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ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | THE TOWN DANDY December 6, 2007
You’re getting warmer The California experiment You’re getting warmer by Bill McKibben I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention-center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall still was littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up a first-ever global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs. A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced. The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance — working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. “It’s in free fall now,” he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington where we can get things under control.” I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.
Ten years warmer The important physical-world reality to know about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record. In that span of time, we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming, but also that we’d dramatically underestimated the speed and the size of that warming. By now, the data from the planet outstrips the scientific prediction on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the melt of Arctic sea ice beat the old record. Beat it in mid-August, and then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week. “Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts,” the headline in The New York Times reported. And they were shaken by rapid changes in tundra-permafrost systems, not to mention rain-forest systems, temperate-soil carbon-sequestration systems, oceanic-acidity systems. We’ve gone from a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: It’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced that his News Corp. empire was going carbon neutral. The important political-world reality to know about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything. Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington, D.C., nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with “witnesses” like novelist Michael Crichton. And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using their coal. Instead of an all-out effort to provide the resources so they could go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: The Chinese now are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as one more predictable folly next to this novel burst of irresponsibility.
A hint of a movement If you’re looking for good news, there is some. For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The last 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent light bulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electric generation throughout the period. Japan and then Germany have pioneered with great success the subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels up on rooftops. Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: His movie made millions realize just what a pickle we were in. Many of those, in turn, became political activists. Earlier this year, six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month, the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push both Congress and the big Washington environmental groups. All this work has tilted public opinion — new polls actually show energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.
The race of all time Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter? On the domestic front, the numbers look like this: We’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts underway fast — 10 percent in just the next few years. Markets will help — if we send them the information that carbon carries a cost. Only government can do that. Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in America, and 5 million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up on the roofs by themselves. You can’t send the work to China, and you can’t do it with a mouse: This is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us. Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — miss this chance and the climate likely spirals out of control. We have a number here, too: 450, as in parts-per-million carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it. This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe level might be 550. But the data is so clear: The Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought, and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we didn’t stop short of that 450 red line, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century was out. That’s civilization-challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter that anyone ever dreamed about. It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test, nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now, we’ll know which path we chose.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 30 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.
The view from Kyoto by Ed Smeloff
Ten years. In geological time, 10 years is hardly noticed — a speck of dust. But for sentient beings, much happens in 10 years. Children grow up, parents and friends pass away, wars start and end, presidents are elected and disgraced, political parties rise and fall. In the last 10 years around 1.2 billion babies have been born. Some will live to see the 22nd century. Most will have children of their own. Ten years ago, the nations of the world gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to take action to prevent dangerous interference with the planet’s climate. Many hoped that meaningful steps would be taken to protect the Earth for future generations. Ten years earlier, scientists working through the World Meteorological Society and the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess the science of climate change. (The IPCC is the first 20-year-old to win a Nobel Prize.) By 1995, the IPCC concluded that there was a “discernible human impact on the climate.” Banal as those words sound, their significance is overwhelming. They communicate awareness that our generation can irreversibly damage the Earth’s ecosystems for future generations simply by the way we live. Slowing down and stopping climate change will require societal change on a scale never contemplated previously. The Kyoto Protocol was a first attempt by the nations of the world to bring about this vast change.
Welcome to Kyoto Kyoto in December 1997 was festive. I was there as an observer, with my background in energy policy and management resources, for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and was working in tandem with a journalist who was reporting for Salon. (It’s interesting to remember that, 10 years ago, Internet journalism was still a novelty.) Kyoto residents, dressed up as rabbits, ducks, trees and other fauna and flora, marched through the streets in well-choreographed demonstrations. Melting penguin ice sculptures were placed at the entrance to the newly built conference center. Banners and placards in Japanese and English filled the air. A big pink “CO2” wrapped in chains with a leaf growing out of the last link was ubiquitous. Then-Vice President Al Gore was a target of the creatively inclined. “Al Gore — Cut GHGs Now or Go Home” was a Japanese favorite. Some Aussies brandished a red banner with a bunsen burner burning the planet from down under. Greenpeace built a monstrous scrap-heap Tyrannosaurus Rex with a scorecard-style banner that read Dinosaur Diplomacy 1, Climate 0. A beautiful tapestry of a fierce Fudo Myoo, the Buddhist deity of fire, draped the sides of the Kyoto conference center.
