Global Warming

Did Koch Industries Write The Budget Deal?

Dave Johnson — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:28:09 -0400

Did Koch Industries write the budget deal? Or is it just a coincidence that so many of the the things Republicans demanded -- and got -- just happen to line up with the financial interests of the billionaires who fund the Tea Party and much of the “conservative movement?” Cutting money for the EPA, alternative energy efficiency, high-speed rail, efforts to fight climate change -- even prohibiting NOAA from creating a Climate Service ... it reads like an oil tycoon's wish list.

Before you read this, remember that they just finishing pushing through another huge tax cut for the rich. Always remember that tax cut deal any time you hear about "deficits" -- which were caused by tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. And before reading about the cuts below you should know that this buget “cut” deal increased the military budget by another $5 billion. From Talking Points Memo,

One of the hardest hit institutions is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose power Republicans have sought to curtail in recent years through a variety of legislative means. The agency will receive $1.6 billion less in funding than current levels, a 16 percent drop, including a $49 million reduction in climate change programs ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also saw a $142 million reduction in funding and is prohibited from creating a Climate Service.

In addition … programs aimed at boosting energy efficiency for power plants and transportation also were major targets. Energy efficiency and renewable energy were cut by $438 million while fossil energy R&D was reduced by $226 ... Funding for high speed rail, all $2.9 billion of it, was zeroed out entirely. …

Get it? What we just went through was "You stop that energy efficiency and climate change stuff, or we will shut down the whole government." The EPA is cut 16%. And just who benefits from these cuts, which do serious damage to the country? I'll let you guess (hint -- read the title of this post.)

I wonder what this budget will do to real estate prices in coastal areas - the areas that are threatened by rising seas?

WHOSE Priorities?

And what about our country’s priorities? Actually, really just the priorities of the parties in the budget talks ... just as with the "deficit commission" there weren't any low-income people, teachers, construction workers, unemployed, police officers, etc. in that room. I mean, cutting AIDS prevention, childrens' health programs, science research, education, flu prevention, safe drinking water, police?

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military?

… just over $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million to research on health care costs. Funding for health co-ops created under the Democrats' health care law was zeroed out.

… National Science Foundation saw a $43 million cut in its research funding from its current levels but a major $444 million cut from the President's initial request. …

Defense was not cut from current levels, instead increasing by $5 billion. FEMA first responder funding was cut by $786 million. Contributions to the U.N. and international organizations were cut by $377 million.

In addition, from AP,

$468 million from several education programs ...

$276 million from pandemic flu prevention programs, as requested by Obama.

$1 billion from Environmental Protection Agency clean and safe drinking water projects.

$1 billion from an account for prevention of AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases.

$600 million from community health centers.

$578 million from the Army Corps of Engineers.

$504 million from food aid to poor mothers and their infants.

$414 million from grants to state and local police departments.

$3.5 billion in unused Children's Health Insurance Program funds.

$500 million from eliminating summer school Pell Grants for college students from low-income families.

How about these for killing JOBS and the economy?

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military?

$946 million from construction and repair of federal buildings.

$350 million from Labor Department programs, including grants for community service jobs for senior citizens.

$2.5 billion in leftover highway money unavailable under current budget caps.

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military? In case I didn't mention it, they just passed another huge tax cuts for the rich, and this budget "cut" includes another $5 billion in spending on military.

Update: See the full list here.

Imagine a world where losing your job wasn't scary

Natasha Chart — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:33:01 -0500

Can you imagine a union leader talking about the end of a major, historical industry in their country and their not seeming to mind it? Well, I did see that here in Copenhagen and it well and truly blew my mind.

Marie-Louise Knuppert, the Confederal Secretary of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO i Danmark) spoke about this week about the closing of the last Danish shipyard. "We have been shipbuilders since the days of the Vikings," she said, but now the shipbuilding trade that had produced some of the world's largest container ships was looking forward to the new jobs that were coming.

As I mentioned, she didn't seem very bothered.

I asked Bob Baugh, Executive Director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Council, how it was possible. As far as I've ever known, when American unions talk about job sectors closing out it's always with regret. He chuckled.

Baugh said in part it was because they had so many safety nets in Denmark, just as in many other European countries. He said they never have to worry about health care or losing their homes, and they can expect many years of education. But there was more, because he said that even if such safety nets were instituted in the US, he still wouldn't feel the same way.

