by Ben Block on December 15, 2008

Eminent climatologist James Hansen will urge U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to support a carbon tax, in a letter to be sent this week, Hansen said.

Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, is one of the leading voices for a carbon tax to address climate change, rather than backing the more widely used cap-and-trade approach. In his plan, Hansen recommends levying a rising tax on fossil fuels and redistributing 100 percent of the proceeds to taxpayers - a "tax and dividend" approach [PDF].

Obama has preferred a cap-and-trade policy - an economy-wide limit on greenhouse gas emissions that will be lowered over time and that allows polluters to trade emission permits on a carbon market. His most recent climate change speech, delivered last month at a summit hosted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, further emphasized his support for cap-and-trade.

"We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050," Obama said.

Yet Hansen and other carbon tax supporters insist that the debate between the two policies is far from complete.

"Politically, [cap-and-trade] will be convenient, but it will not solve the problem," Hansen said at a Capitol Hill briefing last Tuesday. "We do need a communicator. Obama has the ability and opportunity to do it."

Hansen was the first climate scientist to state publicly that greenhouse gas emissions were causing climate change, at a hearing before the U.S. Senate 20 years ago. He has since become a leading voice on the severity of climate change, urging world leaders to discontinue support for coal and to accelerate the transition to carbon-neutral energy sources.

Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade 

Carbon taxes raise the price of carbon-intensive fuels and thereby encourage low-carbon lifestyles. Tax advocates say the approach could be implemented instantly and that it would avoid the interference of interest groups.

Emissions among the industrialized countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol - a treaty that embraces the cap-and-trade approach - have risen since 2000 [PDF]. Analysts cite several reasons for the rise, including the fact that Western European energy utilities effectively lobbied for free pollution permits as part of the European Emission Trading Scheme (ETS).

Also, one of the tools developed under Kyoto to manage the pollution offsetting process - the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - has lacked effective oversight. The United Nations acknowledged last month that the firm that validated nearly half the world's CDM projects lacked proper qualifications.

Another concern is that cap-and-trade mechanisms have led to volatile prices. Whereas carbon taxes contribute some certainty to energy prices - a $100 tax on a ton of carbon emissions would raise coal prices an estimated 14.6 percent, for instance - the ETS carbon price fluctuates on average 17 percent each month, according to Robert Shapiro, a former U.S. under secretary of commerce for economic affairs.

"We're looking at very, very volatile energy prices," said Shapiro, who is currently the chairman of Sonecon, an economic advisory firm. "Business leaders need to know energy prices when they decide whether to invest in more energy efficient products."

World leaders have promised to address the cap-and-trade flaws during the current climate negotiations. The policy is still preferred by some environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

 

Cap-and-trade advantages include that its emissions cap provides a more certain level of greenhouse gas reductions, if the policy is written without major flaws and the program runs smoothly. Environmentalists are lobbying for an emissions cap lower than what was allowed as part of the ETS.

In addition, a carbon tax is not free of potential scandal. Depending on the policy, billions of dollars would be dispensed to energy efficiency and renewable energy firms, or taxpayers pockets, creating potential opportunities for fraud. Also, Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that advocates carbon taxes, notes that polluters have become skilled at finding tax loopholes over the years.

"Gaining Momentum Every Single Day"

Carbon taxes are currently in place, with frequent exemptions, in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, British Columbia, and select U.S. cities. The taxes are generally politically unpopular - national plans in New Zealand and Canada failed to win residents' support. According to a global BBC poll in 2007, about half of the 22,000 people surveyed were in favor of increased fossil fuel taxes, and 44 percent opposed the proposal.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, said carbon tax proponents have to overcome the disinformation campaigns that regularly attack new tax proposals. "Any legislator considering a carbon tax has to prepare the ground more effectively than we have in Canada," he said at Tuesday's Capitol Hill panel. "Stop calling it a carbon tax. Call it a carbon dumping fee or something that makes it seem more like a climate change solution."

