United States, Australia Partner to Make Solar Energy Cheap

By Jesse Jenkins, originally at the Breakthrough Institute

The United States and Australia have inked a new partnership to pursue joint solar energy research designed to make solar energy cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the announcement in Melbourne on Sunday, with the Australian government set to commit up to $50 million towards the program.

Ms Gillard said the aim was to make solar power as cheap as conventional energy sources.

"One of the greatest barriers to a broader commercial take up of solar power is its cost and that is specifically what this joint research initiative will address," Ms Gillard told reporters.

"The joint project with the United States is part of an aggressive effort to bring the sales price of solar technology down by two to four times."

Ms Clinton said the program aimed to make solar power competitive with conventional energy sources by 2015.

The price had dropped by 50 per cent in the past three years but there was more work to be done, she said.

"Under this initiative our two governments will share both the costs and the benefits of research and development which will speed up innovation," she said.

Secretary Clinton also pledged a $500,000 grant from the U.S. State Department to support a global survey to identify opportunities to reuse carbon dioxide emitted by power plant and industrial processes, headed up by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a recently established research center co-funded by the Australian government.

Solar Powerhouse? Solar irradiation in Australia is among the highest in the world, as this color-coded map from NASA illustrates (darker red areas have the most incoming solar energy). Source: The Age/Reuters

Australia, with perhaps the greatest solar energy potential in the world, has an obvious interest in pursuing affordable, scalable solar power solutions, and has also maintained several long-standing solar research efforts. Can the two new partners accelerate efforts to make solar energy cheap?

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WEBINAR: After Copenhagen: What Was Achieved?

Live Webcast January 26, 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST



The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or Cop15, took place in Copenhagen December 2009 with the goal of establishing a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto accords, due to expire in 2012. The expectations for the first climate convention since President Obama has taken office and the first since China attained its status as a global superpower put additional pressure on world leaders and policy-makers to create a lasting and workable road map to reduce emissions and promote sustainability.

While the devil is certainly in the details, and most certainly the Copenhagen congress should only be viewed as a starting point for global action, it is clear that the world had hope for real progress and actionable goals. Did they get it?

With this question in mind, The Energy Collective, with our enabling sponsor, Siemens, would like to invite you to join us as we break down what was achieved, and what got left undone in Copenhagen this year. In addition to your questions, we will examine the events of Cop15 from a number of angles, including:

Was progress made on on REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) and adaptation aid to developing countries?

What about international technology cooperation and transfers?

What will the new agreements mean for high-emitting industries and companies? Those based in the developed world? Developing world? What about implications for other companies?

Going forward, will the G-20 and other smaller groups have more power than the UNFCCC in shape global climate agreements? Arguably, focused attention by just the main emitters makes more sense and would be more effective.

How will any Copenhagen agreements be enforced?

Register here today.

Featuring:

Marc Gunther is a veteran journalist, speaker, writer and consultant whose focus is business and sustainability. Marc is a contributing editor at FORTUNE magazine, a senior writer at Greenbiz.com, and a lead blogger at The Energy Collective. He's also a husband and father, a lover of the outdoors and a marathon runner. Marc is the author or co-author of four books, including Faith and Fortune: How Compassionate Capitalism is Transforming American Business. He's a graduate of Yale who lives in Bethesda, MD.

Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and his roles include: Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group, and Director of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. Professor Stavins' research has focused on diverse areas of environmental economics and policy, including examinations of: market-based policy instruments; regulatory impact analysis; innovation and diffusion of pollution-control technologies; competitiveness effects of regulation; depletion of forested wetlands; political economy of policy instrument choice; and costs of carbon sequestration. Prior to Harvard, Stavins was a staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Aimée Christensen leads Christensen Global Strategies, advising corporate, philanthropic, governmental, multilateral, and non-profit clients seeking to address the global challenges of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource scarcity. Her clients have included the Clinton Global Initiative, The Elders, Swiss Re, the United Nations Development Program, Virgin United, and Wolfensohn + Co. Previously, Aimée worked with Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, as well as the Legal Department of the World Bank and the International Centre for Trade & Sustainable Development. Among other groups, she is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council on Renewable Energy.

Dirk Forrister is Managing Director at Natsource LLC, responsible for new carbon fund development. Until recently, he worked in the company's London office, where he was responsible for building the company's carbon finance business in Europe. He managed the development and launch of the Greenhouse Gas Credit Aggregation Pool, which grew to over $800 million in corporate commitments. Prior to joining Natsource, Forrister served as Chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force in the Clinton Administration, and prior to that was Assistant US Secretary of Energy for Congressional & Public Affairs. He has also held positions as Energy Program Manager at Environmental Defense Fund and as legislative counsel to Congressman Jim Cooper, the author of two early climate change laws.

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Will Copenhagen Mark the End of "Magical" Climate Thinking?

That's the question explored by the Breakthrough Institute's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in a new column in Foreign Policy that chronicles the climate odyssey of the past year - from President Obama's campaign and election through Congressional climate debates and the chaos in Copenhagen.

Take a gander at the in-depth column here.

Here's a few excerpts:

There was good reason to be hopeful in January 2009 that the election of Barack Obama would bring about America's long-awaited clean energy revolution. As president-elect, Obama had started to talk about energy policy in a way that no leader of either U.S. party had before. Promising to save the country from both severe recession and industrial decline, Obama described the transformation of the United States' energy economy as a defining challenge of his presidency -- an economic and national security imperative that Congress would fail to address at the country's peril.

But the reality fell far short of expectations. The Obama administration succumbed, like many others, to a sort of magical climate thinking that promised a painless and even prosperous transition to a low-carbon future with the tools already at hand. The only official within his administration to accurately grasp the technology challenges faced, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, was sidelined at crucial moments.

[...]

One year ago, in his first State of the Union address, Obama proposed a previously unprecedented $15 billion annual investment in clean energy research and development. Further, he appointed a technologist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chu, as energy secretary to oversee that investment. The $800 billion stimulus, passed shortly thereafter, gave further credence to the notion that after 30 years of false starts, overblown rhetoric, and outright neglect, Congress and the president might finally get serious about remaking the United States' energy economy.

The stimulus included billions for energy R&D, infrastructure, and efficiency, and overturned the conventional wisdom that the United States would never again make big federal investments in technology as it had during the Cold War. But no sooner had the president's stimulus program demonstrated that a new way forward on climate change and energy might be possible, then the new administration relinquished its climate change and energy policy to the partisans of the past.

[...]

Putting Browner, a former Al Gore aide, in charge of climate-change policy was payback to environmental groups and the green donors who had supported Obama's campaign. But it also signaled that, inside the White House, the clean energy investment message that the president had used to such great effect in winning battleground states like Ohio and Colorado was seen as just that: a powerful message to use in the campaign, not a policy priority.

In this, Obama was following two decades of magical thinking among both greens and liberal Democrats about energy technology. In this view, energy efficiency pays for itself, solar and wind power are already nearly cost competitive with fossil fuels, and both can quickly and cheaply reduce emissions. This Pollyanna view of fossil fuel alternatives and efficiency, which makes going green seem cheap and easy -- little more than the cost of "a postage stamp a day" -- has provided the justification for green-policy advocacy that has overwhelmingly focused on pollution regulations and carbon pricing while ignoring serious investment in energy research and development.

