Collide-a-scape

In 2008, it was shaped by Copenhagen and the proposed U.S. congressional cap & trade legislation. That makes sense, since major political events (especially protracted ones) tend to propel narratives. (Ordinarily, climate science drives the global warming narrative, but 2008 was akin to a presidential election year for climate change.) Sure there were new public opinion polls and plenty of fresh, alarming scientific findings that fueled media coverage, but the master narrative flowed from the political dealmaking done in the U.S and on the international stage.

The storyline in 2009 is shaping up to be something much different. Marc Morano can continue to insist that global warming is a hoax because of the hacked emails or the latest IPCC screwup, but no amount of screaming headlines on Climate Depot is going to alter the firm scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming is real, or the minds of a majority of people who think it’s real (if not an urgent problem).

So there’s still going to be a debate on how to curb greenhouse gases this year. The question is, will cap & trade remain a central theme? I’m guessing no if the U.S. climate bill gets put on the shelf with healthcare legislation.

What does that mean for the next round of international talks in Mexico City? Remember, it’s a given that a world treaty hinges on the U.S. passing a climate bill. So what happens if cap & trade is eliminated from congressional legislation, which seems increasingly likely? What if the whole bill is scuttled? What’s the climate narrative then, leading up to Mexico City? How do you negotiate an international cap & trade mechanism with carbon reduction targets if the world’s second largest emitter isn’t on board?

I thought that Mike Hulme laid out an intriguing scenario in this recent Nature piece.  Hulme speaks to the growing sense that a clearer path emerged from the chaos of Copenhagen, one that

reflects a new political reality [where] politics and power will win out. My view is that this was a good outcome from Copenhagen. I think that people may well now see that there is more progress to be made by pursuing options outside of the formal structure of the UN.

Along these lines, Hulme said he would

like to see more radical thinking. Different climate forcing agents might be best attended to in different ways. One could have two separate treaties: one controlling short-lived agents such as black soot and methane, and one concerned solely with carbon dioxide.

So far so good. I can imagine climate advocates in the U.S  signing up for that. But then Hulme suggests a mitigation strategy that would require a whole new institutional and political mindset:

I don’t hold out a great deal of optimism that market-based mechanisms — especially with [only] a proportion being auctioned — provide a strong enough downward pressure on emissions. For that reason, I wouldn’t mind too much if [the climate bill] doesn’t get through the Senate if it forces other types of thinking. I’ve come around to the view that we need to set near-term targets that are pragmatic and technology-based, and they should be achievable on the basis of credible social, technical and economic analysis, not aspirational targets driven by IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] science. It’s better to be pragmatic than to be overly aspirational; surely the lessons of the 12 years since Kyoto tell us that?

Now if this perspective catches on, we got ourselves a whole new climate narrative.

UPDATE: Soon after writing this post, I recalled the news last year of Republican Senator Inhofe’s concerns about black soot. Hulme raises the idea of a separate treaty on this noxious pollutant. Perhaps there is common ground between climate advocates and skeptics on black soot?

UPDATE 2: David Roberts of Grist is becoming a true climate realist:

It’s now fairly clear that the long-time environmentalist dream of having a binding international treaty that imposes ambition on participating countries is forlorn. The iron law of geopolitical relations is asserting itself here: countries will do what is in their own best interests based on their own circumstances … and no more.

David Roberts is first out of the box to note the obvious, after reading this story in today’s Times, which quotes Republican Lindsey Graham:

Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere. They’re not business-friendly enough, and they don’t lead to meaningful energy independence.

Graham then drives the nail in the coffin when he adds:

What is dead is some massive cap-and-trade system that regulates carbon in a fashion that drives up energy costs.

Roberts, who had previously argued that even a weak cap and trade bill was better than nothing, seems ready to throw in the towel:

To me, regardless of what Obama or Reid may want, this signals the death knell for a comprehensive cap-and-trade program, this year and probably for the duration of Obama’s term in office. If Graham won’t go for it, no Republican will, certainly not the 6-8 Republicans needed.

