I have been researching what may be the single biggest game changer for climate action in the next two decades — U.S. natural gas supply.  Last week I attended a workshop where some of the country’s leading gas experts presented the remarkable new projections for near- and medium-term supply and then answered questions from some of the country’s top energy experts.

The bottom line is staggering.  As one of the presenters put it, “If the current trend continues” for production of unconventional gas, then by 2020 “natural gas could displace half of the coal burning power plants.” If that is true, and the projections by the other experts were comparable, then natural gas alone could essentially meet the entire Waxman-Markey CO2 target for 2020 — without requiring gobs of new power plants to be sited and built or thousands of miles of new transmission lines.

There is simply no doubt that, other than energy efficiency and conservation, the lowest-cost option for achieving large-scale CO2 reductions by 2020 is simply replacing electricity produced by burning coal with power generated by burning more natural gas in the vast array of currently underutilized gas-fired plants (as I will discuss in more detail in Part 2).  Natural gas is the cheapest, low-carbon baseload power around.

And it’s not just suppliers and industry experts calling for a major expansion of natural gas.  In its detailed analysis of how the U.S. can quickly slash CO2 emissions and transition off of coal without building new nukes, Energy [R]evolution, Greenpeace (!) assumes a 50% growth in natural gas power generation by 2020.

UPDATE:  I should note that a modern natural gas combined cycle plant has 60% or more lower CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour than a typical coal plant — and substantially lower (if not near-zero) emissions of a variety of toxic pollutants harmful to human health, perhaps most notably mercury.  That’s why it is widely seen, even by groups as green as Greenpeace, as a plausible transition fuel for the next two to three decades as we aggressively ramp up wind, solar PV, concentrated solar thermal, biomass, geothermal, and other ultra-low-carbon energy sources.

The explosion in unconventional gas supply is being led by so-called shale gas (see Wikipedia entry here).  Significantly, candidate Obama’s energy plan actually called for “early identification of any infrastructure obstacles/shortages or possible federal permitting process delays to drilling in “Unconventional natural gas supplies in the Barnett Shale formation in Texas and the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas.”  But shale gas extends way beyond those two plays:

Everyone who cares about clean energy and climate issues needs to become knowledgeable on shale gas — both its supply potential and the environmental risks associated with extracting it.  Where to start?  I’m glad you asked.

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This morning, Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, spoke on the special challenges and opportunities for building an international climate change agreement with China, now the world’s top emitter of global warming pollution. In a speech at the Center for American Progress, where he had been a senior fellow before his appointment to the State Department, Stern explained that “the status quo is unsustainable” and that developing countries like China need to commit to measurable change:

China, and other developing countries, do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking, but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to – internationally – that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the lessons of science. While this choice may be the more difficult one in the immediate term, it is in fact the road to prosperity and success.

In a new memo, CAP’s Andrew Light and Julian Wong explain the impressive gains China has made in building a clean-energy economy, though like Stern they note China is “not there yet.” Stern heads to China on Saturday with “John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, David Sandalow, DOE’s lead international official, and others from Treasury and EPA” for a four-day mission.

Todd Stern’s remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Thanks John. It’s a great pleasure to be back at CAP. I’m one of only, say, 3 or 400 people in this town who owe more than they can say to John Podesta – although I probably have a longer and richer pedigree in that department than most. In a nutshell, when it comes to commitment, integrity, toughness and smarts, John writes the book and the rest of us just do our best to keep up. I am honored to be here.

John and the CAP team have been at the forefront of the climate and clean energy debate for years, taking the fight to those who say we can’t, we shouldn’t, we don’t need to, it will cost too much, we should go slow; and promoting a comprehensive vision of a low-carbon future that strengthens the U.S. economy and protects our security and environment. It might seem second nature now to many of us to think of climate change as the spur to a low-carbon transformation of the global economy – a transformation rich with economic opportunity. But it wasn’t always so, and it was CAP that led the way toward this new understanding.

Of course, the need for action could hardly be more evident. With every passing month, the news from the natural front seems to get worse. Broadly speaking, we are seeing a convergence of two problematic sets of numbers – those showing global CO2 concentrations rising substantially faster than even the worst case scenarios of recent models and those indicating that dangerous climate impacts are likely to happen sooner than scientists used to think.

And we are all too familiar with the accumulating evidence of change: Among many other things, Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected. The melting of permafrost in the tundra raises the risk of a huge methane release, with dangerous feedback potential. The Greenland Ice Sheet is steadily shrinking. Sea level now threatens to rise much more than previously anticipated, and water supplies are increasingly at risk with the melting of glaciers in Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

These facts on the ground send a simple and stark message: the status quo is unsustainable. That may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the obvious is resolutely overlooked. It seems to me that anyone who wants to argue about how policy measures — such as the Waxman-Markey bill for example — are in some way too onerous should be required to explain what they would propose instead. Because the unspoken assumption of these critics — that we can carry on as we are — is just not so.

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Barack Obama is prepared to stake his own political prestige on getting climate change legislation through Congress, and would be willing to intervene directly to ensure passage of America’s first law to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming.

Nancy Sutley, who is pivotal in setting Obama’s green agenda as the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told the Guardian that the president is ready to use his considerable personal popularity to rally Congress behind a sweeping climate change bill.

If it’s true, this is the story of the month, from the UK Guardian (audio interview of the reporter is here).

