Air Travel and Climate Change

The long-running saga of London's Heathrow airport and its need for a 3rd runway took a next turn yesterday with a commission report that made a convincing case: Heathrow is at capacity, London continues to grow as a global financial center, demand is expected to rise by a whopping 200% in coming decades. On the other hand, the usual suspects--noise, pollution, degradation of adjacent neighborhoods--defeated the runway once before, and may do so again, since their champion is London's flamboyant mayor, and the Tory party's shadow leader, Boris Johnson. Yesterday's report changed the odds, but didn't resolve the issue.

Entirely missing from the New York Times (AP) article, and only mentioned in passing by the Guardian, is another troublesome fact: airplanes are major emitters of greenhouse gases, with no real technological remedy in sight, and the quick fixes--crowding more people onto fully booked flights--largely played out. So how will the UK--and every other wealthy country, and some not-so-wealthy ones--address the fact that ever-increasing demand for air travel is at cross purposes with essential climate goals?

It's a thorny problem, but Guardian columnist Andrew Simms wades in with some useful thoughts. Decrying air travel's "massive carbon free-rider pass," Simms suggests we take a closer look at what generates the heavy demand. Business travel, an essential feature of the global economy? Not as much as you'd think: 11% of the UK's international flight traffic by his count. Middle class affluence? Half of the UK's population--the poorer half, one imagines--don't fly at all, while 15% of the population--from posh addresses--represent 70% of all flights, largely for "leisure" travel. These affluent 'frequent flyers,' as Simms perhaps hyperbolically notes, are headed mainly to "recognized tax havens." In any case, their flights are arguably inessential if not frankly self-indulgent.

What to do? Simms addresses the business travel question by noting the success of teleconferencing during the no-fly period that followed a volcanic eruption in Iceland a few years ago. Businesses found a low-carbon substitute for airplanes in the internet, and some have retained that model. For the rest, Simms suggests what any economist would: very high taxes to capture the externalized pollution costs of air travel, to reduce demand (and relieve the need for a new runway). But would this really work in the luxury travel market?

What I imagine is a small group of the highly privileged for whom price incentives don't work all that well. Raise taxes and drive out the price-sensitive middle class, while those tax-haven-bound high rollers will just pay--as they do for 1st class and other amenities--without really noticing the extra cost. Is this a feature only of luxury markets, or a paradigm for all carbon exchange markets? Will they be a mechanism to reduce emissions overall, or a way for the rich to fund our shared catastrophe with accumulated wealth so great they can--and do--spend it without regard? If airline travel--the discretionary kind--is ecologically unacceptable, does it help to raise the cost? Or does it need some other kind of control? These aren't the questions driving the Heathrow debate at present, but we can thank Mr. Simms for enlarging the debate in that direction.

Is Brazil Down with the Climate Program?

Maybe President Obama meant it when he declared his intention to make climate change a main focus of his second term. (It was hardly visible at all for the first term, but that's old news.) In any case, after his historic agreement in China last fall, his rhapsodic--though rather thin on specifics--encounter with India's prime minister Modi last winter, now it's Brazil's turn. President Rousseff was in Washington to celebrate a 'US-Brazil climate partnership' whose purpose seems to be to maximize Brazil's INDC proposal for the Paris conference. Brazil's plan will reportedly commit to generating up to a third of its power by renewable sources by 2030, a sizable step though less than the global goal of 40%.

But as with any large economy--and Brazil is the largest greenhouse gas emitter after the US, China, and the EU--the story is a complicated one. Brazil has reduced its emissions considerably over the past decade, partly by slowing deforestation in the Amazon. But its current commitment is to eliminate illegal deforestation while permitting landowners to cut 20% of their trees. Reforestation of the 750 million hectares cut down since 1970 is proceeding at a minuscule rate, and the problems of illegal cutting are well-documented. Critics note that Brazil is also making little effort to curb growth in its burgeoning transportation--read: private auto--sector, while exploitation of large off-shore oil reserves continues apace. In short, the problem of rapidly developing economies whose energy consumption rises a lot faster than conversion to renewables is epitomized in Brazil.

Can the US partnership help move Brazil toward greener solutions? We may see an answer in the formal submission of Brazil's INDC in  October, but really the answers will more likely come later, after Paris, after the US has a new president--and after more weather disasters like Brazil's current drought add urgency to the question.

Moving the Paris Agenda

Environmental ministers for the 28 EU countries have been at work on a draft proposal for the Paris climate conference that promises to incorporate at least 2 major elements of a successful agreement. The ministers will meet in a formal European Council session in September to finalize their draft, but as reported by The Guardian, the ministers will try to insist on these key elements:

• They call first for a legally binding agreement that will guarantee consistency and compliance in the face of earlier failures of nations to keep their promises. Some nations, such as India, have suggested they have no intention of signing such a binding agreement. China has also been reluctant, but Chinese officials will be meeting with EU officials on the climate question in Brussels tomorrow, so it will be important to see how far the Chinese position has evolved. Meanwhile the US will need to walk the high wire, pursing an agreement that is meaningful but doesn't require Congressional approval (since we managed to elect a Congress whose majority is pre-scientific).
• The EU draft proposal also calls for 5-year reviews of all agreements--a measure strongly supported by climate advocates, and heard with increasing frequency in the pre-conference discussions. On the one hand, this is a concession to limited expectations: no one thinks the Paris agreement will reach a satisfactory resolution, and therefore many participants are looking for ways to make sure the work continues after December. The 5-year reviews are seen by many as the chance to strengthen commitments and ramp up ambitions moving forward.

