Climate Progress

Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.This Center for American Progress post, by Senior Fellow Andrew Light, Senior Policy Analyst Julian L. Wong, and Fellow Samuel Charap, was first published here.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States. on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia—both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue—explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia, like the United States, is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America’s top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world’s most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

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See also: Statement by Professor Pan Jiahua on Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner’s (R-WI) Remarks

A congressional delegation led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently traveled to China to assess the potential for cooperation on international climate change efforts and to survey China’s independent efforts to reduce its CO2 emissions. Ranking member of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) was part of this delegation. His take away from the trip? Nothing good. At a press conference in Beijing on his way home on May 28, Sensenbrenner said:

“It’s business as usual for China. The message that I received was that China was going to do it their way regardless of what the rest of the world negotiates in Copenhagen.”

The take-home message from his full remarks and previous statements were clear: The United States should do nothing on climate change because China will do nothing. The line that China is not cooperating with the world on climate change is an old wag in the debate over enacting a domestic cap and trade. We’ve seen it emerge again in hearings over the American Clean Energy and Security Act introduced by Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) and we can bet on it coming up when the Senate takes up companion legislation in the coming months.

We already knew that Sensenbrenner is no friend of ACES. But what’s newly troubling is that he based his incorrect comments in Beijing largely on remarks made by a Chinese economist, Pan Jiahua, who directs the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Sensenbrenner used an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that quoted Professor Pan to accuse him of “denigrating the Waxman-Markey [energy and climate] bill,” especially its midterm targets of 17 percent cuts below 2005 by 2020. He also claimed that Professor Pan said that, “China has been too aggressive in reducing their [sic] emissions.” Sensenbrenner insinuated after a personal meeting with Professor Pan that he might be “speaking for the thinking of China,” and concluded that Pan’s position represented a “significant step backwards.”

This story is not over yet. In an exclusive statement released to the Center for American Progress, Professor Pan characterized Sensenbrenner’s selective reading of his comments in the Australian press and the account of their closed-door meeting as both “improper and unethical,” and designed to “frighten the American public and halt U.S. progress on solving the problem of global warming.”

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Today’s guest blogger is Kyle Gracey, Chair for SustainUS and a graduate student in public policy and geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

In 2050, I’ll be 77, and given the pace of the climate talks in Bonn these two weeks, I’ll likely spend most of my retirement either under water or on fire.

If finalized in the next climate agreement, the weak targets offered so far by developed countries virtually ensures that greenhouse gas concentrations (and sea levels) will rise to levels well beyond what science says are safe limits to ensure the survival of peoples and nations. Over 100 youth from 6 continents (the Antarctic youth called in sick) participated in the Bonn negotiations, watching our leaders draft an increasingly costly and damaging climate for us to live through.

Daily at the negotiations, youth have shown our governments how vulnerable our generation will be to the warming and climate change they are creating with their short-sighted proposals. We literally brought two camels and tons of sand to the negotiation entrance to highlight the drought and desertification many of our countries increasingly experience. We rapped and rhymed about the threatened survival of nations and developed countries’ weak financing proposals. Youth tracked key negotiators to remind them the next generation is watching, and blogged to their peers in multiple languages.

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“Ich bin ein Berliner” — not!

The other intellectual leader of the GOP — the one whose first name isn’t Sarah — summed up the narrow minded and ultimately self-destructive “every-country-for-themselves” mentality of the modern conservative movement Monday.  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was keynoting the biggest GOP fundraiser of the year for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees — standing in for the dithering Alaska governor (see WP’s “Palin Sideshow Spotlights Cracks in the GOP.”

l had thought the Republican National Convention’s chant of “Drill baby, drill” was the moment the Republic died.  But if Republicans and conservatives continue blocking strong U.S. climate and clean energy legislation — and thwarting the international action needed to prevent this gravest of all threats to citizens of every country — then this statement by Gingrich might top it.

Gingrich’s self-defining and self-defeating statement was doubly ignorant from a historical perspective.  First, he was attacking Obama for remarks that President Reagan himself had made a quarter-century ago, which CNN itself failed to report in its coverage of Gingrich’s remarks.  As Media Matters explains:

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This is the most comprehensive discussion I’ve seen of everything China is doing to green itself.  It is by Julian Wong, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, and Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow.  It was first published here.  Below:  A security guard looks on as a slogan is projected onto Yongdingmen Gate in Beijing, China. The Chinese have recognized that it’s climate inaction—not climate legislation—that will lead to its own economic undoing.  As a result, I am hopeful there will be a U.S.-China climate deal this fall.

