Think globally, act locally: Mayors move on climate change

In a new report on efforts by U.S. cities to outdo the federal government on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels admits that even the early strides made by Seattle -- reducing the city's 1990 carbon footprint by 8% in 2005 -- don't allow the city to rest on its laurels. Today's gains could be tomorrow's losses. Real measures to slow the warming of the planet will take patience, persistence and a determination to press on despite setbacks.
"I'm a realist, and I see Seattle's population growing, so I know we're going to have to increase our environmental vigilance in the coming years in order to stay on track and reach our climate protection goals," said Nickels, who announced that 1,000 mayors have signed on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors initiative to unilaterally limit their own greenhouse gas emissions.
"I also know that this generation, which is showing such a bold willingness to shed old behaviors and habits in the name of climate protection, won't come up with all the answers and won't make the atmosphere a pure place any time soon," he added. "But with each passing decade, we'll make more and more progress greening our cities ... and nobody will forget that all this started because 1,000 courageous and broad-minded mayors thought of the Earth as well as their neighborhood turf at the same time."
The report on the program so far outlines what cities across the country are doing to transition to cleaner fuels, phase in lower-energy lighting, synchronize traffic lights to keep traffic moving more quickly and cleanly and raise energy-efficiency standards for new construction.
"The city of Los Angeles has the largest carbon emissions output of any city in the state of California, which has the largest carbon footprint of any state in the U.S., which has the largest carbon footprint of any country in the world," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in the profile on Los Angeles, which has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.

Divisions in U.S. Over Emissions

If anyone in the global community was still straining to see where the fault lines lay in the American debate over climate change, last week will have provided clarity.

 The very public departure of several large businesses from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which describes itself as “the world’s largest business federation representing three million businesses of all sizes,“ was punctuated Wednesday with an announcement by the shoe manufacturer Nike that it, too, had found itself at odds with the chamber’s stated positions on global warming and how it ought to be addressed.

“We fundamentally disagree with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the issue of climate change,” the company explained in announcing, through a published statement, that it was resigning its seat on the chamber’s board.
“It is important that U.S. companies be represented by a strong and effective Chamber that reflects the interests of all its members on multiple issues,” the statement added. “We believe that on the issue of climate change, the Chamber has not represented the diversity of perspective held by the board of directors.”
Nike said it would retain its chamber membership “to advocate for climate change legislation inside the committee structure,” but its stated opposition to the chamber’s stance on climate change came just days after several large utilities — including Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon, the largest U.S. operator of nuclear plants — quit the association altogether.
As my colleagues Clifford Krauss and Kate Galbraith reported last week, the significance of the dust-up was open to interpretation.
Utilities that rely heavily on emissions-free nuclear power, after all, stand to come out nicely, should the American Congress manage to pass the sort of carbon-cutting legislation now on the table, and to which the chamber has thus far been vehemently opposed.
Still, the discord was unsettling enough for the Chamber of Commerce to prompt a response from its chief executive, Thomas J. Donohue, who argued in a statement last week that the business lobby “continues to support strong federal legislation and a binding international agreement” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“Some in the environmental movement claim that, because of our opposition to a specific bill or approach, we must be opposed to all efforts to reduce greenhouse gases or that we deny the existence of any problem,” Mr. Donohue continued. “They are dead wrong.”
Stakeholders in the environmental community, naturally, were quick to question the sincerity of that assertion — and it arrived just as two Democratic senators, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, introduced their answer to the climate bill passed by the House in June.
Ms. Boxer seized on the perceived splintering of opinion within the business community. “We feel with Exelon quitting the Chamber of Commerce, because they feel they’re anti-business, we have momentum on our side in terms of the businesses that are coming out to support us,” she said.
Speaking to a reporter for Greenwire, Bruce Josten, a vice president for government affairs with the Chamber of Commerce, suggested that discord within the lobby’s ranks was nothing unusual and was unlikely to prove a catalyst for pushing a climate bill through Congress.
“I feel pretty good today if 75 percent of our members agree with something,” Mr. Josten was quoted as saying — adding: “Three companies’ leaving the chamber is not momentum for Senator Boxer.”
President Barack Obama might well share that sentiment. Against the backdrop of the chamber dust-up — and on the same day that the Senate bill was unveiled — the administration announced that it was pushing ahead with plans to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate industrial greenhouse gas emissions on its own.




The move was seen by some as an effort to light a fire under Congress to reach agreement on a climate bill this year — and before the global summit meeting in December in Copenhagen, where delegates hope to hammer out a successor accord to the expiring Kyoto Protocol.






