Climate Feedback

Keith Kloor

While many are feeling pessimistic about the prospects for a deal at Copenhagen, Geoffrey Lean at Grist believes the big climate summit still has a pulse. He reports that “environment ministers from 40 key countries—assembled this week for a two-day preparatory meeting in Copenhagen—made good progress towards a political agreement.”

Lean doesn’t deny that the odds for success are still long. But the game is by no means over, he writes:

“It is all very difficult. But there is a chance that, with luck and skill, a climate-saving deal can be reached. And while far from ideal, the hope that a deal is still salvageable is a lot better than the doom that was so widely pronounced at the start of the week.”

Meanwhile, are people suffering from “climate fatigue,” and tuning out the steady drumbeat of alarming news on climate change? Richard Kerr in Science examines the communication challenges [subscription required]. He writes:

“Almost all climate scientists are of one mind about the threat of global warming: It's real, it's dangerous, and the world needs to take action immediately. But they disagree about the best way to convey the urgency of the situation to the public and policymakers.”

At Yale Environment 360, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that one thing not to do is hype the danger incessantly. Pointing to the consistent polling that shows Americans to have soft support for climate change measures, the authors assert:

“The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats — when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualize, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source — are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people.”

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Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 20, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

The U.S. Congressional climate bill will be tabled until next year, reports The Wall Street Journal. Says Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus:

"It's common understanding that climate-change legislation will not be brought up on the Senate floor and pass the Senate this year."

Just how important is the U.S. climate bill to a climate change agreement in Copenhagen? It’s everything, argues Geoffrey Lean in Grist:

“Never before has such a vital, international treaty depended so crucially on the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. Even previous environmental breakthroughs, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer or the Washington Convention on Endangered Species, were preceded by U.S. legislation. As such, the rest of the world is experiencing for the first time how its vital interests can be affected by American politics, as senators from coal or oil states object to legislation that would curb emissions from fossil fuels.”

In lieu of this, “the Obama Administration is considering endorsing a limited short-term climate pact,” reports Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post. She writes:

“Backing an interim agreement -- which would fall far short of what many European and developing nations envisioned when President Obama took office -- would be an attempt to keep the U.N.-sponsored talks from being viewed a failure, say administration and congressional officials.”

Enough of all this gloomy talk, admonished European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, in a press conference yesterday. As Green Inc. reports, Dimas:

“criticized world leaders who had played down the possibility of a strong outcome at the Copenhagen meeting, suggesting they were too pessimistic.”

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Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 13, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

Passing climate legislation through the US Senate may be tricky, but that hasn’t scared off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from doing its part. As Stephen Power at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol notes:

“Congress might be a long way from passing legislation to fight climate change, but the Obama administration appears one step closer to creating its own regime for controlling greenhouse gases.”

Now the President has said he may even attend the UN conference in Copenhagen ---if a deal is at hand. The AP has the scoop:

"If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over the edge, then certainly that's something that I will do."

But if an accord isn’t reached this year, the global climate-change negotiations may be “headed toward the same aimless end” as the notoriously endless ‘Doha round’ of global trade talks, writes Bryan Walsh at Time magazine.

Speaking of something once thought endless, it’s been 20 years since the cold war crumbled in a heap. Now, a certain key historical figure from that time has emerged to implore today’s leaders to “tear down” another kind of wall. In a guest commentary at The Times of London, Mikhail Gorbachev writes:

“Addressing climate change demands a paradigm shift on a scale akin to that required to end the Cold War.”

If there’s going to be such a paradigm shift, it’s safe to say that most environmentalists weren’t betting that the UK would approve a new fleet of “clean coal” and nuclear power stations. As energy secretary Ed Miliband puts it in The Guardian:

"The threat of climate change means we need to make a transition from a system that relies heavily on high-carbon fossil fuels, to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewable and clean coal power.”

Ready for another puzzler? What’s going on with that Indian government report claiming there is no evidence that global warming has shrunk Himmalayan glaciers? Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, is hopping mad over this, and gives The Guardian an earful, and then some.

"We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."

Finally, in the feel-good story of the day, Politico reports that two U.S. political combatants know how to set aside their differences at the end of the day and share warm and fuzzy gifts. "We are really very good friends,” Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer tells Politico, referring to Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, who has called global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.' Adds Boxer: “It’s a good working relationship we have. People are very surprised about it.”