The price of Obama's failure to break with green climate orthodoxy is only now becoming apparent. The collapse of international climate negotiations in Copenhagen last month was just the latest evidence that efforts to regulate global pollution output cannot succeed. The Kyoto framework, which imagined that carbon pollution limits could be the primary driver of the complete transformation of the global energy economy, has irretrievably failed.

The real technological obstacles to decarbonizing the global economy today represent an insurmountable obstacle to political efforts to limit carbon emissions. Until policymakers get serious about addressing the central technological challenge, all efforts to control carbon emissions are doomed.

[...]

Steven Chu came to Washington expecting to manage a massive expansion of energy R&D. Chu had cut his teeth as a research scientist at the justly famed U.S. government-funded Bell Labs, which he saw as a model because they were responsible for inventing or developing a range of devices now part of the fabric of American life, from fax machines to TV transmission, radio astronomy, solar panel cells, the transistor, calculators, cell phones, Wi-Fi, and hundreds of other technological miracles.

Chu had never bought the idea that, in Al Gore's words, "we have all the technology we need" to solve the climate problem. Instead, he told the New York Times that Nobel-caliber breakthroughs are required in chemistry, physics, and biology to make more efficient batteries, solar panels, and biofuels that can compete with fossil fuels in price, and that nuclear power is needed to displace coal.

Unfortunately, his view hasn't shaped the actions of the administration or Democrats in Congress. By early spring it was clear that Democratic leaders on the House and Senate budget committees were not inclined to honor the president's request for a dramatic scale-up of federal clean energy R&D and that the White House was not inclined to fight for it. And with greens and establishment Democrats fully lost in the magical idea that we can achieve massive emissions reductions through conservation, efficiency, and existing renewable technologies, there was scarcely any constituency inside the Beltway for the kind of big energy-technology program that Chu had hoped to launch.

[...]

The Waxman-Markey legislation passed the House of Representatives last summer by a scant few votes, even as it became glaringly obvious to everyone who dared look that it would not require emissions reductions below business-as-usual levels.

Green groups insisted that the bill would reduce emissions and pointed reporters and green donors to allegedly independent analyses by the World Resources Institute (WRI). But the WRI, a major party to the cap-and-trade agreement negotiated by the EDF and NRDC with energy companies, simply used a magic accounting trick that was visible in plain sight: counting carbon offsets as real reductions of U.S. emissions.

Offsets typically fund activities such as tree planting and methane capture from landfills, and have proven over the last decade to be extremely unreliable, when they have not been outright fraudulent. The extensive offsets in Waxman-Markey would have allowed U.S. emissions to rise at business-as-usual rates over the next decade rather than declining to 17 percent below 2005 levels, as proponents of the bill claimed. Nevertheless, the WRI created graphs showing U.S. emissions magically going down 17 percent by 2020 and nearly 80 percent by 2050; the New York Times duly reprinted them; and partisans on both sides of the debate tacitly agreed to pretend as if proponents' farcical claims about the bill's mandated emissions reductions were true.

[...]

Incumbent energy interests had, in short, hijacked magical climate thinking for their own uses. They took cap-and-trade legislation and turned it into an opportunity for them to raise energy prices on consumers, invest a fraction of the higher revenues in clean energy, remove existing regulatory obstacles to the construction of coal plants, and lock in their competitive advantage while crowding out energy newcomers, including clean energy firms, for decades to come.

The legislation's prominent defenders, like CAP's Joseph Romm, labeled green critics of the bill "global warming deniers" and told anyone who would listen that Waxman and Markey had pulled a fast one on the coal lobby. Duke Energy's James Rogers played along, offering to gladly repay the American public in emissions reductions after 2030 for billions in free allowance allocations today.

[...]

The collapse of the Copenhagen talks marks not just the end of the United Nations as the primary venue for global climate negotiations but also the abandonment of binding emissions-reduction targets and timetables as the primary vehicle for achieving emissions reductions. Targets will continue to be tossed around, either as aspirational goals or as loophole-riddled sops to appease greens. But the real international action on climate change and energy will involve bilateral and multilateral negotiations to develop and deploy clean energy technologies.

Those negotiations will sometimes look like trade negotiations, sometimes like IMF negotiations, and sometimes like global agriculture or public health efforts. What they won't look like is the impossible global pollution-output negotiations that have defined international efforts to address climate change since the Rio climate convention 18 years ago.

[...]

In the end, whether or not the Senate passes a cap-in-name-only climate bill, the long-term failure of Kyoto and all other efforts to establish binding emissions caps is virtually assured and is a function of a basic technological problem. We simply do not have low-carbon technologies today that can at large scale replace fossil fuels at a cost that any political economy in the world is willing to impose upon itself. There will be no political solution to climate change, no binding international agreement to substantially reduce emissions, and no effective domestic carbon cap until low-carbon technologies are much cheaper than they are today.

[...]

However, the technologies we need will not materialize in response to carbon prices or emissions caps. Nor will they arrive, as many conservatives would have it, by getting the government out of the way and simply allowing a new generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to tinker away in their garages.

Rather, we need to create a new clean energy economy in the same way we created our information economy: by identifying a set of well-defined technical problems and mobilizing the human resources of our technologically advanced civilization -- our scientists, laboratories, universities, and engineers -- to solve them.

These technical questions are not difficult to grasp and in fact have already largely been laid out by Chu in his remarks to the New York Times. How do we convert sunlight into energy much more efficiently than solar panels do today? What combination of chemicals can store more energy in batteries that are smaller and lighter? How can we manufacture a next generation of self-contained nuclear reactors that are safer, smaller, and cheaper than the large ones of the 1950s and 1960s? And how can we engineer new biological organisms to serve as a cheap fuel alternative to oil?

Solving global warming's technology challenges will require not a single Apollo program or Manhattan Project, but many. We need to solve technical problems across a range of technologies and at a variety of stages along the road from technological development to demonstration to commercialization to mass deployment.

[...]

Transforming the global energy economy from fossil fuels to low-carbon alternatives over the next 50 to 100 years is such a monumental technological undertaking that it is quite understandable that many would either declare it impossible or retreat into magical thinking. We must resist these temptations.

Solving the technology challenge will not be easy, but in terms of our collective wealth and knowledge we are in a better position today than at any other point in our history. In the end, global efforts to address the climate challenge, if they are to succeed, must centrally focus upon the creation of a new and extraordinarily important global public good: the development of low-carbon energy technologies that are cheap, clean, and abundant. After two decades of domestic and international failure to take real action on climate change, it is time for the purveyors of magical thinking to take their exit so that the main act can begin.”

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Newsweek: Copenhagen R.I.P

Originally at the Breakthrough Institute

Newsweek's senior science writer Sharon Begley doesn't mince words in her post-mortem on Copenhagen. Declaring "Good Riddance to Copenhagen," Begley writes:

That sound you'll hear in 2010 is a can being kicked down the road. Again. In the wake of the failure of the international negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, you'll hear a lot of talk about how the world has two good chances in the new year to achieve what it failed to do at Copenhagen. Don't believe it. ...

The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of.

That's because developed countries are no more likely to work out their differences with developing countries before those 2010 meetings than they did before Copenhagen. Must China, India, and Brazil agree to legally binding, verifiable cuts in their carbon-dioxide emissions? How much will rich countries ante up to help poorer ones segue to noncarbon renewable-energy sources and adapt to rising seas, droughts, dwindling water supplies, and crop failures? Will countries have to accept international monitoring of their emissions, which drives China crazy? Rather than repeating the Copenhagen charade in 2010, then, it's time for creative destruction.

