Canadian environmental minister Peter Kent

Environment Minister Peter Kent on Thursday pressed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline and affirmed the Harper government’s belief the Obama administration’s rejection of the $7-billion project had “nothing to do with the merit of the application.”

But Kent, in Washington for a summit on climate change, pointedly declined to weigh in on current efforts by congressional Republicans to strip the U.S. State Department of its authority to approve a new application for the 2,700-kilometre [1700 mile] oilsands pipeline.

Kent’s promotion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline made a mockery of the climate pollution deal covering methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon, to which the United States has pledged $12 million and Canada $3 million. The Keystone XL pipeline is a $7000 million project.

“Action on short-lived climate pollutants will have clear benefits for particularly vulnerable regions like the Canadian Arctic,” Kent said. “The fragile Arctic environment is susceptible to the impacts of short-lived climate pollutants which may be partly responsible for the accelerated warming trend that we are recording there.”

The worst thing Canada can do to the “fragile Arctic environment” would be to mine and burn the “carbon bomb” of the tar sands.

If the short-lived pollution deal is a “critical step forward” in the fight against global warming, then investing billions in the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands is a giant leap backward.

Our guest blogger is Glenn Hurowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Follow him on Twitter @glennhurowitz.

The Obama administration has announced its support for the junta that ousted democratically elected Maldives president and climate hero Mohamed Nasheed in a military coup.

Even though President Nasheed was apparently forced to resign at gunpoint, the State Department has continued to address the coup-makers as the “legitimate government” of the Maldives, referred to Nasheed as the “former president,” and called the leader of the junta that seized power “President.” Here’s State Department spokesperson Ambassador Victoria Nuland last week:

In that context, Assistant Secretary Blake spoke this morning to former President Nasheed conveying our assurances that the United States supports a peaceful resolution of this, that we are also expressing our views to the government that his security should be protected, but also encouraging him, as we encouraged President Waheed, that this needs to be settled now peaceably through dialogue and through the formation, as the new president has pledged, of a national unity government. And as we said, Assistant Secretary Blake will be there on Saturday…

QUESTION: So does – the U.S. considers the new government a legitimate government of the Maldives?

MS. NULAND: We do.*

*The United States will work with the new Government of the Maldives but believes that the circumstances surrounding the transfer of power must be clarified, and suggests all parties agree to an independent mechanism to do so.

The italicized remarks were issued following Nuland’s briefing; the following day, she maintained the administration’s backing for the coup – saying that while “the circumstances need to be clarified,” the United States is “going to work with the government.”

In diplo-speak, that means, “We support the coup, though we’re putting on a display of squeamishness.” And that “national unity government?” The idea may sound good, but the people of the Maldives elected President Nasheed’s government. They certainly didn’t elect the aides of former dictator Abdul Gayoom that have been put into key cabinet posts. Read more

The Energy Information Administration (EAI) projects that the United States will fall far short of its commitments to greenhouse pollution reductions, putting the future prosperity of human civilization at risk. To give humanity a chance of keeping climate change at levels compatible with modern industrial civilization, global emissions need to peak before 2020, with the developed world peaking well before.

In its 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA forecasts that natural gas consumption will surge as coal and oil use remains strong. Greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8 percent from 2005 levels in 2009, but that progress will reverse. The EIA projects that climate pollution will start rising again, leading to only a 7.5 percent reduction in 2020 and a 3.2 percent reduction in 2035:

The White House website, describing how President Obama’s leadership is allowing the United States to “meet the climate change challenge,” writes how President Obama negotiated the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In that document, the United States committed to cutting its greenhouse pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

In 2011, climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the United States was still “committed” to the 17 percent target, but “cannot yet tell you how close we are to meeting the 17 percent reduction levels.”

“The United States takes seriously the commitments first made by our Leaders in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun,” US climate envoy Todd Stern declared at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa last December. “We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts.”

According to the EIA, the United States will lose ground already achieved when the pledge was made, and fall 56 percent short of its 2020 target. This year’s projection is more optimistic than the 2011 report, which estimated an 80 percent shortfall.

The United States is nowhere close to meeting even the insufficient target set by the administration. Without major, immediate changes in national policy, human civilization will be locked on a path of catastrophic global warming. The White House would do well to be honest about that reality.

Dr. Ali Malkawi

This conference brings together the different players linked to the built environment from around the world, with the goal of finding solutions that can feed to the international meeting in Rio de Janeiro on climate change and global sustainability next year, twenty years after the seminal conference that set up the international framework for fighting global warming pollution in 1992.

The T.C. Chan Center, founded by Dr. Ali Malkawi, researches and develops technology to “create healthier, productive, energy efficient strategies that will lead to high performance buildings and sustainable environments.” In an interview with ThinkProgress Green, Dr. Malkawi explained why this sustainable building conference is so important, and what are the exciting developments in the world of green architecture.

“The main problem that we have is measuring the performance of buildings,” Malkawi said. “Most of our research is built toward finding solutions that can predict energy consumption of buildings.”

At first glance, the problem of figuring out the energy consumption for buildings doesn’t seem that hard, at least in developed countries like the United States. We have metered electricity and heating use, and clear metrics of energy production. However, when it comes to actually making buildings more sustainable, this aggregate information is insufficent. To design or retrofit an energy-efficient building, Malkawi said, one needs to look at lighting, heating, and cooling systems separately, potentially floor by floor. Most buildings are not submetered. Without sufficiently granular information, it becomes impossible to guarantee clear results:

The rule of thumb is if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

The rewards of data-driving green building design are huge. According to Malkawi, you can save 50 to 60 percent of energy consumption during the design phase. A good example is the Monterrey International Airport, where a new terminal was designed with the idea to lower energy consumption even before systems were put in. Major improvements can also come from ensuring efficient operation of existing systems, the equivalent of making sure that a car’s tires are properly inflated and its sensors calibrated. At the T.C. Chan Center’s home, the University of Pennsylvania, they’ve worked with facilities managers to find problems that exist in systems and optimize systems behavior, using computational models that allowed them to pinpoint individual problem buildings. They’ve achieved 15 to 25 percent reduction in energy use just by getting the best use from existing systems.

The challenge of sustainable buildings is greater than just one of designing good structures. “There’s work that’s underway that looks at the behavior of urban environments and the interaction with individual buildings,” Malkawi said. If buildings are placed away from urban infrastructures, that will require more energy consumption by its users, including the costs of increased transportation. A good rating system for green buildings takes into account the “neighboodscape,” as Malkawi described it.

The UN symposium deals with the technology, policy, and financial issues of sustainable building. There needs to be meaningful, performance-based policy to encourage green buildings, as well as a way to finance these measures. “There’s a need for both top-down and bottom-up policy,” Malkawi said. Without mandatory policies that set objective standards and technology to measure results, the financial sector won’t be able to ensure that efforts to decrease energy consumption have guaranteed value. Policies that set clear thresholds, Malkawi believes, “would drive the financial sectors and technologies.”

Unfortunately, the United States is lagging behind, Malkawi said, although our strong university system is keeping us in the game:

At the moment, research and development is in good shape. We’re much further than other countries because we still have the best universities in the world — but not in deployment and practice, which is best in best in northern Europe and Japan. It’s being hindered here by lack of enforced standards that would require developers to erect energy efficient buildings. Pretty soon, if you don’t put these issues up front, even the areas of research are going to be lagging behind.

Rebuilding our living and working spaces to be sustainable is both one of the world’s greatest challenges but also an incredible opportunity. The housing crisis, jobs crisis, and climate crisis are linked by our built environment. Whichever nation leads the way will reap the greatest rewards.