What will history say about Brazil's job hosting the Rio+20 summit? Photo: Stephen Lacey

World leaders are set to convene at the Rio+20 Earth Summit tomorrow to begin high-level negotiations on a global sustainability framework. But if the reaction from civil society groups to the draft text is any indication, the negotiations will be all style and very little substance.

After working through the night on Monday, international negotiators agreed on a framework for “sustainable development goals” that could help guide a wide-range of policies on issues like poverty eradication, clean energy deployment, sustainable cities, and fisheries management. But with very few specifics on how to actually implement these sustainability goals, the text has angered almost every single civil society group observing the negotiations.

“The overall response from the NGO community to the negotiations is one of alarm and concern,” said Jeffrey Huffines, a representative for Non-Governmental Organizations to the United Nations. “Our concern is that the means of implementation are not clearly articulated.”

In other words, there’s very little in the text that would get us from here to there.

Civil society groups are expressing concern about almost every issue in the draft agreement. Leaders representing labor, agriculture, women’s rights, science & technology, local governments, and indigenous peoples all raised serious concerns today about the watered down text.

“There are a some things that are strengthened like the role of social protection and the mention of green jobs. But the document is not really ambitious in terms of implementation,” said Annabel Rosemberg, the Environment Coordinator with the International Trade Union Confederation.”

“We are deeply disappointed,” said Gita Sen, a founding member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era. Sen lamented that much of the language on women’s rights had been stripped from the text, calling it a “war on the human rights of women.”

“There’s a lack of detail,” said Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. “But for us, the document is a starting point for what happens afterward.”

The text might be a start for some. But with almost every portion of the document watered down to be politically acceptable, most civil society groups fear that it does very little to establish any concrete end goals.

Even the UN’s hallmark program for addressing energy poverty, Sustainable Energy For All, has taken a hit. The initiative, which would require roughly $50 billion in public and private-sector commitments per year, was designed to eradicate energy poverty by 2030. However, the new text gives countries plenty of room to wiggle out of any commitments:

We note the launching of the initiative by the Secretary General on “Sustainable Energy for All”, which focus on access to energy, energy efficiency and renewable energies. We are all determined to act to make sustainable energy for all a reality, and through this, help eradicate poverty and lead to sustainable development and global prosperity. We recognize that countries’ activities in broader energy-related issues are of great importance and are prioritized according to their specific challenges, capacities and circumstances, including energy mix.

Compare that to the old working text from June 2nd, which created a road map for a multilateral process to actually realize the program’s goals:

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Spanginator, via Flickr

by Letha Tawney, via Clean Edge

The solar industry has come a long way in recent years, but now companies around the world are grappling with a solar photovoltaic (PV) industry in rapid transition, with significant oversupply and prices in rapid decline. Dominant players are struggling; emerging players are seizing market share. Each company is trying to turn the current upheaval into their opportunity to emerge as the new top player.

But what do policymakers do to ensure the top players are located in their country? Which public sector strategies are successfully supporting local industries?

World Resources Institute (WRI) previewed early research on the sidelines of the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development that suggests policymakers do play a critical role in ensuring the private sector builds a robust solar industry. Working with partner research institutions in Japan, Germany, China, and India, WRI is exploring not just who is drawing the most investment (the US and China) or has deployed the largest amount of solar PV (Germany), but who has the largest industries and the lowest domestic costs for solar PV.

Public sector goals for solar PV development include supporting the success of the industry, enabling the related economic development benefits, and lowering the cost of solar energy. Policymakers, who focus on the near term, typically worry about anything that might raise electricity bills for consumers and hurt the competitiveness of other sectors, as well as the pressure public-backed industry support may put on taxpayers. Building an internationally competitive solar industry cannot be done at the expense of energy prices overall.

The early results show that Germany and China have the lowest domestic costs for solar power systems and the largest scale of annual deployments. They have created a positive feedback loop whereby relatively low and declining solar system prices are fueling further deployment and this, in turn, is helping their domestic solar industries to continue to reduce costs. Both countries still provide subsidies to deployment, but these are declining rapidly. Some of the recent increase in deployment has developed as subsidies did not fall as fast as technology costs making new installations very attractive—but generous subsidies are hardly the story. Both are deploying solar systems at a significantly lower cost than the Japanese and United States industries do, which in turn saves consumers money.

