Last week, Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman (KGL) reportedly released an 8-page outline for a bill mitigating climate disruption that they are crafting in order to try to break the deadlock that has heretofore blocked legislation in the Senate. ClimateWire reported that the KGL bill would incorporate ideas from the bill introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D. Wash.) and Susan Collins (R. Maine), the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act. That incorporation might be a good thing, because CLEAR contains several great ideas.
Last year, Amy Sinden and I characterized the idea of Dirty Input Limits (DILs), limits on inputs causing pollution rather than pollution itself, as the “missing instrument” in environmental law. We used the idea of creating a tradable permit market from limits on fossil fuel production and imports as an illustration of the potential of this instrument, which has been used in successful regulatory efforts to head off stratospheric ozone depletion and practically eliminate lead pollution, but has hitherto gone unnoticed as an environmental policy instrument. CLEAR in fact creates a DIL for fossil fuels, just as we recommended.
The main advantages of this approach come from its relative simplicity and its likely effect on innovation. We have far fewer fossil fuel producers and importers than fossil fuel users. By regulating upstream, CLEAR may reduce the number of entities that EPA needs to monitor. Also, by sending a strong signal that the government will demand reductions in fossil fuel use, this approach will likely jump-start innovation.
Full textTuesday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released an Interim Progress Report of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, a group charged by President Obama in Executive Order 13514 to develop (by Fall 2010) recommendations for the federal government for adapting to climate change. More than 20 federal agencies, departments, and offices are participating in the task force.
The progress report notes that some agencies are taking action toward implementing programs and policies to deal with the changes and risks climate change will bring. But it also notes many significant gaps remain, including:
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Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
The Council on Environmental Quality has issued a draft guidance to agencies on treatment of greenhouse gases. The key point is that emissions exceeding 25,000 tons per year of CO2 will be considered a “significant environmental impact” and require preparation of an environmental impact statement.
Overall, of course, this is a huge step forward. One point that does deserve further attention is the discussion of land use. On a fairly quick read, I’m not clear on the scope or effect of the draft’s discussion of this issue.
1. Scope of the exclusion. The drafts says: “Land management techniques, including changes in land use or land management strategies, lack any established Federal protocol for assessing their effect on atmospheric carbon release and sequestration at a landscape scale. Therefore, at this time, CEQ seeks public comment on this issue but has not identified any protocol that is useful and appropriate for NEPA analysis of a proposed land and resource management actions.” It could be true that we don’t have a good metric for determining whether a change in federal forest management or grazing rules would cause a significant GHG release.
The concept of cap and trade took another hit recently with disclosures that hackers had been able to get into the accounts of several holders of carbon emissions allowances in Europe and steal some of the account balance. This, along with the continued snowstorm in Washington, D.C. seems to fill those opposing a federal comprehensive cap and trade plan with glee.
While the issue of record setting snows in D.C. should be addressed with basic scientific education (trends and averages are not the same as one time events; snow often results from warmer temperatures, etc…) the issue of possible fraud in carbon trading systems deserves examination to see if there is such a systemic problem with cap and trade that it is more subject to fraud and manipulation than other markets.
The short answer to this question is “no.” The fraud perpetrated on the E.U. exchange was basic garden-variety thievery. Criminals got access to an asset (carbon credits) and stole them. This could (and has) happened with many assets, and is a risk of electronic records and trading. Does this mean that we should not be concerned or aware of the risks? Absolutely not. The one way that this can be attributed as uniquely related to the carbon market is that the entire trading system is new, and new systems present more opportunities for thievery, rent-seeking, and fraud. Clearly the security protocols on some of the E.U. country registries were not sufficiently strong or that market participants were not educated enough about the protocols of the exchanges to protect their security information from “phishing.” Luckily, the amounts in play were relatively small, they were quickly discovered, and this will provide lessons for future security upgrades.
Full textSenator Murkowski’s proposal to disapprove EPA’s scientifically and legally justified finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare would strip the federal government of its primary legal mechanism for addressing catastrophic climate change. If Congress does not think the Clean Air Act (CAA) is the best mechanism for regulating greenhouse gases, it should pass legislation providing a better alternative, not gut the only law that currently applies to still-uncontrolled emissions.
As the Supreme Court found in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, greenhouse gases are clearly “air pollutants” as defined by the Clean Air Act. The CAA purposefully crafted a broad definition in order to empower EPA to respond to new threats as they emerge. EPA’s recent endangerment finding was the logical, legally required, and inevitable next step. The science is unassailable: greenhouse gas emissions pose a profound danger to the public health and welfare.
EPA’s endangerment finding was made in response to a petition for automobile emission standards, and the resolution to disapprove EPA’s finding would, technically, apply only in that context. Nonetheless, the writing is on the wall both at EPA and in Congress. EPA’s endangerment finding in the automobile emission context would apply equally to other sections of the Clean Air Act, including provisions that control new sources of pollution. And Sen. Murkowski would presumably move to disapprove any endangerment findings EPA made under these other sections.
