gunther and this week he’s got a story on how we’re going to divvy up the proceeds from the inevitable U.S. cap-and-trade program that will be on the books sometime in 2009.  See A $3 trillion climate change battle.  As Gunther writes, “The issue gets pretty wonky pretty quickly, but it’s worth trying to understand because the stakes are so high.”  The question is who will get the money raised by the permits issued.  That’s the much-more-than-$64,000 question.  Should it go to the taxpayers, the industries effected in the form of some rebate, to help fund renewable energy investments, and/or any of a number of other constituencies and projects?  This will be a big part of the debate as this legislation wends its way through Congress, and in the early days of the next administration.  (As we learned in the last post below, the next President of the United States, whomever he or she will be, will be on board for some sort of cap-and-trade regime.)   

New Study Pinpoints Thousands of Climate Change Impacts – “Nature,” one of the oldest, most revered, and most definitive science journals, published a paper this week, Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change, from key scientists who were involved with last year’s landmark Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  “Nature’s” superb blog, “Climate Feedback,” said here that “Nearly 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - from the timing of plant flowering to the rate of ice melting - are being influenced by human-induced global warming, according to the first study to formally link trends in biological and physical systems to rising greenhouse gas emissions.”  Here’s the story from NASA where the lead author, Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, has her day job.

Wind Power – There are two good stories at “EERE Network News,” the weekly newsletter of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.  Not incidentally, folks, if you haven’t looked at the DOE’s website, there is really a goldmine of great information here, from soup to nuts on energy.  (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?  Sorry, if I’ve offended any particularly delicate sensibilities on these sorts of things.) 

Anyway, the first compelling story here is New DOE Report Analyzes a Path to 20% Wind Power by 2030.  This means the US would move from its current generating capacity of 16.8 gigawatts to 304 GW in 2030.  It would also mean we’d achieve an annual reduction of 825 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2030.  The report further calculates “…the accelerated wind power effort would support roughly 500,000 U.S. jobs and add more than $1.5 billion in annual revenues to the coffers of local communities.”  Go to the “20% Wind Energy by 2030” program website for more.

The second story from DOE references a new report from the American Wind Energy Association showing a continuing boom in windpower installations.  The “…industry continued new installations at a breakneck pace in the first quarter of 2008, putting 1,400 megawatts or approximately $3 billion worth of new generating capacity in place,” according to the report from the AWEA.  The first quarter!  Not bad.

However, even though it appeared as of my post from last month, Tax Breaks, Finally, for Renewables, that the deal was done and the extension of tax credits for the renewables industries was at hand, it appears to be not quite yet the case.  The AWEA and her sister renewable energy industry trade groups are still pitching.  See this release.  We’re getting close though.  See this from Reuters’ today:  Renewable Energy Tax Bill Advances In US House. 

The big news came from John McCain on Monday.  McCain Pledges To Combat Climate Change is the story from Reuters’ “Planet Ark” service.  In an obvious attempt to delineate the difference between President Bush and himself, he said “I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges.”

McCain’s speech was thoughtful too about the problem of getting China and India on board.  He said:  “In my approach to global climate-control efforts, we will apply the principle of equal treatment. We will apply the same environmental standards to industries in China, India, and elsewhere that we apply to our own industries. And if industrializing countries seek an economic advantage by evading those standards, I would work with the European Union and other like-minded governments that plan to address the global warming problem to develop effective diplomacy, effect a transfer of technology, or other means to engage those countries that decline to enact a similar cap.”

The story from NPR on this, included the news that “A prepared text of McCain’s speech supplied to reporters suggested that western countries might use trade sanctions to push China and India into cutting their carbon output. But in delivering the speech, McCain substituted softer language, saying diplomacy and technical support should be enough to move the two countries.” 

He seems to be referring to the idea of a trade mechanism related to carbon consumption that I wrote about here in December.  See the last paragraph at that post where I described the idea:  “So, if you can’t get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies.”

For a good, well-rounded look at McCain’s position and history on climate change, and the positions of the other two candidates remaining, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, look at this item from “The Online NewsHour.”  (For more on cap-and-trade and other stories related to the carbon markets, you can see these posts.) 

All three Presidential candidates support a cap-and-trade system and, for me, that is reassuring.

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.”)

Earth: 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.

Voluntary Offsets – So we’ve gone off for a visit to a resort area in Arizona, staying with a friend.  What’s the expenditure of GHG as a consequence of our trip?  The short answer is:  I have no idea.  However, if I choose to “offset” the carbon “cost” of the round-trip flight from Newark to Phoenix, I can go to my airline and they’ll calculate it for me and I can pay them a little extra and they will then apply that to a worthy project such as reforestation, or some other project, usually under the rules of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) program.  There is enormous business activity that stems from this arrangement which I wrote about back in April under Markets. 

Well the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is interested in this market and how it serves people, and rightfully so.  F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent is the headline of the story from the “NY Times” last week.  “Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million last year on carbon offset credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects to balance the emissions created by, say, using a laptop computer or flying on a jet.”  And the market is growing.  All the F.T.C. wants to know is if consumers are being treated honestly.  They had a workshop last week to address this question.  You can see a webcast of the workshop and other information here.  This is all part of their regulatory review of the Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims. 

