Tag: Obama

The Climate War

The climate change rhetoric when Obama came to power was exciting. It sounded as if he would lead from the front and the US would soon have a federal cap-and-trade system. “Delay is not longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”  Certainly we have seen an end to denial from the White House. But we are still waiting for an end to delay, and increasingly it looks as if we’ll be waiting for a long time. Why?

Eric Pooley’s book The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth sheds a good deal of light on why it is that America, in spite of all the scientific evidence that demonstrates the threatening reality of climate change, is still unable, and often unwilling, to mobilise itself to address the danger.
The author is an accomplished journalist who has spent hundreds of hours over the past three years interviewing some of the players in America’s painfully slow progress towards climate change legislation.  The result is an illuminating story of battles in an ongoing war which is far from conclusion. It’s told painstakingly but with a narrative verve that carries the reader along irresistibly through its mass of detailed accounts. It’s compelling reading, from which I’ll mention just a few examples.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is the climate change group to which Pooley devotes most of his attention. A large organisation which has been at work for over 40 years, the EDF has long argued for a cap and trade system to tackle CO2 emissions. Its president, Fred Krupp, is focused on partnership with business to bring about political action on climate change and was influential in the formation of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) in 2007, initially a group of ten companies and four environmental groups. Among them was Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy. In typically detailed fashion Pooley recreates the drama of meetings at which were hammered out the conditions on which Rogers felt he could join the Call for Action USCAP planned to issue. It hinged on whether allowance was made for initial free distribution of allowances to utilities like Duke, a sticking point for Rogers.

USCAP may have been looked at askance by many Green groups, but Roger’s involvement didn’t go down well with his colleagues at the Edison Electric Institute either. He was chairman at the time and several CEOs called for him to step down. At the Heartland Institute denier’s convention in 2008 Steven Milloy bitterly expressed his dismay that CEOs would endorse a mandatory cap. “What do you do when the people who represent business and free enterprise have switched sides on you?”

As the Waxman-Hartley bill was developing, the question of emission allowances being free or auctioned remained vexed. Krupp was willing to give way to the companies, maintaining that it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how many allowances were distributed in a given year and how quickly the number was ratcheted down. The declining cap would see to it that coal use declined.

After his close coverage of the tortuous development of the bill, Pooley concludes:

“Of course Waxman-Markey was full of flaws, compromises, and reluctant nods to political reality.  But the bill got right a lot more than it got wrong.  By giving carbon allowances to electric distribution companies and requiring them to pass the value on to customers, it used the cap and trade mechanism to address to genuine cost imbalances between regions of the US – making the system fairer and helping the very heartland people who most wanted to see the whole thing wither and die.”

Pooley recognises that the intransigence of the Republicans meant that the bill reflected negotiations only between the left and right wings of the Democratic party, not between the left and right wings of America. “Like a wounded animal, the GOP’s only reflex was to lash out. Anything Obama was for, they would be against.”  It’s a sad commentary on a party which has too often allowed itself to be informed on global warming by the organised denial movement which Pooley also takes into his purview.

Al Gore features frequently in the book. His Alliance for Climate Protection organization aimed to spend $100 million a year for three years on advertising campaigns. In July 2008 his Repower America speech challenged the nation to commit to clean energy within ten years. After the elections he sought to orchestrate a large, loud chorus of voices calling on the president-elect and the new Congress to go big and go quickly on the energy front. Some wanted an energy bill first and to leave cap-and-trade for later. Gore disagreed. “If we’re going to have a fight on climate, let’s have a big fight.”

James Hansen enters the picture from time to time.  He met with Rogers over a meal. Pooley records each man’s feeling as they left the restaurant. Rogers felt positive: I’m not a confrontational guy, and neither is he. Hansen felt disappointed: This man has a reputation for being green, but he doesn’t really know what it means. His priority is making money.

