Leading climate scientist takes his eye off the ball

Many environmentalists are abandoning the climate bill right when it needs them most, and leading global warming scientist James Hansen just ran to the front of the rat pack with a flag. In a commentary yesterday in the Huffington Post, Hansen announced the bride isn’t as pretty as the one he wanted, so he’s not showing up at the wedding.
Hansen’s post is titled “G-8 Failure Reflects U.S. Failure on Climate Change,” and let’s start right there.
At the summit this week, the world’s eight most developed nations, which produce almost two thirds of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution, announced they would reduce that pollution by 80 percent over the next 40 years. They agreed to strive to limit global warming to 2-degrees celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels, and keep in mind that about a third of that increase has already occurred and almost another third is likely to occur even if we stopped polluting today.
So the G8 nations agreed to two hard targets, which was a first for the U.S., Canada, Russia, and Japan. How is the G8 summit a failure?
The media were so committed to reporting a G8 failure that they started reporting it before the summit announced its outcome, then seemed devoted to minimizing its successes. Hansen refers to a New York Times article noting that China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and other developing nations did not agree to reduce their emissions by 50 percent, as the G8 would like, but that’s not a G8 failure. That disagreement occurred at the Major Economies Forum in Mexico in June, and has been a known quantity since then. Chinese President Hu Jintao’s departure from L’Aquila signaled that wouldn’t change.
The G8 summit was a success by any reckoning that remembers how little progress has been made over the last 20 years, since Hansen first helped to bring global warming to national consciousness. Hansen nonetheless blames the G8 failure on the U.S. Climate Bill, which is heading to the Senate after its summer recess. A stronger climate bill would have won compliance from the developing nations, Hansen believes, but what the developing nations really want is money from the developed world to fund their improvements, and they’ve taken the position most likely to produce movement in negotiations between now and the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December.
The position developing nations sought at MEF–a 40 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2020–isn’t feasible in a bill that takes effect in 2012, and they know it. Hansen should too. Hansen also points to some “egregious flaws” in the climate bill, including:
It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
EPA doesn’t have that ability yet, and has pursued it in order to hold a hammer over Congress. The Climate Bill locks the U.S. into a carbon regulation system. Why don’t we want the EPA to be in charge of regulating CO2 instead? Does anyone remember the Bush EPA?
It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, “businesses and households won’t be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense,” thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.
Because we all sit down with our calculators when we’re about to turn on a light bulb. The fact that carbon emissions now cost something, when they previously did not, ought to simplify that calculation significantly.
Hansen doesn’t like cap and trade’s participation in and vulnerability to the market. He’d prefer a “fee and dividend” system” in which we charge a fee to polluters and give the money to Americans. I’d also like to require the airlines to give us free flights to St. Tropez. Ain’t gonna happen. And it really is too bad that political feasibility matters in democracies.
Rep. Chris van Hollen offered a nice compromise proposal, a cap and dividend bill, that was the darling of environmentalists, but that died a quiet death in favor of the bill we got instead.
The bill we got instead, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is far from perfect. It’s also the only bill we’ll get this year, and if it fails, better legislation looks less, not more, likely next year. Steven Stills had the right advice for this circumstance way back in 1970: “When you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.”