A Campaign Primer
The political winds have warmed steadily this year on the issue of climate change. Following a two-decade-long national debate about whether humans are heating the globe and what we should do about it, the next president will enter the White House committed to curbing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
It won’t come soon enough for climate and energy experts, who say the world is potentially nearing several tipping points. Warming of the oceans and atmosphere could trigger irreversible environmental changes in coming decades, for example, by causing vast numbers of species to go extinct and by melting polar ice. At the same time, if industrialized nations do not develop and deploy cleaner energy choices soon, rapidly growing economies such as China and India will miss the turnoff toward a green future and will send the climate barreling toward unprecedented warmth.
Both John McCain and Barack Obama have pledged to reverse the course of past administrations and demonstrate leadership on the issue of climate change by cutting domestic emissions sharply. Researchers say that policy shift is necessary to push the world onto a different climate trajectory. “This federal election is maybe one of the most important in history,” says Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California at Berkeley. “The world can’t get on a path to a low-carbon economy without the United States,” says Kammen, who advises the Obama campaign on energy issues.
On the surface, the climate-policy proposals of the two candidates share many features. Both endorse a market-based approach called a cap-and-trade system, in which permits would be issued to companies and other entities for emitting a set amount of greenhouse gases. Those permits could be traded, and the number of permits would diminish over time, thereby reducing the country’s overall emissions.
However, the two candidates diverge on how aggressively they would cut emissions. That conflict reflects a broader debate in the academic world about how quickly the nation needs to kick its carbon habit and how to best reach that goal. Climate scientists, economists, disaster specialists, and public-opinion researchers have been revving up their models lately and sharing their insights. Here is a quick snapshot of some of their recent findings.
How much of a priority should global warming be?
Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its six-year study on the science of global warming and picked up the Nobel Peace Prize for its effort. Compiled by thousands of researchers from academe, as well as from the public and private sectors, the report forecast that climate change will cause a long list of problems, some of which cannot be avoided, given the previous century’s worth of pollution.
The IPCC predicts that global temperatures will rise between 2 degrees and 12 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the present century. But as the saying goes, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity — and floods, fires, and other problems that will accompany a warmer world. Rainfall in many regions will come in more-extreme bursts separated by dry spells, increasing the chances of floods and droughts. By 2020 some African countries could see their agricultural yields drop by 50 percent. Fresh-water supplies will decrease in large parts of Asia. Alpine areas in Europe could lose up to 60 percent of their animal and plant species by 2080. In North America, water will grow scarcer in Western states, and wildfires will burn more frequently, as winter snows dwindle.
The scary assessments, in concert with natural disasters, rising fuel costs, and other factors, have made a strong impression on the public. During the last presidential election, few Americans based their voting decisions on the issue of global warming. But Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of humanities and social sciences at Stanford University, says that now “about one in five Americans will vote on this issue,” according to survey research he has conducted.
How quickly should the United States and the world cut emissions of greenhouse gases?
In 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern, then head of Britain’s Government Economic Service, issued a 700-page economic assessment of climate change. Judging from the results of economic models, his team concluded that the costs of global warming would equal about 5 percent of the global gross domestic product each year, possibly up to 20 percent of global GDP or more. Those findings argue for quick and decisive action, according to the report. Although it stopped short of offering specific targets, it suggested developed nations reduce their emissions by 60 percent to 80 percent below their 1990 levels by the year 2050.
That damage assessment got a chilly reception from many economists, including William Nordhaus, a professor at Yale University. In A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, published in June by Yale University Press, Nordhaus argues that the British report reached such dire conclusions because it is based on the unconventional assumption of a nearly zero time-discount rate. In other words, it valued the welfare of all future generations the same as it did today’s. With that assumption, potential damages more than 800 years from now significantly drive up the projected costs of climate change, according to Nordhaus. He calls for a much more modest approach to greenhouse gases. The optimal strategy from his economic modeling would be to trim emissions by 25 percent by 2050 and 45 percent by 2100.
Both candidates, though, have pledged to reach more-aggressive targets. McCain would cut emissions 60 percent below their 1990 levels by 2050, while Obama would reduce them to 80 percent below their 1990 levels by the same time.
Those reductions come closer to the policies that many climate scientists say are necessary to avoid substantial harm. Even if countries managed to chop global emission in half by 2050, for example, “there is an even chance of around one billion people being short of water by 2050, a number that rises as high as two billion by 2100,” according to a recent commentary in Nature Reports: Climate Change, written by several researchers at Britain’s national weather service, the Met Office, who were also leaders of the IPCC assessment.
The next president will have to work quickly once in office. Nations are negotiating a treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate agreement that is set to expire in 2012. The talks will conclude at the end of 2009 with what is expected to be a much more ambitious treaty designed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. Although the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate never ratified it, and President Bush has not supported it. Without the participation of the United States and China, the agreement has had limited success in slowing emissions.
