What I meant to say was that “the US should be willing to reduce its net emissions by purchasing more international emission allowances on top of the 14% reduction.” In other words, if the US doesn’t make more domestic emissions reductions, it should pay other countries to reduce theirs.

I think he means “… reduce its net emissions by selling fewer emission allowances (if they don’t sell at the floor price) …”

Do you really believe that?

To give but one example: As Waxman-Markey is debated in Congress, the Scottish Parliament is also working on climate-change legislation.

The Scottish Climate Change Bill was unveiled late last year, and it was hailed then as a landmark document. It includes plans to boost renewable energy and cut GHG emissions by 80% by 2050. It sets out measures to tackle aviation and shipping emissions, improve energy efficiency, and will include provisions for a 34% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020, and a 50% cut by 2030. If backed by the Scottish Parliament — which appears likely, as it now has all-party support — it would also allow ministers to establish a Scottish Committee on Climate Change to exercise advisory functions.

During the current debate, parliamentarians are already talking about increasing the interim 2020 CO2 reduction target to 42% over 1990 emission levels — if an agreement is reached in Copenhagen. They are also talking about dramatically limiting the use of offsets to reach CO2 reduction goals, so that emissions in Scotland really are reduced dramatically.

In decarbonising the Scottish economy, the government will work particularly hard on several key energy-intensive industries, and require increasing use of either carbon capture and sequestration for fossil fuel plants, as well as hard renewable energy targets. The bill would also boost the biomass sector by creating woodlands, and opening up Scottish forests to wood fuel production. It also requires government ministers to produce a National Action Plan on energy efficiency within 12 months, and review it every three years. The government is also launching an innovative carbon assessment project to drive future budget and spending decisions, and monitor progress.

The plans are expected to cost the Scottish economy in the neighborhood of $1.49 to $2.97 billion annually. A Scottish coalition of 40 groups, including many international environmental organizations, have given the proposals a warm welcome, although they are pressing for quicker action and stronger targets, and it appears that the government is listening.

I can provide other examples, but I think you get my point. Many places in the world are taking dramatic steps to cut emissions, and I don’t see the point in conflating American efforts, or denying international progress.

I think Waxman-Markey is a beginning, and I’m glad for it. The huge American carbon behemoth will not be able to do an about face in four or five years. You need more time. I get that.

I would describe Waxman-Markey as a fresh start. And I hope that you can do better as the real effects of climate change become apparent.

The way to stop something with accelerating growth would be to “nip it in the bud”, of course. The longer we wait, the harder this will be, and the greater the potential for runaway positive feedback effects:

Chris Field, one of the IPCC group leaders, from Democracy Now!, February 26, 2009:

And what we increasingly see is that with temperatures at the upper end of this warming range, we begin to get a large series of very dangerous feedbacks from the earth’s system. In particular, we see tropical forest transitioning from taking up large amounts of carbon to taking up very little or even releasing carbon. And it looks like there’s an increasing risk that high latitude ecosystems that are characterized by these frozen soils called permafrost may release some of the organic matter that’s stored in this permafrost to the atmosphere. So you end up in a situation where, instead of having ecosystems storing large amounts of carbon, their storing very little or releasing large amounts.

The calculations to date are that tropical forests—and this is something that is explored in the IPCC—could, at the higher ranges of temperature forcing, release anywhere from a hundred billion to 500 billion extra tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. And that should be put in the context of understanding that during the entire period from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until now, all of the world societies have only released a little over 300 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask not only about what’s happening in the Southwest, but a vicious cycle you talked about that could do everything from ignite tropical forests to melt the Arctic tundra.

CHRISTOPHER FIELD: The idea of these vicious cycle feedbacks is that once warming reaches a certain point, the amount of assistance that we’re getting in terms of carbon storage from the land and oceans tends to go down. And this is quite clear from the IPCC models, and it’s clear from a number of other more recent lines of work.

One of the new numbers that’s a great concern to me is that we’ve been doing studies of how much organic matter is stored in these frozen soils in northern latitudes, permafrost soils, and the new numbers are that approximately a billion tons of carbon [he meant more than a trillion tons - some estimates put it at 1.6 trillion tons - LP] is stored in the organic matter in these high latitude soils. Climate model projections indicate that at high amounts of warming large fractions of the permafrost could melt, and some of the projections have that at from 60 to 90 percent of the permafrost melting.

And the surprising thing about these permafrost soils is that the organic matter that’s contained within them is not this incredibly stabilized, difficult-to-decompose stuff; it’s basically frozen plants that have been sitting there for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. And when the permafrost is thawed, these plants decompose quite quickly, releasing their carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere or as methane to the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas that, on a molecule per molecule basis, is about twenty-five times as powerful as CO2.

The basic risk is that if we reach a certain point in the warming, what we’ll end up with is a vicious cycle, where the warming causes additional permafrost melt, which causes additional CO2 to be released to the atmosphere, which causes additional warming, which creates this vicious cycle.

All of us on this blog already know things like this, I think.

I don’t think we have any conception just how violently the climate can react to the huge, unprecedented rates of change of carbon concentration in the atmosphere we have imposed on it.

Truly uncontrollable global heating, which cannot be stopped, no matter what we do, and which may not stop short of the complete destruction of the biosphere may result.

It’s a solvable problem – we’re just not solving it.

I am very disappointed that the 20% reduction has been reduced to a 14% reduction. At Kyoto, the US agreed to reduce its emissions in 2008-12 to 7% below 1990 levels — and then failed to ratify. The W-M 20% reduction would reduce emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by 2020; the 14% reduction reduces emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. This sends the wrong signal internationally. To make up for this, the US should be willing to reduce its net emissions by purchasing more emission allowances on top of the 14% reduction. The US legislation must also allow flexibility to tighten the target later.

The free permits are unsurprising, but have is a significant opportunity cost. The money spent could be used much better if it went to RD&D, or went directly to households.

the strongest piece of clean energy and climate legislation probably in the world

considering where we rank among similar countries for resource use efficiency, the narrowness of this statement is almost insulting. are we really about to pat ourselves on the back for promising to maybe go from 2x to 1.7x modern european per-capita carbon, in ten years?

i’ve always liked it when people say europhiles in the US have no pride in their own country. if people here really had pride, we’d be embarrassed at how bad we’re being spanked by our competitors and aim to beat foreign performance with something other than lawyers and bank fraud.

High GDP – high CO2 – tradition of selfish independence – car based culture – spread out land use requiring aviation to get anywhere … what do you expect? I would rather they scrapped the bill, saved the paper and gave all the politicians a day off.