Let’s not talk about the war – or climate
change!

Climate change advocates haven’t had much to
celebrate recently, but New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement
last week that he was giving $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal
campaign marked a real win. So writes Bryan Walsh in Time Science.

Yet when he (Walsh) spoke to Bloomberg before
his donation became public, climate change wasn’t foremost on his mind. He saw
coal pollution first and foremost as a public health issue, one that is
directly hurting Americans through higher rates of asthma and heart disease.

If we’re smart, this approach might be the
new way to attack climate change: by identifying actions that can provide a
wealth of benefits — including on carbon emissions — rather than simply
focusing on global warming alone. That’s the message of a new paper called
“Climate Pragmatism” that’s being published today by a bipartisan range
of thinkers on energy and climate issues. Read More

Fighting Climate Change by Not Focusing on
Climate Change

By Bryan Walsh in Time Science (26 July
2011):

Climate change advocates haven’t had much to
celebrate recently, but New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement
last week that he was giving $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal
campaign marked a real win. The Sierra Club — the nation’s largest
environmental group — has successfully stopped more than 150 proposed coal
plants from being built over the past decade through the campaign. Bloomberg’s
money — and perhaps more importantly, the imprimatur of one of the richest and
most influential people in the country — will enable the Sierra Club to bring
its war on coal to a new level, preventing untold millions of tons of
greenhouse gas emissions from warming the planet.

Yet when I spoke to Bloomberg before his
donation became public, climate change wasn’t foremost on his mind. He saw coal
pollution first and foremost as a public health issue, one that is directly
hurting Americans through higher rates of asthma and heart disease. He was
certainly worried about the greenhouse gases those coal plants were spewing —
coal is responsible for about 20% of global carbon emissions — but what really
motivated him were the mercury emissions, the particulates, the arsenic and all
the other conventional poisons created by burning coal. “Coal kills every
day,” Bloomberg told me. “It’s a dirty fuel.” So it is with the
Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which has succeeded more by motivating
individual communities over the local health effects of coal pollution than by
appealing to the broader risks of global warming.(See why Bloomberg pledged $50
million to fight the coal industry.)

If we’re smart, this approach might be the
new way to attack climate change: by identifying actions that can provide a
wealth of benefits — including on carbon emissions — rather than simply
focusing on global warming alone. That’s the message of a new paper called
“Climate Pragmatism” that’s being published today by a bipartisan
range of thinkers on energy and climate issues. The best way to deal with
climate change, as it turns out, is not to deal directly with climate change.
As the authors write: “Policymakers today are likely to make the most
progress to the degree that they refrain from centrally justifying energy
innovation, resilience to extreme weather and pollution reduction as ‘climate
policy.’”

It sounds a bit confusing — if we’re going to
deal with climate change, why not just directly deal with climate change? The
answer is simple: we can’t, or at least, we refuse to. Over the past several
years, even as the scientific case on manmade climate change has gotten
stronger, the international system has failed again and again to reduce carbon
emissions. The effort to produce a global carbon deal failed decisively in
Copenhagen in 2009. In the U.S., a carbon cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate
a year ago, and there’s little chance it will be revived. Even Europe — home to
the governments and citizens that seem to care about climate change the most —
has gradually scaled back its ambitions on reducing carbon as the cost and
complexity of those policies has become clearer.

The failure of the global deal is an
inevitable consequence of what Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental
science at the University of Colorado and one of the authors of the
“Climate Pragmatism” paper, calls “the iron law of climate
policy.” Any climate policy that is viewed as obstructing economic
progress will fail — especially in large developing countries that are counting
on rapid economic growth to lift citizens out of poverty. Take China, for
example — while the country has emerged as a world leader in terms of clean
energy investment, its leaders remain reluctant to sign onto any kind of
meaningful carbon reductions. The economy comes first, with renewables
supplying just a tiny portion of China’s overall energy mix. Coal is and will
be far more important, with coal imports in China and India slated to grow 78%
in 2011.

This means any global carbon cap that would
raise the price of fossil fuels significantly simply won’t fly, in China or for
that matter, in the U.S. But that doesn’t mean there’s zero willingness to
consider the environmental or health perspectives of the energy we use. The
developed world has vastly reduced air pollution over the past several decades
through ever-tougher regulations on conventional pollutants like soot and acid
rain causing sulfur dioxide. These are rules that, despite constant industry
opposition, remain broadly popular among the public — much more popular than
carbon regulations — because the benefit is visible, immediate and personal.

