Climate, Politics, & Tea

There was a fascinating feature article in the New York Times today (“Wanted: A New Home for My Country”) profiling the president of the Maldives and his dilemma over how the Maldives should adapt to climate change. Sea level rise is the big threat they’re facing since the Maldives are an average of 4 feet above sea level. They are currently pursuing two strategies: becoming carbon neutral and approaching other countries about buying a new homeland for their people. The first strategy is really more of a political ploy since obviously the Maldives going carbon neutral would do next to nothing to reduce global carbon emissions.

As the article points out, there are a couple of factors that make understanding the impact of sea level rise on the Maldives more complicated than just comparing the projected global average sea level rise to the average elevation of the Maldives. First, regional sea level rise is not the same as the global average, and the net sea level rise for the Maldives may be reduced if storms bring sand that can build up the islands further. Second, and not mentioned in the article, salinization of the water supply could force people to move or invest in desalinization before sea level rises enough to drown them out. These complications have led to the controversy reported in the article over what residents of the Maldives should expect in terms of sea level rise in the next few decades and whether or not they’ll have to relocate.

Despite the various complications involved in making sea level rise predictions for the Maldives, one thing seems very clear to me and was not mentioned in the article: melting of either the Greenland Ice Sheet and/or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would be the end of the Maldives. Melting of either ice sheet would raise sea levels by 5-7 meters; granted this would take several hundred years, so it would be possible for the nation to artificially build up their islands over that amount of time, although I’m not sure whether or not such an investment would be more expensive than relocating. “Business as usual” scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. those with no climate policy) would lead to ice sheet collapse. Some recent studies suggest that in order to avoid an ice sheet collapse, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations need to stabilize at 350-450ppm, which would basically require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak and start declining within the next decade or two (at the most). It is a bit unfortunate that the NYT article didn’t mention this issue, since it seems like there would be less controversy among Maldivians if the issue were simply framed as: don’t let climate change proceed to the point that locks us into 5-7 meters of long term sea level rise. Even this modest demand from the Maldives would already be a serious political challenge.

Apologies for the long time without posting. I suspect that posting will continue to be sporadic until this semester is over …

But, I was quite excited to see the Environmental Protection Agency officially released this major announcement on Friday:

“EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Threat to Public Health, Welfare / Proposed Finding Comes in Response to 2007 Supreme Court Ruling”

After a long scientific review process, the EPA has come to the conclusion that greenhouse gases, via the climate change that they cause, pose a threat to public health and welfare. This may not come as a shock to a lot of people, but it has the very significant implication that the EPA will now be able to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. (Actually the EPA’s conclusion published yesterday is only a “proposed finding;” the “final finding” will not be released until after a public comment period, and only then could regulations be imposed).

Some background on this issue:
In 2003, the EPA Administrator decided that the EPA lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and, if it did in fact have the authority, it wasn’t going to regulate them anyway. [1]. Twelve states and several cities sued the EPA over its refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars. The Supreme Court ruled against the EPA in April 2007 (Massachusetts v. EPA), finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants and therefore the EPA would have to regulate them under the Clean Air Act if they were found to endanger public health and welfare. The Bush EPA basically sat on this court order, dragging its feet until Bush left office.

The interesting thing about the Clean Air Act, which I was only recently made aware of, is that the legislation requires the EPA to put public health and welfare first when making regulations. That is, the economic costs don’t enter into the EPA’s pollution standards; they only enter into the second stage when deciding how to go about achieving a given reduction in pollutants. This is how the national ambient air quality standards are set for the major air pollutants (particulate matter, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead). After my non-expert reading of the relevant section of the Clean Air Act, I’m pretty sure that the same situation would also apply to greenhouse gases, now that they are considered a threat to public health and welfare. Thus, I would suspect that utilities and other carbon-intensive industries would much prefer having a carbon policy imposed by Congress, where they will likely get more of a say in shaping the legislation, rather than having a mandate slapped down on them by the EPA. It will be very interesting to see if/how this new statement from the EPA will change the dynamics of the climate bill debate in Congress in the coming months.

I have been getting depressed lately over the fear that Congress will fail to pass significant climate legislation this year ([1]; [2]). So I’m writing this post in an attempt to cheer myself by pointing out all the other work that could still be done even without a national framework.

Suppose a comprehensive piece of climate legislation does not pass Congress. There is still a fair amount that the president and Energy Secretary Chu can do through regulatory measures and other government programs. I’ll focus here on energy efficiency, although regulatory agencies can also weigh in on other areas (e.g. by creating a national low carbon fuel standard, modeled on California’s example). To give some perspective, building energy use is responsible for almost 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; residential buildings for 18%. And making new homes energy efficient won’t be sufficient; existing homes consume about 90% of the amount of energy that will be used by the country’s housing stock in 2030. ([3];[4]; [5])

Even if we do pass cap and trade legislation (the most likely form that a national climate bill would take), a lot of other regulations and programs will still be necessary to encourage energy efficiency. That is because energy efficiency represents a huge market failure – there is an estimated 600 million tons per year of carbon emissions reductions available through energy efficiency at net negative cost (compared to total U.S. emissions in 2005 of 7.2 billion), according to a recent report by McKinsey . Various market barriers have prevented people from taking advantage of these savings. For example, alternatives with higher upfront cost won’t necessarily be chosen even though they save money on energy bills in the long run. Adding another market (a carbon market) on top of the existing market won’t solve these problems.

One of the barriers to improving energy efficiency that I’m becoming increasingly aware of is the lack of skilled people to actually do the necessary work. I recently heard a talk by someone from the California Building Performance Contractors Association estimating that the average California home could save 60-80% of its energy use through improved efficiency. Unfortunately there just are not that many people trained to do whole home energy audits; most contractors are trained in narrower sub-specialties and whole home performance retrofits hasn’t yet taken off as an industry. There are about a dozen contractors certified by the CBPCA in the entire San Francisco Bay Area. On a smaller scale, we are seeing pretty much the exact same thing on my campus – not pursuing energy efficiency projects as vigorously as we could simply for lack of trained staff. So we seem to be running up against a human capacity issue that environmental groups, in their focus on designing cap and trade legislation during the Bush years, seem not to have put a lot of thought into addressing (but I could be wrong here).

One silver lining of the economic crisis is that it is finally providing the impetus to take this human capital problem seriously. There is a pretty strong argument for government-funded job training programs that would result in (a) employment; and (b) lower energy bills.

Fortunately our president seems to be taking energy efficiency extremely seriously. The stimulus bill provided $800 million in job training programs for energy efficiency. It also provided $5 billion for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)’s Weatherization Assistance Program; for some perspective, in 2008 EERE requested a budget of $200 million for weatherization. The Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development just announced a $16 billion partnership to use stimulus bill money for residential energy efficiency.

My point with all of this is that, regardless of whether or not we pass a climate bill, there is still a ton of important work that can happen and is happening through government programs and regulatory agencies to drive significant emissions reductions. If a climate bill fails this year, one might hope that continued emphasis and funding for energy efficiency could help build the momentum and the public awareness of the climate crisis needed to accept a climate bill in the (near) future. But it would obviously better to pass serious national climate legislation as soon as possible since efficiency alone will never get us where we need to be.