The High Price of US Global Disengagement on Climate

It is not news, nor of much great concern to most Americans, that in the international arena over the last 7 years, the US has been disengaged and overtly obstructive of climate progress. That's why discussion of climate solutions in the presidential race remain largely insular, and the most common approach to the global dimension of the issue is through finger-pointing.

Look at India and China, and their skyrocketing emissions!

And the thinking -- if you can call it that -- essentially stops there. Nobody stops to look at a map of the earth -- like the one pictured here with big red dots showing everyone's got big carbon-spewing power plants.

It's too bad you can't win votes when a recession looms by talking about forging solutions with international economic competitors. And the bromides and slogans on energy and climate tailored to manipulate voters just don't come close to getting at a true picture of the hole we are in and the global solutions that are truly needed.

There's some awfully bad news about emissions coming at us from developing nations, news that will probably reinforce the finger-pointing reflex, when it ought to be treated with reflection - the kind provoked by looking into a mirror and being disturbed by what you see.

Here's the latest alarming news from India, courtesy of Carbon Monitoring for Action, (CARMA), the website of the Center for Global Development.

CARMA estimates carbon emissions in India will increase 150% over the next ten years, largely as the result of new coal-fired power plants. There's an enormous one going up right now in Gujarat -- Tata Power Corporation's Mundra Plant -- that will be bigger than the Scherer plant in Georgia, the US's largest emitter. (Remember, please hold off making judgments, in favor of reflection. There's much more.)

While it is getting tougher to build coal plants in the US, industry is still planning on building more than 100 new ones -- so what we see happening in India is not a lot different from what's happening in America, and federal and state governments are doing what they can to support the expansion of coal in the US.

• We've reported on the recent appointment of a coal industry crony to a key Department of Energy (DOE) position.
• On January 31, the DOE will decide whether to lend $100 million to a Pennsylvania entrepreneur to build a coal-to-liquid fuel plant. The Pennsylvania governor, its two Senators, and at least one Representative are supportive.
• And let's not leave the judiciary out of the picture. The New York Times yesterday reported that a justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court and a powerful
  coal-company executive met in Monte Carlo in the summer of 2006,
  sharing several meals even as the executive’s companies were appealing
  a $50 million jury verdict against them to the court.

And so on. So it should come as no surprise that business-as usual is prevailing in India as well, with assistance from the UN system. The World Bank's International Finance Group is going to provide a chunk of financing for the giant Mundra plant; and -- get this -- the plant has been deemed eligible to qualify for carbon credits. Here's how CARMA reports it.

To the “untutored reader,” this must seem crazy. Just as the UN
Secretary General declares an international emergency created by carbon
emissions, a UN-affiliated agency (the IFC) announces that it will use
scarce development-lending resources to help finance an enormous
coal-fired plant in India. At the same time, another UN-affiliated
group (the CDM Executive Board) announces that the plant is actually
eligible to provide carbon credits for rich-country power plants that
are emitting more CO2 than their Kyoto permits allow.

Instead of supporting critical zero-emissions energy investments,
scarce international resources are sweetening a private-sector project
that will emit over 700 million tons of CO2 during its operating life.
And the Tata case is by no means unique, either in India or the
developing world more generally.

Or in the US. Let's remember the energy bill that the President signed into law in December that has maintained billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil industry, and the omnibus spending bill that provided massive loan for both the coal and nuclear industries.

Is it any surprise then, that the US under the current administration has refused to lead the world to climate solutions, or that the world continues to follow the poor US example? David Wheeler of CARMA takes the UN to task with these words:

Coal-fired power in any form is extremely dirty and we’ve run out of
time. The only hope for coal is elimination of emissions via carbon
capture and storage (CCS), and this technology remains unproven at
large scale. There is no chance — let me repeat this: zero chance — of
holding global carbon emissions within safe limits if the UN continues
subsidizing coal-fired power expansion on a massive scale without CCS.
Our only chance at this point lies in immediately hiking the price of
carbon, lowering the price of zero-emissions energy technologies
(including CCS, if it proves feasible), and subsidizing the rapid
adoption of these technologies by India and other developing countries.

There are plentiful opportunities for clean power investment, as the World Bank Group itself has noted in a report
just released by its Energy Sector Management Assistance Program
(ESMAP). Even with a much larger budget to support zero-emissions power
expansion in developing countries, the World Bank Group could find
ample project opportunities. And the same reasoning applies to
clean-power opportunities for Clean Development Mechanism support.

This fatally-dangerous schizophrenia has to end. The UN cannot
declare that carbon emissions are creating a planetary emergency and
identify myriad clean-power options, while UN-affiliated institutions
such as the World Bank Group and the Clean Development Mechanism
continue to subsidize coal-fired power generation without CCS. The
message for these agencies (as well as other multilateral and bilateral
lending institutions) is clear: Stop this practice, now. Build your
future on expanding clean power as rapidly as possible, or you won’t
have a future.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

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