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EnvironmentBlog, via Flickr

By Leon G. Billings

On May 17, a Committee of the United States House of Representatives voted to repeal the very premise, the heart of the Clean Air Act.  By a party line vote of 28-18 the Committee rejected an amendment to strike this outrageous provision and decided to replace science with politics in determining whether the air is clean or dirty. By replacing the requirement that scientific analysis be the premise for defining the levels of air pollution that cause adverse health effects with a requirement that polluters, politicians and economists set “clean air” levels based on cost, these House Committee Republicans would repeal the fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act: that every American has a right to breathe healthy air.

On Thursday, June 21, the House of Representatives will vote on the legislation which has been rolled into large package of bills that block clean air protection and promote big oil’s agenda.

In 1963 Congress agreed, unanimously, that the Public Health Service ought to research the available health science to determine how clean the air we breathe needed to be to protect public health.  The Clean Air Act is credited with preventing 160,000 premature deaths 54,000 cases of chronic bronchitis and 1.7 million asthma attacks, all while saving the U.S. economy more than $1.3 trillion in 2010 alone.

These “air quality standards” are simply the level of air pollution above which people’s lungs are threatened and health endangered.  To date only in China has a government decided that people are not entitled to know when their health is endangered by dirty air.  Earlier this month, China demanded that the U.S. Embassy stop releasing air quality information. Fortunately, the United States has rebuffed China’s demand. The House Leadership bill, if enacted, would mean that the people of the United States will not be told of the risks of air pollution just like China’s approach.

Is China’s air pollution policy the model for Speaker John Boehner, Leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy, Chairman Fred Upton and his fellow Republican Committee Members?

The GOP controlled House of Representatives is on the verge of deciding that the American people ought not to know if air pollution is threatening their health.  Energy company polluters have tried for four decades to repeal the requirement that sound science be the basis for clean air regulation.  They went so far as to challenge this sound science in the Courts only to be rejected in a unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court written by Justice Antonin Scalia.

The vast majority of Americans want healthy air.  According to bipartisan surveys for the American Lung Association strong majorities (greater than 2 to 1) want EPA not Congress to set air pollution standards.

Every family who has a kid who has asthma or other lung problem wants healthy air.  Virtually every cardiologist and pulmonologist would agree that dirty air is bad for heart patients and people with lung ailments.  But 28 Republican members of a House Committee and their elected leadership think the polluters’ economic interests should guide US policy air pollution information.

We can disagree on taxes and deficits — but suffocating our citizens because polluter lobbyists don’t want to pay to clean the air so everyone can breathe freely sounds more like China’s approach not America.

– Leon G. Billings was staff director of the Senate Environmental Pollution Subcommittee, and had primary staff responsibility for writing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. He was chief of staff to Edmund Muskie when Muskie was Senator and Secretary of State. He served as Executive Director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the 1982 cycle and served 12 years in the Maryland legislature.

By Jessica Goad

Map and picture released by Congressman Ed Markey

This afternoon the House of Representatives is considering H.R. 2578, a package of public lands bills that contains a provision from Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) giving U.S. Customs and Border Protection authority to shut down any economic or recreational activity within 100 miles of the northern and southern U.S. borders if deemed necessary for securing them.

The section also rolls back more than 30 environmental and public health laws within the 100-mile zone including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Park Service Organic Act that helps protect and preserve national parks (see full list here).

Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) dubbed the provision a “drone zone” bill and explained at a press conference today that:

It essentially will be a national sacrifice zone where our rights, our liberties, and our environment can be sacrificed for the sake of an ideological anti-immigrant, anti-environment agenda.  Make no mistake, this isn’t a bill that actually addresses immigration issues.

Watch it:

Unrelatedly, but ironically, last week the right-wing media reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was using drones to spy on Midwestern ranchers.  In actuality, the EPA has for many years used manned flyovers (not drones) to crack down on pollution.

The provision in the package of bills being voted on today, known as the “National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act” (Title XIV), was ostensibly designed to address immigration and drug trafficking issues.  However, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that the bill as introduced is “unnecessary, and it’s a bad policy.”

At the press conference a coalition of 51 Latino and environmental groups released a letter decrying the provision saying it:

…would sacrifice the rights of Americans to use their land and flout the environmental laws that protect it, all to advance an anti-immigrant, anti-privacy and anti-regulatory agenda.