Connecticut Representative John Larson has sponsored U.S. legislation that would impose an excise tax on any taxable carbon substance sold by a manufacturer, producer, or importer. The bill currently has support of 12 fellow Democrats. "It's gaining momentum every single day," Larson said on Tuesday. "Twelve members may not seem like a lot, but [three of] these are influential members of the Ways and Means Committee."

Political Success May Need Additional Research

At a time of economic recession, further research may be necessary to galvanize support for the higher energy costs that may accompany a climate change solution, the panel's economists said.

Hansen's letter to Obama will request that the president-elect order a National Academies of Science study of the latest climate science. Such a study should determine the present and future impacts of global greenhouse gas emissions, Hansen said.

"We have the strongest scientific body in the world. He should ask them because the situation is more severe than people realize," Hansen said. "It's even worse than what is inferred from the latest [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] report. A lot of information has become available in the past two years."

A report would also help silence climate change disbelievers, Hansen said. "It would give [Obama] cover. Otherwise critics say it's just a few scientists saying this, or the IPCC is politicized," he said.

The Academies are already developing several climate change-related research projects, however. In October, the Division on Earth and Life Studies began its America's Climate Choices project, which seeks to address how the United States can limit the magnitude of future climate change.

"Overall, I believe the study will meet [Hansen's] concerns," said Thomas Dietz, director of the environmental science and policy program at Michigan State University and vice chair of the project's science panel. "We will address the current state of the science around issues that matter in making decisions about climate change."

Hansen has made available a more detailed draft [PDF] of the letter he plans to send to Obama. His policy recommendations are comments of personal opinion and are not related to his government position, he said.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

The last week has been filled with speculation about what President-elect Obama will and will not do during his first days in office. The prevailing assumption is that his to-do list is so long that he'll have to take some things on and let other things go.

In the words of The New York Times, "With the economy in disarray and the nation’s treasury draining, President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out which of his expansive campaign promises to push in the opening months of his tenure and which to put on a slower track."

Well, maybe. And then again, maybe not. There's a possibility, or maybe even a likelihood, that the logic underlying this view is flawed. It assumes that these crises are entirely severable—that they occupy solo silos. Not so. The crises are interconnected.

This faulty logic, which we might call the Not-a-System Fallacy, really gets my goat. This is because I've seen it way too many times, and it produces faulty strategies, and these faulty strategies keep the world in its massive rut. It is yesterday's mindset—Old Think—in a world that badly needs new approaches.

In Einstein's famous to the point of cliché phrase, you can't solve a problem at the level at which is created.

If the Obama Administration goes with Old Think, some pretty radical crisis triage is probably in the offing. Important measures will be deferred indefinitely, perhaps forever.
 
However, if the Obama Administration takes a systems tack, the need for triage will be much reduced. Under a systems approach, the following question would come first: what meta-strategy will address multiple crises simultaneously?

The answer to this question leaps out at me like Superman busting through a wall. A green New Deal would simultaneously create jobs, address climate change, make us energy-independent, boost the auto industry, and … well, you get the idea. Think birds with one stone, or bang for the buck. A green New Deal would be highly synergistic.

What this suggests is that there is a compelling strategic logic for making a green New Deal the gravitational field around which Obama's larger transformational enterprise revolves.

From where I sit, the odds seem reasonably good that this will happen. For one thing, Team Obama appears to be constitutionally incapable of practicing Old Think. If their campaign performance is any indication, their sonar will guide them straight to the highest-leverage solutions.

For another, the green New Deal concept is going mainstream rapidly. Late last month, the United Nations Environment Programme issued a call for a global green New Deal, stating: "Mobilizing and re-focusing the global economy towards investments in clean technologies and 'natural' infrastructure such as forests and soils is the best bet for real growth, combating climate change and triggering an employment boom in the 21st century."

About the same time, Newsweek published a lengthy article titled ‘A Green New Deal.’ In the teaser, the magazine made no bones about its position on the issue: "Some of the world's most powerful leaders argue that this crisis is a call to speed up the creation of a new energy economy. Why they're right."

