I completely agree that we developed nations must lead — where we differ is that the science demands that the world act collectively and right now. So we must lead in a way that gets developing nations to agree to caps now. It might be inequitable, it could be unjust, and it certainly isn’t the easiest deal to strike.

But it is the only one which will avoid an irrevocable hell on earth.

And that’s why I disagree with Ms. Clawsen, if she meant what she said.

So basically, we need to find a way to help them develop with clean energy — not impossible, and that’s the price we developed nations pay for past pollution.

We also need something punitive for those who won’t sing a treaty — my favorite is a global carbon tariff for non-signatories.

You said: [whether or not Obama needs some action by China to get a U.S. bill passed, his entire presidency and the fate of the planet rest on whether he can in fact get a China deal ]

The fundamental point there is getting a US bill passed… (EPA cannot regulate CO2 using the CAA. Congress must give statutory power to an agency to regulate CO2).

The Congress will not pass a bill without agreement by China to join the US to achieve a scheduled, huge reduction of CO2 emissions.

If the Congress goes ahead unilaterally, we have lost any leverage we had with our largest creditor.

On the other hand, Chinese officials and scientists understand the threat global warming poses to China’s long-term future…string with measurement of Himalayan glacier melt back. China does not have the internal wealth to weather climate change as long as the US will. China can be persuaded to enter a joint agreement with the US but that can only be achieved if the President will convene a top level, multi-agency and departmental negotiation with Chinese counterparts over several years. I mean negotiate at a level and with determination as if it was a nuclear weapons treaty issue we had to resolve with China.

The Democrats, in the House and Senate, are doing what must be done to keep public attention focused on climate change and particularly in this agonizing economic time with unemployment jumping half a percentage point each month. But, it does not have to act to bring a bill to the President in the absence of China’s buying in to the reduction plan.

We can wait China out before or after we act but we can also catch China at a moment of its own realization that the impact will be greater upon Chinese citizens than Americans in the long term….eventually it catches all of us.

Business practices and trade laws, in China, do not benefit foreign companies. In fact, they discourage large foreign investments. Brookings and others have documented these impediments to foreign cooperation via contracts with China’s energy sector. Those barriers can be negotiated first and when China can come to a mutual agreement with the US through hard nose, bi-lateral negotiations we will have a bill before the US Congress that will get the support form both parties.

John McCormick

Eileen Claussen’s quote, probably in the context of Copenhagen as you suggested, is far LESS outrageous than your presumption. If we can’t convince 20 or 25 rich country government representatives (currently on the fence) to make the first leap of good faith in what will be a multi-decade tit-for-tat iterative game, then civilization is doomed.

And of course we CAN convince them. Keep up the good work and give us more ammunition with which we can go after these Senators.

The policy gamble stuff you’ve posted on, from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, implicitly suggests a 670 CO2_eq target, and gets away with this by (1) looking at warming by 2100 (not equilibrium warming) as well as (2) looking at warming from now on, not from the pre-industrial.

Just look at the chart (again). Look what a good chance it seems to be suggesting its policy target has of “meeting the 2 degree target.”

http://globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/policy.html

This confuses matters and ends up loosely (and inaccurately) conveying the message that this target, this policy goal, offers us a fair chance of staying below a “2 degree target.” (That is, gives us a fair chance of the temperature not having increased more than 2 degrees (from current levels) by the end of the century.)

This relies on equivocation (and, of course. on ignoring the risk of triggering feedbacks, but that’s a separate point).

That’s why, in the comments to your recent Friedman post, I called for pie charts as pretty as the MIT charts, but showing what the true gamble looks like, ie the likelihoods for equilibrium warming over the pre-industrial for this policy of targeting 670 ppm CO2_eq. That chart will not suggest 670 CO2_eq has anything to do with a 2 degree target.

Once this has been cleared up, your point about feedbacks should be made as a kind of final thrust. But the more basic stuff needs to be sorted out first, or else the MIT work cannot help but confuse matters and encourage people to bandy about these ppm:s in the six hundreds.