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Boxer, Kerry Set to Introduce Climate Bill in Senate

Ending some nine months of closed-door deliberations, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) will release global warming legislation Wednesday that they hope will be the vehicle for broader Senate negotiations and an eventual conference with the House.

The bill’s authors said last week that they expect to start hearings early next month on the bill, with a markup in Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee to follow soon thereafter. They also acknowledged that their legislation is just a “starting point” in a bid to win over moderate and conservative Democrats, as well as Republicans.

“I hope what we’ve done is constructive and well-received,” Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday. “I have no pretensions, and neither does Barbara, that this will be the final product. It is a starting point, a commitment, full-fledged, across party lines to do what we need to do to protect the planet for the next century.”

The Boxer-Kerry bill will build in large part off H.R. 2454 (pdf), legislation approved in June by the House following several marathon months of negotiations that involved lawmakers representing coastal and industry-heavy districts. Exactly what is the same in the two bills remains to be seen. As for differences, Senate Democratic aides say they expect the legislation to divert from the House bill’s 17 percent emissions target for 2020 and go with an even more aggressive 20 percent limit. The bill also will stay silent on exactly how the Senate should divide up emission allowances.

At least five other Senate committees are also expected to contribute to the climate debate. The Foreign Relations and Agriculture committees are preparing language without convening a markup.

Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he will hold votes on his pieces of the global warming bill. And the same goes for Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who last week told reporters that provisions on international trade and the allocation of emission allowances would be marked up provided Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says the bill is “clearly moving.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has already approved legislation (S. 1462 (pdf)) out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that includes a nationwide renewable electricity standard and a raft of other energy incentives, including a provision that could bring oil and gas rigs closer to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Bingaman is also planning a hearing Thursday on several competing cost estimates associated with the House-passed climate bill. The session, which was postponed once earlier this month, now gives senators an early public forum to sound off on the Boxer-Kerry bill.

Already last week, several Democratic senators working outside of the Boxer-Kerry camp said their ideas would be melded into the legislation at a later date. “It’s going to need a lot of work,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Brown said he did not expect the Boxer-Kerry bill to include language adopted in the House that tries to assist energy-intensive manufacturing industries, including steel, pulp and paper and cement.

“My understanding is they did not include the House language on manufacturing,” Brown added. “But I’ve been talking to them about it. They are very open to it. They are in no way dismissive.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said she also does not think her concerns will be addressed in the initial draft from Boxer and Kerry. That means further efforts on issues related to agriculture, offsets and energy intensive industries.

“We will have to take a look at the language and then determine it from there,” Stabenow said.

China leads way for solar energy

Next month, Santa Clara’s Applied Materials Inc. is scheduled to open a giant solar energy R&D center. The company is investing up to $300 million in the facility. It will not be situated in California, nor in the United States, but in Xian, China. Because China’s where the action is.

“If the U.S. doesn’t get serious, China’s going to own this industry,” said Applied Materials spokesman David Miller. He points to the Manhattan Project-like push for alternative energy adopted by Chinese officials, which includes up to $60 billion annually in government investment. And here? “Here, we’re way behind,” said Miller. “We’re still messing around with energy bills. We need to get serious, to get capital spending flowing, to get the government truly behind it, to get focused.”

Miller and his company are not simply blowing smoke. In as little as two years, analysts predict, China will be the world’s biggest consumer of solar energy. By 2013, its clean tech market could amount to $1 trillion annually, according to a report earlier this month from the China Greentech Initiative, a consortium of U.S. and Chinese companies that includes Cisco Systems and the Silicon Valley VC firm VantagePoint Venture Partners, which specializes in clean tech investments.

Neither is Applied Materials alone in its views. I’ve heard them similarly expressed by numerous Bay Area executives and investors with business ties to China. “They get that these are the industries of the 21st century,” says VantagePoint managing partner Alan Salzman, whose Bay Area clean tech investments include Tesla Motors, BrightSource Energy and Solazyme. “The level of support for green tech there is breathtaking. It exceeds anything done here on a state or federal level.”

As if any more wake-up calls were needed, two other VantagePoint Venture Partners’ portfolio companies, Santa Clara’s Miasolé, which produces advanced, thin-film solar panels, and Sunnyvale’s Bridgelux, developer of energy-efficient LED lighting, are reluctantly considering locating their manufacturing facilities outside the United States.

“From a global competitiveness perspective, we’re just not there,” said Salzman.

East Africa Drought In Fifth Year, Millions Hungry

Drought for a fifth year running is driving more than 23 million east Africans in seven countries towards severe hunger and destitution, international aid agency Oxfam said on Tuesday.

Launching a $9.5 million (6 million pounds) appeal, it said the situation was being worsened by high food prices and conflict. The most badly hit nations are Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda.

Malnutrition is now above emergency levels in some areas and hundreds of thousands of valuable cattle are dying.

“This is the worst humanitarian crisis Oxfam has seen in east Africa for over ten years,” Paul Smith Lomas, Oxfam’s East Africa Director, said in a statement.

He said failed and unpredictable rains were ever more common in the region, and that broader climate change meant wet seasons were becoming shorter. Droughts have increased from once a decade to every two or three years.

“In Wajir, northern Kenya, almost 200 dead animals were recently found around one dried-up water source,” Lomas said.

“People are surviving on two litres of water a day in some places — less water than a toilet flush. The conditions have never been so harsh or so inhospitable, and people desperately need our help to survive.”

Some 3.8 million Kenyans, a tenth of the population, need emergency aid, Oxfam said, partly because food prices have risen to 180 percent above average.

One in six children are acutely malnourished in Somalia, the charity said, while conflict meant people were less able to grow food and drought is ravaging areas where people have fled. Half the population — more than 3.8 million people — are affected.

