Hill Heat

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to a Congressional briefing with Sir Nicholas Stern a year after the release of the landmark “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.” The Stern Review represented a key milestone in our understanding of the urgent need to take action and the associated costs of tackling climate change. The headline message that the cost of action would be far less than the cost of inaction was a catalyst for many governments to increase their efforts in the fight against global warming.

In the run up to the next UN meeting on climate change in Bali (December 2007), there are a number of complementary processes taking place, including the UN Secretary-General’s meeting in New York on September 24 and the US Meeting of Major Economies on Energy Security and Climate Change in Washington on September 27-28. How will the findings of the Stern Review affect these meetings? Will the policy recommendations recommended by the Review be considered as part of the final deal?

Sir Nicholas Stern will speak about these issues, which will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Briefing speaker:

• Sir Nicholas Stern, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics Asia Research Centre and author of the “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change“

The Stern Review was commissioned by Gordon Brown, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the British Prime Minister. The Stern Review’s principal conclusion was that tackling climate change is a pro-growth strategy. It found that the earlier effective action is taken, the less costly it will be. The Stern Review surprised many policymakers in terms of describing the relatively small cost of action versus the significant costs of inaction, i.e. stabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cost about one per cent of annual global output by 2050. If no action is taken, climate change will reduce global consumption per head by between five and 20 percent. In addition, markets for low-carbon energy products are likely to be worth at least $505 billion per year by 2050.

This briefing is open to the public and no reservations are required. For more information, please contact Fred Beck at fbeck@eesi.org or 202.662.1892.

During the last week of September, three high-profile global meetings will address the challenge of climate change. On Monday, September 24, the United Nations will convene a unique High-Level Session of the General Assembly, at which dozens of heads of states will address this topic. Starting Wednesday, September 26, the Clinton Global Initiative will bring governments, business, NGOs and media together to catalyze concrete action to address climate change. Starting Thursday, September 27, the Bush administration will host representatives of leaders from 15 major economies for an unprecedented meeting on this topic.

To preview these events and assess their significance, Brookings will host a forum on Friday September 21. After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Introduction:

• Strobe Talbott, President, The Brookings Institution

Moderator:

• Carlos Pascual, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution

Panelists:

• Yvo de Boer, Executive Director, United Nations, Framework Convention on Climate Change
• David B. Sandalow, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution, chair of the Energy & Climate Working Group at the Clinton Global Initiative

Ambassador Room Hilton Embassy Row 2015 Massachusetts Ave, NW

Institute of Ecosystem Studies President Dr. William Schlesinger is going to be speaking at 6:00 pm this Thursday on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., about his recent work on the interaction between forests and climate—and its implications for how and whether carbon offsets should be allowed.

Glenn Hurwitz has more at Grist.

Before coming to IES, Dr. Schlesinger served in a dual capacity at Duke University, as both the James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry and Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

255 11th Street SE (close to the Eastern Market metro stop)

RSVP with Glenn Hurwitz (glenn dot hurowitz at ecologyfund dot net)

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to learn about the impacts climate change is having on ecosystems, in particular those changes that are rapid, large, and potentially irreversible. We now have evidence that there may be thresholds that, once crossed, will present serious coping challenges to humans. This raises a major strategic challenge in the climate policy debate before this Congress: What concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere might lead to environmentally, socially and economically unacceptable impacts?

In response to this question, a project was developed jointly by the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, the Joint Global Change Research Institute, and The Nature Conservancy, entitled “Understanding the Consequences of Thresholds in Global Change and Their Implications for Decision-Making.” The project promotes understanding of the physical, natural, and social dynamics that underlie ecological thresholds in order to better inform ongoing adaptation measures and response options across scales of decision-making. Our panel will focus on the work of this important initiative and its draft report, which is based on the first of a series of meetings that took place in 2006. Case studies presented at the meeting included impacts on the critical ecosystems of the American Rockies and Alaska such as: drought in the Colorado River Basin; bark beetles in Western Canada; and forest die-off and die-back in the West. Our speaker panel includes Ecothresholds Project participants and other experts:

• Dr. Anthony Janetos (Moderator), Director, Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/University of Maryland
• Dr. Ed Miles, Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Marine Studies and Public Affairs, University of Washington
• Dr. Neil Cobb, Director, Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research, Northern Arizona University
• Dr. Mark Eakin, Coordinator, NOAA Coral Reef Watch, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Dr. John Wiens, Lead Scientist, The Nature Conservancy
• Michael Bradley, Canfor Pulp Limited Partnership

The Ecothresholds Project envisions workshops and conferences to engage resource managers and practitioners to explore responses to threshold effects that challenge the condition of ecosystem services and the foundation of a range of natural resource management practices. Creating a dialogue between this project and policymakers will help ensure that the major strategic questions being addressed by this project will be incorporated into the federal policy debate on climate change.

This briefing is open to the public and no reservations are required. For more information, contact Fred Beck at 202-662-1892 (fbeck@eesi.org)

U.S. PIRG today announced the release of “Cleaner, Cheaper, Smarter”, a report which makes the case that any greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade program have a full auction of emissions credits.

In a supporting statement, numerous environmental and progressive organizations and individuals state:

It is critical that any cap-and-trade program require the auctioning of pollution allowances, rather than giving those allowances away for free to polluters.

By auctioning pollution allowances, we affirm that no one has a “right” to pollute. Instead, we claim the atmosphere as a common resource, to be managed for the benefit of the public, which no polluter may foul without due compensation.