Accept that the 192 nations roped together by the U.N. will not agree on a meaningful climate treaty next year either. Drop the pretense that every country matters equally. Instead, set up bilateral talks and a "club" of the countries that do matter: a mere dozen account for almost all greenhouse emissions.

Sounds like another cogent call for a new Climate Realpolitik actually capable of bending the course of global emissions downwards and putting the world on a clean development path.

As the Breakthrough Institute's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus write:

The death of the UNFCCC heralds the end of the delusion that nation-states will radically alter their energy, forestry, and agricultural paths through pollution regulations and a massive and extremely complicated global carbon market managed by Wall Street firms. It will mark the end of the belief that serious action on climate is better negotiated with representatives from 193 U.N. member nations in the room, rather than bilaterally or between a handful of large economies, which generate the bulk of emissions.

It should also land a death-blow to the dark fantasy that we'll solve global warming by restricting economic growth. ...

A more appropriate forum will allow major economies to more easily advance their collective self-interest through real actions, such as energy and agricultural technology development, rather than United Nations-certified acts of altruism, such as more development aid or purchasing fake emissions reductions in the form of offets. Climate realpolitik must function in a larger context of trade and technology innovation, both of which have historically created win-win opportunities between nations. ...

If we're lucky, the historians of the future will look back at Copenhagen as the beginning of the secularization of climate policy, a time when the religiosity, pomposity, and mania of efforts to reduce emissions were asked to take a back seat by serious nations who had left the simulacrum to do the hard and vital work of shaping a new, real world.

After the chaos in Copenhagen, Begley concludes, such a change in tact could not come a moment too soon:

With the emerging science on sea-level rise, it is becoming clearer that it isn't just the good people of the Maldives who will have to look for a new home. Even more reason to say good riddance to Copenhagen, and replace it with something that actually has a prayer of reining in dangerous climate change.

Begley's full column can be read here.

See Breakthrough's collected Copenhagen coverage here.

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Copenhagen: Obama Announces Climate Deal, UNFCCC Crumbles?

By Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey and Yael Borofsky, originally at the Breakthrough Institute

In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined...

Breaking free from the auspices of the UN's 190+ nation negotiating framework, major emitters, including the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, appear poised to move forward with or without the rest of the UNFCCC nations.

According to a flurry of tweets and reports from observers on the ground in Copenhagen, the leader of the "G77," a large group of developing nations, are crying bloody murder, declaring that the deal "locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever" and saying "Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush." The EU is grudgingly signing on to the accord "as better than no accord." And protestors, led by radical activist Bill McKibben, are gathering outside the Bella Center crying "shame on our leaders."

"The President has wrecked the UN (and the planet)," declared a press release from McKibben's 350.org.

Despite the backlash he left behind in Copenhagen, President Obama's remarks at a press conference earlier today appeared firmly rooted in the political and economic realities of climate policy and seemed to embrace many of the tenets of an emerging Climate Realpolitik that could finally spell a new way forward for effective international action on climate change.

In his remarks, Obama succinctly outlined the fundamental tension that has impeded progress on addressing climate change under the UNFCCC process for 17 years.

"Essentially you have a situation where the Kyoto Protocol and some of the subsequent accords called on the developed countries who were signatories to engage in some significant mitigation actions and also to help developing countries. And there were very few, if any, obligations on the part of the developing countries.

Now, in some cases, for countries that are extremely poor, still agrarian and so forth, they're just not significant contributors to greenhouse gases. But what's happened obviously since 1992 is that you've got emerging countries like China and India and Brazil that have seen enormous economic growth and industrialization. So we know that moving forward it's going to be necessary if we're going to meet those targets for some changes to take place among those countries. It's not enough just for the developed countries to make changes. Those countries are going to have to make some changes, as well -- not of the same pace, not in the same way, but they're going to have to do something to assure that whatever carbon we're taking out of the environment is not just simply dumped in by other parties.

On the other hand, from the perspective of the developing countries like China and India, they're saying to themselves, per capita our carbon footprint remains very small, and we have hundreds of millions of people who don't even have electricity yet, so for us to get bound by a set of legal obligations could potentially curtail our ability to develop, and that's not fair."

Under the new pending agreement, a timeline to achieve a "legally binding" international treaty has been dropped and the President said that reaching such an agreement "is going to be very hard and it's going to take some time."

President Obama also reminded the world that a "legally binding" international climate agreement is not, in the end, legally binding anyway, while repudiating the notion that "Science" can dictate and bind national economic and political decision-making.

"And the second point that I'd make is that Kyoto was legally binding and everybody still fell short anyway...And so I think that it's important for us, instead of setting up a bunch of goals that end up just being words on a page and are not met, that we get moving--everybody is taking as aggressive a set of actions as they can....I think that as people step back, I guarantee you there are going to be a lot of people who immediately say, the science says you got to do X, Y, Z; in the absence of some sort of legal enforcement, it's not going to happen. Well, we don't have international government, and even treaties, as we saw in Kyoto, are only as strong as the countries' commitments to participate."

The framework of the deal appears to essentially be an agreement amongst major emitters to move forward with verifiable domestic actions to reduce carbon emissions and spur clean development, rejecting the abstract emissions targets and timetables that were the hallmark of the Kyoto protocol.

Noting that the deal falls short of many expectations, Obama recognized that technology is our last best hope to bridge the gap between what actions nations are willing (or able) to take today and what climate scientists argue is necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change:

"Our hope is that by investing in clean energy, in research, in development, in innovation, that in the same way that the Clean Air Act ended up spurring all kinds of innovations that solved the acid rain problem at a much cheaper and much more rapid pace than we expected, that by beginning to make progress and getting the wheels of innovation moving, that we are in fact going to be in a position to solve this problem. But we're going to need technological breakthroughs to get to the goals that we're looking for."

Hopefully, it was only President Obama's visible exhaustion that led him to confuse investments in research and innovation with regulations like the Clean Air Act, that, while successful for their limited purpose, offer no real insight or viable strategy for solving a technology innovation challenge as complex as climate change. If President Obama is serious about embracing technology innovation as a means of accelerating the creation of a clean energy economy and fueling sustainable global development, we hope the President and his advisers will take a fresh look at the kind of strategy necessary to jump-start a clean energy revolution and make clean energy cheap.

Ultimately, we will have to wait and see as the dust settles in Copenhagen whether the first sprouts of a new Climate Realpolitik, focused on the clean technology innovation capable of achieving real climate progress, have emerged. Mainstream green groups like the League of Conservation Voters are already spinning the deal as "a breakthrough" that "provides a path forward towards a binding global treaty in 2010," raising the specter that the UNFCCC may shamble onwards... Stay tuned.

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$10.5 Trillion by 2030: the Number that Should be at the Heart of Copenhagen Climate Talks

By Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey

Forget 80% by 2050 and 17% by 2020. Time to stop fixating on 450 ppm vs 350 ppm. As UN climate talks kick off today in Copenhagen, Denmark, if you want a number to focus the world's attention on, try this one: $10.5 trillion.

