Stephen DeCanio published the following article on the Real Climate Economics blog, a Triple Crisis partner. In it, DeCanio explains that US actions on climate change will be ineffective unless there is global action, and that addressing climate change is in the US’ national interest.

Suppose you believe, as I do, in basic conservative principles (free enterprise and a market economy, limited government, and minimal change in established institutions that work well), but also acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change presents a sufficient danger that something needs to be done about it.  The risk is that even as little as 2° Celsius (about 3.6° Fahrenheit) of warming might push one of a number of different earth systems past a tipping point that is both catastrophic and irreversible.  In other words, the problem is one of risk management, in which prudence calls for taking action before it is too late to make a mid-course correction.  What would be a conservative response to this threat? 

It is unfortunate that the climate issue has been co-opted by liberals, because conservative policy prescriptions would not be the same as those that have been put forward by the Democrats and their allies among the environmental groups.  The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2010 (then died in the Senate) was a 1400-page monstrosity; it catered to special interests, placed undue burdens on people with low incomes, and had no connection to a coherent US international negotiating strategy on climate.  Just as misguided is the EPA’s intention to regulate CO2 as a pollutant by executive fiat – a scheme that also is inefficient, non-transparent, and regressive.  Virtually all economists would agree that either approach is inferior to a well-designed carbon tax or auctioned emissions permits, with revenues returned to citizens on a per capita basis or used to cut other taxes.

Read the full post at the Real Climate Economics Blog.

James K. Boyce

It is time for a new strategy for climate policy in America – a strategy founded on climate justice.

Climate justice has four pillars:

• Action: Climate change will affect us all, but its heaviest costs will fall upon low-income people who live closest to the margin of survival and are least able to afford air conditioners, sea walls, and other types of insurance. Climate inaction is climate injustice.
• Adaptation for all: We cannot prevent climate change altogether. Investments in adaptation are necessary, but how should these be allocated? The conventional economists’ prescription is that investments should be guided by “willingness to pay,” which of course depends on ability to pay. The implications of this logic were spelled out two decades ago in the Summers memorandum that purported to make the case for dumping toxic waste in low-wage countries. Climate justice requires that investment in adaptation should be guided by human needs, not by the distribution of purchasing power.

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Lyuba Zarsky

Climate policy may have fallen off the US legislative agenda but the evidence that the planet is on a path to catastrophic climate change keeps mounting. In early May, the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program found that temperatures in the Arctic in the last six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880. Arctic sea ice is melting significantly faster than projected by the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and, along with melting ice sheets and glaciers, points toward a sea level rise of 35-63 inches by 2100.

Most people know by now that cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon, is the only way to back off from a global warming “tipping point”– maybe around 2 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit)—that could trigger chaotic climate change. We are already nearly halfway there—the earth has already warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius– and going strong. Under a “business as usual scenario (BAU),” carbon emissions will double by 2050 over current levels. Given the inertia in the climate system—carbon is very long-lived in the atmosphere–and the momentum of the fossil-fuel-based global economy, is it possible to reduce emissions enough and in time?

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Frank Ackerman

Climate legislation, even in its most modest and repeatedly compromised variety, failed last year. And there won’t be a second chance with anything like the current Congress. What caused this momentous failure?

Broadly speaking, there are two rival stories. It could be due to the strength of opposing or inertial forces: well-funded lobbying by fossil fuel industries, biased coverage by increasingly right-wing media, the growth of the “Tea Party” subculture and its rejection of science, dysfunctional institutions such as the U.S. Senate with its filibuster rules, and the low priority given to climate legislation by the Obama administration.

Or it could be because environmentalists screwed up and shot themselves in the foot.

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Triple Crisis blogger Frank Ackerman published the following opinion article in Grist on the media’s misleading reports on the recent release of the first half of the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Residential Energy Consumption Survey.

Imagine a press release with this message: We’re not using more household energy than we used to — and the latest data won’t be available until next year. If you read that, I’m guessing you would join me in yawning and moving on to the next story.

That is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the federal agency that tracks our energy usage, just said — but it said it in a confusing way that sounded like a much bigger story, and was almost designed to mislead readers. Jess Zimmerman, writing in Grist, was among those whom they succeeded in misleading. Zimmerman’s article, “How Americans defeated efficiency with consumerism,” says that average household energy use has remained stable even as appliances have become more efficient, because we all have more appliances now.

Read the full article at Grist.

Sunita Narain

Triple Crisis blogger Sunita Narain published the following opinion article in Business Standard on legislation attempting to remove the EPA’s power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant in the U.S.

Last fortnight, the final nail was driven into the action on climate-change coffin. In the US, a crucial vote in the house sub-committee decided that the country’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA) would no longer have the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The committee voted we say that the threat from climate change was not real, urgent or even serious. They said that any steps to curtail emissions would impact manufacturing and energy industry in the US. This was not negotiable. In other words, the world is back to square one — where it started in 1992, at the Rio Conference and where US president George Bush said that his country’s lifestyle was not negotiable.

Read the full article at Business Standard.