Reducing short-lived gases is only effective as part of broader CO2 reduction strategy

A new plan to tackle short-lived pollutants may help bridge the gap between current emission reduction pledges and what is actually needed by 2020 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius.

At the State Department this morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a six-country initiative designed to reduce pollutants like methane, black carbon (soot), and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) that help speed up global warming. These pollutants are often called “climate forcers” because they push temperatures up much more quickly than carbon dioxide.

Methane, a shorter-living greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 100-year period — and 100 more potent over a 20-year period — has contributed to roughly 50% of tropospheric ozone helping warm the planet.  Soot from burning biomass and coal travels around the world and lands on ice caps and glaciers, increasing melting and preventing the reflection of sunlight. HFCs, a common refrigerant, are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.

These pollutants come from inefficiently burning biomass and coal, improperly handling waste water or municipal solid waste, and poor vehicle emissions standards, among many other sources. Along with having a major impact on climate, they are also a major cause of premature deaths and crop failures.

The countries working to reduce climate forcers include Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden and the U.S. American officials say they will commit $10 million to the initiative, which will be run by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The initiative will follow guidelines set forward by UNEP in a report on climate forcers last November.

While the plan to reduce these pollutants is only a short-term fix, it could put the world on a path toward faster temperature reductions and provide a needed cushion as countries grapple with slow-moving international negotiations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide.

In January, Drew Shindell, a researcher with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, found that a strong international effort to address these pollutants could slow the rise of global temperatures by a half degree celsius by 2050, prevent 4.7 million deaths per year, and improve global crop yields by 135 million metric tons per season.

“We’ve shown that implementing specific practical emissions reductions chosen to maximize climate benefits would also have important ‘win-win’ benefits for human health and agriculture,” said Shindell, when he released his findings.

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This week marked the two-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed 300,000 people, displaced 1.5 million people, and crippled already-crumbling infrastructure.

In the effort to rebuild, the Haitian government has a unique opportunity to transform its electricity grid to favor distributed generation and help increase energy access in the most energy-impoverished country in the western hemisphere. Today, only 12% of Haitians have access to the electricity grid.

However, expanding access means thinking differently about infrastructure than before the tragedy.

“After the earthquake, everyone wanted to focus on rebuilding the grid. But it’s important to remember that even if the grid were fully constructed, it’s still serving a small amount of the population and still hemorrhaging money,” explained Allison Archambault, president of EarthSpark International, an organization working to bring distributed energy technologies to Haiti.

“It’s the smaller solutions that have a bigger and faster impact,” she told Climate Progress.

EarthSpark’s mission is to bring distributed energy technologies to Haitians in order to help them spend less time and money on securing energy. The organization helps set up stores for selling LED lanterns and solar technologies, while also providing education on distributed energy.

Rather than spend millions of dollars on an expensive, unreliable electricity system that may not benefit Haitians for many years (if at all), EarthSpark is working on building a small-scale, profitable alternative focused on individual solutions.

For example, the solar LED lantern it sells costs about $12. With the cost of operating a kerosene lantern at around $0.25 per night, the payback for a safe, renewable product only two months. And that’s not even factoring in the cost of the actual kerosene lantern itself.

“The big grid is sucking up almost all of the political attention. It’s complicated and can be very political, but these distributed technologies make such a huge difference, very quickly,” says Archambault.

This struggle between large, centralized energy infrastructure and nimble, distributed infrastructure is playing out throughout the developing world. As emerging countries rush to catch up with the developed world, they’re often focusing on building the same type of dirty, inefficient energy systems — with that vision pushed by organizations like the World Bank, which is helping fund massive coal plants.

This conflict is now a central piece of the conversation around sustainable international development.

“Eliminating kerosene is different than eliminating a coal plant. You’re dealing with some pretty deeply ingrained forces,” said Justin Guay of the Sierra Club’s international climate program, speaking to Climate Progress at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

One of the big “wins” coming out of Durban was the creation of a framework for the Green Fund, an international pool of money that will help finance mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries. The fund is designed to bring together $100 billion a year by 2020 for deploying clean energy and other infrastructure projects.

But environmental groups are also heavily criticizing World Bank involvement in the Green Fund, saying the organization’s bias toward dirty fossilized infrastructure makes it ill equipped to manage it:

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JR:  From the perspective of putting global emissions on a path to avoid catastrophic climate change, Durban was a failure.  But as I’ve said many times, that failure was “baked in” because the two key players — the U.S. and China — simply refuse to act to stop the planet from baking, among others reasons.  That said, Durban was consequential, and Harvard’s Robert Stavins explains why.

Photo: Inhabitat

by Robert Stavins, cross-posted from Harvard’s Economic View of the Environment Blog

In my previous essay – following the 17^th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which adjourned on December 11, 2011 – I offered my assessment of the Durban climate negotiations, addressing the frequently-posed question of whether the talks had “succeeded.”  I took note of three major outcomes from the negotiations:  (1) elaboration on several components of the Cancun Agreements; (2) a second five-year commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol; and (3) a non-binding agreement to reach an agreement by 2015 that will bring all countries under the same legal regime by 2020.  My conclusion was that this package – in total – represented something of a “half-full glass of water,” that is, an outcome that could be judged successful or not, depending upon one’s perspective.

However, something I did not discuss last month is that this third provision ­– the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” – has opened an important window.  To explain what I mean requires a brief review of some key points from twenty years of history of international climate negotiations.

