Some global-warming-related articles.
Feb. 24th, 2007 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan
A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan
By JOHN TIERNEY
On Friday, when Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to anyone who figures out how to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, Al Gore sat by his side and called it an “important and welcome” initiative. For once, Mr. Gore couldn’t be accused of hype.
Vacuuming up our carbon-dioxide mess sounds improbable now, but so did the idea of precisely determining a ship’s longitude in 1714, when the British government offered a prize that led to a revolutionary tool for navigators, the chronometer. Private spaceships seemed impractical a decade ago, but the $10 million Ansari X Prize spurred competitors to spend more than $100 million, and the winning design will soon be taking tourists into space.
If governments and other moguls throw in more money, the new Virgin Earth Challenge may be the start of competitions that ultimately yield nanobots or microbes capable of gobbling up carbon dioxide. As far-fetched as it seems today, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could turn out to be a lot more practical than the alternative: persuading six billion people to stop putting it there.
In his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Gore has done a brilliant job of reaching the masses by combining a sober science lecture with a horror movie: gigantic ice sheets quickly melting, seas rapidly swamping vast areas, hurricanes relentlessly battering the coasts, the Gulf Stream stopping and plunging Europe into an ice age.
But there are two problems with this approach. One is that scaring people doesn’t necessarily make their political leaders do anything substantive.
The other problem is that most of the horror-movie scenarios are looking less and less plausible. Climate change will probably occur not with a bang but with a long, slow whimper, as you can see in the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report concludes that it’s “very likely” that humans are now the main factor warming the climate. But even as the panel’s scientists are becoming surer of the problem, and warning of grim consequences this century and beyond, they’re eschewing crowd-thrilling catastrophes. Since the last I.P.C.C. report, six years ago, they haven’t raised the estimates of future temperatures and sea levels.
While Mr. Gore’s movie shows coastlines flooded by a 20-foot rise in sea level, the report’s projections for the rise this century range from 7 inches to 23 inches. The panel says Greenland’s ice sheet will shrink and might eventually disappear, but the process could take “millennia.” The Antarctic ice sheet is projected to grow, not shrink, because of increased snowfall.
The scientists acknowledge uncertainties and worrisome new signs, like the sudden acceleration in the flow of Greenland’s glaciers several years ago. But the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, didn’t extrapolate a short-term trend into a disaster, and its caution is vindicated by a report in the current issue of Science that the flow of two of the largest glaciers abruptly decelerated last year to near the old rate.
The panel does consider it “likely” that future typhoons and hurricanes will be stronger than today’s. But it also expects fewer of these storms (albeit with “less confidence” in that projection).
As for the Gulf Stream, it is “very unlikely” to undergo “a large abrupt transition during the 21st century,” according to the new report. The current is expected to slow slightly, meaning a little less heat from the tropics would reach the North Atlantic, which could be good news for Europe and North America, since that would temper some of the impact of global warming in the north.
Whatever happens, you can stop fretting about the Gulf Stream scenario in Mr. Gore’s movie and that full-fledged Hollywood disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow.” Mr. Gore’s companion book has a fold-out diagram of the Gulf Stream and warns that “some scientists are now seriously worried” about it shutting down and sending Europe into an ice age, but he must have been talking to the wrong scientists.
There wouldn’t be glaciers in the English shires even if the Gulf Stream did shut down. To understand why, you need to disregard not only the horror movies but also what you learned in grade school: that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping London so much warmer than New York even though England is farther north than Newfoundland.
This theory, originated by a 19th-century oceanographer, is “the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend,” in the words of Richard Seager, a climate modeler at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He and other researchers have calculated that the Gulf Stream’s influence typically raises land temperatures in the north by only five degrees Fahrenheit, hardly enough to explain England’s mild winters, much less its lack of glaciers.
Moreover, as the Gulf Stream meanders northward, it delivers just about as much heat to the eastern United States and Canada as to Europe, so it can’t account for the difference between New York and London. Dr. Seager gives the credit to the prevailing westerly winds — and the Rocky Mountains.
When these winds out of the west hit the Rockies, they’re diverted south, bringing air from the Arctic down on New York (as in last week’s cold spell). After their southern detour, the westerlies swing back north, carrying subtropical heat toward London. This Rocky Mountain detour accounts for about half the difference between New York and London weather, according to Dr. Seager.
