Moving Beyond the Status Quo [ PDF ]

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A Message From the President on Win-Win Climate Strategies: What is Economically Smart is Politically Right

John C. Topping Jr., President and CEO, Climate Institute

The past couple of years have been ones of great frustration for many in the climate protection movement in the US. Evidence has mounted that climate change may be moving painfully close to several irreversible tipping points. Methane releases from thawing Arctic tundra may add to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, compounding the damage from human industrial and agricultural activity. Changes in albedo, especially in the Arctic and in other glacial regions, have reduced Earth’s capacity to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space, adding both to global temperature rise and increase in sea level. Moreover, these harbingers of a potential climate metastasis where change feeds on itself are paralleled by other human induced threats to the life support systems that enable our species and others to thrive.

Despite this mountain of evidence, much of it widely reported in US media, and despite massive spending by US environmental groups to spread a climate protection message, public skepticism has grown both on the human role in climate change and on the urgency of acting. This may be attributable to a variety of factors, among them, a pinched economy in which climate protection seems a more distant concern, a more polarized blogosphere, and freakish weather, e.g. cold or snowy weather in some regions, even in years when global average temperatures are rising. Addressing these societal challenges and the mounting climate crisis will require some fundamental shifts in substantive and messaging strategy by the climate protection movement, in the US and elsewhere. Climate protection strategies that have simultaneous health, economic or political benefits will be the most effective means.

Over the past couple of years, building especially on ideas advanced by two of our Board Members, Tom Casten and Mike MacCracken, the Climate Institute has argued first for energy recycling to play a much more central role in US energy and climate mitigation strategy, and second for US and global climate mitigation strategies to be revised to focus much more significantly on reducing emissions of black carbon and relatively short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane. Archaic rules, often in state law and utility regulation, frustrate the use of energy recycling or cogeneration by limiting the ability of a facility using recycling to sell excess power to anyone other than utility buyers, by price discrimination that penalizes local generation, and by utility rate practices that discourage least cost approaches. It has been estimated that these barriers to industrial energy recycling and other forms of cogeneration swell US carbon dioxide emissions as much as 20% and cost US industry and consumers tens of billions of dollars annually. The technologies to achieve this have been around for decades (the Netherlands gets nearly 30% of its electricity from energy recycling), but the challenge is to remove perverse economic incentives embedded in state law and utility regulations. As Mak Dukan’s article indicates, enhanced industrial energy recycling is likely to produce, in addition to averted emissions of carbon dioxide, reductions in black carbon emissions.

The articles by Mak Dukan and Katie McWilliams show great benefits to the environment and the US economy from energy recycling and from methane reductions, even under incentive systems that provide no financial valuation for reductions of black carbon and may well undervalue reductions in methane vis a vis carbon dioxide. One can only imagine a greater pace of investment in both energy recycling and in methane mitigation, and more rapid reductions in radiative forcing, from movement to a more rational greenhouse trading system. There is a glimmer of hope here already - an ingenious collaboration is now underway involving a Philippine jeepney drivers’ association, the Australian engineering firm Rotec, and a voluntary emission reduction credit group, that will facilitate a retrofitting of jeepneys throughout Metro Manila by valuing black carbon reductions, benefiting the climate and health of drivers and passengers alike. This could open the door for changes in the formal trading systems. Meanwhile, as Zahava Essig’s article indicates, there is ample authority under the US Clean Air Act to limit black carbon, a subset of a pollutant controlled by this Act.

The fascinating article by Vice Admiral Clyde E. Robbins, recounting his experience as On Scene Coordinator for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, reminds us of the complexities of satisfying our energy needs. A strategy that seeks to blend climate protection with the enhancement of human health and economic well-being has scientific credibility, economic viability and long-term political traction.

Besides lowering barriers to recycling and shifting emission reduction valuations to quickly reduce radiative forcing, there are a host of other win-win reductions available. John-Michael Cross describes an innovative approach to reducing emissions from idling ships that improves public health in port cities. Lynn Kirshbaum shows how energy retrofits can save homeowners money while protecting the climate. Shannon Horst of the Savory Institute discusses the benefits of Holistic Planned Grazing for grasslands. Some approaches like that in Megan Falkenberry’s article on algal fuel may require some federal R&D funding, but their potential in minimizing prospects of another Deepwater Horizon blowout may justify this. Lifestyle changes, such as those advocated in Corinne Kisner’s article on walkable communities and reduced meat consumption, can have a beneficial effect on carbon footprints as well as waistlines.

These and other promising initiatives, such as a shift to biodegradable motor oils, can alleviate the changing climate even before creation of an optimal institutional framework. Besides their climate benefits, these strategies are economically sound, politically feasible, and can improve human health.

SPRING 2010 Climate Alert

Moving Beyond the Status Quo [ PDF ]

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