Climate change negotiations are set to resume in Bangkok in early April. Three weeks ago, we published links to a broad range of analyses of the Cancun Climate Summit. We asked readers to suggest resources that we may have missed, and we have now updated the original post by adding the following resources below. We hope you find them useful, and we look forward to further discussion during and after the Bangkok meetings. (See the recent video interview with Nicholas Stern and the talks by Martin Weitzman and Lord Stern on “Toward a New Economics of Climate Change,” and see further extensive coverage on this blog.)
World Bank Energy Strategy Must Address Energy Poverty and Climate Change
Athena Ballesteros and Tom Nagle, Guest Bloggers, cross-posted with permission from the World Resources Institute
The World Bank is in the final stages of drafting a new energy strategy due late April 2011. The strategy has drawn so much attention because of its potential to address two major challenges confronting developing countries – energy poverty and climate change. While the strategy could be an opportunity for the institution to tackle both challenges simultaneously, some stakeholders are concerned that it may sway too much in one direction, addressing one challenge while undermining the other.
To balance these differing opinions, the World Bank embarked on an eight month consultative process with input from client and donor countries, civil society, the private sector, and others. We studied the reports of the consultations carefully to distill important messages emerging from the process. There appears to be some areas of resounding agreement, while in other areas, differing perspectives emerged. The overarching message delivered to the World Bank is a demand for investments in the energy sector that produce sustainable development outcomes.
Popular Climate Economics Model Needs Major Overhaul
Frank Ackerman, re-posted from the Real Climate Economics Blog, a Triple Crisis partner.
True or false: Risks of a climate catastrophe can be ignored, even as temperatures rise? The economic impact of climate change is no greater than the increased cost of air conditioning in a warmer future? The ideal temperature for agriculture could be 17oC above historical levels?
All true, according to the increasingly popular FUND model of climate economics. It is one of three models used by the federal government’s Interagency Working Group to estimate the “social cost of carbon” – that is, the monetary value of the long-term damages done by greenhouse gas emissions. According to FUND, as used by the Working Group, the social cost of carbon is a mere $6 per ton of CO2. That translates into $0.06 per gallon of gasoline. Do you believe that a tax of $0.06 per gallon at the gas pump (and equivalent taxes on other fossil fuels) would solve the climate problem and pay for all future climate damages?
Lord Nicholas Stern on the new economics of climate change
Triple Crisis blogger Frank Ackerman interviewed Lord Nicholas Stern for the Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE) on the changes in economics needed to understand climate change issues and consequences. Last week, GDAE presented Stern and Dr. Martin Weitzman with the 2011 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought for their pioneering analysis of the economics of global climate change. Read a transcript of Stern’s remarks and full event coverage at GDAE.
Nuclear Power Not the Solution
The emerging nuclear crisis in Japan has brought the future of nuclear power in the U.S. to the fore. The Obama administration supports nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels. But is it really the solution? Triple Crisis blogger Frank Ackerman addressed this question in a post this past summer for our partner the Real Climate Economics blog. We cross-post his original piece below.
If carbon emissions from energy production are the problem, is nuclear power the solution? After all, nuclear reactors split uranium atoms to generate heat; no fossil fuels are used on site, and no CO2 is released into the air from the power plant itself. Plenty of voices can be now heard advocating construction of nuclear plants in order to save the environment. The Obama administration supports new loans and incentives for nuclear power, as does the Kerry-Lieberman climate and energy bill.
It’s not quite that simple. The nuclear power life cycle includes many steps, from mining and enriching uranium, building the reactor, operating the plant, processing and disposing of the spent fuel, through, someday, decommissioning the plant when it can no longer be used. Many of these stages are quite energy-intensive, so there are life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power. The best available data show the life-cycle emissions from nuclear power to be much lower than from fossil fuel-burning power plants, but equal to or higher than the emissions from renewable energy, such as solar, wind, and hydro-power.
Green new deals, ecological scarcity and the lessons of history
Edward B. Barbier, Guest Blogger
The history of natural resource use and development, from the Agricultural Transition 12,000 years ago to the present, suggests that humankind has had to surmount successive scarcity problems: From Malthusian population-land “traps” to fossil fuel scarcity, and now, ecological scarcity.
