Europe made a major commitment under the Kyoto Protocol that U.S. conservatives have been telling us for years it would never achieve.  In fact, the Europeans are poised to surpass their targets under the terms of the Protocol. It is no longer plausible for those who don’t want a U.S. cap-and-trade system to point to the European Trading System (ETS) as a failure.  Quite the reverse.

A report by the European Environment Agency released today shows that the European Union and all Member States but one [Austria] are on track to meet their Kyoto Protocol commitments to limit and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Whereas the Protocol requires that the EU-15 reduce average emissions during 2008-2012 to 8% below 1990 levels, the latest projections indicate that the EU-15 will go further, reaching a total reduction of more than 13 % below the base year.…

Looking further ahead, almost three quarters of the EU’s unilateral target to cut emissions to 20 % below 1990 levels by 2020 could be achieved domestically (i.e. without purchase of credits outside the EU).

The report highlights the importance of the EU ETS in helping Member States meet their targets.

That is today’s news release from the European Environment Agency.  The full report is here.  The report notes:

Five EU”‘15 Member States (France, Germany, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom) have already achieved average GHG emission levels below their Kyoto target….

The EU ETS is expected to result in important reductions of domestic EU emissions.

The EEA analysis concludes the EU-15 will not need to rely on offsets to meet their Kyoto target and “foresees a variety of factors contributing to the EU-15′s total reduction of more than 13%”:

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This piece by Steve Rendle, CEO of The North Face, and Mike Kaplan, CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, was first published in “High Country News.”  For more, see “Aspen SkiCo and global warming” and “The AP gets the bark beetle story right.”

In the summer of 2003, one of the most legendary and fearsome mountaineering routes in the world — the North Face of the Eiger — fell victim to climate change. An unusually warm summer melted much of the ice that makes this route in Switzerland passable. As temperatures continue to warm, this iconic passage may only exist in winter.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, aspen trees have begun dying off in huge numbers. Aspens can fall victim to many diseases, but science suggests that a warmer climate will lead to increasing tree mortality as a result of sickness, insect infestations and other pests.

As CEOs of two of the most widely known consumer brands in the outdoor recreation market — Aspen Skiing Company and The North Face — it gets our attention when our companies’ namesakes start to vanish before our eyes. Although we operate different businesses, we share concern about the impact of climate change on our companies, the economy, the environment and our customers. We also agree that now is the time for dramatic action by Congress to curb greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate investment in renewable energy sources and clean technology, and encourage energy efficiency.

The effects of warming global temperatures are not theoretical.

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Today, fourteen Democratic senators, led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), affirmed their allegiance to the profits of polluting industry at the expense of the health and jobs of their constituents. In a letter to Senate leaders, a bloc of senators with powerful coal interests in their states called for “fair emissions allowances in climate change legislation.” Their definition of “fair,” unfortunately, turns out to be full taxpayer subsidies for global warming polluters. They call for the free allocation of pollution permits to electric utilities to be distributed “fully based on emissions“:

We urge you to ensure that emission allowances allocated to the electricity sector – and thus, electricity consumers — be fully based on emissions as the appropriate and equitable way to provide transition assistance in a greenhouse gas-regulated economy.

The signatories on the letter defending coal-heavy polluters are Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), Al Franken (D-MN), Roland Burris (D-IL), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Russell Feingold (D-WI), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Udall (D-CO), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Carl Levin (D-MI), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

Their demand is a basic violation of a core principle of environmental economics — that companies should pay based on their pollution. The transition-period formula in the House bill, Waxman-Markey, and the current Senate legislation, Kerry-Boxer, at least distributes the free permits based 50 percent on electricity production. This formula was negotiated with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and has received the endorsement of the Edison Electric Institute, the largest lobbying organization for the nation’s utilities. In contrast, President Barack Obama called for a full auction of pollution permits to avoid rewarding polluters at the taxpayers’ expense, instead dedicating the revenues to creating jobs, lowering taxes on the middle class, and building a clean energy economy.

The argument that the most “fair and effective,” “appropriate and equitable” way to help the constituents of their states is to increase subsidies to coal-powered utilities is frankly absurd.

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USGBC/Booz Allen Hamilton Report Shows Green Construction to Contribute $554 Billion to U.S. GDP Between 2009 and 2013.

