Adaptation Time
As the Climate Summit at the National Academy of Sciences progresses today, it is increasingly clear that a broad swath of mainstream climate scientists agree: not only are humans unequivocally warming the planet, serious impacts are inevitable. It is time to start preparing adaptation plans. (A topic this blog has addressed before.)
The preoccupation with adaptation among scientists here is sobering. Politicians may debate climate impact and mitigation proposals, but the scientists have moved on. We need legislation, but we must also prepare for more frequent and intense storms, rising sea levels, species relocation and disappearance, drought, and flooding (perhaps repeatedly of the Red River?).
Is a National Climate Service Enough?
At the National Academy of Science's Climate Summit today, the new head of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator (NOAA) Jane Lubchenco endorsed the idea of creating a National Climate Service.
This new organization, to be housed within NOAA, would act as a one-stop aggregation point for all of the government's climate science data and information. It would ideally provide policy makers and the public better information on climate change.
Continue Reading...Science Comes to Washington
Editor's Note: Frederick Anderson is blogging from the National Academy of Science's Summit on America's Climate Choices.
The head of GM is out, but science and technology are in, and the National Academy of Sciences convened today with Congress's blessing a Summit on America's Climate Choices. The purpose of the two-day meeting is to kick off the development of a scientifically-credible "framework for a national response to climate change."
Look at this effort the way Congressman Alan Mollohan (D-WV) invited participants to do a minute ago: this Academy study will lay down a science marker for Congress and policy makers going forward.
The Week in Cap and Trade: The Waiting Game
All eyes continue to be on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman. Waxman has promised to deliver legislation on energy and climate change with a cap-and-trade provision to the full House by Memorial Day, but so far has released no draft bill for debate.
Committee member Congressman Mike Doyle told Point Carbon (subscription required) last week that he expects to see a draft of the bill “in the next week or two.”
Continue Reading...Who Owns the Amazon?
The Brazilian Supreme Court yesterday blocked an attempt by the country’s rapacious rice farming industry to plow under a 4.2 million acre section of the Amazon rainforest. This decision didn’t receive a lot of press (it was buried in the news briefs in this morning’s Washington Post) but it gets my vote as the most important climate change development to date in this new year.
The Court concluded the land in question, known as the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation, belonged to 18,000 aboriginal Amazionian Indians.
This is the latest twist in a decades-long struggle between an aboriginal people and the modern agricultural industry over the future of the Amazon.
But here’s the larger import: preventing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest may be as important to climate change as any legislation that the United States could adopt.
Continue Reading...A Carbon Rule is Not a Carbon Law
EPA announced a proposed rule on Tuesday to create a national registry for greenhouse gas emissions reporting.
This step is crucial to any effort to enact a law pricing GHG emissions, be it a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax. The rule would mandate annual reporting from suppliers of fossil fuels or industrial greenhouse gases, manufacturers of vehicles and engines, as well as any other facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more per year of GHG emissions.
Of course, this wasn’t news to us. We wrote about the rule and the 25,000 metric ton threshold last month.
Continue Reading...Getting Our Fill of Ethanol
The support appears to be growing since the request was made to the EPA to grant a Clean Air Act waiver on Friday. Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack expressed his support for the move today.
Critics say the government should study the impact of burning more ethanol on the environment before granting a waiver. But there’s plenty of hard data to examine.
Continue Reading...Measuring the Green Mile
I sometimes wonder about the economic cost of the foot. I’m not talking about the body part, mind you, but the unit of measurement, arch-rival to the meter. During the great wave of globalization, we’ve relied on two competing systems of measurement. What inefficiencies did this produce?
Continue Reading...Why the House is Off on Offsets
So the House of Representatives won’t go carbon neutral, after all. Its decision could portend poor treatment for carbon offsets in the upcoming debate over climate change legislation.
The House’s decision came after its leadership dropped an essential part of the plan to purchase carbon offsets. The House reportedly paid $89,000 for offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange to cover its 2007/2008 emissions. (Most of those emissions come from steam heat generated by the ancient coal-burning Capitol Power Plant that inspired a protest Monday, hailed the largest act of civil disobedience against coal.)
The House’s decision appears to be rooted in a misunderstanding of offsets. Leaders are uncomfortable with them, according to the Post, because "the money was funneled to [offset projects] that had been completed before the House paid a cent." The Post continues: "Experts said those issues make it hard to say that the House's money had caused the environmental benefits the chamber paid for." Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) is quoted as saying, "Maybe they're admitting that what we did [in purchasing offsets] was actually nothing."
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of offsets and how they work.
Continue Reading...