But with the likelihood of Congressional action dimming, and the administration facing the prospect of arriving in Copenhagen with no clear evidence that the United States is willing or able to address its substantial carbon footprint, having unleashed the E.P.A. to begin regulating emissions might well be the only card the American delegation will have to play come December.
Indeed, the administration appeared to concede as much Friday, when Carol Browner, the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told a gathering in Washington that the United States would not have a climate bill in hand at Copenhagen.
“Obviously we’d like to be through the process” of forging legislation, Ms. Browner said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Of course, even the E.P.A.’s ability to manage emissions is far from clear. Under proposed rules issued last week, the agency suggested it would be aiming only at large industrial emitters: “This is a common sense rule that is carefully tailored to apply to only the largest sources,” Lisa Jackson, E.P.A. administrator, said in a published statement.
Large emitters quickly fired back, however, suggesting that if the E.P.A. aimed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as pollution, it had better do so uniformly. “You can’t pick and choose which industry and which emitter E.P.A. is going to regulate,” said Charles T. Drevna, the group’s president, in a chat with Kate Galbraith for our Green Inc. blog.
Given that industry, for the most part, disputes the E.P.A.’s claimed prerogative, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all, the strategy here is almost certainly to force the agency into a regulatory quagmire in which every commercial source of carbon dioxide — from belching cattle to the neighborhood bakery — would require federal oversight.
And trade groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — have already threatened to sue over the E.P.A.’s role in managing emissions.
“Our position is simple,” the chamber asserts as part of its “Five Positions on Energy and the Environment,” posted on its Web site.
“There should be a comprehensive legislative solution that does not harm the economy, recognizes that the problem is international in scope, and aggressively promotes new technologies and efficiency.”
“Protecting our economy and the environment for future generations,“ the chamber continues, “are mutually achievable goals

New Script for India on Climate Change

When the United Nations convened its summit meeting on climate change last month, China and the United States, the two most important countries at the negotiating table, hewed to mostly familiar scripts, making promises without making too many specific commitments. Less familiar was the script followed by the third most important country at the table, IndiaIndia’s public stance on climate change is usually predictable — predictably obstinate and unwilling to compromise, at least according to many industrialized nations. But at the United Nations, India’s delegation toned down its usual criticisms of the industrialized world, presented new plans to reduce India’s emissions and sought to reposition the country, in the words of the environment minister, as a “deal maker,” not a “deal breaker.” The shift comes as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is pushing India to adopt a more internationalist posture on issues like climate change and trade as he seeks to expand India’s global stature at a time when declining American influence is altering the geopolitical balance of power.
Mr. Singh’s government has concluded that addressing climate change is intertwined with addressing domestic priorities like pollution, energy security and even national security.
Moreover, analysts say, India’s rigid, hard-line posture has backfired; the country has been typecast as intransigent, even as its putative ally on the issue, China, a far bigger source of emissions, has succeeded in creating the impression that the Chinese are more active and engaged.
“We cannot compromise our basic national position on protecting our prospects for growth, but we can see things that can be done,” said Nitin Desai, a member of the prime minister’s special advisory council on climate change. “The signal that I get is that India is not going to be a spoiler at Copenhagen. If a reasonable deal can be worked out, they will be there.”
With less than three months before final talks commence in Copenhagen, many analysts are deeply pessimistic that a comprehensive deal can be reached. But others are already discussing Plan B’s that might give credit for domestic programs, like one proposed by India, instead of creating a global set of binding limits like those in the existing, but faltering, Kyoto Protocol.
India’s close alliance with China — they are co-leaders of the bloc of developing nations — has been rooted in their shared interest in protecting economic growth and has created the impression that the two countries share a similar emissions profile, but, in fact, they do not. China is a far bigger polluter. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said India had one-fifth of China’s emissions, measured either in total or per capita amounts. Over all, China accounts for roughly 23 percent of all global emissions, while India accounts for less than 5 percent.
Those disparities are why some analysts say the relationship is subtly shifting. China has now overtaken the United States as the biggest emitter in the world and is under pressure to assume responsibilities more in line with industrialized countries.
India is worried that it could face similar expectations, based on its population size and potential for future growth, even though its levels of economic development and emissions lag far behind those of China.
David G. Victor, an energy analyst who has studied India’s situation, predicted that the Indian and Chinese positions could gradually separate.
As demands on developing countries increase, Mr. Victor predicted, their bloc will fragment. Low-per-capita emission countries, possibly led by India, may try to differentiate themselves from countries like Mexico, Brazil and China, which have more advanced economies and higher emissions.
“The Indians need to be very careful that they are seen as a different kind of country,” said Mr. Victor, who also teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Mr. Ramesh, India’s environment minister, said China and India were closely coordinating their positions on the negotiations, but he also conceded that China was winning the public relations battle.
“China has raced way ahead of us, both in terms of emissions and in conveying the impression they are doing a lot on climate change,” he said in an interview in New Delhi before he left for the United Nations summit meeting.
Mr. Ramesh said India’s basic demands for signing an international accord were unchanged: that industrialized nations agree to significant emissions reductions by 2020 and also provide financial and technical assistance to the developing world. India also remains opposed to accepting any mandatory caps on emissions.
But regardless of the fate of the agreement, he said, India was moving forward anyway. His ministry would soon submit legislation to the Indian Parliament that would tighten fuel efficiency standards, set voluntary targets to improve energy efficiency, push ahead with solar power and expand the use of clean-coal technology in power plants.
“I want to be aggressive, because, frankly, we are a country that is climate dependent,” he said, alluding to the vulnerability of India to rising sea waters and potentially disruptive annual monsoons. “We don’t like to think about it, but we are vulnerable.”
He added: “Our prime minister’s clear message to me was, ‘India has to be part of the solution. We may not have caused the problem, but we have to be part of the solution.’ ”
At the United Nations, Mr. Ramesh focused on practical issues like expanding forest cover, extending a treaty program encouraging investment in clean technologies and expanding technological cooperation.
“I think a lot of people welcomed that as a positive contribution,” said Michael A. Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It showed engagement on substance rather than rhetoric.”
For years, Indian negotiators defined climate change through the geopolitics of economic justice and national sovereignty, arguing that the industrialized world had a historical responsibility to bear the brunt of any global response while equating mandatory caps on emissions as being tantamount to capping India’s economic growth.
These arguments are still deeply felt in India and continue to shape the domestic political debate; Mr. Singh was sharply criticized by some members of Parliament after he agreed with other leaders last summer in Italy that nations should prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit from its current level.
His critics called the deal a trap to limit India’s development.
Mr. Ramesh said part of his job was to build a new domestic political consensus about how India could constructively address climate change without damaging its national interests because “without a solid domestic consensus, or even a domestic constituency, we cannot even think about engaging internationally.”
“And this is also true of the United States,” he added. “It’s true of all democracies.”

