There are two separate meetings going on here in Copenhagen, really. The one that everyone is focused on is the official negotiations between the countries to reach a new binding agreement on climate change (or extend Kyoto in some form). The other “meeting” is the interaction of the observer organizations inside and outside of the side event meetings and their informal reports to the official delegations. This second “meeting” is more amorphous, and more subject to chaos (the security clearance for credentialed observers has required more than seven hours of waiting in the cold and this morning (Wednesday) was suspended indefinitely). Nevertheless, it appears to me that there is some significant progress being made.
While here, I've focused on the intersecting issues of the carbon market, offsets and adaptation assistance to affected countries. From the official reports, it appears that little has happened in these areas. Many of the developing countries remain suspicious of CO2 trading schemes, and are at least publicly measuring success by the amount of money that they will receive for adaptation. However, the very crux of the argument points out some important facts. First, the fault line on adaptation funding is now clearly whether it will come from a tax or other proceeds from a carbon market or from direct aid. The negotiating position of the developed countries that they wish to secure adaptation funding from carbon trading is now an official position, indicating that most of the developed world is more than ever bought into the idea of using CO2 trading markets for controlling greenhouse gases. Even as the United States considers the latest legislative idea that eschews trading (the “cap and dividend” proposal from Senators Cantwell and Collins), it appears more than ever that cap and trade is what must ultimately happen in the US. The United States is a big player for sure, but even it must be affected by what goes on in the rest of the world. You can be sure that U.S. businesses will not want to be cut out of the growing international market in CO2 trading that will be in the EU and likely other countries as well. Nothing in the “cap and dividend” proposal is inconsistent with trading, and the auctioning of rights to emit is clearly borrowed from the scheme.
Full textIn his speech in Copenhagen Tuesday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger applauded international leadership on climate change, but said that national or international agreements alone will not address the issue. He said that the "scientists, the capitalists and the activists" across the world have and will play an important role. And he talked about the job for subnational governments, like his own:
While national governments have been fighting over emission targets, subnational governments have been adopting their own targets and laws and policies.
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In California, we are proceeding on renewable energy requirements and a cap and trade system for greenhouse gases. We are moving forward. As a matter of fact, we are making great progress. If hydro is included, we will get 45 percent of our energy from renewables in ten years from now and we are already at 27 percent.
We are proceeding on the world's first low carbon fuel standards and limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars which, by the way, the Obama Administration has now just adopted. We are proceeding in a major way on green tech, no matter what happens in Washington or in Copenhagen.
I bring this all up as a reminder of the role of states here in the United States. The question: will federal climate change legislation, if and when it is passed, perhaps pre-empt states from taking some of these important steps Schwarzenegger spoke of?
Full textAlthough virtually all of the attention regarding Copenhagen in the United States focuses on mitigation targets, in the developing world a primary focus of any environmental agreement is on the scale, sources and governance of any financial resources being made available. This is particularly true in Copenhagen, where the Global South has demanded upwards of a trillion dollars in development assistance over the next decades. That number is almost certainly out of reach, but with only a few days left of the negotiations none of the numbers are adding up, and there is little clarity over the scale, structure, or sources of climate financing.
Monday's distribution here of a new “facilitators draft” on financial resources (not publicly online, at least at the moment) did little to clarify the situation, punting most of the details to next year’s COP-16. The draft contemplates a new (as of yet unnamed) mechanism to coordinate all funding arrangements under the COP. In addition to that coordinating mechanism, a new fund would be created to provide support for both mitigation and adaptation efforts.
More generally, discussion of financial resources has been split into both short-term finances (meaning between now and the end of the Kyoto Protocol) and medium or long-term commitments. The final amount in either category is not easy to predict, particularly because the United States has yet to table any specific overall number for increased climate-related financial support. Yesterday, Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu announced a $350 million, five-year plan to support the deployment of renewable energy technologies in developing countries. Welcome news, but rather oddly timed given that delegates are waiting for more clarity on the overall assistance package the United States is expected to announce later in the week. The Europeans have announced $3.4 billion a year financing for the short-term (between 2010-2012), but they have not promised that this will all be additional funding. Japan, reportedly, will offer $10 billion over the course of three years. Under the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, financial support is supposed to come from new and additional resources, which is short hand for ensuring that any promised climate-related support is not merely a shift in development assistance from support for the Millennium Development Goals or related poverty alleviation goals.