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by Andrew Light

I’m going to assume that anyone reading this post is driven as I am everyday by alarm at the growing climate crisis and the apparent lack of progress in responding to it.  We all articulate this existential worry in various ways, but I feel that at bottom our alarm is commonly driven by a deep moral concern about what is and is not being done with respect to the welfare of current and future generations and the planet we inhabit, along with moral outrage at the roadblocks that are intentionally thrown up against our efforts.

In this world of deep and abiding moral concern reports of yet another empty pledge, or failed promise for action, or lost vote in a deliberative body may as well be the latest nonsense from the climate denial crowd.  In many ways though its worse.  We don’t expect those folks to listen to what the latest credible science says, marry that to a thorough assessment of our values, and then set priorities for action.  We expect those folks to stand in the way and that’s what they do.

So when a big global event comes together, like the annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which ended last Sunday in Duban, South Africa, without easily discernable progress if not game-changing solutions, the climate community’s dismay turns to the same sort of incredulity and frustration with which we greet the climate skeptics.

That’s the view of Mark Hertsgaard over at The Nation about the Durban outcome.  Hertsgaard calls out climate negotiators who settled the Durban deal with a special focus on the U.S. and Chinese climate envoys.  In Hertsgaard’s analysis, the likes of Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing over at the State Department, are a new breed of climate deniers responsible for the “disaster in Durban.”

This would be a bold take down of the Durban outcome if there was any hint of accuracy in it.  Instead, for anyone who closely follows the climate negotiations, this piece comes across as at best biased by a blind spot about the full package that moved forward at Durban, and at worst remarkably uniformed.

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It’s Key to Bringing Private Capital to the Fight Against Global Emissions

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gives a speech prior to the Durban climate conference, urging world leaders to create a multibillion-dollar fund to fight the effects of climate change.  AP photo.

Richard W. Caperton in a CAP repost

The Green Climate Fund created at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, meeting in Durban, South Africa, last week will go a long way toward reducing ever-increasing emissions in developing countries by broadly distributing investment risks and encouraging an increased flow of private capital into the fight against climate change. Thanks to the American delegation at the conference, the fund has the right design in place to support projects effectively around the globe that will help avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change and help developed countries meet their pledges for the climate finance needed in the years to come.

In fact, the only way developed countries will fulfill their pledge made in Copenhagen in 2009—to mobilize $100 billion per year in adaptation and mitigation funding by 2020—is through a sophisticated Green Climate Fund that uses public money to leverage large amounts of private capital. Negotiators at Durban succeeded in making this fund a reality, and their work is a critical step forward in battling climate change.

This international action to bring private investors to the table in solving the climate problem is regrettably in marked contrast to the United States, where policymakers continue to thwart efforts to build the clean energy economy.

Before getting into how the fund should work, it’s important to understand why it’s necessary in the first place.

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by Arne Jungjohann, excerpted from Grist.

Sweden, the U.K., and Germany: The European trio leads the world in fighting climate change.

That’s the finding of the most recent Climate Change Performance Index [PDF], which was released this week at COP 17 in Durban. But Swedes, Brits, and Germans shouldn’t cheer just yet; even their countries are not contributing their fair share.

In fact, that is the most worrying result of the index: No country is doing enough to seriously fight climate change. Consequently, the report — published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe — did not reward any country a ranking of 1-3. The countries ranked worst this year are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

What about the United States? In comparison to 2010, the U.S. has climbed up two ranks, mainly due to emission reductions from the recession and increased renewable energy capacity. However, given still-high emissions and the lack of substantial national policies, the U.S. remains toward the bottom of the index, ranked No. 52. Among the large emitters around the world, only Canada, Russia, China, and Iran are worse.

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A Media Matters Repost

As many faith leaders have recognized, climate change presents a massive ethical challenge since those least responsible for global warming are among the most vulnerable to its consequences, including water scarcity, climate-sensitive diseases, and sea level rise. Yet in response to the recent international climate talks, conservative media outlets are mocking developing countries for seeking adaptation assistance, saying they just want to “cash in” on “climate gold.”

The NY Times, through blogger Andy Revkin, is pushing Bjorn Lomborg’s alternative-universe “Post-Pollution” solution to global warming — more research and development (R&D).  Revkin is also misrepresenting a Center for American Progress report, which is why I am going to debunk this too-little, too-late strategy for the umpteenth time.

As Andrew Light, the lead author of the CAP report, explains, “I think Andy read our piece too quickly” and “I’m disappointed to see once again here the false dichotomy” that “somehow an agreement on CO2 is mutually exclusive with a mechanism to grow clean technology and sustainable development solutions.  It’s a completely uninformed view.“  I’ll repost his statement in full at the end.

False dichotomy is what the do-little crowd traffic in, sadly, and it mucks up the debate — see Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy.  No, that abbreviated description of the optimal strategy has never been my suggestion for the sequence of investments [!] but for the ratio of spending needed!

See also this post by a leading journalist and climate expert, Robert Collier, noting “The basic message of all these reports is akin to Romm’s mantra: Deploy, deploy, R&D, deploy, deploy — but all simultaneously.”  Precisely.

We do need a vast increase in clean energy R&D spending, as I have been arguing for more than two decades.  But averting catastrophic warming requires spending several times more on deployment than on R&D.

I would have thought that the recent International Energy Agency report would have made clear to all that aggressive deployment, not R&D, must be where we put most of our money ASAP:

On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.

… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]….  Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

The IEA is one of the few credible international bodies with a combined global economic and energy model that allows them to come to quantitative conclusions rather than just the hand-waving that dominates most discussions.  And by handwaving, I specifically mean this nonsense from Lomborg (Revkin’s comments are in italics at the end):

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