"They have, as a country [Denmark], put money into developing new industries. It's not just happenstance," said Baugh. "The other economies of the world engage in industriial policy and planning. We don't and it's killing us."

Baugh referred to the US' infrastructure debt of over $2 trillion. "It could be green," he said, "it could be spent to create good jobs." He said if the US didn't think about it strategically and promote certain industries, money could be spent to fix one problem only to make the employment situation worse.

As an example of how a job-promoting infrastructure policy could work, Baugh said that instead of simply purchasing transportation technology from a country such as France, the US government could pay to license that technology and bring the manufacturing work here. He said this would build capacity in the US as workers and engineers learned from the production and innovation cycle.

(The way innovation and research follow manufacturing was well and previously explained by Carolyn Bartholomew, Vice Chair of U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.)

For every country, Baugh said that "people are worried about who's going to get all the green jobs. There are plenty of green jobs just meeting the needs of your own country."

If we had a good safety net and a national commitment of meeting our clean economy needs at home, that does sound like a vision of a world where layoffs and company shutdowns might eventually stop being so alarming. it even sounds like a world that's an orthodox free trade dream of business flexibility. But the United States has a long way to go before US workers have every reason to be as mellow about getting a pink slip as the Danish.

Climate talks, forest agreement in little danger of 'creating a better world for nothing'*

Natasha Chart — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:35:12 -0500

Stall, confusion and indecision reign in the UNFCC COP15 summit in Copenhagen according to negotiators for both developed and developing nations, with the possible exception of the REDD+ agreements, which are intended to reimburse poorer countries for preserving existing forests.

The last publicly available drafts of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) and Long Term Cooperative Action (LCA) agreements were filled in with placeholders like "to be elaborated" at critical points, such as the financing and trade measures. So for any of these major pieces to be nearly complete (how complete is very much in doubt, though,) seems quite astonishing and I think it's worth examining in terms of whose interests are being represented.

Forest Cover

So while the REDD deal is being reported in the New York Times as though "all major points of disagreement ... had been resolved through compromise," including concerns about protecting indigenous rights. Yet a look at the UN release on the matter says, "activists complain that [indigenous rights have] been moved out of a legally binding part of the text."

Now, maybe people who are concerned about getting kicked off their land might be inspired to activism, or might have inspired other advocates, but maybe they're just people concerned about getting kicked off their land who are tired of being on the losing end of 'compromise.' Maybe being described as activists misses the point.

Environmental Defense Fund's Fred Krupp, (EDF, btw, being so important that they've got their own office in the trailers where the country delegations are set up) was quoted in the Times article saying that the main benefit of REDD was the way it would let US companies reduce their emissions at "lower cost." By which he almost certainly meant a lower cost than actually reducing emissions, offsetting unhealthy practices through the purchase of land rights to land that other people may already live on and hadn't agreed to sell.

Krupp described this business bonanza as being "very important politically," which I expect will cut little ice with people who stand to be made homeless by it. Without legally protections, indigenous peoples are about as protected by any agreement as the world's children are by UN proclamations on their rights and welfare.

I don't hear anyone describing Krupp as a 'business activist', for example, (indeed I've never heard that term used to describe anyone,) though he's probably better labeled that way than an indigenous person coming to the UN to ask for tenancy rights for their very own ancestral land.

Perhaps the UN press staff should have left it at saying 'some indigenous peoples' were unhappy with the deal, and the Times should have made it more clear who was actually doing the compromising in this case. Because I don't think the Amazon Indians who are counting on REDD to save their home want it to come with an eviction notice.

Moreover, there's concern that the legal definition of "forest" for the agreement purposes might also include tea or biofuel plantations. Such export-oriented agricultural development is often also responsible for the displacement of indigenous peoples, may be initiated by governments who aren't keen on democratic consultation, and are scientifically, emphatically, not the same as established forest cover.

When it does come to negotiating something substantial in terms of technology transfer, financing and trade, are the rest of the compromises going to mean greater exposure for the little guy, as well?

The G77 Speak Out On Inclusion

The G77 negotiators, such as Bernarditas de Castro Muller of the Phillipines, and head of the African Group, Kemel Djemouai of Algeria, and Sri Lankan ambassador Dr. Palitha T.B. Kohona, are certainly concerned that with things going as they are, they're going to end up on the menu.

