As national pledges (INDCs) for greenhouse gas reduction pile up at the UNFCCC office in Bonn, in preparation for the Paris conference, do you ever wonder how all these nations are going to meet those sometimes ambitious goals? I do. Of course there are some obvious answers:  President Obama tightens regulations of coal-fired plants, putting some out of business and making it unlikely that others will ever be built. Carbon exchange markets in China, subsidies for renewable installations in Europe, challenges to fossil fuel subsidies, an expanded nuclear power sector in India ... there are pretty tangible policy decisions of many sorts that will clearly take us part-way there.

But what about all the independent economic agents, the individual consumers like you and me, and--maybe less visible to the rest of us--the private corporations who drive much of the energy sector wherever they operate? An interesting light was shone on this missing piece of the puzzle in this morning's New York Times, as a group of some of the world's largest corporations joined the existing coalition of such companies taking actions to avert the unfavorable business climate which would result from climate change.  What sorts of actions? According to the article:

"The efforts include less overall use of energy and water, more recycling, more use of renewable energy, and a wave of promises to improve the supply chains for commodities like soybeans, palm oil and beef. These are often produced in the tropics, creating powerful financial incentives to chop down forests, which not only contributes to global warming but destroys some the world’s richest biological regions."

In sum, companies are interested in some substantial changes in how they produce. For example Astra Agro, one of Indonesia's largest palm oil producers and a major influence on forestry policies, could significantly alter the political equation that permits Indonesia's disastrous loss of tropical forest.

Is this international coalition of global corporations for real, or is it just another greenwashing effort? Probably some of both, though it would be hard to tell in the short term. What is surely true, though, is that in the current climate of opinion, it seems important for these powerhouse companies to burnish their credentials on climate questions. That in itself--along with the Pope's visit, some Republican defectors from denialism, and much else--suggests that we are reaching a critical mass of public support. About time.

All Politics is Local 2.0

While last fall's historic climate summit between Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping has been justly celebrated as a milestone for the climate movement, something arguably more interesting happened in Los Angeles earlier this week. Representatives of several dozen municipal and state governments from each country met to discuss specific cooperative programs and technology exchanges, with an important goal: to implement last fall's broad bilateral agreements, but also to accelerate and deepen commitments made by their national governments. Given the sclerotic impediments of the Chinese system, and the obstructionist tendencies of the legislative branch of our own federal government, these local initiatives may prove to be the most effective mechanism by far to bring the world's two largest national producers of greenhouse gas into alignment with the urgent goals of the Paris conference.

What will these city-to-city partnerships look like? You can read the lengthy list of projects here. Among the more impressive instances are pledges by Beijing and Guangzhou to reach peak levels of carbon emission by 2020, rather than the target of 2030 set by the national government. Overall, the group of Chinese cities declaring accelerated rates of energy conversion represent 25% of China's total urban carbon emission--a significant amount by any measure.

On the American side, California, both the state and a large number of its cities, are taking the lead with a state-wide goal of 80-90% carbon reduction by 2050. Seattle, meanwhile, has pledged to become carbon neutral--no new emissions--by 2050. Among the dozen or so American cities at the summit was Boston--a fact that hasn't yt come to the attention of local media.

Beyond the setting of ambitious goals, the conference put into place collaborative systems, drawing on advances in both countries, to help municipalities achieve these goals. One such joint effort is the California-China Urban Climate Collaborative, an initiative to share planning and policy ideas between the two countries as well as building connections between clean technology companies. Another is the agreement between Shenzhen, Guangdong, and Los Angeles to share best practices in green construction and ship pollution containment. China also brings to the table advances in smart grid design and low-emission transportation, among other successes.

