Monthly Archives: June 2009

New Climate Report: Life in a Very Different United States

By / Bio / Published: June 17, 2009

Days Over 100 Degrees (NOAA)NOAA just released a terrific scientific report that explains, in plain English, the current and projected effects of climate change on the U.S. The nonpartisan report, prepared by the 13-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program, tells a grim but important story, clearly and with lots of powerful maps and charts. I encourage you to check it out to see how climate change will affect your area of the country.

Here are some of the “business-as-usual” projections that my colleagues and I find most striking and disturbing:

You think August is hot now?

By the end of this century, we could be in for much more severe summers all across the country.

  • If you live in New Hampshire, summer could feel like it does today in North Carolina (p.107).
  • If you live in Michigan, brace yourself for summers that feel like today’s summers in Oklahoma (p 117).
  • And if you live in Texas, you now experience 10 to 20 days a year over 100 °F. By the last two decades of this century, look for 100 such days – that’s more than three months (p. 90).
  • In 1995, Chicago suffered a heat wave that killed more than 700 people. Chicagoans could experience that kind of relentless heat up to three times a year (p. 117).
  • The Southwest, including cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, will face worse and more frequent droughts, as spring rains decline by as much as half, snowpacks shrink and melt earlier, and water evaporates more rapidly (p. 129-130).

People who live on the coasts could be a lot closer to the shore

Sea level is projected to rise up to 3 to 4 feet. Here’s what that means for various parts of the country:

  • Portions of New York City and Boston could be regularly flooded by storms and even high tides (p. 150).
  • On the Gulf Coast, approximately 2,400 miles of roads and 250 miles of freight rails are likely to be permanently flooded (p. 62). This area is home to seven of the nation’s ten largest ports and much of our oil and gas industry.
  • Some coastal freshwater sources will be contaminated with saltwater, meaning we can no longer use them for drinking water without expensive desalinization (p. 47)

Your grandchildren will miss out on local icons and specialties

The foods and activities that define different parts of the country are changing.

  • Some western ski resorts could face a 90 percent decrease in snowpack, making the country’s most iconic ski locations just shades of what they are today (p. 133).
  • Thanksgiving might no longer include cranberries produced in the Northeast’s cranberry bogs (p. 73).
  • In the Northwest, salmon will be driven out of about one-third of their habitat. We could start to see the changes in the next ten years (p. 137).

This very thorough scientific report paints a bleak picture of what life will be like in this country if we let pollution continue at today’s rate. The report’s good news is that if we act now, we can avoid the most severe consequences. But the more sobering news is that even if we cut emissions aggressively, not everything in this report can be avoided. This is a first step toward understanding how to prepare for the coming changes.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would take us off the “business-as-usual” path, will come in front of the U.S. House for a vote in a matter of days. This report gives our leaders yet another reason to do the right thing for our country’s future.

Posted in Extreme Weather, Science / Read 4 Responses

7 American Species Threatened by Global Warming

By / Published: June 15, 2009

Canada Lynx
The Canada lynx is at risk because of changes to the snowpack caused by climate change.

With the political debate heating up over the American Clean Energy and Security Act, it’s easy to lose sight of what the fight is about.

Yes, this is about people and jobs and freeing ourselves from foreign oil and creating a clean energy economy for the 21st century. But it’s also about our natural heritage and the wildlife with which we share this planet.

Species from blue whales to butterflies confront growing threats. Their habitats are rapidly changing along with the climate. Global warming is pushing nature to the brink.

That’s why we launched a new campaign, Warming and Wildlife, where we document the story through the prism of seven “ambassador species” from across America already struggling to survive.

Without action, there’s a good chance these species won’t make it — we could lose them in our lifetimes.

Our seven ambassador species are:

The bumper sticker is right: Extinction is forever. But, it doesn’t have to be inevitable, not if we each do our part to cap America’s global warming pollution and unleash the clean energy economy of the 21st century.

Posted in Plants & Animals / Comments are closed

Link: TNR on How Climate Bill Allocates Allowances

By / Published: June 10, 2009

Brad Plumer over at TNR has a good post about how allowances are allocated in the climate bill in front of the House. He goes into detail about how savings will be passed through to consumers, including some insight from our own Nat Keohane.

Posted in Climate Change Legislation, What Others are Saying / Read 1 Response

Climate Bill Passes Five Tests on Allocating Allowances

By / Bio / Published: June 10, 2009

I was invited to testify yesterday in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on how allowances are allocated under HR2454, the American Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). You can see my full testimony here.

I started with the broad economic arguments for passing climate legislation now: by doing so, we can harness American innovation, ensure leadership in making the next generation of clean-energy technologies, and unleash investment that will help pull our economy out of the recession.