Presidential Candidates and Science – I’ve written about the U.S. Presidential race a couple of times, most recently here.  “Science,” the prestigious journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science had a ten-page special report, “Science and the Next U.S. President” recently.  This article sums up the report.  One of their top editors said:  “Science felt that it was important to find out what the presidential candidates think about issues that may not be part of their standard stump speeches but that are vital to the future of the country–from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to improving science and math education.”  Go here for the introduction to the report, to access all the various candidates’ views, and to see related items from “Science.” 

“Here Comes the Sun” – The  venerable “Financial Times” had an arresting article the other day:  The sun shines on the solar industry’s quest for ‘grid parity’, in which we learn that “…last year is likely to have seen the installation of solar systems providing 4GW, up from 2.5GW in 2006.  Most commentators expect the figure to continue to grow by 25-35 per cent a year.”  They reference the enormous influence of the initiatives from Google and Walmart, among others, in advancing solar capability and other renewables.

A story from the “NY Times” – Plan on Airline Emissions Hints at U.S.-Europe Rift – is a window onto an interesting bigger story:  how global warming is impacted by aviation.  I’ve written on one aspect of this recently in a story I did for “Planning” on Sustainability at the Airports.  I also blogged on Green Flying in July, with a great video included from the EU. 

Here’s a sense of the overall contribution of aviation on carbon dioxide emissions, as of 2002.

The EU came out with a draft policy about a year ago to regulate emissions from aircraft flying into or out of their countries’ airports.  You can refer to this memo for an explanation of the ins and outs of the policy.  Included here is also the answer to the essential question:  “How do aircraft affect the global climate?”  EU Environment Ministers meeting in Brussels last week agreed to the policy of including aircraft in the overall European emissions trading scheme, but with some softening of the draft plan.

The US doesn’t like the idea of requiring limits as the “NY Times” article referenced above indicates.  They don’t like it in anything as we know from the Bush Administration’s continuing opposition to national or international caps on GHG emissions.  (For the latest evidence of this, witness the EPA’s refusal to grant California and other states the right to regulate GHG emissions from cars.  See this from Environment News Service, this from AFP, and this from Time/CNN, an interview with the Governator and the Chair of the California Air Resources Board.)

Some of the environmental community in Europe think that the EU environment ministers have fatally dumbed down the policy.  The European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) issued this release:  Aviation emissions plan could derail international climate targets.  T&E have this informative briefing on the subject. 

The BBC has released a poll showing that people “… are ready to make personal sacrifices – including paying more for their energy – to help address climate change.”  Support for carbon taxes (see previous post below) is very high when it’s framed that the money would go to help further renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.  Support is also quite high when the scenario becomes using the carbon tax proceeds to offset other taxes.  This is precisely the approach being promulgated by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and many economists.   

See more on this at the BBC and at World Public Opinion.

Meanwhile, for a nice summary of the issues involved in the carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade debate, go to The Real Climate Debate: To Cap or to Tax? from the “NY Times” the other day. 

Presidential Race – Two of the leading Democratic presidential candidates made their voices heard this week, with John Edwards calling global warming a “moral test” and Hillary Clinton saying:  “Tackling the energy crisis is the calling of our time. And when I’m president, it will be the calling of our nation.”  See this from AP on Edwards’s speech and see the Edwards website for more.  See the story here on Clinton’s plan from the “Des Moines Register” as well as her speech from the campaign website.

See also this comprehensive piece, Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats, from today’s “Washington Post.”

I’ve written about Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ambitious energy and environmental plans on a number of occasions.  See Congestion Pricing in New York from July and Mike Bloomberg’s Earth Day from April.  As someone who would’ve had a role working on environmental issues had Bloomberg’s opponent, Mark Green, won in 2001, I might be prejudiced about our mayor’s performance in this area.  I’m not.  Bloomberg’s done a nice job. (Green was the odds-on favorite to win on September 10, 2001.  Things changed the next day, very much including the politics of the mayoral race that year.  But that’s another story.) 

As a highly visible national figure, as a self-made billionaire, and as a passionate advocate for changing direction so as to avoid our impending head-on collision with catastrophic climate change, Bloomberg’s views have considerable heft.  The mayor attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ “Climate Protection Summit” this past week in Seattle.  (See the USCM website for news on the conference and their work on climate change.)  He unveiled his unqualified support for a carbon tax in a speech he gave at the conference.  He told us to “stop ignoring the laws of economics” in his smart, low-key and persuasive speech.  Here’s a video of the speech.  The carbon tax portion runs for ten minutes starting at around 17:30.

See also this article from the A.P. via the “Seattle Post-Intelligencer” and this press release from Bloomberg’s office.  The Carbon Tax Center, a group that has been providing a good deal of the intellectual foundation for the concept, was rhapsodic about Bloomberg’s speech.  (I’ve written about the carbon tax as recently as last week in “France’s Initiative” under More Quick Hitters below, and elsewhere.)

Will the carbon tax pick up steam and supplant cap-and-trade as the preferred method of addressing global warming in Congress?  Bloomberg kept emphasizing the political unpopularity of the concept at present.  Stay tuned.

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.