Pooley records at best mixed messages from the White House. On a good day Larry Summers told USCAP leaders that the stimulus bill needed to be complemented with a cap-and-trade mechanism. “It’s like two blades of a scissors…We need both of them.”  But when it came to the Waxman-Markey bill, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod wanted to stick to the clean energy message and leave climate policy to Waxman. Pooley tells of the committed greens in the White House being defeated time and again by those in the political and economic teams who consider voters don’t care about climate action enough for the president to fight for it. The president who we expected to lead on the issue remains strangely constrained.

Obama went to Copenhagen having failed to move a climate bill. Pooley credits him with an honest, even heroic, attempt there to break the deadlock by bringing the major developing nations to the climate table. His speech offered welcome straight talk on the science, though little on the necessary action to address it. But the possibility of a triumph at Copenhagen had already been ruled out by his decision at home not to mount an education campaign on climate science and clean energy jobs to counter the sceptics, and the failure to put a top-level aide in charge of the international climate issue.

Pooley ends with questions:

“Alexis de Tocqueville long ago said that in the US, events ‘can move from the impossible to the inevitable without ever stopping at the probable.’  Was that still true?  How bad did things need to get before the moment came?  Would the prospect of a clean energy economy, and the jobs it would bring, mobilize enough people to make a difference?  Or would some sort of monstrous, galvanic weather event – epic heat and drought, Katrina on steroids – be needed to shake America fully awake?”

They seem to me open questions.  After following through the labyrinthine processes the author describes by which anything happens, if it happens, in the American political system and recognising the blinkered self-interest and sometimes sheer malevolence that seems to motivate many of the players, I found it hard to credit that America is on the verge of significant progress.  But I took what comfort I could from Pooley’s final brief paragraph where he imagines that the campaigners refused to be paralysed by the questions posed, “splashed some cold water on their faces, ran their fingers through their hair, threw back their shoulders and marched toward the sound of the guns”.

[Buy at Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

Dominion Post editorial as shaky as Herald’s

When I was writing the post on the Herald’s acceptance of journalistic say-so in its editorial on the IPCC Gareth drew my attention to the fact that the Dominion Post had also produced an editorial claiming that the ethics and integrity of climate scientists is being called into question.  I was too engaged with the Herald to consider including the Dominion Postin the ambit of my attention at the same time, but now that I’ve had a closer look I rather wish I had.  The editorial is four days old, but still deserves taking apart.

The evidence the editorial draws attention to is first the publication of the stolen emails, suggesting, it claims, a conspiracy to hide data and play down information which didn’t fit the theories of the scientists concerned.  Then the Himalayan glacier error.  Nothing new here and comment familiar and predictable.

But the editorial had a  revelation (a different one from those offered by the Herald):

 

“Now it has been revealed that another IPCC warning –- that global warming could wipe out 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest –- was extrapolated from an unsubstantiated claim by two green campaigners who had no scientific expertise.”

Looks pretty serious.  Where did the revelation come from?  It turns out from the same journalist as one of the Herald’s revelations.  Yes, Jonathan Leake in a different article in  the UK Sunday Times.

I’m relieved of the need to track down the details of Leake’s supposed exposure of yet another bogus IPCC claim by Tim Lambert of Deltoid who has a detailed analysis of the shady process by which Leake got to where he did. It turns out that Leake had been told by the scientist concerned, Dan Nepstad, that the IPCC statement was correct, but there had been an error in the citations listed in the WWF report (yes, WWF – no prizes for guessing who’s been trawling through the IPCC references looking for the letters WWF). I won’t try to cover the details of the account Nepstad has given to Lambert, which you can read on Deltoid, but the essential point is that Leake in his article concealed the fact that he had been told by the scientist concerned that the statement was correct. Presumably it would have made his story unnecessary. Why bother telling the truth when it would interfere with a story which opens like this?

A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Dominion Post is as guilty as the Herald of uncritically passing round journalistic stories which drastically and groundlessly distort the work of the IPCC. Its editorial doesn’t draw the conclusion that climate change is not happening, but makes this extraordinarily sweeping and ignorant statement:

“Why trust a panel that confuses opinion and fact, wrongly attributes that opinion, tries to shout down critics and displays a determination to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around.”

Evidently in the editorial sections of our leading newspapers where the IPCC is concerned  ignorance and carelessness won’t be permitted to inhibit confident assurance.

