Our guest bloggers are Senior Fellow Andrew Light and Special Assistant Sean Pool for the Energy Policy Team at the Center for American Progress.

The agreement that emerged from December’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen continues to attract support from a growing number of nations despite naysayers who still insist that the meeting ended in failure. A recent Reuters article shows that there are now 110 countries on board, including the world’s major carbon emitters, representing more than 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions:

These countries’ collective commitments will not yet achieve the accord’s stated goal of holding temperature rise over pre-industrial levels at 2 degrees Celsius, but achieving these commitments could hold us to a 3-degree increase rather than the 4.8 degree rise we would see by 2100 under a business as usual scenario. These commitments also represent a vital first step toward achieving the 2-degree goal. These commitments bring us a bit less than 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent shy of the reductions needed to stabilize temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels assuming that countries succeed in meeting the high end of the goals they have set for themselves and also that commitments tied to other countries’ comparable efforts go forward.

So how do we achieve the remaining reductions needed to achieve climate safety? The first step in this process is to make the Copenhagen accord binding in order to lock in the reduction commitments, and the second is to increase the ambition of those parties that have signed onto the accord:

Make The Copenhagen Accord Binding. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon previously pledged to shift the Copenhagen Accord from a political agreement to a legally binding agreement by the next U.N. climate summit in Cancun, Mexico this December. U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern has agreed that we should be moving toward a legal agreement this year. Most participants in the process believe that the 2010 meeting in Cancun should at least include a discussion of how to make the accord legally binding by the 2011 meeting in South Africa if it cannot be made legally binding before then.

Increase The Ambition. The easiest way to increase the ambitions of countries signing onto the accord is to fix one of the biggest holes in the agreement: the lack of any emission reduction targets for those parties signing on. This gap is in sharp contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, which did include such targets. Reduction targets for developed and developing countries, starting with the 17 to 20 largest emitters responsible for almost 80 percent of emissions globally, should be the first priority. This would bring us closer to the overall temperature goal of the accord than simply increasing the number of parties signing onto it since the countries that have not yet made commitments collectively represent a tiny fraction of global emissions.

Any emission reduction targets added to the Copenhagen Accord will have to conform to the 2 degree Celsius temperature target that is part of the accord. As such, additional emission targets would need to aim to close the 5-gigaton gap from the current Copenhagen pledges if this figure does, in fact, represent the reductions needed to achieve the 2 degree Celsius target for climate safety. If it turns out that we need to achieve greater additional reductions than 5 gigatons, then we should do so.

The United States can make the needed reductions, but it would be a big help if Congress were to pass legislation like the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which would achieve overall emissions reductions greater than the current U.S. pledge of 17 percent cuts below 2005 levels by 2020. The direct set aside in ACES for international forestry programs—which is separate from the allowable forestry offsets in the bill—could alone achieve 750 megatons of reductions annually by 2020. But if emissions reduction programs like this are eliminated in a Senate bill, then these additional reductions would be difficult to achieve, even if the bill is ultimately successful. Those interested in a global agreement on achieving climate safety will therefore have to work hard to make sure that Senate legislation is structured so that it generates revenue to pay for such programs.

One good outcome of Copenhagen is that the accord is still a work in progress. Our calculations of what can be achieved by current pledges under the accord are not final. They can still be improved. It doesn’t make sense to worry that the commitments made so far put us on a disastrous pathway to a world 3, 4, or more degrees warmer. That would only be a legitimate worry if the Copenhagen Accord had been finalized last December as a legally binding document at the current level of commitments. Instead, we still have time to use the accord to get us to a safer world.

So, no conspiracy, no collusion, no manipulation of data, no corruption of the peer-review process, no scandal; just an understandable reluctance to hand over data to dishonest people with a history of misrepresenting it.

