New Day on Climate Change

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

In one dramatic stroke, President Obama has removed any doubts that he intends to break sharply from President George W. Bush's policies on yet another vital issue - this time repudiating Bush's passive approach to climate change. At a news conference on Monday, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to consider immediately California's application to set its own rules on greenhouse-gas emissions from cars and trucks. Bush had rejected that application.
Once California receives permission to move ahead - as it surely will - 13 states, and possibly more, are expected to impose similar rules. The result will be to force automakers here and overseas to begin producing cars and trucks that are considerably more fuel efficient than today's models and on a faster timetable.
The California decision is of great significance not only for that reason but for what it says about Obama's commitment to the cause of reversing the rise in greenhouse gases. Bush began his tenure by breaking a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide and by withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto agreement on climate change. Obama begins his with a clear signal that he will not hesitate to use the regulatory levers provided by the Clean Air Act and other federal statutes to fight global warming.
California has long had the right to set stronger air pollution standards than the rest of the nation, provided it has federal permission. Its earlier requests to set stronger air pollution standards were routinely approved, but in this case the Bush administration said no, dredging up all manner of arguments to support its case. One was that California had not demonstrated "extraordinary and compelling" reasons to limit greenhouse gases; another was that a national regulatory system was preferable to state-by-state laws - even though the administration itself had shown no interest whatsoever in a national system.
In a companion move, Obama directed the Transportation Department to complete the interim nationwide fuel-efficiency standards called for in the 2007 energy bill. These standards would eventually require fuel-efficiency increases in the American car and light-truck fleet to roughly 35 miles per gallon by 2020 from the current average of 27 mpg The California standards would require automakers to reach the same 35 mpg target four years ahead of the federal timetable.
The California rules cannot by themselves stop the rise in greenhouse gases. In addition to regulatory controls, Obama must eventually embrace a broader strategy involving major federal investments in clean-energy technologies and, down the road, some effort to put a price on greenhouse-gas emissions in order to unlock private investment. But after eight years of inaction, this is a wonderful start.

Democratic feud hurts Obama's climate agenda

By John M. Broder
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama is moving quickly to act on the environmental promises that were a centerpiece of his campaign. But tackling global warming will be far more difficult - and more costly - than the new emissions standards for automobiles he ordered with the stroke of a pen Monday.
Already, the congressional Democrats Obama will need to carry out his mandate are feuding with one another.
By coincidence or design, most of the policy makers in Congress and in the administration charged with shaping legislation to address global warming come from California or the East Coast, regions that lead the United States in environmental regulation and the push for renewable energy sources.
That is a problem, says a group of Democratic lawmakers from the Midwest and the Plains states, which are heavily dependent on coal and manufacturing. The lawmakers have banded together to fight legislation they think might further damage their economies.
"There's a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "It's up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it's cheaper."
This brown state-green state clash is likely to encumber any effort to set a mandatory ceiling on the carbon dioxide emissions blamed as the biggest contributor to global warming, something Obama has declared to be one of his highest priorities. Obama has said he intends to press ahead on such an initiative, despite opposition within his own party in Congress and divisions among some of his advisers over the timing, scope and cost of legislation to curb carbon emissions.
The centrist Democrats who urge a slower approach represent states that are crucial electoral battlegrounds and that stand to lose the most from such regulation. They say they believe that global warming is a serious threat and they will support legislation to address the problem - but not at the expense of their already-strained workers and industries.
These Democrats are concerned, they say, that climate bills will be written by committees in the House and Senate led by two liberal California Democrats, Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Henry Waxman, and shaped by Obama's team of environmental and energy advisers, virtually all of whom are from California or the East Coast.
For decades, California has led America in environmental regulation, including the most sweeping effort to address global warming by imposing mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.
Following California's lead, a group of Northeastern states have created a partnership known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to control carbon emissions.
But California and many East Coast states also differ sharply in the extent to which they depend on coal - a fossil fuel that is a major culprit in producing carbon emissions. California, for example, derived only 20.7 percent of its electricity from coal and 40 percent from hydroelectric power and renewable sources in 2005, while Ohio drew 86 percent of its electricity from coal that year, according to the Department of Energy. Other states of the Great Lakes and the Plains are much more like Ohio than California in energy usage.
Obama and leaders in Congress have endorsed a so-called cap-and-trade system in which power plant owners and other polluters could meet limits on heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by either reducing emissions on their own or buying credits from more efficient producers.
Obama's energy and environmental advisers include Lisa Jackson, the former head of the New Jersey environmental agency who will lead the Environmental Protection Agency; Steven Chu, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who is the new secretary of energy; and Nancy Sutley, former deputy mayor of Los Angeles for environmental affairs, the new chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Among other things, the appointees will have to deal with bruised feelings among many Democrats over the coup Waxman mounted last November to wrest the gavel of the Energy and Commerce Committee from its longtime leader, Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan and a longtime champion of the auto industry and other Midwest manufacturers.
"For us, it's still a big disappointment," said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, referring to the unseating of Dingell, who was pursuing a more moderate climate proposal than those advocated by Boxer and Waxman.
Stabenow is a leader of the so-called Gang of 10, representing the coal-dependent states in the middle of the country; the group was formed after the failure of a Senate global warming bill pushed by Boxer last June. The members' goal is to assure that their concerns are met in any future legislation.
"We will play an important role in the final bill," Stabenow said.
Representative Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been a leader in Congress on environmental matters for three decades, has been assigned by Waxman to write the House's version of global warming legislation. Markey said he was very aware of the concerns of coal-state Democrats.
He noted that Obama, who comes from Illinois, a coal-dependent state, had traveled to Ohio last week to speak at a factory that produces parts for wind turbines. "Every single wind turbine takes 26 tons of steel to construct," Markey said. "A lot of new jobs will be created if we craft a piece of global warming legislation correctly, and that is our intention."