The other half is caused by to the simple fact that London sits on the east side of an ocean — just like Seattle, which has a much milder climate than Siberia, the parallel land across the Pacific. Since ocean water doesn’t cool as quickly as land in winter, or heat up as much in summer, the westerly winds blowing over the ocean moderate the winter and summer temperatures in both Seattle and London.
So unless the westerlies reverse direction or the Rockies crumble, London and the rest of Western Europe will remain relatively mild. The danger London faces isn’t an ice age but a long, inexorable warming that will keep the temperatures and sea levels gradually rising for centuries — not an action flick but a super-slow-motion documentary.
It’ll be hard to keep audiences interested, particularly since the solutions are also in slow motion. The I.P.C.C. considers options for reducing greenhouse emissions, but projects that even the most radical (and politically painful) policies wouldn’t make much difference the first two or three decades. To politicians worried about the next election, especially in poor countries, 2030 sounds like eternity.
It’s always possible that something will galvanize people around the world into taking short-term pain for long-term gain. But I suspect there’s a better chance of someone claiming that $25 million prize. Whether it’s carbon-dioxide-gobbling nanobots or something else, it’d be good to have a backup plan when 2030 rolls around.
Europeans Agree to Cut Emissions Sharply if U.S. and Others Follow Suit
Europeans Agree to Cut Emissions Sharply if U.S. and Others Follow Suit
By JAMES KANTER
PARIS, Feb. 20 — Seeking to persuade other nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, European Union ministers pledged Tuesday to raise their own targets if industrialized countries like the United States made similar efforts.
European governments would be ready to cut emissions 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, from a current pledge of 20 percent, but only if other heavy polluters joined in, said Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister, who led a meeting in Brussels that formally endorsed the European targets.
Germany, the biggest European economy, was already prepared to cut its emissions even further if there was a broader agreement, Mr. Gabriel said, noting that the German Parliament had supported a 40 percent target.
The pledges, which match a proposal made by the European Commission last month, are signs that nations are gearing up for new negotiations on a global climate accord after 2012, when the first period covered by the Kyoto Protocol expires.
The issue is expected to be on the agenda when Germany serves as host of a meeting in June of the Group of 8 nations. European countries are hoping to win pledges from big developing countries as well, including China and India.
“You get a deadlock in international negotiations when there’s the attitude that, ‘We’re not going to do anything until someone goes first,’ so it’s good that the ministers committed to 20 percent,” said Kirsty Hamilton, a policy consultant for the UK Business Council for Sustainable Energy, a group representing British utilities.
But environmentalists were disappointed that governments postponed a more ambitious goal of 30 percent, unless other countries adopted similar policies.
Choosing a lower target “will send the wrong signal to the international community, casting a dubious light on how serious the European Union is about fighting climate change,” said Jan Kowalzig, a climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth in Brussels.
European officials want other parts of the world, including the United States, to adopt European-style restrictions on emissions to fight climate change, thus helping European businesses compete globally at a time when the European Union is toughening regulation in sectors like air travel, car manufacturing and construction.
But splits among member states over how much more Europe can afford to cut back on pollutants have emerged as obstacles to reaching firm targets.
Last week, European Union energy ministers backed away from approving a binding proposal that 20 percent of all energy must come from renewable sources, like wind and solar power, by 2020.
According to Friends of the Earth, Finland, Poland and Hungary resisted the 20 percent target, and only Sweden and Denmark supported a unilateral 30 percent target.
A European diplomat said Finland, Poland and Hungary had expressed reservations about how the burden would be shared so that poorer and more energy-intensive parts of Europe could develop their economies.
Such differences could foreshadow a showdown in March, when political leaders are to meet in Brussels and reach a final position.
A Battle Over the Costs of Global Warming
A Battle Over the Costs of Global Warming
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New Haven
There is an unofficial code of conduct that dictates how intellectuals should behave when they’re jousting with each other, a sort of Geneva Convention for the ivory tower.
Before they attack somebody else’s work, they first need to praise their opponent. A typical way to do so is to describe another professor as a distinguished scholar who has made an important contribution to the research literature. When you hear that, you can be pretty sure things are about to get nasty.
The rest of us can usually ignore these spats, but once in a while there is an academic fight that really matters. The economics profession is engaged in one of those right now and, as luck would have it, it’s even more entertaining than most.
