Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 10:12 AM PDT

Questions of the Day:  Is this just a desperate attempt by The Washington Post to drive traffic to its website, by publishing outrageous crap designed to stir controversy?  Is it just a coincidence that Marcus Brauchli, the Post's new executive editor (as of September 2008), had been the WSJ's editor, and that Raju Narisetti, who was named a managing editor at the Post in January, had been a deputy managing editor at the WSJ?  You can ask the Post Ombudsman, Andy Alexander, for his answer by e-mail at ombudsman@washpost.com or by phone at 202-334-7582.

Garbage

Fred Hiatt keeps delivering self-inflicted body blows to the dwindling reputation of the Washington Post editorial page — see Editorial page editor Hiatt just recycled a right-wing WSJ op-ed by Reagan's chief economist Martin Feldstein. It's déjà vu all over again today, but now with a Lomborg op-ed as the piece of recycled garbage.

Just last month, the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a disinformation-filled piece from Lomborg (debunked here, "The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer").  It had  lines like:

… agreements to reduce carbon emissions are costly, politically arduous and ultimately ineffective….

But his research demonstrates the futility of trying to use carbon cuts to keep temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)….

Hiatt, who  is as zealously anti-environmental as he is pro-recycling, apparently feels that Lomborg's lies aren't getting a fair enough hearing in the media, so he runs a piece titled, "Costly Carbon Cuts" with lines like:

… many politicians are vowing to make carbon cuts designed to keep expected temperature rises under 3.6 degrees (2.0 Celsius). Yet it is nearly impossible for these promises to be fulfilled.

Now you're probably saying to yourself, wait a minute, Joe, Hiatt's version of Lomborg's piece is completely different than the WSJ's because he forced Lomborg to put temperature in Fahrenheit with Celsius in parentheses like a real American editor, not the reverse, like those world-government, Europhile types at the WSJ ed board.  But I digress.

Lomborg has done the denier two-step with Hiatt — going straight from denying the problem to saying it's hopeless to even try to solve.  And I'm sure future generations, if no one else, will note that if we don't keep total warming below 3.6 F or 2 C, it will be because of people like Lomborg and Hiatt who are devoting all of their efforts to convincing opinionmakers that it can't and shouldn't be done!!

I'm not going to waste time debunking Lomborg yet again [see "Lomborg skewers the facts, again" and "Debunking Lomborg — Part III and "Voodoo Economists 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates"].  But I'm happy to feature the work of guest debunkers (see "Lomborg's main argument has collapsed)."  And you can read a good critique by Grist's Miles Grant of what the Post and Lomborg have done here.

But I will acknowledge there is something in this piece that I haven't seen before — Lomborg's (non)apology for coal:

Today, coal accounts for almost half of the planet's electricity supply, including half the power consumed in the United States. It keeps hospitals and core infrastructure running, provides warmth and light in winter, and makes lifesaving air conditioning available in summer. In China and India, where coal accounts for more than 80 percent of power generation, it has helped to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

There is no doubt that coal is causing environmental damage that we need to stop. But a clumsy, radical halt to our coal use — which is what promises of drastic carbon cuts actually require — would mean depriving billions of people of a path to prosperity.

No need to have any discussion whatsoever of climate impacts, say that pesky 6,700-page report by world leaders concludes that climate change means "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse."

And certainly Hiatt would never require Lomborg to explain that the international deal they are trying so hard to kill doesn't require "drastic carbon cuts" for the developing world and certainly doesn't require a "radical halt" to their coal use — or that both China and India have announced their intention to restrict the growth of carbon emissions and aggressively pursue clean energy.

This isn't about the truth — and it's not about exercising editorial judgment that Lomborg deserves some of the most precious space in the media world, the op-ed page of the Washington Post.  No, it's strictly about generating attention — for the faux environmentalist Lomborg and the faux editor Hiatt.

Or perhaps the reason the Post is recycling the WSJ's garbage is that it's now being run by the folks who used to run the Journal.

What do you think?

Clinton Climate Initiative on "creative destruction": From buggy whips to the global warming imperative

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:34 AM PDT

This is a Wonk Room repost.

