Green Saturday
02 December 2005

Here's my initial stab at a weekly wrap-up of environmental issues that I plan on posting on Saturdays (which I'll be pulling together while watching Chelsea play Middlesbrough--yes, cable TV has indeed snuck back in our lives, but more on that in another post).

First off, some of the bigger recent news stories about our changing climate (and it's not just warming).

TerraDaily/AFP - Global Warming Set To Hit Europe Badly: EAA
Europe is facing the worst climate change in five millennia as a result of global warming, the European Environment Agency (EAA) warned in a report issued on Tuesday. Europe's four hottest years on record were 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, the agency said.

"Ten percent of Alpine glaciers disappeared during the summer of 2003 alone," the report said. "At current rates, three-quarters of Switzerland's glaciers will have melted by 2050. Europe has not seen climate changes on this scale for 5,000 years."

London Guardian - Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream
The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent years, a consequence of global warming that could trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region, scientists warn today.

Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean measured the strength of the current between Africa and the east coast of America and found that the circulation has slowed by 30% since a previous expedition 12 years ago.

Article continues
The current, which drives the Gulf Stream, delivers the equivalent of 1m power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, propping up temperatures by 10C in some regions. The researchers found that the circulation has weakened by 6m tonnes of water a second.
[...]
If the current remains as weak as it is, temperatures in Britain are likely to drop by an average of 1C in the next decade, according to Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton who led the study. "Models show that if it shuts down completely, 20 years later, the temperature is 4C to 6C degrees cooler over the UK and north-western Europe," Dr Bryden said.

Although climate records suggest that the current has ground to a halt in the distant past, the prospect of it shutting down entirely within the century are extremely low, according to climate modellers.

BBC - CO2 'highest for 650,000 years'
Current levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years. That is the conclusion of new European studies looking at ice taken from 3km below the surface of Antarctica.
[...]
Over a five year period commencing in 1999, scientists working with the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica) have drilled 3,270m into the Dome C ice, which equates to drilling nearly 900,000 years back in time. Gas bubbles trapped as the ice formed yield important evidence of the mixture of gases present in the atmosphere at that time, and of temperature.

"One of the most important things is we can put current levels of carbon dioxide and methane into a long-term context," said project leader Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, Switzerland. "We find that CO2 is about 30% higher than at any time, and methane 130% higher than at any time; and the rates of increase are absolutely exceptional: for CO2, 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years."

WaPo - Report Accuses EPA of Slanting Analysis
The Bush administration skewed its analysis of pending legislation on air pollution to favor its bill over two competing proposals, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Oct. 27 analysis of its plan -- along with those of Sens. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) -- exaggerated the costs and underestimated the benefits of imposing more stringent pollution curbs, the independent, nonpartisan congressional researchers wrote in a Nov. 23 report. The EPA issued its analysis -- which Carper had demanded this spring, threatening to hold up the nomination of EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson -- in part to revive its proposal, which is stalled in the Senate.

The administration's "Clear Skies" legislation aims to achieve a 70 percent cut in emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide after 2018, while Carper's and Jeffords's bills demand steeper and faster cuts and would also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which are linked to global warming. The Bush plan would also cut emissions of neurotoxic mercury by 70 percent, while Jeffords's bill reduces them by 90 percent.
[...]
EPA estimated the administration's plan would cost coal-fired power plants as much as $6 billion annually, compared with up to $10 billion in Carper's measure and as much as $51 billion for Jeffords's. It calculated that Bush's proposal would produce $143 billion a year in health benefits while Carper's would generate $161 billion and Jeffords would yield $211 billion. Carper's measure would achieve most of its reductions by 2013, while Jeffords's bill would enact even more ambitious pollution cuts by 2010.

The School of Barack - Renewed Energy
A handful of senators and reps unveiled proposals pressing for the Bush administration and automakers to shrink America's outsized energy demands and tackle the climate crisis. They got little to no attention at the time, but their innovative thinking could help set U.S. energy policy on a new, more progressive course.

Last Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) introduced a "Health Care for Hybrids" bill outlining a new approach for boosting fuel efficiency in Detroit. It would offer struggling U.S. automakers a voluntary but potentially enticing deal: relief from some of the high health-care costs they pay for retired employees (expected to total more than $5 billion in 2005) in exchange for a commitment to reinvest at least half of those savings into the development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles.

When Obama first publicly discussed this proposal in September during a speech at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan D.C.-based think tank, he proposed a 3-percent-per-year increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards over the next 15 years. But there's no mention of CAFE in his current bill. Rather, there's a stipulation that automakers can't undermine their investments in efficiency by simultaneously manufacturing other, more wasteful vehicles.

Despite the disappointing loss of the CAFE component, Obama's proposal "is nevertheless a gain for vehicle efficiency," said Deron Lovaas, vehicles campaign director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, "and will improve the average fuel-economy performance of American cars."

And finally, some commentary on next steps for the "environmental movement" by the authors of the much discussed "death of environmentalism" broadside from earlier this year. Their piece--A Third Way on Global Warming--starts off discussing the weakening of Tony Blair's resolve and the continuing isolationism of the BushCo administration on this topic (which, really, isn't the only area of policy they're isolated on):

TomPaine - A Third Way On Global Warming
But the stalemate over addressing global warming speaks not to the failure of Blair or Bush but rather that of environmentalism and the politics of limits. Global warming did not have to be, a priori , an “environmental” issue. It was made so by environmentalists who understood global warming originally not so much as an impending global crisis that needed to be addressed by any means necessary but rather as a powerful new argument for restricting activities (e.g., driving cars and burning fossil fuels) that they already wanted to restrict. As such, the solutions to global warming were, from the very start, conceived of as limitations and restrictions—the approach that lies at the heart of the Kyoto protocol and virtually every other effort to address global warming.

There is a different way to think and act on global warming. Truly addressing the ecological crisis will, by all accounts, require a dramatic transformation of the global energy economy. In that transformation lies the possibility of enormous economic growth and the potential to lift living standards around the world. Economists have known for decades that investments in innovative new energy sources, from solar to biomass and biodiesel to wind, as well as energy efficiency, have a multiplier effect on the economy.

Nobody should understand this better than Tony Blair. It was, after all, Blair’s idol Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who first suggested in the year after World War II that Britain and Europe invest in a joint energy and manufacturing venture to heal the wounds and unite the continent. Four years later, the European Coal and Steel Community—precursor to the European Union—was born.

Blair’s environmentalist critics are right that Bush’s Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate was cynically conceived to undermine Kyoto and Blair. But their myopic insistence that Kyoto—and the environmental ethos of limits—must be at the center of the debate has been counterproductive.

Bush’s bluff is an opportunity for a true third way on global warming. The prime minister should call Bush’s bluff— and up the ante. As world leaders meet this week in Montreal to discuss Kyoto, Prime Minister Blair should embrace the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development—and propose that the United States and other G8 countries fund it to the tune of $30 billion per year, creating an “Opportunity Fund for Clean Development.”

Blair should see the fund not simply as an “environmental” solution, but also as a central strategy in the global campaign to “make poverty history.” To underscore the central role that economic development must play in places like China, Blair should call for global leaders to negotiate the Opportunity Fund in Beijing.

The British PM should also speak out about the Opportunity Fund. In the United States, the timing is right. The public is increasingly outraged by high gas prices, the record-breaking $100 billion in oil industry profits, and the collapse of the U.S. auto industry.