One of these has been expressed a fair number of times here:  We are seeing progress on renewables and energy efficiency that, if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would’ve said I thought wasn’t going to happen - at least not in my lifetime.  I continue to be delighted at how wrong I was.  Today’s special section in the “NY Times” for instance, on the Business of Green, has a number of stories relevant to this theme, among them this one on what would really make clean tech companies happy.  An agreement in Copenhagen is not high up the list.  “What matters far more in the near term, the companies say, are national governments’ efforts to provide incentives for developing technologies like wind and solar power or cellulosic ethanol.”  Further, this industry “…has already begun to find its footing, both in the United States and abroad, without any recent international action on climate - although concerns about emissions as well as energy security are clearly the driving force.”  I would not hesitate to add that money - spelled s.a.v.i.n.g.s. - is another huge impetus.  Green economic stimulus in the US and elsewhere are yet another positive factor.

This special “NYT” section has other great articles including on how successful energy efficiency initiatives may well have flattened out our consumption for the long run.  It is precisely the following sort of perspective that absolutely makes my heart sing:  “In April, Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), said that because of the combination of renewable energy and energy conservation, the United States might not need to build any coal or nuclear plants to meet the base-load capacity that runs around the clock and is supplemented by natural gas and other sources at peak periods.  ‘We may not need any, ever,’ he said.”  The Smart Grid is going to further drive that devoutly wished for outcome.

One of my favorite writers, Andrew Leonard over at Salon.com, had this essay yesterday about how renewables can sneak right up on you.  (I cited Leonard’s take on the virtually limitless potential for renewables here a while back.)  He’s talking here about how the windpower industry in Texas has just exploded over ten years, from 180 MW to 6.223 GW just this month.  Worldwide, windpower capacity is burgeoning.  The World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) says that wind energy continued its growth in 2008 at an increased rate of 29%.  See this chart.

A few more thoughts, if I may.  I quoted Amory Lovins here recently saying that “The Renewable Revolution has been won.”  This was echoed by Peter Löscher, the head of Siemens, in this recent “FT” article:  “The green revolution has started and by 2020, green technology will have surpassed the car industry as well as the engineering sector in Germany.”  Sweet.

With Copenhagen looming in just 15 days, and with the eyes of the world already focused on what can be expected to happen - and what should happen - it is not without purpose to hearken back to an article written by President Barroso in September:  Edge back from the abyss - It’s time to deliver on climate change.  The EU has already committed to a 20% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 (along with a 20% share for renewable energy, and a 20% boost to energy efficiency) - and they say they’ll produce a 30% reduction in GHG if others make a similar commitment.

Barroso, among many others, has noted the need to move ahead with speed and determination.  He wrote in his article that the draft text for Copenhagen to come out of the UNFCCC talks in Bonn in June was a “…a feast of alternative options…”  Barroso said:  “If we don’t sort this out, it risks becoming the longest and most global suicide note in history.”

There’s much more to say, obviously, about where we are and where we’re going.  For now, see this succinct video from President Barroso.

President Obama and other APEC leaders agreed with Rasmussen.  “The Guardian” reports here that “During a hastily convened breakfast meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from the moribund negotiations by aiming for a broad political agreement and postponing contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer.”

When Vernon Evans set off headed West from South Dakota to find work during the Depression, he painted “Oregon Or Bust” on his old car.  This phrase has come to stand for reaching your destination no matter what.  Copenhagen is not our final destination anymore, if it ever really was.  Our destination, our goal in all this is to pull back from the brink of plunging the earth and all its life into oblivion.  Does that sound too apocalyptic?  Well, if it does, I’m sorry, but that’s exactly how it is.  Let’s hope we get there and we can look back at Copenhagen as a critical way station.

I love this stuff.  I’ve written here about two exhibitions at the National Design Museum in New York:  Design for a Living World and Design for the Other 90%.  If fighting climate change doesn’t also mean building out our capacity for sustainable development, and in a very big way, then we’re not on the right track.  The folks at DM2009 definitely are.