Then I turned to the allocation provisions of the bill.  The allocation plan will preserve the environmental and economic effectiveness of the legislation, helping move us forward in solving the climate crisis in a way that is affordable, equitable and efficient.

Specifically, I outlined five major principles that any set of allocations should reflect, and illustrated how HR2454 fulfills each.

  • First, the bill protects consumers, particularly low-income consumers.  It does this through three channels: allowance value allocated to local distribution companies, who are required to pass that value on to customers in the form of lower utility bill; direct funding for rebates and energy credits directed specifically at low- and moderate-income households; and broader tax refunds, especially in the later years of the program. In total, nearly half (44 percent) of the total allowance value goes directly to households – amounting to an estimated $700 billion in present value.
  • Second, HR2454 includes provisions that preserve and strengthen the international competitiveness of U.S. businesses and workers during the transition to a clean energy economy, by directing about 12 percent of total allowance value (over the life of the bill) to energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries.
  • Third, the allocation plan respects differences across states and regions by allocating half of the allowances for electricity consumers on the basis of CO2 emissions and half on the basis of electricity generation.
  • Fourth, the integrity and credibility of the program is preserved since the bill ensures that consumers receive the allowance value intended for their benefit due to provisions specifically requiring utility companies to pass on the allowance value they receive.
  • Finally, HR2454 directs some value (26 percent over the life of the bill) to public purposes that are the objectives of the legislation, including clean energy innovation, carbon capture and storage, investments in renewables and energy efficiency, and climate change adaptation.

Overall, HR2454 passes these tests with flying colors.

Posted in Climate Change Legislation, Economics / Read 1 Response

Climate Change Hitting Home: Galveston and Houston Residents On Notice

By / Published: June 9, 2009

This post is by Amy Hardberger, an attorney with EDF’s Texas Office’s Climate/Air and Water programs.

Hurricane Ike storm surge, by Flickr user eh3kHurricane Ike storm surge hits Jetty East, by Flickr user eh3k.

For some, it’s hard to care about global warming because its impacts on everyday life aren’t obvious. It’s too abstract. It’s not tangible. It’s too wonky. It’s just not real enough.

Well, what if you learned that global warming could literally push you out of your home? Is that real enough for you?

Texas cities Houston and Galveston just got a wake-up call – conservative estimates of sea level rise due to climate change will displace 78 percent of households over the next 100 years in Galveston County alone, according to a new study that EDF and the British Consulate-General commissioned from the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.

And that’s the conservative estimate. In a business-as-usual scenario, Galveston-area sea levels could rise as much as 1.5 meters in the next 100 years, which could displace more than 100,000 households and create more than $12 billion in infrastructure losses for Houston and Galveston.  Rising sea levels will also damage at least 23 public facilities, industrial sites and water treatments plants, begging many questions about where to move or how to protect these sites. (See a related post on sea level rise.)

For cities like Galveston, which is still rebuilding from Hurricane Ike, these findings reinforce the notion that planning for how to adapt to climate changes or mitigate their effects is critical. Current discussions have centered around building a large, expensive and likely ineffective “Ike Dike” to protect the city from future storm surges, though there are likely more realistic adaptation measures that will make people safer quicker. Passing federal climate legislation and ramping up local municipal energy efficiency are surely the most effective ways to begin reducing the rate of sea level rise.

So, for all of you out there who don’t think global warming could happen to you, take a hard look at the harsh reality that these coastal communities face.

Posted in Extreme Weather / Tagged , , , , , , | Comments are closed

Let’s Just Give Up

By / Bio / Published: June 2, 2009

That, in a nutshell, is Jim Manzi’s prescription for climate change (see the June 8 National Review).  It’s a really, really bad one.

I’ll limit myself to three key points here, though there is much more to say about why Mr. Manzi is mistaken.

1. The damage from climate change in the United States is likely to be very large, and very bad. And it is coming soon.

Mr. Manzi may not have had the chance to take a look at the work done by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a major scientific effort by prominent research scientists from around the country, coordinated by scientists at federal agencies.

One thing this project has done is to look hard, using the best available scientific tools, at the specific impacts of climate change in the United States.  The final draft report on that topic came out in early January 2009.  That is, it came out during the George W. Bush Administration, with the approval of President Bush’s appointees across the federal government.  It’s called Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  You can see the draft here. (The final version should be out soon.)

It’s worth a close look.  (The graphics are spectacular.)  And it tells nothing like the Pollyanna-ish story that Mr. Manzi — a very successful entrepreneur, and obviously a smart person, but not a scientist — tells in his piece.