The article went on to observe, "(T)here are …  powerful voices being raised amid the [current] din of despair, saying that now is precisely the time to seize the initiative and launch [a green] 'global revolution' …

And not just because it will stave off disasters two or three decades away, but because it can provide the impetus to pull the global economy out of the slump it's in now and put it on a more solid foundation than it's had in at least a generation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American presidential candidate Barack Obama have taken up the cause of what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week called a 'green New Deal'…"

Finally, the Newsweek article noted that Obama "is talking about goals so ambitious that they amount to a green New Deal, even if he doesn't use the phrase himself."

Add all this up, and you get an impressive trifecta: Team Obama's strategic sagacity, its demonstrated inclination to head in the green New Deal direction, and the concept's careening toward mainstream acceptance.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on a green New Deal coming soon to a country near you.

This would be a good thing, brought about by bad times. In the words of Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's new chief of staff: "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste."

By Bill McKibben

And so our eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we’re not just cleaning up after a failed presidency. We’re cleaning up after a two-century binge.

Barack Obama won an historic victory yesterday, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe more difficult, because while both FDR and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown — the rapid disintegration of the planet's climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilization.

Do you think that sounds melodramatic? Let me give it to you from the abstract of a scientific paper written earlier this year by one of the people who now work for Mr. Obama, NASA scientist James Hansen. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm." In other words, if we keep increasing carbon any longer, the earth itself will make our efforts moot.

Hansen's calculation is a scientifically grounded way of saying: Everything must change at once. To meet his target, before enough feedback loops kick in to irrevocably warm the planet, Hansen says fossil-fuel combustion, particularly coal, must cease around the planet by about 2030, and that it must happen sooner in the industrialized nations. As the climate observer, and tireless blogger, Joe Romm observed when Hansen's paper was published, it means that "we need to go straight to the government-led WWII-style effort for the whole planet that is sustained for decades." (Well, back to FDR, what do you know.).

Anyway, here are some of the pieces of what Obama must push for:

-- Massive government investment in green energy. For this to have any hope of being politically viable, it will need to be seen as the single huge stimulus effort that might lift us out of our financial swamp. (That's almost certainly true, by the way — name another emergent technology capable of re-floating the economy for the long run). We have at least some of the technologies we'd need — wind, the newly promising desert solar arrays, and the ever-useful insulation (the installation of which would at least create a lot of jobs — you're not going to send your house to China for a layer of fiberglass). You might also push for nuclear, but it takes a long time and it's probably too expensive to make a rational list. Still, no holds barred.

-- A stiff cap on carbon, which will help drive the process. Again, to have any chance of passing politically, it will need to come with the feature proposed in recent years by Peter Barnes, and that Obama has semi-endorsed: a "cap and share" approach that would return the revenue raised directly to consumers. That is, Exxon would pay for the permit to pour carbon into the atmosphere, a cost that would rise steadily as the cap was lowered. But instead of the money going into government coffers, every American would get a check each year for their share of the proceeds. They'd be made whole against the rising cost of energy, while the shock that the price signal would send would be preserved. Current versions of cap-and-trade are too weak and too riddled with loopholes — getting a clean, tough bill through Congress needs to be a preoccupation of President Obama.

-- Once the president has done all that tough stuff at home, he'll need to do it all over again, globally. The world is meeting in Copenhagen in December of 2009 to come up with a successor to the Kyoto treaty, the modest first international effort that George W. Bush walked away from weeks after taking office. If Hansen and others are even close to right, this will represent the last legitimate shot the world has at putting itself on a new carbon regime in time to make any difference.