I was going to hold off on posting about this momentous development until Joe Romm weighed in. Nobody’s more wedded to the cap and trade bill than him. He’s put all his chips on it. I’m kinda thinking he’s going to play out that hand, no matter how rotten it gets. (Andrew Light should school him on how to win at poker.) But as of this writing, Romm is silent on Graham’s bombshell. I don’t imagine it’ll stay that way for long.

More importantly, I look forward to hearing what Roberts and other cap and trade advocates come up with as alternative policy paths. I’ve argued here that a true reset in climate policy will only come after some of the influentials start singing a new tune. That might happen real soon if Senator Graham is taken at his word.

UPDATE (1/27, 12:30 pm): How weird is it that CP’s news round-up mentions this story but not this one? This particular feature at the blog, in the way it studiously avoids any bad news to the party line, rivals Pravda. Still waiting for Romm to issue a judgment on the Graham quotes.

UPDATE 2: (2:40 pm) Romm plays down the signficance of Graham’s statements to the NYT.

UPDATE 3: (1/28): David Roberts, after being “scolded by several progressive green friends,” walks back his initial post. Nice backbone Dave, and how lame is it to blame the reporter? If anyone portrayed Graham’s quotes out of context, it would be you (and me), not Broder. And I’m not seeing that, just a lot of walk back from him too.

Looks like there’s an important new voice in the climate change debate. As Roger Pielke Jr. notes, Bill Gates recently offered some refreshing thoughts on climate policy, starting with this:

Conservation and behavior change alone will not get us to the dramatically lower levels of Co2 emissions needed to make a real difference. We need to focus on developing innovative technologies that produce energy without generating any CO2 emissions at all.

To this end, Gates charts a new path for climate advocates who can’t get traction with doomsday scenarios and who now watch helplessly as chances for an international climate treaty grow dimmer by the day.  Let’s stop focusing on halfway measures, Gates argues, and just cut to the chase:

If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters – getting to zero.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.

However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

Some climate advocates are likely to counter that Gates presents a false dichotomy – innovation or effeciency. But Yael Borofsky over at the Breakthrough Institute blog has a convincing rejoinder:

They are ignoring the “energy crossroads” the United States is facing. As it becomes increasingly clear that cap and trade is not the policy to help us meet our climate change mitigation goals or our energy needs, Gates is not pushing for an either/or decision, he’s pushing for an honest prioritization.

Gates will have to keep pushing if he becomes seriously engaged in this debate, because energy innovation is not at the tip of the political or policy spear. In fact, there’s so much political and institutional investment in cap and trade at this point that I think one of two things has to happen before innovation becomes an “honest prioritization”:

1) There has to be fundamental mindset change in the influentials, such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. The horse they back is Joe Romm. So far, Romm’s approach (cap and trade, political horsetrading) has won over both Friedman and Krugman. (It’s the so-called “climate realist” approach.) But if the two influential columnists start to believe that Romm is leading them down a dead end, then maybe they rethink their positions and start listening more to Gates.

2) Peak oil happens soon, as in within a few years. If oil prices spike and Americans are again paying over 4 bucks a gallon for a gallon of gas, then political conditions might be right for an “honest prioritization” in energy policy.

And you thought the the whole cap-and-trade debate surrounding the U.S. climate bill was already hopelessly politicized. What’s that, you’ve become a bit numbed to it all? How about we throw in a juicy free speech angle to spice things up a bit.

Remember those two EPA lawyers that wrote a critical op-ed of cap-and-trade last weekend in the Washington Post?  They also made the same case in a video posted on YouTube (entitled, “The Huge Mistake”), which EPA is now demanding be removed, according David Roberts at Grist. Wrong move, Roberts points out, for one obvious reason:

When Bush administration NASA officials attempted to monitor and control what scientist James Hansen said to the press, they were rightly criticized. By the same token, even though I think many of Williams & Zabel’s policy arguments are deeply flawed, I can’t see any justification for refusing them the right to communicate honestly about their backgrounds to the public. EPA should back off.

The irony of the EPA’s attempted muzzling doesn’t stop there. In May of 2008, the same two lawyers wrote a similarly critical missive against cap-and-trade in an open letter to Congress.  Guess what, the Bush Administration had no problems with this demonstration of free speech. As Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environment Capitol noted at the time, if the muzzle was strapped on for the likes of Hansen,

it apparently can also be removed–like when a chance arises to criticize the climate-change bills in Congress that the administration dislikes.