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 10, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

Prospects for the U.S. congressional climate bill appear grim, writes Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:

“With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.”

David Roberts at Grist offers a similar prognosis for a bill he says that is already “far weaker than what’s needed.” Because of America’s institutional “political dysfunction,” Roberts predicts:

“There’s every chance it will a) get weaker still and b) fail to pass in the end.”

Amidst this backdrop, cap-and-trade, which is the basis for the congressional climate legislation, is getting raked over the coals again. Two attorneys for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which they asserted:

“The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more.”

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs in the November/December issue of Scientific American takes a similarly dim view of “the cumbersome cap-and-trade system proposed by the House of Representatives. Too much is at stake, argues Sachs:

“We’ll need to spend trillions of dollars over time to save the planet from climate change. All the more reason not to let lobbyists make a financial game out of this deadly serious effort.”

Did American politicians thus bet on the wrong horse, muses Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol? He suggests it might be wise to set aside the conventional wisdom about carbon taxes being “a political dead-end.” Johnson lays out how environmentalists can find common ground with deficit hawks on a climate bill centered on a carbon tax.

Whatever policy instrument eventually gets put in place to reduce carbon emissions, it may still be too late to save the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As The Times of London reports:

“The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.”

Continue reading "Countdown to Copenhagen " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 03, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

So if Copenhagen doesn’t produce a global warming treaty next month, which now seems likely, what about setting up a global environmental body? The environmental ministers for Italy and Kenya float this idea in a Guardian op-ed. They note that Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France are lobbying to have the idea taken up at Copenhagen:

“In a letter to the UN secretary general [Merkel and Sarkozy] emphasised that we must overhaul environmental governance and use Copenhagen climate talks in December to progress the creation of a world environmental organisation.”

In their op-ed, the two environmental ministers argue:

“History has proven that strong international institutions are the precondition for building any successful international cooperation. The global financial crisis and the collaboration through the G20 and the International Monetary Fund are recent examples.”

Anyone familiar with the bad environmental press Canada has been receiving of late will be surprised to learn that the country has agreed to preserve vast tracts of its Boreal Forest from development, which will helpfully soak up huge amounts of carbon. The action, as the Guardian notes:

“is somewhat of an anomaly for Canada, whose government has been accused of sabotaging the global climate change talks by its development of the Alberta tar sands and its refusal to make deep cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions.”

Three days of hearings on climate legislation in the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee concluded on Thursday. The big story to emerge, according to Politico, is a key moderate Democrat’s “serious reservations” about the bill. Recalcitrant Republicans, meanwhile, heard about the national security implications of climate change from retired military brass and former Republican Sen. John Warner, who is a close ally of the military. He cautioned:

"We are talking about energy insecurity, water and food shortages, and climate-driven social instability. We ignore these threats at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform."

Committee Republicans, for their part, seem more interested in winning additional time to study the bill’s cap-and-trade program.

The African Union takes up the issue of "climate refugees" in a new treaty that addresses the plight of displaced people. According to IRIN, a U.N. news service:

“the inclusion of displacement by natural disasters was informed by the global debate on the need to develop a framework for the rights of ‘climate refugees’ - people uprooted from their homes and crossing international borders - because the changing climate threatened their survival.”

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Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 30, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

The public battle starts anew on the U.S. congressional climate & energy bill, as senate hearings get underway today. Keith Johnson over at the WSJ’s Environmental Capital believes that three camps will shape the debate:

“Those that believe climate legislation will actually strengthen the economy, those that figure it will have significant but manageable costs, and those that figure it will further burden a recession-challenged economy. Much of the opposition in the Senate—both from Republicans and Democrats—centers on how big the final bill is and who picks up the tab.”

While the proposed legislation is slated to cut greenhouse gases by about 80 percent by 2050, Grist predicts there will be plenty of concessions to coal, nuclear, and natural gas proponents, and even then:

“Reaching a compromise, as the debate over health care reform is already showing, will come down to a key question: How much are the Democrats willing to give away in order to secure one or two votes from the other side of the aisle?”

Despite the tough congressional slog, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was hopeful the U.S. congress would pass the bill before the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference in December. At a press conference on Monday, the Secretary General said he would be personally calling Senators to pick up the pace.

