US: No climate deal without all aboard

Chief Climate Envoy Todd Stern
© AFP/File Ronaldo Schemidt

AFP

NEW YORK (AFP) - The United States said Wednesday it opposed a climate deal that does not bring aboard both wealthy and developing countries as feuding over nations' commitments dominated UN-led talks in Bangkok.

Todd Stern, the chief US climate envoy, said it was time to lay to rest the concept of a "firewall" between wealthy and developing countries that dates from the early 1990s -- before the rapid economic growth of China.

"Many developing countries, including large ones, continue to be fixated on preserving the firewall between developed and developing countries," Stern told a conference in New York, in a likely reference to China.


"We see this as both unjustified and incompatible with solving the problem," he told the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit. "We are not going to be part of a new agreement with a fixed, bright-line, 1992-vintage firewall."

The Kyoto Protocol required only wealthy nations to cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming, leading the United States to reject the landmark treaty.


The treaty's obligations run out at the end of next year and the European Union has led calls for a new round of Kyoto pledges as a stop-gap measure.

Japan and Russia have led opposition to a new Kyoto round as the treaty does not involve China and the United States, the two largest emitters. China and other major developing countries would welcome an extension to Kyoto.

But Stern insisted that China should be part of any future deal, saying it has surpassed France in emissions even on a per capita level.

"You cannot build a system that treats China like Chad when China is now the world's second largest economy," Stern said.

"Instead, you need to start with all the major emitters, both developed and developing, accounting for some 85% of global emissions and build out from there," Stern said.

While seeking an agreement that involves all major economies, the United States has played down the need for legally binding obligations.

The United States has instead called for each nation to submit its own national plans -- a bottom-to-top approach that would carry political weight but not necessarily legal obligations to cut a set amount of emissions.

"Don't get me wrong, we are not opposed to such obligations if they genuinely apply to all the major players," Stern said.

"But they are not really necessary; it is the national plans of countries, written into law and regulations, that count and that bind," he said.

Legal obligations are an increasingly sensitive issue for the United States.

President Barack Obama has pledged that the United States will do its part to fight climate change, but leaders of the rival Republican Party that won congressional elections last year are deeply skeptical on the issue.

© AFP -- Published at Activist Post with license

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Weird Global Warming and Nuclear Science

BATR image

SARTRE, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

The catastrophic disaster that swept Japan into a new stone age is truly an earth-shattering milestone. Worldwide grief and empathy is real and deserved. If this occurrence were only, a script out of a Godzilla B movie, or just lyrics from a ringtone song, the hurt or the aftermath would not be so horrible. 


you cannot run in any direction

no place to hide ain't got no protection

it can be sorrow, blood, and destruction

but it can give you incredible emotion


How does one explain this calamity? Is it a mysterious act of God, or is it modern technology run amuck? 

As long as the earthquake was not triggered by HAARP like intentions, the wall of tsunami destruction is part of the risk of residing in the active zone of the ring of fire. The meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant complex is far less than a matter of fate. Is nuclear electric generation just too risky to chance or can humanity trust upon technology to institute new safeguards for future developments? 

The answer usually depends upon one’s viewpoint on the Global Warming theory. Those who worship at the altar of Transhumanism love their environmentalist adoration. While nuclear power is CO2 friendly, the radiation peril is too threatening to accept. The half-life of these zealots often reflects the mental capacity of Homer Simpson and the appearance of Polycephaly mutant beasts of burden.

Those who see Global Warming as a manageable problem often place great reliance on scientific progress in solving and overcoming environmental challenges. These people normally populate the engineering professions and research laboratories that spawn the next evolution of made-made technological marvels.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger write in the WSJ.

"There is a better way. Nations should focus on lowering the cost of clean energy, not raising the cost of fossil energy. The goal? Make clean energy cheap enough to become a viable option for poor as well as rich nations. Until that happens, emissions will continue to rise, and no effort to regulate carbon can succeed.

How do we accomplish that? Stop subsidizing old technology that will never compete with fossil fuels and create incentives for innovation. Along with ramping up support for research, governments should buy cutting-edge clean-energy technologies, prove them—and then give away the intellectual property, so others can improve on it".

Then there are those who view Global Warming as a hoax and a political grab for further consolidation of a centralized society under the control of a corporate/state oligarchy. The evidence is on their side. Exhibit 1, Cap and Trade proposals demonstrate the total disconnects for meeting the energy needs of a modern society.