Source for the goose: footnotes to history

Exploring the footnotes in Ian Wishart’s Air Con is proving to be an entertaining exercise. Last week I followed a reference that revealed a “National Science Foundation report” he cites to support his thesis that glaciers are showing a “delayed reaction” to warming hundreds of years ago, was in fact a 10 year old US educational web site aimed at middle school students — and that he had misunderstood it.

This week, I’m going to take you on a strange trip deep into the workings of Wishart’s theories about George Soros, and reveal the telling details he doesn’t want you to know. Earlier this week, Peter Griffin’s Sciblogs post on the US Centre for Public Integrity’s in-depth reporting on climate lobbying attracted Wishart’s attention:

…in their battle to spin about the evils of climate PR propaganda, Peter and Gareth approvingly hang their story on the work of the “US Center for Public Integrity”, exposed in Air Con as funded handsomely by drugs legalization kingpin and carbon investor George Soros.

I mean, puhleeeaze!

Soros is bankrolling virtually every global warming belief initiative that moves because he knows his children will become trillionaires off the carbon trading derivatives market and UN contracts the Soros group will win.

Yet another reason for the media to laugh at the Science Media Centre.

My curiosity piqued, I thought it might be worth re-reading the chapter in Air Con he devotes to Soros, and trying to follow the footnote trail he so obligingly provides.

Continue reading “Source for the goose: footnotes to history”

A positive view of Copenhagen

coplogoI wrote a column early in December trying to discern reasons for hope even in the face of the likelihood that Copenhagen was not going to produce a legally binding agreement. In the event it not only did not produce a legal agreement, but endorsed an Accord quite different from the kind of document we were expecting.  I’ve asked myself since whether the measure of cautious hope I  expressed in advance was foolishly optimistic.  Certainly some commentators have suggested so. But not all. Joseph Romm’s Climate Progress website has been upbeat about the Accord.  And today he has drawn attention to an article in the Huffington Post by David Doniger, policy director of the US Natural Resources Defence Council’sclimate centre.  Doniger hails the Accord as a gridlock breakthrough on three counts:

First, it provides for real cuts in heat-trapping carbon pollution by all of the world’s big emitters.  Second, it establishes a transparent framework for evaluating countries’ performance against their commitments.  And third, it will start an unprecedented flow of resources to help poor and vulnerable nations cope with climate impacts, protect their forests, and adopt clean energy technologies.

Doniger writes warmly of Obama’s personal involvement in forging the agreement and rescuing the conference from collapse. Brazil’s President Lula commented that it was unlike the kind of discussions that Heads of State normally have, and reminded him of his days as a trade union negotiator. I have read some accounts of the events which suggest that Obama showed little concern for climate change and was revealed as just another political leader manoeuvering to preserve the perceived interests of his own country ahead of those of the global community. It would be deeply disappointing if that were the case. Earlier this year I read both of Obama’s books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, as well as the collection of his election policies and speeches in Change We Can Believe In, and felt they represented an authentic and decent commitment to human welfare. I have written positively on Hot Topic several times about his unequivocal statements on climate change and the measures his administration has already begun to take to address it. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all.” I certainly don’t want to hastily credit the possibility that this has all been shown up as nothing more than hot air.

Back to Doniger, who addresses some of the concerns he has seen expressed about the Accord. First is the argument that the Accord isn’t enough to keep us under 2 degrees. He concedes that the agreement is not in itself ambitious enough to achieve that, but points out that Obama was quite candid that it is only a first step. Doniger thinks a significant one:

The real goal going into Copenhagen was to get the U.S., China, and the other fast-growing developing countries to take their first steps to curb their emissions.  That goal was achieved.  And that was no mean feat.

A second expressed concern is that emission cuts aren’t specified. In reply Doniger points to the open enrollment period through to the end of January which allows countries to record their emission reduction commitments. He considers that a year ago the targets and policy announcements on offer today from big developing countries would have been unthinkable. The Accord creates a dynamic situation, with the potential for a virtuous circle of countries reinforcing their commitments over time in response to similar moves by others.

