Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

This guest post is by Julian L. Wong and Austin Davis at the Center for American Progress.

Multiple news outlets have been reporting that yesterday’s news conference with China’s top climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, marked a significant departure from China’s established attitudes toward climate change. He also expressed a degree flexibility regarding China’s previous demands that developed nations pledge to reduce their carbon emissions 40% by 2020 from 1990 levels at Copenhagen this December.

It’s true: Wednesday’s conference provided a more explicit explanation of China’s position on climate change than had been offered previously. Yu reaffirmed China’s commitment to eventually reducing its carbon emissions while giving more specific details as to China’s position on the Copenhagen talks.

Great quotes like “there is no one in the world who is more keen than us to see China reach its emissions peak as early as possible” may have caused a stir among the western media, but this is not really news.

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This guest post is by Julian L. Wong and Dan Sanchez at the Center for American Progress.

South Korea may not be outdoing the United States’ clean energy commitments yet, but it has just announced intentions to adopt a 2020 emissions cap, the first developing (non-Annex I) country to do so. Reuters explains:

The government said it would choose a target this year from three options: an 8 percent increase from 2005 levels by 2020, unchanged from 2005, or 4 percent below 2005. Its emissions doubled from 1990 to 2005, the fastest growth in the OECD….  Officials said they marked a big commitment to head off an estimated 30 percent rise in emissions that would result if no action were taken.

One might argue if South Korea is really a developing country—it is considered one under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was adopted in 1992, but was in 1996 subsequently admitted to the OECD, which is usually thought of as a club of the rich countries.

One might also question the choice of a 2005 baseline rather than 1990, which all the targets in the Kyoto Protocol are keyed to.  The reasoning behind the choice of a 2005 baseline is obvious from the quote above, which explains that South Korea’s emissions have risen steeply in the years since 1990.  The result is that none of the three choices will result in reductions from a 1990 level.

Nevertheless, the symbolic significance of the announcement cannot be overstated–South Korea is the first non-Annex I country to indicate that it will adopt quantifiable emissions targets for 2020.  While the article notes that South Korea’s commitment could be “voluntary,” the 2020 timeframe suggests that the country may be open to a binding emissions cap in the December round of international climate talks in Copenhagen, where a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, will be negotiated and likely to cover the period of 2013 through 2020.

Why is South Korea doing this?

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Its detractors should note: the L’Aquila conference did move vital climate change legislation forward.

If you believe recent media reports, the two international climate change meetings held last week in L’Aquila, Italy, at best failed to do anything and at worst signal that no serious progress will be made on a global climate agreement this year.

If true, this is bad news. According to the byzantine rules of the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, a successor to that treaty must be decided this December at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The good news is that many of the assessments of these meetings are incomplete, if not inaccurate.  A New York Times editorial on Friday, for instance, based its argument in language from a draft of a declaration — not from the document itself. The Times described the recognition by the world’s major carbon emitters that temperatures should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as an “aspirational” goal. They concluded that “with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won’t carry things very far.” But this weakened, “aspirational” language was struck in the final version of the document, rendering this claim obsolete.

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Shangri-La is in trouble.

According to an article by Stephen Faris in Foreign Policy and the IPCC, the Himalayan glacier in the Kashmir province that provides 90 percent of Pakistan’s water for agricultural irrigation will disappear by 2035 as a consequence of climate change.

Appropriately titled “The Last Straw,” the article reviews water conflicts exacerbated by climate change in general while focusing on Pakistan’s unsustainable dependence on Kashmiri waters – a dependence that only exacerbates the long-standing historical, cultural, and religious animosity between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir territory.

Faris reports that a shocking “ninety percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in Kashmir.” This water comes from three of the six tributaries that India and Pakistan split in their 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. Is the treaty’s continued existence a testament to how future resource shortages will draw normally hostile states into cooperating? Perhaps – the agreement has so far survived three major wars and nearly 50 years of hostile exchanges.

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Since the big international climate negotiation will be in Copenhagen this December, we can expect way too-much commentary by and coverage of the second most famous Danish delayer (after Hamlet).  Bjorn Lomborg may be the most widely debunked of that (small) group who claim to believe the IPCC science but who in fact spend all their time trashing both climate science and climate scientists (although Roger Pielke, Jr. is probably a close second).  I have certainly spent my fair share of time on him [see “Lomborg skewers the facts, again” and "Debunking Lomborg — Part III and "Voodoo Economists 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates"].

Today’s guest debunking is by Michael Pawlyn, Founder of Exploration Architecture –- a practice that proposes new design solutions to global challenges based on biomimicry.  Pawlyn “was one of five winners in ‘A Car-free London’ – an ideas competition for strategic solutions to the capital’s future transport needs and new possibilities for urban spaces.”

Well I guess Bjorn Lomborg was hardly likely to welcome the news that his main argument has collapsed.   But that was the gist of what I said when I had to oppose him at the BCO conference (one of the major annual construction industry events in the UK) in May.

Nevertheless, it was surprising, and somewhat satisfying, to see how unhappy he was about this, given his calm and unflappable reputation. Unfortunately Lomborg refused to be filmed but you can see my talk here in three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, with the full transcript copied below).  This post is a summary of the second half of my presentation -– the first half describes some positive solutions based on applying biomimicry ideas to architecture. Lomborg’s presentation was very close to his set piece so those unfamiliar with his position may want to see his TED talk here.

As Climate Progress regulars will know, Lomborg has been remarkably successful in persuading people that tackling climate change is a low priority. His Copenhagen Consensus was a study paid for by The Economist and took as its starting point the challenge “If we had $50 billion dollars to spend, how could we achieve the greatest possible global good?” The study concluded that, from a list of thirty priorities, tackling climate change was the lowest. The argument could be summarized as follows:

• We’ve only got a limited amount to spend,
• Climate change is far from urgent and,
• Tackling it will be very expensive while doing little good.

While this argument has convinced thousands, every element of it has now been either discredited by the latest science or exposed as statistical trickery.

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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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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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Senior advisors to the Chinese leadership, such as climate change negotiator Su Wei, below, are openly suggesting that China consider “carbon intensity” targets.  Even as China aggressively pursues world leadership in key clean technologies like solar and wind, it has also announced plans to keep expanding coal use at a pace so rapacious it would single-handedly finish off the climate no matter what we and the other rich countries do. That is why for Obama to preserve a livable climate and be a great president, he must have a climate deal with China. In this post, Andrew Light and Nina Hachigian discuss the “Rise of the Green Dragon?“

This week the Obama administration convenes a meeting of 17 of the world’s major economies in a forum on global warming outside of the ongoing U.N. climate change process. Though the history of this Major Economies Forum is somewhat tainted, it may well provide a useful opportunity to engage China on global warming. There are ample indications that China is ready for such an overture from the United States if not an outright proposal for action.

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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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Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs at HuffingtonPost.com and his own GreenGrok.com, which is certainly worth reading.

He just posted “Impressions from National Academies Climate Summit,” in which he drops a bombshell quote from Eileen Claussen, head of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change (the two are pictured above). But Chameides treats the quote as if it were just another piece of the puzzle, rather than a stunning revelation of a lack of understanding of climate science — assuming the quote is accurate. Here is what he blogged:

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“Money no object for Indian reactor plans”

That is certainly the attitude you need to have if you’re planning to build a bunch of nukes:

• Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour
• Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power
• Warning to taxpayers, investors — Part 2: Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings
• The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power
• Nuclear meltdown in Finland