A third key proposal that needs to be worked up before the Paris meeting is the question of financial support by wealthy nations for the Green Climate Fund, or some other mechanism to aid poorer countries in their energy transformation. The EU finance ministers will meet in a formal Council session in October to prepare a draft proposal, though important international meetings will take place in Addis Ababa next month, and in New York in September, on this delicate question.

What all this activity means for Paris is far from clear--the question of massive international transfers of development money, and of legally binding agreements, are particularly thorny. What we can see, though, is the the EU is determined to play its historic role as the large entity most concerned to move these agenda items. (An interesting analysis of that role can be found here.)In the absence of US political consensus, and with the problematic positions of other heavyweights like China and India, the EU has to assume that leadership role, and it seems to be doing just that.

Methane: Friend or Foe?

Will fracking save us (as David Brooks and other conservative commentators are wont to say)? Certainly natural gas is 'cleaner,' isn't it? And so the infusion of cheap, clean fossil fuel, crowding out dirty coal and dirty oil, will at least buy us time, won't it? Or be the 'bridge' to a renewable energy economy many decades from now? With new research posted by the Environmental Defense Fund, the question needs a closer look.

What the EDF suggests is that leakage of methane threatens to negate most of the gains from gas conversion, in a calculus that is complicated and subject to a variety of measurements. Leaks can be controlled--at considerable expense--but without those controls the leakage is somewhat rampant, with no strong economic incentive to reduce it.
Obama's EPA is entering the list with new rules, but these will pertain only to new wells, and lead to reductions of 40-45% of current natural gas emissions. If natural gas is to play the role envisioned for it in the next several decades, a more rigorous approach to controlling methane leaks will be needed. And the EDF's round-up of research projects suggests that this could indeed happen ... subject as always to political will, and threatened by the lobbying power of hugely wealthy producers.

Meanwhile Bill McKibben, in the June 29 issue of the New Yorker, points to a simpler and potentially more comprehensive solution: solar panels on houses everywhere, connecting to the grid, using new battery storage techniques, bypassing the grid altogether in remoter areas, changing the whole power dynamics of utilities companies and consumers. Feasible? Technically yes, as his article makes quite clear. Economically and politically likely? Only if the inertia and self-dealing among utilities executives and their political allies can be tamed.

Which will be easier, regulating the frackers, or winning over the utilities? Well, fortunately we don't have to choose. Both will carry us a long way toward safer ground. But only if we make our policy makers make them happen.

Has Francis Got It Right?

Now that the pope's climate encyclical has had a few days to settle, we can see another value to it: it has stimulated (alongside some incredibly dismissive conservative reactions) a healthy debate on many sides, including in the New York Times, which has not been a steady contributor to that debate. Perhaps the most interesting of these was the op-ed by philosopher Joseph Heath, who respectfully challenges Francis's critique of carbon exchange markets. The encyclical roundly decries speculation in these markets, and deployment of market forces in general. Francis advocates instead a morality of austerity and sacrifice, a refusal of consumerism and limitless growth in the material sphere--themes that have inspired this pope and most of his modern predecessors in contexts quite distinct from environmental crises.

I must admit to a certain hostility to consumerism myself, an attraction to frugality, and a desire that Americans and other profligates would reduce their consumption of fossil fuels and other stuff as well. But could this be policy? For all the moral clarity of his critique, I'm not sure Pope Francis in these passages is leading us to a useful set of solutions. As Heath and many others have noted, the consensus among economists that only carbon market adjustments can reduce greenhouse gas emissions is just as strong as the climate change hypothesis among earth scientists. Even the pope should be wary of cherry picking his science.

But is the confidence in carbon exchange markets well placed? The subject is very technical, but I'm not at all convinced. First there is the justice problem: would the accrued wealth of developed nations be translated into continued high levels of carbon emission, while the gap in energy consumption between them and the poorer nations remains unaltered? More pragmatically, at what price are carbon allowances to be traded? If the price is too low--as seems to have happened in Europe--traders trade without particularly encouraging any reduction in carbon or transfer to renewable sources. Some experts in California claim their carbon exchange has been more effective, but I'd need to see a lot more evidence--not market theory--before I was convinced.