A common refrain from climate action naysayers is that, “China is building two coal-fired power plants a week!” They insist that the United States should wait until this major emitter takes on binding commitments to climate change mitigation before it decides to adopt global warming pollution reduction policies in the American Climate and Energy Security Act (H.R. 2454). They further claim that if such a bill became law, the United States would be transferring its jobs to countries such as China and India that are doing nothing to curb emissions. But that thinking is exactly wrong.

Critics fairly point to the fact that 80 percent of China’s power is derived from dirty coal, and that China recently surpassed the United States as the word’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Yet China’s per capita emissions remain a fifth that of the United States, and its historical cumulative per capita emissions from 1960 to 2005 are less than one-tenth that of the United States.

Still, the Chinese have recognized that it’s climate inaction—not climate legislation—that will lead to its own economic undoing. As the U.S. Congress debates the merits of enacting renewable electricity and energy efficiency standards, China has already forged ahead with building its own low-carbon economy, laying the foundation for clean-energy jobs and innovation.

China ranked second in the world in 2007 in terms of the absolute dollar amount invested in renewable energy, according to the Climate Group. It spent $12 billion, which put it just behind Germany’s $14 billion. These investments have placed China among the world leaders in solar, wind, electric vehicle, rail, and grid technologies. And now approximately 9 percent of China’s $586 billion economic stimulus package will go toward sustainable development (excluding rail and grid) projects.

China is expected to unveil in the coming weeks another extensive and unprecedented stimulus package—reported to be in the range of $440 billion to $660 billion—dedicated solely to new energy development over the next decade, including generous investments in wind, solar, and hydropower. If those expectations are fulfilled, China could emerge as the unquestioned global leader in clean-energy production, significantly increasing its chances to wean its energy appetite off coal, and at the same time ushering in an era of sustainable economic growth by exporting these clean-energy technologies to the world.

The bottom line: China is not there yet, but it is beginning to transition to a clean-energy economy through a wide range of actions. The United States should recognize China’s efforts and encourage China to expand upon them. We have sketched this claim before, but let’s run though the numbers in more detail.

Energy efficiency

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U.S. Climate Envoy and former Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Todd Stern spoke at CAP Tuesday.  If you want to know where US-China negotiations are headed on climate, I highly recommend watching the video of his talk here (a PDF of his prepared remarks are here).

He is a blunt guy for someone who is the lead State Department climate negotiator, as made clear by the headline quote about the need for the United States to get off its butt and lead the way with domestic climate action.  Duh! (see “US responsible for 29% of carbon dioxide emissions over past 150 years, triple China’s share“).

He emphasized that  “the [current] status quo is unsustainable.” He took that message in his subsequent travel to China last week to discuss bilateral global warming agreements between the U.S. and Chinese governments.

“This is a moment to reevaluate our conceptions about what is possible,” CAP President and CEO John D. Podesta said as he introduced Stern. It’s a crucial opportunity for the United States and China to move forward together on climate issues because, as Stern pointed out, any U.S. action on climate change will not be enough without China.

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We have a real chance of a deal with China before the big international talks in Copenhagen this December (see “Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?“). But it won’t be easy, especially since the 2020 target in the Waxman-Markey climate bill falls far short of the 40% cut from 1990 levels that China recently demanded developing nations achieve by 2020.  A confused New York Times story yesterday noted, “A leading Beijing expert on climate change economics, Zhang Shiqiu, said Wednesday that she was optimistic that the two nations would reach some accord on global warming before the Copenhagen meeting,” but then misreported, “The Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning research organization, said in a report published Wednesday that the House legislation was unlikely to win enough Chinese support for the two nations to present a united front at the Copenhagen talks in December.”  In fact, leading international experts from CAP also believe a deal is doable — and that Waxman-Markey helps — as they explain in a post first published here and reprinted below (along with their response to the NYT).

UPDATE:  The Times has agreed to correct the mistake in their story.  The squeaky wheel does get greased!