On the final day of the Clinton Global Initiative, the Wonk Room caught up with Ira Magaziner, the senior advisor for policy development in the Clinton White House and now the chairman of the William J. Clinton Foundation's Climate Initiative. We discussed the Clinton Climate Initiative's approach to the challenge of global warming, including its work to advance energy efficiency projects in the world's cities from the Empire State Building to Lagos, Nigeria. Magaziner also directly addressed why critics argue that advocacy of clean energy is a socialistic economy killer, citing Adam Smith's recognition of the need for governmental action to address market externalities. As we neared the conclusion of the interview, Magaziner tied all the threads of the conversation together into one impressive discourse on building a clean-energy economy:

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION — PAST VS. THE FUTURE

MAGAZINER: Schumpeter — yet another capitalist economist — talked about creative destruction. Periodically, as new technologies develop and new needs arise, business systems and economic systems need to be remade — creatively destroyed and remade. We don't need a buggy whip industry any more. We've got automobiles. And the buggy whip guys may not like it, but they ought to switch to making automobiles if they're going to have a future.

What always happens in those periods of transformation is that some people oppose and some people see the future. We went from mainframe computers to minicomputers to PCs. And as we went through those transformations, different companies succeeded. DEC and Wang and companies that were the minicomputer companies didn't understand the potential of the PC. So you had the Dells and others who developed them. In some cases, companies do make the transformation and they go with the future instead of the past.

We have a similar situation with clean energy and energy efficiency. You have some companies now, like GE, and there's a bunch of others, who are saying, "I want to go with the future, and I'm going to invest in wind, I'm going to invest in solar. I'm going to invest in these things that I know are going to eventually be the future." And you've got others who say, "I'm going to defend the past and stick with what I've got," and fight Congress to prevent the future from coming.

BRINGING THE FUTURE FASTER

MAGAZINER: I think, in this case, in the case of clean energy, we have a public interest in bringing the future faster, because of global warming. We know that if we don't bring the future faster with clean energy and with energy efficiency, that it's going to have a tremendous economic and social cost. Therefore, we have to accelerate the process of that future coming.

That's why government has to especially play a role in this revolution. I mean, it played a stimulative role in the Internet revolution, but in this revolution it has to play a much more active role. Because the negative consequences of not doing so are going to cause governments and people and economies tremendous unhappiness.

There have been so many reports written. The thousands of scientists in the International Panel on Climate Change established that the world is warming, they've established what the impacts can be, and there's only now a few dissident scientists left. The overwhelming 99.9 percent opinion is very clear on this.

Economists like Nicholas Stern who have done serious work on this have said we can lose 5 to 10 percent of GDP in the next ten years, fifteen years if we don't act, because of all the major dislocations. And if we spend one percent of our GDP to bring the transformation faster, we'll save ten percent or 15 percent of our GDP. So there are enough studies out there.

THE CLINTON CLIMATE INITIATIVE

MAGAZINER: What we're trying to do with the Clinton Climate Initiative is to make it real.

It's very important that global leaders, the political leaders agree to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's very important they pass legislation to put a price on carbon — because it does have a price for society — to help speed the transformation.

What we've said, what we're doing, is say, even after that's done, what you're going to still need projects that demonstrate in large scale how to do this, what the business models are what the government models should be, so that government money gets spent well, carbon credit money gets spent well, and ultimately businesses can move into this in an accelerated way to make this happen. And so that's why we've focused on these projects.

We've worked on energy efficiency, clean energy, and the third area we're working on is forests, preserving forests around the world. What we as a human race have been doing is at the same time we're putting all this CO2 into the air — which is poisoning the atmosphere — we're cutting down the forests — which are nature's way of taking carbon dioxide out of the air. We're making the problem worse on both ends.

So we have major projects that we're doing in Indonesia, and Cambodia, Guyana — Africa and the tropical countries — to help preserve forests and create economic value in preserving forests.

So that's what we're up to and we're trying to make our contribution. That's going to require a lot of different groups working in a lot of different ways to make a contribution.

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT

MAGAZINER: What we do is: we do these projects and can measure the direct impact, and say there's this many millions of tons less of CO2 going into the air because of the projects we have done. And then we're creating these models which we can spread to others, so that we can have a multiplier effect that multiplies the impact of what the direct projects we're doing can accomplish.

That's why when we show that we can do an integrated waste management project in Delhi — in a very complicated, large city that's never had integrated waste management — what we did in Delhi is the first integrated waste management project in the whole of southern Asia. We showed that it can work, it's actually returning a profit to the commercial developers, it's saving the city money, and it's working in terms of making Delhi a cleaner place.

And now there are ten other cities that are ready to do it. As soon as we finish the project in Lagos — Lagos, Nigeria is a place with 21 million people in that city, growing a million and a half people per year — and they had no waste system. We're putting the first integrated waste system there. We're now doing it in Dar Es Salaam and Tanzania. We have requests from a number of other African cities. So our goal is to create these models and then spread them, because that's really where we're going to get at the problem.

Markey spokesman: "The Breakthrough Institute seems to believe, much as the Bush administration did, that technology will solve all, even without a market."

