Kind of a good news, bad news story:

President George W. Bush has invited the European Union, the United Nations and 11 other countries to the September 27-28 meeting in Washington to work toward setting a long-term goal by 2008 to cut emissions.

Yet it turns out just to be a meeting full of sound and fury, signifying nothing:

But a senior U.S. official said the administration stood by its opposition to mandatory economy-wide caps.

A meeting aimed at 1) developing voluntary or aspirational targets, 2) for the long-term, 3) by 2008 [i.e. Bush's last year in office]. Three strikes and you are out.

Bush’s last chance to be a small part of the solution rather than a large part of the problem came and went at the G-8 meeting, where Bush nixed an effort to set realistic and binding long-term targets.

The only interesting question that will be answered by this meeting is whether the media will be suckered into giving the President the one outcome he truly wants — positive press coverage on climate change, an area of such catastrophic failure by this administration that it will probably ensure (even more than Iraq) that history judges Bush a failure.

Both chambers overwhelmingly approved the $43 billion “21st Century Competitiveness Act.” The bill has a lot of good stuff in it, but on the down side, it creates an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) inside the Department of Energy (DOE).

ARPA-E is, as E&E News (subs. req’d) puts it “a special agency within the Energy Department to spur research into breakthrough energy technologies.” Great idea, which is why Congress set up a number of offices decades ago to do exactly the same thing, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (which I helped run in the 1990s) — which does mostly applied research into breakthrough energy technologies — as well as the Office of Energy Research, which does long-term, basic research into breakthrough energy technologies. ARPA-E is pretty much completely duplicative, but Congress wanted to do something new.

ARPA-E is supposed to be “modeled after the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” But as much as we all love what DARPA has done, the main reason for its success is that the military is the ultimate customer, and and so DARPA doesn’t have to worry about creating commercial technologies (i.e. cost is no object). For DOE, the public is the ultimate customer, and cost is incredibly important, which is why DOE does so much joint research with industry, to make sure we’re not pursuing things that have no commercial prospect.

Yes, DOE’s research into low carbon technologies is woefully underfunded — and much of it is misdirected towards hydrogen cars — so ARPA-E will have some value IF its budget does not come at the expense of currently funded research. Given the massive deficits we’re running, and the Democrats’ pledge to do pay-as-you-go budgeting, however, I expect that DOE research and development funding will be a zero-sum game, and ARPA-E will be pointlessly duplicative bureaucracy.

A review by Anne Wingate

On Wednesday, Reel Progress sponsored a screening of “The 11th Hour,” a feature-length environmental documentary. The film is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and explores the myriad of ecological crises confronting our planet. Its message is straightforward: the earth is teetering toward irreversible environmental catastrophe, but there is still a chance to change course, and “turn mankind’s darkest hour into its finest.”

The film begins with an exploration of humankind’s place in Earth’s biological community, lamenting that we’ve been living under the “illusion that we are separate from nature when in fact we are one, we are connected to nature.” It goes on to explain the history of human evolution and population growth, ultimately pointing to the industrial revolution and the birth of the fossil fuel age as the turning points when humanity began to overshoot the earth’s ecological limits.

The film features interview clips from over fifty experts. William McDonough talks about green design, NASA’s Jim Hansen discusses global warming, World Wildlife Fund Scientist and author Theo Colborn talks about chemical contamination and proliferation of ailments like asthma and cancer. The film is full of hard scientific evidence, yet presents the information in a very watchable format.

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NASA’s James Hansen has posted his “Declaration of Stewardship for the Earth and all Creation“:

1. Moratorium on Dirty Coal: I will support a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2.

2. Price on Carbon Emissions: I will support a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions, reflecting costs to the environment. Mechanisms to adjust price should be apolitical and economically sound.

3. Energy Efficiency & Conservation Incentives: I will support measures to improve energy efficiency, e.g., rewarding utilities and others based on energy and carbon efficiencies, rather than on the amount of energy sold.

Hansen wants to keep this as simple as possible. He argues “every
candidate in 2008 should be asked whether they will sign onto each of the three items.” Who can disagree?