Last week, Sir Nicholas Stern, a top adviser to the British government, came to the United States to talk about climate change. In October, a commission he led released a 700-page report calling for “urgent action” against global warming to prevent economic damage that could rival that of the world wars and the Great Depression. Given its source and its tone, the Stern Review has nudged people to talk more seriously about climate change.
In the minds of a lot of American economists, however, the review is a badly flawed piece of work. These economists don’t doubt that earth is getting hotter, that human activity is the cause and that the results could be bad. But they think that Sir Nicholas may have exaggerated the likely speed of warming, among other things, and overstated the case for big, quick action.
The epicenter of the opposition has been here at Yale, and so last week, after stopping in Washington to testify before Congress, Sir Nicholas came to New Haven for a public debate with his critics. With a couple of hundred students and professors in the audience — and a sculpture of an angry Zeus-like figure looming above the stage — the two sides went at it in the dignified, vicious way that academics do.
Sir Nicholas spoke during the morning, and his case is really quite simple. The carbon dioxide that has already been pumped into the atmosphere guarantees that the planet will keep getting warmer. But the decisions that people make over the next couple of decades will determine how much warmer — and, in all likelihood, how many floods, droughts, hurricanes, crop failures and species extinctions occur. The surest way to reduce emissions is a big economic deterrent, like a carbon tax.
“The later we leave it, the more difficult it will be,” he said, “and the more risks you run.”
The Stern Review’s most influential critic has probably been William Nordhaus, a 65-year-old Yale professor who is as mainstream as economists come. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the anti-poverty advocate, calls Mr. Nordhaus “about the most reasonable man I know.”
He was the first speaker after lunch, and, of course, he had some very nice things to say about Sir Nicholas. The report “was presented here very eloquently by a distinguished scholar,” Mr. Nordhaus said. But then came the juicy stuff: the Stern Review “commits cruel and unusual punishment on the English language,” Mr. Nordhaus said, and the British government’s opinion on climate change is no more infallible than was its prewar view about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This was fairly tame compared with the comments of another Yale economist, Robert O. Mendelsohn. “I was awestruck,” he said, comparing Sir Nicholas to “The Wizard of Oz.” But “my job is to be Toto,” he added, in the same good-humored tone Mr. Nordhaus used. “Is it in fact The Wizard of Oz, or is it nothing at all?”
The two professors raised some questions about the science in the Stern Review. Mr. Nordhaus wondered if carbon emissions and temperatures would rise as quickly as the report suggests, and Mr. Mendelsohn predicted that people would learn to adapt to climate change, reducing its ultimate cost.
But their main objection revolved around something called the discount rate. The Stern Review assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now (adjusted for inflation) is roughly as valuable as a dollar spent reducing emissions today. In effect, the report argues for spending the money to cut emissions because future generations have as much claim on resources as current generations. “I’ve still not heard a decent ethical argument” for believing otherwise, Sir Nicholas said at the debate.
I’m guessing that your instinct is to agree with him. Mine certainly was. The problem is that none of us actually behave this way. If we really thought that our great-grandchild deserved our money as much as we do, we would never go out to dinner again. Instead, we would invest the $50 we would have spent on dinner, confident that it would grow over time and become perhaps $1,000 for our great-grandchild to put toward health care, education or a supercomputer. Any of that is preferable to our measly dinner.
But a dollar today truly is more valuable than a dollar a century from now. For one thing, your great-grandchild will almost certainly be richer than you are and won’t need your money as much as you do. So spending a dollar on carbon reduction today to avoid a dollar’s worth of economic damage in 2107 doesn’t make sense. We would be better off putting the money toward something likely to have a higher return than alternative energy, like education.
Technically, then, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate. But in practical terms, their argument has a weak link. They are assuming that the economic gains from, say, education will make future generations rich enough to make up for any damage caused by climate change. Sea walls will be able to protect cities; technology can allow crops to grow in new ways; better medicines can stop the spread of disease.
No one knows whether this is true, let alone desirable, because no one knows what life will be like on a planet that is five degrees hotter. “If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it,” said Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist who attended the debate.
While sitting there, I was reminded of the speeches that Alan Greenspan gave a few years ago about the risks of deflation. It wasn’t the most likely outcome, he said, but the consequences of it could be so bad that policy makers had to take steps to prevent it. Focusing attention on this point — the catastrophic risks of climate change — is Sir Nicholas’s biggest accomplishment, whatever you think of his math.