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 07:52 AM PDT

"Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Those words, "attributed" to the 18th century English essayist Samuel Johnson, are a perfect summation of the oeuvre of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI).  So it is with their latest attack on the climate and clean energy bill — "Climate Bill Analysis Part 20 [!!!]: Over-Allocation of Pollution Permits Would Result in No Emissions Reduction Requirement during Early Years of Climate Program."

And no, I can't bring myself to link to their crap — that is apparently what the status quo media is for (see "Memo to media: Don't be suckered by bad analyses from TBI and "The Audacity of Nope: George Will embraces the anti-environment message of TBI" and "TBI is lying about Obama, misstating what CBO concluded about Waxman-Markey, and publishing deeply flawed analyses" and "Will America lose the clean-energy race? Only if we listen to the disinformers of TBI").

Indeed, this time I don't even need to debunk their "analysis" — which looks strangely like the evil twin of a blog post I wrote two weeks ago that they never even reference (see "EIA stunner: By year's end, we'll be 8.5% below 2005 levels of CO2 — halfway to climate bill's 2020 target").

No, someone in the media has actually done a bang-up job of it already, truly a fine piece of journalism by Greenwire, "Institute's critique of Waxman-Markey draws fire" (subs. req'd), which I  excerpt at length below:

U.S. businesses won't need to cut carbon dioxide emissions until possibly as late as 2018 under the cap-and-trade program that would be created by the House-passed climate bill, according to a new analysis that examined the recession's effects on emissions.

The Breakthrough Institute, which favors direct investment in clean energy sources, examined the House bill's policies in light of the federal Energy Information Administration's September report forecasting a 6 percent drop in carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, which followed a 3 percent decline in 2008. Declines were spurred by the recession and lower natural gas prices that caused power generators to switch away from coal, EIA said.

Those downturns equal almost half of the 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions that the bill seeks by 2020. Reductions in greenhouse gases mandated by the measure are pegged to emissions in 2005, which had levels higher than they are now.

The legislation would require businesses to buy allowances for their carbon emissions, but it would give away the bulk of those allowances in the program's early years. That, combined with the economic downturn, would create low allowance prices, giving businesses the option to sidestep penalties for several years, the Breakthrough Institute report says….

The institute issued the report to give the Senate important data as it crafts climate legislation, Jenkins said. But there were immediate questions about the study's credibility and the motivations behind it. An EIA expert said he was skeptical of the findings.

"The numbers sound awfully large for me," said J. Alan Beamon, EIA's director of the coal and electric power division, who worked on an April analysis examining the effects of the House bill. "If [emissions] are down a year or two because of a recession, they're not going to make that big of a difference over the long haul." Beamon said he had not looked at the Breakthrough Institute's analysis and said he did not immediately have time to study it.

The report is the 20th from the Breakthrough Institute examining the bill from Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) Some Democrats and environmentalists distrust the Oakland, Calif.-based institute because of its contrarian positions.

Breakthrough was founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who in 2004 wrote "The Death of Environmentalism," an essay arguing that traditional environmentalism lacked solutions to address climate change. The institute does not back the cap-and-trade approach to driving down carbon emissions.

"The Breakthrough Institute keeps coming out with these pointless reports attacking Waxman-Markey," said Joe Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by John Podesta, who was chief of staff to former President Clinton. "Waxman-Markey is kinda old news. The Senate is constructing a bill now."

"I'm confident that the smart senators and people who write this bill will fix it," Romm said.

Changes to legislation already are under way. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, which is writing a climate bill, will raise the House's 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions to 20 percent by 2020, Senate Democratic aides have said. The California Democrat will argue that it is not a sizable increase, given the EIA projection of a 6 percent drop in emissions this year….

The House bill creates a cap-and-trade program that would start in 2012 and reduce allowable emissions levels each year, hitting a 17 percent reduction below 2005 levels in 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. Because it is set to pre-recession emissions, when the cap starts, "U.S. emissions may still be recovering to pre-recession levels and may remain substantially lower than historic 2005 levels," the Breakthrough report says….

EIA in its analysis of Waxman-Markey, which was done in April, assumed a 3 percent downturn in emissions in 2009 and a 2 percent downturn in 2008, a total 3 percent short on the decline EIA now projects.

"It's hard to believe that 3 percent would really change the overall 40 years of the program," EIA's Beamon said. In addition, he said, businesses plan for the long term.

For his part, Romm said he does not trust the institute's analysis.

"They just keep publishing analysis after analysis, half of which are wrong, the other half of which aren't terribly original," Romm said. "They have many biased studies that do not stand the light of day."

The institute, he said, is "trying to scare people into opposing the bill."