It will be incredibly difficult, mostly because we begin from such unequal places. China has lots of coal and it would like to burn it, because it's the cheapest way to pull rural Chinese out of dire poverty (something the country's leaders would quite like to do because otherwise they won't be the country's leaders much longer). If we want them to use, say, windmills instead, we're going to need to “share some wealth,” north to south, to make it happen. The Chinese opened the bidding last week, with a suggestion that one percent of the U.S. annual GDP would be a good amount to send their way. That's going to be quite a political ask — it means that Americans would be working roughly one hour every two weeks just to help the global South build up their clean alternatives. What we're talking about is a carbon version of the Marshall Plan, and it would mean Obama needs to be not just FDR but Truman and Ike as well.

What it all boils down to is: The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man.

Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food, and the economy are now hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse. More, he needs to understand, again viscerally, the single stark fact of our time: No matter how many votes, no matter how much lobbying, no matter how much pressure you apply, you can't amend the laws of physics and chemistry. They aren't like the laws that politicians are used to dealing with. They will be obeyed, like it or not. 350 is now the most important number on the planet, the red line that defines reality reality.

It doesn't define political reality, however. The political reality goes like this: George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low — Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.

My guess, from the outside, is that all Obama's instincts are centrist. Certainly in energy policy he's offered nothing all that bold or interesting, though his sophistication and engagement have grown during the campaign, which is a good sign.

A better sign is simply that, by every testimony, he's one of the smartest men ever to assume high political office in this country. Not just smarter than Bush. Really smart. Smart enough, if he sits down to really understand the scale of the problem he faces, that he might decide to take the gambles that the situation requires. He said, not long ago, "under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" — which is a sign of someone who is aware there may be a reality to come to grips with.

First signs to watch for: Does he go to Poland next month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and in so doing electrify the international talks over carbon? Are people like green-jobs advocate Van Jones on the short list of those he's listening to on energy policy? Can he see clear to making this — after dealing with the short-term financial emergency — his first legislative priority, even before health care?

Obama, and the rest of us, have a lot more to fear than fear itself. We've got carbon, and right now that's the most frightening stuff on earth.

(This article reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360)

Last month, I wrote about how some more economically advanced countries were helping the developing world to deal with the impacts of global warming. Far from the distant doom predicted by scientists and derided by climate change deniers, these warming impacts are already manifest in many areas of the world. But now, a professor at England’s University of East Anglia suggests developing countries ought to be channeling more effort into preparing for the near-term effects that changing weather patterns will have.

“Are we paying too much attention to uncertain long-term climate predictions - dominated by greenhouse gas-driven global warming,” asks Professor Mike Hulme, “whilst taking our eye off the more immediate weather futures which will determine the significance of climate for society over the next years and decades?” Professor Hulme’s recent BBC editorial questions the current focus on carbon emissions, citing irregular weather patterns that are becoming all too familiar in Europe. “We will never know empirically on any useful timescale whether or not we have accurate climate predictions for 2050.” He continues, “We may end up just as maladapted and just as exposed to weather risks as if we had ignored global warming entirely.”

Could this really be true? Global warming doctrine states that temperature change will occur gradually and imperceptibly until it is too late, most famously illustrated by the boiling frog in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Yet many cities, even in developed nations, seem to be battening down for impending impacts. London has already announced a water management plan to prepare for heavy flooding, while in the U.S., the city of New Orleans continues to re-evaluate its storm protection systems. Clearly, while the temperature increases themselves may not be directly perceptible to humans, the impacts these increases have on the weather system are very real.

So is it time to start selling people on the immediate effects of global warming, rather than prophesying an unsustainable future some distance down the road? I’m not entirely certain, but I find myself leaning against it. Immediate effects are something that people can understand and endure. In a way, this makes them useful tools; walk instead of drive to the corner store and your basement won’t flood. But that might just encourage people to build more houses without basements.

Even worse, it might make people who do not yet suffer any of the consequences of global warming to continue in their unsustainable daily routines; my basement’s not flooding, so why should I care? The long-term goal of climate change prevention through emission reduction plays off people’s fears that their grandchildren’s basements will flood—and it will be their fault.

Most importantly, the focus on warming over flooding or overcast days attacks the problem at its root. Sure, short-term preparedness will save lives and keep the economy moving, but in the long run, our dollars will be better spend ensuring that today’s preparedness measures remain strictly short term.