Full textAs the first week of formal negotiations at the Copenhagen Climate Summit comes to a close, the United States and China are exchanging barbs and little progress is being made … but behind the scene many negotiators remain confident that at least some form of a political agreement can be reached that will move global climate governance significantly forward.
Beginning on Sunday I will join fellow CPR Member Victor Flatt (see his preview on offsets and adaptation) as a credentialed non-governmental observer at the Copenhagen negotiations. I and six of my students from the American University Washington College of Law will be supporting the work of the Center for International Environmental Law and the Climate Law Policy Project, as well as other organizations. We will be looking at issues relating to the future financial architecture for responding to climate change; the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD); measurement, reporting and verification requirements; and implications of the climate regime on other sustainable development goals such as human rights and the conservation of biological diversity.
The general framework of a likely “political” agreement emerging from Copenhagen began to take shape in the days leading up to the negotiations, and has been largely reflected in the so-called “Danish” draft released on the second day of the negotiations.
Full textToday, EPA made its long-expected official finding: climate change is real, and we human beings are the cause.
More than two years after the Supreme Court ordered EPA to address the issue, EPA has now formally ruled that greenhouse gases cause climate change that endangers human health or welfare. EPA also found that motor vehicles contribute significantly to levels of greenhouse gases. These findings trigger regulation under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles. Similar findings are likely in the near future under a different section of the statute relating to stationary sources such as factories.
This development has been inevitable since the Supreme Court ruled that EPA must make a decision based solely on the scientific evidence. Despite all the recent brouhaha about hacked emails, the scientific evidence on climate change is just as solid as the evidence behind DNA identification, the ill effects of cholesterol, the dangers of smoking cigarettes, and a host of other scientific knowledge that we all take for granted. If there were any tenable scientific evidence going the other way, the Bush Administration would have made its own findings in order to block regulation. They knew they couldn’t do that, so they just stalled as long as possible and ran out the clock.
No doubt there will be efforts to challenge the EPA finding in court. But the scientific evidence is overwhelming. In addition, the Supreme Court itself found enough evidence of harm from climate change to create standing for the state of Massachusetts in the original ruling that lead to today’s action. It would take a very bold lower court judge to even think about ruling the other way.
Nobody thinks that the Clean Air Act is the ideal way to address climate change. It would be much better for the Senate to join the House to pass new legislation. I hope that will happen soon. But let’s face it, the Senate has too often become the place where public policy goes to die. Congressional deadlock creates a vacuum that other actors – the Executive Branch, the courts, and state governments – rush to fill.
In short, at this point, it is no longer a question whether federal law restricts carbon emissions. The only question is which federal law: the Clean Air Act or new legislation aimed specifically at climate change.
Full textToday, the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opens in Copenhagen. I will be a credentialed observer from non-governmental academic and research organizations including the Center for Progressive Reform and the Center for Law, Environment, Adaptation, and Resources (CLEAR) at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
In this space I have particularly focused on the carbon trading market and the use of offsets in the context of domestic legislation; in Copenhagen, I will continue to focus on the implications of any decisions regarding offsets and the carbon market, and whether or not this will in turn affect the U.S. debate and legislation. Because offsets raise concerns of co-harms and benefits, and because much of this harm or benefit will occur in the developed world I will be examining issues concerning adaptation as well.
The conference is a huge undertaking that is less predictable than might seem at first blush. Officials of the 192 parties to the UNFCCC (the United States is represented by the State Department, and various lawmakers will also attend) will meet in two groups: the official Conference of the Parties and an implementation group. Additionally, the credentialed side organizations, along with the countries themselves, will be holding nearly 300 official side meetings and presentations.
While the conventional wisdom is that any real progress must be made before the conference, this is not necessarily true. Though the diplomats and other negotiators would like to have all substantive decisions settled, some real progress can occur at the meeting itself. In fact, the whole point of bringing together 5,000 government agents with 15,000 experts, business persons, and environmentalists, is to allow knowledge and agreement to flow between countries and the public and private sectors to facilitate the best possible outcome.
Full textCPR Member Scholars Victor Flatt and David Hunter, along with several guest contributors, will be writing for CPRBlog from the climate talks in Copenhagen. Stay tuned.