Never mind the charges of hypocrisy that are sure to be leveled at the Obama Administration if its EPA insists on that video being pulled down. As one commenter at Grist observes

No, the real stupidity by the EPA is that by reacting so, they propel this into greater controversy and publicity.

Too late for that, unless Morano sleeps in on Sundays.

Lost in all this is a larger, perhaps even uglier debate that might soon rear its head, if anyone picks up on the argument Michael Tobis is making, in light of recent events:

Now that Copenhagen is not a big deal anymore, there’s no real rush to produce a bill in the US. Let’s drop Waxman-Markey and its variants, and take our time to try to come up with something that works.

Michael, what are you, a “delayer”?

If you are honest about the proposed climate change legislation in Congress, you have to be asking yourself this too:

It’s such a colossal compromise from a scientific point of view that one wonders why industry is mobilizing elaborate and dishonest astroturf campaigns against it.

The nascent field of environmental security better be ready for prime time, because this front-page NYT story on Sunday is sure to inject the national security/climate change nexus into the public debate.

It’ll be interesting to see how the leading environmental security advocates respond to John Broder’s NYT article. (Keep an eye here and here.) I’ll wager that they are overjoyed by the sudden spotlight but also nervous about having to defend climate change as their premier issue. To understand their dilemma, all you need to do is read Broder’s opening graph:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Guess what: violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics already occur without climate change. (They always have throughout history.) Now throw in shaky governments, civil wars and terrorism. All these volatile forces, in some combination, adds up to what many nation-states face daily.  The problem, according to environmental security advocates, is that U.S. policymakers and military planners haven’t focused enough on the environmental side of the equation. True, that’s slowly changing. But it’s also not so easy to tease out the multiple factors responsible for a country’s descent into disorder and assign which is most responsible.

Hopping aboard the climate change bandwagon makes that task much easier. It’s risky, though. Some environmental security experts, such as Geoff Dabelko, recognize this:

While climate change is expected to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intrastate conflict, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of conflict. For example, simply labeling the genocide in Darfur a “climate conflict” is both wrong and counterproductive: It ignores political and economic motivations for the fighting—and can be perceived as a way to let the regime in Khartoum off the hook. To fully understand how the conflict between  Sudanese pastoralists and agriculturalists reached this extreme, we must not only examine the interplay between environmental issues like desertification, drought, and declining agricultural productivity, but also political relationships, power struggles, and ethnic grievances

What should be of more immediate concern to Dabelko and his colleagues, which they are likely waking up to this morning, is how quickly their work will become political fodder in the furious climate policy debate. Witness for example, the two responses published hours after Broder’s story appeared, from two people who represent the extreme ends of this debate. (See here and here.)

Interestingly, the person who has best analyzed Broder’s story (so far) is Andy Revkin over at Dot Earth. Part of Broder’s piece discusses how the security angle is being used to sell pending cap and trade legislation in Congress. But as Revkin notes,

Even if the legislation took effect and emissions were curtailed, the world would still see disruptive pressures building in places already facing severe drought and flood risks with or without the added kick from greenhouse warming. Africa’s population could easily double by midcentury, and recent research has shown that its most volatile region, along the south flank of the Sahara, faces the inevitability of epic droughts.

Revkin thus sets the stage for the focus of the next Times story on climate change and national security: adaptation.

Play along with me for a minute. Let’s say this economist from the London School of Economics is right when he asserts:

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud.  It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions.  In fact it is designed to permit increases in CO2E emissions.

And that Roger Pielke Jr. is right when he shows here

how offsets under the bill will allow emissions to rise essentially indefinitely.

Or that at the very least, as A Siegel contends, the bill

falls far short of what is necessary and, well, quite likely falls short of what is possible.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, the worst outcome as envisioned by the above critics, particularly the first two. (Climate change advocates like playing that “worst scenario” game, so why not?) If the WM bill is really a con, then why do so many smart, well-intentioned people, such as President Obama, Al Gore and Paul Krugman support it?