The high and mighty culture would like you to believe that nuclear energy from civilian reactors is a centerpiece of scientific superiority over nature. Well, there are a few problems with this conclusion. Since the nuclear genie escaped from the bottle, the myth that science is equal to God has run wild for decades. At the risk of condemnation by the scientific inquisition court, is the world a better place to live under the canopy of a mushroom cloud?

Admittedly, the symbol of this age is the face of existential oblivion, dressed up in space suits on life support. The fallout from the Fukushima reactor disaster will last longer than the radioactive dust that contaminates the ecosphere. At question is not solely the safety of the nuclear electrical generation process, but the notion of pushing the limits of human endeavors that endanger the survival of the species itself.

A favorite and world-class curmudgeon, Fred Reed, proposes a valid and alternative conclusion to the insanity in, Why We Need an Asteroid Strike.

"I figure that what we need is to tear the whole sorry system down and see what comes next. The best hope is that a patriot will learn how to impel some unused interplanetary object, Phobos or Deimos or Ganymede maybe, into Washington at ninety percent of the speed of light. This would eliminate the teachers unions, the Pentagon, AIPAC, Fox News, Langley, the Washington Post, lobbies, and my mother-in-law. Cockroaches would doubtless survive, that being what they do best, and evolve into a civilization less degraded than ours, briefly".

The disinformation coming out of Japan from official circles all qualifies as radiation poisoning. The Green revolution is nothing more than a denial cult of blind faith in the power of mankind to destroy society with all the best intentions that the Tempter can muster. Wind and solar are not candidates for prime time. Renewable deficiencies are well documented by IWA and CPA and suggest that only a "true believer" would accept the prevarications of the anti fossil fuel lobby. Sentencing clean coal to the pits of a dark hole verges on calling for the release of Jeffrey Skilling from prison.  

After the Japanese disaster, the nuclear industry needs an alternative to the current reactors, now perceived as unsafe. John Wheeler in This Week in Nuclear, evaluates the safety of small nuclear reactors.

"These smaller reactors contain less nuclear fuel. This smaller amount of fuel (with passive cooling I’ll mention in a minute) slows down the progression of reactor accidents. This slower progression gives operators more time to take action to keep the reactor cool. Where operators in large reactors have minutes or hours to react to events, operators of SMRs may have hours or even days. This means the chance of a reactor damaging accident is very, very remote.

Even better, most SMRs are small enough that they cannot over heat and melt down. They get all the cooling they need from air circulating around the reactor. This is a big deal because if SMRs can’t melt down, then they can’t release radioactive gas that would pose a risk to the public. Again, this means the need for external emergency actions is virtually eliminated.

Also, some SMRs are not water cooled; they use gas, liquid salt, or liquid metal coolants that operate at low pressures. This lower operating pressure means that if radioactive gases build up inside the containment building there is less pressure to push the gas out and into the air. If there is no pressure to push radioactive gas into the environment and all of it stays inside the plant, then it poses no risk to the public.
SMRs are small enough to be built underground".

"So called" miracles of science often become the thimerosal babies of tomorrow. Likewise, the politics of nuclear energy are riddled in contradictions. Lessons from the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Debate, points out the ineptness of domestic energy policy.

"Over the past decade, more than 7,000 shipments of radioactive nuclear waste have been sent, without any problem, to a government repository in the southwestern United States.

This crucial repository is not the ill-fated Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that has been steeped in controversy since Congress selected it 22 years ago to store the country's civilian nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain, in fact, has gotten so bogged down in legal and political fights that President Barack Obama, in his new budget, is proposing to eliminate almost all of its funding and explore "alternatives," raising serious questions about how the United States will resolve its nuclear waste problems—and, for that matter, whether the nuclear industry will be able to grow in coming decades. 

The functioning repository is located in Carlsbad, N.M., and it may hold some useful answers. Since opening in 1999, it has received more than 60,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste from the country's nuclear defense facilities. Experts say its success offers valuable clues about how Washington can learn from the mistakes made at Yucca Mountain to find a lasting waste solution".

If the nuclear industry is targeted for demise, only natural gas or coal can produce the needed electric energy on a scale to keep the economy viable. The alternative of rolling brown outs are a favored tactic used by such titans of business ethics as Enron. Welcome to the era of designed shortages and inflated costs. 

The risks of hydrofracking techniques to extract natural gas are very real and profound. The New York Times reports on contamination of the water table.

¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.

¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.

¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

Weird science is a serious problem, but factitious global warming is a well-designed dose of irradiation that attacks the mush of feeble-minded morons who want to be "PC" in a culture gone mad. If you surrender to the totalitarian collectivists, you are accepting the global gulag. Clean coal offers the best economic and safe energy future for an independent America. Synthetic fuel conversion from coal into synfuel is the best way to reduce the addiction of imported oil.

Original article archived here 

SARTRE is the pen name of James Hall, a reformed, former political operative. This pundit's formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce.  SARTRE is the publisher of BREAKING ALL THE RULES. Contact batr@batr.org   

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Plan for a Renewable Future

Policy Innovations contributor Roy Morrison weighs in on alternative global warming solutions and related policies to finance them. He calls for a 20-year plan to transition to renewable resources:

The popular wisdom is that a global emissions reduction agreement through cap and trade or taxation is humanity's last best hope before the consequences of melting ice and methane hydrates make irrelevant further human efforts to stop global warming. If that's true, we are in grave danger indeed. We should instead focus on a workable global investment and jobs plan to build the global renewable resource infrastructure that can sustain global prosperity while slashing global greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan will draw upon existing and emergent renewable energy technologies. These technologies range from the now-familiar wind turbines, photovoltaic solar arrays, hydropower dams, and geothermal plants, to new solar concentrators and medium-temperature geothermal systems running organic Rankine cycle generators. These will be combined with electric and renewable-fueled hybrid vehicles using their lithium batteries for energy storage. Renewable systems are characterized by rapidly improving energy conversion efficiency and declining cost.

We should understand that the problem is not that we do not have sufficient renewable resources. This is a plan that will create millions and millions of new jobs and global markets for our products and at the same time free us from the fossil fuel curse and its economic, ecological, and security threats.

The plan for a renewable future is based not on imposing taxes on the unwilling or forcing everyone to eat celery. It's time to stop focusing our efforts on raising costs for polluters who are politically powerful and will fight us every step of the way. We can do without the higher taxes or complex cap and trade schemes that will further enrich Wall Street sharks and may not even work.

It's absolutely clear that markets with sharply fluctuating asset prices, whether for carbon credits or Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), do not provide sufficiently stable long-term cash flows to convince bankers and investors to risk trillions of dollars financing a sustainable future.

For example, I'm working on building solar farms in New Jersey. New Jersey, admirably, sets high regulatory alternative compliance payments (ACP) for energy suppliers that do not purchase solar RECs (SRECs) from solar developers. But since the actual price for those SRECs is determined by a bid-and-ask market with fluctuating prices, there is no working futures market for buying and selling large quantities of SRECs. Why stock up on SRECs now when prices could plunge, as they have for RECs around the country and for carbon in Europe?

Without a long-term SREC contract in hand, financiers will not invest hundreds of millions of dollars in solar farms. We are scrambling to negotiate deeply discounted long-term deals with electricity suppliers and designing our own innovative financial structures to get the financing to build our solar farms.

What works much better is the feed-in-tariff (FIT) used by Germany and now by Ontario. The Ontario Power Authority offers 20-year fixed price contracts, at different price levels, for various renewables, with the goal of ultimately eliminating the province's reliance on coal. You can take an approved design and a 20-year OPA contract to the bank.

If it's true that renewable resources can do the job, then why not put America on the path to its own 20-year plan? As renewable resources and a continental-scale renewable smart grid are phased in, fossil fuel resources will be phased out gradually. The oil and coal can be left in the ground, or sometimes used for chemical feedstock in accord with an industrial ecology of zero waste and zero pollution.

As we increase renewable resource use by a small percentage each year, natural gas can serve as the transition fuel. We don't even need to build the next generation of coal and nuclear plants and gas-guzzling automobiles. If it's politically necessary, we can pay the coal companies for mineral rights, much as we have paid farmers not to plant corn. And, of course, we could stretch the time frame out for 40 years to 2050. But why do that? The risks are too high to drag our feet, while the benefits of implementing a 20-year plan are enormous.

In 20 years, by 2030, fossil fuel power can be an artifact of a bygone era. Gasoline-powered engines would become a once-a-year treat at the county fair demolition derby. The daily news would be not about military deployments, but about surprising new trends in building an ecological civilization.

There's no reason to wait. Renewable resource construction is already moving ahead. It just needs a little more systematic push. Mechanisms we can rely on include:

Feed-in-Tariffs: We set goals for phasing in renewables and phasing out fossil fuels and nukes. We offer long-term contracts at prices sufficient to support investment given current capital costs and energy market prices. Most renewables have zero fuel cost, but high capital costs. Periodically, the price level of new FIT contracts are adjusted to keep up with changes in capital costs and market income as more renewables are phased in and the need for subsidies decreases. The FIT should be applicable to storage and efficiency projects as well as generation.