That's the scale of additional investment required between now and 2030 to put the world's energy system on a lower-carbon path, according to the world energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency.

Without measurable progress that dramatically increases global investments in clean energy, we can forget stabilizing global temperatures or atmospheric carbon dioxide at any level. And as the IEA makes clear, the world's governments must lead the way in making massive public investments to rapidly develop and deploy an array of clean energy technologies capable of sustainably and affordably powering the planet.

So for those following the progress in Copenhagen, keep that sense of scale -- $10.5 trillion -- and just one phrase on your mind: Show me the money!

Enough With the Targets and Timetables

In the days leading up to the UN climate summit beginning today in Copenhagen, the focus has been on pronouncements from world leaders establishing various national targets to reduce or curb the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions principally driving global warming.

In July of this year, the world's 17 largest economies declared support for "an aspirational global goal" to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. Then, the world watched in recent weeks as first the United States, then China and most recently Brazil and India put their emissions pledges on the table. Each would cut their emissions some amount by some date, with the developed countries outlining targets for absolute cuts to CO2 emissions and most developing countries, including China and India, announcing reductions in the carbon intensity of their economies (aka CO2 per GDP).

The withering array of different baselines and methods for counting cuts has left plenty confused as to where the world now stands as we enter the global climate talks this week.

But where do all these targets and timetables get us?

Whether you think the world should aim for 450 ppm or 350 ppm, 80% by 2050 or 50% by 2050, upshot is pretty much the same: the world must drive net global greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible towards zero. The real question then, is how to get there. And that is a question that tireless debate over emissions targets, timetables and ppm gets us no closer to answering.

The obsession with targets and timetables, both at the national and global level, obscures and diverts attention from the critical and fundamental reality underlying any successful global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. A revolutionary transformation of the global energy system requiring trillions of dollars of shared investment in clean energy technology will be necessary to meet the global climate objectives being discussed in Copenhagen.

As Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Green and co-author Isabel Galiana recently wrote in Nature:

"The fixation on near-term targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions at the climate meeting in Copenhagen has resulted in insufficient attention towards the technological means of achieving them."

10.5 Trillion Dollars by 2030 - The Scale of Investment Required

In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2009 World Energy Outlook in an effort to provide a boost to international climate negotiations by "detailing the practical steps needed for a sustainable energy future as part of a global climate deal."

The IEA predicts what the world energy mix will look like in 2030 under business-as-usual (what they call their "Reference Scenario"). Under the Reference Scenario, global energy demand increases by 40% from now until 2030. Absent significant global efforts to increase the utilization of clean energy technologies, fossil fuels will account for more than three quarters of the additional global demand. Significantly, the large majority of additional global energy demand--over 90 percent of the increase--will come from developing countries, with China and India alone accounting for half.

There is little doubt that such a scenario would be insufficient to keep the cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions under 450 parts per million. A business-as-usual energy future would also propagate a "persistently high level of spending on oil and gas imports"; the United States would still be dependent on imported oil, with the attendant negative implications for U.S. energy independence and national security.

The IEA also outlines a "450 Scenario", a future energy path that would limit the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas emissions to 450 parts per million. In the 450 Scenario, 60% of global electricity production comes from clean energy sources; 37% renewable, 18% nuclear, and 5% from plants fitted with carbon capture and storage.

Achieving anything close to this scenario will require a revolutionary transformation of the global energy system. Investment and innovation will be required across a wide range of technologies, almost all of which must be improved to become cheaper and more reliable in order to accelerate the pace of global clean tech adoption and emissions cuts.

This worldwide energy technology transformation, according to the IEA, will require additional investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technologies on the order of $10.5 trillion from now until 2030, above and beyond investments in energy infrastructure already included in their business-as-usual scenario.

This scale of additional clean energy investment, at roughly $500 billion per year over the next two decades, is far more than the world spends today on clean technology. And until we have cheaper and better clean energy technologies, the costs of meeting our climate objectives will continue to be excessively high, creating real, ongoing political hurdles and slowing the pace of clean energy adoption.

Indeed, the costs of climate mitigation are one of the major barriers constraining efforts to successfully address climate change. That is why the Breakthrough Institute has consistently advocated for a proactive clean energy technology strategy to make clean energy sources cheap, thereby cutting the costs of their widespread adoption. As the IEA has made clear, clean and cheap energy is needed to power sustainable global development, particularly to meet the massive demand for new, affordable energy sources in the developing world, where the bulk of new energy infrastructure investments will be made in coming decades.

All of this exposes an ironic truth: we will never reduce global carbon emissions on the scale necessary if the world continues to obsess about targets for reducing carbon emissions To succeed, the world must instead focus a healthy obsession on the massive shared global investments in clean technology needed to get the world running on low-carbon energy.

How to Judge the Outcome of Copenhagen

The important question in international climate negotiations should not be which countries are promising to reduce their emissions by which level. As similar commitments under the Kyoto Protocol reveal, these emissions pledges can easily become empty promises, and creative accounting offers plenty of ways to "comply" with these targets while avoiding the real task of fundamentally transforming the way the world makes and uses energy.

The only truly important metric is the impact Copenhagen has on the shared sums the global community will invest to build a new clean energy economy, how and where the funds are allocated, and where the investment will come from.

Without real, concrete strategies to drive over half a trillion dollars in new global annual investment in clean technology over the coming decades, our critical climate objective will remain far out of reach. And we will no doubt see world leaders continue to make empty promises that may provide a brief moment of catharsis for many climate advocates, while doing little to solve climate change.

$10.5 trillion dollars by 2030. That's the scale we must grapple with. If Copenhagen doesn't get us closer to closing this massive clean energy technology investment gap, it will have failed the global community, plain and simple.

Post updated 12/9/09

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NYTimes Gets "Lessons from Kyoto" Right

A new info-graphic from the New York Times, released today as UN climate talks begin in Copenhagen, looks at the "Lessons from Kyoto," the global treaty that's ongoing fate will be the focus of UN climate negotiations beginning today in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The graphic gets the lessons pretty much dead-on, including how little actual progress any nations have made towards meeting their Kyoto “obligations.” As the Times notes, "The legacy of the Kyoto Protocol is mixed." Of the 36 wealthy nations who agreed under the 1997 treaty to cut their emissions by an average of 5% below historic 1990 levels, just 18 are on track to meet their targets, almost all of them in Europe.

As the graphic illustrates, the bulk of these "successful" nations are former members of the Soviet bloc, and almost all saw deep economic declines after the fall of the Soviet Union, which conveniently occurred after the 1990 emissions baseline year used in the Kyoto treaty. Deindustrializing Eastern bloc nations, including East Germany, saw big cuts in their emissions and made compliance with the Kyoto protocol easy. Better yet, for these nations, exceeding their Kyoto "obligations" left them with excess credits under the treaty framework that they could sell to other nations struggling to cut their own emissions.

As the Times notes, 19 other nations subject to the Kyoto treaty are not on track to meet their emissions targets. Most have seen emissions grow with little hope of complying with Kyoto due to surges in economic growth and activity, including Canada (where emissions shot up through development of the Alberta tar sands for heavy oil extraction), Spain and Portugal (who's economies boomed over the last decade) and even green-minded Ireland and New Zealand (who's growing economies drove emissions up roughly 20% above 1990 levels).