"One assumes the people who write the final bill will use the new [emissions] numbers, and then the problem goes away," Romm said….

Jenkins did the analysis for the institute. He does not have a background in economics.

"It's not an economic analysis," Jenkins said. "It's based on the economic forecasts of the EIA and CBO. Beyond that, it's relatively simple arithmetic that any old competent policy analyst such as myself is capable of."

A new analysis?

Romm, an acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy in the Clinton administration's Energy Department, questioned whether the Breakthrough report uncovers anything new. Romm in his Sept. 15 "Climate Progress" blog wrote about EIA carbon emissions numbers under the headline, "EIA stunner: By year's end, we'll be 8.5% below 2005 levels of CO2 — halfway to climate bill's 2020 target."

In the blog post, Romm calls for tightening the emissions reduction target and reducing the number of free permits given to businesses in the early years.

"Everything claims to be a new analysis," Romm said. "It's a new analysis that they glommed from me."

Although Romm did post the blog item, Jenkins said, the Breakthrough Institute's analysis looked beyond the drop in emissions and at the implications of that EIA forecast….

The institute has a "philosophical difference" with the Democratic leadership in that it does not believe that penalizing carbon emission would create a market for clean energy technology, said Eben Burnham-Snyder, spokesman for Markey and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

"The Breakthrough Institute seems to believe, much as the Bush administration did, that technology will solve all, even without a market," Burnham-Snyder said. "Waxman-Markey is predicated on the belief that we must invest in technology, but that more clean energy technologies will be invented and deployed by establishing a mandatory market for carbon."

The bill has $200 billion dedicated to clean energy development, Burnham-Snyder said, as well as mandatory carbon emissions cuts.

"By and large, we have tried to engage with those who are willing to have a constructive policy argument," Burnham-Snyder said. "We chose not to engage with those who are not trying to be constructive, with those who are merely trying to stir the pot."

Precisely.

If Obama is going to Copenhagen to push Chicago's Olympic bid this week, he has to go in December to push a climate deal, yes?

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 06:27 AM PDT

http://z.hubpages.com/u/923807_f520.jpg

President Barack Obama, who initially planned to let First Lady Michelle Obama represent the United States in Copenhagen this week, when the International Olympic Committee chooses a site for the 2016 summer games, plans to travel there too….

"There is no greater expression of the support our bid enjoys, from the highest levels of government and throughout our country, than to have President Obama join us in Copenhagen for the pinnacle moment in our bid," said Chicago 2016 Chairman and CEO Patrick G. Ryan.

This is the best news I've heard in a while.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJSS48xrZHcBADT6wD4Q0R7tRvTGR29E358MaPjHKqeg3tfbNrPOL5-383xHhlZC1HRmZbojN8R3Ddrh_03FGDLuq7-3jvVNUtqq7AL9eRrU0E0FHIJb8Nt-I2v3zGxfTGInErUJV4wEgu/s320/new-chicago-olympics-logo.jpg

After all, if the president is going to Copenhagen for something that is relatively inconsequential both substantively and politically — it's not like Illinois is in great jeopardy for the Dems — then I can now predict with high confidence he will be go to Copenhagen in December for the climate talks, which w

ill be crucial for helping achieve a global deal.

Success in Copenhagen this week gets Obama the Chicago Olympics in the final year of his presidency, a tiny, but fleeting, salute (if he gets a second term).  Success in December — not a final deal, of course, but moving the ball forward to achieve such a deal next year — ensures that Obama is not seen as a failed president historically and that he is not viewed as a failure internationally for however long he is president.

Inhofe on why global warming isn't real: "God's still up there."

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 06:08 PM PDT

CALLER: Yes, I agree with the Senator on what he says about the climate change. I believe that the world is just changing like it usually does….

INHOFE: I think he's right. I think what he's saying is God's still up there. We're going through these cycles. … I really believe that a lot of people are in denial who want to hang their hat on the fact, that they believe is a fact, that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, are causing global warming. The science really isn't there.

Thank God the Senator from Oklahoma is here to promise us that that the Almighty will override at a planetary level the laws of physics He created and simply stop human-emissions of heat-trapping gases from ravaging his Creation.  Now if we can only get Inhofe to tell God to stop all cancers and traffic accidents, too.

More seriously,  the only thing more stunning than the fact that a U.S. Senator — the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works committee, no less — would advance such a predeterministic view is that anyone in the media would treat him seriously (see for instance, "NYT's Green Inc. blog wins worst headline of the day").

