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 We are an organization that firmly believes we have come up with a revolutionary development program.  We must do this now.  Let's come together, put our heads down, and work for a better, more enjoyable, and renewable life experience

 

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The climate-change bill

Once more unto the breachA new energy and climate bill appears in the Senate. Does it have a chance?

May 13th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

And then there were two

“KERRY-GRAHAM-LIEBERMAN”—it sounded so promising. One Democrat, one Republican and one independent (senators John, Lindsey and Joe) have been busily writing a new energy and climate bill taking in ideas from both sides of the partisan aisle. Alas, the unity was shattered last month when Mr Graham, the Republican, refused to come to the bill’s press launch, after hearing that the Senate would consider immigration first. Then the spill in the Gulf of Mexico fouled the waters: one of the bill’s key elements is an expansion of domestic offshore oil exploration. Mr Graham says the bill does not have the votes, though he may still vote for it. Messrs Lieberman and Kerry unveiled it nonetheless, on May 12th.

The new bill makes extensive changes to earlier versions, which have been marooned in the Senate for more than a year. They are mostly aimed at deferring the economic pain, and offering treats to woo Republicans who are wary of an enterprise that, along with health-care reform, has been one of Barack Obama’s most cherished goals. Two-thirds of the revenue raised by the proposed bill from the sale of carbon permits is to go to reducing electricity customers’ bills straight away. From 2026, that money will return to customers as cash.

On the supply side, power-generating utilities are to get a long phase-in period, with generous initial allowances to emit CO²; these taper away until 2030, when all emissions permits must be bought. Expansive nuclear-power and “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) provisions have been retained from earlier drafts of the bill. Near-zero-carbon nuclear power is popular with conservatives, while unproven CCS is meant to seduce the many coal states. In short, goodies all round.

But offshore drilling may get the most attention in coming weeks. Those focusing on building a consensus consider the spill a rarity that can be avoided in future, and stress using more American oil, rather than importing it from unfriendly climes. The bill would require tougher preliminary studies of the impact of spills, and lets states block new drilling up to 75 miles off their coast. (The incentive not to is that those states get 37.5% of the oil revenue.) But opponents of new offshore drilling include both of New Jersey’s senators and Bill Nelson of Florida, all Democrats. The bill will need several Republican votes to pass, with Democrats already one vote shy of a filibuster-proof majority.

Aside from Mr Graham’s, can it get them? The bill’s title (the “American Power Act”) obscures a crucial fact: it is still a cap-and-trade bill that seeks to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 17% on 2005 levels by 2020, and 83% by 2050. Many Republican senators still consider this a job-killing energy tax. Messrs Kerry and Lieberman have tried to be generous, and aides called the bill an invitation to further negotiation. But any change that can win one vote may lose another.

How many minds can be changed may depend on the spill’s progress (see next story). If the weather keeps the spill from devastating the coast, the bill’s chances are improved. Not since Hurricane Katrina have the political winds depended so much on the real ones.

Content Providers for the Peace Day Global Broadcast are thanked for their participation.  As partners they are providing video content or live feeds that will be includedin the Broadcast Event.

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Action Against Hunger UN World Food Programme Positive Spin World Peace
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Prem Rawat Foundation Medicine For Humanity Global Oneness Project Yuval Ron Ensemble Peace Portal ENO Programme

 

The depth and richness of new content this year will be well appreciated!  following is just some of the exclusive content prepared by Positive Spin for this year's event.

• Jane Goodall: United Nations Messenger of Peace, and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute.  We will showcase a celebration of the life and work of Dr. Jane Goodall on her 75th birthday, looking back at fifty years of dedication to animal welfare and primatology
• Mary Robinson: former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Ireland
•  Sergio Duarte: UN Undersecretary-General for Disarmament
• "We Unite":  a report on how Indian women are using micro-loans to better their lives
• "Dance for Life": story on the United Nations Population Fund's "Dance for Life" program
• Olga Speranskaya: recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2008
• "Brother to the Dreamer: Behold the Dream": a documentary detailing the life and controversial death of the Rev. Dr. Alfred Daniel Williams King -- younger brother and an important strategist to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Wanze Eduards and Hugo Jabini: environmental activists and Goldman Environmental Prize recipients for organizing efforts led to a landmark ruling giving indigenous and tribal peoples control of their natural resources.  (see: Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Rights)
• report on Brazil's innovative techniques and strategies to save the rain-forest.