His top White House deputy on climate change and energy, Carol Browner, said in this report from Bloomberg News that “We feel very, very confident that we can work with the rest of the world to take significant steps forward in Copenhagen.”  What concerns a lot of folks though - here in the US and in the community of nations, some of which have really been working very hard to effect something truly meaningful at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - is that the US Senate, with only 26 days to go before the meetings in Copenhagen, is stuck in reverse.  As I’ve noted a number of times, including here most recently, the House has done its job and the President and his team are working very hard to make things happen, internationally and domestically.  The Senate, however, is throwing an awful lot of sand into the machinery.

I’ve opined on how the US Senate may be the least democratic parliamentary body in the democratic world.  First, Senators do not each represent an equal number of Americans.  Wyoming has as many Senators as California, South Carolina as New York.

Second, the rules work against progress.   Two fifths of the body - 40 Senators - can thwart the will of the rest.  It’s called a filibuster.  This comes from a Dutch word meaning “pirate.”  How apt.  If you thought the filibuster was an antidemocratic and archaic mechanism, how about the Senatorial “privilege” of a hold!  One Senator can stop what 99 others may want.  (See the “ugly” part of my post here.)  Treaties need two thirds assent for passage.  So, a determined minority can block anything that comes out of COP 15.  (See, for instance, how  the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court have been DOA at the Senate’s door.)

Third, the Senate - and the House of Representatives for that matter - are so overwhelmed by heavily bankrolled special interest lobbies that it would be difficult to call much of what comes out of Congress untainted good public policy.  No, I’m not naïve.  I know what time it is.  That’s how the game is played.  Nevertheless, the influence of money is so strong that it’s virtually impossible to work through to positive outcomes good for the body politic as a whole - not to mention the planet.

Lobbyists Accused of Blocking Climate Change Efforts reports CBS’s BNET.  According to the Center for Public Integrity this is, to be fair, a global problem.  Efforts at reducing the world’s GHG emissions “…are being stymied by a far-reaching, multinational backlash led by fossil fuel industries and other heavy carbon emitters…”  In America, even in the face of good-faith efforts by powerhouse groups of businesses like the United States Climate Action Partnership and Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, the fossil fuel folks are spearheading opposition to cap-and-trade.

You may have noted that the seven Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted last week’s markup of the Kerry-Boxer bill.  Committee Chair Barbara Boxer bent over backwards to play ball with them, as Politico reported here.  They still refused to get in the game.  As Senator Lautenberg said:  “Their behavior challenges everything we are about.  It’s almost like school children over there.”

Well, Senator, it’s not just the Republicans.  Senator Baucus, the only member of the Environment Committee who voted against the bill, is having his own hearings in the Finance Committee that he chairs.  “Grist” had this to say: Senate Finance Committee calls on polluter lobbyists to defend pollution economy yet again.  Is Baucus trying to completely scuttle climate legislation in the Senate this year?

The “Financial Times” had some more to say on this last week here.  They’re writing about “Americans for Prosperity, the rightwing group that inflamed the healthcare debate over the summer and is set to do the same on climate change.”  Follow the money though:  “AFP is partly funded by the Koch Family Foundations, an offshoot of Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned US energy company, and receives other corporate funding, including from ExxonMobil in the past.”

So with all the organized, special-interest opposition - and tepid response from Democrats, at best, it’s going to continue to be a tough slog.  “The Caucus” blog at the “NY Times” has this sober reflection in its succinct and lucid item on the situation:  “…prospects for an energy bill capping carbon emissions appear shaky even next year.”  [My emphasis.]

I really thought the stars were aligning in American politics for a breakthrough this year.  As noted, the President and the House of Representatives have been doing their jobs.  The Senate, however, is going to be a much tougher nut than even long-time - and cynical - Hill watchers like me had predicted.  We need a progressive version of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate that he was, to crack some heads.

The preeminent journalistic voice on climate change, Betsy Kolbert, interviewed Gore at her blog for “The New Yorker.”  It’s a wide-ranging conversation and Gore’s optimistic about prospects, both for Copenhagen and beyond.  I had one cavil which I expressed in a comment there:  “I’m somewhat at a loss, though, in reading this conversation, to note the absence of reference to greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. As we all know, methane, nitrous oxide, the F-gases, ozone and black carbon are all pernicious actors in warming and need to be addressed.”  I think they both know this perfectly well, but there seems to be a sense that the issue has to be dumbed down for the general public, a perception that I challenged when Bill McKibben did it last summer in a book review.  In any event, Kolbert, McKibben, and Gore are three of the greatest rainbow warriors of our age and should be regarded as such.