Whatever happens in Congress, pressure is mounting for President Obama to bring his prestige and Nobel aura to Copenhagen. That’s not likely to happen, reports The Times. According to this story:

“a source close to the Administration said it was ‘hard to see the benefit’ of his going to Copenhagen if there was no comprehensive deal for him to close or sign. Another expert, who did not want to be named, said he would be ‘really, really shocked’ if Mr Obama went to Copenhagen, adding that European hopes about the power of his Administration to transform the climate change debate in a matter of months bore little relation to reality.”

Despite the increasingly bleak outlook for a comprehensive deal at Copenhagen, people around the world on Saturday expressed their concern about global warming. At over 5,000 events, signs and banners were unfurled that read 350, a symbolic number in reference to 350 parts per million, which many scientists have said should be the limit for carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. (We’re currently topping out at 387 parts per million.)

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Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 27, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Keith Kloor

If all the maneuvering in advance of Copenhagen is beginning to resemble a high-stakes poker game, then the European Union has thrown its cards down on the table this week. As the Guardian reported:

“The EU negotiating position offers to slash greenhouse gas emissions by between 80-95% by 2050 and to deepen cuts from 20 to 30% by 2020 if other world powers sign up for similar action.”

That’s a pretty big if, especially in the case of the United States, since the U.S. official position is that it won’t commit to any targets until its Congress passes a climate change bill that is now in the senate. “Without such a commitment,” the New York Times writes, “other nations are loath to make their own pledges.”

Except the EU, that is. There’s still plenty of deal-making happening on the sidelines, though. For example, the border between China and India may be heating up over competing land claims, but that hasn’t stopped the two countries from inking a deal to cooperate on energy and climate issues ahead of Copenhagen.

As Keith Johnson over at the WSJ's Environmental Capitol notes:

"The battle over the Senate climate bill starts in earnest today, with more details on the Kerry-Boxer bill, fresh economic analysis from the EPA, and a speech by President Obama backing the measure."

Greens are thus wringing their hands over a new Pew Research Center poll that finds:

“There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.” Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research center, tells AP that the poll's results probably reflect the bleak economic landscape:

“The priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the economy and because of the focus on other things.”

Still, as Grist observes, there is a sliver lining:

"There were two small (and puzzling) bits of consolation in the poll: many respondents support limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, and many want the U.S. to join an international climate-change plan."

That's precisely why people should look at the poll in a larger context, Roger Pielke, Jr., argues, in his analysis of the data:

"One reason to stop focusing on what people think about the science of climate change is that a majority of the public supports action on emissions as well as international cooperation on climate change. The policy challenge is thus to design policies that can be effective given the strong political support that has existed on this topic for some time. The realities are that support is about as strong as it is likely to be, and really hasn't changed much over a decade or longer."

Ironically, the Poll came out a day after 18 scientific organizations sent a letter to the U.S. Congress, reaffirming “the multiple independent lines of evidence” for climate change:

“Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.”

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 23, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Keith Kloor, Opinion, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Has continuing criticism of the controversial Superfreakonomics book taken an ugly turn? Co-author Stephen Dubner believes so and fires back at his NYT blog, asserting that critics have:

“given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific. Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not.”

Roger Pielke Jr., never one to shy away from a battle, believes that Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been critized by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress. Dubner's charges have been denied by Romm, who has written multiple, lengthy posts in just the last 24 hours to defend himself. Regardless of who claims the high ground in this episode, Bradford Plumer reminds us over at The New Republic's website that Dubner has yet to "address any of the errors that scientists like William Connolley have pointed out," which Olive Heffernan summarized here:

Meanwhile, Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt has scolded the Superfreakonimics authors for embracing geoengineering, which Schmidt asserted:

“is neither cheap, nor a fix, and the reasons why it is very likely to be a bad idea are ethical and legal, much more than its still-uncertain scientific merits.”

Incidentally, the book is being published today. Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune magazine, who is friendly with one of the co-authors registers his disappoinment in the book over at Bloomberg. The controversial book, Pooley writes:

“turns out to be the same pile of misinformation the skeptic crowd has been peddling for years.”

In recent weeks, the big news on the U.S. business front has been about all the companies, such as Apple, quitting their membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the latter’s hostility to regulatory action on global warming. Now it seems that the climate issue is dividing energy producers as well. The NYT reports:

Continue reading "Countdown to Copenhagen" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 20, 2009
Categories: In the News, Keith Kloor, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)