Full textBjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize the temperature would have astronomical costs, according to Lomborg, while the benefits would be small.
This is par for the course for Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who has gained international notoriety for his repeated attacks on environmental protection. His source for his climate policy skepticism is a very selective reading of economics, described grandly and inaccurately as what all economists think. For instance, do “all the major climate economic models” agree on a specific, extreme forecast of carbon taxes, as asserted by Lomborg? Not a chance; major models tend to disagree somewhat about such forecasts, and there is no consensus around anything like Lomborg’s claim. Do “most mainstream calculations” agree that global climate damages will be less than $1 trillion per year (a fraction of one percent of global output) by the end of the century, as he also alleges? Again, not even close.
Full textCPRBlog asked some of our regular bloggers to give us some suggestions for the high and low points of the regulatory year. We began by taking the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations” off the table, so that we could focus in on the Obama Administration’s impact to date. CPR President Rena Steinzor begins.
The high point of the year on the regulatory front was EPA’s endangerment finding on climate change, issued December 7, 2009, finally giving the seventh day of December a positive symbolic role in history, beyond the more memorable one as a day that will “live in infamy.” We endured eight solid years of stonewalling by the Bush Administration on climate change – a saga that included everything from suppressing EPA reports because the facts were inconvenient, to the downright juvenile step of refusing to open an email from EPA because it contained a finding that climate change pollutants must be controlled. Now, finally, the adults are back in charge.
Full textRob Stavins has a good, concise overview of the session and the outcome on the Belfer Center website. Not as negative as some other observers, he highlights the extraordinary procecess that resulted in the Copenhagen Accord:
Full textIt is virtually unprecedented in international negotiations for heads of government (or heads of state) to be directly engaged in, let alone lead, negotiations, but that is what transpired in Copenhagen. Although the outcome is less than many people had hoped for, and is less than some people may have expected when the Copenhagen conference commenced, it is surely better – much better – than what most people anticipated just three days earlier, when the talks were hopelessly deadlocked.
As we move into the last days of climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the chances of securing a binding agreement of all countries continues to look less and less likely. The primary culprit, according to the New York Times, is the G77, a group of 130 developing countries that have negotiated as a block since arriving. But as the Times notes, since they have very different needs and incomes, the main thing they have in common is their ability to rail against the rich developed world and hold up negotiations. Indeed, it seems that the main impediment to progress (at least from the perspective of the organizers) has been the continued focus on process rather than substance.
As any progressive knows, the G77 countries certainly have a lot to rail against, in terms of unfairness in many arenas, including climate change. Unfortunately, being right doesn’t always mean getting what you want or getting what is fair.
Everyone is correct that the developed world, including the United States, should morally do more, in terms of both emission cuts and in terms of adaptation assistance. But the sad truth, of course, is that the wealthier countries have never really understood or accepted responsibility for worldwide poverty in any significant form, so perhaps it is naïve to assume that they would in the climate change circumstance. Thus, though we do have discussions of the developed world being “responsible” for historic emissions, it is unrealistic to assume that climate change will finally be the place in which the developed world completely changes its attitude on fairness in the developing world.
Full textEnvironmental negotiations have long set the standard for transparency and participation. The relationship between environmental organizations (of all kinds) and the negotiators has always been one tempered by a shared vision that the negotiations would succeed (in contrast to negotiations at the WTO or World Bank where “success” for many activists was often defined as the failure of the negotiations). The history of transparency and participation in environmental negotiations is taking a huge hit this week in Copenhagen—not because of a loss of a shared vision of success—but because the sheer scale of these negotiations has led to increasing security and a tightening noose around non-governmental participation.
It started on Monday morning. Literally thousands of participants arrived to pick up their registration badges and found instead large, slow-moving lines. In the end, some people stood in the cold for 10 hours and never got into the Bella Center, the enormous complex holding the negotiations. Even participants who had received their credentials earlier in the week had to stand in the line for an hour or so. Greenpeace, in what has to be one of their most appreciated actions of all time, served free coffee to the cold people standing in line—until the police cordoned them off saying “we’ll now decide who gets coffee here.” Some advocates for veganism passed out material while dressed in warm-looking chicken suits. At least the restrictions were democratic; the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council stood next to a law student from American University Washington College of Law, and both waited in vain.
By Tuesday, the United Nations had instituted their “secondary badge” system. Seven thousand badges were released to non-governmental organizations. Most organizations received passes for about one-third of their delegations. Despite the Secretariat’s presumed love of cap-and-trade for emissions, the badges are not transferable between organizations. The Secretariat was apparently concerned that compliance would be more difficult if they allowed trading, and organizations would sneak more than one person in with each badge. Apparently, monitoring against leakage is harder for secondary passes than it is with the offset emissions market. If you have too many passes, said the Secretariat, you can turn them back and they will reallocate them. The plan was to tighten participation further over the week as only 1,000 passes would be allowed on Thursday and only 90 observers on Friday, though that number was apparently raised to 500. No one knows how these later passes will be allocated. (Perhaps they should try an auction).
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