As Mr. Weitzman puts it, the Stern Review is “right for the wrong reasons.”
Even its critics seem open to this idea. When Mr. Nordhaus and Sir Nicholas were exchanging e-mail messages before the debate — to their credit, some academics keep their arguments from becoming personal — Mr. Nordhaus sent a note that summed up his view. “I think it’s a great study, but it’s 50 years ahead of its time,” he recalled writing. “Since everybody else is 50 years behind the times, if you average the two, you might come out just right.”
In other words, it’s time for a tax on carbon emissions.
Cutting Back Without Deprivation
Cutting Back Without Deprivation
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY
IT sounds like something that would happen in San Francisco. In 2005, a few friends gathered for dinner and started bemoaning the fate of the planet, the environmental impact of consumer excess — and ended up challenging one another to not buy anything new for six months.
By mid-2006, the rapidly growing group was featured on the “Today” show, and people were calling it a movement.
“We think of it as more of a phenomenon than a movement,” said John Perry, a co-founder of the group, now known as the Compact. “We’re grateful for our 17 minutes of fame,” he added, “but we didn’t intend this to be broadcast. We didn’t mean to attract followers.”
Yet for such a simple and not terribly sexy idea — to buy nothing new, other than food and other absolute essentials — the Compact has managed to build a groundswell of supporters. The group has more than doubled since the fall, to nearly 8,000 members from 3,000. It has even found a footing in Europe and Australia.
If Thoreau comes to mind, Mr. Perry would be the first to agree that “there is nothing new or startling” about the Compact. The main difference between the Compact and other organizations with an antimaterialism bent, like Voluntary Simplicity, he said, is that the aim of the Compact is not just to scale back financially but to reduce the environmental toll of the American consumer lifestyle.
Compact members reuse or recycle what they have and buy only used or secondhand goods — except for food, health-related items and personal things, like socks and underwear. You can spend as much as you like on life’s more intangible pleasures, like travel, sports, music and other cultural activities.
Although the group took its name from the Mayflower Compact of 1620, it is not as Puritan as it sounds. As Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a Compact member who runs a small advertising agency in Charleston, S.C., put it: “It’s about mindful consumerism, not about depriving ourselves.”
When Mrs. Abbott-Ross first joined the Compact about a year ago, she was a nonstop shopper.
Packages would arrive from eBay and she wouldn’t remember what she had ordered. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed: by the clutter, by the credit card bills, by all this stuff we didn’t need.”
Now, she says, “I don’t even think about spending.” The result is not only an extra cushion of cash, “it’s a huge stress reducer,” she said. “Now I can buy what I want, whether it’s a nice bottle of wine or organic food for my family.”
To the extent that the Compact has any structure at all, it exists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) where people can join threaded discussions about things like the temptations of Costco or whether your friends look at you askance (which many do, members report).
Mr. Perry monitors the group and has read thousands of statements about people’s reasons for joining. “I think we’ve touched a bundle of angry nerves,” he said. “People are worn out and hung over by all the stuff in their lives. Many have terrible consumer debt. They feel out of control.”
What may contribute to the Compact’s success, Mr. Perry thinks, is that it gives people a place to talk. “You can’t go to a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, I’m $30,000 in debt, and I’m addicted to The Shopping Channel.’ ”
WHILE the chance to let your hair down financially may provide some relief, the Compact offers a surprising payoff. Yes, the group’s secondhand-buying strategy has helped members to save money, pay off their credit card debts and pad their children’s college funds. And it gives people the satisfaction of knowing they are contributing less to the local landfill.
The much bigger dividend gained by many members is time.
“When you don’t go to stores, you spend a lot more time doing other things,” said Mr. Perry, who has traded his own “recreational shopping habit” for a plot in the community garden, eating out with friends and volunteering at his son’s school.
Bridget Stuart, a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, Calif., who joined the Compact in December, experienced a similar windfall of time. Now she invites friends over for dinner and to play board games and takes walks with her children in lieu of cruising the mall.
“I’m even getting back into tennis,” she said. “I used to play tennis all the time, and the biggest thing that supplanted it was shopping. That’s crazy. I actually feel like this is getting me back to the way I want to live.”