Just a few highlights of what we can expect during this century from the what-we-worry course that Mr. Manzi prefers:

  • By the period 2080-2099, devastating heat waves of the kind that killed more than 700 people in Chicago in 1995 will occur three times per year.
  • During that same period, the climate of Michigan will become like that of North Texas today.  Illinois will become like South Texas.
  • Florida will become stunningly and unrelentingly hot:  “By the end of the century, projections indicate that North Florida will have more than 165 days (nearly six months) per year over 90˚F, up from roughly 60 days in the 1960s and 1970s.”
  • The Great Lakes are likely to lose up to two feet in depth by 2070, with devastating effects on shipping:  “up to 240 tons of capacity [per large ship] for each inch of draft lost.”
  • “The combined effects of natural climate variability and human-induced climate change could turn out to be a devastating ‘one-two punch’ for the [Southwest] region.”

There is much more.  I urge you, and Mr. Manzi, to read the CCSP report to see for yourself.

The 2080’s may sound like a long time away to Mr. Manzi, but they don’t to me:  odds are my grandkids, and I hope my kids, will be alive to see the world we’ve left them.

2. However much we spend on government research, private firms will have no incentive to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution if it continues to be free to dump it into the atmosphere.

Curiously, Mr. Manzi does not credit the so-called “Breakthough Institute” for his proposal to solve the climate problem exclusively through government-funded research.  But his advocacy suffers from the same fundamental problem as theirs:  if a firm can emit pollution without paying any price for doing so, it has no incentive to spend money on cutting its pollution – whether using government-developed technology or otherwise.

It is truly surprising to see a prominent National Review columnist so strongly opposing use of the most basic of all free-market economic tools — markets and prices, which a cap would create — in favor of a hypothetical, future, government-funded, Buck Rogers fix.  (Mr. Manzi’s philosophy is popularly known as “pay-and-pray.”)

Consider one (important) practical example.  Suppose the government devotes vast  resources to developing new and better ways to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by coal-burning power plants and burying it underground.  (This is called “carbon capture and storage” in the business.)  However advanced this technology may be, it will cost money.  Why would Duke Power, AEP, or any other utility spend a penny on this technology if they can simply dump their pollution into the air for free?

Every undergrad who takes Econ 101 learns it’s bad if firms can impose their costs on other people – that is, externalize them.  Starting with the Clean Air Act in 1970, we’ve insisted that companies internalize the costs of other types of pollution — like mercury, sulfur dioxide, and dioxin.  But, in violation of the most basic rules of economics, we have yet to insist that firms internalize the costs of their global warming pollution.  That’s what cap-and-trade — and the Waxman-Markey bill — does.  It’s the right thing to do to protect us from the climate misery that the scientists tell us we are rushing towards if we continue, as Mr. Manzi urges, to do nothing.

3. Mr. Manzi’s projections of costs are far off base. 

Lots of serious economists have looked at the economic impact of putting a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions.  And the consensus is that, at worst, it will have a very small impact on incomes and on GDP.   I say “at worst” because no one knows how to model the ways in which necessity (a price on carbon) begets invention, and thus lower costs.

The EPA’s analysis of the current (Waxman-Markey) bill is consistent with this consensus:  the Agency estimates that the bill is likely to cost households between $98 and $140 a year – less than a postage stamp a day.

Mr. Manzi says he can’t believe that.  But the EPA’s analysis relied on two of the most respected and sophisticated economic models available.  It is simply absurd for  Manzi to baldly pronounce that “he doesn’t believe the numbers,” as if he were competent to  judge what economic estimates are credible or not.

In any event, there’s plenty of logic behind the EPA analysis, including the fact that there are huge opportunities to live the same lifestyle we live now, while using much less energy.

Here’s a homely example:  the office building in which my organization rents space in Washington, D.C. is heated by an archaic, inefficient boiler that operates at about 60% efficiency.  Much more efficient boilers are available – boilers that save so much energy that they have payback periods of only a few years.  (And there are American jobs at every stage of replacing this dinosaur, from mining to manufacturing to installation.)

The respected consulting firm McKinsey & Co. did a big study showing there are similar opportunities throughout the economy.  With a little incentive from energy prices that internalize pollution costs, doing these sensible things becomes an easy lift.

There will always be voices telling us it’s too much trouble to control pollution – pieces like Mr. Manzi’s were commonplace before we cracked down on conventional pollutants in 1970, and before President George H.W. Bush used cap-and-trade to attack acid rain (very successfully) starting in 1990.

It would be a ghastly mistake to heed them.   

Posted in Economics / Read 2 Responses