Full textOnce upon a time, EPA and other agencies labored under the yoke of a cruel regime that was contemptuous of the “reality-based community,” but intimately aware of the needs and desires of the energy industry. Climate policy didn’t really happen in those days. Then the world changed.
In the first year of the new regime, EPA and NHTSA proposed a standard for tailpipe emissions, including an estimate of the “social cost of carbon,” or the value of the incremental damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Someone needs to tell the authors of this standard that we are free at last to take climate change seriously; you don’t have to keep censoring yourself, as you may have in the past. And once we start exercising that freedom, we will find that the social cost of carbon is much larger than the EPA/NHTSA estimates, which include values as low as $5 per ton of carbon dioxide.
The analysts who proposed the new standard narrowed their scope at the outset, ducking the tough questions and relying on the most conservative sources – and in some cases, misrepresenting data and references. There are three stages of the analysis, each of them problematic: estimates of climate damages; choice of a discount rate; and near-dismissal of worst-case catastrophic risks. (The following remarks are highlights of comments I submitted to the agencies on the proposed tailpipe emissions standards, which include citations to references and data sources.)
Full textThough few agencies or legislatures have begun to actually develop programs for cultivating adaptation to climate change, at least discussions on climate change adaptation are starting to take place. Unfortunately, as I detail in a forthcoming article, adaptation is still being given short shrift at local, state and federal levels of government, and those who are considering it lack the information and tools to engage in proactive adaptation.
Some of the key developments on adaptation in the past few weeks include:
1. A GAO report and legislative hearings detailing the poor existing capacity for adapting to climate change in the United States.
The General Accountability Office released a report that surveyed local, state and federal officials, concluding that federal and other government agencies are ill-prepared for adaptation to the effects of climate change. Consistent with my earlier research, the study found that few federal agencies are developing adaptation strategies, and those state and local governments that are considering adaptation planning lack the resources, site-specific data, and metrics to do so. In large part this is because of a lack of public awareness and leadership in Congress and among federal agencies about the importance of adaptation planning. In addition, the study found that 70% of 180 federal, state and local government official respondents were concerned regarding the lack of clarity on the roles and responsibilities of various regulatory authorities in adaptation planning. The report recommended that the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Office of Science and Technology Policy develop a national strategy to coordinate federal, state and local government adaptation activities. The GAO recommended that the strategy include (1) clarifying the roles of agencies at all government levels, (2) providing resources for plan implementation, (3) improving data collection, in particular site-specific data, and (3) training and educating government officials and the general public.
Full textThe latest version of the Senate climate bill, released by Senator Boxer on Friday, October 30, retains EPA’s authority to establish meaningful facility regulations under the Clean Air Act (CAA) while freeing EPA of the obligation to implement CAA provisions that are ill-suited to controlling greenhouse gases (GHG). (Section 128(g): Amendments Clarifying Regulation of Greenhouse Gases under Clean Air Act (at page 867). The Friday version of the bill is available by E&E subscription here.) The Senate bill’s continuing preservation of core regulatory authority is superior to the House bill’s sweeping preemption of traditional regulation (see my previous analysis). Ultimately, however, Congress should give EPA regulatory authority in a manner uniquely suited to the character of GHG emissions, rather than continuing to refine existing CAA authority.
The Senate bill limits EPA authority to require pollution controls to large facilities: those that emit more than 25,000 tons per year of carbon-dioxide equivalent. In so doing, EPA will have authority over roughly the same “major” facilities that it has traditionally regulated. The Clean Air Act defines a facility as major, and subject to controls, if it emits 100 or 250 tons per year of a pollutant (depending upon the industry). With that standard, many small facilities would have been drawn into the regulatory net, overwhelming EPA with the duty to develop standards for relatively minor contributors. EPA has attempted to address this risk through administrative action: last month the agency proposed to apply the Clean Air Act only to the large sources covered under the Senate’s recent revision. But that administrative action risked legal challenge since it was inconsistent with the statute’s plain language triggering regulatory requirements at much lower levels. By codifying EPA’s administrative efforts, the agency is on safer ground. Although direct regulation of small sources is worth considering seriously, the Clean Air Act provisions at issue would have provided a poor mechanism for doing so.
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