We are now entering the six-month period before the U.N. climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, which are intended to hammer out a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol that expires in 2012. Progress on climate policy domestically will increase U.S. leverage in these talks, but President Barack Obama should look for additional ways to improve the American negotiating position than what we currently have on the table.

In particular we need a better accounting of what the United States—and other countries as well—are doing to achieve meaningful carbon reductions. Importantly, a more detailed analysis would reveal that the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES, recently passed through committee by Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA), would achieve more carbon reduction than first meets the eye.

The soft underbelly of ACES is its 2020 midterm carbon cap targets, which have been assailed by some environmentalists. At 17 percent below 2005 levels these targets apparently give the Obama administration precious little to meet global expectations about U.S. action on climate change. For starters these caps fall below the European Union’s agreed-upon 20 percent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020. If we were to meet our allies at these goals then the European Union will increase their midterm reductions to 30 percent. At its current levels ACES does not trigger this critical shift.

More troubling, there are already clear signs that ACES’s targets are far less than we need to garner China’s full engagement in an international agreement on capping emissions.

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For those of us who believe that maintaining a livable climate pretty much depends on a U.S.-China deal on greenhouse gas emissions (see here), the Guardian’s story Monday was a bombshell:

China and US held secret talks on climate change deal

• Negotiations began in final months of Bush administration
• Obama could seal accord on cutting emissions by autumn

But was the story true?  Turns out I know one of the key players:

“My sense is that we are now working towards something in the fall,” said Bill Chandler, director of the energy and climate programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the driving force behind the talks. “It will be serious. It will be substantive, and it will happen.”

I’ve known Bill since my DOE days, so I called him to get the scoop.  He says the story is mostly true — and thus a true potential breakthrough that may well lead to a major announcement in the fall — but it has inaccuracies, including the nature of the deal being discussed.  Let me try to separate fact from hype and examine what China might be willing to commit to (assuming we makes serious commitments, too, a la Waxman-Markey).

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Climate Progress is launching a new feature today.  With the help of  Center for American Progress staffers, we’ll post links to some of the top energy and global warming stories of the day, with a short summary.  So if you only have a couple of minutes to check the blog, you’ll still be able to get a quick survey of the day’s news.  And it will help me feel better about not writing about every lost drop of the open fire hydrant of energy and climate news coming out every day.  And yes, we will generally be doing this much earlier in the day!  Comments welcome.

Top Stories

Science Daily
When Oceans Get Warmer Carbon Dioxide Uptake On Marine Plankton Will Be Reduced, Potentially Increasing Climate Change
The ocean plays a central role in Earth’s climate system and has considerably slowed down climate change by taking up about one third of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted through human activities.  But that is likely to change in the future, as an experiment that warmed up plankton found.  “What came as a surprise to us was that the plankton consumed up to one third less CO₂ at elevated temperatures. Ultimately, this may cause a weakening of the biological carbon pump”, says Prof. Ulf Riebesell from IFM-GEOMAR, the principal investigator of the study.

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“China should at the very least be expected to commit to a cap on its CO2e emissions in 2030 at 7.8 Gigatons” (15% above 2005 levels) — so says guest poster Charlie McElwee.  This is based on a new McKinsey study McElwee discusses.  Needless to say, the U.S. must commit to deep reductions by 2030 — 42% below 2005 levels (a la Waxman-Markey and USCAP) is a reasonable figure.  But the notion offered by some — “Binding targets for the developing nations is [sic] out of the question” – is the road to Hell and High Water for the Chinese, Americans, and the rest of humanity.  McElwee is an international energy & environmental lawyer and Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Law who writes the blog China Environmental Law.

In less than nine months the world gathers in Copenhagen to forge a post-Kyoto climate change agreement. Without a substantial commitment from China to address its CO2 emissions, whatever the rest of the world does will be swamped by China’s carbon juggernaut. Can the China carbon engine be retooled to save us from catastrophic climate change?

Yes, says a new McKinsey study “China’s green revolution.” It crunches the numbers and provides a framework for a real “green revolution” in China. The study concludes that by aggressively utilizing a suite of technologies that are or are likely to be commercially available no later than 2030, China can limit the growth of its annual carbon emissions to 15% or “just” 1 additional Gigaton over 2005 levels by 2030 (6.8 Gigatons of CO2e in 2005 vs. 7.8 Gigatons of CO2e in 2030).

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