Credit: Citizens Campaign for the Environment

Earlier this week, Bloomberg flagged work by the Stockholm Environment Institute and others to nail down answers to those questions with hard numbers. Their conclusion?

As of now, the United States bears fully one third of the burden to reduce global carbon emissions, with much of Europe shouldering nearly another third. It’s a bracing conclusion. The latest analysis suggests the per-unit social and economic damage from carbon emissions due to global warming is as much as twice what we thought. Several countries with much more modest obligations than America’s have already moved to price carbon, leaving the U.S. sticking out like a sore thumb. Even China is tip-toeing up to it.

Much of the researchers’ work comes from the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework. First, they set a global threshold for living standards, below which people are considered free from the responsibility to sacrifice in the fight against climate change. They came up with $7,500 a year in dollars (adjusted for purchasing power parity) — it’s the living standard at which malnutrition, infant mortality, low education, and other problems of poverty begin to fade, plus a bit of breathing room. Even then, about 70 percent of the globe lives at or below this level, and taken all together is responsible for only 15 percent of the cumulative global emissions.

Capacity to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation was then defined as all income per person falling above that threshold. As you can see below, the United States’ capacity swamps that of both India and China, despite the much larger populations of the latter two countries:

Source: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework

The researchers then tried to quantify responsibility for climate change by accounting for cumulative emissions since 1990, and all projected emissions going forward, while excluding all emissions associated with income below the threshold. Putting it all together, they calculated the “responsibility and capacity indicator” (RCI) for each country. In other words: everyone’s fair share of the responsibility to reduce carbon emissions enough to keep the planet’s climate under two degrees Celsius of warming.

The result? The United States has 33.1 percent of the global RCI in 2010, dropping to 25.5 percent in 2030. The European Union has 25.7 percent in 2010 and 19.6 percent in 2030. Thanks to its economic growth, China does jump from 5.5 percent in 2010 to 15.2 percent in 2030. But no other country even cracks 8 percent, or changes much over that period.

Source: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework

This shouldn’t be surprising. Other data suggests the U.S. can claim a third of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions since the mid-1800s, and our per capita emissions top nearly every other nation. We’re also the most economically developed nation without a price on carbon, meaning we implicitly subsidize fossil fuel use far more than anyone else.

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Ohio is one of many states trying to scale back energy efficiency standards set for utility providers — even though these standards have lowered costs and reduced energy consumption by customers, according to the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association.

OMA, the state’s largest manufacturing trade group, is fighting against Republican-led efforts to weaken the laws that require utilities providers help customers use less electricity. The laws set a deadline of 2025 for electric utilities to help their customers reduce consumption by 22 percent. All but one state legislator approved the bill in 2008. The effects were dramatic and immediate; from 2008 to 2009 alone, Ohio electric utilities saved 530,062 megawatt-hours, ten times the prior year’s savings.

First Energy Corp, Ohio’s influential utility company, is seeking to freeze the efficiency standards at 2012 levels, which mandate reductions of .8 percent. The energy giant tried to rally its larger industrial customers against the efficiency standards, claiming they were hurting businesses. While First Energy Corp’s profits have certainly dropped, industrial manufacturers and Ohio consumers alike are enjoying the lower utility bills resulting from greater energy efficiency.

OMA commissioned an analysis of how the standards were working, presenting the findings to the Senate Public Utilities Committee on Tuesday. The analysis found that the total savings for utilities customers have surpassed the cost of implementing the programs. If the efficiency mandate levels are kept intact, Ohioans could save roughly $5.7 billion by 2020. The group has also argued that energy efficiency competes with power plants, keeping power prices lower.

Ohio’s small businesses and other industrial groups also overwhelmingly support the standards, arguing that business owners are now motivated to strive toward more efficient energy use in order to reduce their costs. Even other Ohio power companies, including American Electric Power, Duke Energy of Ohio, and Dayton Power & Electric, have embraced the programs.

On the national level, comparable energy efficiency standards have a long record of success. Yet the Department of Energy recently backed away from these standards for natural gas furnaces, which would have avoided 100 million tons of carbon emissions and reduced consumers’ costs by $10.7 billion.

The industrial sector is historically the biggest energy consumer in the U.S. However, as companies work to reduce their energy use, the industrial sector now accounts for the majority of energy reduction. Manufacturing consumption in the U.S. dropped 17 percent between 2002 and 2010.

by Rob Honeycutt

Climate scientists are in the unfortunate position of being the messengers of bad news. So in a way, climate change denial is a massive attempt to shoot the messenger.

There are so many existing technologies to address climate change that are positive messages that too often get lost in the noise.  I want to share what I see coming from my industry, which is manufacturing.

Specifically, I want to address how things are manufactured rather than technological solutions.

