By Brad Johnson, campaign manager for Forecast the Facts. [JR: I'll add some thoughts at the end.]

As climate change accelerates, it appears the Obama administration is in retreat. In an address on Thursday, the top climate negotiator for the United States rejected the administration’s formal commitment to keeping global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels.

This about-face from agreements endorsed by President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010 indicates a rejection of the United Nations climate negotiations process, as well as an implicit assertion that catastrophic global warming is now politically impossible to prevent.

Speaking before an audience at his alma mater Dartmouth College, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern argued that treaty negotiations based around “old orthodoxies” of a temperature threshold “will only lead to deadlock“:

For many countries, the core assumption about how to address climate change is that you negotiate a treaty with binding emission targets stringent enough to meet a stipulated global goal – namely, holding the increase in global average temperature to less than 2° centigrade above pre-industrial levels – and that treaty in turn drives national action. This is a kind of unified field theory of solving climate change – get the treaty right; the treaty dictates national action; and the problem gets solved. This is entirely logical. It makes perfect sense on paper. The trouble is it ignores the classic lesson that politics – including international politics – is the art of the possible. . . .

These basic facts of life suggest that the likelihood of all relevant countries reaching consensus on a highly prescriptive climate agreement are low, and this reality in turn argues in favor of a more flexible approach that starts with nationally derived policies. . . .

The keys to making headway in this early conceptual phase of the new agreement is to be open to new ideas that can work in the real world and to keep our eyes on the prize of reducing emissions rather than insisting on old orthodoxies. . .

This kind of flexible, evolving legal agreement cannot guarantee that we meet a 2 degree goal, but insisting on a structure that would guarantee such a goal will only lead to deadlock. It is more important to start now with a regime that can get us going in the right direction and that is built in a way maximally conducive to raising ambition, spurring innovation, and building political will.

Stern is absolutely right that the political challenge of achieving a 2°C goal is extremely high, but what is the “flexible, evolving” regime he proposes?

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by Jake Schmidt, via NRDC’s Switchboard

With the haze of the Durban climate negotiations finally lifting, the climate negotiations in Germany at the midway point, and one month before Rio+20 it is time to reflect on the path that lies ahead for the rest of this year.  While global negotiations have slowed since the high-intensity period over the last three years (in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban), that doesn’t mean we can afford for action to slow down.  After all, as the International Energy Agency just pointed out the door for avoiding the greatest impacts is quickly closing.

Four key themes are critical to watch the remainder of this year that are essential ingredients for progress on international global warming action: (1) the actions countries take at home right now; (2) the actions countries commit to implement at Rio+20; (3) how much progress is made in closing the “mitigation gap”; and (4) what stage is set this year for the international legal agreement that is to be reached in 2015.

Acting at Home Right Now

No global political signal or agreement is sufficient if countries don’t act at home to pass laws, adopt regulations, or support incentives which spur the necessary actions.  As a result, what happens in key countries around the world is essential for putting the world on a safer path.  So here are some key actions to watch in some of the key countries the rest of this year.

Some important countries have taken additional action at home this year. Mexico has adopted a national law which establishes in domestic law the country’s target to reduce its emissions 30 percent below business-as-usual emissions by 2020 and 50 percent below 2000 levels by 2050.  The law sets in place the foundation for even greater action by Mexico under future Administrations.

The South Korean Government approved a mandatory carbon trading program for its biggest polluters. The legislation is set to go into effect in 2015 and would cap the carbon pollution from power plants, steel plants, ship makers, and large universities.  The final details are still to be worked out sometime this year so stay tuned.

South Africa announced that it will introduce a rising price on carbon pollution from major sources starting in 2013.  The proposal is to implement the carbon tax at a level of $16 per ton in 2013, with annual increases of 10 percent through 2019.  Final details could come later this year.

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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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World leaders struck a deal last month during the Durban United Nations conference that sets a path to a global climate deal by 2015 — a precarious agreement including major developing countries like China and India. However, a report by the research branch of the HSBC bank predicts a deal would be trashed if President Obama is not reelected. With climate denial and opposition to emissions limits rampant in the GOP field, HSBC finds a global deal would be “almost impossible” if a Republican wins the White House:

[The] prospects for a new global climate deal in 2015 depend considerably on the election of a pro-climate action president. The election of a President opposed to climate action will not only damage growth prospects for low-carbon solutions in the USA itself, but will make the hard task of negotiating a new global agreement by 2015 almost impossible. If Obama is re-elected with support in both houses, we expect modest measures to introduce a federal clean energy standard for electricity; a stripped down cap and trade programme could re-emerge building on the regional scheme on the West and East coasts.

Though some GOP contenders haven’t always positioned themselves as climate zombies, everyone from Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, to Jon Huntsman have doubted climate change science leading up to the primaries. Frontrunner Romney opposes carbon emissions limits and a cap and trade program, despite having supported pollution limits as Massachussets governor.

Of course, the future of energy policy also hinges on political developments worldwide. The report also notes that elections worldwide, particularly France, will be an “important test of the resilience of pro-nuclear policies” in a post-Fukushima world.

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.

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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