A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan
By JOHN TIERNEY
On Friday, when Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to anyone who figures out how to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, Al Gore sat by his side and called it an “important and welcome” initiative. For once, Mr. Gore couldn’t be accused of hype.
Vacuuming up our carbon-dioxide mess sounds improbable now, but so did the idea of precisely determining a ship’s longitude in 1714, when the British government offered a prize that led to a revolutionary tool for navigators, the chronometer. Private spaceships seemed impractical a decade ago, but the $10 million Ansari X Prize spurred competitors to spend more than $100 million, and the winning design will soon be taking tourists into space.
If governments and other moguls throw in more money, the new Virgin Earth Challenge may be the start of competitions that ultimately yield nanobots or microbes capable of gobbling up carbon dioxide. As far-fetched as it seems today, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could turn out to be a lot more practical than the alternative: persuading six billion people to stop putting it there.
In his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Gore has done a brilliant job of reaching the masses by combining a sober science lecture with a horror movie: gigantic ice sheets quickly melting, seas rapidly swamping vast areas, hurricanes relentlessly battering the coasts, the Gulf Stream stopping and plunging Europe into an ice age.
But there are two problems with this approach. One is that scaring people doesn’t necessarily make their political leaders do anything substantive.
The other problem is that most of the horror-movie scenarios are looking less and less plausible. Climate change will probably occur not with a bang but with a long, slow whimper, as you can see in the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The report concludes that it’s “very likely” that humans are now the main factor warming the climate. But even as the panel’s scientists are becoming surer of the problem, and warning of grim consequences this century and beyond, they’re eschewing crowd-thrilling catastrophes. Since the last I.P.C.C. report, six years ago, they haven’t raised the estimates of future temperatures and sea levels.
While Mr. Gore’s movie shows coastlines flooded by a 20-foot rise in sea level, the report’s projections for the rise this century range from 7 inches to 23 inches. The panel says Greenland’s ice sheet will shrink and might eventually disappear, but the process could take “millennia.” The Antarctic ice sheet is projected to grow, not shrink, because of increased snowfall.
The scientists acknowledge uncertainties and worrisome new signs, like the sudden acceleration in the flow of Greenland’s glaciers several years ago. But the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, didn’t extrapolate a short-term trend into a disaster, and its caution is vindicated by a report in the current issue of Science that the flow of two of the largest glaciers abruptly decelerated last year to near the old rate.
The panel does consider it “likely” that future typhoons and hurricanes will be stronger than today’s. But it also expects fewer of these storms (albeit with “less confidence” in that projection).
As for the Gulf Stream, it is “very unlikely” to undergo “a large abrupt transition during the 21st century,” according to the new report. The current is expected to slow slightly, meaning a little less heat from the tropics would reach the North Atlantic, which could be good news for Europe and North America, since that would temper some of the impact of global warming in the north.
Whatever happens, you can stop fretting about the Gulf Stream scenario in Mr. Gore’s movie and that full-fledged Hollywood disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow.” Mr. Gore’s companion book has a fold-out diagram of the Gulf Stream and warns that “some scientists are now seriously worried” about it shutting down and sending Europe into an ice age, but he must have been talking to the wrong scientists.
There wouldn’t be glaciers in the English shires even if the Gulf Stream did shut down. To understand why, you need to disregard not only the horror movies but also what you learned in grade school: that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping London so much warmer than New York even though England is farther north than Newfoundland.
This theory, originated by a 19th-century oceanographer, is “the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend,” in the words of Richard Seager, a climate modeler at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He and other researchers have calculated that the Gulf Stream’s influence typically raises land temperatures in the north by only five degrees Fahrenheit, hardly enough to explain England’s mild winters, much less its lack of glaciers.
Moreover, as the Gulf Stream meanders northward, it delivers just about as much heat to the eastern United States and Canada as to Europe, so it can’t account for the difference between New York and London. Dr. Seager gives the credit to the prevailing westerly winds — and the Rocky Mountains.
When these winds out of the west hit the Rockies, they’re diverted south, bringing air from the Arctic down on New York (as in last week’s cold spell). After their southern detour, the westerlies swing back north, carrying subtropical heat toward London. This Rocky Mountain detour accounts for about half the difference between New York and London weather, according to Dr. Seager.