Is is possible they know the WM bill is really a “con” but that they have a different end game in mind?

The person who best supplies that answer is Joe Romm, among the bill’s biggest champions. His rationale, shared by many cap and trade advocates, is that the WM bill

takes us off of the business as usual path, which is the most important thing, and it accelerates the transition to a clean energy economy, which is the second most important thing, and it establishes a framework that can be tightened as reality and science render inevitable.

Viewed this way, the WM bill is likely rationalized as a temporary misdirection, a necessary illusion. Instead of the bill taking the trajectory that Pielke imagines, supporters believe its course can be corrected at a later, more politically opportune date.

To WM boosters, this is not a “con,” but it is a very risky gamble.

Over at Foreign Policy, Daniel Drezner offers a tutorial on international relations theory as it applies to international climate change negotiations:

China has supplanted America as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. From an economic perspective, we are witnessing a transition from a bipolar world (the US + EU) to a multipolar world (OECD + BRICs). International relations theory is not sanguine about what this means for international cooperation. In theory, a concert of great powers can still foster cooperation. Possible does not mean likely, however.  In practice, as the number of powerful actors increases, the likelihood of meaningful cooperation declines.

Advocates of the Waxman-Markey climate bill argue that the odds of such cooperation greatly improve if the U.S. brings a congressional commitment to the bargaining table. Drezner remains unconvinced:

my expert take is that Waxman-Markey is kind of like Obama’s other soft power initiatives–they certainly don’t hurt, but they also don’t help all that much either.

Prodded by his editor to offer an alternative course of action, Drezner suggests that an international climate change framework

link adaptation benefits to constructive steps on mitigation.  The expert consensus on global warming is that regardless on what is done to mitigate its effects, adaptation to elevated levels of greenhouse gases will be required. Furthermore, this burden will fall disproportionately on the developing world.  Unlike mitigation, which is a pure public good, adaptation is an excudable benefit.  If a climate change regime proffers an adaptation fund of some sort linked to concrete steps on mitigation, it could nudge the big LDC emitters towards the necessary levels of cooperation

That’s intriguing. I wonder what climate policy experts make of this.

As the mind-numbing debate over Waxman-Markey grinds on, we should be thankful for the unintended entertainment provided by Joe Romm’s rants and contortionist logic.

Upset that some critics have accused him of “cheerleading” the WM bill, Romm is now flailing away, lashing out in typical, unseemly asides at all his usual bogeymen. More bizzarely, Romm is trying to convince his readers (and himself?) that he’s always been upfront about how foul-smelling the WM bill really is. Well, for those who care to follow it, here’s the paper trail:

May 12: “How I learned to stop worrying and love Waxman-Markey, part 2: In praise of domestic offsets.”

May 17: “…what it actually does is enact into law a sweeping clean energy revolution that puts the nation on a path to virtually eliminate global warming pollution from the entire economy in four decades.”

May 21: “House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate bill…”

June 1: “No, I’m not a cheerleader for this weak, cheerless bill.”

On a related note, it’s fascinating to watch Romm dig a hole for himself with comments like this, also from his recent tangential post:

To be clear, my perspective is that the chances of avoiding catastrophic climate change if Waxman-Markey dies is zero…

Now Romm has previously admitted that the odds are against this bill getting through the House and Senate. So what happens if the WM bill does die?

Is that it? Game over? Romm closes shop, and we wait for doomsday? There’s really no getting around zero. But if this bill goes down, you can bet that Romm will climb out of that hole he built and pretend like nobody saw it happen.

Earlier this week, Curtis Brainard at CJR’s The Observatory wrote an excellent appraisal of the cacophonous debate over the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Brainard neatly summarized the two contradictory narratives and the main protagonists.

To help navigate what Andy Revkin recently called “the fog of climate policy,” Brainard suggests that newspaper editorial boards should be weighing in on the Waxman-Markey bill (only a handful have thus far):

These editorials are incredibly valuable to readers trying to make sense of the myriad voices ringing out on the news pages.

I’m not so sure that’s the best way. After all, most editoral pages have a particular ideological slant. I’d argue that more independent thought and less ideology would better help people reach an informed decision.