Rich countries 'must slash living standards' to fight climate change

Living standards in Britain and other rich countries must fall sharply over the next decade if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a leading climate research centre.
Consumption of energy-intensive goods and services should be cut and remain capped until low-carbon alternatives are available, said the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
The study says that Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions need to fall twice as fast as planned by the Government. It concludes that global greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than previously thought.
It says that Britain should commit to making all energy, including for electricity, heating and cars, zero-carbon by 2025, at least 25 years earlier than planned.







The centre, a partnership of seven universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, says that the economies of developed nations will have to shrink and consumption of almost all types of goods will have to fall “in the short to medium term”.
Speaking to The Times, Professor Kevin Anderson, the centre’s director, said: “The wealthier parts of the world, including Britain, will have to seriously consider reducing their levels of consumption over the next 10-15 years while we put in place low-carbon technologies.
“That may mean having only one car per household, a smaller fridge, buying fewer clothes and electronic goods and curtailing the number of weekend breaks that we have.
“It’s a very uncomfortable message but we need a planned economic recession. Economic growth is currently incompatible with reductions in absolute emissions.”
The study says that global emissions are rising much faster than has been assumed by Britain and other countries in setting their carbon targets. It says that these targets are “dangerously misleading” because they focus on distant dates, such as 2050, and avoid mentioning the immediate cuts that are needed.
Professor Anderson calculates that emissions in all developed countries must peak by 2012 and fall by 20 per cent a year from 2018 to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C above the pre-industrial average.
Britain and most major economies agreed in July to limit the increase to 2C to avoid an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in the developing world. The global average has already risen by almost 1C.
Most climate scientists agree that an increase above 2C is likely to trigger mass migration from countries made uninhabitable by drought and rising sea levels.