In Ethiopia, 13.7 million people are at risk of severe hunger and need help, Oxfam said. Many are selling cattle to buy food. Farmers in northern Uganda have lost half their crops.

EU, U.S. eye green goods tax pact in climate fight

EU diplomats told Reuters that under a plan being discussed by Brussels and Washington, the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China would agree a global pact to phase out import tariffs on goods such as wind turbines, renewables and green technologies.

But any deal is unlikely to include environmentally friendly hybrid cars, the diplomats said.

“The talks are entering an advanced stage. Brussels and Washington hope this could be one of the incentives needed to get China on board in the lead up to the Copenhagen climate change talks,” one EU diplomat told Reuters.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said the United States and the EU had been pushing within the Doha round of world trade talks since November 2007 for a deal to cut tariffs on environmental goods “and continue to work closely in pushing for concrete progress.”

“We remain eager to move ahead with negotiations to eliminate tariff barriers on climate-friendly technologies and spur momentum on a larger WTO Doha package on environmental goods and services,” said USTR spokeswoman Carol Guthrie.

U.S. businesses such as United Technologies Corp and General Electric Co, that are frustrated with the slow pace of the Doha round, have urged the Obama administration to consider alternative paths to reach a deal to boost trade in environmental goods and services.

“It’s a chance to jump-start U.S. trade policy and aid global climate negotiations at the same time,” said Jake Colvin, vice president for global trade policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, a U.S. business group.

China is on course to become the world’s largest producer of wind turbines in the world this year and is a major manufacturer of solar products.

Britain to host pre-Copenhagen climate talks

Britain said on Monday it would host a meeting of major economies next month ahead of talks to reach a new U.N deal to fight climate change.

The United States had asked Britain to hold the meeting of the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF) it set up earlier this year to provide an informal forum to discuss climate issues in London on October 18 and 19.

The discussions come less than two months before about 190 nations gather for talks in Copenhagen in December to forge a successor to the emissions-capping pact known as the Kyoto Protocol.

“MEF will cover most of the climate issues discussed in the official UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) talks ahead of Copenhagen but is not an official part of the negotiations,” Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change said in a statement.

“However, it will provide valuable contribution towards Copenhagen if developed and developing countries can reach a shared understanding and build consensus on some general principles.

“Real commitment from all countries is needed to secure a breakthrough deal.”

Delegates are currently meeting in Thailand for two weeks of talks to try to settle on the outline of a tougher pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

A spokeswoman for the department said the MEF was likely to meet again following the London talks and a further meeting on the eve of the Copenhagen talks was also likely.

Going green at Whitey’s, with aid from government

Whitey’s Auto Mall is going green, and the business secured $20,000 in federal funds to help.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, announced Saturday that Ohio will receive more than $10 million in federal funds to support renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. The funding was made available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program.

Whitey’s plans to install a geothermal climate control system for its new Mercedes showroom, which opened this month. Co-owner Dirk Schluter said drilling started three months ago for the energy-efficient heating and cooling system.

“We’re looking for whatever we can to go green. If this system works well, we plan on doing more,” he said.

The business applied for the grant a few months ago, and only learned of the award Saturday.

Brown, a leading advocate in Congress for creation of a clean energy industry, is the first Ohioan to serve on the Senate Agriculture Committee in more than 40 years.

“These funds will help Ohio’s small towns and rural communities make strides in energy efficiency and energy innovation,” he said in a news release. “Across the state, these are projects that work to reduce our dependence on foreign energy and are key to our future economic development and prosperity.”

Schluter said Whitey’s is interested in wind turbines and new lamps for the entire dealership, which will mean considerable savings in utilities.

He said the Park Avenue West dealership’s new auto body shop uses a waterborne paint system, which contains and emits less organic solvent, is less flammable and has a lower toxicity.

“It’s a pretty big green investment we made,” he said.

U.N. warns deadline imminent on climate change agreement

The United Nations on Monday warned world leaders they have only 70 days to reach a new deal to limit global warming.

“Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out,” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said of leaders’ dwindling time before they meet in Copenhagen to finalize a pact.

“As many leaders have said, there is no Plan B,” he said. “If we don’t realize Plan A, the future will hold us to account for it.”

But only hours after negotiations began, rich and poor nations were already flinging their usual rebukes at one another for failing to do their part to reach a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Talks have been deadlocked for months over the industrial nations’ refusal to commit to sufficiently deep cuts or provide billions of dollars to poor nations to help them adapt to the effects of climate change and transition to a low-carbon economy.

Major developing nations, such as India and China, have refused to agree to binding targets altogether and are leery of demands that their commitments be monitored and verified as part of any agreement.

Indian delegates called Monday for emissions cuts by developing nations of 40 percent to 45 percent below 1990 levels. And Sudan, speaking for the Group of 77 developing nations and China, said industrialized nations must provide financial help.

But the U.S. shot back that developing countries would have to do their part – short of binding targets – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and for the first time agree to a system that would monitor and verify their promised actions.

The need for a deal was driven home by a U.N. report last week that showed climate-related events such as the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets and the increasing acidification of the oceans are happening much faster than scientists had predicted even two years ago.

CIA opens center for climate change

The Central Intelligence Agency announced plans to launch a center on climate change to examine the potential security risks of environmental issues.

The CIA said it was working on its new Center on Climate Change and National Security to examine the national security impact of environmental issues such as population shifts, rising sea levels and increased competition for natural resources.

CIA Director Leon Panetta described the center as an effective support tool for U.S. lawmakers examining international agreements on the environment.

“Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security,” said the director. “The CIA is well positioned to deliver that intelligence.”

The CIA will use the center to coordinate with other members of the intelligence community to review and declassify imagery and other data for use in environmental and climate-related issues.

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This entry was posted by Jaren on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Climate Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.