Gore was at the American Museum of Natural History earlier this week and “Scientific American” covered the event.  Gore talked about population, a too-neglected part of the equation in the climate change calculus, and he talked about gender equality.  “Near-zero growth, however, could be attained with four basic societal achievements, he said. The goals include: the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the spread of fertility management and a higher child survival rate. Regardless of climate change, he noted, these aims are ‘all things we should be doing for good and beneficial reasons otherwise.’”

The good folks at Salon.com did an interview with him too.  Asked his expectations for Copenhagen, he said:  “I think it is realistic to expect a treaty. It will not be as strong as I would like it to be. But it will put a price on carbon and change the forward planning of businesses and cities and states, provinces and nations.”  Putting a price on carbon is one of the cornerstones of climate policy that the IPCC, the Stern Review, the EU, and most economists in the world concerned about the issue have all trumpeted.

Perhaps some of the most visible and controversial commentary he had this past week happened in an ABC interview.  He said that people should eat less meat, agreeing with Lord Stern’s recent pronouncement.  (See the two posts immediately below for more on this approach.)

In a happy coincidence, the author of the book I referred to in my post below on Meat, Bloodless Revolution, has a review of Gore’s book in this past weekend’s “FT.”  Tristram Stuart’s highly laudatory review is itself very much worth reading.  He notes, among other things, Gore’s embrace of biosequestration as a vital tool in fighting climate change and his disavowal of the massive biofuel development for which he had formerly been an advocate.  (See, for example, my posts on biochar and Are Biofuels a Bummer?)

Gore is going to Copenhagen as a sort of Ambassador Plenipotentiary for the planet.  He’s well suited to the role.

The former, an op-ed by a “livestock rancher” and author, basically says yes, meat consumption as we know it today has serious problems globally but if you buy only “green” beef it’ll all be fine.  We are given a reasonable survey of the environmental burden of modern meat production and told “Don’t worry, be happy.”  The letters in response are revealing.  One comments “Ms. Niman’s argument amounts to lowering an ethical standard to fit the demands of our meat-centric culture and Western privilege.”  (See, for instance, Nature, Poison and “Eco-Nomics” at the blog.)  One letter argues for hunting and fishing for food, another for eating poultry instead of beef.  And one letter posits the humane argument:  “When Nicolette Hahn Niman refers to ‘a conscientious meat eater,’ she is using an oxymoron. Can anyone in good conscience be complicit with the unnecessary suffering and slaughter of another sentient being?”  (That’s where I started with my vegetarianism 38 years ago.)

This brings us to the subject of Betsy’s Kolbert’s “New Yorker” review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.  Foer is a novelist, but delves into some new, not-uninteresting territory in this book.  He looks at the massive pollution engendered by industrial meat production.  “The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.”  And, “According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement.”  He looks at the extraordinary amounts of antibiotic pumped into animals we eat and how this has led directly to “…producing new, resistant strains of germs-so-called superbugs.”  And he looks at the pain inflicted on the animals on which we feed.  Good review of what appears a most compelling book.

This discussion appears to be one that is not soon going away.

He gave a wide-ranging interview recently to “The Times” in which he said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”  “The Times” also reports that “UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.”

(If full disclosure from me is of any note, I’ve been a vegetarian for pretty much the entirety of my adult life.  I had my last hamburger 38 years ago and have never looked back.)

Not surprisingly, when someone as prominent as Stern makes a pronouncement as unequivocal - and controversial - as this one, there’s going to be a rapid backlash.  Thus, Critics round on Lord Stern over vegetarian call is a headline from the very next day from “The Times.”  They wrote:  “Farmers and meat companies across Britain reacted with a mixture of anger and exasperation yesterday after one of the world’s leading climate change campaigners urged people to become vegetarian to help to fight global warming.”

When another highly visible and respected climate change leader, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, delivered the same message a year ago, there was a not-dissimilar reaction.   See this from “The Guardian.”

There is a fair bit to be said on this subject - and I will be saying more here.  There are an awful lot of reasons why meat consumption is a big net negative for people and the planet, and climate change is high on the list.  There is a growing movement to highlight the connections.  Witness, for instance, this useful comment on a recent post.

