EU May Begin to Show that Climate Action and Markets can Work Together

Europe has agreed to new 2030 targets for emissions reductions. They will bring thei economy-wide targets from 20% reduction by 2020 to a 30% reduction by 2030. 

Some campaigners, quoted in this NY Times article see this as a step back from Europe's role of climate leadership. 

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/business/international/european-union-lowers-ambitions-on-renewable-energy.html?_r=0&referrer=

However, maybe we should question these campaigners. Groups like Greenpeace and Freinds of the Earth play an important role as a country's environmental conscience, but we should be careful about handing them the keys to the store. 

The truth is that the EU has been bold in making a choice to reduce emissions. They have been a leader in this for over a decade. I do not see why you need a target for renewables percentage to go along with that. The atmosphere literally doesn't care if you achieve emissions reductions through enhanced renewables, greater efficiency, cultural change, biofuels, or fuel switching. 

So- good for them for making a real effort to reduce emissions, and good for them for realizing that you don't need mandatory ways to reduce emissions. I suspect that the renewables penetration will be much higher in 2030 than any of these predictions, but that's a good thing!

Despair - can this Congress do anything?

Sometimes our political system just drives you crazy. Those of us who want to get something done on climate change, whether mitigation or adaptation, struggle to see how anything can get through. We want to do something, but we're constrained by the system we're in.

There's a temptation to say that we should just focus on adaptation, because mitigation is going to be too hard to get through. But, then something like this comes along and it kills your will on getting anything done. Even climate observation - not even climate adaptation - gets killed.

House Republicans just killed a budget neutral proposal  to institute a climate service at NOAA. It was pure adaptation - and it didn't pass. Despair.

The Country Deserves A Real Debate on Climate and Energy Policy

Last week, I noted on twitter that Governor Romney said that "the world is getting warmer". This should not be a controversial statement. It is unequivocally getting warmer.

I see now that he has been getting some serious push-back from the right wing of the party. This Washington Post gave it front page treatment in an article saying "Romney Draws Early Fire from Conservatives on Climate Change." The article cites Rush Limbaugh and the Club for Growth as leading the criticism against him.

Climate change - and especially how it will impact America's energy choices - is an important issue that deserves real debate. It is true that some policy options will raise the price of energy. However, its important to note that they won't raise its full cost - our society is already paying the costs of climate change and dependence on fossil fuels. As food prices rise, water becomes more scarce, coal kills more miners, and the costs of military deployments in oil producing regions escalates, the cost of energy will continue to rise. ASP's "Pay Now, Pay Later" report quantified the anticipated costs of climate change across the United States. And, Brookings' Hamilton Project recently released an important report that sought to quantify all of energy's externalities.

Even the Bush Administration - enemy #1 for most environmentalists - in 2008 said that the President "wasn't necessarily against cap and trade proposals." We should actually remember that cap-and-trade used to be the preferred Republican Party approach to dealing with pollution. Using the market to internalize the costs of pollution -through either cap and trade or a carbon tax - is an inherently conservative approach to governing.

In a rational political system, the debate would go: climate change is a problem, and these are our ideas for how to solve it. Instead, the debate in this country focuses too much on whether climate change even exists, even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. Even a skeptic, if he was rational, would acknowledge that it might be a problem, and that prudent risk-management would dictate taking some long-term approaches to reducing risk. Instead, the anti-science climate-deniers have muscled their way into a key part of the Republican Party. Legislators are afraid to acknowledge the reality that the climate is changing because when they do, they get attacked by the loudest voices.

We used to be able to have a serious debate. I hope that Governor Romney's stand on climate change encourages other high profile Republicans to return to the debate on this issue. I see that Governor Huntsman and Governor Christie have said that they acknowledge the science of climate change. The United States faces a lot of challenges over the next decade. On energy, we need to take into account questions of energy security, economic stability, and environmental sustainability. I hope that Governor Romney will engage the Republican hopefuls on this issue so that we can have a real debate on the full costs of energy.

[UPDATE] I see that Al Gore gave some support to Romney on his blog. This probably won't help his bid for the Republican Party's nomination. But it is important to the debate that he hears support.

[UPDATE #2] Reason Magazine agrees with me - "Conservatives once understood that corporations are entitled to foul the environment"

Environmental Change and Energy Infrastructure Investment

Via Keith Kloor's blog, I see that my friend Cleo Paskal has a good post up on how environmental change is upsetting risk assessment in making major infrastructure investments.

"First, due to changing environmental conditions (sea level rise, subsidence, changing storm activity, etc.), historical records may no longer be reliable predictors for future risks. 

For example, the summer of 2003 was unusually hot. Many of the French nuclear power stations are cooled by river water. But, in 2003, the rivers were so warm, they couldn’t be used to cool as normal. That caused the powering down or shutting off of 17 French nuclear reactors. It cost the French utilities hundreds of millions of dollars to buy power from neighboring countries. 

This ‘anomaly’ happened again in the summers of 2006 and 2009, again causing powering downs at French nuclear facilities. According to the Hadley Center, by 2040, it will be ‘commonplace‘ for European summer temperatures to reach 2003 levels. 

