The Environment Under President Trump.

                                                      Comments due March 10, 2016

Let’s play a game.

It’s April 30, 2017: Day 100 of President Donald Trump’s first hundred days. The champagne floweth, the Wall is under construction, and now we’re more or less federally mandated to refer to 1600 Pennsylvania as the Gold House. The president’s bombastic governance is buoyed by a comfortable Republican congressional majority. After the Senate blockaded Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, it confirmed a jubilant Ted Cruz, who has only cemented far-right ideology in the justice system. The GOP has had a busy hundred days. This is patriot country.

How’s the environment doing?

Most people don’t really talk about the environment anymore. The last time a journalist tried to ask Press Secretary Sean Hannity a question about climate change, she was booted from the briefing room. We can talk about land, though. With a real estate developer for president, we spend a lot of time talking about land.

Under the fast-tracked Business Opportunities for Appalachia Act (BOFA), mountaintop removal mining has decimated something on the order of 25 percent of the peaks in Central Appalachia. During late January’s fire sale of the American West, the private sector scooped up all but a fraction of the land previously owned by the federal government. Upwards of 15 percent of the leases are reportedly held by the blind trust that currently controls the Trump Organization’s assets.

Miles of the Pacific Northwest coastline are unrecognizable — it turns out we needed a couple more good swathes of land to host burgeoning U.S. crude exports to Asia — but hey, the Gold House lawn looks great. And besides, Seattle’s got it easy compared to Oakland, which is now just one large coal export terminal.

How’d we end up here? Well, what you have to understand is that a lot happened at once. President Trump moves without hesitation.

If we’re going to start with something, though, it probably began with the Paris climate change agreement the world was so happy to adopt in 2015. One of the first things that occurred after inauguration day was the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. This didn’t bode well for international climate action writ large. Without the U.S. on board, China and India pulled out, citing uncertain economic times ahead, leaving the European Union to try and salvage a neutered deal. Sure, the U.S. was broadly condemned, but with OPEC’s mid-2016 restrictions on oil supply and an uptick in the price of Gulf crude, cheap American oil sounded pretty good to China, which was happy to help finance those shiny new Pacific Northwest oil export terminals. They went up pretty quick, and that was enough to keep the president happy.

It’s important to keep this president happy.

After the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement, Congress swiftly, predictably, rolled back the Clean Power Plan for curbing carbon pollution from power plants and the Obama administration’s updated methane rules for cutting leakage from landfills and the oil and gas sector. Trump, flanked by coal executives amid much fanfare, signed the legislation. (This was before the dismantling of the EPA, but we’ll get that later. We’ve only made it to early February.) Either way, with a new originalist on the bench, SCOTUS was bound to strike down the power plant regulations anyway.

Early March is around when things really started to get interesting.

Reinvigorated by a friendly business climate and overt federal support, Shell has begun preparations to head north. Very north. A global scramble for Arctic oil, currently in full tilt, is only avoiding escalation because of the president’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin (and the worldwide acknowledgement that the States’ indiscriminate bombing of Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi oil supply chains has actually left Arctic oil with one of the lowest risk profiles).

Speaking of Russia, Vice President Sarah Palin recently returned from her first state visit to Moscow, where she, Fred Singer (her chief of staff), and U.S. Trade Representative Carl Icahn (everyone thought he’d been pegged for Treasury!) punched out the first unofficial draft of a new public-private partnership incentive program aimed almost exclusively at international oil pipeline construction. Keystone XL, now back on track, was small potatoes compared to the Big and Tall versions on the horizon. Between the vice president’s program and President Trump’s invocation of eminent domain in more or less whatever direction his eyeballs are swiveled, pipelines are effectively the new highways. (Don’t worry about the highways, though. Secretary of Transportation Chris Christie has made sure to prioritize highway funding over bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly transport.)

Sure, there’s the whole climate change thing, and of course, academics and non-profit types remain today at near-nuclear war with the government on all things coal, oil, and gas; but the new U.S. moratorium on climate science research makes it difficult to put forth any new arguments.

Then there was mid-March’s spike in oil train explosions. You couldn’t really blame the GOP for that one, but environmentalists did anyway. The probability of an oil train explosion remained constant, but with more fracked oil came more trains. (As well as subsidies for private sector fire departments. It has become abundantly clear that we’ll need a lot more fire departments to deal with a rather unprecedented uptick in railway explosions.)

Of course, nobody, Republicans included, was really sure what would happen when Trump dismantled the Environmental Protection Agency. It kinda just happened in one of his fits of rage, and we’re frankly still sorting that one out. It turns out that the first thing that happens when you shutter an agency is that its 15,000 employees get angry. The next thing that happens is that the private sector steps in for the purpose of “economically efficient environmental protection.” EnviProtect Systems, which now holds a near monopoly on pipeline-spill cleanup and gas-leak plugging, was rumored just this month to be pondering a bottled-water business play. Fracking contamination has been a boon for private-sector water.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the elimination of the Department of Energy and the drastically curtailed purview of the Bureau of Land Management, but there’s probably not time to dive into the intricacies of Interior Secretary Rand Paul’s days. Suffice it to say that the man works long hours.

And the climate is still changing, but don’t tell Sean Hannity I said that.

