Gimme a ‘B’ … B!  Gimme a ‘minus’ … Minus!  What’s that spell?

My friend A. Siegel wrote on his blog last week (and republished on DailyKos and Grist):

Joe Romm, who has been cheer-leading Waxman-Markey recently (despite much on-the-record work that provides a basis for highlighting its inadequacies), says that it might (MIGHT) give us a 10-20% chance of stabilization at 450 ppm and avoiding catastrophic climate change. Hmmm “¦ what wonderful odds.

I don’t see how giving a B- grade to the bill and asserting it has a small chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change qualifies as “uncritical enthusiastic support for somebody or something,” to use Encarta’s definition of “cheerleading.”

Needless to say I was rather unhappy with this misrepresentation.  After all, he left out a central point of my post, which is that “Waxman-Markey is the only game in town” and if it fails, then there is no chance of averting catastrophe.  So I complained to him and he added this:

[UPDATE: 1. To try to clarify, Romm believes (with reason) that this is an improvement over the odds without Waxman-Markey. He is stating his perspective that Waxman-Markey improves the chances of avoiding catastrophic climate change. 2. That Romm is strongly supportive gives pause to what might otherwise be harsher criticism & conclusions. 3. For those who aren't aware, Romm's Hell & High Water is perhaps the top book on the intersection of climate change and US politics. Of it, I wrote that "This work might be called the work to read after seeing An Inconvenient Truth."]

Modified rapture!

How long did it take before we got a chance to take up serious health care legislation after it died?  How long since we reconsidered an energy tax after the BTU tax died?  How long since we have passed major legislation to strengthen the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act to deal with obvious dangers to public health?  Still waiting!

I happen to be a political realist as well as a climate science realist, and while the two can be hard to reconcile, they ain’t impossible.

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

A yield loss of three percent of the U.S. corn crop due to a rise in temperature of 2 degrees F totals $1.4 billion. Environment America, April 2009.

Farm-belt lawmakers are posing a challenge to passage of clean-energy legislation in Congress, but torpedoing the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) would hurt farmers because harms linked to global warming — including drought, flooding, and other crop damage — would continue unabated. House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson (D-MN) has threatened to bring down the entire green economy legislation if he doesn’t get his way on the renewable fuel standards and jurisdiction in the agriculture committee:

If they don’t want to change it, they’ll have to find the votes some other place. In my district a “no” vote would be a good vote.

Without congressional action on climate change legislation, global greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise and the impacts on agriculture would grow. The link between global warming and extreme weather events is evident, and research predicts that the trend will intensify in coming decades:

Heatwaves, Extreme Storms, And Droughts Will Increase In Frequency And Intensity. Changes in extreme weather are “among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate,” a 2008 federal report indicated. In the future, the report predicts, “With continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity.” [U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2008]

Climate Disasters Have Increased Sixfold Since The 1950s. An insurance company database showed that weather-related disasters have increased sixfold since the 1950s, compared to only a slight increase in non-weather disasters. At a meeting of climate and insurance experts in 2006, “delegates reached a cautious consensus: Climate change is helping to drive the upward trend in catastrophes.” A Government Accountability Office investigation in 2007 found that private and government insurers including the federal crop and flood insurance programs paid out more than $320 billion for weather-related losses between 1980 and 2005. [Nature, 6/2006; GAO, 5/3/2007]

The 1988 And 1993 Midwest Climate Disasters Caused $79 Billion In Damages Alone. Not only are the costs of climate disasters high, they come in the form of unpredictably catastrophic events. A report in 2000 by Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment found that extreme weather events have “caused severe crop damage and have exacted a significant economic toll for U.S. farmers over the past 20 years” and “could rise significantly due to greater climate variability, and to increases in insects, weeds, and plant diseases.” Total damages — including agricultural losses — from the 1988 drought and 1993 Midwest floods were $79 billion. In the future, “variability of precipitation — in time, space, and intensity — will make U.S. agriculture increasingly unstable and make it more difficult for U.S. farmers to plan what crops to plan and when.” [Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, 5/2000]

Crop Losses To Rise To Billions A Year, Doubling By The 2030s. Crop losses insured by the federal government have also risen substantially in the past two decades, due to higher participation by farmers, rising crop prices, and big loss years like 2008, when the federal program paid out nearly $8.6 billion, much of it because of flooding in the Midwest. Looking just at increased soil moisture that comes with higher precipitation driven by climate change, authors of a study published in 2002 by Global Environmental Change estimated that the roughly $1.5 billion per year in crop damage could double by the 2030s. And an April report by Environment America found that U.S. corn growers could face annual losses of $1.4 billion due to future climate change, looking just how higher temperatures reduce yields. [USDA Risk Management Agency; Global Environmental Change, 11/15/2002; Environment America, 4/2009]

Return Of The Dust Bowl? A 2007 report cites a potential agricultural loss of as much as $10 billion by 2090 in the Edwards Aquifer region of Texas, and productivity losses exceeding 50 percent for wheat and soybeans in the southern and Great Plains regions. Other research predicts that the American Southwest will by mid-century face extremely difficult choices between supplying water for agriculture and the region’s booming cities. A study reported in Science in April 2007 said that a drought similar to conditions during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could become the norm in the Southwest by 2050. [Center for Integrative Environment Research at the University of Maryland, 10/2007; Science, 4/2007]

In 2007, the Center for Integrative Environment Research at the University of Maryland report, “The U.S. Economic Impacts of Climate Change and the Costs of Inaction,” included a review of previous studies on climate change impacts on agriculture and water for various regions of the United States:

The uneven nature of climate change impacts throughout the country makes the net impacts of global warming on the agricultural sector uncertain . . . Some northern regions are likely to experience fleeting economic benefits with more profitable crops migrating there (as the climate becomes hospitable to those crops.) As climate conditions continue to change, however, those temporary benefits may be lost. Other regions, such as the Southeast, West, and southern Great Plains may face challenges from increased temperatures, water stress, saltwater intrusion, and the potential increase in invasive species and pests — the impacts of which may cause costs to outweigh benefits.

