Some Clarity From Kerry On The Carbon Conundrum

(And I also posted here.)

Sen. John Kerry at The Hill posted this yesterday on the urgency of enacting legislation to control man-made carbon emissions (and please allow me to observe that I can’t think of a word to describe how pathetic it is that I posted on this topic not quite four years ago here, and I believe events require that I continue to post about it)…

The truth is that the threat we face is not an abstract concern for the future. It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now. Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.

Make no mistake: catastrophic climate change represents a threat to human security, global stability, and -- yes -- even to American national security.

Climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

…

Anyone who doubts the threat should talk to the 11 retired American admirals and generals who warned in 2007 that "Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national-security challenges for the United States."

You can even ask the security planners in the Bush Administration, whose final national-defense strategy document recognized climate change among key trends that will shape U.S. defense policy in the coming years.

Or ask the National Intelligence Council -- the U.S. intelligence community's think-tank -- has concluded "global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national-security interests over the next 20 years."

Former CENTCOM Commander Anthony Zinni, no radical tree-hugger, put it simply: "We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

Kerry then goes on to describe with disturbing clarity how the climate crisis could impact southeast Asia, perhaps the most volatile region in the world.

And actually, the security threat posed by climate change has been known in this country for some time, as noted in this story, which also tells us the following…

Nearly six years ago, two scenario planners prepared a report for the Department of Defense titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." The report (download - PDF), by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, a San Francisco-based think tank, explored how an acceleration of climate change "could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war." It examined climate-induced constraints such as "food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production; decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patterns, causing more frequent floods and droughts; and disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess."

And even though we know what the response was from our prior ruling cabal, I must reiterate it with this 2007 story, which tells us that…

George Bush was castigated by European diplomats and found himself isolated yesterday after a special conference on climate change ended without any progress.

European ministers, diplomats and officials attending the Washington conference were scathing, particularly in private, over Mr Bush's failure once again to commit to binding action on climate change.

Although the US and Britain have been at odds over the environment since the early days of the Bush administration, the gap has never been as wide as yesterday.

Britain and almost all other European countries, including Germany and France, want mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse emissions. Mr Bush, while talking yesterday about a "new approach" and "a historic undertaking", remains totally opposed.

The conference, attended by more than 20 countries, including China, India, Britain, France and Germany, broke up with the US isolated, according to non-Americans attending. One of those present said even China and India, two of the biggest polluters, accepted that the voluntary approach proposed by the US was untenable and favoured binding measures, even though they disagreed with the Europeans over how this would be achieved.

I don’t completely trust China and India on this issue either, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s no excuse for our inaction.

So where are we at the moment concerning climate change legislation?

Well, Marshall Saunders of the Citizens Climate Lobby tells us the following today in the Philadelphia Inquirer in support of a carbon tax (I haven’t quite made up my mind about this guy, but I have a feeling he’s “on the beam” here - the fact that the Inky published him automatically makes me suspicious)…

The more I look at Congress' legislation to address climate change with a cap-and-trade program, the more it looks like a Rube Goldberg device - one of those amusing contraptions that employ all manner of moving parts in a complicated, convoluted process that performs a simple task.

The task we're talking about - reducing carbon emissions by making fossil fuels more expensive - is pretty straightforward. And yet to accomplish it, Congress has come up with a 1,400-page bill that makes War and Peace read like a short story.

To raise the cost of carbon-based energy and make clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, more competitive, cap-and-trade creates a market in which thousands of companies are required to purchase permits to emit carbon dioxide. But wait - most of the permits will initially be given away rather than auctioned off. And there's also this messy contrivance called carbon offsets, which allows polluters to invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions. Good luck verifying the efficacy of those offsets.

This seems to verify what Mother Jones points out here about Waxman-Markey (the ACES bill, which passed the House by seven votes as noted here); the MJ post tells us the following…

The split (over the bill) encompasses more than predictable ideological divides. Debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus this bill's cap-and-trade model has mostly given way to concerns about whether the legislation, sponsored by representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), lines the pockets of polluters with little to show for it. The most it would cut carbon emissions by 2020 is 17 percent below 1990 levels, nowhere near the 25 to 40 percent reduction sought by scientists and international climate negotiators. The Sierra Club has withheld its endorsement in hopes of improving the bill before a final vote—it wants to prevent polluters from receiving tradable emissions permits for free, preserve the EPA’s authority to independently regulate carbon, and better fund energy efficiency and clean energy—but Fahn and other environmentalists are skeptical that lawmakers will listen. “From my perspective,” he says, “the prospects of strengthening it to where we’d want to support the ultimate version are growing slim.”

Many environmentalists blame Waxman-Markey’s flaws on the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of industry and moderate environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council that, during the last years of the Bush administration, quietly hammered out what has become the bill’s framework. Sierra Club board member M.K. Dorsey, a professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth, calls the environmentalists in US-CAP “well-meaning liberals who do not pay enough attention to political economy.” He adds: “They got out-maneuvered, they got hoodwinked, because they were in over their head.”

As much as I respect the two principals behind the House bill, this seems to verify what I’ve read from other sources also (this recommends a carbon tax as does the Saunders column today, and even Exxon supported a carbon tax in Australia, as noted here, so there is a precedent - we also learn the following)…

Imposing a global carbon tax would ease pressure on the climate more cheaply than emissions trading, according to a study released last week by Danish professor Bjoern Lomborg.

A $0.50 tax for each ton of emissions may generate $1.51 in avoided climate damage, compared with costs as high as $68 per ton, resulting in 2 cents of avoided damage, under some emissions-mitigations models, the study said.

And that leads us back to the Senate bill sponsored by Kerry and Barbara Boxer of California, which, as noted here, will not be introduced until late September (with Dem senators from states dependent on coal manufacturing claiming here that they won’t support the legislation without job protection measures; I respect their fight, but I think they may lose on getting our trading partners onboard with this also).

I sincerely hope the Boxer-Kerry bill favors the carbon tax as opposed to the “cap ant trade” Waxman-Markey model. My suspicion is that the former would have a better shot at passage, since it’s a lot harder to demagogue on such a direct concept (though the “teabaggin’” demagoguery will come, of course).

I know a lot has transpired this year between the automaker assistance, the stimulus, the health care reform battle, and now this. But all of these are necessary components in the process of rebuilding an economy that has suffered from years of neglect.

And let’s hope and pray that I don’t somehow find myself in a position to post about our inaction on this four years from now. In that event, anything I or anyone else would say on it probably wouldn’t matter any more.