Fracking In Florida

                                                   Comments due March 3 , 2016

 With geology akin to a wet sponge and fragile underground aquifers that supply almost all its drinking water, Florida has never been considered part of the agitated battle over fracking as a technology for extracting oil and gas. But that began to change two years ago when a Texas­ based oil and gas company was found to have been using hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and matrix acidizing, a fracking­ like method that dissolves rocks with acid instead of fracturing them with pressurized liquid. Neither residents nor local governments knew about it because well stimulation, the catch­all term for both techniques, does not require a separate permit and is not regulated. The result has been an unlikely battle over fracking in Florida that is picking up steam across the state. The discovery outraged local government officials and environmentalists, who said they were worried about the effects of toxic chemicals and acids on Florida’s soil and water. Nearly 80 counties and cities have passed ordinances to ban or oppose the methods, in part because of their dissatisfaction with the State Legislature’s proposals. Now, a bill to try to regulate fracking is dividing the Legislature. Environmentalists and some local officials have sharply criticized the measure, saying that it would fail to regulate matrix acidizing, the technology most likely to be used in Florida, and that it would stop local governments from banning fracking. The bill also would revoke any local bans. The House has passed the bill, and the Senate is considering it. “There is a certain amount of despair and disbelief” over the legislation, said Penny Taylor, a commissioner in Collier County, which is home to Naples on the gulf coast. “At this point, the concern is spreading statewide, and it does appear that counties where there may not even be oil are very concerned about fracking.” Local officials said they were angry about being overruled by state lawmakers in Tallahassee, an increasingly common move by the Republican dominated Legislature when it is displeased with local decisions. “I think the last couple of years we have had some of the biggest assaults on home rule that we’ve ever seen,” said Marni Sawicki, the mayor of Cape Coral. Such strong local opposition has led to bipartisan misgivings in the State Senate, where a few prominent Republicans have broken ranks and publicly criticized fracking. “Fracking isn’t the way,” State Senator Anitere Flores of Miami, a conservative Republican who sits on the Appropriations Committee, posted on Twitter. The committee is the bill’s final hurdle to the Senate floor. Even the powerful chairman of that committee has had qualms about the bill. He recently delayed a hearing on the legislation, saying he wanted to learn more about the fracking technologies directly from officials at the state’s environmental protection agency. The hearing is expected to take place this week. “We want credible, scientific responses to questions, not special­ interest  responses,” State Senator Tom Lee, the chairman, said. In the House, lawmakers in support of the bill said local governments and environmentalists were misconstruing facts and exaggerating the potential consequences of the measure, which would regulate fracking for the first time. They said the bans were illegal because counties and cities have little authority to regulate oil and gas drilling, other than as zoning and land­use issues. Still, to allay their concerns, the authors of the measure said they tweaked it to, among other things, require oil companies to notify local governments when they intend to use fracking. Most of the state’s oil and gas drilling, which is modest compared with major oil ­producing states, takes place in Florida’s panhandle and in the southwest, on the edge of the western Everglades. “The environmentalists claim that we are taking control from local government on this matter,” said State Representative Ray Rodrigues, the Fort Myers Republican who introduced the House bill. “You can’t take something away if you don’t have it in the first place.” Mr. Rodrigues said the bill took other precautions as well. It calls for a moratorium on “high pressure stimulation” — hydraulic or acid fracking, but not matrix acidizing, which does not create cracks but helps enhance the process — until state environmental regulators complete a peer­ reviewed study. The study would look at how the extraction methods could affect Florida’s geology and its underground water supply. Regulators would then complete the rules and forward them to lawmakers for their approval. Dave R. Mica, the executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, said acidization was not included in the bill because it was an offshoot of a common, well­ accepted technique used to clean wells and should not be subjected to more regulation. “It is regulated, and we have used it for decades and decades,” Mr. Mica said. Mr. Rodrigues agreed that a study was needed before moving forward because the state’s porous geology raises concerns that toxic chemicals could more easily penetrate groundwater. Studies from other states with different geology simply do not apply to Florida, experts said. Environmentalists are also concerned that the acids and chemicals used in matrix acidizing could further dissolve delicate limestone formations that protect the aquifers. “I think it would be foolish to ban a practice without any scientific evidence,” Mr. Rodrigues said. “For those who oppose the practice, they should support the study. And if the study proves their belief, then it’s acceptable to ban this practice.” But environmentalists and local officials said the legislation was seriously undermined by the fact that matrix acidizing was left out of the study and the regulations, leaving it to continue unabated. They want lawmakers to include acidizing in the bill but carve out an exception for the form used to clean wells. “We feel that we couldn’t have a bill that would address a technique we likely won’t use in our state and not address a technique we likely will use,” said Jennifer Hecker, a policy director for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, an environmental group. Anthony R. Ingraffea, an authority on fracking at Cornell University, said that because the bill did not include rules for all forms of well stimulation, it would do little to help Floridians. He said the legislation appeared to be a “smoke screen” to eliminate local control of fracking. Mr. Mica, of the petroleum council, said environmentalists were trying to put up barriers to any well­ stimulation technologies and would prefer to let local governments ban them. “Environmentalists should just say, ‘We don’t want oil and gas,’ ” he said. (NYT 2/24/2016)

Flint Michigan isn't alone.

                                                  Comments due by Feb 25, 2016

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.  As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”

President Obama would have good reason to worry if his kids lived in Flint. But the city’s children are hardly the only ones threatened by this public health crisis. There’s a lead crisis for children in Baltimore, Md.; Herculaneum, Miss.; Sebring, Ohio; and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.; and that’s just to begin a list. State reports suggest, for instance, that “18 cities in Pennsylvania and 11 in New Jersey may have an even higher share of children with dangerously elevated levels of lead than does Flint.” Today, scientists agree that there is no safe level of lead for children and at least half of American children have some of this neurotoxin in their blood. The CDC is especially concerned about the more than 500,000 American children who have substantial amounts of lead in their bodies. Over the past century, an untold number have had their IQs reduced, their school performances limited, their behaviors altered, and their neurological developmentundermined. From coast to coast, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, children have been and continue to be imperiled by a century of industrial production, commercial gluttony, and abandonment by the local, state, and federal governments that should have protected them. Unlike in Flint, the “crisis” seldom comes to public attention.

