Under the Obama administration, the U.S. has made some (small) progress limiting the amounts of greenhouse gases that states emit, e.g. through Environmental Protection Agency limits on carbon dioxide emitted by power plants.
Given that greenhouse gases do spread all over the globe, the U.S. must also support action abroad to reduce levels of greenhouse gases.
At the upcoming Climate Summit in New York, September 23, President Obama will have a good opportunity to do so.
President Obama can and should support an accord for nations to jointly commit to bold action, including the imposition of fees on fossil fuel exported to nations that fail to commit to such action.
Where necessary, World Trade Organization rules should be agreed to be adjusted in order to accommodate such fees.
An accord on export fees can help U.S. exporters remain competitive and avoid repercussions. Such fees will also help make importing nations impose fees domestically, as they will not want to miss out on the revenues from such fees.
Revenues from such fees are best held in a trust fund and they are best used exclusively to finance international projects, such as efforts to save the sea ice in the Arctic and R&D into ways to decompose methane. As more nations impose fees domestically and accept responsibility to participate in international projects, such export fees can phase themselves out.
The People's Climate March will take place on September 21, starting 11:30 am from Central Park West (between 65th and 86th streets). Whether or not you're taking part in the march, consider supporting the Climate Plan. If you print out above image, you could make a cardboard sign. Over the coming days, photos of people holding up such a sign can be posted and shared at facebook and, if you add some lines saying you like the idea, they will be considered for display at the Arctic-news blog. You can also make it your profile picture on facebook during the remainder of the month to get a chance to be mentioned as a supporter. Thanks in advance.
Update of Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly below:
Thanks to all who liked, tagged and shared the top image. Two examples of how the message is shared are highlighted below.
On June 2, 2014, the Obama administration through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that states must lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted for each unit (MWh) of electricity they produce.
1. Too Little
Under the EPA rules, the nationwide goal is to reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector by 30% from 2005 levels. This will also reduce other pollutants.
Sam Carana: The goal should be an 80% cut in emissions. Reductions should not be averaged out over different types of emissions, but instead the 80% reduction target should apply to each type of emission, i.e. 80% cuts in CO2 and 80% cuts in CH4 and 80% cuts in black carbon, etc.
2. Too late
Under the EPA rules, states must meet interim targets during the 2020s, but they can delay making emission cuts provided they will on average comply with targets by 2030. Moreover, the EPA suggests that they can from then on maintain that level subsequently.
Sam Carana: For over six years, I have been calling for an 80% cut in emissions by 2020. When people now ask if I still believe such reductions are feasible given the lack of action over the years, I respond that, precisely because so little has been achieved over the years, it now is even more imperative to set a target of 80% emissions cuts by 2020. If we start cutting 13.4% off this year's emissions, and keep cutting emissions by the same amount each subsequent year, we'll be under 20% (i.e. at 19.6%) by 2020.
3. Too ineffective
Under the EPA rules, states could comply by either reducing CO2 emissions from their power plants or buying credits or offsets from elsewehere, e.g. through cap-and-trade programs. States can choose to use existing multi-state programs or create new ones.
Sam Carana: The goal should be a genuine 80% cut in emissions in each and every state. It is good to delegate decisions to states regarding what works best locally to achieve such reductions. However, schemes such as cap-and-trade, carbon credits and offsetting keep local polluters dirty by allowing them to claim credit for progress made elsewhere. A state buying credits from beyond its borders does not genuinely reduce its own emissions, making it even harder for it to reach its next targets (which should be even tighter), while also making it harder for targets to be reached elsewhere.
The bigger such schemes grow, the more they become fraught with difficulties, twisted with irregularities and riddled with political chicanery, making them prone to fraud and bribery, often beyond the administrative scope and legal reach of local regulators.
Such schemes are inherently counter-productive in that they seek to create ever more demand for polluting activities; they will continue doing dirty business until the last possible 'credit' has been sold, burning the last bit of fossil fuel from irrealistic carbon budgets that are fabricated inside the dark politics of compromise, campaign-funding and complacency.