Will all these arrangements work? Part of me is suspicious of grand announcements and bureaucratic fixes, but the fact is, much of what needs to happen with decarbonization needs to happen locally. California has proven the truth of this with its notable successes under two administrations, and cities like Portland OR and Seattle have leaped ahead of national targets. Maybe most significant is the high level of participation by major Chinese cities. The world has to believe that the US and China are serious about climate policy if any global progress is to be made in Paris--and if we have a prayer of containing emissions levels at a livable level. Yesterday's summary announcement in Los Angeles may come to be seen as a historic breakthrough in the nick of time.

Will Australia Join the Climate Movement?

No one should mistake the abrupt change in Australia's  leadership for a 'green revolution.' While it is true that deposed Liberal leader Tony Abbott was possibly the world's most powerful climate change denier, a PM whose economic policy focused on the promotion of coal production ("coal is good for humanity," he infamously remarked just last year), his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, has pledged not to change Australia's energy policy in the short term. That policy includes an INDC pledge to the Paris conference that is widely regarded as inadequate, especially given Australia's central role in coal export and consumption, and given the clear failure of Abbott's climate plan, an Emissions Reduction Fund that actually pays corporations to increase their fossil fuel consumption.

Beyond that bleak picture, though, there is some reason for hope: Turnbull, after all, was a supporter of Australia's path-breaking carbon exchange program in 2009, support which caused him to lose his leadership position to Abbott, who killed the exchange last year and replaced it with the toothless ERF. Furthermore, without any dramatic policy initiatives, Turnbull could--as The Guardian's Lenore Taylor points out--adjust the baseline against which emissions are measured to make the ERF an effective tool, quite similar in fact to the defunct carbon exchange system. But will he?

On the one hand Turnbull is a conservative, tenuously restored to power and not eager to put his majority on the line. On the other he clearly was on the green edge of the Liberal Party before Abbott pushed him out. Maybe more to the point, his mandate is economic development, and Abbot's vision of a coal-based future for Australia's economy--quite apart from its offensive repudiation of the whole global movement to limit emissions, especially coal-driven--looks like economic nonsense as the coal industry contracts.

There are many twists and turns on the long road to bring the world's nations--all 195--to some effective consensus on climate policy. Australia, with the world's 19th largest economy, is neither a key player nor an irrelevant one. Tony Abbott, with his big mouth and tone-deaf ear, played a disproportionately large role in undermining that consensus. If he leaves the stage, or at least loses his megaphone, even to another business-minded conservative, this can only be a good thing. Maybe Turnbull will seize the historic moment to do even more.

Sunny Side Up

As I've mentioned, the COP 21 Paris climate conference officially happens in early December, but the essential work of the conference is happening right now. Last week's negotiations in Bonn were one manifestation of that; another is the extensive commentary that is appearing, both about the UNFCCC process and the many other facets of the issue, even here in the US, where consciousness has lagged far behind most of the rest of the world.

One extraordinary instance of this is the essay by commentator Jonathan Chait in the current issue of New York magazine (from which I've borrowed this rather stunning image from photographer Ralph Smith). Chait efficiently sums up the key indices of the problem, the history of the global process to address it, and in particular, some recent instances of 'issue fatigue' that make it hard to sustain a public discourse about it. But his real point is to address that mood of avoidance or despair that has immobilized many a concerned person--hence his title: "The Sunniest Climate-Change Story You've Ever Read." I would encourage anyone to read the whole piece, but here are a few points that struck me:

