Red, Green, and Blue

About ten weeks from now leaders from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen to discuss the next climate treaty. During the last two to three years governments around the world moved to and fro over contentious issues like funding, technology transfer, intellectual property rights and emission reduction targets. As the world started to look for a replacement of the Kyoto Protocol, the start was slow with no sign of urgency even as the UNFCCC recommended a 25 to 40 percent reduction in global carbon emissions by 2020.

But the change at Washington brought a colossal change in the pace of global climate negotiations. The United States had played a vital role in formalization of the Kyoto Protocol but never ratified the same which created a gapping hole in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. With the failure of Kyoto Protocol acknowledged by almost all it is clear that the we cannot afford to repeat the mistake committed in the past. United States’ commitment to act boldly and swiftly has become the make or break issue for the next climate treaty. Read the rest of this entry »

San Francisco based power utility Pacific Gas & Electric has announced it will leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the organization’s “extreme” position on climate change.

Last month the Chamber of Commerce called for a “trial” on climate science as a means to thwart efforts in Congress to pass climate legislation, stymie the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding CO2 emissions, and needlessly continue to sow discord and confusion over the issue. It is an extremist position with which PG&E apparently wants no association. On a company blog post yesterday entitled Irreconcilable Differences, their position was made clear.

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After spending some time bringing together Israel and Palestine for a handshake photo-op in New York, President Obama turned his attention to a problem that may prove equally daunting: global cooperation on climate change.

In his first UN appearance since taking the Oval Office, Obama staked a lofty position for the US, promised that the US is “determined to act,” and that the US “will meet our responsibility to future generations.” Chinese President Hu Jintao matched Obama’s rhetoric, pledging that the Chinese would commit to a host of progressive steps around renewable energy and emissions reductions, but also cautioning that developing economies like China’s “should not … be asked to take on obligations that go beyond their development stage.”

The summer saw a lot of pre-positioning in advance of Copenhagen, and with today’s UN General Assembly marking the beginning of a series of mini-summits in the lead-up to December’s big climate change conference, the volume on those announcements will only increase along with their frequency and grandeur.

Still, with Obama facing an uphill battle on domestic climate change legislation and China hiding behind their “developing” status, Copenhagen is threatening to become little more than a public relations event with little real concerted action. The US will have to avoid making the push for global leadership on climate change into a new breed of arms race that would find Obama and US policymakers at a significant disadvantage against the Chinese in the following ways:

Paying Lip Service is Costly – China, India and other developing countries want the US-led West to subsidize their carbon reduction efforts. If the West balks and no comprehensive global agreement emerges, the US could still find itself saddled with costly commitments made in going toe-to-toe with China as a demonstration of leadership and willingness to cooperate. For example, at the UN, President Jintao made the headline-grabbing promise to plant enough new trees in China to cover the area of Norway. Jintao also promised to get China to 15% renewable energy within 10 years, a much more ambitious timeline than any US plan. While it may not represent the kind of economy-crippling commitment that China fears will result from a global agreement, these programs will be costly, and Obama has his hands full just trying to pay for health care.

Democracy’s Dilemma - Not only is Obama hamstrung by health care, an increasingly troublesome war in Afghanistan, and an economy that is still teetering; but, he also has the mettlesome matters of bipartisanship, political pressure and budget restraints. While a strongly Democratic House could barely pass a weakened climate bill, Jintao and the Chinese have a one-party system overseeing a command economy that gives the Chinese a lot more adaptability as circumstances dictate in Copenhagen, in the world press, and on the geopolitical landscape.

The World Won’t Grade on a Curve - The Chinese are already crying foul over efforts to stifle their economy for the sake of climate change action and the world community is not expecting much from the world’s fastest growing economy and most voluminous emitter. Commitments like those above are enough to make a splash and convince the world that China really is trying. By contrast, Senators from Obama’s own party are refusing to discuss the prospect of domestic climate change legislation unless it includes trade protections. That kind of opposition in his own party makes a lot of his words ring hollow while the Chinese will certainly be able to deliver on whatever proposals they float. There are no handicaps in this game, so even if they overshoot on a much lower standard, the Chinese promise to steal Obama’s thunder.

Conventional wisdom says you should never enter a land war in Asia. The same might be said for wars of words.

Flickr photo.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled on Monday that five of the largest power utilities can be called upon to defend themselves in court against allegations that their greenhouse gas emissions create a public nuisance by contributing to global warming.