And that brings us back to the larger scope of Francis's critique: his language is deeply suspicious of capitalist market forces, because he can see how corrosive they are of communal goals such as the shared stewardship of the earth. Can such means be directed toward a very different, collectively beneficial end? History is not encouraging, and neither is the behavior of the largest players, the energy companies. As these corporations become advocates for carbon markets, are they anticipating reductions in profit, or a new set of market manipulations that will leave us on the same road to catastrophe? Francis suspects the latter; so do I. Maybe we're both just ignorant of economics, and saturated in left-wing hatred of so-called free markets. I frankly don't see how to translate that anti-market (anti-liberal in Heath's terms) ideology into viable climate policy. But if international carbon markets are established at the Paris conference or in its aftermath, we should all be concerned that market forces might simply reconfigure the status quo without driving the huge energy transformation we need.

Thank You, Pope Francis

What right does the Pope have to butt into public policy issues? What does he know about science, or economics, or any of that Real Men stuff? That's what candidate Jeb Bush wants to know, and a host of other embarrassed Catholic Republican politicians.

And it's a legitimate question: if we don't want the Pope's opinions on, say, reproductive health and procreation to influence our policies, why do we care about his ideas on climate and ecology?

First, he's using real science, drawing on his respected (Lutheran!) advisor from the Potsdam Institute Joachim Schellnhuber, who also advises Chancellor Merkel on climate matters. First assessments put the Pope's text on the cautious side of the scientific discussion. What to make of the claim (Bush's, among others') that Popes should stick to theology and leave science alone, as if theology dealt with some world other than our own? Catholic teaching has embraced science, ill or well, for 150 years, because it insists that religious faith is practiced in living, in the actual world, not alongside it.

But more especially, Pope Francis has established himself as a moral teacher, perhaps the best Pope in this role since John XXIII. And what he brings to the global conversation--more effectively than the most astute climate scientist or economist--is its moral dimension. Climate change is a technical problem, which needs to be addressed with technical changes both to the economics and the physics of energy use. But it is also a moral problem: the climate crisis is part of the problem of global inequality, the disproportionate appropriation of the world's goods by elites. The carbonized atmosphere is the largest imaginable instance of this justice deficit: the entire planet dangerously polluted, inflicting drought, desertification, hunger, and ultimately migration on the earth's poorest dwellers, mainly to benefit the excessive profits and consumption of the richest few. The Papal Encyclical is perhaps the most powerful framing yet of this moral problem of climate justice.

Of course like candidate Bush, the other minions of the Koch brothers, and certain disgruntled Catholic conservatives, we can reject Francis's teaching. He has no automatic claim to our allegiance. But he does claim our attention. He'll seize it again in September when he addresses Congress and then the UN general assembly. He speaks powerfully, and in this instance, credibly. He has made himself a valuable ally, and that alone is justification for the role he is claiming with this encyclical.

Common Sense on Energy

The International Energy Agency issued a pre-Paris report yesterday which is both clarifying and distressing in its implications, but in any case worth looking at closely. The IEA, an independent agency founded in the oil shock days of the 1970s, includes as members most of the world's wealthy nations, and speaks authoritatively on matters of global energy resources. Here are some highlights:

• Context: The IEA's executive director, renowned energy economist Fatih Birol, has stated (as have many others) that allowing greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2030 (the target of many INDC plans submitted so far) will lead to "catastrophic" temperatures well above the dangerous 2C level. The IEA urges instead that the Paris agreement point toward peak emissions by 2020, and goes on to show how this could be done.
• Their biggest proposal is to speed up the conversion, in massive coal-burning economies, from outmoded and wasteful coal plants to modern cleaner ones, while banning the construction of new (cheaper) old-fashioned coal plants. They call this a 'bridge' plan en route to fully renewable energy down the road.   
• Other items in this 'Bridge Scenario' include increasing investment in renewable power generation by 50% (to $400 billion per year); regulating oil and gas production to prevent the spillage of methane, an unregulated practice that now causes huge methane pollution, a major source of greenhouse gas; and the phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies by governments world-wide, now estimated to amount to $5 trillion annually. 

Is the IEA correct that these are feasible ways to accelerate the work of greenhouse gas reduction? You bet. Will they hold temperatures at acceptable levels? No one quite knows, but peaking at 2020 is a whole lot safer than 2030. 

The IEA also offered a set of three other 'pillars' to guide the Paris deliberations. These useful suggestions include: 1) endorsing the long-term goal of a carbon-free global economy (as the G7 leaders did last week); 2) instituting 5-year reviews starting in 2020 to check on progress, nation by nation, as a mechanism for 'raising ambitions'; and setting up a global tracking system to measure worldwide energy transition.  

So the IEA's report, though it breaks no real new ground, is a useful and rigorous summary of what the Paris conference might sensibly agree to. But is there political will to institute these proposals? That's the big question. And here's an anecdotal answer:

Last week, in a little-noted move, the US House Appropriations Committee removed the $3 billion the Obama administration is seeking to fund the Green Climate Fund for developing nations (already, at 3% of the globally agreed total, a disappointingly small sum). Instead, House Republicans proposed using the money for security at facilities like the Benghazi consulate (take that, candidate Clinton!), and proposed releasing funding for worldwide coal-based(!!) projects. Political will? Here at home, not so good.