Summary
2008 did not, for my money, have as many noteworthy events as 2007 did but there were critical developments nonetheless. 2007 saw Al Gore win the Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. The IPCC came out with its landmark Fourth Assessment Report and shared the Nobel. The EU established a target of 20% renewables and a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases (from 1990 levels) by 2020, and the US Congress passed an energy bill that, in many ways, significantly altered the course of energy policy and practice. The Bali meetings created an important set of principles for a Post-Kyoto international agreement on addressing the climate change crisis.
But that was then. This past year, developments were less dramatic, I think, but tended, strongly, to foster further significant progress on getting our planet’s ecology back on nature’s intended path.
Obama - There was one singularly dramatic development, however, that will have a significant impact going forward: You guessed it! The election of Barack Obama. We know now who’s going to staff key leadership positions at the Department of Energy, EPA, State and at the White House. They are an experienced, highly regarded, progressive group. We know that all the signals are green - as it were - for a serious, straight-ahead approach, both domestically and internationally, to dealing with climate change and energy. (See posts here and here for more.)
Congress - There wasn’t a lot of action on The Hill, but, as with so much, things were moving below the surface, building for big things in 2009. The elections, certainly, further enhanced the standing of the Democrats in Congress which bodes very well, pretty clearly, for greater attention to matters of energy, the environment and climate change. (See this and this for more.)
One thing that did happen, and it was a bit of a surprise, was that tax credits for renewables finally passed - on the back of the bailout legislation. (See Tax Credits!)
Another big change took the form of the ousting of John Dingell from the chair of the very powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Henry Waxman, a strong, smart and progressive leader from California, with a long and impressive track record on energy and the environment, found the votes to assume the chairmanship and will hit the ground running when Congress reconvenes. P.S. Waxman’s former chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, is Obama’s Director of Legislative Affairs. (See Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.)
International Meetings - The UNFCCC annual Conference of the Parties took place in Poznań in December. This was important as a bridge between last year’s meeting in Bali and the all-important meeting in Copenhagen set for December of 2009 in which a successor to the Kyoto Protocol will be finalized. In Brussels, an EU Climate Summit was held to iron out the disagreements within that 27-member body on how to proceed on the ambitious program they’ve set out for themselves. (See under “European Union” here and also Another Part of the Forest.)
There were, of course, hundreds of other meetings, conferences, conventions, working groups and other get-togethers relative to climate change. I mentioned many of these at the blog, and even attended a few.
Coal - As the quest for a viable, cost-effective and universally applicable approach to carbon capture and storage (CCS) continued, coal-fired power plants were coming up against increasing opposition, at least in this country. (See posts here, here and here, for instance, on the feasibility of CCS.)
At Coal Takes Some Lumps and Baby, It’s Coal Outside, I reported on some developments that were leading more and more people to believe that coal-fired power plants were living on borrowed time. Certainly, a federal cap-and-trade regime in the US and elsewhere would put a great honkin’ kink in the colon to coal. (See Cap-and-Trade, Baby, Cap-and-Trade, among other posts.)
Biofuels - This particular magic bullet is losing some of its cachet. Aside from the corn ethanol boom crashing in the US, the environmental impacts of biofuels have come under much greater scrutiny this year. (See Are Biofuels A Bummer?) Among other things, the rush to biofuels has been identified as contributing to the calamitous rise in food prices worldwide. (See under “Biofuels and Food” here.)
The Media and Public Concern - Our perceptions about climate change and energy are growing in breadth and depth week by week as the media pays more and more attention. The media’s coverage and the public’s response to that coverage is itself a hugely important story. Katrina, the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and the IPCC, and the Iraq War have focused Americans, certainly, and many others around the world as well, on these issues. The salience of climate change and the many subject areas that it engrosses have kept them center stage in our public consciousness.