Multiple complaints have been made regarding the process arranged by the meeting's Danish hosts, who are said to be cutting many nations out of secretive side negotiations and refusing to release draft texts to the parties.

At a press conference Monday night, Muller said their bloc had been "shifted aside" from negotiations, and was frustrated that the ministers of 48 nations had met privately over the weekend. She said that no 48 countries should be allowed to decide for everyone "no matter how important they are," and that it was wrong that so much of what was in the agreements appeared to be "self-financed adaptation."

Djemouai agreed that it wasn't fair for wealthy nations to do nothing, while the poor were asked to make commitments. Under Kyoto, developing nations have only voluntary responsibilities, while developed nations have legally binding emission reduction obligations. He said that "maybe in 50 years it will be fair," referring to future projections indicating that the share of developing country emissions will become the largest sources of additional greenhouse gases.

Their concern stemmed largely from the fact that even with a binding treaty, emissions from wealthy nations have continued to rise. At present, the LCA track isn't expected to produce a binding treaty, only a political agreement, along with a great deal more relative pressure on poorer countries to abide by it.

As Bolivia's ambassador, Pablo Solon, said after the US negotiator, Todd Stern, recently rejected the idea that the US had culpability in the climate crisis, "the industrialised countries ... have used up two thirds of the atmospheric space, depriving us of the necessary space for our development and provoking a climate crisis of huge proportions. ... In Bolivia we are facing a crisis we had no role in causing. Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor."

Yet as Meena Raman of the Third World Network explained in a December 14th Copenhagen news update, this question of whether both the KP and LCA discussions will go forward is a key sticking point. The EU and Japan are insisting that they want to be part of an agreement that includes the US, which the KP treaty isn't, and that they want there to be only one treaty. The developing nations prefer Kyoto and want a new commitment period negotiated, and appear to think that too little of either good faith or assistance has been extended for them to make binding commitments.

Where REDD Fits In

If REDD actually worked, it could net developing countries as much as $33 billion per year in carbon credit trades, which is more than three times the best offer of direct assistance suggested by wealthy nations who have so far offered a maximum of $10 billion.

The promise of that much additional money might well overcome objections to a verification mechanism that applied to developing nations. If it were an additional benefit on top of direct aid, REDD might just make things work.

Further, after strident objections by US negotiators to financially supporting initiatives that would benefit China, they appear to have agreed to refuse to take adaptation and mitigation funds. While they're still holding to a developing nation status, which they say is warranted by their per capita GDP, they're also saying that unlike many other countries, they can self-finance much of their development.

It'll be interesting to see how that unfolds after their insistence that wind projects in China should still be eligible for Clean Development Mechanism financing, but who knows. Even the US has shown lately that it can be less belligerent.

Still, there are serious problems with what's known about REDD to date, and it doesn't warrant unlimited exuberance.

Indigenous rights remain in limbo, the definition of a forest is as much in question as it was back in November after the Barcelona REDD talks, there are logging loopholes that allow developed nations to refuse to count logging below a projected baseline of logging activity as emissions, and the NGO observers who would generally remind negotiators of all this are being shut out.

As Brad Johnson said this week, "The UN is doing better on setting a mandatory and declining cap on access to Bella Center than on carbon emissions."

Funny, but true, and no less true of REDD so far than anything else we've seen. This agreement won't actually help if it simply creates "museums for trees", while allowing wealthy nations to go on about their business as usual. If climate change continues killing forests because preventing new emissions is counted as if it were cutting them, this will all have been for nothing.

* Quote in title from this article on the no regrets path to stabilizing the climate.

G77 Suspend COP15 Talks: "These Negotiations Are A Joke."

Natasha Chart — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:55:29 -0500

Members of the African civil society delegations held a protest in the main hall of the COP15 summit today to support their negotiators' decision to hold up the climate summit talks, temporarily suspending the conference, over the sidelining of the Kyoto Protocol discussions, that were proceeding in parallel to the Long-Term Cooperative Action (LCA) talks in which the US is participating.

"Nothing is being offered by the rich countries," said Negusu Aklilu of Ethiopia's Forum For Environment, "it's just a joke. Climate change is not a joke in Africa, but these negotiations are a joke."

"As we speak now, [Kyoto] is the only binding agreement that we have," said Aklilu. He reiterated the stance that there needed to be a binding agreement, saying that wealthy nations were refusing to engage and were deep in a "politically motivated, 'after you' syndrome."