Siding with a coalition of eight states, three land trusts, and the city of New York, the court made its long awaited ruling, reinstating the lawsuit State of Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co (pdf) brought under federal common law. The suit was rejected by a lower court judge in 2004.

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Recent forest fires resulted in a quarter of the Angeles National Forest being burned to a crisp. More than 160,000 acres of wood and chaparral were destroyed.  Impassioned editorials are calling for the restoration of the forest’s beauty spots and trails, but what is the political cost of restoring the environment at a pace faster than nature’s, or of failing to do so?

Natural regenaration causes its own problems

The chaparral will reappear within a couple of seasons,  and the trees will begin to regenerate although for some species, seed germination won’t be possible until years of rain-water leaching remove the carbonised layer of ash and debris from the soil surface. While pines are willing to push through anything, oak is less rugged, and seedling trees don’t tolerate soil acidity as nearly as well, tending to fail before the end of their first year if they can’t get their roots down into rich humus.

Without tree cover, there is more damage on the way. If there are strong winter rains, then landslides will sluice fallen branches and trees down the steep slopes, pushing over remaining plants and creating debris jams in the watercourses with two results: denuded hillsides and flooded lower lands. Jams mean that water can’t run cleanly or well and that means that fish like trout, which rely on clear, fast running streams, die.

Recreation versus regenaration

But The Angeles is not just an area of forest – it’s a massive escape route for the people who live near it. From Patrick Swayze, who owned the five acre Rancho Bizarro at the foot of the forest, through to the poorest Angeleno who hitches to the Angeles to backpack the forest trails, the National Forest is both a green lung and a vast playground.

Not all visitors are enthralled by the beauty of the landscape: biker gangs frequently cut new trails through the woodland, and are hunted in turn by rangers, while gangs growing marijuana find or create clearings in which they can establish their crops. One of the strangest illegal activities in The Angeles is the searching out of hidden Native American sites, often to be found in caves hidden in the hills, and the looting of sacred items left there by previous generations of shamans and artists.

Another area of conflict that will appear very rapidly is that when a quarter of a habitat disappears, many animals need to relocate. They will move into other areas of the forest, but because human habitation now presses right up to the edges of the forest, they will also move into backyards and gardens, and while the odd rabbit or raccoon might not present too much of a problem, the migration of rattlesnakes will present many families with nightmares and mule deer stripping suburban yards of all their carefully nurtured plants will be very unpopular. And that’s without the mountain lions and bears …

Managing habitats requires funding and people

So funding the restoration of the habitat has to be a priority, for several reasons – the tourism factor, the need to ensure Los Angeles has enough greenery to act as a pollution soak, and the simple fact that failing to remedy the effects of fire will lead to greater problems later as invasive species, both plant and animal, take over the scorched spaces.

The great problem is that the earliest re-growth is the ecosystem that requires most management. Chaparral is a mixture of hardy small trees and shrubs such as scrub oak and ceanothus, Manzanita and bush rue, many of which will, in seven to twelve years, have become largely old, dead wood. This wood acts as a tinder to forest fires. And managing chaparral is a labour-intensive business – it has to be stripped out by hand or grazed by goats or mountain sheep, and the Forest has been understaffed by rangers, let alone foresters, for years.

However, there’s no obvious political will as yet to establish a large-scale reinvestment programme for the Forest and until some substantial replanning of the Forestry resources occurs, it will continue to be a fire risk.

National Forest courtesy of Rennet Stowe at Flickr under a creative commons licence

The Sunday talk shows were full of talk about the health care reform fight: are there 60 votes in the Senate? is the public option off the table? are illegal immigrants covered? And, while consensus on any health care answers has been fleeting, everyone agrees on what is the most important question: how is President Obama going to PAY for health care reform?

The White House still lists climate change legislation as one of its priorities, but with Senate action on a bill getting pushed deeper into September - and closer to oblivion for 2009 - greens cannot help but worry that their cause will not only be eclipsed by health care, but also by the economy generally, unemployment specifically, and even foreign policy issues like the escalation in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Even in the midst of the health care fight, the Sunday talk shows devoted some time to the political fallout from the resignation of Van Jones, and with his resignation over the weekend, the former White House green jobs czar has become a national object lesson in partisan politicking. But, outside of the American political media vacuum, Jones’ green-jobs-for -the-urban-poor programming will be his lasting legacy.