Two, three … many Flints

In Flint, the origins of the current crisis lay in the history of auto giant General Motors (GM) and its rise in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the status of the world’s largest corporation. GM’s Buick plant alone once occupied “an area almost a mile and a half long and half a mile wide,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and several Chevrolet and other GM plants literally covered the waterfront of “this automotive city.” Into the Flint River went the toxic wastes of factories large and small, which once supplied batteries, paints, solders, glass, fabrics, oils, lubricating fluids, and a multitude of other materials that made up the modern car. In these plants strung out along the banks of the Flint and Saginaw rivers and their detritus lay the origins of the present public health emergency.

The crisis that attracted President Obama’s attention is certainly horrifying, but the children of Flint have been poisoned in one way or another for at least 80 years. Three generations of those children living around Chevrolet Avenue in the old industrial heart of the city experienced an environment filled with heavy metal toxins that cause neurological conditions in them and cardiovascular problems in adults.

As Michael Moore documented in his film Roger and Me, GM abandoned Flint in a vain attempt to stave off financial disaster. Having sucked its people dry, the company ditched the city, leaving it to deal with a polluted hell without the means to do so. Like other industrial cities that have suffered this kind of abandonment, Flint’s population is majority African American and Latino, and has a disproportionate number of families living below the poverty line. Of its 100,000 residents, 65 percent are African American and Latino and 42 percent are mired in poverty.

The president should be worried about Flint’s children and local, state, and federal authorities need to fix the pipes, sewers, and water supply of the city. Technically, this is a feasible, if expensive, proposition. It’s already clear, however, that thepolitical will is just not there even for this one community. Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, has refused to provide Flint’s residents with even a prospective timetable for replacing their pipes and making their water safe. There is, however, a far graver problem that is even less easy to fix: the mix of racism and corporate greed that have put lead and other pollutants into millions of homes in the United States. The scores of endangered kids in Flint are just the tip of a vast, toxic iceberg. Even Baltimore, which first identified its lead poisoning epidemic in the 1930s, still faces a crisis, especially in largely African American communities, when it comes to the lead paint in its older housing stock.

Just this month, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community, and development, Kenneth C. Holt, dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callouslysuggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

There is, in fact, a grim broader history of lead poisoning in America. It was probably the most widely dispersed environmental toxin that affected children in this country. In part, this was because, for decades during the middle of the twentieth century, it was marketed as an essential ingredient in industrial society, something without which none of us could get along comfortably. Those toxic pipes in Flint are hardly the only, or even the primary, source of danger to children left over from that era.

In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead was introduced as an additive for gasoline. It was lauded at the time as a “gift of God” by a representative of the Ethyl Corporation, a creation of GM, Standard Oil, and Dupont, the companies that invented, produced, and marketed the stuff. Despite warnings that this industrial toxin might pollute the planet, which it did, almost three-quarters of a century would pass before it was removed from gasoline in the United States. During that time, it spewed out of the tailpipes of hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, it tainted the soil that children played in and was tracked onto floors that toddlers touched. Banned from use in the 1980s, it still lurks in the environment today.

Meanwhile, homes across the country were tainted by lead in quite a different way. Lead carbonate, a white powder, was mixed with linseed oil to create the paint that was used in the nation’s homes, hospitals, schools, and other buildings until 1978. Though its power to harm and even kill children who sucked on lead-painted windowsills, toys, cribs, and woodwork had long been known, it was only in that year that the federal government banned its use in household paints.

Hundreds of tons of the lead in paint that covered the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States remains in place almost four decades later, especially in poorer neighborhoods where millions of African American and Latino children currently live. Right now, most middle class white families feel relatively immune from the dangers of lead, although the gentrification of old neighborhoods and the renovation of old homes can still expose their children to dangerous levels of lead dust from the old paint on thosewalls. However, economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today. As with the water flowing into homes from the pipes of Flint’s water system, so the walls of its apartment complexes, not to mention those in poor neighborhoods of Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and virtually every other older urban center in the country, continue to poison children exposed to lead-polluted dust, chips, soil, and air.

Over the course of the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead and millions more remain in danger of it today. Add to this the risks these same children face from industrial toxins like mercury, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs) and you have an ongoing recipe for a Flint-like disaster but on a national scale.

In truth, the United States has scores of “Flints” awaiting their moments. Think of them as ticking toxic time bombs — just an austerity scheme or some official’s poor decision away from a public health disaster. Given this, it’s remarkable, even in the wake of Flint, how little attention or publicity such threats receive. Not surprisingly, then, there seems to be virtually no political will to ensure that future generations of children will not suffer the same fate as those in Flint.

The future of America’s toxic past

A series of decisions by state and local officials turned Flint’s chronic post-industrial crisis into a total public health disaster. If clueless, corrupt, or heartless government officials get all the blame for this (and blame they do deserve), the larger point will unfortunately be missed — that there are many post-industrial Flints, many other hidden tragedies affecting America’s children that await their moments in the news. Treat Flint as an anomaly and you condemn families nationwide to bear the damage to their children alone, abandoned by a society unwilling to invest in cleaning up a century of industrial pollution, or even to acknowledge the injustice involved.