The U.S. Green Building Council is having its huge annual conference now — you can watch live streams and archived videos of the leading experts on clean energy and energy efficiency here.  And they just released a major new “Green Jobs Study” done by Booz Allen, which concluded:

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Germany to Help Develop Moroccan Solar-Thermal Energy Projects

Germany plans to help Morocco develop a water-desalination plant and electricity generators using solar power as part of a larger program to expand the use of renewable energy in the North African nation.

Funding and specifics of the solar accord will be discussed at talks next week in Rabat between the two governments, Sabine Brickenkamp, a spokeswoman for the German economic cooperation and development ministry, said in an interview.

Morocco, the only country in the region with a power cable to Europe, imports 97 percent of its energy. The nation is vying with Algeria, Tunisia and Libya for 400 billion euros ($596 billion) of investments in solar-energy systems over the coming decades as the EU seeks to trim emissions from coal and natural gas power plants by importing clean power from the Sahara.

The nation of 36 million people this week announced a plan to invest $9 billion to install 2,000 megawatts of solar power through 2020, the equivalent of about two nuclear power plants and about 20 percent of Morocco’s electricity consumption.

German companies including Munich Re, Siemens AG and RWE AG in July announced a plan called Desertec to probe the potential to generate electricity in North Africa using solar-thermal systems to pipe power in cables under the Mediterranean Sea to provide 15 percent of Europe’s electrical needs by mid-century.

Solar-thermal systems heat a fluid by concentrating the sun’s rays on a tube. The liquid produces steam that turns turbines. The world’s largest solar-thermal system is in California’s Mojave Desert, operated by a group of U.S. companies.

Details of the desalination plant, which will use energy from the sun to extract salt from sea water, will be worked out next week, Brickenkamp said.

Clinton calls Copenhagen ‘steppingstone,’ outlines U.S. priorities

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This is a guest post by Chelsea Sexton, my friend and costar of the 2006 documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?“  At a young age, Chelsea began working for GM marketing their ill-fated electric car, the EV1.  She even married an EV1 service technician!  Now she serves as the Executive Director of Plug In America (full bio here).  Her first guest post was, “So what is it like to actually drive the Chevy Volt plug in hybrid electric car?“).  This post was first published on her blog.  The picture is of Fisker Karma’s artificial sound-emitting bumper speakers.

For the most part, the electric vehicle world is palpably buzzing with excitement of cars to come — and after some seriously dark years, there is much to look forward to. The collective conversation has finally shifted from “if” to “how”, but even on easier “how” points, we can’t seem to get out of our own way — which really doesn’t bode well for the hard stuff.

Case in point is a newly-emerging issue over the silence of hybrids and electric cars. In the EV generation of the 1990′s, their comparative lack of noise was a selling point. Now, according to some, it’s a threat to life itself.

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This is a guest post from David Childs with The International Boreal Conservation Campaign. For terrific graphics and images, click here.

When we think about forests and climate change, we tend to think about tropical forests. This is not without undue reason – some of the highest rates of deforestation are happening in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia Pacific. But one source of carbon, which happens to be the world’s largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon, has been mostly overlooked in international climate discussions to date. I’m talking, of course, about the boreal forest.

The global boreal forest circles the northern portion of our globe, carefully edging along the southern arctic through Russia, Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska. A report out today by the Canadian Boreal Initiative and Boreal Songbird Initiative states that the boreal forest stores as much as 703 billion tons of carbon in its trees, peatlands, and soils – this amounts to nearly twice the storage capacity per unit area as tropical forests.

So what makes these numbers so high? The main difference with boreal forests is that a significant portion of its carbon is stored below vegetation level whereas tropical forests tend to store the majority of their carbon in the trees and plants themselves. Because boreal forests reside in much colder climates, much of the carbon stored in its vegetation never fully decomposes and is gradually pushed into thick layers of peat and permafrost to be stored for thousands of years.

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First Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced his breakthrough Senate climate partnership with John Kerry (D-MA).  Then Teabaggers tried to “flush” Graham out of GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy.” Graham responded, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys.”  But the Tea Party activists weren’t done, as this Think Progress repost makes clear.

On Monday, the Charleston County Republican Party’s executive committee “took the unusual step” of officially censuring Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The local GOP committee admonished Graham for stepping across party lines to work with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on a bipartisan clean energy bill and other pieces of legislation. The censure stated that Graham’s “bipartisanship continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom.”

Part of the fury from the right against Graham is being spurred by the oil and coal industry. The oil company front group “American Energy Alliance” has blanketed South Carolina with ads smearing Graham for seeking to address climate change.

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