Such schemes are designed to profit from keeping the dirtiest power plants going and prolonging their lifetime beyond any reasonable purpose, in efforts to perpetuate the scheme itself and extract further money that, instead of being used to benefit the cleaner solutions, is then often used to finance further pollution elsewhere and spread the reach of such schemes. Such dreadful conduct is typically hidden away in a web of deceit custom-made to avoid the scrutiny of public accountibility.
And what if states fail to reach targets? The EPA suggestion to use such schemes effectively delays much local action, while encouraging states to negotiate with each other. This opens up the prospect of states blaming each other and taking legal action rather than genuine action. If the trappings of such schemes make states fail to reach targets, penalties could be imposed, but that still does not guarantee that targets will be reached; furthermore, given the complexities of such schemes, policing them poses additional burdens on administrators, police, courts and lawyers. Huge amounts of money and time have already been spent on court cases to postpone action, rather than on building genuine solutions.
The best way to cater for non-compliance is to prepare federally-administered fees, to be levied on sales of polluting products, and with the revenues used to fund federal projects that do reduce emissions. As said, it's good for the EPA to encourage states to each work out how best to reduce their respective emissions, provided that each state does indeed reach set targets. Where a state fails to take the necessary action, the EPA should resume control and call for federal fees to be imposed in the respective state.
The Clean Air Act calls for the 'best system of emissions reduction' to reduce emissions from power plants. The best system is one that levies fees on pollution and then uses the revenues to fund rebates on the cleaner products sold locally.
Such combinations of fees and rebates (feebates) are the most effective way to make our economy sustainable, as part of the comprehensive action that is needed to avoid climate catastrophe. For more details on comprehensive and effective action, see the ClimatePlan blog.
President Obama, why don't you use your powers to more effectively reduce the danger of catastrophic climate change?
As an example, you could direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose fees on sales of gasoline. The revenues of such fees could then be earmarked to fund ways to make the use of genuinely clean energy more attractive.
Delegation
The duty to act on climate change can delegated to states, provided that sufficient progress is made to combat climate change. States can thus to a large extent decide what action and what mix of policies they feel will work best where. Where such progress is lacking, federal authority can resume control, impose fees in the respective state and decide to direct (part of) revenues to federal programs, such as construction of high speed rail tracks that cross state borders, waste management in national parks, federal research grants into ways to combat climate change, etc.
State administrators can similarly decide to delegate their authority to local levels, allowing each local council to implement feebates believed to work best in the respective area. And similarly, state administrators can resume control in case of a lack of progress in a specific area, and direct the revenues to state programs.
Further action
Further action will be needed to reduce the danger of catastrophic climate change, which calls for a comprehensive climate plan such as described at http://climateplan.blogspot.com
At the 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama said that the all-of-the-above energy strategy he announced a few years ago is working, describing natural gas as the bridge fuel that can power our economy.
President Obama said: "Businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in new factories that use natural gas. I’ll cut red tape to help states get those factories built, and this Congress can help by putting people to work building fueling stations that shift more cars and trucks from foreign oil to American natural gas."
President Obama added: "And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did."
Sadly, President Obama doesn't. President Obama missed yet another opportunity to articulate a plan to shift to genuinely clean energy, and instead chose to persist supporting all types of energy, in particular natural gas.
As the U.S. shifts to natural gas, more methane is entering the atmosphere. At the same time, methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean continue to contribute to the temperature rises in the Arctic that are making the weather ever more extreme. The image below shows surface temperature anomalies above 20°C in the Arctic, while anomalies below -20°C feature at lower latitudes.
President Obama's Climate Action Plan doesn't look much like a shift to genuinely clean energy. As discussed in a recent post by Peter Carter, the President's Plan sadly supports fossil fuel in many ways.
The plan supports natural gas very prominently. Indeed, how clean is natural gas? Years ago, a Cornell University study (image below) concluded that emissions caused by natural gas can be even worse than coal and diesel oil, especially when looked at over a relatively short period.