Flint may be years away from a solution to its current crisis, but in a few cities elsewhere in the country there is at least a modicum of hope when it comes to developing ways to begin to address this country’s poisonous past. In California, for example, 10 cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Oakland, have successfully sued and won an initial judgment against three lead pigment manufacturers for $1.15 billion. That money will be invested in removing lead paint from the walls of homes in these cities. If this judgment is upheld on appeal, it would be an unprecedented and pathbreaking victory, since it would force a polluting industry to clean up the mess it created and from which it profited.

There have been other partial victories, too. In Herculaneum, Miss., for instance, where half the children within a mile of the nation’s largest lead smelter suffered lead poisoning, jurors returned a $320 million verdict against Fluor Corporation, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. That verdict is also on appeal, while the company has moved its smelter to Peru where whole new populations are undoubtedly being poisoned.

President Obama hit the nail on the head with his recent comments on Flint, but he also missed the larger point. There he was just a few dozen miles from that city’s damaged water system when he spoke in Detroit, another symbol of corporate abandonment with its own grim toxic legacy. Thousands of homes in the Motor City, the former capital of the auto industry, are still lead paint disaster areas. Perhaps it’s time to widen the canvas when it comes to the poisoning of America’s children and face the terrible human toll caused by “the American century.” (TomDispatch)

Supreme Courtputs Clean Air plan on hold.

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A divided Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to halt enforcement of President Barack Obama's sweeping plan to address climate change until after legal challenges are resolved.

The surprising move is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations "an unprecedented power grab."

By temporarily freezing the rule the high court's order signals that opponents have made a strong argument against the plan. A federal appeals court last month refused to put it on hold.

The court's four liberal justices said they would have denied the request.

The plan aims to stave off the worst predicted impacts of climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions at existing power plants by about one-third by 2030.

Appellate arguments are set to begin June 2.

The compliance period starts in 2022, but states must submit their plans to the Environmental Protection Administration by September or seek an extension.

Many states opposing the plan depend on economic activity tied to such fossil fuels as coal, oil and gas. They argued that power plants will have to spend billions of dollars to begin complying with a rule that may end up being overturned.

Implementation of the rules is considered essential to the United States meeting emissions-reduction targets in a global climate agreement signed in Paris last month. The Obama administration and environmental groups also say the plan will spur new clean-energy jobs.

To convince the high court to temporarily halt the plan, opponents had to convince the justices that there was a "fair prospect" the court would strike down the rule. The court also had to consider whether denying a stay would cause irreparable harm to the states and utility companies affected.

Paris Agreement

                                                          Comments due by Feb 11, 2016

Do you agree with this assessment of Paris?

 The Paris Agreement, a truly landmark climate accord, which was gaveled through today, December 12, 2015, at 7:26 pm (Paris time) at the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP-21), checks all the boxes in my five-point scorecard for a potentially effective Paris Agreement, described in my November 17th blog essay, Paris Can Be a Key Step.  The Agreement provides a broad foundation for meaningful progress on climate change, and represents a dramatic departure from the Kyoto Protocol and the past 20 years of climate negotiations.

Essential Background

Anyone who has read this blog over the past several years, or – even more so — my academic writing over the past twenty years on international climate change policy architecture, knows that I have viewed the dichotomous distinction between Annex I and non-Annex I countries as the major stumbling block to progress. That distinction was first introduced in the climate negotiations at COP-1 in Berlin in 1995. That was, in my view, an unfortunate and narrow interpretation of the sound equity principle in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) – “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” It was codified two years later in the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol, which has been the primary international agreement to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global climate change, included mandatory emissions-reduction obligations only for developed countries. Developing countries had no emissions-reduction commitments. The dichotomous distinction between the developed and developing countries in the Kyoto Protocol has made progress on climate change impossible, because growth in emissions since the Protocol came into force in 2005 is entirely in the large developing countries—China, India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia. The big break came at the annual UNFCCC negotiating session in Durban, South Africa in 2011, where a decision was adopted by member countries to “develop [by December 2015, in Paris] a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties.” This “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” broke with the Kyoto Protocol and signaled a new opening for innovative thinking (which we, at the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, took to heart).

The Paris Agreement is a Departure from the Past

Today, in Paris, representatives of 195 countries adopted a new hybrid international climate policy architecture that includes: bottom-up elements in the form of “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), which are national targets and actions that arise from national policies; and top-down elements for oversight, guidance, and coordination. Now, all countries will be involved in taking actions to reduce emissions.

Remarkably, 186 of the 195 members of the UNFCCC submitted INDCs by the end of the Paris talks, representing some 96% of global emissions. Contrast that with the Kyoto Protocol, which now covers countries (Europe and New Zealand) accounting for no more than 14% of global emissions (and 0% of global emissions growth).

This broad scope of participation under the new Paris Agreement is a necessary condition for meaningful action, but, of course, it is not a sufficient condition. Also required is adequate ambition of the individual contributions. But this is only the first step with this new approach. The INDCs will be assessed and revised every five years, with their collective ambition ratcheted up over time. That said, even this initial set of contributions could cut anticipated temperature increases this century to about 3.5 degrees Centigrade, more than the frequently-discussed aspirational goal of limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees C (or the new aspirational target from Paris of 1.5 degrees C), but much less than the 5-6 degrees C increase that would be expected without this action. (An amendment to the Montreal Protocol to address hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) is likely to shave an addition 0.5 C of warming.)

The problem has not been solved, and it will not be for years to come, but the new approach brought about by the Paris Agreement can be a key step toward reducing the threat of global climate change.

