by Eric Roston
First things first: President Barack Obama
defended a market-based system to limit the pollution of heat-trapping
gases, a core part of his legislative agenda, even as he acknowledged
the Senate may pursue an energy bill without one. He spoke to a “town
hall” meeting in Nashua, N.H., about the potential of Senators removing
technology-and-jobs legislation from the context of a larger climate
bill: “We may be able to separate these things out. And it’s conceivable that that’s where the Senate ends up.”
Unlike last year, the White House’s proposed 2011 budget,
which came out Monday, assumes no revenue from a “cap-and-trade”
program. In a footnote, the administration says that in the event
revenues materialize, they should be used in “climate-related purposes”
for industry and consumers. The budget eliminates fossil-fuel
subsidies, boosts EPA funding to implement its greenhouse gas
regulations, and triples loan guarantees to the nuclear industry, to
$54 billion, an olive branch to the GOP that is likely to rankle the
left.
The key Republican in the Senate climate debate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, pushed back at his colleagues who favored an energy-only bill, saying, “If the
approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that’s
moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.”
Washington beyond politics: The Defense
Department includes a dense, serious four pages on climate change and
energy security in its 128-page Quadrennial Defense Review [pp 84-88]. Planners write that global warming will challenge the kinds
of missions the military will carry out. The authors rely on official
U.S. scientific reports, including the U.S. Global Change Research
Program’s 2009 overview,
and intelligence sources. The QDR observes that “climate-related
changes are already being observed in every region of the world,
including the United States and its coastal waters.” Climate change, to
Defense planners is “an accelerant of instability or conflict.” The
military will also have to adapt to changes along with everyone else: “In 2008, the National Intelligence Council judged that more than 30
U.S. military installations were already facing elevated levels of risk
from rising sea levels.”
Politics beyond Washington: The Quadrennial Defense Review provides a sobering dose of reality to
the political arena, where the driving motivation for strong policy is
employment. And that message faces strong headwinds.
In California, fiscal woe is undermining public support for
leadership in climate and environmental policy. A bill to repeal the
state’s climate solutions law, known as A.B. 32, has failed in the
legislature. It would have suspended the law’s implementation, due in
2012, until California’s state employment rate falls to 5.5 percent,
from the current 12.4 percent. Opponents are pressing for a November public referendum to repeal. Separately, the oil, chemical, and trucking industries are suing California over its low-carbon fuels regulations, which took effect
last month. The suit charges that the state rules violate the
constitution by interfering with interstate trade. The rules, they
argue, discriminate against out-of-state fuel companies.
Internationally, the Guardian concludes from chats with international climate specialists that “a global deal
to tackle climate change is all but impossible in 2010,” leaving an
uneasy trajectory. Jan. 31 was the “soft” deadline for nations to
submit to the UNFCC their emissions reduction commitments or national
mitigation actions. Fifty-countries complied with the deadline set out
in the Copenhagen Accord, including the European Union members. Top
U.N. officials who assessed the pledges have expressed concern that the numbers are very unlikely
to meet the political aspiration of keeping global warming limited to
two degrees. The U.S. submitted language similar to what Obama promised
at Copenhagen, a 17 percent emissions cut below 2005 levels in 2020.
Europe would reduce 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. China and
India have pledged reductions in the carbon-intensity of their fuels.
Intergovernmental Panel for Corrections and Clarifications: Twenty-six percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. This unremarkable fact surfaced this week after a Dutch magazine discovered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put 55 percent of
the land below the threshold in its 2007 report (55 percent of the land
is vulnerable to flooding). Finger-pointing ensued. Perhaps the IPCC
was thinking not of the modern Netherlands, but the Batavian Republic
of the late 18th century, which was smaller and more concentrated by
the sea?
How can such mistakes be avoided in the future? If you ask
cryptographers how to reduce the potential for mistakes, they’ll tell
you to publish everything about a cryptographic system publicly. If
there are security flaws, some enterprising hacker will find them. The
same idea applies to Wikipedia, whose quality control is only as good
as its volunteer community gardeners. It’s not a new idea. Attending a
livestock exhibition a century ago, the scientist Francis Galton was
surprised to discover that in a contest, no individual accurately
guessed the weight of an ox, yet the average of more than 800 guesses
hit the mark.
If so many of us are interested in helping scrutinize the second
review draft of the fifth IPCC report, perhaps there is a way to make
it easier for good Samaritan fact-checkers to root out what turn out to
be dumb mistakes. The IPCC is already an openly collaborative
work—scientific peer review is the original “crowdsourced” enterprise. And the organization is up front about the process by which it produces its comprehensive reports [pdf]. How can public readers of Web-published drafts strengthen the next final report?
Concerns about a lack of crowdsourcing go to the heart of
accusations over what, if anything, was wrong or distasteful about the
tranche of more than 1,000 e-mail messages hacked out of University of
East Anglia servers late last year. Yesterday, an ad hoc committee of
Pennsylvania State University administrators cleared paleoclimatologist
Michael Mann on three of four concerns arising from the UEA e-mails [pdf]:
that he made up or falsified data; disregarded protections on other
researchers; and failed to disclose financial conflicts of interests. A
fourth inquiry—“failure to comply with other applicable legal
requirements governing research or other scholarly activities”—will be
looked at by a group of faculty members, because the administrative
committee wasn’t in a proper position to evaluate.
Question of the week: If you’ve read this far down, and do every week, you officially are a friend of the Climate Post. Thank you. Lunch with a couple friends of Climate Post turned on a—perhaps the—central
question in talking about this stuff: How (on Earth) can we tell
experiential, photo-friendly stories about a phenomena experienced most confidently
only by satellites, digitized ocean buoys, and air-sipping,
laser-blasting, carbon-dioxide-molecule counting machines? In the post-Copenhagen world of Waxman-Markey purgatory, what do we talk about when we talk about climate change?
Have you personally experienced global warming? And how do you know
that, exactly? Let’s hear about it. We can crowdsource the big story embedded in
them.
IPCC, brown-paper cover edition: In a move no one could have foreseen, embattled IPCC chief Rejendra Pachauri last month published a lascivious romance novel, Return to Almora, which he wrote during recent years traveling the world as a celebrity scientist. Full stop.
Related Links:
A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill
Anti-jobs ‘California Jobs Initiative’ crew threatens suit over name change
Digging into Obama’s 2011 budget on energy and the environment