At the time, I wrote that this kind of support for natural gas - as if that was supposedly "clean energy" - would only perpetuate the government's support for fuel, while doing little or nothing to help genuinely clean energy. Moreover, continued support for fossil fuel comes at the expensive of growth in genuinely clean energy that we need instead.
EIA figures also show that, over the period from 1990 to 2010, the average amount of carbon dioxide produced in the United States for each unit of energy generated has remained much the same as the world average, while the situation in China has grown even worse.
IEA figures further show that the world's energy-related carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise rapidly and that they, for the period 1900 - 2012, add up to a staggering amount of 1257 Gt.
As the image below shows, from a recent IEA report, the carbon intensity of global energy has hardly improved over the decades.
The colored lines on the right correspond with scenarios in which global temperatures are projected to increase by, respectively, 6 degrees Celsius, 4 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius.
What are the chances that it will be possible to avoid the worst-case scenario? The IEA elaborates that an extension of current trends would result in an average global temperature rise of at least 6 degrees Celsius in the long term. To have an 80% chance of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions need to be cut by more than half in 2050 compared with 2009. They would need to continue to fall thereafter.
While the IEA adds that the goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius can only be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions in non-energy sectors are also reduced, the IEA does not elaborate on what further action will be needed and whether emission reductions alone will suffice to avoid climate catastrophe.
[click to enlarge]
As said, the world's cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions add up, for the period 1900 - 2012, to a staggering amount of 1257 Gt. As the graph on the right shows, methane's global warming potential for the first decade since its release into the atmosphere will be more than 130 times as much as carbon dioxide.
Abrupt release of just 10 Gt of methane will - during the first decade since entering into the atmosphere - have a stronger greenhouse effect globally than all cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from 1900 to 2012.
Note that above calculation applies to methane as it's typically released at present, i.e. gradually and spread out over the world, mostly originating from cattle, wetlands, biowaste, energy, forest fires, etc. Things will be much worse in case of abrupt release of methane from the Arctic seabed, when much of the methane will initially remain concentrated in the Arctic, where hydroxyl levels are also very low.
After 5 years, a methane cloud 20% the size of its original abrupt release of methane in the Arctic will still have more than 1000 times the warming potency locally that the same mass of carbon dioxide has globally.
Look at it this way; an abrupt release in the Arctic Ocean will initially remain concentrated locally. The Arctic Ocean covers 2.8% of the Earth's surface, while there's currently about 0.14 Gt of methane in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean. Abrupt release of 1 Gt methane from the Arctic seabed will thus initially multiply methane levels in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean by 8, trapping much more heat from sunlight, especially during the June solstice when solar radiation received by the Arctic is higher than anywhere else on Earth.
This comes on top of warming that is already accelerated in the Arctic. Albedo changes alone could cause more warming than all emissions by people globally, according to calculations by Prof. Peter Wadhams, who also describes things in the video below.
The resulting temperature rises in the Arctic threaten to trigger further methane releases from the seabed and wildfires on land in the Arctic, further driving up temperatures in an exponential spiral of runaway global warming.
In conclusion, what's needed is a climate plan that will genuinely produce the necessary action, i.e. a comprehensive and effective climate plan as described at https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climateplan.html
Let us return for a moment to election night 2008. As I sat in our farm house in Pennsylvania, watching Barack Obama's victory speech, I turned my head aside so my wife would not see the tears in my eyes. I suspect that millions cried. It was a great day for America.
We had great hopes for our new President. It is appropriate, it is right, in a period honoring Martin Luther King, to recall the hopes and dreams of that evening, and the hopes and dreams that we…will… never - give up.
We have a dream – that our President will understand the intergenerational injustice of human-made climate change – that he will recognize our duty to be caretakers of creation, of the land, of the life on our planet – and that he will give these matters the priority that our young people deserve.
We have a dream – that our President will understand the commonality of solutions for energy security, national security and climate stability – and that he will exercise hands-on leadership, taking the matter to the public, avoiding backroom crippling deals with special interests.