Developing countries will be no different.
Conventional air pollution is a tremendous threat to Chinese growth and public
health, as anyone who watched the Beijing Olympics in 2008 knows. Air and water
pollution costs China an estimated 4.3% of its GDP each year, and globally, air
pollution contributes to an estimated 3 million deaths a year. Any policies or
efforts that divert investment from the dirtiest sources — as the Sierra Club
is doing with its Beyond Coal campaign — towards cleaner alternatives like
natural gas and renewables will benefit public health, while helping the
climate as well.

One target should be black carbon — a fancy
word for soot — which not only causes serious respiratory problems but also
contributes disproportionately to the warming of the atmosphere and especially
high-altitude snow cover. (Black carbon can actually settle on white ice,
darkening it and causing it to absorb more sunlight and melt faster.) Unlike
carbon dioxide, black carbon is relatively easy to control with better engines
and cleaner fuels, and tackling the pollutant pays off immediately for health
and the climate as well. It’s even bipartisan: in 2009 the staunchly Democratic
senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer joined with the Republican climate change
skeptic James Inhofe to co-sponsor an effort to investigate ways to reduce
black carbon.

At the same time — especially for developing
countries — those alternatives need to be economically viable. The
“Climate Pragmatism” paper explodes a myth that’s held by many
greens: that energy is too cheap. For most of the world, the opposite is true,
which is why more than 1.4 billion people lack virtually any access to
electricity. That’s an astounding figure, but one that rarely gets the
attention it deserves. Lack of electricity impacts public health — try running
a modern hospital without any power — and retards economic growth. If we want
developing nations to be better prepared to deal with the effects of climate
change — or just about any other threat — we need to get them wired.(See the
effects that climate chnage will have on Thailand.)

The challenge will to develop low-carbon
alternatives that can compete with fossil fuels on price. (Subsidies are
limited — already, even ultra-green countries like Germany are cutting back aid
for renewable power because of the rising price tag.) In some places and some
conditions, renewables are already winning — for example, in rural areas of
Cameroon, where I’m currently traveling, it’s often cheaper to support off the
grid solar than run power lines to remote villages. But if alternatives are
going to win they need to get a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient, and
that’s going to require vast increases in the amount of basic R&D spent on
energy. The American Energy Innovation Council — a heavyweight lobbying group
that includes Bill Gates — has suggested that the U.S. should increase funding
for energy research around $3 billion a year to at least $15 billion annually.
Some of that money could come from a small price on carbon, just as the federal
gasoline tax raises money for highway construction and maintenance.

Lastly there’s the pressing need to adapt to
climate change. It seems like a no-brainer, but we need to think a little
harder about what adaptation actually means. Thanks in part to years of UN
negotiations, there’s an assumption that we can actually separate adapting to
climate change from preparing for any natural disaster or extreme weather. In
reality, though, separating the two is nearly impossible — we still can’t
assign blame for specific weather events — and absolutely pointless. The
climate adaptation assistance that rich nations are sending to the developing
world is almost totally drawn from the existing budget for foreign aid.(See how
climate change is whittling down the world’s species.)

A hurricane will create havoc for an
unprepared population whether the storm has been strengthened by carbon
emissions or not. Countries need to be prepared for all the stresses the future
will bring — from extreme weather to higher energy prices to infectious
disease. The watchword should be resilience — creating societies that can
bounce back from anything — and the best way to do that is through continued
economic development. A rich country will be better prepared for climate change
than a poor country just about every time.

Most of the proposals put forth in the
“Climate Pragmatism” paper aren’t new — which in some ways is their
virtue. Nationally and internationally, climate politics are deadlocked, even
as carbon emissions keep rising and the most of the U.S. sweats through a
summer that feels like a trailer for global warming to come. What’s needed in
this long hot season is an oblique approach to climate change, one that
sidesteps the roadblocks by taking advantage of popular, no-regrets actions
that are worth doing even if global warming wasn’t real. It’s not as simple or
as elegant as one global deal — but it might actually work.

Has “China Sky” helped slow global
warming?

Source: www.time.com