What is the best way to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint?
There are two broad approaches to curbing greenhouse-gas emissions: regulating limits on pollution (as in a cap-and-trade program) and taxing pollution (usually expressed in dollars per ton of carbon or its equivalent). Economists generally line up in support of carbon taxes because they are seen as simple, efficient, and less subject to gaming and market volatility.
Nordhaus suggests a steadily increasing emissions tax that would start out at roughly $30 per ton of carbon, which would add about 9 cents to every gallon of gasoline. That tax would pull in $50-billion in revenue, he says.
Gary Yohe, a professor of economics at Wesleyan University and one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, proposes a tax of nearly double that amount, starting at $55 per ton. The initial value, he says, matters less than ensuring that the tax increases each year, which sends a market signal that carbon polluting will grow more expensive over time. He suggests raising the tax to $110 per ton by 2020, a level at which it might start becoming worthwhile to reduce emissions by capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground or under the seafloor.
While carbon taxes would disproportionately affect lower-income Americans, the revenue raised could be returned as credits to people below a defined income level. Some of it could also provide support for developing cleaner technologies, Yohe suggests.
Despite the popularity of carbon taxes among economists, politicians have avoided them, fearing that the public would never support new taxes. But Krosnick, of Stanford, found some surprises when his team polled people last year about a carbon tax versus a cap-and-trade system. Taxes came out marginally more popular, and neither plan captured support from a majority of respondents. “Cap and trade is going to be a liability right now because it’s not that appealing,” he says.
A separate survey this year, however, should hearten the advisers of McCain and Obama. Krosnick discovered that people’s support for a cap-and-trade policy increased substantially, from four out of 10 people to nearly six out of 10, when they were told that the system had proved effective in reducing the sulfur pollution that causes acid rain. “The problem with cap and trade at the moment is that people don’t believe it will work,” he says.
If the candidates can get over that hurdle, they will take different approaches to starting their programs. Obama has pledged to auction off all pollution permits, generating revenue that would help low-income Americans and support technology development. McCain, however, has vowed to provide some free permits initially to help industries make the transition toward low-polluting technologies.
Some economists have worried that giving away permits will not only deprive the government of revenue but will also weaken the incentives for industries to shift their practices.
Is it economically feasible to reduce emissions quickly enough to make a difference?
According to the ipcc, the costs of mitigating climate change will not break the global economy. In order to stabilize greenhouse-gas levels at double their preindustrial values, nations would have to reduce global emissions to roughly 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, which would slow the growth rate of global GDP by less than 0.12 percent each year. That would only slightly retard world GDP, says Yohe.
Critics of the IPCC maintain that the panel was unreasonably optimistic, especially regarding the capacity of societies to change. Vaclav Smil, a professor of energy studies at the University of Manitoba, in Canada, says simply, “We are structurally cooked.” Author of Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (MIT Press, 2008), Smil has studied past technological revolutions and found they all take considerable time.
“Every new technology takes 40 to 50 years before it captures the bulk of the market. No exceptions,” he says. As of today, there are no clean-energy technologies that can replace fossil fuels on a large scale. In theory, technology that would capture and sequester carbon from power plants could allow countries to continue burning fossil fuels without adding to global warming, but those methods are still in their infancy, he says.
Many energy experts say nuclear power must play a role in helping wean the country from its dependence on fossil fuels, but that option faces significant hurdles. The United States has yet to solve the problem of how to store spent nuclear waste, and a major expansion of nuclear power here and abroad would raise security concerns.
While Smil has little confidence that society can solve the climate problem, other researchers are not so dour. The appropriate economic incentives, such as those being discussed by the candidates, will make new technologies viable, says Yohe: “It won’t solve the problem. We’re going to manage the risk, not eliminate it.”
The growing consensus is that nations must deal with the climate problem by doing more than just going on an extreme carbon diet. No matter how successful the world is in curbing emissions of greenhouse gases, it will have to adapt to some level of climate change, says the IPCC. A decade ago, climate researchers avoided the topic of adaptation because they worried that discussing it would prevent politicians from taking steps to slow it down. But adaptation is no longer a dirty word in climate policy.
Kammen, of Berkeley, agrees that tackling all facets of the climate problem will prove daunting, especially making the shift to a low-polluting future: “It’s the biggest change we’ve seen in the industrial economy since the Industrial Revolution, but I think it’s quite possible.”
America and the rest of the world do not have long to act, however, he says. Projections suggest that the United States, India, and China will invest $1-trillion in the next 10 to 15 years in coal-based energy. “If that $1-trillion goes to more coal versus to a green set of options,” says Kammen, “we will make this job incredibly hard, some would say impossible.”
Richard Monastersky is a senior writer at The Chronicle.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 48, Page B8