Continental-Scale Renewable Smart Grids: We transform the current regional power grid system into one capable of operating efficiently on a continental scale using High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines and smart controls. Such continental systems will be designed to optimize the balance between distributed local resources and system resources. Developing efficient and cheap local devices such as fuel cells, heat pumps, photovoltaics, batteries, flywheels, and capacitors means a potential major reduction in large scale "system" generation and storage resources needed to move large amounts of power over long distances.

Self-Equilibrating Systems: The system can be designed to operate in a substantially self-equilibrating and highly secure manner using cybernetic feedback loops. By equipping end-use devices and distributed generation with the ability to sense and respond to fluctuations in local voltage and frequency, the system can be substantially self-controlling, capable of operating in a regional fashion in the event of system disruption, and largely immune from cyber attack from malware and viruses since there will be few control signals to sabotage such as the current Automatic Generation Control (AGC) signals.

Clean Development: Development aid must be provided in sufficient quantities for poor and developing nations to make the transition. In countries without a national power grid, regional renewable resources with local storage and smart control can do the job. The approach must be global or it will fail. Global problems will require global solutions and cannot be accomplished upon the backs of the poor for the benefit of the rich.

This is a plan with winners and few losers. We build massive new non-polluting industries, and create millions of good-paying high-technology manufacturing, installation, computer control, and service jobs. In addition to transforming the economy, we free ourselves from the oil curse, the resource wars, and balance of payments nightmares. Cash will flow in from our customers instead of out to the sheikhs and oil barons. And we will lessen the threat from nations that wish to enrich uranium for "peaceful" purposes under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Today we face resolute opposition to anything more than marginal changes in emissions from such political and economic heavyweights as the global coal, oil, auto, and electric industries, and from major energy exporting and importing nations such as OPEC, Russia, China, and even the United States.

It's time to stop trying to plow a granite field. We can instead focus our efforts on an investment and job strategy that will build the renewable infrastructure and the powerful new industries that will be the basis not only for the prevention of climate catastrophe, but also for the development of prosperous and sustainable ecological future.

[PHOTO CREDIT: Photovoltaik, by Bernd Sieker (CC).]

Send A Colleague to Copenhagen

I won't be attending the Copenhagen climate conference but my colleague David Kroodsma still has a shot to do so if he wins the Huffington Post contest to send a citizen journalist (You can vote for him here). David is a writer, climate-energy expert, and bicycle adventurer with degrees in physics and climate science. He and I met last year on the Climate Ride while we were traveling to Washington to lobby for clean energy. Prior to that, David bicycled across North and South America to raise awareness of global warming and he has since documented his journey in a forthcoming book.

I spoke with David recently about the city of Copenhagen and how one-third of commuters there use bicycles. Below is an excerpt from his book where he talks about the choice world cities face: They can either copy Copenhagen, or they can copy American cities such as Los Angeles. The excerpt is from his chapter on Colombia. David visited Bogota and saw how investments in public transportation and bicycle infrastructure have helped to reduce carbon pollution and make the city a more pleasant place to live.

Something else remarkable has happened in Colombia over the past decade: the country has reduced its carbon dioxide pollution. Some of this reduction has been because of an increase in hydroelectric power—eighty percent of the country's electricity comes from dams—and a decrease in coal-fired power. But the Transmilenio [the public transit system] and bikeways have also had a serious effect, perhaps decreasing Bogotá's pollution by over half a million tons of carbon dioxide a year and cutting Bogotá's total pollution by a few percent. Car use in Bogotá has dropped significantly, and nearly twenty percent of daily trips are via the Transmilenio, an efficient service that didn't even exist a decade earlier. Bogotá shows that reducing pollution often has ancillary benefits. The city didn't set out to reduce pollution. The city set out to make itself more livable, and consequently reduced fossil fuel use.

If cities in the developing world decide to copy Bogotá, how big of a difference would it make? In the next thirty years, almost all growth in greenhouse gas pollution is expected to come from developing nations such as Colombia—nations where living standards are rising rapidly. Cities in these countries are growing rapidly, and decisions made today will decide the transportation infrastructure for decades to come.