For example, take this morning’s BBC feature on Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, a part of the British news radio network’s recent series of features on the US economic downturn and its ground-level impacts in California. The BBC focused on some of the funding problems that Homeboy faces in these times of both declining philanthropy and state budgets.

Still, the organization - devoted to reintegrating former LA-area gangbangers by providing everything from job training to tattoo removal - is finding a productive niche in the green-collar economy. Operating under the slogan “nothing stops a bullet like a job,” Homeboy recently began training former gang members as solar panel installers.

Class members in the solar program attend a two-month course - with the $131 tuition and an $8 hourly stipend paid by Homeboys - and graduate with skills that are helping them land jobs that pay from $15 to upwards of $30 an hour. If programs like Homeboy’s can catch on the way that Jones has envisioned, the average political observer some years hence may remember Jones more for the green-collar economic policies that the BBC highlighted rather than as the political cautionary tale that defined his 15 minutes of fame over one Labor Day weekend.

Illustration of Van Jones “greening the ghetto” by RADillustrates at Flickr.

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) may not sound snappy, but its long-term aim is easily expressed: to act as a vegetable ark.  Part of the treaty requires the developed world to fund the preservation of diverse species of food crop around the world.

The funding is provided by richer nations, which have often become variety poor, and given to other nations, which are often poorer but have a wide range of plants which could act as an ‘agricultural insurance’ by maintaining biodiversity in essential crops.

The crops being preserved in this way include potatoes in Peru, corn and beans in Cuba and oranges in Egypt. The varieties need to be preserved to ensure that the planet has a range of foods that are more likely to be able to adapt to challenges ranging from climate change to pollution, from salination to the loss of pollinators like insects to the ability to resist diseases and predators.

Up to 90% of vegetable variety has been lost

Four basic food staples: rice, wheat, corn and potatoes make up more than half the total foodstuffs eaten on the planet, and in this group of staple foods, less than 150 varieties are grown commercially. Wheat has just five major varieties now grown globally on a commercial scale, of the more than 700 recorded varieties, many of which have been lost and others of which are only grown by hobby farmers or in remote districts where the ‘big five’ will not thrive. China alone has lost nearly 90% of the wheat varieties that were grown across the country sixty years ago and India grows only 10% of the rice varieties that appeared in its fields a hundred years ago.

This is not just a loss of diversity – a limited range of varieties means that those grown are more liable to damage by pests or disease. It also leaves many countries open to price hikes in the recently globalised commodity markets, meaning that many people simply cannot afford to buy the staple foods that used to grow in the fields around their houses.

ITPGRFA set up the Svalbard seed-bank last year, and now that a repository for 1.1 million plant varieties exists, it is focusing on the very many crops that can’t have their variety maintained in a seed bank, such as tuberous crops like potatoes.

International treaties depend on funding and have no national accountability

For a long time this part of the ITPGRFA programme looked as if it would never get off the ground because for five years the parties who were funding the seed conservation initiative couldn’t agree how to finance the on-site part of the project nor on contracts that guarantee any commercial use of the diverse species will bring financial benefit to the nations that have been conserving them. And perhaps the best news of all, for those already involved in ITPGRFA, is that the USA may be willing to join the scheme after expressing no interest in it under the previous administration.

Corn varieties courtesy of alecim at flickr under a creative commons licence

Back in late spring, critics on the left attacked the Waxman-Markey bill for compromising on carbon credits even as the right slapped on the “energy tax” label, and - at least if early September is any indication - that label has stuck.

It is not clear that President Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (pictured left with New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman - another key climate voice) can win a simple majority for carbon-capping climate change legislation this year, with industrial state Dems already defecting, but the lift for Reid and his whips will be even tougher: they cannot overcome a GOP filibuster without a 60 vote super-majority.

If those Senators in favor of climate legislation get the 60 votes they need to block a filibuster and pass a climate bill, they likely can’t do it without a little help from these six. These are the six Senators that lobbyists will be courting, the White House will be pressing, and you should be watching in the coming days and weeks as the Senate addresses climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

Utility withdraws from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the troubled coal industry group

Duke Energy, the North Carolina-based electric utility announced on Wednesday it would be leaving the clean coal lobbying group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), over differences with the organization’s opposition to clean energy and climate legislation being considered by Congress.

Officials from Duke Energy said that “While some individual members of ACCCE are working to pass climate change legislation, we believe ACCCE is constrained by influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke said that ACCCE’s position is not consistent with Duke Energy’s work to pass economy-wide and cost effective climate change legislation as soon as possible. Read the rest of this entry »