• First, Chait schematizes the challenge to address climate change as a dialectic between governmental mandates on an international scale, and technological innovation of a free-form, mostly private sector and rather decentralized nature (an interplay between "edict and invention," as he puts it). Government mandates won't help unless they can be realized with efficient, not hopelessly expensive technical means. But those innovations will have trouble flourishing without support from the public sector--and protection from the destructive efforts of powerful existing energy corporations, a point Chait perhaps under-emphasizes. (A timely instance: the oil interests in California just yesterday killed a legislative bill that would have mandated reductions in gasoline consumption, and thus opened a huge market opportunity for electric cars and other transit alternatives.)
• Second, he documents the wildly accelerating efficiency of solar energy in particular but also wind and other non-carbon alternatives, applying the logic of Moore's Law (which postulated the amazing progression of computer chip capacity) to these technologies. The sunshine in his title is more than a metaphor, and the possibilities for rapid solar conversion--if one had the investment capital and the political will--are there for all to see.
• There is, though, a particularly concerning dark cloud that could blow over this cheerful scenario and block the sun's healing power: the Republican Party, the only major party in the world, as he notes, that is still locked in delusional denial and insanely anti-scientific dogma. Unfortunately, that party controls the legislative branch of the world's most powerful nation, largest economy, and second largest source of greenhouse gas. The threat of Republican obstruction, and the nightmare of a denialist President taking office in 2017 and undoing all the executive actions taken so far, is a major impediment to the rest of the world. It may already have doomed the possibility of legally binding agreements in Paris, and undermines whatever trust the other nations might have in the UNFCCC process--and trust is the essential currency of this unprecedented effort to address an existential problem by international consensus. 

Chait lays this out for us with articulate logic, which is why I think it is one of the most useful articles on any  subject I have seen in quite a while. Follow the link, above, and read it.

Traffic Slows on the Auto-Bonn to Paris

Negotiators from all 195 COP nations were meeting in Bonn last week, trying to get the UNFCCC draft agreement into manageable shape for the Paris conference. This process has been at work in a sense for 4 years, but more actively since the Geneva meetings in February. Now, with about 10 weeks and 5 official meeting days left till Paris, lots of folks are offering a range of opinions on the crucial question: how's it going, and will there be a strong, substantive text that all parties will be willing to sign onto in December? Here are some key opinions on the state of negotiations after last week's meeting:

• The 'Elders,' a distinguished group of global leaders led by Kofi Annan, Graca Machel, and Mary Robinson, declared that the negotiations were stalemated, and called on National leaders to intervene directly to find common ground, not only for Paris but for the the Sustainable Development Goals agreement to be hashed out in New York late this month.
• Guaranteed funding for the promised $100 billion/year mitigation and adaptation ("loss and damage") fund (aka the Green Climate Fund) remains a potential deal breaker for the developing nations (the 134 nations in the 'G77' group) who will need the funding to implement their own plans. About 20 of the wealthiest nations, including the US and the EU, issued a statement last week in Bonn that laid out complex rules for how this money would be accounted (the point is in part to avoid counting existing funding in the total). While precise modes and pledges are far from ready, the signatories do seem committed to a transparent process--involving a very complex array of national, international, public/private, and other sorts of funding--a good sign, but not yet a deal.
• Procedurally, the Bonn meeting took a big step by delegating to  smaller group of co-chairs the task of producing a new, streamlined draft of the UNFCCC agreement by early October. That would set the stage for finalizing the Paris document in advance of the actual Paris conference--an essential deadline if any meaningful agreement is to be reached at the huge Paris event. Various participants pointed to this procedural move as a major display of trust by national delegates--riven as they are by tensions and competing interests--though it could also be seen as a desperate maneuver to break through the logjam that has so far produced diffuse, unusable drafts.

It has long been clear that these months leading up to Paris would determine the real work of forging global agreements that the Paris meeting will only have time to acknowledge, perhaps tweak, and sign. The phrase 'legally binding' is being used with greater frequency in these preliminaries, though it isn't at all clear that major players such as the US, China, and India will sign any such thing. Diplomats speak an inscrutable tongue, so it's hard to know really how much mistrust, difference of opinion, and outright resistance is being rubbed away in these seemingly nonstop sessions such as the one in Bonn. But the declaration of some--that the sessions are doing much better than those that preceded Copenhagen--should perhaps be taken as a good sign, if not quite a promise.