Other pieces in the package of bills being voted on today include a measure to privatize prime public lands in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, roll back protections for a wild and scenic river in California, and eliminate protections for the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

Tomorrow, the House takes up a package of seven bills to promote more oil and gas drilling on public lands across America.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Economist magazine itself relates the story of how “Harry Truman famously asked to be sent a one-armed economist, having tired of exponents of the dismal science proclaiming ‘On the one hand, this’ and ‘On the other hand, that’.” That, however, doesn’t solve the problem if you have several one-armed wonks battling each other, as the Brookings Institution clearly does.

For the past year or so, Brookings has been aggressively trumpeting the benefit of federal clean energy programs, including the loan guarantee program. Back in September, Brookings published a piece, “Why the United States Should Not Abandon Its Clean Energy Lending Programs” that asserts

The reality is the DOE’s loan guarantee program will likely result in minimal costs and large gains for taxpayers—just like many other federal lending efforts.

Duh.

Brookings also lamented the imminent crash of that funding in an April report they coauthored, titled “Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence” (the source of the alarming chart above). That report concluded:

Policy makers should steadily scale-up investment in energy RD&D to triple today’s levels to matchthe scale of other national innovation priorities.

Duh.

Strangely, though, that report ignores both “climate change” or “global warming” and while it devotes a full 20 pages to policy recommendations, it devotes not one single sentence to a carbon price. The phrase “carbon price” never appears.

Now that’s schizophrenic because in August 2008, Brookings President Strobe Talbott and VP for foreign policy studies Carlos Pascual wrote an Op-Ed titled, “7 Years to Climate Midnight” that opens:

The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades. That means that between Inauguration Day in January 2009 and 2015, either John McCain or Barack Obama will face the most momentous political challenge of all time.

Duh.

In May of this year, Talbott repeated the message in a piece titled, “It’s the Climate, Stupid!”

Apparently, though, no one at Brookings actually reads what anyone else writes, including their own President (since who could believe there’s a lot of stupid people there?).

And if that wasn’t clear before, it is now, with the release of their new report, “Clean Energy: Revisiting the Challenges of Industrial Policy.” That report basically trashes clean energy subsidies (mistakenly labeling them “industrial policy”). Indeed, it has a whole paragraph pooh-poohing the loan guarantee program. Doh!

The authors, which include two economists, argue, “Clean energy subsidies without a price on carbon may be money down a rat hole” — in direct contradiction to the April report, which endorses a whole bunch of clean energy subsidies while going out of its way to ignore a price on carbon.

Ironically, both reports are misleading in this regard. Certainly, the ultimate goal must be a carbon price, since that is the only way to avert the kind of catastrophe Brookings President Strobe Talbott has warned about (see my post on the first report, “Can We Stop The Collapse of Federal Clean Energy Support Without Talking About Climate Change Or A Carbon Price?“). The International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008 that just to stabilize at 550 ppm (roughly 3°C or 5.4F warming), which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, you’d need a price of “$90/tonne of CO2 in 2030.” You need a 2030 CO2 price of “$180/tonne in the 450 Policy Scenario.”

But we don’t have a carbon price, and until we do, arguing against clean energy subsidies seems perverse if one is at all concerned about climate change, which Brookings is, except when it isn’t.

It really seems a waste of time to debunk this nonsensical report — you can just read everything else Brookings has written on the subject.

Still, the confused report is already being used by the media to confuse the issue. For instance, the Washington Post used the report as the basis of an equally nonsensical piece by one of its editorial writers, “ ‘Clean energy’ is money wasted.”

So let me focus on two of the sillier things in this report. The authors do understand that the political support for a carbon price hasn’t been there, but they are exceedingly confused about what the implication of that is (or should be) for clean energy policy:

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The House of Representatives holds the title of the most anti-environment House in congressional history. Led by Republicans, the House has voted against the environment 247 times in the last 18 months, averaging one anti-environmental vote for every day the House has been in session.