The United States, meanwhile, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, yet saw emissions grow at a slower rate than many Kyoto countries, including each of those mentioned above.

Emissions have soared in rapidly developing China and India. Major developing nations were not subject to any requirements to cut emissions or drive clean development under the Kyoto treaty framework.

Essentially, as the Times info-graphic clearly illustrates, the "Lessons from Kyoto" are clear: economic trajectories, and little else, determined emissions outcomes under the targets and timetables focused Kyoto Protocol.

Without a proactive and massive shared global effort to sever economic growth from emissions by accelerating clean technology innovation and deployment, the Copenhagen summit now underway shouldn't be expected to produce a dramatically different outcome than it's Kyoto predecessor, despite likely "participation" from the U.S. and big developing nations like China this time around.

Check out the full, interactive info-graphic at the New York Times here. All graphics in this post from NYTimes. Originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute

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Climate Conundrum Continues in Run-up to Copenhagen

Originally a the Breakthrough Institute

The United States may be stuck in the middle of a climate conundrum. A proposal to establish border tariffs to account for the carbon associated with the imported manufactured products, like steel, looks critical to securing the support of key swing Senators interested in protecting the competitive position of American manufacturing. ... Yet ... those same tariff provisions that could win passage of a U.S. climate bill are firmly opposed by China and other developing nations and could both damage Sino-American trade relations and fissure international climate negotiations.

Breakthrough's Yael Borofsky wrote that back in October, and this climate conundrum continues to present perhaps the thorniest negotiating point as world leaders prepare to meet for international climate talks in Copenhagen next week. Indeed, on the eve of the global climate talks, the negotiating positions of the United States and major developing economies, including China and India, appear to remain at loggerheads.

In a letter to President Obama today, nine moderate Democratic Senators, all key swings for climate legislation or ratification of any international climate treaty, reiterated their demands that any international climate framework U.S. negotiators sign in Copenhagen must include comparable action from all major economies and allow tariffs to adjust prices on imports from any nation that does not agree to bindings agreements to reduce emissions "in specific trade- and energy-intensive economic sectors."

"Climate change is a serious and growing threat to the United States and the world," the Senators wrote. "Smart climate change policies would guard against these risks while also spurring clean energy investments that promote economic growth and create good domestic jobs."

"Importantly, however, poorly designed climate policies could also jeopardize U.S. national interest," the Senators warned, "by imposing burdens on U.S. consumers, companies and workers without solving the climate challenge."

To address these challenges, the U.S. should seek to negotiate a new international climate agreement under which, "All major economies should adopt ambitious, quantifiable, measurable, reportable and verifiable national actions" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Furthermore, U.S. climate policy, the Senators wrote, should include provisions to implement border adjustment tariffs if necessary to help shield domestic industries facing international competition from countries that have not implemented carbon reduction requirements for their industrial sectors.

Here's the key excerpt from the letter, signed by Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Begich of Alaska:

"Climate and trade policies should be designed to encourage all major emitting nations to take climate action and to deter the migration of polluting activities from one nation to another. Internationally, the United States' preferred and primary strategy ... should be to negotiate effective bilateral or multilateral agreements on reducing emissions in specific trade- and energy-intensitve economic sectors. Collectively, these new agreements -- whether negotiated under the United Nations, World Trade Organization or elsewhere -- should not only ensure emissions goals are reached but they should also integrate climate objectives into the international trade system, such as through border adjustments on imports from nations that have not yet adopted sufficient emissions control measures. ... Indeed, to promote equitable and effective global action any new U.S. climate change laws should establish a national system of border adjustments, in concert with emissions allowances or rebates to trade- and energy-intesnsive sectors of the economy. Any border adjustment policies should take effect by a date certain if appropriate international agreements have not entered force.

Simultaneously, two Indian newspapers reported over the weekend on a pre-Copenhagen summit in Beijing that included leaders of Brazil, South Africa, India and China, a group collectively dubbed the "BASIC" countries that includes the largest four emitters among the developing world.

The four BASIC nations reportedly agreed on a new draft of a negotiating position that sets all four nations up to collectively walk out on the Copenhagen negotiations if any of their "non-negotiable" planks are violated.

According to the Times of India, the four nations, along with Sudan as the head of the G77, a larger bloc of developing nations participating in the climate talks, agreed on a new draft negotiating position that argues that the Copenhagen framework should largely consist of an extension of the current Kyoto Protocol framework for a second commitment period running from 2012-2020. This seems to suggest that the carbon intensity targets recently announced by China and India would be voluntary goals, not binding commitments.

That runs counter to the U.S. negotiating position, which has remained adamant that the Kyoto Framework, which excluded commitments for developing nations including the big emitters amongst the BASIC countries, is not a workable framework. The United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol and has not participated in the international treaty's current commitment period set to end in 2012.

Furthermore, the BASIC nations' "non-negotiable" planks include a pledge to stand opposed to any global deal in Copenhagen that does not explicitly reject the use of carbon border tariffs or other measures to restrict trade in the context.

The Times of India reports (emphasis added):

Besides the elements of the Kyoto Protocol, there are "significant new features" in the draft proposal worked out by BASIC countries-Brazil, South Africa, India and China-at a meeting here on Saturday, Jairam Ramesh, minister of state for environment and forest said.

These countries have decided not to allow rich nations to make climate change an excuse to set up trade barriers or resort to trade protectionism. Rich countries should be ready to contribute funds for stopping the process of forest degradation including the one in Amazon valley in Brazil and also invest in the process of creating new forests.

The developing nations will also not accept any pressure from developed countries to establish legally binding emission targets at Copenhagen. Developing countries want to be allowed to reduce emissions voluntarily and take what they consider to be "nationally appropriate actions" he said.

Ramesh said India will under no circumstances accept the concept of a peaking year under which each country will have to indicate on what date they will reach the highest level of pollution before beginning to come down.

India will also not accept any unsupported mitigation actions without any effort by developed countries to provide funds and technology support to improve environment in developing nations.

New Delhi has also set its face against any international measurement, reporting and verification of the work done in India for environment protection.

The Indian minister said that China, Brazil and South Africa were also in agreement on these issues.

I have to note that China, India and the other BASIC countries' position on the border adjustments and emissions related to their exports is entirely inconsistent. They have continued to simultaneously argue that they should not be responsible for the emissions associated with the products they produce for export to developed nations and that the developed nations who buy them should be responsible. That's a fair and arguable point. But at the same time, the BASIC countries vehemently object to any border adjustment tariffs which would be a clear way for importing developed nations to take responsibility for the emissions associated with their imports (e.g. by internalizing the price of pollution associated with them).

The key, of course, is that China, India, Brazil and South Africa each put their economic development first and foremost, and border tariffs equal less exports. That's simply unacceptable to them (for easy to understand reasons).

I'm not exactly sure how this issue resolves, and it seems nearly impossible to imagine a U.S. Senate ratification of a treaty, let alone passage of a climate bill, that does not address the tariffs issue. At the same time, I can scarcely imagine China, India and the BASIC countries backing down on this issue given the central role exports play in each nation's economy.

Stay tuned. I don't envy the negotiators now embarking for Copenhagen...

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Climate Envoy: U.S. Unlikely to Commit to Emissions Target This Year

Originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute

A week of preliminary UN climate talks in Bangkok come to a close today with little concrete progress to show for it. With just two months left until much-anticipated negotiations in Copenhagen, it will be "extraordinarily difficult" for the U.S. to agree to specific emissions reduction targets in an international climate treaty, warns the United States' deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing (pictured right).

