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Debate on Climate Change, moderated by Steven Cohen, posted at 6:00

Kasey Jacobs argues that cities in the American Northeast could average 20 to 30 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit per year by the end of the century, and that average temperatures could go up by several degrees. Short-term droughts could become an annual event in certain areas of the state. New York’s summer climate would come to resemble the current summer climate of Georgia. Our efforts continue to go into energy production rather than energy efficiency, which is the wrong focus. There are a number of solutions that are available. One of the primary needs is investment in renewable energy. The Regional Greenhouse Gases Initiative (RGGI) is going to be a cap-and-trade system for the Northeast. The goal is that regional and state-based systems like this will push the federal government to act. Fuel economy standards should be increased, and the recent increases, to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 did not go far enough.

Manik Roy speaks on behalf of the Pew Institute. His core position is that we do know enough about climate change to act now to do something about it. What are the policy tools we can use to achieve these goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? One type of response is the voluntary response, in which we challenge the leaders of corporate America to take steps to reduce their carbon footprints. Another important initiative is to subsidize research and development into new and more efficient technologies. Third, we should consider a command and control alternative, in which the EPA would set up a stricter set of permits for pollution. Finally, there’s a cap-and-trade program that would set limits and allow actors to exchange carbon credits.

Keep in mind that we have tried to reduce emissions voluntarily and do research and development, and those haven’t worked by themselves. We need the latter two options, especially cap-and-trade. A cap-and-trade program is a powerful way to get government and industry to do what they do best. The government sets the target and then the industry gets to decide the best way to accomplish that target. It sends a price signal throughout the economy. It won’t be cost-free to deal with climate change, it probably won’t be easy, and success isn’t guaranteed. But these policies will give us a decent chance of succeeding, especially if we get started on them now. We don’t have a choice.

Myron Ebell notes that the IPCC report itself is not a prediction. We have seen about 85% of a doubling of global carbon, and about 1 degree of temperature increase has been the likely result. We need to question alarmism about global warming and put it in context with the other problems that we face. He notes that Bjorn Lomborg has put together a group of economists to develop the Copenhagen Consensus, and they put global warming in a less important category than other concerns. We should address problems like malaria in Africa directly, not indirectly through global warming policy. Many of the problems that are alleged to be caused by global warming can be addressed directly now, which would be much more cost-effective than the very expensive policies that have been proposed to combat global warming. Do we really need to put everyone on an energy diet?

In response, Kasey Jacobs says that we are going to need to deal with these impacts, and we do have solutions. But we also need to consider adaptation to global warming, such as measures to secure our coasts, our food and water supply, and fisheries. The carbon dioxide going into the ocean is often an underappreciated component of global warming. Because there is no guarantee we can prevent global warming, we also need to consider adaptation. Also, many of the solutions that have been proposed are good in and of themselves. An energy diet is a good thing. It can increase our energy independence, health, and economy, independently of its effects on global warming.

Manik Roy argues that global warming is different from all of our other problems, because we can’t be confident that it will be a gradual process. There are aspects of the climate system that don’t act like a dial, they act like a switch. Because of the possibility of abrupt, unpredictable changes, we need to react. Also, we don’t necessarily need an energy diet; we need a carbon diet.

Myron Ebell says that adaptation consists of building wealth and building new technologies. We need to build resilience in poorer countries by encouraging the spread of wealth and technology. He also notes that cap-and-trade might be a big giveaway to big corporations, and we want to be careful of that. Finally, he contends that reductions in energy are actually much more expensive than many economic estimates. Keep in mind that future generations are likely to be much wealthier than we are, so it might not make sense to sacrifice a significant amount of present income to benefit future generations.

The panel discusses how to mobilize public support for responses to climate change. Manik Roy points out that all three remaining Presidential candidates – McCain, Clinton, and Obama – are committed to action on climate change. Kasey Jacobs says that this fact is because of public pressure in favor of action on climate change, and local civil society can get involved to push leaders at the local and national level to make changes.

Myron Ebell notes that the United States is actually stable on per capita carbon emissions relative to other parts of the world. The EU has seen significant growth in emissions, and China has seen its emissions grow exponentially.

Manik Roy argues that the international situation has deteriorated in large part because the United States has abandoned global leadership on this issue.

What about a carbon tax? Myron Ebell says that a carbon tax wouldn’t change behavior, and that it would be economically crippling if we set it high enough to change behavior. Manik Roy says that a cap-and-trade system would provide more predictability in the amount of emissions, which is the real goal, and that it wouldn’t be politically possible to get a carbon tax. Kasey Jacobs says that if you do a cap-and-trade, you need to avoid the big giveaways that you had with the EU model. You need close to a 100% auction model.

Panel 2, discussing the impacts of climate change on health and human security, moderated by Joshua Moses, posted at 4:30

Themba Masuku, the FAO liaison to the United Nations, gives some background on the food security situation. He defines food security as the condition when all people have adequate and stable access to food. According to the FAO, some 854 million people in the world are undernourished or lacking in food security. And climate change poses serious stresses on the food systems of the world. Climate change threatens to disrupt food production, harm the infrastructure, and create greater risk exposure to storms and floods, as well as diseases. The FAO is responding with a focus on more sustainable approaches to management of fisheries, forests, and other natural resources. For more information, please visit: http://www.fao.org/clim/

Mr. Masuku also advocated more sharing of agricultural technologies across the world, saying: “We are all in the same boat. When that boat sinks, it’s not just sub-Saharan Africa that will sink, it’s not just the United States or Japan or the EU that will sink, but we all will face the consequences.”