American farmers, like all of us, have a huge stake in the fight to stem global climate change. To hold their future hostage to a rulemaking battle over ethanol would be a grave, shortsighted disservice.

Read an extended version of this post at the Center for American Progress website.

Fred Hiatt keeps delivering self-inflicted body blows to the dwindling reputation of the Washington Post editorial page.  His latest punch to the Post‘s kidney (or is that groin?):  Running a misstatement-filled piece trashing the House climate bill by one-time Reagan administration chief economist Martin Feldstein — just two weeks after the uber-right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a very similar piece by Feldstein.

Heckuva job, Freddie!  What’s next — reprinting the Washington Times editorial page?

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America’s mayors, governors and CEOs may be feeling a sense of relief now that Congress shows signs of movement on a climate bill. Over the past decade, some of them have stuck their necks and spent their political capital on climate policy. Now, Congress is taking the heat.

But unfortunately, there is no rest ahead for anyone, not if we’re going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions back to levels we haven’t seen in a generation or more. Whatever agreements emerge from Congress this summer and from Copenhagen next December, the fate of the planet will remain largely in the hands of our corporations and cities.

That’s a message I will deliver June 3 to corporate and local leaders from Europe and the United States at the World Investment Conference in La Baule, France, where the topic will be trans-Atlantic cooperation on building sustainable cities. We can’t count on Washington or Copenhagen to solve the climate and energy problems. The most important leadership ahead still will come from cities and CEOs.

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I keep getting confirmations that Speaker Pelosi still aims to put climate and clean energy bill on the House floor the last week in June, as first reported here (see “Climate politics scoop and question of the week“).  Grist has a long article, excerpted below, on next steps.  I would note that other committees may not have to vote the bill out — concerns from Ways and Means and Agriculture might instead be negotiated with Henry Waxman (D-CA) and addressed in a manager’s amendment on the floor.

Next Steps for Waxman-Markey

The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill cleared a major hurdle on May 21 when it was approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee. But the American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009 still has a long road to travel before it can be voted on by the full House.

The House parliamentarian has referred the bill to nine committees, though only four have signaled that they intend to review it in the next weeks. Some estimates of how many committees may want a chance to modify the legislation go as high as 11, and it’s certain that the Ways and Means, Agriculture, Science, and Natural Resources committees will all play some role in the development of the bill.

All of this will take place before the bill goes up for a vote in the full House, which could come by the end of June, if some reports are to be believed. Here’s a run down of the committees likely to take a stab at the bill (or a hatchet, perhaps), and any indication we have so far of these panels’ intentions:

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Europe made a major commitment under the Kyoto protocol that U.S. conservatives have been telling us for years they would never achieve. It now seems clear Europeans will meet their commitment under the terms of the protocol. It will become increasingly difficult for those who don’t want a U.S. cap-and-trade system to point to the European Trading System (ETS) as an obvious failure.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) reported Friday:

EU greenhouse gas emissions fall for third consecutive year

European Union emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases (GHG) declined for the third consecutive year in 2007, according to the EU’s GHG inventory report compiled by the European Environment Agency. The EU-27′s overall domestic emissions were 9.3 % below 1990 levels, which equalled a drop of 1.2 % or 59 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent compared to 2006. The EU-15 now stands 5 % below its Kyoto Protocol base year levels.

You can see how each individual country is doing here (full report here).

And just two weeks ago, the European Commission reported that a subset of total EU GHG emissions, the carbon dioxide emissions traded in the European Trading System (ETS), dropped sharply in 2008:

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Since the mid-1800s, U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary human-caused greenhouse gas, accounted for 29% of the global total.  Those 328,000 million metric tons of cumulative emissions are the most of any country and more than three times the amount emitted by China over the same period (93,000 MtCO2), according to data from data from the World Resources Institute.

Cumulative emissions are responsible for the high levels of CO2 concentrations that are destroying the climate, which means the moral responsibility rests with Americans to show leadership on emissions reductions.

Using WRI data, Greenpeace has written “America’s Share of the Climate Crisis,” which also looks at emissions since 1960:

Here are some more quotable factoids from their report:

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Is any question more central to averting climate catastophe than “the challenges and the opportunities of working with China in the context of our broader climate and clean-energy policy”?

On Wednesday, 10:30 to 11:30 EST, the Center for American Progress will be hearing from Todd Stern, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change on that very subject.  He will be introduced by John Podesta, President and and CEO of CAP.

This event is, not surprisingly, full but you can view the live webstream here.

Background:

• Does a serious bill need action from China?
• Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?
• Is China ready to act on climate? Part 2: The green dragon is considering a carbon tax and a major carbon intensity target
• Chinese Premier: Rich nations should ditch ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles “¦ and stop buying all the crap we make