We include content from providers who have provided permission for use of their material, some content made available under the Creative Commons License, and content provided to us by Live Feeds.  If you'd like to submit content, collaborate, support, or sponsor this event, please contact us.

TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2010OBAMA'S SECOND CHANCE ON THE PREDOMINANT MORAL ISSUE OF THIS CENTURYby James Hansen
NASA Climatologist

President Obama, finally, took a get-involved get-tough approach to negotiations on health care legislation and the arms control treaty with Russia -- with success. Could this be the turn-around for what might still be a great presidency?

The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet.

Yet the president, addressing climate in the State of the Union, was at his good-guy worst, leading with "I know that there are those who disagree..." with the scientific evidence. This weak entrée, almost legitimizing denialists, was predictably greeted by cheers and hoots from well-oiled coal-fired Congressmen. The president was embarrassed and his supporters cringed.
This is not the 17th century, when "beliefs" trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system. The president should unequivocally support the climate science community, which is under politically orchestrated assault on the legitimacy of its scientific assessments. If he needs reassurance or cover, the president can ask for a prompt report from the National Academy of Sciences, established by Abraham Lincoln for advice on technical issues.

Why face the difficult truth presented by the climate science? Why not use the president's tack: just talk about the need for clean energy and energy independence? Because that approach leads to wrong policies, ineffectual legislation larded with giveaways to special interests, such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House and the bills being considered now in the Senate.

The fundamental requirement for solving our fossil fuel addiction and moving to a clean energy future is a rising price on carbon emissions. Otherwise, if we refuse to make fossil fuels pay for their damage to human health, the environment, and our children's future, fossil fuels will remain the cheapest energy and we will squeeze every drop from tar sands, oil shale, pristine lands, and offshore areas.

An essential corollary to the rising carbon price is 100 percent redistribution of collected fees to the public -- otherwise the public will never allow the fee to be high enough to affect lifestyles and energy choices. The fee must be collected from fossil fuel companies across-the-board at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Revenues should be divided equally among all legal adult residents, with half-shares for children up to two per family, distributed monthly as a "green check". Part of the revenue could be used to reduce taxes, provided the tax reduction is transparent and verifiable.

The rising carbon price will affect almost everything. People's purchases will reflect a desire to minimize their costs. Food from nearby farms will benefit; imports from halfway around the world will decline. Renewable energies, other carbon-free energies, and energy efficiency will grow; fossil fuels will decline.

The fee-and-green-check approach is transparent, fair and effective. Congressman John Larson defined an appropriate rising fee. $15 per ton of carbon dioxide the first year and $10 more per ton each year. Economic modeling shows that carbon emissions would decline 30 percent by 2020. The annual dividend then would be $2000-3000 per legal adult resident, $6000-9000 per family with two or more children.

About sixty percent of the public would receive more in the green check than they pay in added energy costs. People will set their net cost or gain via their energy and other consumer choices. Dividends could be adjusted state-by-state to prevent transfer of wealth from one part of the country to another.

Religions across the spectrum -- Catholics, Jews, Mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals -- are united in seeing climate change as a moral and ethical challenge. The Religious Coalition on Creation Care is working with the Citizen's Climate Lobby, the Price Carbon Campaign, and economists at the Carbon Tax Center to help promote this honest and effective energy and climate policy. The public, if well-informed, can be expected to support this policy.

But so far Congress has been steamrolled by special interests. Congressional leaders add giveaways in their bills to attract industry support and specific votes. The best of the lot, the Cantwell-Collins bill, returns 75 percent of the revenue to the public. But it is still a cap-and-trade scheme, and its low carbon price and offset-type projects create little incentive for clean energy and would have only small impact on carbon emissions.

Can the cacophony of special interests be overcome? There is one way: the president must get involved. He must explain the situation to the public and use his bully pulpit to persuade Congress to do what is right for the nation and future generations.