We have a dream – that the President will stand as firm as Abraham Lincoln when he faced the great moral issue of slavery – and, like Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, he will speak with the public, enlisting their support and reassuring them.
It is not easy to find an Abraham Lincoln or a Winston Churchill. But we are here today looking to find that in you, Mr. President. And until you summon it within yourself, let me assure you that we will return, and our numbers will grow.
Mr. President, we will be here until the promise of a safe world for our children and grandchildren, and your children and grand children – is not a dream. We will be here until we are assured that the history books will rightfully record – that you were the person we were looking for - the person who turned these dreams…into reality.
______________________________ 1Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, Pray-in at NY Ave. Presbyterian Church and the White House (www.interfaithactiononclimatechange.org) on Martin Luther King's birthday. "We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…" Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gary Houser, long-time public interest writer, documentary
producer currently working on climate tipping points, and
member of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG),
with one of his projects, solar parking for Athens, Ohio.
by Gary Houser
"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it – boldly, swiftly, and together – we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe... the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."
"There are potential irreversible effects of melting the sea ice... We'll begin to release methane hydrates... There is enough there to cause as much warming as all the coal in the world... It's not clear that civilization could survive that extreme climate change."
—Dr. James Hansen, renowned climate scientist. (interview for documentary "Arctic Methane Tipping Point?" )
Dear President Obama,
History has conspired to place you at the presidential helm during a turning point moment of unprecedented global significance. The climate crisis preceded your presidency and will still be with us when it ends. But time is quickly running out to prevent this crisis from escalating beyond human control. The staggering record loss of Arctic ice seen this year is a clear sign that the forces of climate change have been set in motion. A growing chorus of scientists and experts believe we are sitting on the knife's edge of humanity's ability to mitigate or stop the growing threat.
When you chose to open your presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois in 2008, you made a bold statement about your aspirations to the greatness of an Abraham Lincoln. The mark of a great president is to recognize the moral issue that transcends all others and take the actions which push history in a positive direction. Lincoln did so on the issue of slavery. In a speech to Congress in 1862, he said: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."
The call that beckons you is to recognize the unique, all-encompassing urgency associated with the need to prevent a global climate catastrophe. There is no higher mission you could possibly perform than to "rise to the occasion" by using your oratorical gifts to inspire humanity to turn back from the brink of oblivion.
While world attention has focused on human-generated carbon dioxide, a sleeping giant has been stirring in the Arctic. Frozen methane is thawing and releasing a global warming gas at least 30 times more powerful than CO2. There is more carbon energy in this methane than all the world's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas combined. As both open water and methane push Arctic temperatures higher, even more methane is subject to thawing and release—creating the frightening prospect of an unstoppable "runaway" chain reaction, or feedback loop. In a frightening worst case scenario, the planet could be pressed toward a mass extinction event comparable to earlier ones that some scientists attribute (video) to large scale methane release.
In your 2009 speech to the UN you shared these uplifting words: "It is work that will not be easy... But difficulty is no excuse for complacency. Unease is no excuse for inaction... It is a journey that will require each of us to persevere through setback, and fight for every inch of progress."
It is clear why every single "inch of progress" has become a "fight". Though the survival of life on earth surely transcends partisan politics, a fossil fuel industry blinded and rendered senseless by corporate bottomlines has invested mountains of money to attack climate science and confuse the public. Are you willing to "persevere through setback" and speak truthfully by exposing these actions as nothing less than crimes against current and future generations?
History shows that the American people have responded positively to presidents who courageously took the moral high ground in response to soul-testing adversity. Seize your greatness as a president and the people will honor you. Polls show that a majority of the independent voters that campaign strategists say you need are actually with you on climate.
The decision that will be—in your own words—"judged by history" is in your hands. Will you act on behalf of our children and future generations before the "time to reverse the tide runs out"? The moment has come to end the silence.
In your 2008 campaign, you featured these words from Rev. Martin Luther King: "We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now."
However, you did not mention the warning that immediately followed, when King said: "There is such a thing as being too late... We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"
Posted with author's permission - earlier posted at commondreams.org
