International Adaptation Assistance - the Dark Side of the Climate Debate
We have shared views in an earlier blog on climate adaptation, but recent discussion of responsibility for the overall global impacts of climate change leads us to return to the subject. For some time it has been clear that great care needs to be taken in how greenhouse gas reduction responsibilities are assigned to developing nations. They do not want to be denied the blessings of development in order to counter global warming created by the economies of the developed world over the past decades.
Now, a second major issue has surfaced. The developing world is going to need adaptation assistance – upwards of an initial $100 billion – as it experiences actual injuries from the changing climate. The issue is kicking up a lot of sand recently.
The impacts of an altered climate – coastal erosion and inundation, health effects, drought, and extreme weather events – are expected to be more severe in developing countries. The choice of means to provide climate adaptation assistance to developing countries is fraught with the greatest policy ramifications. Should aid be provided through technical expertise, direct grants, loans, or combinations of these?
As members of the community of nations, wealthier countries historically have had no problem stepping forward to help correct global disparities in economic development, public health, and human rights protection. But to be told that their greenhouse emissions have caused massive harms for which billions in reparations are now due causes many developed nations to question how to proceed. Yet, the debate over direct aid grants vs. adaptation loans has now taken on precisely this dimension. International reparations payments for aggression and injustice have a long and tangled history.
If adaptation assistance is provided to right past wrongs, then some may argue that a developed nation's generous adaptation assistance can be taken as an admission of wrongdoing, a basis for civil liability. The same facts, the same analyses, stand behind both the climate-justice rationale for legislative aid to counter climate impacts (S. 3036 SEC. 4801-4804) as underpin the several suits now making their way through the courts seeking damages for “climate torts.”
If loans are provided instead of direct grants, does this evade the difficulty? Perhaps, but the concept of loans to be paid off with interest does not sit well with advocates for adaptation and “climate resiliency” aid to the developing world. The UK has offered $1.56 billion to be incorporated in a World Bank adaptation fund, but the UK has indicated that the fund is for loans, not grants. Advocates say debt-stressed developing nations should not be loaned, but given, the aid that is owed for the damage greenhouse emissions have caused over time.
Also, advocates are questioning the pivotal role the World Bank group is angling to play in deciding where and how any funds are to be invested. They want a role in deciding how the pie will be sliced, not unlike stakeholders in the US debate over the revenues from cap-and-trade want a say in any federal revenues will be distributed.
Where does this issue stand in the US today? Because the US is not a Kyoto signatory and has not offered funds, the adaptation debate in the US is just beginning. Each of the concerns addressed above will figure into the US's legislative debate in the coming months. What is almost certain is that some of the huge revenues of the Lieberman-Warner bill's cap-and-trade provisions will be earmarked for adaptation assistance. Other legislative proposals are also in the wings. Watch this space.
Global Climate Change Under NEPA
Increasingly, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is being seen as a vehicle for ensuring that the federal government considers the impact of its actions on global climate change. Relying on a string of judicial decisions that require agency NEPA impact statements specifically to address the climate consequences of agency actions, environmental organizations have petitioned the President’s Council on Environmental Quality to conform its NEPA guidelines to the requirements of these cases. Climate will clearly figure prominently in future federal impact statements, and non-federal stakeholders, who often are the real parties in interest in NEPA compliance, would be wise to address climate early and often when developing their NEPA compliance strategies. [summary]
Increasingly, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is being seen as a vehicle for ensuring that the federal government considers the impact of its actions on global climate change. Enacted in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to prepare environment impact statements for all “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” Agencies must assess all reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts of a proposed action, including an analysis of direct, indirect, and cumulative effects.
Recently, several NGOs petitioned the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to amend its regulations to make clear that NEPA requires that climate change effects be addressed in NEPA compliance documents. The US groups and their allies abroad see the use of NEPA to raise “climate consciousness” and force federal agencies to take climate into account as part of a wider effort to use both the NEPA-like impact assessment law of almost ninety other countries, and the extensive environmental impact assessment requirements of the World Bank Group, to raise climate concerns.
The petition argues that scientific evidence supports the conclusion that climate change results from the build-up of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activity. Thus climate change is “reasonably foreseeable” within the meaning of NEPA and should be evaluated by agencies when considering the environmental impacts of their actions. The petition relies upon several federal court cases where NGOs have challenged agency failures to consider climate change impacts in a variety of contexts, ranging from the impacts of a proposed project’s greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., federal permit for power plant transmission lines) to climate change impacts on resources also affected by a proposed project (i.e., incidental taking of polar bears and walruses). Courts have not been reluctant to find agency NEPA compliance deficient because climate impacts were not considered.
Yet under NEPA, the courts and the CEQ, should it decide to amend its regulations, can do no more than mandate federal agencies to expand their disclosure of the potential climate impacts of approvals and projects, however indirect and remote they may be. Unlike other environmental statutes, NEPA neither contains particular criteria nor mandates particular results. It is well settled that NEPA is only a “full disclosure law.” In reality, however, energy, transportation, manufacturing, forest, and agricultural projects may be quite vulnerable to delays associated with agency NEPA compliance or an injunction requiring the federal agency to expand its NEPA analysis to cover potential climate impacts. Faced with an adverse court ruling, the decision to proceed with a project may be revisited by one or more agencies, the corporation or its partners, or financial backers.
