On Saturday, I reported that 15 EU countries were on track to meet Kyoto targets, but some readers — including Roger Pielke, Jr. (!) — were skeptical. Now the European Environment Agency (EEA) has released a lot of the underlying data, “Greenhouse gas emission trends and projections in Europe 2008.”

Figure ES-1 (click to enlarge) tells much of the story:

The Kyoto goal for the EU-15 is an 8% cut by 2008-2012 compared to 1990 levels. Four Member States (Germany, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom) expect to achieve their targets “through reductions from existing measures alone.” What will the EU-15 do as a whole?

Data show that the 15 EU Member States sharing a common target under the Kyoto Protocol (EU-15) achieved a reduction of their greenhouse gases by 2.7% between the base year and 2006. The policies and measures in place as of today will not be sufficient for the EU-15 to meet its Kyoto target, as they are expected to push down emissions between 2006 and 2010 to an average level only 3.6% below the base-year emissions. If the additional measures planned by 10 Member States were fully implemented and on time, a further reduction of 3.3% could be obtained. The full effect of the EU Emission Trading Scheme is not reflected in all Member States’ projections.

That means if the additional measures are achieved, the EU-15 would achieve nearly a 7% cut between 1990 and 2010, which is quite close to their target. What are these measures?

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Our guest blogger is Robert M. Sussman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and former Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion piece, The Carbon Ultimatum, accuses Barack Obama of planning to unleash the bureaucracy of the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to “bludgeon” Congress into enacting climate change legislation:

He plans to issue an ultimatum to Congress: Either impose new taxes and limits on carbon that he finds amenable, or the EPA carbon police will be let loose to ravage the countryside.

To support this charge, the Journal points to recent comments by Jason Grumet, an Obama energy advisor: “The EPA is obligated to move forward in the absence of Congressional action. If there’s no action by Congress in those 18 months, I think any responsible president would want to have the regulatory approach.”

This opinion piece, which uses the time-honored ploy of opponents of environmental progress of demonizing the EPA and ascribing sinister motives to its political overseers, has two fatal flaws. One, the specter of bureaucrats running amok and strangling the economy — by intruding into small businesses and individual households and banning fuels on which millions of Americans depend — is a fantasy of die-hard free-market zealots. In fact, a new administration could enforce new global warming regulations with common sense, focusing on large emitters of greenhouse gases to achieve reasonable reductions while spurring trillions of dollars worth of economic growth and green-collar jobs.

Second, in its zeal to accuse the EPA workforce of a naked power grab, the Journal ignores the central reason why EPA is part of the climate equation, as even the conservative law professor Jonathan Adler recognizes: Read more

Answer: Yes.

While the news division of the WSJ is trashing bogus offsets, the blog division is challenging my term for them (see “Selling Hot Air“):

Joe Romm at Climate Progress calls them “rip-offsets,” and bemoans the fact that people get paid extra for business as usual activities and that companies buying the offsets are wrapping themselves in a non-existent green cloak.

But are offsets really so bad? One of Mr. Romm’s readers says not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Some individual projects, like the New Jersey landfill profiled in the WSJ, might not provide “additional” emissions reductions. But if the carbon-offsets lucre encourages smaller, unregulated players to change their behavior, it’s not such a bad thing overall:

If the offset market for capturing landfill methane causes a lot of methane capture that would have not otherwise been captured, it is NOT a case of “lack of additionality.”

This isn’t a wonkish point. For climate-change legislation to pass Congress in the midst of an economic crisis, everybody from environmentalists to big business has to be on board, and businesses say they need access to cheap emissions reductions provided by the offset market.

It just goes to show you that a good comment on this blog can get you into the Wall Street Journal — congrats to Larry Coleman.

I definitely think the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But the phony should be the enemy of the genuine [Note to self: With that attitude, you're never going to get a job in Hollywood or in a GOP political consulting firm].

The problem with the WSJ/Coleman critique is that, as my lawyer friends might say, it assumes facts that are not in evidence. If the Chicago Climate Exchange or anybody else can find a landfill that was not capturing its methane but that needs the money from the offset market to make methane capture profitable, I say go for it. But where is the evidence that fraudulently charging Americans for projects that are supposed to be offsetting their emissions but in fact aren’t offsetting anything has caused methane capture that would not otherwise have occurred?

This isn’t a wonkish point. If climate legislation requires rip-offsets to be passed, and if the entire point of climate legislation is to reduce emissions and avert catastrophic climate outcomes, then offsets that are not real are merely enabling a system whereby coal companies can keep burning coal and then pay people to do stuff they were already doing. The net result — emissions keep rising.

