President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight will reportedly focus on the economy, jobs and what he calls a “return to American values.” But as the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Lindsay notes in a CNN column today, “What the president says about foreign policy, however, will be equally important.”

Indeed, the last year saw the end to two very different wars and two competing visions of American power. One war, in Iraq, finally came to end in December after a series of poor policy choices and overzealous neoconservative thinking cost the U.S. nearly a trillion dollars and 4,500 American lives over the course of eight and a half years.

The other war, in Libya, accomplished nearly the exact same objectives as the war in Iraq, but the selective application of American power and the diplomatic efforts to gain the support of both NATO and the U.N. Security Council allowed the U.S. to accomplish its goals for just over $1 billion and not one lost American life.

A new infographic from the Center for American Progress compares the costs of the two wars:

Libya may not be a model for every future American conflict, just as the lessons of Iraq do not preclude the use of American force in every scenario. But as the country looks back on 2011 and looks forward to the international challenges we face in 2012 and beyond, Iraq and Libya present us with two different visions of American power. As CAP’s Peter Juul writes, President Obama’s actions over the past three years have reaffirmed the credibility of American military power; credibility that President Bush put into question.

Looking at the comparative costs of war in Iraq and Libya, what do you want American power to look like in 2012 and beyond?

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.

The House is scheduled to vote today on HR 2594 which would seek to stop the European program to control aviation’s carbon pollution and push the U.S. closer to a trade war with Europe. This bill should be rejected by the House, never even considered by the Senate, and rejected by the Obama Administration. Now is not the time to start a trade war with Europe.

The bill would tell the U.S. government to work with U.S. companies to break another country’s law. And it tells the U.S.-based airlines to break the law in another country. Could you imagine the outrage if another country told its companies to break the U.S. law when they operate in the U.S.? Well that is exactly what this law directs the U.S. government and U.S.-based carriers to do — break the law. That isn’t a principle that the U.S. should implement. Here is what the bill says:

The Secretary of Transportation shall prohibit an operator of a civil aircraft of the United States from participating in any emissions trading scheme unilaterally established by the European Union. [...]

The Secretary of Transportation, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and other appropriate officials of the United States Government shall use their authority to conduct international negotiations and take other actions necessary to ensure that operators of civil aircraft of the United States are held harmless from any emissions trading scheme unilaterally established by the European Union.

This is not a vote for or against action on global warming — it’s a vote to tell U.S. companies to break the law in other countries and move the U.S. closer to a trade war. Proponents of this bill are outlining many mistruths. Here are the facts:

1. The Europeans only acted after waiting 15 years for a global solution which never materialized. For almost 15 years, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — the U.N. body tasked with coordinating international aviation — has failed to come up with mandatory global actions to significantly reduce aviation’s carbon pollution. After this failure, Europe took the reasonable step of passing a law to require carbon pollution reductions from flights that use European airports. The Europeans tried to get a global solution, but a global solution never materialized.
2. The European program is legal. Independent assessments have concluded that the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation in the EU’s program “is consistent with all relevant international provisions and therefore permissible under international law.” In fact, a preliminary court finding from the EU courts has found that the law is legal.
3. The EU program will not lead to massive price increases and will not have huge impacts on airline travel and the airline industry. When the Europeans had this system independently evaluated they found that the program would add a mere $11-57 to a roundtrip ticket — less for shorter flights. On a ticket that easily costs $800-1400 this is a very marginal price change. In fact, it is about the same as the price that airlines charge per checked bag on a domestic flight in the US. Instead the E.U. program will provide an incentive for airlines to find the best way to reduce their fuel use and encourage them to purchase the most efficient aircraft that are already rolling off the production line. These are investments that will spur savings to American consumers as US-based carriers improve the efficiency of their aged fleet.
4. US companies are already competing to produce better airplanes. US-based aircraft and engine manufacturers are already making strides to produce more efficient airplanes. For example, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney tout the fuel saving benefits of their aircraft and engines.
5. The European program regulates only carriers that use their airports. They aren’t applying an arbitrary program targeted at the US or one that is different for flights from another country. Their program applies the same standard for all flights that land at and take-off from European airports — regardless of where that flight takes off. Indeed the EU program allows completely exempts foreign carriers whose own governments take any comparable measures. But rather than clean up carbon pollution here at home, the House wants to prohibit American carriers from complying with other countries’ laws.