The new climate agreement, despite being path-breaking and the result of what Coral Davenport writing in The New York Times rightly called “an extraordinary effort at international diplomacy,”is only a foundation for moving forward, but it is a sufficiently broad and sensible foundation to make increased ambition over time feasible for the first time.  Whether the Agreement is truly successful, whether this foundation for progress is effectively exploited over the years ahead by the Parties to the Agreement, is something we will know only ten, twenty, or more years from now.

What is key in the Agreement is the following: the centrality of the INDC structure (through which 186 countries representing 96% of global emissions have made submissions); the most balanced transparency requirements ever promulgated; provision for heterogeneous linkage, including international carbon markets (through “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes” – ITMOs); explicit clarification in a decision that agreement on “loss and damage” does not provide a basis for liability of compensation; and 5-year periods for stocktaking and improvement of the INDCs.

The Key Elements of the Paris Agreement

Here are some of the highlights of what stands out to me in the Paris Agreement.

Article 2 of the Agreement reaffirms the goal of limiting the global average temperature increase above the pre-industrial level to 2 degrees C, and adds 1.5 degrees C as something even more aspirational.  In my opinion, these aspirational goals – which come not from science (although endorsed by most scientists) nor economics, and may not even be feasible – are much less important than the critical components of the agreement:  the scope of participation through the INDC structure, and the mechanisms for implementation (see below).

Article 3 makes it clear that the INDC structure is central and universal for all parties, although Article 4 blurs this a bit with references to the circumstances of developing country Parties. But throughout the Agreement, it is abundantly clear that the firewall from the 1995 Berlin Mandate has finally been breached. In addition,five-year periods for the submission of revised INDCs (and global stocktaking of the impact of the Paris Agreement) are included in Article 14.  The first stocktaking review will be in 2018, with the start date for new INDCs set for 2020.

Article 4 importantly describes transparency requirements (domestic monitoring, reporting, and verification).  This is crucial, and represents a striking compromise between the U.S. and Europe, on the one hand, and China and India, on the other hand. All countries must eventually face the same monitoring and reporting requirements, regardless of their status as developed or developing.

Article 6 provides for international policy linkage, and is therebyexceptionally important for the successful exploitation of the foundation provided by the Paris Agreement.  The necessary language for heterogeneous international policy linkage (not only international carbon markets, but international linkage of other national policy instruments) is included. I have written about this key issue many times over the past ten years. It can bring down compliance costs greatly, and thereby facilitate greater ambition over time. (See our paper on this from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements:  “Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Climate Policies Through a Future International Agreement” By Daniel Bodansky, Seth Hoedl,Gilbert E. Metcalf and Robert N. Stavins, November 2014.)  The Paris Agreement accomplishes this through provision for “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes.” With this provision, we have a new climate policy acronym – ITMOs – about which I suspect I will be writing in the future.

There is considerable discussion of “finance” in Article 9, but the numbers do not appear in the Agreement, only in the accompanying Decision, where item 54 states that by 2025, the Parties will revisit the total quantity of funding, using the current $100 billion target as a “floor.”

Finally, the Agreement’s Article 8 on Loss and Damage was necessary from the point of view of the most vulnerable countries, but the most contentious issue is settled in Decision 52, where the Parties agree that this “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability of compensation.”  That decision was absolutely essential from the perspective of the largest emitters.

Anticipated Impacts of the Paris Agreement

Before I turn to my assessment of the Agreement, I should comment briefly on a topic that seems to be of considerable interest to many people (based on the questions I received from the press during my 10 days in Paris), namely what effect will the Agreement have on business, what signals will it send to the private sector?

My answer is that impacts on businesses will come largely not directly from the Paris Agreement, but from the policy actions that the various Parties undertake domestically in their respective jurisdictions to comply with the Paris Agreement.  I am again referring to the 186 countries which submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions – INDCs – under the Agreement.

So, in the case of the United States, for example, those policies that will enable the country to achieve its submitted INDC are: the Clean Power Plan (which will accelerate the shift in many states from coal to natural gas for electricity generation, as well as provide incentives in some states for renewable electricity generation); CAFE (motor vehicle fuel efficiency) standards increasing over time (as already enacted by Congress); appliance efficiency standards moving up over time (as also already enacted by Congress); California’s very aggressive climate policy (AB-32); and the northeast states’ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

These various policies are credible, and they will send price signals that affect business decisions (but not across the board nor with ideal efficiency, as would a national carbon tax or a national carbon cap-and-trade system). In terms of impacts on specific companies, impacts will continue to vary greatly. But a useful generalization is that a major effect of most climate policies is to raise energy costs, which tends to be good news for producers of energy-consuming durable goods (for example, the Boeing Company) and bad news for consumers of those same energy-consuming durable goods (for example, United Airlines).

An Assessment with my Paris Scorecard

Lastly, here is my November 17th scorecard and my assessment of the five key elements I said would constitute a successful 21stConference of the Parties:

1. Include approximately 90% of global emissions in the set of INDCs that are submitted and part of the Paris Agreement (compared with 14% in the current commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol). This was obviously achieved, with total coverage reaching 96% of global emissions.

2. Establish credible reporting and transparency requirements. This was achieved, through long negotiations between China and India, on the one hand, and Europe and the United States, on the other.

3. Move forward with finance for climate adaptation (and mitigation)B the famous $100 billion commitment. This was achieved.

4. Agree to return to negotiations periodically, such as every 5 years, to revisit the ambition and structure of the INDCs. This wasachieved.