The other half is caused by to the simple fact that London sits on the east side of an ocean — just like Seattle, which has a much milder climate than Siberia, the parallel land across the Pacific. Since ocean water doesn’t cool as quickly as land in winter, or heat up as much in summer, the westerly winds blowing over the ocean moderate the winter and summer temperatures in both Seattle and London.
So unless the westerlies reverse direction or the Rockies crumble, London and the rest of Western Europe will remain relatively mild. The danger London faces isn’t an ice age but a long, inexorable warming that will keep the temperatures and sea levels gradually rising for centuries — not an action flick but a super-slow-motion documentary.
It’ll be hard to keep audiences interested, particularly since the solutions are also in slow motion. The I.P.C.C. considers options for reducing greenhouse emissions, but projects that even the most radical (and politically painful) policies wouldn’t make much difference the first two or three decades. To politicians worried about the next election, especially in poor countries, 2030 sounds like eternity.
It’s always possible that something will galvanize people around the world into taking short-term pain for long-term gain. But I suspect there’s a better chance of someone claiming that $25 million prize. Whether it’s carbon-dioxide-gobbling nanobots or something else, it’d be good to have a backup plan when 2030 rolls around.
Europeans Agree to Cut Emissions Sharply if U.S. and Others Follow Suit
Europeans Agree to Cut Emissions Sharply if U.S. and Others Follow Suit
By JAMES KANTER
PARIS, Feb. 20 — Seeking to persuade other nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, European Union ministers pledged Tuesday to raise their own targets if industrialized countries like the United States made similar efforts.
European governments would be ready to cut emissions 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, from a current pledge of 20 percent, but only if other heavy polluters joined in, said Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister, who led a meeting in Brussels that formally endorsed the European targets.
Germany, the biggest European economy, was already prepared to cut its emissions even further if there was a broader agreement, Mr. Gabriel said, noting that the German Parliament had supported a 40 percent target.
The pledges, which match a proposal made by the European Commission last month, are signs that nations are gearing up for new negotiations on a global climate accord after 2012, when the first period covered by the Kyoto Protocol expires.
The issue is expected to be on the agenda when Germany serves as host of a meeting in June of the Group of 8 nations. European countries are hoping to win pledges from big developing countries as well, including China and India.
“You get a deadlock in international negotiations when there’s the attitude that, ‘We’re not going to do anything until someone goes first,’ so it’s good that the ministers committed to 20 percent,” said Kirsty Hamilton, a policy consultant for the UK Business Council for Sustainable Energy, a group representing British utilities.
But environmentalists were disappointed that governments postponed a more ambitious goal of 30 percent, unless other countries adopted similar policies.
Choosing a lower target “will send the wrong signal to the international community, casting a dubious light on how serious the European Union is about fighting climate change,” said Jan Kowalzig, a climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth in Brussels.
European officials want other parts of the world, including the United States, to adopt European-style restrictions on emissions to fight climate change, thus helping European businesses compete globally at a time when the European Union is toughening regulation in sectors like air travel, car manufacturing and construction.
But splits among member states over how much more Europe can afford to cut back on pollutants have emerged as obstacles to reaching firm targets.
Last week, European Union energy ministers backed away from approving a binding proposal that 20 percent of all energy must come from renewable sources, like wind and solar power, by 2020.
According to Friends of the Earth, Finland, Poland and Hungary resisted the 20 percent target, and only Sweden and Denmark supported a unilateral 30 percent target.
A European diplomat said Finland, Poland and Hungary had expressed reservations about how the burden would be shared so that poorer and more energy-intensive parts of Europe could develop their economies.
Such differences could foreshadow a showdown in March, when political leaders are to meet in Brussels and reach a final position.
A Battle Over the Costs of Global Warming
A Battle Over the Costs of Global Warming
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New Haven
There is an unofficial code of conduct that dictates how intellectuals should behave when they’re jousting with each other, a sort of Geneva Convention for the ivory tower.
Before they attack somebody else’s work, they first need to praise their opponent. A typical way to do so is to describe another professor as a distinguished scholar who has made an important contribution to the research literature. When you hear that, you can be pretty sure things are about to get nasty.
The rest of us can usually ignore these spats, but once in a while there is an academic fight that really matters. The economics profession is engaged in one of those right now and, as luck would have it, it’s even more entertaining than most.