The newest report, released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), finds that many of these votes have directly benefited the oil and gas industry. According to the report:

• One out of every five votes has either rolled back protections for public lands, clean air, clean water, or enriched the oil industry.
• There were 77 votes undermining Clean Air and public health protections, including new EPA regulation of mercury toxins.
• Another 39 votes would weaken public lands protections, 37 votes to block climate change action, and 31 votes against Clean Water Act protection.
• The House voted to enrich the oil and gas industry 109 times, a total 44 percent of its anti-environment votes. There were 38 votes to prevent clean energy deployment and 12 votes to expedite review of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Republicans have close ties to the industries seeking to roll back environmental protections. House Republicans have received 8o percent of the oil industry’s campaign contributions over their careers, according to a ThinkProgress analysis of Center for Responsive Politics data. House Republicans have taken $38 million from the industry throughout their careers. By comparison, House Democrats have taken nearly $9 million, meaning Republican members have received more than four times as much of oil’s dollars as Democratic members. Meanwhile, coal contributions to Congress are on track this year to beat a record $8.1 million spending, and House Republicans have taken 85 percent of the coal industry’s cash.

After slashing key clean energy programs 13 times in recent weeks, the GOP will continue their sterling track record with a series of bills that protect their donors’ interests ahead of public health, public lands, and clean air. According to Markey, these bills count as “one of the largest fire sales of America’s taxpayer-owned land in history while attacking the bedrock environmental laws that protect our water, our air, and our people.”

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

Four dozen of the world’s largest cities are attempting to cut 248 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution by 2020, according to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will deliver the news at the Rio+20 Earth Summit this week. Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post reports:

Japan is poised to overtake Italy and become the world’s second-biggest market for solar power, as incentives starting July 1 propel sales. It could eventually top Germany, which holds the No. 1 spot. [Bloomberg]

Global leaders, development experts, bankers, academics and activists are gathering here this week to celebrate the anniversary of the landmark Earth Summit of 1992 and to try to address the linked problems of poverty, hunger, energy shortages and environmental degradation.[Washington Post]

Corn prices surge as crops begin to droop in hot, dry weather; metals, energy products mixed The price of corn jumped 3.5 percent Monday as crops have begun drooping under a blanket of hot weather across the Midwest. [Star Tribune]

The death toll of campaigners, community leaders and journalists involved in the protection of forests, rivers and land has risen dramatically in the past three years, said Global Witness. [Guardian]

by Jocelyn Fong, via Media Matters

A recent Forbes column alleges that federal scientists are “doctoring” temperature data to fabricate a warming trend, after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the last 12-month period was the warmest on record for the continental U.S.

But what the column paints as a nefarious conspiracy is actually just proper science — NOAA painstakingly applies peer-reviewed adjustments to account for errors and gaps in the raw data from thousands of temperature stations across the country. The resulting temperature record has been independently evaluated and corroborated.

The column is by James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, the libertarian group that recently made headlines with a short-lived billboard campaign tastelessly invoking the Unabomber. This is not the first time Taylor has used his platform at Forbes to  malign scientists and spread bad information about climate research.

At issue are the corrections NOAA uses to eliminate errors and known sources of bias from the raw weather station data (which Taylor likes to call “the real-world data”). Keep in mind that the U.S. represents just 2% of the Earth’s surface so the data we’re talking about are a small part of the evidence of global climate change.

The scientists (or as Taylor calls them, “bureaucrats”) know that the raw data have flaws — stations are moved, natural disasters knock stations offline, measuring instruments change — so NOAA performs quality control using methods that are published in peer-reviewed papers. Taylor concedes that “it is, of course, possible that certain factors can influence the real-world temperature readings such that a correction in real-world temperature data may be justified.” But when he doesn’t like the results, he concludes that the adjustments aren’t valid corrections but “doctored data.”

Against NOAA’s rigorous science, Taylor offers his “common sense,” which tells him that any corrections should, in fact, reduce warming:

Common sense indicates that if the real-world data need adjustment, the proper adjustment is to further reduce recent temperature readings. Yet the bureaucrats who oversee the data have instead doctored the data to show a false, long-term warming pattern.

How does Taylor, a lawyer, know what “the proper adjustment” is? He simply asserts that if there are factors biasing the data, “The most important such influence is the growth of towns and cities around temperature stations.” The urbanization would cause the raw data to show more warming than actually occurred and the adjustment should decrease that warming, according to Taylor. But a quick search on NOAA’s website shows Taylor is wrong. The most important bias is not urbanization, as Taylor assumed, but a change in observation times. NOAA explains:

The most important bias in the U.S. temperature record occurred with the systematic change in observing times from the afternoon, when it is warm, to morning, when it is cooler. This shift has resulted in a well documented increasing cool bias over the last several decades and is addressed by applying a correction to the data.