Gulf oil states seeking a lead in clean energy

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Tuesday, January 13, 2009

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates: With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.
Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7.
Still, the region's leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.
So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America's route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.
They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.
"Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy," said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.
These are long-term investments in an alternative energy future that neither falling oil prices nor the global downturn seems likely to reverse. Even as the local real estate market is foundering, leaders in politics, business and research from across the globe will flock to this distant kingdom for three days starting Monday for the second World Future Energy Summit, which just one year after its inception here has become something of a Davos gathering on renewable energy.
This year's guest list includes a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the European Union energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, as well as the oil and gas ministers of Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. In attendance will also be executives representing hundreds of companies, large and small, from BP and Credit Suisse to dozens of start-up companies from Europe and the United States.
"Truth is that locally money is tight as everywhere, and the property market is certainly taking a correction downwards," said Richard Hease, whose Dubai-based company, Turret Middle East, organized the conference. "But on the renewable energy front, it is business as usual."
This new investment aims to maintain the gulf's dominant position as a global energy supplier, gaining patents from the new technologies and promoting green manufacturing. But if the United States and the European Union have set energy independence from the gulf states as a goal of new renewable energy efforts, they may find they are arriving late at the party.
"The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily," said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi's national energy company. "Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital."
The vision of a renewable future in the gulf is rooted not so much in a fuzzy green sentiment — though that is starting to take hold — as in analysis of the region's economic future and the high-end lifestyles of its citizens.
"You see what the gulf states have achieved in terms of modern infrastructure and beautiful architecture, but this has come at a very high environmental price," said Awad of Masdar, standing in a field of 40 types of solar panels that the project's engineers are testing, and using to power offices.
"We know we can't continue with this carbon footprint," he said. "We have to change. This is why Abu Dhabi must develop new models — for the planet, of course, but also so as not to jeopardize Abu Dhabi."
The world is now consuming 80 million barrels of day, and that could continue to rise steeply over the coming decades if population and consumption trends continue. That could mean having to add six Saudi Arabias worth of oil output just to keep up, according to Barker-Homek, at a time when scientists are warning that carbon levels need to be cut significantly to avoid potentially disastrous global warming.
To hedge their positions, then, an increasingly sophisticated generation of largely Western-educated leaders in the Middle East are seizing on green business opportunities, by seeding research in faraway nations.
The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President-elect Obama has proposed investing — in the entire United States — "to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future."
Masdar, the model city that will generate no carbon emissions, is tied to the crown prince's ambitions. Designed by Norman Foster, the British architect, it will include a satellite campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a research park with laboratories affiliated with Imperial College London and other institutions.
In Saudi Arabia, the new state-owned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.
And it has other agreements as well, with Caltech, Cambridge, Cornell, Imperial, La Sapienza, Oxford and Utrecht, to name just a few.
In November, the Qatari government signed an agreement with Britain's visiting prime minister, Gordon Brown, to invest £150 million, or more than $220 million, in a British low-carbon technology fund, dwarfing the fund's investments from home.
For the rest of the world, the enormous cash infusion may provide the important boost experts say is needed to get dozens of emerging technologies — like carbon capture, microsolar and low-carbon aluminum — over the development hump to make them cost-effective.
"The impact has been enormous," said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant. "It has greatly accelerated the development process."
Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. Research money is tight, he noted.
With the Saudi money he has hired 16 new researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. "People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from," he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were one-fiftieth that amount.
Experts say the vast investments from the gulf states have already restarted stalled environmental technologies.
Nancy Tuor, vice chairwoman of CH2M Hill, the Canadian construction firm that is building Masdar city, said that the sheer size of the investment had had a "forcing effect," pushing polluting industries to experiment with cleaner solutions.
For example, initial plans for Masdar excluded both aluminum and conventional concrete because the production of those materials generates high levels of carbon emissions, which warm the planet. Aluminum manufacturers protested and came back with a product that reduced emissions by 90 percent compared with regular aluminum; it is now included in the project.
Proponents say Masdar goes beyond creating new materials and is in fact exploring a new model for urban life. Masdar will use one quarter of the energy of a conventional city its size (about 50,000 people) — an amount that it will produce itself.
"When people think about sustainability, they think about devices," said Gerard Evenden, a partner at Foster and Partners, the British architectural firm that is designing the site. "But here you're taking it to a city scale, which has much more of an impact — connecting the devices to the structure to the transportation to the people."
The city will have no cars; people will move around using driverless electric vehicles that move on a subterranean level. The air-conditioning will be solar powered.
With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing.
Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. "The sun shines 365 days a year," he said.