E&E News's ClimateWire reports (sub. required):

[T]he chief U.S. negotiator acknowledged that the United States may not agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a treaty this year until Congress passes its climate legislation.

"It will be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S. to commit to a specific number in the absence of action from Congress," State Department deputy climate envoy Jonathan Pershing said. "The question is open as to how much we can do. It's not really possible to answer."

Some progress was made in Bangkok, said Kim Carstensen, leader of the global climate initiative at WWF. But "on issues that require political breakthroughs, they've not made any real progress," she said. "That means targets, finance, institutions and the legal form of the outcome in Copenhagen."

While efforts to drive towards global agreement on binding emissions targets stall and both the United States and key developing nations, including China and India, balk at such proposals, a series of recent recommendations are establishing a growing consensus for an alternative to the targets and timetables approach that has repeatedly failed to make either political or substantive progress.

This emerging climate consensus would scrap the Kyoto Protocol's focus largely-symbolic emissions targets and timetables in favor of specific, actionable national commitments to the two things that actually drive down global emissions: accelerating the deployment of clean energy and the improvement of energy intensity in key sectors of the economy.

Alongside real commitments from the world's rich nations to help provide financial and technical support to speed the diffusion of clean technologies to the world's poorer nations, this more direct framework can build off of policies already underway in key nations, including the U.S., China and India, and result in far more concrete climate action than the empty commitments to symbolic emissions targets.

For more on the Breakthrough Institute's coverage of the Road to Copenhagen, explore our archives here or see these selected posts:

• "Only Technology Policy, Not More Targets and Timetables, Can Save Copenhagen"


• "How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course: New Report Proposes Post-Kyoto Framework for Copenhagen"


• "IEA Sends Message to Copenhagen Delegates: $10 tn Needed to Combat Climate Change"


• "New "National Schedules" Proposal Could Change International Strategy in Time for Copenhagen"

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DailyShow: World's nations speak out boldly at the UN about their future tenuous plans to hit possible abstract climate goals

In their usual spot-on style, the Daily Show with John Stewart captures the essence of the United Nation's forum on climate change this week, where the heads of state of the world's nation's gave speeches on the topic in New York. Stewart notes the contrast between the doomsday rhetoric and the overall lack of concrete progress towards real action to slash emissions and get the world running on clean energy.

Never fear, Stewart says, "The world's largest industrial nations have spoken out boldly about their future tenuous plans to hit possible abstract goals." We're saved.

I appreciate my doomsday world outlook with a solid helping of satire, so enjoy...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Cloudy With a Chance of Heat Balls
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

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The Clean Energy Race: Nationalism, Rhetoric or Realpolitik, Part 2

Originally posted at The Breakthrough Institute. Part 1 is here.

A second piece on nationalism in the context of the clean energy race was published on Mother Jones' blog MoJo, and is evidence that the growing body of discourse around this issue has struck a very resonant chord. In the post, entitled "Harnessing Nationalism," Kevin Drum offers poignant, if somewhat veiled, criticism of the rhetoric behind the "clean energy race" narrative.

Inspired by The New Republic's Bradford Plumer, the post starts with a lengthy quote whose primary point is this: the clean energy race is not a zero-sum competition because everyone stands to benefit if China makes a significant effort to reduce emissions by investing in clean technology.

First, as Drum puts it, Plumer's commentary may be an attempt at "intellectual honesty," but honesty doesn't make it completely accurate. True, the whole world will benefit from advancements in clean energy no matter where it comes from, but China is not motivated to compete in the clean tech industry by emissions reductions - it is driven by the potential for economic gain.

As a (rapidly) developing nation, economic development, not emissions targets, is the highest priority. Thus, the race is not about emissions, it is about whose economy stands to benefit from leadership in clean technology.

Drum views the clean energy race through "green" tinted glasses, as well, preferring the "race" rhetoric to the alternative: the apocalyptic narrative that has clearly failed to motivate effective climate change action. Rhetorically speaking, framing the need to reduce carbon emissions as a clean energy race is both more engaging and more productive. As he aptly declares:

If this kind of thing got us to the moon, maybe it can save the planet as well. I say we go along.

The clean energy race, however, is more than just a new and improved framing mechanism or encouragement of America's honed nationalistic tendencies - it is an economic truth. What Drum misses when he writes off the recent proliferation of clean energy articles as hype, is that this issue could both be an effective rhetorical tool as well as a humbling reality.

The main-stream media and editorial contributors are not the only writers expressing concern that America is sacrificing competitiveness in the clean tech industry. Recent reports from the Climate Group, the Center for American Progress and others report quantitative analysis that China (not to mention Japan, South Korea, and India) is accelerating its clean tech initiatives at unprecedented rates, especially in comparison to the U.S.

Although his language is flippant, Drum draws attention to an important criticism of the clean energy race narrative. It has the potential to be perceived not only as an example of over-exerted nationalism but also as an expression of xenophobia. Anti-China or anti-Asia sentiment could be an outgrowth of engaging in a clean energy competition, however, that is not the point of alerting policymakers and the general public to the fact that America is losing ground in a sector it should be dominating.

While Drum obliquely asserts that clean energy rhetoric paints the Chinese as "scary" "quasi-socialist...hordes," this is far from the intention. While the framing plays to American aspirations of greatness, it does not do so at the denigration of the Chinese. The point is that the U.S. needs to be competitive, not because the Chinese are bad guys, but because America is being challenged by a serious economic threat to its leadership in innovative sectors. The U.S has the ability to lead, but it is not currently living up to its potential.

Plumer and Drum are correct in terms of climate change. The clean energy race is effective rhetoric but it is not a zero-sum game since more clean energy technology is a win-win-win. Unlike the nuclear arms race - which left the world with an arsenal of supremely destructive weapons and dicey non-proliferation policy to negotiate - the clean energy race will only lead to innovation and eventually, significantly less carbon intensive energy supplies.

In fact, the clean energy race has repeatedly been compared to the "space race," a nation competition that also spurred innovation and technological advancements. The space race ended on the moon; it is still not clear where the clean energy race finish line will be.

From an economic stand-point, however, the clean energy race has much higher stakes. If America wins, the race is a productive means by which the U.S. can revitalize a struggling economy. The imperitive to "win" is strong since the U.S. stands to lose its status as the world's technology innovation leader and economic superpower.

Still, it is not quite a zero-sum situation. Full-fledged, healthy competition will spur innovation, resulting in measurable economic benefits for both countries and the rest of world. Thus, America must embrace this technology challenge, not because it must defeat China, but because it stands to gain from rising to the occasion and proving that it deserves to be a global economic leader.

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The Clean Energy Race: Nationalism, Rhetoric or Realpolitik, Part 1

Originally posted at The Breakthrough Institute

When the Breakthrough Institute's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus began advocating for a paradigm shift in the global approach to climate change in the early 2000's, they could not have predicted that a paradigm shift of another variety might occur simultaneously. That is: a shift in the balance of global power.