For the first seven days, the European Union and the United States haggled over how much greenhouse gases to cut and how much flexibility to provide in the treaty. Enviros complained the United States wanted so many loopholes — “flexibility mechanisms” to use the language of the diplomats — that the treaty would be toothless. On the eighth day, Gore flew in and told the U.S. delegation to compromise. Later, Gore symbolically signed the protocol on behalf of the United States. Gore, who stated in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit that “we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization,” was an enigmatic figure for many attending the Kyoto conference. No political persona understood the issue of climate change better than Gore. Yet the Clinton-Gore administration risked little to move the public on an issue in which the Earth was in balance. Even before the Kyoto conference it was clear the Clinton-Gore administration would not fight for ratification of the treaty in the Senate. It may have been a question of timing. Seven years later the treaty became international law, ratified by 169 countries. Among developed nations, only the United States and Australia have been AWOL. (Though following a change in government, Australia signed the treaty this week.) A core principle of the treaty is that the nations of the world have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. That phrase is an acknowledgment that the developed countries of the world are responsible for most of the damaging emissions in the atmosphere and need to take the first steps to reduce emissions. Developing countries, like India and China, are not required to meet specific emission targets during the first compliance period (2008-12). The Bush administration has argued that the United States should not be compelled to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions since China is not required to do so. And although the United States never officially withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty was never sent to the Senate for ratification. From 1990 to 2005, U.S. emissions have increased by 16.3 percent. The Kyoto Protocol requires a U.S. reduction 7 percent below 1990 levels. Among European nations, only the United Kingdom and Sweden now are achieving real reductions in greenhouse gases. The most significant emissions reductions in the last 10 years have come from the collapse of industrial enterprises in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
A failed success Looking back 10 years, it would be easy to argue that the Kyoto Protocol has been a failure. Without U.S. participation, it was doomed, at best, to only partial success. However, during the past 10 years the awareness of the impact of climate change and the impetus for strong action has grown. Devastating hurricanes, fierce wildfires, prolonged droughts and cataclysmic flooding have defined what is at stake. The consequence of inaction for the lives of those born in the last decade and their children is now obvious. The significance of Kyoto, beyond the details, is that there is now a viable international legal framework for dealing with climate change. This week, the nations of the world came together in Bali, Indonesia, to start negotiating for a post-2012 climate plan. What happens in Bali will set the stage for the next U.S. administration. It is hard to imagine that the United States will not want to re-engage the rest of the world on an agreement that is crucial for the health of the planet and future generations. The magnitude of what needs to be done to stabilize the planet’s climate can hardly be understated. We must transform the ways we produce electricity, heat our homes, power our factories and transport ourselves. We need to cut the use of fossil fuels by at least 50 percent, and maybe more, by 2050. We don’t have any time to lose.
Ed Smeloff has 20-plus years of expertise in energy policy and resource planning. He now works as a senior manager for project development at Sharp Solar Energy Solutions Group in Southern California.
Story and photo by Heidi Walters
Fred Marinus van Eck loved trees. The New York City investment banker owned thousands of acres of them all over the world. And it wasn’t only their cool, fragrant, fern-swept, critter-harboring selves that enchanted him, but their potential — he loved working trees, timber. And one patch he was particularly fond of was the nearly 2,100-acre redwood forest he bought in 1969 on the Pacific Northwest coast, sandwiched between tiny Fieldbrook and now-sprawling McKinleyville. Once a year, van Eck would fly out from New York to wander through his California woods. They’d been hammered in the past — heavily logged in the 1800s, and again in the 1950s. Now van Eck was watching the property grow into what he hoped would be a different sort of working forest: one with a redwood-dominant mix of species and different-aged trees supporting wildlife while growing big timber. Sylvia Garlick, a McKinleyville real estate agent who befriended the rather shy van Eck, often accompanied him on his walks. “I always remember one time in particular,” said Garlick. “We were walking on the property and he had a pair of clippers, and he would stop and snip the redwoods — the little ones, trees about a foot tall. He was pruning.” Jim Able, who managed this forest for van Eck for 30 years, says his annual working stroll with van Eck was like “somebody reviewing your master’s thesis. He asked you everything, from weather patterns to forest types.” He’d check on individual trees and quiz Able about their readiness for harvest. Van Eck’s scrutiny was but a foreshadowing of what was to come. Today the climate change community is eyeballing this sky-reaching swatch of dark green, slowly reclaiming time just miles from the Pacific Ocean, with particular intensity. It could be a bright new hope on the global warming front: the working forest/carbon credit grocery store. Already the celebs have come shopping: Earlier this year Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bought some carbon credits from the van Eck to offset some of the considerable carbon dioxide generated by his traveling. Nancy Pelosi, Fabian Núñez and California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams likewise bought some van Eck cred. And big utilities like PG&E are talking about using forest credits. Mr. van