In reply to the objection that the commitments aren’t legally binding, Doniger replies that the Accord sidestepped “legally binding” in favour of action commitments from both the big developing countries and the U.S.  Otherwise there was unlikely to have been an agreement. And there are other ways of getting there:

If countries can be bound by a web of interests and economic forces to make and follow through on commitments, that will mean more than any legalistic formulation of their duties.

In response to the objection that the Accord threatens the future of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Doniger points to the limitations of the Conference of the Parties in requiring consensus of all 193 countries – a requirement which finally resulted in the Conference agreeing to “take note” of the Accord rather than adopt it, because of the continuing opposition of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Sudan.

Doniger expects the government of the new Accord is likely to depend in part on the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. Gareth noted in his Copenhagen post that the mix of this organisation covers just about all the necessary bases.  This doesn’t mean the UNFCCC will necessarily have no function, as Doniger sees it, but it will need to find ways of working which do not leave it open to rogue obstructionists and it will need to embrace the new agreement wholeheartedly.

Finally Doniger addresses the claim that the Accord won’t move the Senate.  It will:

[It] delivers the two principal things that swing Senators have demanded from the international process:  meaningful commitments to reducing the emissions of key developing countries, and a transparent framework for evaluating their performance against those commitments.

Political disappointments are not hard to find in the issue of climate change. I’m willing to hope that the kind of analysis of the Accord that Doniger and others offer proves to have some substance.

A thread of hope

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 1st December

Do we lament that the Copenhagen Conference is evidently not going to produce a binding global deal to tackle climate change?  Or can we take comfort from the likelihood that it will produce an agreement in principle and proceed to further legal negotiations with a deadline for their conclusion?  In other words a delay, not a failure.

The cruel reality is that President Obama, who needs no convincing as to the seriousness of the challenge, has not yet seen legislation from the Senate which will seal a US commitment to emissions reduction. It seems likely that he will see it, but not before Copenhagen and therefore not in time for the US to yet be fully confident of what it can offer to the global deal.

When one considers how for the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration the US acted as an anti-scientific spoiler of international negotiations it may be understandable that less than a year later they are not yet quite ready for what they so long delayed. The complicated American system of government is not easily harnessed to the change of direction. The President has to carry Congress with him.

To counter disappointment it may be worth remembering the political progress that is apparent. The science of climate change is now overwhelming and widely accepted by world political leaders. They know that emissions of greenhouse gases by human agency must start to lessen almost immediately, drop substantially within the next decade, and continue to fall heavily as the century proceeds. If this doesn’t happen, the prospect for humanity is dire.  Obama, Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel, and many others say as much. Even Medvedev has recently sounded the alarm after years in which Russia seemed lukewarm on the issue.

And this has happened in spite of the organised forces of denial which continue to work feverishly on public perception to blunt the impact the science ought to have. We still see letters to the editor and opinion pieces claiming that temperature is going down, not up, that thousands of scientists disagree with their colleagues, that any changes are just naturally occurring variations, and so on.  None of it true, but well packaged and unceasing.

However although it has helped delay effective action for many years since it was first launched by vested corporate interests, denial of the science is no longer entertained by educated political leadership. That’s progress.

Of course it’s worth nothing if not translated into effective remedial measures. Politicians are notorious evaders but on a matter now accepted to be of such serious consequence there are surely enough among them who will push for adequate action. Copenhagen may not be the time when it is all stitched up, but legal agreements not too long afterwards would be acceptable.

The November meeting between President Obama and President Hu Jintao in China was encouraging.  These two powers are central to a global deal.  Without them it will not work. They are the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.  The fact that they are now talking and working together on the issue is of great significance.  Their meeting announced unexpected bi-lateral agreement on a variety of areas of practical cooperation including clean energy research, electric vehicles, an energy efficiency action plan, and a number of other quite specific matters. This is beyond sterile arguments about the respective responsibilities of developed and developing countries.  It’s affirmative joint action.

Their statement on the Copenhagen Conference was similarly positive, and carried no suggestion of drawing back from the task of finding a common legal agreement.

I don’t think we should surrender hope yet.