What proponents fail to acknowledge is that the only thing this bill will do is move the U.S. closer to a trade war with one of our major trading partners. Given the state of the economy, why would the United States want to risk such an outcome?

This bill is wrong and should be rejected by the House and never taken up by the Senate. It will move the U.S. closer to a trade war with Europe and tell U.S. companies to ignore E.U. laws when they operate at European airports.

But despite the news this week, the Republican presidential candidates mentioned Iraq a grand total of once during last night’s debate, and the reference had nothing to do with the war itself. “We’re spending — believe it or not, this blew my mind when I read this — $20 billion a year for air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq in the tents over there and all the air conditioning,” Rep. Ron Paul said.

In fact, the GOP candidates spent just 9 minutes of last night’s one hour and 40 minute debate discussing foreign policy, a data point that establishes a trend in this election cycle’s Republican presidential debates:

Why are the Republicans — supposedly the party of national security — not talking about national security? A myriad of reasons, of course, one primarily being that jobs and the economy are the topics du jour. But also, it could be that Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and co. don’t really have much to criticize. Indeed both Perry and Romney praised Obama for nabbing Osama bin Laden and Michele Bachmann had an awkward moment last night when she continued to attack Obama on Libya even though Muammar Qaddafi is no longer its leader — thanks in part to Obama’s foreign policy. “If President Obama had taken the same view [as Bachmann],” debate co-moderator John Harris said, “Qaddafi would, in all likelihood, still be in power today.”

And as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted last weekend, Obama got elected in part because he pledged to change the course of President Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. “So what’s happened over the past 32 months?” Ignatius asks, “if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run.”

Should the Chinese military expansion really stop U.S. defense cuts?

The Hill notes that the report will be “fuel for congressional hawks — mostly Republicans in the House, who point to China as the main reason annual Defense Department budgets must continue to grow.” Politico quotes Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), whose most major campaign contributions come from the defense industry, saying that American security will be “jeopardized” by defense cuts in the wake of China’s military rise:

“China clearly believes that it can capitalize on the global financial crisis, using the United States’ economic uncertainty as a window of opportunity to strengthen China’s economic, diplomatic, and security interests,” said Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a leading opponent of deep defense spending cuts. “Security in the Pacific could be further jeopardized if our regional allies also come to believe that the United States will sacrifice the presence and capability of the U.S. military in an attempt to control spending. This is an unacceptable outcome in such a vital region of the globe.”

What both the Hill and Politico fail to provide in their coverage of the Pentagon’s report and the right-wing response to it is any context about the relative levels of U.S. and Chinese military spending. The U.S. defense budget is six times as large as annual Chinese military spending. The following graphic from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute chronicling U.S. defense spending from 1989 to 2008 visualizes this:

While it’s not unreasonable to discuss the growth of Chinese military spending and debate the U.S. response, these discussions in the media should include the context of relative spending between the two countries to best serve readers.

While China’s military spending remains far eclipsed by that of the United States, there is one area where it is besting the United States: investing in clean energy. China invests twice as much money in clean energy as the United States, and for every dollar it spends on clean energy, it spends two to three dollars on defense. In the United States, every clean energy dollar is paired with 41 dollars of military spending.

The rhetoric over raising the debt ceiling has become increasingly harsh as Democratic and Republican congressional leaders trade barbs back and forth. But as the U.S. inches closer to defaulting on its debts for the first time in history, criticism of Congress is starting to come from beyond our own borders. From France and Germany to China and India, countries around the world are angry that American politicians play with the possibility of a U.S. default like a yo-yo with little regard for the international economic system that depends on American solvency.

Despite China’s traditional preference of staying out of the domestic affairs of other nations, senior Chinese officials’ frustrations are growing louder and louder. Stephen Roach, the non-executive chairman of Morgan Staley Asia, said senior Chinese officials told him the debt ceiling debte in the U.S. is “truly shocking.” “We understand the politics,” a Chinise official said, “but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.” And newspapers around the world are voicing discontent with Congress’s handling of the debt ceiling:

Conservative German Die Welt: “[T]here are few signs of self-doubt or self-awareness in the U.S. … [The Tea Party movement] sees the other side as their enemy. Negotiations with the Democrats, whether it’s about appointing a judge or the insolvency of the United States, are only successful if the enemy is defeated. Compromise, they feel, is a sign of weakness and cowardice.”