Last week, Sir Nicholas Stern, a top adviser to the British government, came to the United States to talk about climate change. In October, a commission he led released a 700-page report calling for “urgent action” against global warming to prevent economic damage that could rival that of the world wars and the Great Depression. Given its source and its tone, the Stern Review has nudged people to talk more seriously about climate change.
In the minds of a lot of American economists, however, the review is a badly flawed piece of work. These economists don’t doubt that earth is getting hotter, that human activity is the cause and that the results could be bad. But they think that Sir Nicholas may have exaggerated the likely speed of warming, among other things, and overstated the case for big, quick action.
The epicenter of the opposition has been here at Yale, and so last week, after stopping in Washington to testify before Congress, Sir Nicholas came to New Haven for a public debate with his critics. With a couple of hundred students and professors in the audience — and a sculpture of an angry Zeus-like figure looming above the stage — the two sides went at it in the dignified, vicious way that academics do.
Sir Nicholas spoke during the morning, and his case is really quite simple. The carbon dioxide that has already been pumped into the atmosphere guarantees that the planet will keep getting warmer. But the decisions that people make over the next couple of decades will determine how much warmer — and, in all likelihood, how many floods, droughts, hurricanes, crop failures and species extinctions occur. The surest way to reduce emissions is a big economic deterrent, like a carbon tax.
“The later we leave it, the more difficult it will be,” he said, “and the more risks you run.”
The Stern Review’s most influential critic has probably been William Nordhaus, a 65-year-old Yale professor who is as mainstream as economists come. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the anti-poverty advocate, calls Mr. Nordhaus “about the most reasonable man I know.”
He was the first speaker after lunch, and, of course, he had some very nice things to say about Sir Nicholas. The report “was presented here very eloquently by a distinguished scholar,” Mr. Nordhaus said. But then came the juicy stuff: the Stern Review “commits cruel and unusual punishment on the English language,” Mr. Nordhaus said, and the British government’s opinion on climate change is no more infallible than was its prewar view about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This was fairly tame compared with the comments of another Yale economist, Robert O. Mendelsohn. “I was awestruck,” he said, comparing Sir Nicholas to “The Wizard of Oz.” But “my job is to be Toto,” he added, in the same good-humored tone Mr. Nordhaus used. “Is it in fact The Wizard of Oz, or is it nothing at all?”
The two professors raised some questions about the science in the Stern Review. Mr. Nordhaus wondered if carbon emissions and temperatures would rise as quickly as the report suggests, and Mr. Mendelsohn predicted that people would learn to adapt to climate change, reducing its ultimate cost.
But their main objection revolved around something called the discount rate. The Stern Review assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now (adjusted for inflation) is roughly as valuable as a dollar spent reducing emissions today. In effect, the report argues for spending the money to cut emissions because future generations have as much claim on resources as current generations. “I’ve still not heard a decent ethical argument” for believing otherwise, Sir Nicholas said at the debate.
I’m guessing that your instinct is to agree with him. Mine certainly was. The problem is that none of us actually behave this way. If we really thought that our great-grandchild deserved our money as much as we do, we would never go out to dinner again. Instead, we would invest the $50 we would have spent on dinner, confident that it would grow over time and become perhaps $1,000 for our great-grandchild to put toward health care, education or a supercomputer. Any of that is preferable to our measly dinner.
But a dollar today truly is more valuable than a dollar a century from now. For one thing, your great-grandchild will almost certainly be richer than you are and won’t need your money as much as you do. So spending a dollar on carbon reduction today to avoid a dollar’s worth of economic damage in 2107 doesn’t make sense. We would be better off putting the money toward something likely to have a higher return than alternative energy, like education.
Technically, then, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate. But in practical terms, their argument has a weak link. They are assuming that the economic gains from, say, education will make future generations rich enough to make up for any damage caused by climate change. Sea walls will be able to protect cities; technology can allow crops to grow in new ways; better medicines can stop the spread of disease.
No one knows whether this is true, let alone desirable, because no one knows what life will be like on a planet that is five degrees hotter. “If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it,” said Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist who attended the debate.
While sitting there, I was reminded of the speeches that Alan Greenspan gave a few years ago about the risks of deflation. It wasn’t the most likely outcome, he said, but the consequences of it could be so bad that policy makers had to take steps to prevent it. Focusing attention on this point — the catastrophic risks of climate change — is Sir Nicholas’s biggest accomplishment, whatever you think of his math.