Squibs don’t get much damper than “Climategate”. The most worrying aspect of the drama was the way in which most of the media ditched any attempt at assessing the claims and became caught up in the frenzy, when a couple of hours spent reading the emails and talking to one of two of those involved would have made the conclusions of the House of Commons inquiry entirely predictable.

That’s CP’s favorite Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton in his ABC column, “Climategate: The lion that squeaked.”  Note that a “damp squib” is an explosive dud, “a firework that fails to go off, due to wetting,” like say, the Segway, questions about Obama’s place of birth, or anything Geraldo Rivera reports on.

I don’t think “damp squib” will catch on, though, nor did “Swifthack,” so offer your own suggestions for renaming the non-gate.  Gotta be catchier than TSFKAC to give the status quo media something to write about.  They lavished coverage on TSFKAC, but it has mostly been crickets chirping on the exoneration of Phil Jones by the House of Commons.  At the very least, CP needs something to call it.

Here’s Hamilton’s whole piece:

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Our guest blogger is Julian Wong, Senior Policy Analyst with the Energy Opportunity team.

My colleagues and I from the Center for American Progress are off next week on a fact-finding mission to China. Much has been written over the past year about how other countries, particularly China, are investing heavily to increase their economic competitiveness by building domestic clean energy industries. We will therefore be traveling to China to meet with policymakers and companies that are driving its aggressive pursuit of clean energy technology development — and share our findings with you on the CAP energy policy page.

At least three studies were released this past month alone about China’s clean energy investment. A report from Pew Charitable Trusts, using data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, declared China the early winner in the clean energy race by outspending the United States $34.6 billion to $18.6 billion in 2009. And while it’s true that decarbonizing our economies requires significant financial investments, it will not happen simply by throwing money to the wind. Deutsche Bank’s global survey of national clean energy policies highlights China, Brazil, and Germany for their exemplary scale and effect. And our own report “Out of the Running?” discusses how Germany, Spain, and China are adopting comprehensive policy approaches to clean energy by developing markets, building infrastructure, and financing research and deployment projects.

China recently identified alternative energy as a “key industry” that it would actively support in its next five-year economic development plan. This move is wholly consistent with China’s push for the new and more sustainable kind of development pathway that they call “scientific development.” As we discussed in “Out of the Running?,” China has created powerful top-down policies such as national clean energy and energy conservation targets, and more recently a goal to limit growth of carbon emissions. These top-down policies are supplemented by local incentives and investments to stimulate the innovation, manufacture, deployment, and export of low-carbon technologies.

These concerted efforts have yielded concrete results in renewable energy deployment, enhanced energy efficiency, and pushed the creation of new rail and grid infrastructure. China already boasts the world’s fastest high-speed train in operation, has developed the world’s leading technology for ultrahigh-voltage grid transmission wires, and is on track to become the largest producer and user of solar panels.

These developments will reduce the Chinese economy’s carbon intensity while significantly boosting job creation. China employed 1.12 million people in clean energy sectors by 2008, according to the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association. This number is small compared to a labor pool of 700 to 800 million, but it is forecasted to grow significantly over the next decade. A study by the Global Climate Network in conjunction with the Research Center for Sustainable Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projects that the combination of policies and investments in clean energy industries can create up to 6.79 million new jobs in the country by 2020.

The speed and extent to which China has raced ahead to invest in green technologies is worthy of envy. Yet the many recent media stories come up short in explaining just how the Chinese government is coordinating this massive push.

The CAP trip, which will include Sarah Wartell, Kate Gordon, Michael Ettlinger, Sarah Miller, and myself, is a fact-finding mission to three northeastern cities in China to see how national policy is intersecting with researchers, businesses, and leaders at the local level. We will start in Beijing, the nation’s capital and the heart of national energy policy decision making, and make day trips to Tianjin, a relatively new and rapidly growing national economic development zone, and Baoding, a city in neighboring Hebei province that has gained attention for its strategic emphasis on clean energy industries.

Read more about the trip at Center for American Progress, or follow on Twitter by subscribing to the hashtag #cappek.