But this fundamentalist, anti-scientific tripe, far from disqualifying Inhofe, puts him in very good company with other leading conservative politicians:

It bears repeating that the fact the climate has changed in the past, does not mean humans can't change the climate today.  Quite the reverse.  As the famous climatologist Wallace Broecker, climate scientist, wrote in a 1995 Nature article:

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.

The point is that "natural cycles" do not mean "random cycles."  The climate changes when it is forced to change.  Past warmings were driven by natural forcings, including massive releases of greenhouse gases.  But now humans are dwarfing the natural cycles and natural forcings by pumping out greenhouse gases at a much higher rate than ever occurred in the past — see Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks..

If the "Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small nudges," what will happen to people foolish enough to keep punching it in the face?  The answer is biblical, but rather than divine intervention, it will, I fear, be Hell and High Water.

H/t to Think Progress, which posted the video and gives its background.

On C-Span's Washington Journal this week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the godfather of global warming deniers, said that he will travel to the climate change summit in Copenhagen this fall to present "another view." "I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad," he said. Throughout the program, Inhofe went through his tattered global warming denier claims: that climate change is a "hoax," that CO2 is not a pollutant, and — latching on to the latest false right-wing talking point — that clean energy legislation will cost American families $1,700 a year.

No, Copenhagen is not dead. Quite the reverse — prospects for a global deal have never been better.

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 05:45 AM PDT

The usually savvy Mother Jones reporter, David Corn, has published a flawed analysis, "Is Copenhagen dead" (original here, repost here).

The media has a herd mentality when it comes to reporting on all things presidential — either you're up or you're down.  Indeed, the media likes to build up politicians and then tear them down.  So it is with Obama now.

Compounding that, the media likes a simple story, either great success or great failure.   Since the media (mis)perceives that both domestic and international climate action are on a down swing, even more piling on is inevitable.  Then again, some in the media believe temperatures are on the down swing, so what the frac do they know?

For eight years, Cheney-Bush not only muzzled climate scientists and blocked domestic action, they actively worked behind the sciences to kill any international deal.  It takes a lot of effort to unpoison a well.  And we've only had the possibility of serious international negotiations since January..  Anyone who thought there would be a final deal, signed and sealed in December, a mere 11 months later, wasn't paying attention to recent history and doesn't appreciate the nature of international negotiations.

The fact is, the news from China, India, Japan, and this country is far more positive toward the possibility of agreement than it has been for a decade or longer.  This is, finally, the one brief shining moment for action.

Does that mean there will be an ultimate deal that begins in Copenhagen?  Not at all.  The forces of denial and delay in this country in particular are strong and may still kill domestic action, which would in turn make a global deal very, very hard to achieve.

But I remain confident that Obama can and will deliver a domestic bill and an international agreement.   Since Corn based his misanalysis on a column coathored by the CEO of CAP, I'll let John Podesta have the final word with his reply, "Poised For Progress At The U.N. Climate Summit In Copenhagen":

While Mother Jones' David Corn is an excellent reporter, he is a lousy tealeaf reader. Mr. Corn misread a recent article by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and myself in advance of the G20 summit, incorrectly concluding our purpose was to downplay expectations on behalf of the Administration. Mr. Corn's interpretation of our piece is inaccurate. Dr. Pachauri, one of the world's foremost advocates for strong global action on climate change, and I both recognize that significant challenges remain in advance of the U.N. summit in December. But we are confident that the international community is poised to make substantial progress on climate change in Copenhagen, and that the U.S. is now in a position to exercise renewed leadership in pursuit of a best-case climate scenario.The purpose of our September 23 piece was to emphasize the importance of climate change in advance of the G20 meetings and encourage the world's top emitters to seize an important opportunity to take concrete steps to move forward in advance of December's summit. It is not news that the divide between the unwieldy groups of developed and developing countries have stalled climate talks in the past and that they are drifting again. It is, however, noteworthy that major emitters have recently utilized new channels — the Administration's Major Economies Forum, for example, as well as the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue — to lay the groundwork for a new climate agreement in Copenhagen. We think this is an important development and should be pursued whenever opportunities, like this week's summit, arise. Our piece urged leaders at the G20 to pursue concrete actions prior to Copenhagen on issues such as financing arrangements, technology cooperation, and deforestation prevention to increase the chances of success in December.

Even in the midst of global economic crisis, climate change has remained at the top of the agenda both in the United States and in key countries around the world. There is broad consensus that the effects of climate change are not only real, but will be devastating to developed and developing countries alike if the international community fails to agree on a global emissions reduction strategy soon. The road ahead is not without obstacles, which our piece pointed out. But the fate of Copenhagen is far from sealed — and it is my strong belief that the Obama Administration is committed to doing all it can to lead the world into a low-carbon, clean energy future.