Poor Nations' Climate Adaptation Could Cost $100 Billion a Year

Helping developing countries adapt to climate change will cost the world between US$75 and $100 billion per year for the period 2010 to 2050, the World Bank said today. The figures are detailed in the most in-depth analysis of the economics of climate change adaptation published to date.
The draft consultation document was released at ongoing United Nations climate negotiations in Bangkok that are shaping a post-Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas agreement to take effect at the end of 2012.
"The costs of adapting to a 2 degree Celsius warmer world are of the same order of magnitude as current Overseas Development Assistance," said Katherine Sierra, World Bank vice president for sustainable development.

Food aid is distributed during a drought in Zimbabwe by Aktion Deutschland Hilft, 2007 (Photo courtesy World Vision)

"Faced with the prospect of huge additional infrastructure costs, as well as drought, disease and dramatic reductions in agricultural productivity, developing countries need to be prepared for the potential consequences of unchecked climate change," Sierra said. "In this respect, access to necessary financing will be critical."
The study, "Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change," funded by the governments of the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, is
President Barack Obama and the leaders of the other large industrialized countries have pledged to help the least developed countries adapt to climate change.
At the UN Climate Summit in New York in September, Obama pledged to help provide the financial and technical assistance needed to help the poorest and most vulnerable of developing nations "leap-frog dirty energy technologies and reduce dangerous emissions."
"What we are seeking, after all, is not simply an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions," said Obama. "We seek an agreement that will allow all nations to grow and raise living standards without endangering the planet."
This is the first report to develop a workable definition of adaptation costs that can set the stage for common understanding of what adaptation actually entails, what role development plays, and what policy changes are needed to facilitate adaptation.
Suggesting that countries become less vulnerable to climate change as their economies grow, the study finds that adaptation costs decline as a percentage of GDP over time.
"Economic growth is the most powerful form of adaptation," said Warren Evans, director of the World Bank’s Environment Department. "However, it cannot be business as usual. Adaptation minimizes the impacts of climate change, but it does not address its causes. There is no substitute for mitigation to reduce catastrophic risks."
In the study, adaptation costs for all developing countries are estimated for the major economic sectors using country-level data sets that have global coverage, including partial assessment of costs of adaptation for ecosystem services.
Cost implications of changes in the frequency of extreme weather events are also considered.
The study uses a new methodology for assessing these adaptation costs, comparing a future world without climate change and a future world with climate change.
The difference between these two worlds entails a series of actions to adapt to the new world conditions. The costs of these additional actions are the costs of adapting to climate change.

Rural families in Bangladesh are vulnerable to increased flooding and sea level rise, especially during the monsoon season. (Photo by Natasha Scripture courtesy World Food Programme)

A key part of the overall analysis involved estimating adaptation costs for major economic sectors under two alternative future climate scenarios, a wet scenario and a dry one.
Under the dryer scenario, the adaptation cost is estimated at US$75 billion per year, while under the scenario that assumes a wetter future climate it is US$100 billion. The drier scenario requires lower adaptation costs in all regions except South Asia.
The highest costs of adaptation will be borne by the East Asia and Pacific Region, the World Bank reports, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
"The World Bank study makes plain that taking action in favor of adaptation now can result in future savings and reduce unacceptable risks," said Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation Bert Koenders.
"At this point," Koenders said, "the costs this will entail can still be borne by the international community, to judge by the GDPs of rich countries, but for poor countries they are unacceptably high."
"More than ever, mitigation, adaptation and development cooperation are needed to make the poor less vulnerable to climate change," he said. "International public financial support for adaptation in the poorest developing countries should be new and additional, so as not to jeopardize the Millennium Development Goals."
The eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 were adopted by all nations during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. They are: eradication of extreme hunger and poverty, universal primary education, gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat disease, ensure environmental sustainability, and create a global partnership for development.
The impacts of climate change in developing countries will make many of these goals more difficult to achieve as droughts and extreme weather events, floods and sea level rise take their toll.
"The Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change study provides a range of estimates for a world in which decision makers have perfect foresight," says Sergio Margulis, lead environmental economist with the World Bank. "In the real world where decision makers hedge against a range of outcomes, the actual expenditures are potentially higher than this."
The report stresses that development strategies must maximize flexibility and incorporate knowledge about climate change as it is gained and emphasizes that many questions remain, and that further work is essential.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2009/2009-10-01-02.asp?5f868080

Smoking Bans Reduce Risk of Heart Attacks by Lowering Exposure to Secondhand Smoke

People who live in communities that ban smoking in public places--such as bars, restaurants, and government buildings--have fewer heart attacks, according to two new research studies recently reported by the National Institutes of Health.
In the communities researchers studied, the rate of heart attacks fell dramatically within one year after the smoking ban was put in place (17 percent in one study and 25 percent in the other), and dropped about 36 percent after three years, leading one researcher to estimate that a nationwide ban on smoking in public places in the United States would result in more than 154,000 fewer heart attacks annually.