This new environmental change variable is often left out of risk assessments for all manner of new infrastructure builds. Dams in India are seeing reduced generation capacity as a result of shifting monsoons. Sections of oil and gas infrastructure along the U.S. Gulf Coast are suffering repeated shutdowns due to flooding, hurricanes and subsidence. Homes in the US and UK are already being built on actual floodplains, let alone areas that are likely to become floodplains."

One question I have for Cleo (and have posted on Huffpost) draws from her statements about risk assessment.  She gives high marks to actuaries and the insurance companies. But, we should be very careful about attributing perfect knowledge to private-sector actors, while going against government. Certainly, the lessons of AIG show that the insurance industry is not always very good at assessing risk.  Maybe structural and engineering risk is different from financial risk, but there are still questions here.

Also - it is important to note that the Indian parliament decided not to allow the liability cap on nuclear power.  The implications of that, though, are far from clear. The result very well could be that companies from the United States are prevented from investing there, because of (justifiable) investor concerns about being stuck with a potentially unlimited bill for a nuclear accident, while Russian nuclear companies face no such concerns - because their decisions are made for political, not economic reasons.  The likely result here would be Indian investment in reactors that are not as high a standard as possible.  So - we have to be careful about creating perverse incentives with policy decisions like this.

A quick note on climate skeptics

Anyone who's spent any time on the internet reading and writing about anything to do with climate change has run into some members of the really committed climate skeptics.  Reading the comment threads of some of the more popular climate-related blogs, like DotEarth or the Guardian, can be a strange descent into the minutiae about a) whether the climate is changing, b) whether humans are responsible for it, and c) how fat Al Gore is.  They marshal a lot of scientific-sounding evidence that they claim disproves climate change. The intention, however, is not to educate, but to confuse.  They want to sow doubt about what is admitadly a complicated subject.  You will hear a lot about the  Paleocene\ Eocene Thermal Maximum, or the Medieval warm period, but you won't really be any more certain.

I bring this up because of an article, "Playing Politics with Climate Change" on Atlantic-community.org, by Jean Pierre Schaeken Willemaers of the Thomas More Institute that questions the science behind climate change.

The truth is that the earth is warming- undeniably. We're pretty sure that we're doing it. We don't kow how much it is going to keep warming, but we what we do know should worry us.

That puts climate change as a clear and present "threat". Does that mean it will cause mass disruption? No- but it might. Just because we don't have certainty does not mean that we should not act. I would direct everyone to the recently released report from E3G about risk management planning for climate change. Find it here.

We should not allow uncertainty to preclude action. In fact, uncertainty should be the central reason for action.

Also- the canards that Mr. Schaeken Willemaers puts in there about polls and public opinion are immaterial. The public is reactionary- but it is government's job to be proactive. A government that does not take rational, foresighted action on preventing the dangerous effects of climate change will be held to account by it's citizens in the future.

I hope that this will be my last post about climate skeptics. Whether or not you believe that the climate is warming, you should at least acknowledge that it is a threat that demands prudent action.

Climate, Food, and Conflict

Cary Fowler has a provocative piece up in HuffPo: "Avoiding a Global Food Fight".  He draws on three studies linking past changes in climate and weather to increased incidents of conflict, in Africa and in Europe. Notably, these studies are not new, nor were they without controversy when they were released - the study linking climate to conflict in Africa was fairly effectively rebutted in a PNAS article saying "Climate not to blame for African Civil Wars".

Geoff Dablelko's New Security Beat blog had a great break-down of how the media and advocacy organizations react to these arguments among the scientific community in a post titled "Climate Security Linkages Lost in Translation".

The effect is that the media bounces from one side to the other, reporting the controversy more than they report the science.  Advocacy organizations, like Fowler's Global Crop Diversity Trust, seize on the results of the studies that fit their preferred policy options, while ignoring those that could refute them. I don't want to pick on Fowler alone - all advocacy organizations are like this, and arguably politicians are probably worse - they seem to make their decisions, and then go looking for support after.

The truth is that the link between climate change and security is complex, but clear. Fowler was correct to link the the CNA's report on climate change and security from 2007.  But, he should also have looked beyond that to all the research on climate change and security since then.  I would direct him to my old blog, climatesecurity.blogspot.com for more detail on the links between national security and climate change.

A New Blog about our Rapidly Changing World

This is the first post to my new blog.

Our human and natural systems seem to be changing at an ever increasing rate.  Part of the reason for that is that, more than ever, the human and natural worlds are intersecting.  For the past two years, I have written the blog of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Transatlantic Dialogue on Climate Change and Security.  Through those two years, a total of 262 posts looked at such questions of whether military action can amplify local glacial melting, how transboundary water resources are shared, and a series of posts looking at how intelligence agencies are addressing the challenges of climate change.

While that blog focused exclusively on how climate change affects issues of security, I aim with this blog to reach further than simply climate issues. A changing climate poses significant threats to security; and I will expand on those in future posts. However, so too does pollution, cyber security, population density, or migration.  These topics and, hopefully, a dose of pop culture and sports, will be addressed in the blog.

I encourage readers to comment to any posts.  Take a look at the links I've posted on the blog to the right for my interests.  Thanks for reading.