Sunday, November 15, 2009

Climate Progress


Climate Progress


World leaders say Copenhagen to be a steppingstone to final climate deal

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 07:18 AM PST

Some very good news on the international front, as the UK Guardian reports today:

During a hastily convened breakfast meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from the moribund negotiations by aiming for a broad political agreement and postponing contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer….

The deferral plan was outlined to 19 leaders, including Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao, who were in Singapore for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

"Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," the Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, told the leaders after flying in overnight for the unscheduled discussion. "The Copenhagen agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion."

… This would give breathing space for the US Senate to pass carbon-capping legislation, allowing the Obama administration to bring a 2020 target and financing pledges to the table at a UN climate meeting in Mexico or Germany in mid-2010.

This is no big surprise to CP readers or anyone who follows international negotiations or domestic politics.  For 8 years, U.S. negotiations were run by hard-core anti-scientific conservatives, who not only blocked any domestic action and opposed any international deal — but the Cheney-Bush negotiators actually actively worked to undermine the efforts of other countries to develop a follow on to the Kyoto Protocol.

It was never possible that team Obama — in just a few months — could undo that and simultaneously develop a final international deal and pass bipartisan U.S. climate legislation — a very slow process, given the experience with our last major domestic clean air bill, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

As the NYT's Revkin blogs this morning, "Many seasoned participants in nearly two decades of treaty negotiations aimed at blunting global warming had predicted this outcome."

The new plan for Copenhagen makes the prospects for a successful international deal far more likely — and at the same time increases the chance for Senate passage of the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill that Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen Lieberman (I-CT) are negotiating with the White House.  The NYT print story reports:

"There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days," said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. "I don't think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact."

Indeed, had leaders gone into Copenhagen without this recognition of the obvious and let the whole effort collapse under the weight of unrealistic expectations, that would have been all-but-fatal to the domestic bipartisan climate bill.

Now it will be obvious when the Senate takes up the bill up in the winter that the rest of the world is prepared to act — that every major country in the world has come to the table with serious targets and/or serious commitments to change their greenhouse gas emissions trajectories.  Every country but ours, that is.

The few key swing Senators will understand that they are the only ones who stand in the way of strong US leadership in the vital job-creating clean energy industries and stand in the way of this crucial opportunity the world now has to preserve a livable climate through an international deal.  Their role in history will be defined by this one vote.  And, yes, I do think that matters to people like Dick Lugar (R-IN) and perhaps even John McCain (R-AZ).

UPDATE:  One can expect those who have long opposed serious action on climate change to trumpet this good news as bad news.  The WSJ, for instance, writes, "International efforts to combat climate change took a significant blow when the leaders of the APEC forum conceded a binding international treaty won't be reached when the U.N. convenes in Copenhagen in three weeks."  What do you expect from a paper that has long trumpeted disinformation on climate science and the economic impacts of climate action?  Yes, this was a "news" story, but consider this line from the story:  "The election of Obama, a believer in strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions, had raised hopes among environmentalists that Copenhagen would produce a tough, binding treaty to follow the Kyoto accords of 1997."  Notice how Obama is framed not as someone who believes in climate science, but merely in regulations.  And again, notice how for the WSJ, the only people who care about those regulations are "environmentalists" rather than, say, all of humanity or even those who understand the climate science laid out by the IPCC that sets the basis for international climate agreements.

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The environMENTALIST contest: On what day will Obama sign the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill into law?

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 06:31 AM PST

http://sharetv.org/images/the_mentalist-show.jpgOne of my guilty pleasures is the CBS crime show, The Mentalist.  One-time fake psychic Patrick Jane uses his powers of observation and deduction to figure out the answer to the mystery before everyone else.

So here's the contest for all you would-be environ-Mentalists.  Use your amazing powers of observation and deduction to figure out on what day Obama will sign the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill into law.  The winner gets to write a blog post for Climate Progress — woo hoo!

Remember, the bill has to pass the Senate, go into conference, pass the House and Senate again, and then a few days after that, Obama has the big signing ceremony.

Yes, you could pick "never" but, of course, you'd never collect!  Plus the bill remains a likely prospect since the breakthrough Senate climate partnership between Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Kerry (D-MA) — see E&E News: "At least 67 senators are in play" on climate bill.

Indeed, with the addition of Sen Lieberman (I-CT) to the bipartisan (tripartisan?) team and the beginning of talks with White House "to discuss a possible compromise" the chances may be greater than ever.  Heck, even the moderate coal-state Democrat Sen. Baucus (D-MT) said last week, "There's no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation."

That said, it seems increasingly unlikely that the bill will get to Obama's desk before the summer.  Indeed, The Washington Times Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req'd) has these remarkable prognosications from a former Senate majority leader and a leading industrial expert:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Friday that, judging by the past, Congress's climate change bill will likely pass within months of next November's general election.

Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, said big legislation has historically passed within a few months of a major election and he envisions the same will be true for climate legislation.

"Welfare reform passed within months of an election back in the 90s, so did Medicare Part D — it passed in September of an election year," Daschle said on a conference call about clean energy and manufacturing. "There are a lot of other examples."

… But even if the Senate doesn't advance climate legislation before Copenhagen, that doesn't mean the legislation won't be a top priority in the Senate next year, Daschle said."Contrary to conventional wisdom, a lot can be done in 2010," he added.