He must explain that a rising carbon price is needed to phase out our fossil fuel addiction. The dividend will provide the public the means to move to a clean energy future, stimulating the economy.

Carbon fee and dividend is the base policy needed to move the nation forward to a clean energy future. It must be supplemented by other actions including building and efficiency standards, and public investment in improved infrastructure and technology development.

Congress has a role to play toward these ends, but it is the rising carbon price will make them feasible. Investment decisions are best left to the private sector. The government can provide loan guarantees for nuclear power and support development of trial carbon capture storage, but these energies must compete with energy efficiency and renewable energies in a free market.
The best part about a simple honest rising carbon price is that it provides the only realistic chance for an international climate accord. President Obama was right to abandon the 192-nation debate. The need is for an agreement between the two dominant emitters: the United States and China.

China will never agree to the "cap" approach that Congress favors. Developing nations will not cap their economies. But China is willing to negotiate a carbon price. How can I say that with confidence?

China is making enormous investments in nuclear power, wind power, and solar power. They want to avoid the fossil fuel addiction of the United States. They want to clean up their atmosphere and water. They want to protect the several hundred million Chinese living near sea level. They know that their clean fuels will win out only if fossil fuels are made to pay for damages that they cause.

Once the United States and China agree on a carbon price, most other nations will accept the same. Products made by nations that do not have a carbon price can be charged an equivalent duty under existing rules of the World Trade Organization. That will convince most nations to join, so they can collect the tax themselves.

Perhaps posterity may remember that Obama reduced the number of nuclear-tipped missiles, or that he added ten percent of Americans to the health care roles. But if he dreams of being a great president, he needs to take on the great moral challenge of our century.POSTED BY ECOLOGICAL BUDDHISM AT 8:19 PM

The Dalai Lama’s Endorsement
of the 350ppm CO2 Target

The background, the letter, the latest developments

In his closing speech to the international climate talks in Poland in December 2008, Al Gore stated that former targets for fighting global warming had been rendered obsolete by new findings, and that 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide was the new standard for which the world should aim. His remarks drew the longest applause of the conference.

The 350 target accepts that we are challenged not only to reduce carbon gas emissions, but to actively remove huge quantities of fossil carbon already present in the atmosphere. It represents the upper limit of a safe-climate zone (300–350 ppm) for human civilization. It is the only target so far proposed that is consistent with the avoidance of runaway global warming. The existential challenge we face is expressed as a simple target figure, first defined by NASA’s James Hansen and colleagues in their key 2008 scientific paper, “Target Atmospheric CO2–Where Should Humanity Aim?” which states:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2  will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that… An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2is captured, and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

At many sites around the world, such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii, scientists have measured man-made increases in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the main driver of global warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuates annually, because more is “drawn down” during summer by large Northern Hemisphere forests. The annual cycle, shown in the inset figure, appears as “saw-teeth” behind the yearly average rise.

The pre-industrial atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 280 ppm (parts per million).The current level is 390 ppm—the highest for 650,000 years, long before the modern human species appeared. Where should humanity aim? The safe-climate target for atmospheric carbon dioxide is 350 ppm, the level that avoids the possibility of runaway warming and maintains the planet we know.

We are honored to present here the Dalai Lama’s official letter of endorsement of the 350 ppm target. Among the growing list of other international figures supporting this target are Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Indian environmental leader Dr. Vandana Shiva, Canadian biologist and broadcaster Dr.David Suzuki, Dr.Hermann Scheer, chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairperson of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. It has been endorsed in a personal capacity by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC. The world's leading climate economist Sir Nicholas Stern describes it as "a very sensible long-term target" 

 

Collective Action to Protect Our Climate

On 24th October 2009, many activists around the world joined forces to organize an International day of Climate Action. They generated and sent in thousands of creative digital images recording unique individual contributions to a global demonstration for a Safe Climate Future and the 350 ppm target. Climbers high on the Swiss Alps held up 350 banners, bicycle parades took place in San Francisco and Copenhagen, churches in Barcelona rang their bells 350 times, people protested coal plants and celebrated windfarms, schoolchildren, Buddhist monks and other citizen groups formed the letters 350 with their bodies and were filmed from above, thousands of people marched under the 350 banner in the streets of Bogota, Kathmandu, Addis Ababa,  Mexico City, Togo and Seattle. It was the biggest news story of the day on Google, CNN and many newspapers around the world. It showed that a global climate protection movement is not only possible, but sufficiently informed and determined to set a new agenda.

