Articles by Adam Stein

More blather about sacrifice from pundits who don’t really care about climate change

I see the pundits are still lobbing up chinstrokers about how addressing climate change is going to require "sacrifice -- serious wartime sacrifice." This sounds Very Serious. The only quibble I have is that it's probably not true. "Going green" in a carbon-constrained economy won't feel like sacrifice to most people. It will feel like shopping.

Meaning, it will feel like all the decisions we make every day, but tilted imperceptibly by the price ramifications of a carbon cap. Studies suggesting that the overall economic effect of climate change legislation will be fairly small just keep piling up. The most recent one was from the environmental radicals at the IMF.

So why all the sacrifice talk? Maybe because it's just plain hard to imagine what a decades-long economic transformation will look like. We tend to extrapolate crudely from where we are now. If you want to cut your individual carbon footprint 80 percent today, you might have to sell your car, give up flying, move into a smaller house, and start foraging for food.

But that's not how this will go down. Fully decarbonizing will take several decades. The process will be unpredictable, creating winners, losers, opportunities, and benefits. Come with me now to Strained Analogy Land. Imagine going back in time to meet your hippie forebear ...

Everyday choices depend more on culture, infrastructure, economics, and values

I see Maywa beat me to the "I really like Michael Pollan, but ... " post. I too was disappointed with Pollan's answer to the question of "Why Bother?" As in, why bother taking personal steps to reduce one's contribution to climate change? I will say this, though: the article did sharpen my thinking about why I think we should bother.

One of the things I've always admired about Pollan's writing is his knack for delivering sly polemic that hangs equally on scientific arguments and common sense. It's a neat trick that makes simple acts like reading an ingredients label seem slightly radical and even fun. I read his stuff and think, "Of course I want to get on board with this. Why wouldn't I?"

Like Maywa, I was dismayed by Pollan's disparagement of "grand schemes" to address climate change. But beyond that, I was struck by the fact that the essay seemed to teeter on the edge of the sort of petty moralism that infects a lot of thinking on this topic. Where was the sense of fun?

Carbon projects ‘under attack’ as U.N. clamps down

This is timely. The Wall Street Journal ran a page 1 story on Sunday on the travails of the major developers of carbon reduction projects in the developing world, as standards for additionality and carbon accounting grow more stringent.

Such projects are certified under guidelines established by the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism. As the U.N. has tightened its oversight with each succeeding version of the CDM, early entrants have found themselves squeezed, forced to write down large quantities of carbon credits:

In mid-2006, there was an early hint that regulators were toughening their stance. The issue: manure.

Decomposing manure at farms emits methane, a greenhouse gas. The projects involve placing a tarp over the manure to capture and dispose of the rising gas ... But in 2006 the U.N. tightened its rules, requiring animal farms to measure the amount of methane they were capturing rather than simply estimating the number based on a formula -- and use the lower number. That move slashed by more than one-third the number of credits a typical animal-waste project would produce for sale.

The carbon offset market needs additionality

This post is the slightly tardy conclusion of a series (see parts one, two, and three).

Let's wrap this up by shifting gears a bit. Additionality is central and essential part of the carbon offset market. Additionality is also, in the long term, probably not relevant to the energy efficiency market. The reason hinges on the difference between carbon offsets and carbon allowances. Both are often lumped together under the term "carbon credits," but they're different in important ways that are sometimes lost in discussions of cap-and-trade systems.

Some basic definitions are in order. Carbon allowances are those things that everyone is eager to auction off these days: pollution permits for greenhouse gas emissions. Under a cap-and-trade system, the government issues a fixed number of these permits, and every year the number drops. That's the cap, and as long as it covers a sufficiently large swath of the economy, it's difficult for polluters to evade. (New Yorkers can't, for example, buy electricity from China.)

Carbon offsets, on the other hand, are pollution permits generated from specific projects that exist outside the cap. For example, no matter how big a chunk of the economy the cap covers, it probably won't cover cow manure on small dairy farms. If you can demonstrate that you took specific measures to reign in a certain number of tons of dairy farm methane, you can use those emissions reductions to satisfy your obligations under a cap.