Peter Molinaro, vice president of federal and state government affairs for Dow Chemical, said during the call that he agreed with Daschle's predictions. Molinaro said that in the past, most major environmental legislation has also passed within 90 days on either side of a general election.

He added that ultimately the controversial legislation will pass just like the contentious amendments to the Clean Air Act did in 1990.

The climate legislation and Clean Air Act amendments are in "many ways a parallel — high complexity, strong regional differences and way beyond partisan differences — a lot of the same kinds of implications," Molinaro said. "I don't think there is anything novel about the situation we find ourselves in with [climate] legislation.

Here's a little history on the bipartisan CAA amendments for all you enviro-Jane's out there, courtesy of EPA:

In June 1989 President Bush proposed sweeping revisions to the Clean Air Act. Building on Congressional proposals advanced during the 1980s, the President proposed legislation designed to curb three major threats to the nation's environment and to the health of millions of Americans: acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions….

By large votes, both the House of Representatives (401-21) and the Senate (89-11) passed Clean Air bills that contained the major components of the President's proposals. Both bills also added provisions requiring the phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, roughly according to the schedule outlined in international negotiations (Revised Montreal Protocol)…..

Yes, life was different in Washington, DC two decades ago, a lot more moderates in those days…..

A joint conference committee met from July to October 1990 to iron out differences in the bills and both Houses overwhelmingly voted out the package recommended by the Conferees. The President received the Bill from Congress on November 14, 1990 and signed it on November 15,1990.

Conferences between the two Houses aren't known for their speed.  And again that was two decades ago, when we had a moderate pro-environmental Republican president.

Based on my conservations with Hill experts, I tend to think the bill will hit the Senate floor in late February and the debate will last for a few weeks until it passes in late March or early April.  Then conference could take quite a while.  Still, I think the pressure will be to wrap this up before the late summer recess, and not take this right before the fall election.  I think Obama will sign the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill in early August, but I will say that at least one person with much more Hill experience than I have says it'll be October.

But what do you think?

Superfreakonomics coauthor replies to "scathing review" by Elizabeth Kolbert: "she somehow accomplished all this with a degree from Yale in … literature."

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 10:20 AM PST

On Monday, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Kolbert's lengthy review of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  In her 2400-word review, titled "Hosed:  Is there a quick fix for the climate?" she writes:

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it's noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries' worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.  Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

On Friday, coauthor Stephen Dubner replied in a post titled, "With Geoengineering Outlawed, Will Only Outlaws Have Geoengineering?"  Notwithstanding the title, the piece is clearly meant to be serious.  Here is what they have to say about Kolbert's review:

And for a great illustration of just how repugnant some environmentalists find the very thought of geoengineering, consider this scathing review of our book in The New Yorker. The author, Elizabeth Kolbert, seems to disdain everything we've ever written on any topic, and claims we utterly fail to understand climate science (unless of course we don't). She is a feeling and passionate environmentalist who, seemingly so disturbed by geongineering, is compelled to cast our own horse-dung story right back at us with a splat. Here is my favorite line from the review: "Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science — or, for that matter, in science of any kind."

The time has probably come to admit that neither of us were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. Kolbert, meanwhile, has written widely about the perils of global warming, both in The New Yorker and in book form (see Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), and seems to be extremely well-regarded in the field of environmental journalism. And yet, if her Wikipedia page is correct, she somehow accomplished all this with a degree from Yale in … literature.

Snap.  Or not.

Note how Kolbert is pigeonholed as an "environmentalist," albeit a "feeling and passionate" one, since that allows her to be lumped in with all the other environmentalists who supposedly find geo-engineering repugnant — as opposed to, say, climatologist Ken Caldeira who merely finds the geo-engineering-only solution that the authors propose in their book unworkable and "pretty ugly" and "a dystopic world out of a science fiction story" and "crazy."  Kolbert herself notes:

There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.  "By far the preferred way" to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, "is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases."

You can read the interview she gave and decide if that makes here "a feeling and passionate environmentalist" — not that there's anything wrong with that — or simply a journalist who has talked to dozens of the leading climate scientists and visited many of the places where the climate is changing the most and reported on what she heard, saw, and learned.

Indeed, Kolbert's point about credentials is almost exactly the opposite of what Dubner implies in his dismissal of her:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It's their contention that they don't need it. The whole conceit behind "SuperFreakonomics" and, before that, "Freakonomics," which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed….

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it's noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries' worth of data on global warming.  Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.

Their credentials aren't the issue for her.  They simply didn't do their homework, and so they got the science all wrong (as many, many others have pointed out).  Hence her quote of Pierrehumbert.

Their dismissive reply to her substantive critique is another attempted aerosol smokescreen, just as Levitt's reply to Pierrehumbert on RealClimate was:

Raymond,

I enjoyed your intentional misreading of my chapter on global warming! I think it has really contributed to moving towards a solution to these important problems….

As Pierrehumbert replied:

Steve, glad to see you're reading this.

Something I have found rather bizarre about your responses to the criticisms of your climate chapter is the way you continually try to change history about what you actually wrote, which is plainly there for anybody to see. I found it so unbelievable that you included the "black solar cell" meme when I first heard it that I actually went over to Borders and stood there and intentionally read (not misread) the chapter to see if it was true.

Go figure.

Kolbert ended the review:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that "SuperFreakonomics" takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness.  All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

You don't need to be a climatologist to know that.

their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it's noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries' worth of data on global warming.