Photo courtesy U.S. Geological Survey via Flickr

Keeping with San Francisco's pioneering reputation, four Bay Area agencies joined forces in a groundbreaking effort to address climate change at a regional level.

Through a series of summits and meetings with government officials and members of the general public, they came up with recommendations on how the Bay Area can meet and surpass state and federal mandates of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in a draft plan, Transportation 2035: Change in Motion.

The four regional agencies: Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), Bay Area Air Quality Management District Oakland (BAAQMD), Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), had one common goal: to set an example for California, the nation, and the world.

“This plan is unique in that it integrates the goals of virtually all Bay Area transportation and regional growth agencies,” said Ted Droettboom, Regional Planning Program Director for the Bay Area’s Joint Policy Commission. “We all wish to break the cycle of worsening congestion, traffic delay and air quality. And for the first time, we added a new indicator: global warming.” All the agencies felt the urgency of addressing climate change.

California law AB 32 requires the reduction of carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020, while California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger calls for an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since 50 percent of the Bay Area’s greenhouse gas emissions are generated by carbon dioxides emitted from cars, the Change in Motion plan provides detailed recommendations for reducing dependency on cars, lowering congestion, and promoting public transit.

For instance, included in the plan are the MTC’s programs which encourage increased transit ridership, more walking and biking for short trips, congestion management and intelligent transportation system programs to reduce emissions through smoother, more efficient traffic flow.

Plan Recommendations

Specific recommendations in the transportation part of the plan include:

• High-occupancy toll lanes (HOT) lanes: Taking from the Europeans, HOT lanes are a way to lower congestion on city streets and highways.
• Land-use: Develop more regional “priority development areas,” communities with jobs and public transit.
• Technology development to address shrinking fuel supplies and dealing with vehicle emissions.
• Encourage the convenience of walking and biking and taking public transit.
• Encourage the development of Focused Growth communities.

High-Occupancy/Toll (HOT) Network

The plans for the regional HOT network involve converting existing High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes. A HOT network, according to the agencies, provides the following benefits:

• Reductions in congestion and emissions, including carbon dioxide, by making more efficient use of the freeway system
• Providing a reliable travel option for express bus and carpools and those who choose to pay the toll
• Completing the HOV/HOT network 20 to 40 years sooner than if by relying on traditional state and local funding mechanisms.

Focused Growth

Participants in the workshops supported the concept of “Focused Growth” as way to help reduce greenhouse gases without compromising quality of life. Focused Growth describes compact, walkable, mixed-used communities, well served by transit.

Focused Growth can also reduce carbon by reducing the need to travel while also helping to revitalize distressed communities and improving public health by providing more opportunities to walk and bicycle. The principles of Focused Growth include:

• Expansion of transportation choices
• Pedestrian paths/trails
• Transit options
• Transit-oriented development
• Bicycle paths

Reduce Car Dependency

The planning attendees recognized that a paradigm shift is required to truly achieve climate protection. Lifestyle changes are required, especially the dependency on driving.

Even with all the technological improvements — new engines, smaller and lighter cars, emission control devices, and alternative fuels — the planners argued that the State’s aggressive greenhouse-gas target would not be met. Therefore, they emphasized changing driving behavior, particularly decreasing unnecessary trips and reducing excessively long trip lengths, and taking more public transportation.

According to Droettboom, Bay Area regional agencies are hampered in their promotion of the use of alternative fuel and electric cars due to limited funding and an absence of mandate. “There’s not a lot we can do at a regional level to encourage their use since it’s a funding and mandate issue,” he explains. “It’s up to individual entrepreneurs to develop the technology and government to support research and development. Cities and towns can encourage new technology through fleet purchases.”

All in all, the agency directors are pleased with the results of the plan. Final outreach meetings will be held in early October and the plan will be released in December for public review. The final plan is slated for adoption in March 2009.

Photo by Flickr user Alexander Steffler