A city like Bogotá could look to U.S. cities like Los Angeles where the majority of commuters drive, or they could look to European cities such as Copenhagen where transit is evenly divided between personal automobiles, public transportation, and bicycles. Whereas the average citizen of Los Angeles produces about five tons of carbon dioxide per person through transportation, the average citizen of Copenhagen is responsible for less than one and a half tons per person from transportation.

Half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and the difference between these cities copying the transit system of Los Angeles versus copying the transit system of Copenhagen is thus a difference of about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Given that global carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels is roughly 30 billion tons today, the difference between a world of Los Angeleses and Copenhagens is dramatic.

Here is David's video for the HuffPo Hopenhagen contest. Don't forget to vote:

Resources on Water, Human Rights, and Business

Our colleagues at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre have compiled (below) some great resources on water privatization in advance of World Water Day. Many experts, including Martin Khor, the new executive director of the South Centre, are indicating that water shortages will be where society first feels the pinch of a warming planet.

*********

22 March 2009 is World Water Day. In the preceding week the World Water Forum (16-22 March) and the Alternative Water Forum (20-22 March) are being held in Istanbul. Below is a range of related material focusing on private sector dimensions.

- “World Water Forum is All About Commercialising Water”, interview with water rights activist Tahir Öngür, Bıa news centre (Turkey), 17 Mar 2009

- "World Water Forum Starts with a Bang: Activists Challenge Corporate Hypocrisy", Mark Hays, Corporate Accountability International, 16 Mar 2009

- "IBM Unveils Global Innovation Outlook on Water", IBM, 16 Mar 2009

- "Preparing for Water Quarrels, if not Wars", Hilmi Toros, Inter Press Service, 15 Mar 2009

- "Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water", Alexei Barrionuevo, New York Times, 14 Mar 2009

- "New report highlights crucial role of water in development", UNESCO, 12 Mar 2009
- "The United Nations World Water Development Report 3 - Water in a Changing World", 2009

- "Secretary-General, in message for World observance, underscores potential of water as unifying force rather than catalyst for conflict", UN, 11 Mar 2009. Urges "Governments, civil society, the private sector...to recognize that our collective future depends on how we manage our precious and finite water resources."

- "Global Release: Water disclosure 2.0", UN Global Compact and Pacific Institute, 11 Mar 2009

- "CEO Water Mandate: Independent review of 2008 Programme of Activities" [PDF], Arthur D Little, 11 Mar 2009

- "Coalition urges UN to stop providing cover for life-threatening privatization of water", Polaris Institute, 11 Mar 2009
- Letter from 118 organizations to Ban Ki-Moon calling on him to withdraw support for CEO Water Mandate [PDF]

- "Multinationals control the agenda at World Water Forum", Water Justice, Mar 2009

Earlier relevant report: "Draft report: Business, Human Rights & the Right to Water - Challenges, Dilemmas & Opportunities - Roundtable Consultative Report" [PDF], Institute for Human Rights & Business, Jan 2009

Further materials are in the Access to water section of our site.

Whose Carbon Is It?

Recognition that global warming is anthropogenic grows daily, but sweeping solutions to clean up pollution mature at a different rate. This is not surprising. We're dealing with invisible gases. When determining moral responsibility and economic motivation (or vice versa), we must ask an important question: Whose molecules are they? When the factory is in Bangalore and the corporate HQ in London, who accounts for the emissions? Christian Aid senior climate change analyst Andrew Pendleton writes that the UK has been massively underestimating its contribution to the problem. He calls for standardized and more accurate corporate reporting on emissions, reinforced by legislation.

Fire Sale on Grandchildren

How much are our grandchildren worth? This question of economics and intergenerational ethics is fueling a debate over the best way to douse global warming before it's too late. At the heart of the controversy are Sir Nicholas Stern's calculations in the climate change report he prepared for the UK Treasury. Yale economist William Nordhaus believes that Sir Nicholas set his discount rate for future generations too low, thus overstating the urgency with which we should act:

The social discount rate is a parameter that measures the importance of the welfare of future generations relative to the present. It is calculated in percent per year, like an interest rate, but refers to the discount in future "utility" or welfare, not future goods or dollars. A zero social discount rate means that future generations into the indefinite future are treated equally with present generations; a positive social discount rate means that the welfares of future generations are reduced or "discounted" compared to nearer generations.

Nordhaus advocates a more gradual ramping up of climate change policies, while Stern's numbers lead one to conclude that strong, immediate measures such as a carbon tax are appropriate. Whoever is correct, our ancestors will be hot, hot, hot if we sell them short.