I’ve been reading a great book on the history of vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart, and find, quite to my surprise, that many of the same arguments made today regarding natural resource protection and the medical benefits of vegetarianism were made hundreds of years ago.  Pierre Gassendi, for instance, the 17th Century French philosopher and scientist, was a prominent proponent of a vegetarian diet.  As the book notes, “…Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’”

This echoes a quote that I love from Alex Steffen, the Executive Editor of Worldchanging, here (in the context of geoengineering as “bad planetary management”):  “Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.”  Many would argue that animal agriculture - and certainly the industrial farming that produces most of the world’s meat today - does not reflect how earth’s natural systems were meant to operate.

As you know, the world has been building toward the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for several years.  COP 13, in Bali two years ago, created the “roadmap” for further talks under the UN’s aegis.  In Bali, for one thing, avoiding deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) was embraced as a necessary mechanism for an international agreement after the Kyoto Protocols expire in 2012.  For another thing, the idea that adaptation, with an adaptation funding mechanism, needed to be a key building block in “a strengthened future response to climate change” was established.

Copenhagen is where the international community is going to create the framework for how we proceed.  We will have a more vigorous regime than Kyoto provided.  The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, it should be recognized, was never meant to be the alpha and omega for addressing the climate crisis.  It should be celebrated, nevertheless, for the mechanisms that it established.

What we will have after Copenhagen is somewhat well defined in some areas, and as-yet unclear in others.  The big bones of contention remain to what extent the developing nations will adhere to a quantifiable program of greenhouse gas reductions, how much and in what way the developed countries will pay for mitigation and adaptation efforts in the developing world, and the new and improved mechanisms for achieving the climate-cooling ends nations agree are necessary.

What’s been going on as part of the preparations for COP 15?  The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF), for one thing, has been having a series of meetings all year.  The MEF nations’ leaders met in Italy in July and made several declarations, among them that “Developing countries among us will promptly undertake actions whose projected effects on emissions represent a meaningful deviation from business as usual in the mid-term …”  (My emphases.)  Developing nations represent a large burden of the GHG emissions now and there is plenty more ahead before any “meaningful deviations” start to kick in.  (China, Indonesia and Brazil are 1, 3 and 4 when you count Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry [LULUCF].)  These major developing economies, and others such as India, South Africa, and Mexico, all have a critical voice and a critical role to play in effecting a good agreement in Copenhagen.

Meeting just before the MEF, the G-8 called for a 50% reduction overall in greenhouse gases by 2050, the most advanced economies reducing by 80%.  In mid-September, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon organized the Summit on Climate Change.  A number of world leaders further delineated their intention to address climate change, in Copenhagen and beyond.  The G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh later that week produced a declaration of intent to end fossil-fuel subsidies worldwide, a not-inconsiderable outcome.

Many world leaders, environment and finance ministries, key NGOs, and business leaders have been meeting, talking, negotiating, and building to the critical COP 15 in December.  The President of COP 15, Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedgard, has been working hard and long, saying that failure is not an option.  Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has been engaging some key leaders for extra service in helping to make a deal happen.   Meanwhile, various working groups of the UNFCCC have been plowing ahead, helping to create optimal conditions for the meetings.  The final preparatory meeting before Copenhagen takes place next week in Barcelona.

Just today, after a key EU Summit concluded, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission announced:  “We have a clear, ambitious, and unified EU message on climate finance.  We can take this message to Washington, New Delhi, Beijing and elsewhere.  Next Tuesday, Prime Minister Reinfeldt and myself are meeting the President of the United States and we will say ‘we are ready to engage, let’s make Copenhagen a success.’”  John Fredrik Reinfeldt is the Prime Minister of Sweden.  (See also this video from Reuters on the EU agreement.)

The SG had an op-ed this past week in the “NY Times” in which he says that a good deal can come out of Copenhagen.  He’s certainly been working hard to effect precisely that outcome.

Another of the central players in all of this is Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC.  In the latest monthly newsletter from them, he delivers an urgent, but I think positive message.  He talks about the successes in the Bangkok talks earlier this month.  He mentions the thousands of NGOs and faith groups that are working toward achieving success on climate and sustainability.  He calls on world leaders to follow through on the commitments they’ve been making to finalize a strong, smart and thorough agreement in Copenhagen.