Aklilu said he'd like decisions to be science-based, and that while a 40% reduction by 2020 is now being discussed, new information from the IPCC suggests limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would be necessary to save coastal Africa.

And then there's the question of mitigation and adaptation aid.

Going into more detail over something I've heard from several NGO representatives, Aklilu explained that much of the aid being discussed goes back to 1992 aid agreements that called for an ongoing commitment from wealthy nations of 0.7% of GDP. Not only have developed nations not generally kept this pledge, they would now like to repackage the same commitment as climate aid.

Aklilu said they wanted additional aid because climate change was an additional burden on their countries.

Just How Bad Is The Copenhagen Deal Going To Be?

Natasha Chart — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:41:10 -0500

As EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said when she spoke at the Copenhagen summit on Wednesday, "We all here on behalf of people who ... struggle with obstacles to immediate prosperity and anxiety for their economic future," due to the global financial crisis. With the US being a prime obstacle in the negotiation process, her statements about the US actions seemed like good tea leaves in which to read the fate of the COP15 meeting.

While Jackson went on to point out that this financial crisis has highlighted our interdependence and connectedness as a world community, and our need to work together, chances are that the global financial crisis will be used as an excuse to doom meaningful development assistance to the world's poorer countries, or sufficient action to prevent many island nations from disappearing below the waves.

Though Jackson spoke enthusiastically of having finalized the EPA's ruling on the serious threat carbon to our welfare, and the Obama administration has ruled that each federal agency must prepare its own 2020 emissions reduction plan, I think she was fudging a bit when she said that "this administration will not ignore science or the law any longer. Nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and grandchildren."

As Hunter Cutting of CAN International said in a Thursday press briefing, "We know there's a huge gap between what countries are pledging and what the science tells us we need." And while he said that all the developed world leaders promised a 2 degree Celsius level of warming from a deal, the current proposals would lead to a 3.8 degree rise in global temperatures, leaving the world in danger of "catastrophic warming that we cannot stop."

How does allowing catastrophic warming square with paying attention to science or acting on responsibilities towards future generations?

And consider that while talking about the endagerment finding, she said it "obligated [them] to take reasonable efforts," which isn't really the sort of thing you say when you believe you're endangered. The people of the world's small island nations know they're endangered, that even a 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures will erase them as countries (and devastate many other poor nations,) and when they talk it sounds like they believe that. They use words like "survival" and "emergency", which seem more actually reasonable under the circumstances.

No one in a position of authority is acting or talking as though this is an emergency at all. People notice. It matters.

Jackson also described one of the primary benefits of the EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act as functioning "without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy," and I like having a sound economy as much as the next person, but I couldn't help wondering what she meant by "better." I watched the bank bailout unfold, so did you. Whether better is going to be a measure of job creation or of political influence remains very much to be seen.

And about that Clean Air Act, when Jackson called for passing meaningful reform through the US Congress, she glided right over the fact that pending legislation in the House would remove EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the CAA. If the Obama administration doesn't want to see the loss of an EPA responsibility shunned by the Bush administration, if they really want to "make up for lost time," we should be hearing more about this.

Last, Jackson talked about cutting US emissions 80 percent below current levels by 2050. The rest of the world using the Kyoto Protocol guidelines is talking about emission cuts as compared to a 1990 baseline. So the short of it is that the US position is to try measuring percentage reductions of a larger number, actually our 2005 emission levels, wiggling right out of doing what's needed and giving other nations cover to do the same.

The outcome remains to be seen, though as Cutting pointed out in his briefing, Obama's coming to the summit along with so many other world leaders means there's almost certainly going to be a deal, and almost assuredly, a "greenwash."

If the Obama administration is truly serious about representing constituents facing immediate obstacles to prosperity, they'll think hard about the opportunity to create 20 million low-carbon jobs worldwide, and 1.9 million additional jobs in the US. In the process, they can meet both those obligations to the future and the test of justice towards the world's hundreds of millions who face the total destruction of their communities.

It's a 'death or cake' choice if ever there was one. I hope the administration chooses the cake.

Is China Still A Developing Nation?

Natasha Chart — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:18:26 -0500

This past week, the UN suspended funding for several Chinese wind farms, ruling the China had been gaming the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) subsidies paid by developed countries to developing countries for clean technology projects they would not have otherwise not have built.