 

  
One of many moving images from the International Day of Climate Action 
organized by environmentalist Bill McKibben & his colleagues at 350.org

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon sent this message to the organizers:

"I would like to thank the millions of people in 181 countries who participated in 350.org's Day of Climate Action on October 24th. It was one of the most inspiring examples of grassroots political action on global warming the world has ever witnessed. This Day of Climate Action came at a critical time in the global negotiations, and demonstrated that people around the world - from Ethiopia to India and Paraguay to the United States - understand the scientific challenge the world faces. I encourage governments to heed the example set by their citizens, and to take strong action in Copenhagen to address this crisis through bold, visionary leadership"

A special report on climate change and the carbon economy

Getting warmer

Dec 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

So far the effort to tackle global warming has achieved little. Copenhagen offers the chance to do better, says Emma Duncan (interviewed here)Illustration by M. Morgenstern

THE mountain bark beetle is a familiar pest in the forests of British Columbia. Its population rises and falls unpredictably, destroying clumps of pinewood as it peaks which then regenerate as the bug recedes. But Scott Green, who studies forest ecology at the University of Northern British Columbia, says the current outbreak is “unprecedented in recorded history: a natural background-noise disturbance has become a major outbreak. We’re looking at the loss of 80% of our pine forest cover.”* Other parts of North America have also been affected, but the damage in British Columbia is particularly severe, and particularly troubling in a province whose economy is dominated by timber.

Three main explanations for this disastrous outbreak suggest themselves. It could be chance. Populations do fluctuate dramatically and unexpectedly. It could be the result of management practices. British Columbia’s woodland is less varied than it used to be, which helps a beetle that prefers pine. Or it could be caused by the higher temperatures that now prevail in northern areas, allowing beetles to breed more often in summer and survive in greater numbers through the winter.

The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which the United Nations adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is now 17 years old. Its aim was “to achieve stabilisation of greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The Kyoto protocol, which set about realising those aims, was signed in 1997 and came into force in 2005. Its first commitment period runs out in 2012, and implementing a new one is expected to take at least three years, which is why the 15th conference of the parties to the UNFCCC that starts in Copenhagen on December 7th is such a big deal. Without a new global agreement, there is not much chance of averting serious climate change.

Since the UNFCCC was signed, much has changed, though more in the biosphere than the human sphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body set up to establish a scientific consensus on what is happening, heat waves, droughts, floods and serious hurricanes have increased in frequency over the past few decades; it reckons those trends are all likely or very likely to have been caused by human activity and will probably continue. Temperatures by the end of the century might be up by anything from 1.1ºC to 6.4ºC.

In most of the world the climate changes to date are barely perceptible or hard to pin on warming. In British Columbia and farther north the effects of climate change are clearer. Air temperatures in the Arctic are rising about twice as fast as in the rest of the world. The summer sea ice is thinning and shrinking. The past three years have seen the biggest losses since proper record-keeping started in 1979. Ten years ago scientists reckoned that summer sea-ice would be gone by the end of this century. Now they expect it to disappear within a decade or so.

Since sea-ice is already in the water, its melting has little effect on sea levels. Those are determined by temperature (warmer water takes up more room) and the size of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. The glaciers in south-eastern Greenland have picked up speed. Jakobshavn Isbrae, the largest of them, which drains 6% of Greenland’s ice, is now moving at 12km a year—twice as fast as it was when the UNFCCC was signed—and its “calving front”, where it breaks down into icebergs, has retreated by 20km in six years. That is part of the reason why the sea level is now rising at 3-3.5mm a year, twice the average annual rate in the 20th century.

As with the mountain bark beetle, it is not entirely clear why this is happening. The glaciers could be retreating because of one of the countless natural oscillations in the climate that scientists do not properly understand. If so, the glacial retreat could well stop, as it did in the middle of the 20th century after a 100-year retreat. But the usual causes of natural variability do not seem to explain the current trend, so scientists incline to the view that it is man-made. It is therefore likely to persist unless mankind starts to behave differently—and there is not much sign of that happening.