The German mass-circulation Bild: “What America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics and the whole world is being held hostage… Most importantly, the Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.”

French newspaper Le Monde:”The American politicians supposed to lead the most powerful nation in the world are becoming a laughing stock.”

Chinese state-owned newspaper Xinhua: “Given the United States’ status as the world’s largest economy and the issuer of the dominant international reserve currency, such political brinksmanship in Washington is dangerously irresponsible.”

The founding documents of many nations around the world take their inspiration from and quote the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution. But now, foreigners don’t seem to be too inspired watching the intransigent wing of one political party that controls one house of one branch of the federal government hold the entire U.S. hostage. American soft power has taken a self-inflicted hit as a result of the debt ceiling debate.

Even if Congress manages to forge a deal against the wishes of the Tea Party and deliver a bill to President Obama’s desk raising the debt ceiling before default, the damage to our international standing has already been done. Other nations won’t forget how some members of Congress were so careless to allow the international economy fall into another financial disaster in order to score a few political points.

The East Africa drought has left 11 million people starving.

Funding For Nobel-Winning IPCC: Zero. The budget prohibits funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international volunteer scientific body tasked with assessing the world’s knowledge of climate science. In 2007, the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work.

Funding For International Climate Negotiations: Zero. The budget prohibits funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international body responsible for negotiating climate policy — under a treaty ratified by the United States.

Funding For Strategic Climate Fund: Zero. The budget eliminates support for the World Bank’s Strategic Climate Fund, which fights deforestation, reduces risk to climate disasters, and supports renewable energy in low-income countries.

Funding For Clean Technology Fund: Zero. The budget eliminates funding for the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund, which helps developing countries invest in low-carbon energy technology and infrastructure.

The Strategic Climate Fund and Clean Technology Fund together make up the Climate Investment Funds, established by the World Bank during the Bush administration. Hard as it is to believe, the Republicans now running the House of Representatives are even more radical deniers of the threat of climate pollution than George W. Bush — even though the damaged climate has grown more dangerous.

Scott Borgerson

In response, Scott Borgerson, a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, is encouraging the United States to rush in and burn up the vast reserves of carbon that have spent millennia under frozen seas and tundra. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed with hedge fund investor Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, Borgerson says the response to the “melting sea ice and thawing tundra” of the Arctic is to compete with other nations to drill the “world’s largest oil, natural gas and mineral resources” there:

While most investors are focused on the economic potential of lower latitudes, the Arctic is—due to increased access from climate change—quietly undergoing a radical transformation that is attracting the attention of savvy investors. But the U.S. is asleep at the wheel, leaving some of the world’s largest oil, natural gas and mineral resources to be developed by others. [...] Long literally and figuratively frozen to outside investors, the Arctic now has melting sea ice and thawing tundra that are yielding huge resource opportunities.

The authors say “the U.S. must manage the process so it is environmentally sustainable.”

The premise that there is an “environmentally sustainable” way of accelerating greenhouse pollution borders on insanity.

The North Slope reserves Borgerson mentions in his op-ed would alone emit about 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide if drilled and burned, the equivalent of three years of total US cabon pollution, or half the world’s total annual carbon emissions. This would speed the world headlong toward the trillion-ton limit of irreversible and catastrophic warming.

As the Arctic ice collapses, global weather patterns are changing in unpredictable ways. The jet stream is being pushed “further south and bringing arctic cold to much of Eurasia and Japan” and “increased precipitation and colder temperatures in the winter” in North America. Oceanic circulation is being disrupted, with the collapse of the Gulf Stream a future possibility.

The vast Siberian tundra is thawing, allowing for the potential release of hundreds of billions of tons of methane and carbon dioxide from the long-frozen peat bogs. This is no long-term threat — as the authors of the op-ed note, there are signs the permafrost is already becoming a “permamelt.” Yet “no climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.”

Planetary civilization is speeding toward the cliff of catastrophic climate change. Drilling for fossil fuels in a melting Arctic is as sensible as disabling the brakes and slamming down the gas pedal when the cliff is in sight.