5. Put aside unproductive disagreements, such as on so-called “loss and damage,” which appears to rich countries like unlimited liability for bad weather events in developing countries, and the insistence by some parties that the INDCs themselves be binding under international law. This would have required Senate ratification of the Agreement in the United States, which would have meant that the United States would not be a party to the Agreement. There wassuccess on both of these.

Final Words

So, my fundamental assessment of the Paris climate talks is that they were a great success. Unfortunately, as I have said before, some advocates and some members of the press will likely characterize the outcome as a “failure,” because the 2 degree C target has not been achieved immediately.

Let me conclude where I started. The Paris Agreement provides an important new foundation for meaningful progress on climate change, and represents a dramatic departure from the past 20 years of international climate negotiations.  Of course, the problem has not been solved, and it will not be for many years to come. But the new approach brought about by the Paris Agreement can be a key step toward reducing the threat of global climate change. In truth, only time will tell.

2015 Hottest Year on Record

                                                   Comments due by Feb 3, 2016
Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year in the historical record by far, breaking a mark set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world. In the contiguous United States, the year was the second­warmest on record, punctuated by a December that was both the hottest and the wettest since record­keeping began. One result has been a wave of unusual winter floods coursing down the Mississippi River watershed. Scientists started predicting a global temperature record months ago, in part because an El Niño weather pattern, one of the largest in a century, is releasing an immense amount of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere. But the bulk of the record­setting heat, they say, is a consequence of the long­term planetary warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. “The whole system is warming up, relentlessly,” said Gerald A. Meehl, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. It will take a few more years to know for certain, but the back­to­back records of 2014 and 2015 may have put the world back onto a trajectory of rapid global warming, after a period of relatively slow warming dating to the last powerful El Niño, in 1998. Politicians attempting to claim that greenhouse gases are not a problem seized on that slow period to argue that “global warming stopped in 1998,” with these claims and similar statements reappearing recently on the Republican presidential campaign trail. Statistical analysis suggested all along that the claims were false, and that the slowdown was, at most, a minor blip in an inexorable trend, perhaps caused by a temporary increase in the absorption of heat by the Pacific Ocean. “Is there any evidence for a pause in the long­term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate­science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.” Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, calculated that if the global climate were not warming, the odds of setting two back­to­back record years would be remote, about one chance in every 1,500 pairs of years. Given the reality that the planet is warming, the odds become far higher, about one chance in 10, according to Dr. Mann’s calculations. Two American government agencies — NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — compile separate analyses of the global temperature, based upon thousands of measurements from weather stations, ships and ocean buoys scattered around the world. Meteorological agencies in Britain and Japan do so, as well. The agencies follow slightly different methods to cope with problems in the data, but obtain similar results.                                               The American agencies released figures on Wednesday showing that 2015 was the warmest year in a global record that began, in their data, in 1880. British scientists released figures showing 2015 as the warmest in a record dating to 1850. The Japan Meteorological Agency had already released preliminary results showing 2015 as the warmest year in a record beginning in 1891. On Jan. 7, NOAA reported that 2015 was the second­warmest year on record, after 2012, for the lower 48 United States. That land mass covers less than 2 percent of the surface of the Earth, so it is not unusual to have a slight divergence between United States temperatures and those of the planet as a whole. The end of the year was especially remarkable in the United States, with virtually every state east of the Mississippi River having a record warm December, often accompanied by heavy rains. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and an intensification of rainstorms was one of the fundamental predictions made by climate scientists decades ago as a consequence of human emissions. That prediction has come to pass, with the rains growing more intense across every region of the United States, but especially so in the East. The term global warming is generally taken to refer to the temperature trend at the surface of the planet, and those are the figures reported by the agencies on Wednesday. Some additional measurements, of shorter duration, are available for the ocean depths and the atmosphere above the surface, both generally showing an inexorable long­term warming trend. Most satellite measurements of the lower and middle layers of the atmosphere show 2015 to have been the third­ or fourth­warmest year in a 37­ year record, and scientists said it was slightly surprising that the huge El Niño had not produced a greater warming there. They added that this could yet happen in 2016. When temperatures are averaged at a global scale, the differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree. In the NOAA data set, 2015 was 0.29 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 2014, the largest jump ever over a previous record. NASA calculated a slightly smaller figure, but still described it as an unusual one­year increase. The intense warmth of 2015 contributed to a heat wave in India last spring that turns out to have been the second­worst in that country’s history, killing an estimated 2,500 people. The long­term global warming trend has exacted a severe toll from extreme heat, with eight of the world’s 10 deadliest heat waves occurring since 1997. Only rough estimates of heat deaths are available, but according to figures from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, in Brussels, the toll over the past two decades is approaching 140,000 people, with most of those deaths occurring during a European heat wave in 2003 and a Russian heat wave in 2010. The strong El Niño has continued into 2016, raising the possibility that this year will, yet again, set a global temperature record. The El Niño pattern is also disturbing the circulation of the atmosphere, contributing to worldwide weather extremes that include a drought in southern Africa, threatening the food supply of millions. (NYT Jan 22, 2016)

Scrap Cap & Trade

                                                       Comments due by April 25, 2015
 An argument in favour of carbon taxes over cap & trade is that cap & trade requires an efficient secondary market. As we know from recent experience, financial market efficiency cannot be taken for granted. While the instrument that is traded in the secondary market under cap & trade is relatively simple, compared to Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities based on US subprime mortgages, cap & trade does have this additional link in the chain, and is therefore vulnerable to all the familiar financial market pathologies, from market manipulation to illiquidity.