Carbon-dioxide emissions are now 30% higher than they were when the UNFCCC was signed 17 years ago. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 equivalent (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) reached 430 parts per million last year, compared with 280ppm before the industrial revolution. At the current rate of increase they could more than treble by the end of the century, which would mean a 50% risk of a global temperature increase of 5ºC. To put that in context, the current average global temperature is only 5ºC warmer than the last ice age. Such a rise would probably lead to fast-melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, drought, disease and collapsing agriculture in poor countries, and mass migration. But nobody really knows, and nobody wants to know.

Some scientists think that the planet is already on an irreversible journey to dangerous warming. A few climate-change sceptics think the problem will right itself. Either may be correct. Predictions about a mechanism as complex as the climate cannot be made with any certainty. But the broad scientific consensus is that serious climate change is a danger, and this newspaper believes that, as an insurance policy against a catastrophe that may never happen, the world needs to adjust its behaviour to try to avert that threat.

The problem is not a technological one. The human race has almost all the tools it needs to continue leading much the sort of life it has been enjoying without causing a net increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Industrial and agricultural processes can be changed. Electricity can be produced by wind, sunlight, biomass or nuclear reactors, and cars can be powered by biofuels and electricity. Biofuel engines for aircraft still need some work before they are suitable for long-haul flights, but should be available soon.

Nor is it a question of economics. Economists argue over the sums (see article), but broadly agree that greenhouse-gas emissions can be curbed without flattening the world economy.

A hard sell

It is all about politics. Climate change is the hardest political problem the world has ever had to deal with. It is a prisoner’s dilemma, a free-rider problem and the tragedy of the commons all rolled into one. At issue is the difficulty of allocating the cost of collective action and trusting other parties to bear their share of the burden. At a city, state and national level, institutions that can resolve such problems have been built up over the centuries. But climate change has been a worldwide worry for only a couple of decades. Mankind has no framework for it. The UN is a useful talking shop, but it does not get much done.

The closest parallel is the world trading system. This has many achievements to its name, but it is not an encouraging model. Not only is the latest round of negotiations mired in difficulty, but the World Trade Organisation’s task is child’s play compared with climate change. The benefits of concluding trade deals are certain and accrue in the short term. The benefits of mitigating climate change are uncertain, since scientists are unsure of the scale and consequences of global warming, and will mostly accrue many years hence. The need for action, by contrast, is urgent.

The problem will be solved only if the world economy moves from carbon-intensive to low-carbon—and, in the long term, to zero-carbon—products and processes. That requires businesses to change their investment patterns. And they will do so only if governments give them clear, consistent signals. This special report will argue that so far this has not happened. The policies adopted to avoid dangerous climate change have been partly misconceived and largely inadequate. They have sent too many wrong signals and not enough of the right ones.

That is partly because of the way the Kyoto protocol was designed. By trying to include all the greenhouse gases in a single agreement, it has been less successful than the less ambitious Montreal protocol, which cut ozone-depleting gases fast and cheaply. By including too many countries in detailed negotiations, it has reduced the chances of agreement. And by dividing the world into developed and developing countries, it has deepened a rift that is proving hard to close. Ultimately, though, the international agreement has fallen victim to domestic politics. Voters do not want to bear the cost of their elected leaders’ aspirations, and those leaders have not been brave enough to push them.

Copenhagen represents a second chance to make a difference. The aspirations are high, but so are the hurdles. The gap between the parties on the two crucial questions—emissions levels and money—remains large. America’s failure so far to pass climate-change legislation means that a legally binding agreement will not be reached at the conference. The talk is of one in Bonn, in six months’ time, or in Mexico City in a year.

To suggest that much has gone wrong is not to denigrate the efforts of the many people who have dedicated two decades to this problem. For mankind to get even to the threshold of a global agreement is a marvel. But any global climate deal will work only if the domestic policies through which it is implemented are both efficient and effective. If they are ineffective, nothing will change. If they are inefficient, they will waste money. And if taxpayers decide that green policies are packed with pork, they will turn against them.