In any age of natural resource scarcity, there also appear to be winners and losers. The winners adjust to the changing economic conditions imposed by scarcity, innovate before other economies do, and end up dominating trade and economic relationships as a result. Over a thousand years ago, China, India and other Asian Empires were among the most powerful economies in the world, because their rulers adopted long-term strategies to parlay their vast agricultural and resource-based wealth into regional and then global dominance. Today, modern China, South Korea and other Asian economies look to green and clean energy investments and technologies as propelling their economies to the forefront of global trade and development, as well as securing a more sustainable economic future.
Comparing climate strategies: Economic optimization versus equitable burden-sharing
Triple Crisis blogger Frank Ackerman co-authored the following working paper the Stockholm Environment Institute on climate policy’s unevenly distributed costs and benefits and whether climate policy should be based on economic efficiency or equity.
Comparing climate strategies: Economic optimization versus equitable burden-sharing
Climate change is the ultimate global public good (or public bad): the severity of the problem depends on total world emissions, so anyone’s greenhouse gas emissions affect everyone. The impacts, however, are unevenly distributed, often falling most heavily on the hottest and poorest countries. The capacity to deal with the problem may be even more unequally distributed, since the response requires significant investments in mitigation and adaptation.
Thus the discussion of climate policy naturally includes a focus on questions of international equity. In order to reach agreement on coordinated global action to address this global externality, some agreement on burden-sharing is necessary. In only slightly oversimplified terms, how much of the global cost of climate protection should rich and poor countries pay?
Read the full report at the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Climate Change Negotiations: A Collection of Post-Cancún Analyses
It has been twelve weeks since the conclusion of the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún. There were mixed feelings on the Cancún outcome. While many felt that, in substantive terms, not much was achieved, the agreement was also perceived as process-saving, especially when compared with the Copenhagen debacle a year earlier, and thus the closing session in Cancún met with thunderous applause.
Official climate change negotiations will resume in Bangkok, Thailand in early April. There, work will continue for the working groups on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA 14) and on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP 16). The agenda includes, among others, issues such as a global goal for emission reductions and global peaking, adaptation, MRV for developed and developing countries, the registry, forests financing, technology, capacity building and market/non-market mechanisms. The Bangkok meeting will be the first in preparation for the next UN Climate Change Conference (COP 17), to take place in Durban, South Africa, November 28 –December 9, 2011. As such, no particular outcome is expected, other than progress towards an eventual deal in Durban (or beyond).
Climate Change and the Water Crisis in the U.S. Southwest
Where and how will climate change first affect large numbers of American voters? Answering that question may be crucial to the global efforts to protect the earth’s climate. The tsunami of stupidity and science denial that has washed over Washington won’t be held back by earnest calculations of long-run risks, or by the potential inundation of remote island nations, or by the news that polar bears and other iconic species are endangered.
While climate change may seem remote, the water crisis in the Southwest is all too immediate. Recent years of drought have reached critical levels, threatening to curtail agriculture and even the normal patterns of urban life throughout the region. Even if today’s climate remained unchanged, water use in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah would more than double over the next century, just from population and income growth.
Climate Change: The fatal disconnect
Triple Crisis blogger Sunita Narain published the following opinion article in Business Standard on the World Economic Forum’s analysis that climate change is the highest-ranking risk the world will face in the coming years.
The fatal disconnect
The World Economic Forum — the gathering of power glitterati each year in Davos — has assessed the top risks the world faces in 2011. According to this analysis, climate change is the highest-ranking risk the world will face in the coming years, when its likelihood and impact are combined. What’s even more important is the interconnections between climate change and the other top risks: economic disparity (ranked three), extreme weather events (ranked five), extreme energy price volatility (ranked six), geopolitical conflict (ranked seven), flooding and water security (nine and ten).
This is not a past or future scenario. This is the present. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says world food prices this January hit a “historic peak”. The food price index, collated by FAO, averaged 231 points in January, which is the highest since 1990, when it started measuring food prices globally. The reasons for the spike are not just the traditional, ranging from greedy speculators to faulty future markets and rising demand. They are newer: extreme weather events, floods and droughts, heat and frost waves. And they suggest a threat even more difficult to contain.