Showdown in Sacramento

California is poised to extend its leadership on climate change as a pair of sweeping bills seek passage this week. Supported by Governor Jerry Brown, both bills passed the state senate in June, but passage by the Assembly looks like a close call as the bills advance to a vote as early as this Tuesday. Legislators are well aware that climate activists all over the world are watching them, and the Assembly's action will massively shape the message Governor Brown hopes to bring to Paris in December.

How sweeping are these measures? One requires the state to reduce all greenhouse emissions by 80% over 1990 levels by 2050. Another mandates a 50% reduction in automotive emissions by 2030, and requires as well that 50% of the state's electrical production come from renewable sources. Together the bills would mandate a seismic shift in California's energy systems, with changes in automotive habits and technologies happening with uncomfortable speed in this particularly auto-dependent culture. The changes required by these mandates are epochal, and would set a high bar for the rest of the world in the run-up to Paris.

How will these mandates be achieved? That's the sticking point--the bills don't say, and this gap has given force to a massive lobbying campaign by automotive and petroleum interests. Legislators say they are reluctant to vote for a bill whose enforcement provisions are unspecified, and who can blame them? Meanwhile authors of the bills are working to fill in some of the gaps with amendments that at least rule out measures such as gas rationing and fines for overconsumption. The amendments are designed specifically to win over moderate Democrats to make a majority in the Assembly, and they may prevail. But larger questions remain about the strategy of sweeping mandates, with implementation to be decided later, i.e. by subsequent legislators.

But of course the whole UNFCCC process is built on the same model: nations are committing to goals, sweeping or otherwise, but not generally to modes of achieving them. The struggle in California in that sense mirrors the global one, where promises are only as good as the methods for achieving them. The maneuvering in the California Assembly, powered by interests largely opposed to any climate change measures, will be instructive as to how much of the detail can be mandated along with the goals. A lot hinges on what happens over the next several days in Sacramento.

China and Climate: Macro-Problems, Macro-Solutions

Dramatic convulsions in the Chinese equity markets, rippling through the world's exchanges, combined with currency instabilities, talk of a broader collapse of a Chinese 'bubble economy,' seisms in international commodity markets, and more ... It seems clear that the global economy is going through a turbulent transition as China's mega-economy heads for a 'correction,' a 'slow-down,' or maybe a complete bust. But how will any of these scenarios affect the move to transform global energy use and reduce carbon emissions?

It seems clear that the Great Recession of 2008-09 was the single most effective means yet to control carbon consumption, but alas, it's a painful, temporary, and ultimately counter-productive way to do it. China's annual GDP growth rate has halved to a 'mere' 6-7 %, but that's still a lot of increased energy use. And the effects of a Chinese downturn are multiple, even perverse, and not so easy to predict. For example:

• Chinese global leadership in production of solar panels could be affected, as narrow profit margins will be compromised by market uncertainties;
• China's slowed pace is already part of the steep drop in oil prices, which tends to delay oil exploration--good--but increase demand--very bad, with serious counter-incentives in electric auto development, for example;
• General instability as China adjusts to new conditions can only exact a cost in the climate diplomacy initiative begun last fall with Obama's visit to Beijing, as such niceties can be too expensive to maintain in times of crisis;
• Conversely, greenhouse gas emissions apparently flatlined in 2014, before the Chinese turbulence really took hold, after steep increases the previous year, with no apparent macro-economic drivers at all.

My own amateur's intuition is that the Chinese impacts are so large that we should expect major consequences from what looks to me like more than a natural 'correction'--but I wouldn't be foolhardy enough to predict what those will be. My larger impression is that these global macro-economic events are still holding the rest of us hostage, preempting more direct and rational interventions in the climate problem. In short, we need a new way to measure 'bottom line,' with carbon externalities factored in. That's a mandate bigger than the Paris conference's, but maybe the reviving of the EU carbon exchange, the expansion of China's carbon markets nationwide, not to mention California's big steps in the same direction, will both gain momentum and extend it in the charged atmosphere of the Paris negotiations.