It may not be common sense, but if common sense were good enough, we wouldn’t need science.

NOAA’s David Easterling also said via email that “Urban warming is a very small part of the overall warming, which also has been documented in the peer reviewed literature.” Easterling added, “The conclusions of the column sound like pure speculation on the part of the writer.” Read more

Stephen Lacey is reporting from Rio this week.

If the 1992 Rio Earth Summit was a symbol of political solidarity in a post Cold War world, then the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit is a symbol of the current fragmentation in the geopolitical landscape.

As the world’s leading economies struggle with deep fiscal troubles, an emerging group of developing countries gains more power on the international stage, and citizen activists use the power of distributed social media to influence the negotiations, the structure — and therefore the outcome — of the Rio+20 summit will be fundamentally different.

And the definition of a successful meeting is largely determined by where one sits on this spectrum.

For diplomats hammering out text around the negotiating table, establishing a new framework for sustainable development goals — no matter how watered down — may be seen as a success. To the emerging economies still worried about fairness in any international agreement, the inclusion of “common but differentiated responsibilities” is crucial to any final product. To civil servants and business leaders working on the ground, establishing clear policy goals for deploying clean energy and sharing best practices is the key. And to the activists attempting to put pressure on negotiators, only strong language explicitly calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies would be seen as a win.

“You have all these worlds operating at once, and I’m not always sure how much they are talking to one another or agreeing,” said Michael Liebriech, the CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in an interview with Climate Progress.

As a result, expectations for the final outcome are very low this week.

Liebriech offers the perfect example of why it’s so difficult to gauge the influence of Rio+20. As head of one of the leading firms providing information on clean energy investment trends, he’s witnessed $1 trillion pour into the sector globally since 2004.

“My clients really don’t necessarily care about what’s happening in the negotiations. They’re concerned about what’s right in front of them. What would you rather trust, a decades-long process that hasn’t resulted in a whole lot of progress, or a trillion dollars in investment?”

Two decades after the last Rio Earth Summit, a lot of people are feeling that way.

To be fair, the Millennium Development Goals established at the 1992 summit have served as a framework for many countries setting policies to promote clean energy, reduce local pollution, and establish water-access projects. But with the clean energy sector now taking on a life of its own, some are skeptical of how much an agreement in Rio will actually help the progress already underway.

“The sector is getting into an era where it’s starting to think beyond the support mechanism. It’s now about how do you grow to the next scale point. And I think the next question is about removing regulatory and financing barriers,” said Liebreich.

To do that, however, leaders need better access to information in order to learn from experienced countries. And that’s one of the major reasons for the negotiations — to set up a framework for helping the international community to realize new deployment methods for renewable energy, efficiency, water-access, and sustainable buildings.

“The most important thing that could come out of the negotiations in Rio right now are a discrete set of Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which will expire in 2015,” said Andrew Light, an international climate expert at the Center for American Progress.

“Though the importance of the MDGs isn’t well understood in the U.S., they’ve been important in much of the rest of the world to stimulate national policies to address these goals and to measure success. In this respect the negotiations can serve what’s actually happening on the ground now in clean technology.”

Unlike 1992, there won’t be any major framework agreement or treaty signed. Instead, the meeting is a chance to assess where we stand 20 years later, to agree on some key sustainable development goals, and to establish best practices for national implementation of clean technologies — with a central focus on harnessing bottom-up entrepreneurship to serve the 1.3 billion people without access to adequate energy.

These negotiations also play as a chess match to advance other international agreements. Because the Brazilians are under pressure to ensure the meeting doesn’t just end with a long list of watered-down promises, they could face increasing pressure to sign onto an agreement currently in the works to reduce short-lived climate pollutants like HFCs, black carbon, and methane.

So if the final text is weak, but the Brazilians agree to a framework for reducing pollutants that contribute so much to short-term global warming, is that a total failure? And if leaders can’t agree to a phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, but provide a clearer pathway to deploying the next trillion dollars of renewable energy investment, is that a failure?

There are a lot of moving parts to the Rio negotiations. The summit means a lot of things to a lot of stakeholders — a sign of the times. Clearly, Rio+20 is another step on a long, complicated road to realizing a more sustainable society, not an end goal in itself. And no one should be expecting it to play that role.