The economic equivalence of carbon taxes and cap & trade is exact only in a world without uncertainty, or in a world with uncertainty but with complete contingent claims markets for risk trading. In the real world, where there is uncertainty and markets are incomplete ….

Why then do politicians and outfits like BP prefer cap & trade to a carbon tax? The politicians prefer it because the cap & trade scheme, while economically equivalent to a tax, will not count as a tax in the traditional record-keeping manuals. It does not add to the official 'tax burden' the opposition likes to bash you around the head with. You can present cap & trade in a way that hides/obscures the fact that for it to work, that is, for it to reduce emissions, it must be equivalent to a tax by increasing the marginal cost of emitting CO2E; however, it does not look like a tax and will not show up in conventional tax burden calculations. Lack of transparency means absence of accountability. That is why non-transparent arrangements are universally valued by politicians.

A second reason is that with cap & trade, you can distribute the shadow tax revenue associated with the cap & trade scheme (that is the amount of revenue you would be able to obtain for the permits in a transparent, competitive auction) in a non-transparent manner. Give-aways through explicit grants or subsidies are not as easy. There are parliamentary committees scrutinizing revenues and outlays; there may be institutions like the UK National Audit Office that can ask bothersome questions.

Life is easier with the initial allocation of permits. You can, for instance, hand out the permits free of charge to your friends (including the heavy historical polluters). This is also the reason, I believe, that the heavy emitters, including BP, favour cap & trade over taxes. They believe that the initial allocation of free permits will favour them. There is this crazy notion that past heavy polluters should not be hit too hard by schemes to reduce CO2E emissions, and that they should therefore be given gratis allowances of permits that are related to their recent past emissions record. I can see no efficiency reason in favour of this, and many a fairness argument against it, but the argument carries weight in the unreal real world.

When the problems associated with running an efficient secondary market for CO2E emissions permits and the political economy of the non-transparent initial allocation of the CO2E emissions permits are taken into account, I believe that, on balance, explicit carbon taxes are better than cap & trade.

The Eighth Wonder of the World.

                                                        Comments due by April 18, 2015

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it.”

- Albert Einstein

Yesterday, in my Principles of Food and Resource Economics class (135 students--mostly freshmanpeople and sophomores), I was talking about cost-benefit analysis.  In particular, I was talking about comparing benefits and costs across time, which of course leads to a discussion of discounting.  Rather than drone on about discount rates and present and future values, I decided to show the class the power of compound interest--if nothing else to provide them with something useful they might use outside of class (it's not like they will remember any actual material from class).   

So here is the example I used:  Suppose, starting at age 25, you invest $1,000 per year at 10% return per year (the rough long-term average of the S&P 500) until age 65.  Alternatively, suppose you waited until age 45, but invested $2,000 per year for 20 years.  In both cases you are investing $40,000.  Which savings plan would you choose?

Most of the class chose the delay option (probably because we had already spent a good amount of time talking about the time value of money).  I then showed them how to calculate the future value of an annuity (FV=$X(((1+r)^n)-1)/r).

In the first case, the future value of $1,000 ($X=$1000) invested at 10% annual interest (r=0.10) for 40 years (n=40) is $442,593.  This seemed to shock most of the students.  Investing $40,000 could multiply by over a factor of 10.  I explained that is the power of compound interest.

To emphasize the point I then showed them that the future value of the second savings stream ($2,000 per year at 10% for 20 years) is 'only' $114,550.  Again, this seemed to surprise many of the students. 

So I asked the class, "What is the most sure way for you to become a millionaire by age 65?"

Someone shouted, "Marry rich!"

(John Whitehead)

Income from Commons to All.

Comments due by April 12, 2015

(The following is a book review of a rather novel suggestion to collect income from the Commons in the US and proceed to distribute this financial flow to all citizens)

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In the mid-17th century, Gerrard Winstanley led a series of protests in England against “enclosure,” the practice of landlords privatizing public lands. Nonviolent, with a utopian communist agenda, Winstanley’s followers, the Diggers, published pamphlets and, more quixotically, sang their hopes and fears.

A stanza from one of their songs:

“Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now

Your houses they pull down, stand up now.

Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,

But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown.

Stand up now, Diggers all.”

Peter Barnes’s new book, With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, isn’t as poetic as a Digger tract; yet at its core, it is a book about power relationships as relevant to the 21st century as Digger pamphlets and songs were to the 17th.

What do we do, Barnes asks, when increasing numbers of Americans no longer have jobs that pay enough to generate a modicum of economic security, or when the federal political system seems too paralyzed to do much more than tinker on the margins? What do we do when median wages are unlikely to rebound to pre-2008 levels, while exploitation of common goods by private companies continues to enrich those already perched atop the economic ladder?

The answer: Use the riches of the commons to provide decent living standards for all. Barnes’s inspirations include Thomas Paine’s social insurance schemes of the 18th century, British economist Arthur Pigou’s pioneering work on taxing pollution in the early 20th century, and Francis Townsend’s idea in the 1920s for a universal pension. His modern inspiration is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which pays residents an annual dividend out of the proceeds from taxes on oil companies that operate in the state. Out of these ideas, he carefully develops a framework for change with the core idea that profits extracted from the commons should be broadly shared. Barnes doesn’t explicitly mention Henry George, but the concept of taxing the unearned increase in the value of land, and then plowing that money back into the common good, is also tacitly present in Barnes’s thinking.

Barnes, the co-founder of Working Assets, a socially responsible financial services group, and the author of five previous books, asks readers to visualize a series of “pipes,” which would generate new revenue streams. These pipes, he calculates, would allow for up to $1.5 trillion per year, generated by developing “rent” mechanisms for private companies’ usage of common assets, to be recycled into the economy via dividends paid to all citizens and legal residents of the United States.

