Articles by Ken Ward

Here’s what we have to accomplish

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The supply-side solution developed in the Bright Lines exercise, drawing on Bill Hare's Greenpeace International paper "Climate Protection: The Carbon Logic" (PDF), won little support from first readers. It is included in this proposal as a concept to be explored because no other solution could be determined to meet the dictates of the climate timeframe -- and the strong responses it provokes are evidence of its strong narrative value.

A supply-side response -- imposing a cap on extractions in 2015 with 10 percent reductions at 5 year intervals until emissions are stabilized at pre-industrial levels, as shown in the accompanying chart, for example -- is the ideal climate policy. A cap and phase-down would set clear market parameters for fossil fuels phase-out and establish future economies of scale for renewables and efficiencies, encouraging early investment and driving innovation. Capping extractions would, in effect, move forward the global response to exhaustion of oil and gas reserves, a great challenge even if climate change were not a problem.

It’s time to accept dire climate realities

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A review of recent climate science findings finds that Jim Hansen's bright-line standard and timeframe for global action [1.0ºC limit on further increase in global temperature / 475 ppm cap on atmospheric carbon with <10 years for global action] is, if anything, not conservative enough. A rash of recent reports identify major climate forcings wholly unaccounted for in IPCC models -- such as a five-fold increase in methane releases from Siberian peat bogs -- that support the view of rapid, discontinuous climate change predicted by Hansen.

Energy market projections show that current climate policies will barely dent the ramp-up of fossil fuel use and emissions. U.S. Energy Information Administration (DOE) International Energy Outlook 2006 projects energy-related carbon emissions to increase by 57%, from 25,028 million metric tons in 2003 to 43,676 million metric tons in 2030. Emissions reductions attributable to national environmental policies adopted in furtherance of the Kyoto agreement reduce the EIA reference case by just 58 million metric tons (<1%). Energy market sector leader emissions projections are in the same range; Exxon-Mobil projects an increase from 28 billion to 40 billion tons in the next 25 years (43%).

An increase in carbon emissions in the range 43-57% is more than sufficient to push global temperature above the bright line, roughly between 2020-2030. When the level of atmospheric carbon passes 475 ppm on an upward trajectory, we must assume that Hansen's simple and terrible story -- rapid collapse in Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves, resulting in sea level rise too high and too fast for either civilization or most species to adapt -- will be initiated within the lifetime of our children.

The basic approach of the Bright Lines project

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After a decade of brutal political trench warfare, the surreal debate in the U.S. on the reality of climate change is over. A Democratic Congress looking to put climate in play in 2008, serious buy-in for federal regulation from a band of corporate heavyweights, and a rash of climate conversions from the likes of Pat Robertson and Frank Luntz (author of the infamous strategy memo advising Bush administration operatives how to muddle the climate change debate) demonstrate that a significant and probably permanent shift in climate change political gravity has taken place within the last year.

U.S. environmentalists have a very brief opportunity to reshape our climate agenda in order to meet the demands and seize the opportunities of new circumstances, and the stakes could not be higher. It is likely that the actions of U.S. environmentalists in the next two or three years –- more so than any other group of people on the planet -– will determine whether a functional global response to abrupt climate change is advanced.

A new path forward for climate change campaigners

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Our climate agenda is inadequate and may even be detrimental to the sort of effort U.S. environmentalists must now undertake. I'd like to offer for comment an alternative "bright lines" framework for climate action, and propose a shift in role and agenda for U.S. environmentalists that takes account of the circumstances in which we find ourselves and squarely faces the almost incomprehensible challenge before us.

Our goal, put starkly and simply, is to prevent the planned investment of $20 trillion over the next 25 years to increase fossil fuel supply, substituting in its place a crash global program -- capitalized at the same level -- to cut emissions, improve efficiencies, and develop renewables.

The choice should not be viewed, in the frequently invoked Robert Frost imagine, as " two roads diverged." The world is committed whole hog to fossil fuels, and there is no other road -- yet.

To create one will require restructuring the world's largest corporations, inventing appealing, low- or zero-carbon consumer products, and convincing the world's most powerful, nuclear-weapon-equipped nations to leave their reserves of oil, gas, and coal in the ground. We have less than a decade to do it.

Tectonic social change on such a scale is rapid, haphazard, and non-linear. It cannot be achieved in the time left to us by incremental, measured steps. The image of change we should carry in our minds is not Cape Wind or Toyota Prius, but the Berlin Wall crashing down.