The last point is key, what climate negotiators call "additionality." An agreement or sustainability mechanism is considered to be working if it reduces emissions from a business-as-usual scenario. This idea is going to come up a lot in the climate talks, almost as much as who gets considered a developing or developed nation. The definition determines who gets money and who gives it in this quest to make aid dollars have the most impact possible.

Needless to say, the CDM was not designed as an industrial dumping subsidy for flourishing, well-established industries, such as Chinese turbine manufacturers.

China is truly an economic powerhouse and their government went out of their way during the Olympics to highlight how modern and advanced a society they are. No one could dispute that, nor that they're stiff competition for us in the full range of heavy industry. Though it's hard to say that entirely disqualifies them as a developing nation. Much like India, they're almost two countries: one urban and high-tech, the other almost indistinguishable from a Medieval peasant economy.

According to World Bank estimates released last year, as of 2005, China still had 200 million people living in poverty. That's around six times the population of Canada, for comparison. Really, plenty enough people to be a whole country unto themselves, and it's this face that China presents to the world when it comes to climate negotiations. I'm not going to say that it's wrong for them to do that, either.

Human beings are the most significant arbiters of value for other humans and we should always value each other over dead matter. However, the 200 million in poverty in China live in a country that gets about half of the CDM money, though they make up just less than a tenth of the world population living in poverty.

If we're to really get all countries reducing emissions, what money is made available should at least be shared around more equitably.

I think it's a positive step that Obama has promised to help India and China with research and environmental enforcement., the moreso because it seems to have worked to get them moving in the right direction. They're major world economies with significant global impact and similar situations, and it seems fair for them to say that they didn't bring the world to its current state of crises, that they're late to a game the US, Europe and Japan have been playing for quite a while.

Though as with any other country, Chinese efforts to cut emissions that are meaningful must meet the test of additionality.

Right now, the world is increasing emissions at an increasing rate. Previous climate talks have been centered around getting all of us to increase emissions at a decreasing rate, which is to say, to still be increasing emissions, but more slowly. The scientific imperative is that emissions decrease significantly from previous levels if we want to stave off catastrophe, and that they become negative (that we start pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put in) if we're to keep a stable climate like the one we've had for most of recorded history.

It isn't an accident that there was an explosion of human population and civilization during a period, brief in geologic time, notable mostly for its stability and mildness. Mild climate was a key factor in making civilization as we know it possible.

China has certainly started looking at clean technology as a business opportunity, as well. They have set binding internal targets, even if they've opposed external targets. However, there are serious questions about whether their current emission proposals represent a cut from business as usual. As a leading manufacturing economy, their impact either way, regardless of their relative newcomer status, will affect us all and bears particular attention.

And here we come back to where the US needs to step carefully. China needs to be brought into an agreement, yes, but so do we.

In addition to additionality, the political will required to maintain climate agreements will only stay with us if it accompanies increasing, widespread prosperity. China, India, and all the rest of the developing nations, must rise. Though if workers in developed nations are allowed to fall, that will inevitably choke off support for continuing with technology transfer and development assistance.

Everybody must win or everybody will fail. I don't mean to come over all self-help on you, but it's only the veriest truth.

If jobs and prosperity fall in the US, the US will continue being an enormous obstacle to world emission cuts, as we have been, lo, these many years.

But is China a developing nation or a rival on equal footing? What can both parties give that will best promote cuts from business-as-usual emissions? What mechanism will bring the greatest prosperity to average people in both countries, lifting their population out of poverty and keeping ours from sliding down into it? How we answer these questions will have a huge effect on whether either country comes to the table in good faith, and on that, much of the fate of the world hangs.

A Backdrop For Copenhagen

Natasha Chart — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:16:24 -0500

Jonathan Hiskes at Grist has written up a Copenhagen 101 primer for anyone who's just tuning in to the latest round of world climate talks, so I don't have to. Which is great, because there were three main points I wanted to go over.

First, the imperative: the planet is likely on track to lose life support ability for 5 billion people below current levels and our window to prevent this outcome is closing rapidly.

Catastrophic changes could happen within the lifetime of someone born today and have already begun. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu noted earlier in the year, California could be an uninhabitable desert within 40-50 years, and the state is already seeing mass dust storms, snow pack failures and widespread forest die-off. Around half the Midwest was declared an agricultural disaster area this year. Just for this country in the next couple decades, we could face drastic upheavals and it's no better outside our borders.

