Kyoto Protocol

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 world is waiting for us to lead the way

This is the third in a series on why we should push for climate legislation this year. See also Part I and Part II.

Why push for a climate bill in 2008? I've already offered some reasons in my previous posts: the politics will be much the same in 2009 (Okay, David offered that one), we don't want to squander the current momentum, and in any case, we simply can't afford to wait.

But if those aren't reason enough, here's another: The world is waiting for us to act. To solve the global warming problem, China and other developing countries also must cap their emissions, and they won't do this until our own cap is in place.

From a New York Times report:

"China is not going to act in any sort of mandatory-control way until the United States does first," said Joseph Kruger, policy director for the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group in Washington.

Along with India and other large developing countries, China has long maintained that the established industrial powers need to act first because they built their wealth largely by burning fossil fuels and adding to the atmosphere's blanket of greenhouse gases.

If the U.S. -- the wealthiest country on Earth -- won't establish a cap, how can we expect developing countries to do it?

The history of the ‘safety valve’ debate

The new publication from E&E News, ClimateWire, ($ub. req'd), has a long article on the "safety valve" debate and its history. I will reprint it in its entirety below because

1. The issue is important and not going away.
2. It is the most thorough piece I've seen.
3. I was interviewed at length for it.
4. One of my quotes they used is not something I would have said in a short interview.

First, some background: I have blogged repeatedly on why a safety valve is a bad idea. However, the reporter called me because he said that a number of people in the Clinton administration said I was a key player in the discussions leading up to Kyoto, in which the administration ultimately rejected a safety valve (or price ceiling on carbon emissions permits).

The No. 1 highlight of my time in the administration was at the October 6, 1997, "White House Conference on Climate Change," during my brief tenure as acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. At 12:40 p.m. [I kept the ticket and wrote the time and the quote on the back], the president said, "I'm convinced the people in my Energy Department labs are absolutely right." He was talking about the 5-Lab study that I oversaw, which found that the United States could return to 1990 levels of carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 without raising the nation's overall energy bill -- if we had an aggressive technology deployment effort.

Rather than me giving a solipsistic explanation of what happened, you can read an account by Art Rosenfeld (the first article, his autobiography), now California energy commissioner, then science adviser to the assistant secretary. Or not.

I was certainly proud of my role in the administration. Economic agencies like the Treasury Department and Council of Economic Advisers rarely lose policy debates. But they did this time. That said, I was hardly the main reason they lost.

In fact, as I recall, President Clinton explained at the Georgetown conference that the main reason he didn't believe his economic agencies' gloomy predictions for the economic impact of Kyoto was this: They had made similarly gloomy predictions about the impact of his balanced budget bill, which, instead of causing an economic slowdown as predicted, created millions of jobs.

That said, the subsequent incident described in the ClimateWire article is the No. 2 highlight of my time in the administration, although I foolishly didn't keep the piece of paper. Anyway, here is the article (for ease of reading, I won't bother indenting it):

Japan says it can meet Kyoto goals

Reuters reports:

Japan will be able to meet its greenhouse gas emissions limits agreed under the Kyoto Protocol through additional, mainly voluntary, agreements with industry, a government panel said.

The measures will help Japan cut 37 million tonnes or more of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent a year, a joint panel on climate change under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Ministry of Environment said in a final report approved on Friday.

This is offered in the spirit of actually posting some climate progress now and then ...

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fossil Awards shame obstructionist delegates at Bali talks

You may have heard about the Fossil Awards given at the United Nations Bali climate negotiations. A collaboration between a number of youth delegations and Avaaz.org, the awards are given to nations whose delegates have obstructed progress during the course of the talks. Here's a first-hand account of the first daily Fossil Awards ceremony, when Canada won the infamous prize. Yesterday, Japan managed to win first, second, and third place for threatening to pull out of the Kyoto protocol. Check out this video of the ceremony:

Australia national government transforms; conservative party falls apart

UPDATE: Australia’s new government has ratified Kyoto. Wow. That was fast. Though we’ve mentioned them a couple of times in our news stream, I’m not sure I’ve fully appreciated just how seismic recent political changes in Australia have been. Not only was the Liberal (pro-business right) party defeated but according to John Quiggen it’s completely […]

Gore: It’s not Kyoto but its successor that needs political support

Tallahassee Mayor John Marks stood to introduce himself and Gore said dryly, "I spent a lot of time there." Marks: "I wasn’t mayor then!" He asked Gore how to influence Congress to adopt Kyoto. Gore’s answer was, I think, fairly savvy. In essence, he said that the Kyoto "brand" is tarnished, probably beyond rehabilitation, and […]

China and India have joined Kyoto, they just have different obligations, as is morally appropriate

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Why should the U.S. join Kyoto while India and China haven't?

Answer: The U.S. puts out more CO2 than any other nation on earth, including China and India, by a large margin. Considering the relative populations (a billion-plus each for China and India versus 300 million in the U.S.), per capita emissions in the U.S. are many times larger. This has been true for the past 100-plus years of CO2 pollution.

For the U.S. to refuse to take any steps until India and China do the same is like the fattest man at the table, upon realizing the food is running out, demanding that the hungry people who just sat down cut back just as much as him, at the same time.

The year, alphabetically

When it comes to global warming and the environment, everything seemed to change in 2006 -- at least in terms of public awareness. Here's an A-to-Z accounting of just some of those changes:

A is for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's scientific but surprisingly human documentary on the threat of climate change, which was expected to take in at most $6-7 million at the box office but went on to gross over $45 million, the biggest documentary of the year and the third-largest of all time.

B is for biofuels, which went from becoming a hippies-only fringe product to a highlight of the State of the Union address. To date, Washington has been focused mostly on ethanol, but other fuels requiring much less fossil energy to produce are coming to the fore and proving surprisingly popular. Or as the bumper sticker says: "Biodiesel: No war required."

C is for California, which set a new standard for pollution control by passing a bipartisan package of bills designed to cut tailpipe greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016 (and many other measures). For this, Iain Murray, a fossil fuel-funded think tank writer for the far-right National Review, declared: "It is hard to escape the conclusion ... that what California has done is to decide to join the Third World."