Nathan Currier provides a more alarming perspective, criticizing some of the assumptions underlying the economic projections made earlier. He argues that the excessive focus on carbon dioxide emissions blurs the fact that we could be facing a short-term crisis caused by methane. According to Currier, we could have an ice-free summer in the Arctic by 2012. This could release significant amounts of methane into the atmosphere, even to the point of making large portions of the planet uninhabitable in a very short period of time. Mr. Currier worries that the carbon dioxide-equivalent strategies are moving in the wrong direction, because they can ignore the fact that different greenhouse gases have different time horizons for their effects. Methance emissions might have much worse short-term effects and perhaps we should focus more intensely on the short-term if those effects are as catastrophic as some experts think they will be after 2012.

Will Callaway, from Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has information up at www.psr.org . He thinks there are already many deaths occurring due to global warming. Deaths from heat are going up in the industrialized world due to more extreme temperature incidents. The incidences of respiratory and cardiovascular disease are increasing as well, especially in high-ozone areas. The data are getting stronger as more peer-reviewed studies are being done. These are made worse by increases in global warming. The concern is that we will have longer periods of low air quality in more geographical areas. Also, many diseases that we thought we had defeated, such as malaria and cholera, are coming back. They are more able to live through the winters that are getting warmer. We need to look at the overall public health picture. As Professor Heal discussed in the keynote address, the costs of global warming to public health far outweigh the costs of taking serious steps to prevent it.

Mr. Callaway also argues that the past costs of reducing pollution have ended up being cheaper than many had predicted. We need to realize that the harms of global warming may be bigger than predicted, and there is historical reason to believe that the costs of responding may be lower than predicted.

Joshua Moses, the panel’s moderator, notes that the public health issues are real and are happening in the present, and this may be a way to mobilize public support for a stronger reaction.

Panel 1, discussing markets and economics, moderated by Eron Bloomgarden, posted at 3:10

Carter Bales summarizes the McKinsey Report on how much it would cost to reduce carbon emissions in the United States. The report can be downloaded at www.mckinsey.com/greenhousegas
He finds there are five primary things we need to do:

1. Strong, coordinated policy that is nationwide and predictable for industry.
2. Rapid development of energy efficiency and other negative-cost options for reducing carbon emissions.
3. Accelerate development of a low-carbon energy infrastructure, shift away from coal and other forms of high-carbon power production.
4. Encourage research and development into new ways of reducing carbon output.
5.  Streamline the approval and permitting processes to prevent vital new projects from being help up by red tape.

Annika Colston speaks about the approach taken by Blue Source. This is a company that serves clients seeking to reduce their carbon output by developing carbon offsets, carbon capture and storage projects, and energy efficiency projects, as well as participating in policy-making conversations as the United States is likely to move toward a cap-and-trade system.

Challenges include the uncertainty surrounding the shape of future legislation, and the public perception of the voluntary market in carbon reduction. Another big challenge is the need to consider a long time horizon and the difficulty of accounting for long-term costs and benefits, especially in an uncertain and unpredictable regulatory situation.

Rena Gelb represents Carbon Credit Capital, which generates carbon credits and clean energy offsets, working primarily in India and Brazil. Carbon Credit Capital facilitates the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) process, which invests in cleaner energy projects in countries without carbon caps, such as India, and sells the carbon reduction as a credit to companies in countries that are under the Kyoto protocol’s carbon caps, such as the UK. These renewable energy CDM projects can be profitable as well as causing long-term reduced carbon emissions in developing countries. Since 2005, the carbon market has seen a number of changes. There is now an infrastructure in place, with liquidity, trading and risk management products, a price for carbon, and a corresponding impact on investment decisions that seek to reduce carbon output. There has been a dramatic increase in CDM energy reduction projects and a growth in carbon offsets. 

Summary of Geoffrey Heal's keynote address, posted at 2:00:

Geoffrey Heal lays out the contours of the economic debate, which revolves around evaluating five factors. We need to consider the likely costs of climate change, the amount by which we should discount those costs to present value, the distribution of costs across rich and poor countries, how to value environmental services, and the risk that climate change would result in truly catastrophic outcomes.

He points out that the costs of climate change are likely to be high, and the cost of reducing our carbon output is likely to be low. These basic calculations lead to a conclusion that reducing our carbon output is well worth the cost. (Assuming that the scientific consensus is accurate and that reducing carbon output is likely to prevent climate change.)

This basic calculation is complicated by the difficulty of how to reduce future costs to present value, as well as the difficulty of evaluating how much to weigh costs in poorer countries relative to costs in richer countries. A further problem is that it is extremely difficult to place an economic value on environmental goods and services, which have diffuse effects on human society and are likely to become more valuable as they become scarcer.

Yet another factor is the possibility of catastrophic outcomes. Even if catastrophe is highly unlikely, we should be willing to pay a premium to insure against an outcome such as a reversal of the geothermal currents that would make much of Northern Europe and North America uninhabitable.

Professor Heal boiled this down to a simple conclusion. Under most assumptions and most economic models, the costs of climate change call for immediate and strong action. Some economic projections argue that we don’t need to act, but those models rely on a series of assumptions, including a high discount rate and not taking into account the risk factor of large-scale outcomes. Unless we are willing to accept those assumptions, we should act.