The Recession
Many pundits around the world think that the global recession is going to significantly diminish the progress that we’ve been making toward getting our GHG down. The argument goes that we can’t afford to spend the money on infrastructure for green building, improving our electricity grids and our public transportation, on deploying renewables and on pollution controls, and that we’ll throttle heavy industry with onerous cap-and-trade regimes. The counterargument is that now is precisely the time to retool and repower our world. President-Elect Obama, for one, recognizes the opportunity for creating jobs in rebuilding infrastructure. Much of that work is going to go to green projects.
At The Economic Crisis - and Opportunity, I wrote “Yes, the world economic waters are storm-tossed. We have to focus on the critically important task of stabilizing banks and other financial institutions. That, not incidentally, is a task for all the world’s economies, working together, as so manifestly didn’t happen in the 1930s. But we should also use this time as an opportunity to reconfigure our infrastructure, indeed our way of living, to create the conditions for long-term sustainability - and always remember that means economically and environmentally.”
I see little diminution in enthusiasm by business and industry for getting our GHG down and streamlining our energy pathways. No less an oracle than the “Financial Times” has reported over and over on the opportunities for business as well as the imperatives to avoid the destruction that global warming can and does wreak. (See this recent post, for instance.) Here’s what the “FT” wrote: “The global economic crisis is unquestionably the year’s defining business story. But what does the looming recession mean for the business of climate change? In the final issue of our three-part series on climate change, we examine the risks and opportunities for business.”
Big Story, Under the Radar
Which brings me to the fact that I think that clean tech is the big story in all of this that deserved more coverage than it got in 2008. I’ve written numerous times about how energy efficiency and renewable energy studies and initiatives are popping up all over the world, all the time. In The Business of Renewables, I wrote that one of the world’s leading energy economists, Daniel Yergin, said that we would be seeing “…more than $7 trillion of new investment in clean energy technologies by 2030.” It’s very clear, renewables are “…here to stay, not for a year, but forever and a day.” That was proved in 2008. See the blog if you don’t believe me. I hardly believe it myself because I never, in all honesty, thought I’d live to see the day when energy sanity would start to assert itself. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a whole lot of fun.
Misconceptions
Concerted global action on climate change, energy and the environment is going to be prohibitively expensive and cost jobs. On the contrary, not dealing with climate change is going to be economically catastrophic as the Stern Review on the economics of climate change explained so lucidly. Beyond this, as I’ve noted just above in the section on the economic crisis and in talking about the extraordinary burgeoning of the renewable energy industry, there are opportunities everywhere.
The other thing that may be misconstrued is that industry, including the financiers, want to impede our progress towards a zero-carbon, ecologically sound world. That certainly may be true for some of the oil and gas boys, and some in the coal and utility industries, but, by and large, there is consensus that the time is past to get things in order. You can find a wealth of stories under Business and Economics that support this.
The Crystal Ball and Tea Leaves
It is evident to me that the 111th Congress and President Obama are going to work long hours, both politically and legislatively, to create green jobs in several green infrastructure initiatives, and they are going to make renewables a top priority. They are also, not incidentally, going to roll back the environmental depredations of the Bush Administration, such things as greenlighting mountain-top removal mining and denying California’s application for a Clean Air Act waiver so as to enable requirements for GHG standards on motor vehicles.
I predicted in my last year-end review that the President-elect “…will start gearing up, before the inauguration on January 20, 2009, for serious, robust, progressive American policy leadership on climate change…” That has proven true, and somewhat beyond my hopes at that. In 2009, I believe that we will see a federal cap-and-trade regime come into being. That is beyond what many sage observers on the scene are now saying. It’s my perception, however, that the political will is there, and is personified in Obama, Pelosi, Waxman, Reid, Boxer and Bingaman, among others. I think the environmental community will be out in force to support the efforts of the political leadership, as I think much of the business community will be as well.
Internationally, the big target is Copenhagen in December. It will take a lot of work - epic, heroic work - but I predict that we will have a strong, new international climate change treaty negotiated and that it will come into force, on time, in 2012.
2009 is going to be a very big year in the history of the climate crisis. We are going to look back and say that business, science, and government came together as never before to effect positive changes for economic health, ecological well-being and sustainable development.