Eck, if he were alive (he died in 2000 at 82), might be amazed. Perhaps even pleased. But his old forester, Jim Able, is frankly a little perplexed. The van Eck forest is now managed under a conservation easement by the Pacific Forest Trust for the Fred M. van Eck Forest Foundation. (The foundation was formed when van Eck willed his forest, under condition it remain a forest, and a $21 million endowment to Purdue University to support one of its forestry research programs.) The PFT let go of Able’s firm and hired a new forestry management team last year. They’re good foresters, says Able, but he questions the PFT’s claim that the van Eck now will remove 500,000 tons more of CO2 from the atmosphere — tons that count as credits that can be sold — over the next 100 years (and produce 170 million board feet). What are they doing out there that’s different from Able’s light-harvest, selective approach? How will they sequester more carbon? The answer requires some mental gymnastics. The van Eck is the test site for California’s newly adopted “forest protocols” that a landowner who registers a forest with the California Climate Action Registry must follow. The registry, opened in 2004, is where entities declare publicly what they’re doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — in a forest’s case, carbon dioxide. The protocols are the accounting standards by which the forest’s “additionality” — extra carbon stored — is calculated. To register, a forest must have a conservation easement, which conserves it in perpetuity. Then the forest owner commits to inventorying the trees, calculating how much carbon they can store, and harvesting them within defined limits aimed at growing them bigger over a longer period of time. And the forest has to provide “co-benefits” — local economic value, clean air and water, native forest habitat. The owner reports emissions reductions yearly to the registry, and those are verified by an independent forester as well as one from CCAR. The van Eck was the first forest registered with CCAR, and its declared emissions reductions are now being scrutinized. The forest protocols legitimize the use of managed forests as a climate change strategy, says Andrea Tuttle, former director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who is active in developing California’s forest protocols. She’s giving a presentation on the van Eck Forest and California’s new forestry protocols this week in Bali during Forest Day, a parallel session to the U.N.’s climate change conference. The strategy could be groundbreaking. Forests store more than half the world’s terrestrial carbon, and cover a third of the United States, says Tuttle. “They are a carbon sink through photosynthesis but become an emission when forests are lost and the land converted to other uses,” she wrote in a fact sheet on the protocols. Deforestation accounts for nearly half the extra CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, second only to the burning of fossil fuels. But until now managed forests have been considered too difficult to assess for their carbon storage, Tuttle says. Even under Kyoto, with an established carbon-trade market, the only acceptable forest-generated carbon credits have been from the reforestation of agriculture lands or from new plantations on previously unforested land. California’s protocols could change that view and boost the United States’ own fledgling market, says Tuttle. “There has to be confidence that that ton is being stored,” she said. More important for California is that the protocols could help the state meet the newly mandated goal to cut its emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. But what has actually changed on the van Eck forest so it stores more carbon? Well, it’s a matter of semantics, partly: Under the forest protocols, a forest project’s extra carbon storage is calculated against a baseline of “an aggressive clear-cut scenario,” said Tuttle, referred to as “business as usual” management permitted by state, federal and local laws. So they’re managing the forest to store more carbon than it would have based on what could have legally happened — not necessarily on what actually was happening — as well as based on what carbon might be stored in the future based on the new management. The key point, says Connie Best, managing director of the PFT, is the forest remains standing forever, and the management is locked in. Tuttle says the required easement, which comes with tax breaks, plus the ability to sell verified credits, offer incentive to keep forests alive. “The majority of non-industrial owners in California are already managing their forests less intensively,” she said. This means they’re selling less timber. “I was looking for new ways to help keep non-industrial owners on the land ... to find a new revenue stream.” But some wonder whether locking the forest into a particular management strategy at this point in time might preclude foresters from adapting to the latest and best science. Jim Able, like some other foresters, has trouble with the whole “forever” thing — the conservation easement. “They’re trying to describe a future forest,” he said. “You can’t take a forest and set up rules and regulations for it and say it’s forever. You need to have the ability to change things, as you learn more. For example, fish need structure in the stream — logs, rocks. Well, in the ’60s and ’70s, the state Fish and Game department came along with this idea that some logs were blocking the way of fish. So they took all the logs out of the streams. And so now there’s this great lack of structure in the streams. So, now they know better.” Neil Sampson, of Virginia, who consults for the National Carbon Offset Coalition, agrees it’s hard to predict what’ll happen 100 years down the road. “Our knowledge of how forests grow is based on history,” Sampson said. “The next 100 years, with a different climate, won’t look anything like the last 100 years. And that makes me very nervous about long-term projections.” But he says there’s no magic bullet. “And, you know, we are going to have to transfer to a new energy system. It’s not going to happen overnight. Forestry’s something we can do now; it’s a bridge.” Heidi Walters is a staff writer for The North Coast Journal.
By Cosmo Garvin Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s mad global-warming scientist. Photo illustration by Don Button.