In an op-ed entitled, "Rebalancing Relations with China," published in the Washington Post this week, Henry Kissinger assessed the power shift occurring between the U.S. and China, calling for Sino-American cooperation in lieu of boisterous assertions of nationalistic superiority and hegemonic power.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during the Nixon Administration, Kissinger is a known proponent of realpolitik. Although that term typically has a negative connotation in the U.S. and is often associated with power abuse, the word actually refers to a theory of politics grounded in the realistic assessment of power, rather than ideology.

In accordance with this theory, Kissinger's puts forth an ideology-free assessment of the current relationship between the United States and China. China's position as America's largest creditor and the economic crisis, in combination, have served to level the playing field between the two nations. Faced with increasing economic interdependence and China's conflicting interest in reducing that dependence, "ambivalence," Kissinger asserts, "is the inevitable consequence."

In Kissinger's estimation, a new political framework that recognizes China as a global economic power will be crucial to revitalizing the world economy. From this standpoint, there are three ways a Sino-American relationship could play out on the global stage.

First, both countries could resort to unmitigated nationalism. Historically, Kissinger points out, aggressive national rivalries have resulted in damaging confrontations with far-reaching societal consequences.

American leaders must resist the siren call of a containment policy drawn from the Cold War playbook. China must guard against a policy aimed at reducing alleged American hegemonic designs and the temptation to create an Asian bloc to that end. America and China should not repeat the process that, a century ago, moved Britain and Germany from friendship to a confrontation that drained both societies in a global war.

As China gains political influence, both countries must resist the urge to subvert each other. Should China and America refuse to cooperate, international issues that depend on their partnership, "such as energy, the environment, nuclear proliferation, and climate change," will suffer the greatest casualties. Unmediated nationalism, on behalf of both countries, would only impede progress for both societies and the rest of the world.

The second outcome is for the U.S. and China to form a powerful but exclusive G-2. Perhaps the most alienating possibility, this type of exclusion could only motivate divisive nationalism among other countries instead of the global cooperation that is desperately needed to ensure world order.

Finally, Kissinger suggests that the global goal should be for the U.S. and China to engage in a balanced, cooperative relationship that is particularly inclusive of China's bordering neighbors. This would require the U.S. to break from its time-honored habit of hegemony while still maintaining a leadership role as it adjusts to Asia as the locus of international attention.

While Kissinger's portrayal of the current balance of power between the U.S., China, and the rest of the world is driven by realpolitik, his call for cooperation may not be. For a Sino-American cooperation scenario to play out, the paradigm shift would need to be two-fold: 1) Kissinger's proposal for a new political framework would be adopted and the U.S. would cede the solitary role of global superpower and graciously inhabit the role of co-global superpower; 2) the U.S. would have to accept China as the new technology leader, particularly in clean energy technology, and nostalgically recall the days when winning that other great nation race took us to the moon.

The first shift is already occurring; the second is a potential outcome of the clean energy race.

While Kissinger warns against resorting to "classic balance-of-power" politics, engaging in a clean energy race with China has productive value both inside and outside the realm of economic power. Nationalism aside, competition between the U.S. and Asia, will both drive economic growth (for at least one, if not both countries) and improve the global energy supply. Given its lackluster efforts to construct effective clean energy policy, the question may not be who will win, but can America even compete?

With an old-hand technology leader on one side and an ambitious novice on the other, visions of clean tech grandeur are to be expected and pursued. While competition may preclude both nations from realizing the ultimate wisdom of Kissinger's vision, a high stakes clean energy race has the potential to produce the best both nations have to offer. Of course, the consequences could also be a dramatic shift in economic leadership and a new center for global power.

Read Part 2 in this series here.

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New Report Recommends Technology Deployment Targets to Decarbonize Industry

Originally posted at The Breakthrough Institute

Here's the current climate stalemate: While US and EU negotiators keep pushing for an international treaty based on cutting emissions, developing nations like China and India keep refusing to adopt hard emissions caps. But according to a new report by the Center for Clean Air Policy, those emission caps are too hard to measure and monitor in developing nations, anyway. Instead, the report concludes, developing countries should adopt a new approach to increase efficiency in their most energy-intensive industries by setting measurable clean energy technology targets.

Dan Klein of CCAP, a co-author of the report, explained:

"To be able to say we're going to improve our emissions intensity by 5 percent, that's a nice concept. But to be able to actually do that means ... you have the ability to measure industrywide what you're doing now and what you're doing after."

On the other hand, "It's not such a difficult thing to count the number of plants that have a certain technology," Klein said.



In a close examination of China's cement, iron and steel industries, Klein and his colleagues--including collaborators from China's Tshinghua University--found that adopting targets for the deployment of more efficient technologies in the cement industry alone could reduce emissions in that sector by 10-20%.

Not only would a technology-based approach reduce emissions more quickly and effectively than setting a hard cap, it would also make developing nations more likely to get on-board for an international climate treaty.

Haibing Ma, another co-author of the report, said:

"This kind of approach will have more buying power. [China has] shown a greater level of interest in this type of approach" than in energy-intensity or hard emissions cap approaches.

A technology-based approach also follows logically from the rapid deployment actions China is already taking. The nation has set ambitious targets for clean energy technologies including wind, solar, and nuclear. The Chinese government has implemented a wide range of subsidies and incentives to facilitate the deployment of these clean energy technologies. And it will continue to foster clean technology deployment with a massive $440-660 billion clean energy investment plan, set to be released this year.

As Breakthrough and others have reported, it's not emissions caps but targeted technology deployment policies-- underwritten by substantial and stable government support--that have put China on track to surpass the US in the race to dominate the burgeoning clean energy industry.

Last week's CCAP report isn't the first to call for direct decarbonization of global industries. It falls in line with a recent paper coordinated by British professor and researcher Gwin Pryns, who recommends a strategy called the "Direct Kaya Approach" to reduce the carbon intensity of an economy by increasing energy efficiency and deploying low-carbon technologies. Such a framework could replace the failed, emissions-centric Kyoto model and provide the backbone for a new international climate agreement like the one Breakthrough has advocated.

The sooner climate negotiators heed the call of experts like Klein and Prins, the better. Pledges to slash emissions may make for rosy-sounding headlines, but without a plan to reach these goals, an international climate deal will amount to nothing but empty promises. The world has a far ways to go in order to avert catastrophic climate change--and a framework based on clear, measurable technology targets provides a roadmap for how both developed and developing countries will get there.

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South Korea to Invest $85b in Green New Deal

By Johanna Peace. Originally posted at Breakthrough Generation

This week, South Korea has upped the ante for green public investment as it continues to make swift progress toward becoming a clean-tech economy. Already, a staggering 80% of South Korea's $38 billion stimulus package has been earmarked for green investments.

And today, the South Korean government announced that it will invest $85 billion more over 5 years to encourage the growth of green industries and technologies. That's more than doubling South Korea's recent promise to invest $40 billion over five years in a "Green New Deal," and the equivalent of 2% of the East Asian nation's total GDP. If the United States were to invest a comparable share of it's national wealth in clean energy technology, the sum would total over $275 billion annually.

As part of the investment plan, South Korea will raise $1.6 billion from the private sector to help green industry, using a suite of financial supports and incentives. According to Reuters:

"From the public sector, the state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB) and state-run pension funds plan to set up a 500 billion won ($395 million) private equity fund in the second half of the year, officials said.

The KDB also aims to set up a 300 billion won ($237 million) fund for research and development (R&D) for the industries. The government will increase a fund for smaller firms in the industries to 1.1 trillion won ($868 million) by 2013 from a 60 billion won ($47 million) this year.