We're seeing ice changes happening 20 years ahead of schedule, sea levels that could rise over a meter by the end of the century, and a number of environmental indicators pointing to a worst-case scenario.

So here's the thing, there isn't a bigger problem than this facing humanity. This is the one that will make all our other difficulties impossible to solve.

Both the US military intelligence community and the Chinese government recognize climate change as a threat to national security, no matter what Exxon-Mobil says.

Second, the obstacles: who's going to pay for all this and why do we keep asking that like it's a bad thing?

There are other obstacles, like Exxon-Mobil, but mostly, somebody has invest the startup costs. Germany has done this in-country, as they've met their Kyoto targets three years early and have a strong economy and manufacturing base to show for it.

Though paying for climate mitigation and a clean energy transition is like being offered a chance to get in on the ground floor at Microsoft.

The old economy is dying, and the remnants of it are creating ever lower-paying jobs and an ever-decreasing standard of living. It isn't clear that policymakers have realized this yet, but unemployment and underemployment lead to even bigger deficits and kill the prospect of recovering a broad tax base for struggling state and local governments. We're headed for the bottom right now, if we maintain business as usual.

We must create new industries and new markets to get out of that situation, just as the way out of the Great Depression was direct job creation.

Clean energy, energy and efficiency retrofits, updated transit infrastructure - this is the way forward. People may worry about going forward, but there's no standing still option, only back.

Which is the dirty, big secret of the fossil fuel industry, that they've set us on a path of inevitably declining living standards, fewer jobs and worse health. Indeed, if forty years from now there are more people living and shivering in makeshift huts than there are today, it will be the direct result of listening to the Luddites of the oil, gas and coal industries who don't want our energy economy to advance beyond what it was 100 years ago.

Third, we're all in this together: the climate is a global phenomenon and there's no real escape from it.

Some areas may feel the impact worse than others, some are feeling it earlier than others. But in a globalized economy, wild and unpredictable weather can have worldwide repercussions. Consider that Hurricane Katrina caused an oil price spike, and a scramble throughout the world oil industry over the interruption of refinery and transport services.

A serious commitment to reduce emissions needs to be a worldwide commitment. This has been previously used as a call for inaction by delayers in Congress, dragging their feet until some other country does something first. (Since when did Congress get to be so whiny, so unconvinced that America was capable of great things, anyway?) But it is true that as developing countries pull themselves up, if they do what we did to industrialize, it'll cook the planet.

Developing nations must have the financial support and knowledge resources to lift people out of poverty and create opportunity with the latest, cleanest technology. Now that Obama's planning to attend the last, crucial day of the summit, partly in response to the commitment of so many world leaders to personally attend and really try to get an agreement, that might happen.

If it doesn't happen, we're cooked. And I don't mean that metaphorically.

Climate Change Legislation Must Stimulate Demand, Be Tough On Pollution

Natasha Chart — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:42:26 -0400

Consider these three worrying things: First, there's some risk that putting the wrong type of price signal solely on domestic pollution may transfer both jobs and pollution overseas, while increasing pollution. Second, that prices put on imports, like a recent tariff on imported solar panels, may not withstand the various political pressures brought to bear against it. Third, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proved to have been too optimistic, because climate change is happening much faster than they first thought it would.

Can these problems be solved together? They must.

Preserving Manufacturing

When looking at the state-by-state data for yesterday's post on popular support for the public option, I started off using 2005 census data, but soon found the 2008 data instead. While going through and changing the numbers, which mostly shifted up by some small amount, Michigan's figures were startling just in those three years. But it gets worse.

Between 2001 and 2009, Michigan lost 465,000 residents. It gets worse. The outmigration consists mostly of younger, more educated workers, leaving collapsed home values and eroding the local tax base for essential services and infrastructure maintenance.

Not coincidentally, from 2000 to 2006, Michigan lost 336,000 jobs, mostly in manufacturing. Between 2006 and 2008, the state lost another 74,000 manufacturing jobs. Early this year, Gov. Granholm reported that one in ten residents was unemployed, while talking about retraining efforts the state had implemented to reduce reliance on the auto industry.

If the US continues losing manufacturing jobs, Michigan will have a lot more company in misery.