These realities might be overcome were the real parties in interest – the private companies that rely on federal approvals or funding to go forward – in a position to manage NEPA compliance toward a prompt and successful conclusion. They are not. NEPA climate suits can be brought only against federal agencies, which may not defend the actions with the same zeal as the real parties in interest, or necessarily the same points of view. Industry, therefore, must seek to intervene as defendants, but even if successful will not occupy “first chair” in the litigation. A successful, close working relationship with attorneys in the defendant agency and Department of Justice is not assured. In the end, the fate in court of a federally funded project or federal approval may lie substantially in the hands of government lawyers. Add in the vagaries of the relatively new area of climate change, and companies might well be apprehensive about outcomes before federal agencies and courts.
The problem penetrates even deeper. With growing consciousness of the campaign to bring NEPA cases against federal projects and programs, federal agencies will beef up – and inevitably stretch out – their efforts to comply with NEPA. EAs will become EISes; cumulative impacts analyses will expand in complexity and length. Strategies are available to manage NEPA compliance, e.g., multi-party multi-agency memoranda of understanding on the scope and schedule of NEPA compliance, but few federal incentives exist to chart a definite – much less prompt – course to final NEPA compliance. Again, the real parties in interest will experience project uncertainty, delay, and expense.
Food vs. Fuel and Impacts on Climate Change: Biofuels Under Siege
Concern about world food prices and shortages is causing law makers in both the EU and the US to consider either a moratorium or a cutback in biofuels production. In particular, ethanol produced from corn is being blamed as a significant contributor to the world food crisis. [summary]
International concerns over world food prices and shortages has recently triggered a major fuel-or-fuel debate. A UN official said recently that massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices. In its April 7 cover story, Time Magazine, blasted the impact increased biofuels consumption may have on climate. While US Department of Agriculture economists point to a large array of factors contributing to the current constriction in basic food commodities like corn, wheat, and rice, citing regional drought, larger population demand, and increased cost of production because of rising fossil fuel costs, the attention biofuels has attracted means a rough passage for biofuels and may portend badly for their future use.
The Time Magazine article indicts biofuels for “dramatically accelerating global warming” because of clearing of tropical rain forests for cropland for sugarcane, soybeans, or other fuel crops. The article says the US’s increased production of corn for ethanol has caused farmers to plant fewer acres of soybeans. This, in turn, has caused the world-wide commodity price of soybeans to increase, “spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.” According to Time, deforestation accounts for 20 percent of all current carbon emissions. A Rhode Island-sized area of Brazil was deforested in 2007 alone.
What is most interesting is the intensity of the reaction of UN entities. Concern for food supply has led to what some feel is an overreaction to the role biofuels production may play, as compared to drought, cultivation and transportation costs, and demand. The UN’s Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler has warned that the world is headed “towards a very long period of riots” and conflict stemming from food shortages and price increases. He went on to say that in recent months, rising food costs have sparked violent protests in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Madagascar, and Mauritania. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops were deployed to prevent seizure of food from fields and warehouses, while price increases led to a general strike in Burkina Faso. Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting programs aimed exclusively at debt reduction. He went on to say that “international market speculation on food commodities must cease.”
While Mr. Ziegler’s views may represent an extreme in the current food debate, both he and Time Magazine raise (and at the very least exemplify) issues about biofuels development that must be addressed in the coming months if the promising role biofuels may play in addressing climate, security, and oil dependence is to be realized.
The first is question of whether US biofuels production is causing world food prices to rise dramatically. World Bank President Robert Zoellick seems to thinks so. At a news conference on April 11, he said that demand for ethanol and other biofuels is a "significant contributor" to soaring food prices around the world. The World Bank has projected that food prices will stay high or go even higher over the next couple of years, with biofuels a major factor in keeping them high. "Biofuels are no doubt a significant contributor," Zoellick says. "It is clearly the case that programs in Europe and the United States that have increased biofuels production have contributed to the added demand for food."
The second question that has been raised is whether the impact of biofuels on the environment may outweigh their benefits. In addition to Time’s concern about global warming, just last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) felt compelled to address these impacts after a period of relatively benign acceptance of biofuels’ potential environmental impacts. Among the issues are the increased impacts of nitrogen compounds on the environment stemming from use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and higher nitrogen emissions compared to conventional gasoline. According to Inside EPA, “adding to the concern is the expanded renewable fuels standard (RFS) that Congress included in the recently enacted energy law, which boosts the prior RFS of 15 billion gallons by 2012 to 36 billion gallons by 2022.”
We will address the food-or-fuel issue in future blogs, including the promise of fuel from cellulosic ethanol production, favored by the President and leading environmental organizations alike. Cellulosic ethanol feedstocks, such as pine slashings and switchgrass (the fast-growing plant made famous in the President’s State of the Union two years ago), do not directly compete in food markets. The promise of cellulosic ethanol remains bright, as organizations such as 25X25 have recently begun to reemphasize.