First, the Security Council should join the General Assembly in recognizing climate change as a threat to international peace and security. It is a threat as great as nuclear proliferation or global terrorism. Second, a special representative on climate and security should be appointed. Third, we must assess whether the United Nations system is itself capable of responding to a crisis of this magnitude.

Nauru’s economy is in tatters, as the tiny island, smaller than Manhattan, was denuded for phosphate mining. The planet, he warns, is headed towards a future of resource collapse like his own nation’s, “with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil or abundant food for granted.”

U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford

For weeks, Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty have been attacking President Obama for not doing enough in Syria, saying that he should pull Ford out of Syria. “Words must be backed by clear, firm actions,” Rubio said, “we should now sever ties and recall the ambassador at once.” But if Republicans had their way, Ford never would have even made it to Syria. As Laura Rozen notes, Senate Republicans last year refused to confirm Ford, and several other ambassadors the President nominated, and Obama was forced to issue recess appointments.

Indeed, on May 14, 2010, twelve GOP senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioning the wisdom of sending an envoy to Damascus:

We are writing you to express our deep concern about the ongoing Syrian support for terrorism. … If engagement precludes prompt punitive action in response to egregious behavior, such as the transfer of long range missiles to a terrorist group, then it is not only a concession but also a reward for such behavior.

One official called Ford’s visit to Hama “gutsy,” and the move reportedly “was endorsed by the highest levels of the Obama administration.” Washington Institute for Near East Policy Syria expert David Schenker called Ford’s visit “impressive.” While Schenker said that Washington should be more vocal in support of Syria’s democracy movement, he told the Voice of America:

It is a significant statement for him to go to Hama and seemingly cast his lot, and the American lot, with the people of Syria, to provide some protection for the people of Hama, and to demonstrate where the United States’ sympathies and policies lie.

Rozen notes that Clinton criticized the notion of not talking to adversaries. “Diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends,” she said.

“Having an ambassador in Syria has allowed us to be in Syria,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney said recently, adding, “I think that has been a useful avenue for us to pursue in terms of communicating our points of view.” But as Israel Policy Forum’s David Halperin said of the GOP’s plans to block Obama’s ambassador appointments, “Republicans think that U.S. interests are better advanced by not showing up.”

The countries that have made the smallest contribution to climate change may be doing the most to address it.  That would be Robin Hood in reverse — compounding the fact that we are all reverse Robin Hoods, maintaining our wealthy lifestyles by robbing our children of a livable climate and truly sustainable wealth (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“)

A new report from Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) finds that developing nations are on track to reduce emissions more than their industrialized counterparts.  The report, commissioned by Oxfam for the GROW Campaign, made some striking claims, including:

• China’s total emissions reductions could be nearly double those of the US by 2020.
• The emissions reductions of developing countries could be three times greater than those of the EU by 2020.
• The emission reductions of China, India, South Africa and Brazil – the BASIC countries – could be slightly greater than the combined efforts of the 7 biggest developed countries – the US, Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Russia by 2020.

However, with many developed countries still hesitant to implement aggressive emissions-reduction targets, the cumulative impact will not be enough to prevent a 2 degrees rise in global temperature — the limit agreed upon in Cancun.

Oxfam’s Climate Change Policy Advisor Tim Gore had strong words for the developed countries that are supposed to be “leaders.”

All countries need to do their fair share to tackle climate change. Yet rich industrialized countries which are most responsible for the climate crisis are not pulling their weight.

It’s time for governments from Europe to the US to stand up to the fossil fuel lobbyists. Their competitors in developing countries – from China to India and Brazil – have pledged to do more to rein in emissions and start building prosperous low carbon economies. Europe and the US risk being left behind.

Opponents of action in the U.S. have been wary of committing to specific targets or implementing carbon-reduction programs because of concerns that developing countries won’t tag along. Those arguments are getting harder to make.

— Tyce Herrman and Stephen Lacey

Joe Romm:   The only thing that I would add is that China isn’t really a developing country in the in the way, say, Indonesia is.   It is quickly joining the ranks of the richer countries who are not doing enough.

This is developed world growth + no global agreement on emissions.