If you wiped California off the face of the planet, just made it disappear — left behind no car or SUV, politician, person or cow — you’d eliminate only about 1.6 percent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Keep California and lose Texas, and you’d more or less double the benefit to the planet, but you’d still be a long way short of solving the problem of global warming. So it’s hard at first to see how California’s highly touted experiment in planet saving, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, or just AB 32 for short, is going to make much of a difference. But on a human scale, on the scale of what government can do, AB 32 is an enormous undertaking. “We’ve got only five years to develop regulations for every sector of society,” explained Stanley Young of the California Air Resources Board. The plan was signed into law by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2006, and its goal is to reduce California’s greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. In that way, AB 32 is meant to mirror the Kyoto Protocol. In 2007, California is expected to put about 496 million metric tons (MMT) of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of it is carbon dioxide, but mixed in there are nitrogen oxide, methane and a whole cocktail of less common but more harmful gases produced by transportation and industry. So, what do 496 MMT of greenhouse gases look like? CARB figures that just 1 MMT of CO2 would fill 200,000 hot-air balloons. So, all of California’s greenhouse gases for a year would fit into about 99 million hot-air balloons. Right now, the best estimate we have for greenhouse-gas emissions for California in 1990 is somewhere around 436 MMT. Getting from 496 to 436 doesn’t sound all that impressive. Just as 87 million hot-air balloons doesn’t sound any more manageable than 99 million. But take the longer view. If we do nothing to slow the steady growth of CO2 and other global-warming pollutants, we’ll reach something close to 680 MMT of the stuff by the year 2020. Suddenly, just getting back to the pollution levels of 1990 looks pretty good. CARB has until December 2008 to figure out how to get California there. According to the law, all of the regulations to meet the 2020 goal have to be in place, and in force, by 2012. One of the most promising tools California has in its climate-change toolbox is AB 1493, also called the Pavley bill, after its author, former Assemblywoman Fran Pavley. The Pavley bill requires that, by 2020, all cars and trucks sold in California emit 30 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions from their tailpipes. That’s about 30 MMT — a whopping 17 percent of the overall goal of AB 32. The problem is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won’t let California enforce the Pavley bill. Two years ago, the state asked for a waiver from the federal government to enforce the rule, because automakers argued that only the federal government, not California, could make regulations that would affect fuel efficiency. Two years later, the Bush administration still isn’t saying whether it will grant the waiver or not. In fact, California had to sue the federal government last month just to try and get an answer. If the answer turns out to be “no,” then California likely will sue again. Setting aside the uncertain future of the Pavley bill, the next big category of greenhouse-gas reductions come in the form of CARB’s “early action items,” some of which are supposed to go into effect by 2010, many more by 2012. Each of these chip away at California’s total inventory of greenhouse gases. In combination, the early action rules are supposed to move California another 24 percent closer to the overall goal of AB 32. For example, requiring ships at California ports to get electricity from shore, rather than from their own diesel engines, could shave off about 500,000 metric tons from California’s greenhouse-gas inventory. Similar benefits are predicted for rules requiring people to keep their tires properly inflated, and for tougher regulations on the manufacture of semiconductors. Requiring trucking companies to make their rigs more aerodynamic will net a little over 1 MMT. And capturing more methane from landfills could knock out 2 to 4 MMT of greenhouse gases. Altogether CARB is proposing 44 different regulations just to cobble together that 24 percent. And any one of these regulations could be a potential political fight. Each regulation affects a particular industry or a particular part of the California lifestyle. Let’s see: 17 percent plus 24 percent … that leaves 59 percent of the CO2 pie still to be accounted for. CARB only has until the end of 2008 to figure out where those remaining reductions will come from. Some of the rules are on the drawing board already. The state’s “Low Carbon Fuel Standard,” called for in an executive order from Schwarzenegger earlier this year, could reduce California’s total emissions by 10 to 20 MMT a year. California’s laws requiring the state to use more renewable energy should also contribute to the reductions. After all that, you still end up putting just as much CO2 into the air in 2020 as you did a generation earlier. But you would also be the first generation to force the line on the graph measuring global-warming pollution to go down, instead of up. And that’s a good thing.
Cosmo Garvin is a senior staff writer at Sacramento News & Review.
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Inside, activists from a plethora of NGOs scurried around, sleepless, trying to figure out what was going on in the closed-door negotiations and incessantly writing press releases. Business trade organizations set up booths promoting their technologies. The nuclear industry was calling for a nuclear renaissance. Enron announced plans to build a 50 megawatt solar power plant in the Nevada desert. Toyota passed out refrigerator magnets touting its new hybrid-electric eco-car that it promised to bring to market soon.