By auctioning pollution allowances, we reduce the societal cost of achieving emission reductions, enabling America to achieve its climate protection goals with less disruption to our economy and the lives of individual Americans.

And by auctioning pollution allowances, we prevent the accumulation of billions of dollars in windfall profits by polluters, and instead put those revenues to work on behalf of the public. Allowance revenues can support efforts to transform America into a clean energy economy and to provide a regular dividend or rebate to American consumers.

We call on state and federal lawmakers to limit global warming emissions to the levels demanded by the science and to auction all pollution allowances in any cap-and-trade program.

The list of signatories is after the jump.

The Urban Land Institute will hold a news conference to release a report titled “Growing Cooler: The Evidence” that will discuss the relationship between urban development and carbon dioxide emitted by vehicles.

Contact: Nicole Daigle at 202-715-1553

Urban Land Institute, 1025 Thomas Jefferson St. N.W., Suite 500 West

10:15 Hobson: We agree with the DOE that the potential for wind energy and solar energy in the Southeast are limited. Solar will not be a large source. Landfill methane will be a good source for small-scale generation. We think that a national one-size-fits-all standard is bad. We must either buy credits or pay an alternative compliance payment to the government. It essentially imposes a tax on resource-poor areas. We’ve assessed that 15% impact on our customers. It would be a billion dollars a year. There are 25 states with renewable portfolio standards. Not one of the 25 states’s standards is consistent with the proposed national standard. We believe federal funding and incentives with local standards is the best way.

10:20 Reedy: “I’d put my money on the sun.” That was Thomas Edison in 1931. The president’s vision for the DOE’s solar initiative lies behind the forces under discussion today. I spent most of my career with utilities. Ultimately utilities make decisions all about risk. How can inherently risky ventures such as steam-powered coal plants work? They are very complicated, have unreliable fuel sources, and offer environmental risks. Renewables will lower the risk.

• Economic feasibility: PV systems without financial incentives are projected to cost 9 cents per kilowatt hour by 2020 instead of 31 cents now. Florida consumers pay 12 cents now. By 2020 they can be expected to pay 18 cents per hour. One major frustration to the solar industry is comparing the base rate of convention to the peak rate of solar.

From E&E News (subscription required), at an event in Washington hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Rep. Rick Boucher (Va.), chair of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee of John Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee, said he planned to draft a cap-and-trade bill that distributes tens of billions in pollution credits to U.S. industries for free:

I’m disinclined at the moment to do auctioning, at least in the early years to give it very much prominence, if any at all. The best we can do is give the allowances to the emitters according to their needs. We’re going to have enough problems as it is with coal-fired utilities, for example, and other carbon-intensive industries meeting our production schedules. I think perhaps, at least for the early years, it’s better not to compound these problems by imposing a cost on these emitters of having to go out and pay for these allowances. It will be the least painful, most politically attractive way to do it.

In other comments, Boucher asked Pelosi to delay the conference committee negotiations on the energy bill until he produced his draft cap-and-trade bill, but he said she probably won’t. He agrees with the 80% by 2050 target but is unsure of the path to there: “The schedule that takes us to that very aggressive target will be perhaps the most difficult thing we have to negotiate.” He will be releasing a series of position papers over the coming weeks.

In contrast, Nat Keohane, Ph.D., the Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense offers support for full auctions in a blog post countering Greg Mankiw’s recent NYT op-ed favoring a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade system (in line with Robert Shapiro’s argument):

Mankiw assumes that allowances in a cap-and-trade system would be handed out for free rather than auctioned, thus generating no federal revenue. Now, I admit that this has been the modus operandi in the past. Virtually all allowances were handed out for free under the wildly successful sulfur dioxide trading program in the U.S., set up by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that way.

The alternative, full auctioning, would raise exactly the same amount of money as a carbon tax, and there are signs that it’s gaining ground. Earlier this year, several states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, including New York and New Jersey, announced plans to auction off 100 percent of their allowances. Plus there are calls to phase in auctioning in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System.

Speakers

• Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del.
• Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn.

Contact: Marni Goldberg at 202-546-0007 or mgoldberg@dlc.org

Yorktown Room, Hyatt Regency Hotel, 400 New Jersey Ave. N.W.

Next week the United Nations General Assembly meets. There are several related international summits, starting Monday the 24th with The Future in Our Hands, the UN High-Level Event on Climate Change, followed Wednesday by the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, with representatives from NRDC and Pew, major corporate leaders, and luminaries such as Ted Turner and Jane Goodall. The next, Thursday, September 27, Bush convenes the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change, organized by the White House to promote its agenda.

Not surprisingly, this week sees a flurry of policy and science briefings in Washington DC.

Tomorrow, Sens. Lieberman and Carper present a cap-and-trade discussion with the Progressive Policy Institute.

Friday, September 21: Yvo de Boer (UN) and David Sandalow (Brookings/CGI) discuss the upcoming “Climate Week” with the Brookings Institution, Dr. Kerry Emanuel and other top climate scientists talk hurricanes and climate change on the Hill, and Sir Nicholas Stern weighs in on Bali.

In addition the next two weeks sees hearings on renewable electricity standards and wildfire, and briefings on urban development, ecosystems, and global policy.

As always, you can subscribe to the Hill Heat Events Feed. I’m working on building Google Calendar functionality as well.