Climate Politics

Ex-Im to finance more clean energy exports

The appropriations omnibus bill just passed through Congress "recommends that the Export-Import Bank provide 10 percent of its financing capacity to promote the export of clean energy products and services." This was a recommendation by many groups, including the Center for American Progress:

Having supported more than $400 billion dollars of U.S. exports during the past 70 years, the Export-Import Bank is one of the most powerful tools at the U.S. government's disposal for spurring innovation and economic growth.

But in yet another backward-looking strategy typical of this administration:

Krupp plays along

My ongoing, borderline-obsessive series about how %$@! awful this Washington Post piece is continues. In this episode, we focus on Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense. I’ve tried to give Krupp the benefit of the doubt. The green movement needs somebody sucking up to corporations. (I say that with total sincerity.) But it seems pretty clear […]

Me in CiF

While I was vacationing, the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free site ran two pieces by yours truly, one assessing the climate issue as it manifests in the Democratic presidential field, the other doing the same for the Republican field. Check ’em out. (I continue to be mystified by the extraordinarily high level of fruitcakery in the […]

‘Environmentalists say’ the WaPo should learn to distinguish rhetoric from reality

In an ongoing series about the world-historical suckage of a recent WaPo piece, we come now to the difference between rhetoric and policy. I don’t know about you, but when I see a headline like “In Bush’s Final Year, The Agenda Gets Greener,” I think, “oh, the policy agenda is getting greener.” And that’s probably […]

The Lieberman-Warner bill will … happen

((2008predictions_include)) The Lieberman-Warner climate bill will go to the Senate floor. After a largely uneventful committee hearing, LW is set to be introduced on the floor of the Senate in the early months of 2008, where it will face a bruising battle. Of that I feel certain. Subpredictions about which I feel only certain-ish: Inhofe […]

Barnes answers questions about the Sky Trust

I hope everyone read the essay from Peter Barnes et al that we published last night. If you’re interested in the notion of an atmospheric trust, you might also check out Dot Earth today, where Barnes answers questions from readers.

The Washington Post offers a late entry for Worst Story of the Year

While I was on vacation, the Washington Post published one of the most craptastic pieces of journalism I’ve seen this year, a piece by the normally reputable Peter Baker called "In Bush’s Final Year, The Agenda Gets Greener." Words can scarcely do it justice. A friend forwarded it in horror. If he’d said so, I […]

Iowa

Nervous.

A system to control climate change and reduce poverty

The following is a guest essay.

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Stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere at a level that will fulfill the mandate of the UN Framework Concentration on Climate Change to avoid "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" will require drastic departures from business as usual. Here we introduce one attractive response to this challenge that may seem visionary or idealistic today but that could well become realistic once we reach a tipping point regarding climate change that opens a window of opportunity for embracing major changes.

No silver bullet exists capable of solving the complex and interdependent problems of climate change, sustainability, and economic development. A consensus is emerging, however, that solving these problems will require major changes in existing governance arrangements to eliminate or at least alleviate what the 2006 Stern Review (1) calls the "greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen" -- the failure of the market to send proper signals about the real costs of using the atmosphere as a repository for greenhouse gases. This case exhibits the defining features of market failures surrounding open-access resources (2-6). Because emitters allowed to use the atmospheric commons as a repository for the wastes associated with burning fossil fuels at no cost, they have every incentive to use as much of this free factor of production as possible. But the present and future costs to society of this practice are enormous. Estimates of these costs vary. But there is compelling evidence that the eventual costs will exceed the cost of changing our current practices to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by a large margin (1).

Analysts have proposed a variety of forms of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems as policy measures to deal with this problem (7, 8). A few measures, like the European Emission Trading Scheme, have been implemented to some degree. But the measures under consideration at present are deeply flawed. In this article, we present an alternative system that has several attractive features, including the capacity to deal fairly with the regressive nature of most carbon taxing systems, to protect the new governance arrangements from political manipulation or corruption, and to contribute to the alleviation of global poverty. Working out the details of the general plan will be an ambitious task, but we think it is important to take the first step and propose a broad strategy having the six principles laid out below.

The core of this system is the idea of a common asset trust (9, 10). Trusts are widely-used and well-developed legal mechanisms designed to protect and manage assets on behalf of specific beneficiaries (11). Extending this idea to the management and protection of a global commons, such as the atmosphere, whose owners/beneficiaries include all people alive today as well as future generations, is a new but straightforward extension of this idea. Because the atmosphere is global, the Earth Atmospheric Trust would be global in scope. Initial implementation at a regional or national scale may be necessary and appropriate, however, as we build toward a global system. We cannot examine in detail the path that implementation of the system might take, or how the many institutional, political, and administrative details would be addressed. Our purpose here is to present an integrative idea that has many positive features as the basis for further discussion in the post-Kyoto world.

The trust arrangement we envision has six basic features together with four special features and precautionary measures.

Basic features:

Two thirds of likely caucus voters in Iowa think conservation more important than coal

Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, the Iowa Farmers Union, and Plains Justice have just completed a survey (PDF) in advance of tomorrow's caucuses.

Short version: Iowans think that we've squandered chances to do something meaningful about energy, and that it's time we started to do so before building new coal plants.

The executive summary is below the fold, but it's worth having a look at the whole presentation.