Barnes estimates that upwards of $300 billion could be generated through carbon taxes. More than $350 billion could be brought to the table by taxing financial transactions. Another $300 billion-plus could be made available by charging companies for the use of intellectual property and technological infrastructure seeded with public investments, which they currently use for free. Additional moneys could be raised by charging for use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Barnes also suggests that the Federal Reserve could create more money—a function it has long utilized during economic contractions. The last few years of quantitative easing have been a partial success, but a lot of that money has sat unused in banks. Barnes thinks the Fed could inject it directly into the economy.

Create the mechanisms to raise funds on this scale, Barnes writes, and the funds will be generated along with the political support.

The proposed $1.5 trillion is roughly the amount that Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and disability insurance already pay out annually. It’s a huge sum, but Barnes aims to show that the idea is not just fiscally possible but politically feasible. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the 60 largest companies alone had parked more than $166 billion offshore to avoid paying taxes on that income. Large gas and coal companies weren’t paying the costs of their contribution to carbon pollution, but were passing them along to the public as invisible social expenses. Create the mechanisms to raise funds on this scale, Barnes writes, and the funds will be generated along with the political support.Even if $1.5 trillion proves an impossible goal to attain anytime soon, plans that raised several hundred billion dollars to cycle back into the broader economy would have transformative implications.

On one level, it’s a fairly conservative idea. Barnes is not proposing to raise taxes to fund more government. On the contrary, he is proposing new revenue streams to give everyone a social dividend that will offset dwindling wage and salary income. In conservative Alaska, where the Permanent Fund gives an equal share of oil revenue to every man, woman, and child, this highly redistributive idea is phenomenally popular. In some native Alaskan communities, the Permanent Fund provides a significant portion of all cash income. Like the fund, Barnes’s proposed revenue stream, once experienced, would be politically untouchable. Even former Governor Sarah Palin is a strong supporter, and Alaska voters beat back a recent industry-backed campaign to dilute the annual dividend.

Consider every American to own one “share” in America, Barnes asks his readers. And then work out a way to give each shareholder an annual dividend in the profits generated for the country from the usage of the environment and the broader public sphere: Develop cap-and-trade systems so that carbon polluters pay their way; charge for groundwater withdrawals; create financial transaction taxes paid by large financial companies who currently utilize America’s trading and legal infrastructures for free; create profit taxes on oil and mineral extraction; charge large Internet companies rent (or royalties or licensing fees—the terminology is less important than the outcome) for use of the Internet infrastructure and charge phone, television, and radio companies for use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It’s in these details that this plan morphs from conservative to radical. If Barnes has his way, companies long used to freeloading off of the public—and having that freeloading purchased by well-paid lobbyists and protected by a captive political class—will be faced with far higher bills than they are used to. The more those companies pollute and otherwise wreck the natural environment, the more those bills will increase. Corporations that have effectively engaged in a modern-day Enclosure Movement, privatizing the benefits of large parts of the environment and the economy, will be made to financially compensate the public for the lost access.

Berrett-Koehler Publishers

On the flip side, individuals long used to working for wages that can’t cover all of their needs will find that their families qualify for many thousands of dollars a year in “dividend” income to supplement paychecks of dwindling reliability. Barnes projects that each resident would receive roughly $5,000 per year in dividends—or $20,000 for a family of four—thus locking into place a viable subsidy that would catapult low-income families into something approximating economic security. Don’t think of it as a government giveaway, he argues, in a Digger-like turn; think of it as an empowered citizenry reclaiming essentially looted public property.

A similar system is being developed in Vermont, via a proposed Common Assets Trust, which would raise money from taxes on pollution and other socially harmful practices and pay dividends to each resident while bulking up social investments such as education and public libraries. Several tribal communities across the country have also embraced a form of collective ownership and wealth-sharing. The principle has been institutionalized in California, via utility bill credits, as a part of the state’s effort to encourage utility companies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Barnes reports on local government initiatives, such as in Sherman County, Oregon, where a booming wind energy project has generated large tax windfalls that have allowed the county to pay $590 annually to local households.

Overseas, a mixed analogy is sovereign wealth funds. While some of these are run by corrupt regimes and benefit only a privileged few, elsewhere they have been used to shore up vital public services. Norway has taxed oil production and other usages of public resources in order to sock away huge amounts of money for public investments, cash distributions, and the protection of expansive social safety net systems. According to Barnes, Norway’s fund has assets of roughly $1 million per Norwegian. It’s such a large amount that the state has shied away from cash handouts, instead investing heavily in education, job training, health-care services, and the like.

The social dividend becomes, in Barnes’s telling, both a stunningly effective redistributive tool and a way of reining in some of the most anti-environmental business practices. “Linking nature’s well-being to that of our middle class is the key to harmonizing capitalism with nature,” he writes. “If that connection isn’t made, nature’s rent can’t rise very much, and markets will continue to overuse her.”

With Liberty and Dividends for All does a lot in relatively little space. Over the next few years, the Social Dividend concept will enter into the broader conversation about how to craft a new economy—based on environmental and equity ideas too often absent from current growth-model conversations. If the Occupy Movement put the spotlight on economic inequality, Barnes has now defined a particularly creative solution. By itself, Barnes’s proposed Social Dividend won’t change the underlying power dynamics that generate such wealth extremes in the first place. But it does have the potential to transform our comprehension and politics. Such an idea for reform deserves to be taken very seriously.