I don’t keep repeating every single criticism of rip-offsets in every post — that is what hyperlinks are for. But let me repeat the central point from the major Stanford study this year done on the specific question of what happens if you allow rip-offsets to be used as a major cost-containment strategy in climate legislation (from my post “Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?“)

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As Bush’s pollution-based policies continue driving our economy and planet into disaster, conservatives are crying that changing course with progressive energy policies would “ravage the countryside” with “huge economic costs.” But a major new study of the success of California’s green economy tells the true story: a green recovery will restore the middle class, lift people out of poverty, and protect the planet. The study by economist David Roland-Holst finds that “California’s energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007, while eliminating fewer than 25,000.” Today, California’s per-capita electricity demand is 40 percent below the national average:

Total electricity use, per capita, 1960-2001

Instead of household income being lost to the capital intensive energy sector, Californians have enjoyed the benefits of their wages being plowed into job creating sectors, such that “induced job growth has contributed approximately $45 billion to the California economy since 1972.”

“Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California,” by David Roland-Holst, an economist at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley, is the first study of how the savings from California’s energy efficiency standards affected its economy through “expenditure shifting” away from the energy sector. The author explains:

When consumers shift one dollar of demand from electricity to groceries, for example, one dollar is removed from a relatively simple, capital intensive supply chain dominated by electric power generation and carbon fuel delivery. When the dollar goes to groceries, it animates much more job intensive expenditure chains including retailers, wholesalers, food processors, transport, and farming. Moreover, a larger proportion of these supply chains (and particularly services that are the dominant part of expenditure) resides within the state, capturing more job creation from Californians for California. Moreover, the state reduced its energy import dependence, while directing a greater percent of its consumption to in-state economic activities.

California’s appliance, building, automotive, and utility efficiency standards are a model for the nation — saving money, creating jobs, and saving lives through significant reductions in pollution.

Digg it!

A detailed new economic analysis “Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California” finds:

Over the past thirty-five years, innovative energy efficiency policies created 1.5 million additional fulltime jobs with a total payroll of over $45 billion. Looking forward, the report finds that if California improves energy efficiency by just 1 percent per year, proposed state climate policies will increase the Gross State Product (GSP) by approximately $76 billion, increase real household incomes by up to $48 billion and create as many as 403,000 new jobs.

Imagine how many jobs the entire country could create if we improved energy efficiency by just 1% per year. The answer is many millions (see “What would a Green Recovery do for your state?” and “Mayors report: 4.2 million new green jobs possible“).

Total electricity use, per capita, 1960-2001

And making the country as a whole more efficient would be a considerably easier task than making California more efficient, given that for decades the state has been the leader in tapping the energy efficiency resource and that Californians already use 40% less electricity per person than the rest of America (see “Efficiency, Part 4: How California does it so consistently and cost-effectively“).

Energy efficiency must be the cornerstone of any clean energy climate policy, since efficiency is the only unlimited source of carbon-free energy that generates economic savings. Here are the study’s key historical findings:

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Richard Sandor and his Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) may be doing more to destroy the credibility of the carbon trading market than anyone in the world, as the Wall Street Journal makes painfully clear today.

I urge anyone considering throwing their money away on rip-offsets to read the entire piece, “Pollution Credits Let Dumps Double Dip: Landfills Find New Revenue in Trading System Meant to Curb Greenhouse Emissions.”

Sandor has turned the CCX into Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers and turned the carbon trading market into another example of casino capitalism — all in the name of the almighty dollar (see “Q: What is the difference between carbon offsets and mortgage-backed securites?“).

What CCX is doing — and how Sandor justified it to the WSJ — is almost beyond belief. Let’s start with the rip-offsets.

Buried in a recent Post article was the amazing fact that CCX was selling offsets from a landfill that was flaring methane — and that was going to keep doing so whether they got money from CCX or not (see Is the Chicago Climate Exchange selling rip-offsets?) Even if you think rip-offset money should go for methane flaring projects (I don’t), paying people to do things that they were going to do anyway means that your money is not offsetting any emissions at all. In rip-offset jargon, the project fails the additionality test — for a good discussion of this important concept, see this piece.

Should anyone pay CCX for making the sun rise in the morning? I suppose that if someone wants to flush their money down the toilet, that is their business. But if CCX is becoming the dominant player in the U.S. carbon market by selling rip-offsets and is working to become part of the foundation of a serious national carbon trading system, then it is everyone’s business.

After all, the story reports Sandor says the United States will adopt rules similar to CCX’s and that “companies that buy credits on the Chicago exchange today stand a good chance of being able to use them to comply with any future federal emissions rules.” Let’s hope that is just a huckster’s hype, since all major climate bills currently being considered rely heavily on rip-offsets — and John McCain would allow unlimited rip-offsets at the start of his climate plan (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).

The WSJ made clear today that the landfill story above was not an anecdote but a core CCX strategy:

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