Only President Obama can change the political dynamic and get an acceptable bill through Congress, particularly the Senate, in the next 12 months (see “Reid: Senate to wait for House bill, effectively delaying final bill until 2010. Here’s why that should be good news“).

If Obama is prepared to put his political prestige on the line for climate and clean energy legislation, as Sutley says, then its chances of passage increase sharply.  I have confidence that Obama will do so because, since his election, all of his major appointments, actions, and speeches reveal that he gets it — by which I mean he understands that future generations will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues:  global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change “” Hell and High Water “” then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so (see “The clean energy FDR: Obama’s first 100 days make “” and may remake “” history“).

The Guardian story notes:

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UPDATE:  I’ll excerpt the E&E News PM story, “Pelosi reverses course, slaps June 19 deadline on committees” (subs. req’d) below the jump.

Washington Insight/Energy news brief from the Washington Times just reported:

Chairman Charles Rangel of the House Ways and Means Committee said he learned today that his panel has a deadline of June 19 to complete its version of the cap-and-trade bill now pending in the House.

The New York Democrat told reporters, “We’re going to make it” — referring to the deadline, which he said he was informed about by his staff. The staff apparently had gotten word of the deadline from the House Democratic leadership….

Rangel is expected to press for rebates of some kind to help low-income families cope with the higher energy costs that would come with a cap-and-trade system. Rangel said he would meet with his committee members daily until the deadline is met.

This still suggests to me that the bill is not going to be taken to the House floor the very next week, though it is a very tight timeframe if Rangel really intends to “formally mark up the climate bill” as E&E News had reported (see here).

Today’s E&E News PM has much more:

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China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company has agreed to buy the brand from GM, the two companies said yesterday, for less than $500 million, according to a source familiar with the transaction, well off its peak value of a decade ago.

The 7,000-pound gas guzzlers are rolling out of an environment that became increasingly hostile toward them and into one whose go-go industrialism and lack of regard for the environment — until very recently — resembled that found in the United States a century ago.

So reports the WP in “Hummer’s Home: China, the New Land of Excess.”

Less than $500 million?  That’s a rounding error in the cash giveaways to the auto industry these days.  Why couldn’t we just swallow that cost to forever remove from the planet this unsustainable blight?

Who are these clueless new owners of GM anyway?  Oh.  Never mind!

Seriously, though, this is the second mistake GM/Obama/you-and-I are making:

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This is one of the most detailed studies ever performed of the economic and jobs benefits of a strong renewable energy and climate policy.

The gross increase in clean energy jobs in the EU-27 by 2020 as a result of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) policies vs. Business As Usual (BAU)

E.U. Says Climate Policy Will Boost Growth

The European Commission on Tuesday issued a study showing that its climate strategy – including its fiercely contested cap-and-trade system – would boost growth and generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs by the end of the next decade.

The study appeared to be aimed at squelching concerns that policies designed to cut greenhouse gases would compound economic hardship.

It showed that the “benefits of renewables in terms of security of supply and fighting climate change can go hand-in-hand with economic benefits,” according to the European Union’s energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs….

The consultancies and research groups that carried out the work stressed that their findings represented the “net effects” of climate policies. They said their calculations included “reduced investments, operation and maintenance costs in the conventional energy sector” and “increasing energy costs and their effects on the economy due to reduced competitiveness” from climate policies in Europe….

But they concluded that an additional 410,000 jobs would be created if the E.U. met its goal of generating 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

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Nobel prize-winning NYT columnist Paul Krugman has been doing some terrific writing on the economics of climate action (see Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities” and Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey).

Now he has turned his attention to fellow economist Martin Feldstein, who recycled a lame WSJ piece into an uber-lame Washington Post piece.

[Note to self:  If Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt keeps recycling garbage, you're going to have to stop criticizing him for being anti-environmental.]

At 5:02 am (!) today, Krugman blogged:

Ugh. Martin Feldstein has been making sense on macro issues, but this is a really bad column, on multiple levels.

On the most basic level: Waxman-Markey eventually calls for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 percent, so looking only at the 10-year target, for about a 15 percent reduction is deeply misleading.

Beyond that, Feldstein says this:

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“It doesn’t have to be this month,” Waxman said. “It could be July. But July is going to be awfully crowded with health care. We’ve got to get the bills to the floor and passed by the end of July. And that’s our goal. Both climate and health care.”

So says House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) about his big climate bill in today’s E&E News (subs. req’d).

While the House leadership definitely had been putting out the word that energy and climate legislation was on the fast track (see here), Pelosi appears to have reconsidered after meeting with key committee chairs, as E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported last night.

Indeed, today we learned that the bill has a long way to go to get to the floor.  First, there’s Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.):

Rangel confirmed his intention to formally mark up the climate bill, rather than simply offer amendments on the floor or sign off completely on the measure. “We are going to have a real, true markup,” he told reporters. “It is in our jurisdiction, we owe it to the committee, and to the Congress to have a markup and to get on the floor and explain what we have done.”

Then we have the Aggies:

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), who sits on both the Agriculture and Ways and Means committees, suggested that the entire legislative process could be slowed until Democratic leaders deal with the farm state lawmakers. And the Agriculture Committee members cannot move forward until they resolve their concerns with biofuels and U.S. EPA, Pomeroy said.

The good news is, she remains optimistic, which suggest the bill will get approved by the House this summer:

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