Sulfur Scrubbing Gets A Boost As China Cracks Down On Pollution

Last year's Olympics in Beijing brought China to the verge of global embarrassment over its pollution problem. Only shutting down some of its factories temporarily stopped the city from choking the tourists and athletes.
But beyond such quick fixes, there are signs that China is getting more serious about its long-term environmental problems. In June 2008, the government tightened its gas emission standards.
One of its rules related to sintering, a process that makes solid alloys out of metal powder using high heat. The process emits sulfur dioxide when powered by coal, so the new rules mandate desulfurization equipment on all coal-fired sinters.
Builds Better Mousetrap
Enter Rino International (NasdaqGM:RINO - News) of Dalian, China. More than three-quarters of its sales come from flue gas desulfurization systems, or FGD, designed for that very niche. It costs about a third of what the competition costs without sacrificing quality, says Chief Financial Officer Jenny Liu.
"Our technology can remove 92% to 93% of sulfur," she said. "The current technology can only remove 88%."
So far, the company has installed 29 systems in the sintering facilities of China's major steel producers, more than half of all such installations in China. Its most recent deployment, which started Sept. 8, is a $14 million deal with Hunan Lianyuan Iron and Steel Co. The technology is a new ammonia-based FGD system called DXT, which resolves an earlier issue over what to do with the waste products the process creates, Liu says. DXT's waste comes in the form of ammonia sulfate, which can be used as fertilizer.
There should be more business in the pipeline, according to analyst Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Only about 10% of the 500 or so sinters in China have had FGD gear installed. And unlike some sectors of the Chinese market, the steel industry seems to be expected to comply.
"In many cases where polluters have not adhered to the new laws, arrests have been made," Dayal wrote in his Sept. 3 initiation report. "In regards to Rino's position in this context, a majority of its customers are state-owned steel entities that cannot avoid meeting these mandates."
The FGD business has driven explosive growth. In 2005, Rino pulled just $3.6 million in sales, but last year it reached $139 million. In the second quarter of this year, profit jumped 86% from last year to 39 cents a share. Sales rose 18% to $40.7 million.
Though FGD sales climbed a brisk 20% in the quarter, it wasn't the fastest-growing segment. That honor went to wastewater treatment, whose sales vaulted 53.4% to $6 million. Strange as it sounds, the customer base for this is the same as for FGD gear. Iron-making blast furnaces and steel-making converters both consume and expel large amounts of water, contributing to industrial pollution.
Rino's Lamella wastewater treatment system cost $4 million to install and draws a 40% gross margin for the company. But it is a somewhat more mature market than FGD. Dayal says 68% of blast furnaces and 54% of converters already have treatment systems, some of them installed by the steel producers without recourse to third-party vendors.
Wastewater treatment is Rino's original product line, launched when its first facility started production in 2003. Since then, the firm has been developing new equipment jointly with the research departments of several Chinese universities.
Apart from the FGD line, this system has produced an anti-oxidation technology to combat pollution from production of hot-rolled steel. That drew $1.1 million in sales in the second quarter. Last year, the R&D department also created dust-catching and sludge-treatment technology, but this has yet to produce revenue.
Meanwhile, demand for the existing products has been so brisk that Rino is outsourcing some of its work. This has put pressure on margins, since the firm generally benefits from controlling the supply chain. Liu says the company is "in the closing stage" of a deal to buy another piece of land in Dalian where it will build a factory.
Becoming Visible
The growth has helped raise Rino's U.S. profile. It first started trading on the Nasdaq in 2007 after a complicated reverse merger, but it was trading only around 3,000 shares a day and rarely topped $10 in price. In July, however, it was upgraded to the Nasdaq Global Market, and hired U.S.-educated Liu as CFO. The price and volume both shot up, and it now trades about 600,000 shares a day at over 20.
So far Dayal is the only analyst to launch coverage, but his outlook is promising. The main thing to keep an eye on, in his view, is the restructuring of China's steel industry. It got hit by the global recession like everybody else, causing an ongoing consolidation of production into a few companies. This could potentially limit demand for Rino's products.
But that still leaves room for growth. Dayal expects earnings to jump 122% this year to $1.91 a share, climbing 11% next year to $2.09.