South Korea plans to raise fiscal support for R&D in the industries to 2.8 trillion won ($2.2 billion) by 2013 from 2.0 trillion won ($1.57 billion) this year.

The government will increase credit guarantee support for such companies and projects to 7.0 trillion won ($5.52 billion) by 2013 from 2.8 trillion won ($2.2 billion) this year and triple export financing.

On Thursday, the government said it would help launch a 5 trillion won ($3.95 billion) fund aimed at providing financial support for investments by companies as part of plans to encourage corporate spending."

By expanding R&D funding for technologies such as LEDs, solar batteries, and hybrid cars, South Korea aims to raise its international market share of clean tech products to 8%.

South Korea knows that investing in clean tech industries creates an unstoppable growth engine for broader economic prosperity. Yet the US, a self-proclaimed leader in the drive toward a carbon-free global economy, has invested a paltry 12% of its own stimulus package in creating a clean energy economy at home. Not to mention the feeble climate bill that just passed the House, which totally misses the opportunity to harness revenues from the sale of emission allowances and direct them toward green industry stimulus measures like South Korea's.

Until the US government makes clean energy investment a national priority, America will have no answer to the clean tech challenges coming from Asia's emerging green economies.

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With $17.6b Project, China Surges Forward on Wind

By Johanna Peace. Originally posted at Breakthrough Generation

China's massive public investments in wind and other renewable energy technologies are edging the rapidly developing nation into the lead in the global clean energy race.

By mid-July, China will begin construction of a massive wind farm project in the northwestern Gansu province, at a total cost of US $17.6 billion. It will be China's biggest wind power station yet; according to local Development and Reform Commission official Wu Shengxue, it will reach an installed capacity of 20 GW by 2020. Eventually, the wind power capacity of the area is projected to reach 40 GW.

This development is the latest in what has recently been a major push by the Chinese to expand renewable energy use. Soon, Chinese officials are expected to reveal a new renewable energy stimulus plan of US $44-$66 billion per year over ten years, which will focus much of its resources on wind power. Under the plan, China will be on track to reach 100 GW of wind power capacity by 2020--more than eight times its current level.

By contrast, the American Clean Energy and Security Act invests only $6-12 billion per year in clean energy. As for the US "green stimulus," it includes a one-time clean energy spending boost of $112 billion--just half of China's $221 billion stimulus investment in green initiatives. Here's a sense of scale: If US investments in clean energy were on par with the Chinese in terms of percent GDP, we'd be spending $140-210 billion per year.

Right now, the US maintains an edge in wind power, with about 25 GW of installed capacity to China's 12 GW. But China has been at least doubling its wind power capacity each year for four years, and last year, China was second only to the US in added capacity.

Clearly, China is positioning itself to pull ahead as a leader in wind power and other renewable energy technologies. The major reason is a government commitment to substantial and sustained clean energy investment. The US needs to take note of this model, or watch its already razor-thin edge in clean energy tech getting thinner every day.

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Road to Copenhagen: The Need for a New Framework

By Johanna Peace with Devon Swezey and Leigh Ewbank. Originally posted at Breakthrough Generation

It's official: India won't accept binding caps on its emissions of greenhouse gases. Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh made the case clear last Thursday:

“India will not accept any emission-reduction target--period,” Ramesh said. “This is a non-negotiable stand.”

India's announcement is the latest frustrating news for those following the efforts of climate negotiators as they struggle to eke out an international agreement by this December's UN summit in Copenhagen. It's frustrating because the fundamental dissonance between what developed countries demand and what developing countries are willing to give appears to be the single most intractable roadblock standing in the way of a successful treaty. In fact, this very problem has impeded progress on international climate negotiations for decades.

China is also predictably inflexible when it comes to emissions reduction targets. Its May 20 position paper on the Copenhagen conference makes no mention of reduction targets, and instead demands that industrialized nations cut their emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Chinese officials have repeatedly stated that China will not adopt binding targets because it does not bear the same responsibility as the developed world for historic greenhouse gas emissions.

The EU and the US favor domestic cap and trade systems and seek to expand them into a global carbon market. But in the developed world, this model hasn't worked. Under Kyoto, participating nations promised to reduce emissions below 1990 levels by 2012--instead, their emissions have been rising steadily. From 1990-2006, emissions increased in Japan by over 5 percent; in the US by 14 percent; in Canada by 20 percent; and in Australia by 30 percent.

The cap and trade model isn't likely to start working, either. Though supporters of ACES (the latest attempt to establish a domestic cap-and-trade system in the US) claim it will reduce emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, analyses by the EPA and the Breakthrough Institute reveal that the bill will not require any emissions reductions below projected business-as-usual growth for at least another decade.

Meanwhile, the developing world is looking on, and not surprisingly, they're opting out of the failed cap-and-trade model. China, for instance, has consistently argued that such a system would be incompatible with its institutions.

They might not be jumping on the emissions reduction bandwagon, but major developing countries are not dragging their feet either. Recent weeks have seen China and India sharpen their focus on another approach to addressing climate change: investment. The Indian government plans to invest $100 billion in solar energy production over the next decade, with a target of 20 GW by 2020. In China, officials will soon unveil a massive ten-year renewable energy investment plan on the order of $440-660 billion. This new stimulus spending will dramatically expand China's renewable energy capacity, and could triple the nation's 2020 targets for wind and solar power.

China is pulling ahead as the world's first renewable energy superpower, and India is poised to join it. This means they'll come to Copenhagen with major leverage over finger-wagging Western countries that press for emission cuts from developing nations but do little to invest in renewable energy at home. If China and India can point to substantial domestic renewable energy investment, they'll bolster their case for continuing to reject emissions reduction targets.

So surely it's time to stop fighting a battle we're not going to win. Instead, hope for achieving a successful agreement in Copenhagen lies in adopting an alternative framework that eschews emissions targets in favor of something more workable.

Fortunately, there are already indications that the outlines of such a framework may be emerging, at least for developing countries. China appears open to the idea of carbon intensity targets--essentially slowing the growth of emissions--and India has proposed creating global innovation centers for the rapid development and diffusion of zero-carbon technologies. Both nations have called on developed countries to share clean technologies to foster low-carbon development.

This alternative framework could focus on targets for clean energy investment and deployment. The greenhouse gas emissions displaced by new energy technologies could be calculated relative to a projected business-as-usual trend. By pushing for emissions reduction through targets for clean technology investment, such an approach would mollify developing country leaders wary of setting binding emissions targets, and also result in real emissions reductions in the short term.

Senior U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing hinted that negotiations could move in that direction when he proposed that, instead of emissions targets, developing countries like China could be asked to commit to actions such as energy efficiency and renewable energy deployment:

"We're saying that the actions of developing countries should be binding, not the outcomes of those actions."

This week in L'Aquila, Italy, the Major Economies Forum on Climate Change will bring together the world's largest emitters to continue climate policy negotiations. The meeting will foreshadow the likelihood of achieving a global agreement in December. If US negotiators put forth an alternative framework based on investment rather than emissions targets, there's still hope of aligning the interests of developed and developing nations in a binding agreement in Copenhagen. But if they stick to the failed framework of the past 20 years, prospects for achieving a global treaty will remain exceedingly grim.

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