As Mr. Weitzman puts it, the Stern Review is “right for the wrong reasons.”
Even its critics seem open to this idea. When Mr. Nordhaus and Sir Nicholas were exchanging e-mail messages before the debate — to their credit, some academics keep their arguments from becoming personal — Mr. Nordhaus sent a note that summed up his view. “I think it’s a great study, but it’s 50 years ahead of its time,” he recalled writing. “Since everybody else is 50 years behind the times, if you average the two, you might come out just right.”
In other words, it’s time for a tax on carbon emissions.
Cutting Back Without Deprivation
Cutting Back Without Deprivation
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY
IT sounds like something that would happen in San Francisco. In 2005, a few friends gathered for dinner and started bemoaning the fate of the planet, the environmental impact of consumer excess — and ended up challenging one another to not buy anything new for six months.
By mid-2006, the rapidly growing group was featured on the “Today” show, and people were calling it a movement.
“We think of it as more of a phenomenon than a movement,” said John Perry, a co-founder of the group, now known as the Compact. “We’re grateful for our 17 minutes of fame,” he added, “but we didn’t intend this to be broadcast. We didn’t mean to attract followers.”
Yet for such a simple and not terribly sexy idea — to buy nothing new, other than food and other absolute essentials — the Compact has managed to build a groundswell of supporters. The group has more than doubled since the fall, to nearly 8,000 members from 3,000. It has even found a footing in Europe and Australia.
If Thoreau comes to mind, Mr. Perry would be the first to agree that “there is nothing new or startling” about the Compact. The main difference between the Compact and other organizations with an antimaterialism bent, like Voluntary Simplicity, he said, is that the aim of the Compact is not just to scale back financially but to reduce the environmental toll of the American consumer lifestyle.
Compact members reuse or recycle what they have and buy only used or secondhand goods — except for food, health-related items and personal things, like socks and underwear. You can spend as much as you like on life’s more intangible pleasures, like travel, sports, music and other cultural activities.
Although the group took its name from the Mayflower Compact of 1620, it is not as Puritan as it sounds. As Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a Compact member who runs a small advertising agency in Charleston, S.C., put it: “It’s about mindful consumerism, not about depriving ourselves.”
When Mrs. Abbott-Ross first joined the Compact about a year ago, she was a nonstop shopper.
Packages would arrive from eBay and she wouldn’t remember what she had ordered. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed: by the clutter, by the credit card bills, by all this stuff we didn’t need.”
Now, she says, “I don’t even think about spending.” The result is not only an extra cushion of cash, “it’s a huge stress reducer,” she said. “Now I can buy what I want, whether it’s a nice bottle of wine or organic food for my family.”
To the extent that the Compact has any structure at all, it exists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) where people can join threaded discussions about things like the temptations of Costco or whether your friends look at you askance (which many do, members report).
Mr. Perry monitors the group and has read thousands of statements about people’s reasons for joining. “I think we’ve touched a bundle of angry nerves,” he said. “People are worn out and hung over by all the stuff in their lives. Many have terrible consumer debt. They feel out of control.”
What may contribute to the Compact’s success, Mr. Perry thinks, is that it gives people a place to talk. “You can’t go to a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, I’m $30,000 in debt, and I’m addicted to The Shopping Channel.’ ”
WHILE the chance to let your hair down financially may provide some relief, the Compact offers a surprising payoff. Yes, the group’s secondhand-buying strategy has helped members to save money, pay off their credit card debts and pad their children’s college funds. And it gives people the satisfaction of knowing they are contributing less to the local landfill.
The much bigger dividend gained by many members is time.
“When you don’t go to stores, you spend a lot more time doing other things,” said Mr. Perry, who has traded his own “recreational shopping habit” for a plot in the community garden, eating out with friends and volunteering at his son’s school.
Bridget Stuart, a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, Calif., who joined the Compact in December, experienced a similar windfall of time. Now she invites friends over for dinner and to play board games and takes walks with her children in lieu of cruising the mall.
“I’m even getting back into tennis,” she said. “I used to play tennis all the time, and the biggest thing that supplanted it was shopping. That’s crazy. I actually feel like this is getting me back to the way I want to live.”