The Big Picture

As we all know, over the past 30 years vast portions of the world’s manufacturing base has moved to Asia, primarily China.  What you find there is a spider web network of small factories supplying parts to each other forming a distribution chain of goods.  Those goods are all being delivered by many tens of thousands of these little blue diesel trucks, each belching out heavy particulates, CO2 and any number of unhealthy substances.  None of the factories are located in any rational proximity to each other; it’s fairly random.  The surface streets they travel are generally choked with traffic.  Then each of those factories is running on the Chinese grid, fueled by a lot of dirty coal.  Most factories also keep back up diesel generators running since the Chinese grid is often unreliable.  I’ve even seen small, clearly unregulated, coal fired generators tucked away back in various coves and backstreets putting out very heavy smoke.

Then, of course, all the finished goods are trucked to port, loaded onto an unending train of container ships crossing the Pacific and heading out to all corners of the world.  Each of those is burning bunker fuel, which is something akin to asphalt.  And on top of that you have designers, engineers and execs flying back and forth to Asia numerous times each year to manage their projects.  I have one friend who does 8 to 10 trips a year to China as a product designer, and that’s pretty normal.

Taiichi Ohno and Toyota

Some 70 years ago a man named Taiichi Ohno pioneered Toyota’s incessant quest to ferret out waste from their production systems.  His work heralded in a new wave of manufacturing efficiency.  You may perhaps remember how the Japanese were crushing the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s and 80s.  This was primarily due to systems developed by Ohno.

Taiichi Ohno identified what he termed the “seven forms of waste” or “muda,” as it’s referred to in Japanese.  One of the primary forms of muda is “transportation waste.”  Moving product was always to be kept at its barest minimum since it adds no value to the end product.  There are reams of research on this, and yet, over the past 30 years transportation waste has exploded to epic proportions.  None of it adding value.  All of it putting vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Not even thinking of CO2, and only being focused on efficiency, what Toyota did to minimize this was to work in Keiretsu’s.  They were “families” of suppliers who maintained their facilities in near proximity to the main Toyota assembly plants and they operated their supply chain on hourly delivery schedules.  Over half a century ago Toyota and Taiichi Ohno showed us that operations should always be located as close together as possible.  This got lost in the mad rush to move production to China.

Efficiency Improves Quality

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by Mark Muro and Jessica Lee, via The Brookings Institution

Hubs and clusters, institutes and ecosystems: In recent years, we and others have talked a lot about the morphology of innovation systems, which are frequently anchored by major centers of research and comprised of related regional clouds of entrepreneurs, orbiting firms, industry actors, and educational institutions.

Strengthening that optimal structure was the idea behind our companion proposals for the creation of a network of regional energy discovery-innovation institutes and the establishment of a program to aid and abet nascent clusters with competitive grants. And it is also the point of the Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Hubs program as well as the several regional innovation cluster programs now running, including at the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, that have moved along these lines.

Now, it’s great to see the Obama administration moving to pilot another proposed national network of innovation hubs aimed at catalyzing regional growth ecosystems, this time in manufacturing.

In this case, the news surrounds the launch last week of a robust new public-private institute for manufacturing innovation in Youngstown, OH, that will seek to provide a proof-of-concept for the creation of a $1 billion national network of up to 15 such institutes around the country. Focused on the hot new process of “3-D printing,” the new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) will seek to bolster U.S. leadership on one of the critical Next Big Things in industrial production and will do it through an award of $30 million of federal funding that will be matched by $40 million from a winning consortium of 60 companies, universities, community colleges, and non-profit organizations arrayed around the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia “Tech Belt.”

To that extent it’s reassuring to see concerted effort to strengthen the nation’s competitive advantage on advanced manufacturing through an embrace of regional hubs and ecosystems. There’s been an awful lot of dithering in recent years and it’s time to move forward on bolstering U.S. manufacturing!

And yet what’s equally gratifying is the intellectual sophistication of the administration’s innovation strategies, which have consistently sought to aid and abet local innovation by supporting regional, multi-party collaboration.

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In a hearing to mark up Republican legislation to expedite the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) accused the foreign company TransCanada of misleading the American public that the pipeline would be built with American steel.

Doyle submitted an amendment that challenged TransCanada to certify its claim that 75 percent of the pipe comes from North America is actually true. Discussing his amendment, Doyle expressed his frustration about his attempts to get a straight answer from the tar sands company about where the steel for the 1700-mile pipe was made. Doyle found that the Indian company Welspun Corp appears to be the pipeline supplier, using its Little Rock facilities to store India-manufactured pipe and steel. “I don’t believe there’s a lick of US or Canada steel in this pipeline,” Doyle said:

I’m asking for a bit of truth in advertising here. It’s been my frustration throughout this debate. We hear a lot of claims about the pipeline and I just want to be honest with the American people. My amendment just says this: TransCanada has told us they have made every effort to source as much steel through North American mills as they can. I’m simply asking them to certify that claim. Through my little amateur investigation, I don’t believe there’s a lick of US or Canada steel in this pipeline. But I would love to be proved wrong.

Watch it:

Doyle revealed that he found that 148 miles of pipe have already been constructed in India and shipped to Welspun’s subsidiary Welspun Tubular in Little Rock, AR.

The steel being used comes from the same Indian manufacturer behind the original Keystone pipeline, which has already seen 12 spills in one year, possibly because of defective steel.

The United Steelworkers oppose the pipeline, as another case of manufacturing outsourcing by multinational companies.