Nonetheless, international trade agreements and the status of upcoming climate negotiations make it very thorny to implement tariffs. Stiff opposition to trade barriers used to be the bane of developing nations who wanted to protect nascent, homegrown industries from competition with mature manufacturing economies. The same opposition to trade protections the United States and others embedded into the fabric of groups like the World Trade Organization can easily come back to bite us.

Reaping Renewable Jobs

As workers and investors look for new opportunities in the shifting global marketplace, renewable energy seems like an increasingly better choice. Though as Deutsche Bank analysts warn, if the US doesn't have a strong energy policy, investment capital will go elsewhere.

A decent case scenario for solar manufacturing in the US is probably for enough of a tariff to stand to encourage Chinese companies to bring final stage manufacture to the US. A better case would be winning a dumping dispute against China. Yet in a recent reaction to US charges that China was dumping tires in the US, China brought dumping charges against US chicken and auto parts industries. If it works, they'll probably go that route again, and our trade interdependence can make them hard to argue with.

The risk is that any US domestic industry that wants the government to hold back Chinese competition could trigger retaliation against another industry, possibly pitting US industries against each other.

For example, China also has a lock on many of the rare earth minerals, over 90 percent of the available supply of some, used to make wind turbines and many other devices essential to a high-tech green reformation. They've lately been tightening exports. Long-term, the wind industry and the jobs it creates isn't just vulnerable to pressure from China, it's dependent upon them.

For those seeking less conflict, the Deutsche Bank analysis did point to another type of support long provided to the domestic renewable energy sector in Germany, several other European countries, India and a few states here in the US: the feed-in tariff.

Feed-in tariffs establish a base price for renewable energy generation that's paid for across the system, guaranteeing that homeowners and commercial power utilities using less-polluting technologies can sell into the grid.

The local demand support and reliable cash flow makes all sorts of renewable energy attractive, like solar photovoltaic in Germany, a country not known for its abundance of sunny weather. As the Deutsche Bank report pointed out, Germany's seven years of feed-in tariffs created 300,000 jobs, without running afoul of the international community.

Demand support works on another problem, too, the limited availability of clean energy technologies. Last year. demand for PV panels so outstripped supply that customers missed a tax credit window. (If a business misses a tax credit window, I think it can safely be assumed that the situation is serious.) If the global supply chain can't meet the current needs for renewable energy technologies, a steady uptick in demand provided by strong federal energy policy is likely to create a larger window of opportunity for American manufacturers to step through.

And there are a great many other renewable energy technologies, from geothermal to solar thermal, to solar water heating. Congress already showed a willingness to support demand for many of them in the stimulus bill, where business and individual tax credits for renewables were expanded for 2009. Hopefully they can be nudged a few more steps in that direction.

From manufacture to installation and servicing, each of these technologies holds out a chance for a variety of dignified jobs in industries that the recently released Senate climate legislation will already require to pay prevailing wages.

Climate Deadline

The 2007 IPCC report wasn't able to include papers like this 2007 report, showing that the American southwest was on the edge of entering a permanent drought, because the studies came in after their deadline. In the subsequent two years, some environmental indicators, like ice that's melting 30 years ahead of IPCC projections, has shown the IPCC to have been much too optimistic.

Scientists think we may have already locked in a dangerous degree of warming but there are still some hopes remaining if we act quickly.

One thing the US almost certainly can't for is every other nation on earth agreeing to help us solve this problem in a way satisfactory to us. The ensuing standoff could last, has lasted, far too long. Not only will it prevent our using this period of calm before the storm to grow and attract new industries, it may mean we can't even act in time to mitigate the damage that will be caused by worsening droughts and increasingly unpredictable, violent weather events.

Now is the time to address the climate crisis.

So while I admire Sen. Sherrod Brown's commitment to preserving manufacturing jobs, I hope he'll bring all his creativity to bear on helping Senate colleagues open up new avenues of demand for our nation's talented workers, ones that still allow us to move forward in meeting the challenge of preserving our species' global habitat. We'll only meet that challenge if a large portion of the US' labor pool is working hard at fixing it.

Putting A Cap On A Lie About Cap-And-Trade Cost

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:05:54 -0400

2007 Was Second Warmest Year on Record

Armand Biroonak — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

2007 was Earth's second warmest year on record, tied with 1998. The eight warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years have all occurred since 1990.