The U.S. delegation will include a large number of Cabinet-level (in the language of international diplomacy, “ministerial level”) officials. U.S. delegates “will keynote a series of events highlighting actions by the Obama Administration to provide domestic and global leadership in the transition to a clean energy economy.” The following keynote events and speakers are currently scheduled:

– Wednesday, December 9th: Taking Action at Home, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson
– Thursday, December 10th: New Energy Future: the role of public lands in clean energy production and carbon capture, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
– Friday, December 11th: Clean Energy Jobs in a Global Marketplace, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke
– Monday, December 14th: Leading in Energy Efficiency and Renewables, Energy Secretary Steven Chu
– Tuesday, December 15th: Clean Energy Investments: creating opportunities for rural economies, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
– Thursday, December 17th: Backing Up International Agreement with Domestic Action, Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley and Assistant to the President Carol Browner

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose envoy Todd Stern is in charge of U.S. climate negotiations, was not part of the announcements.

Barack Obama is now the third sitting president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is an enormous honor, awarded in part for “playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.” The timing on this for those following the future of a new international climate treaty could not be more critical. The Peace Prize is presented in Oslo on December 10th. The UN climate talks, where the agenda will feature decisions on replacing the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012, start in Copenhagen on December 7th. The expectation that President Obama will now go for at least part of the UN climate talks is enormous as he’ll already be in Scandinavia.

Remember that Al Gore went immediately to the UN climate meeting in Bali after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Gore’s speech at the Bali meeting, and closed door sessions with climate negotiators for two days following, is credited by some as having saved those talks from failure. Before Gore arrived the EU was about to walk out over protests that the US was holding up progress on the “Bali Action Plan,” the document that set the parameters for what success at Copenhagen is supposed to look like this December. It’s hard to imagine a more directed appeal for President Obama to come to Copenhagen and achieve a similar success.

According to the World Resources Institute, the razing of forests from Indonesia to Brazil is responsible for the release of five billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, which amounts to 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than all the cars and trucks in the world. The international effort to comprehensively fund forest protection as part of a new climate treaty is known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). Experts estimate that an investment of about $10 to $20 billion a year will cut deforestation by half, if properly implemented. This is one of the cheapest routes to cutting global warming pollution, even ignoring the $4.5 to $5 trillion in benefits of saving the world’s tropical forests. As Papua New Guinea’s climate negotiator Kevin Conrad said last month:

We have to value forests when they are alive and standing. Presently, we only value them when they’re dead.

Saving the world’s tropical forests is a profound challenge. A funding framework controlled by corporations and international bodies raises great concerns from representatives for indigenous people, who worry that “States and Carbon Traders will take more control over our forests.” “Where countries are corrupt,” the United Nations notes, “the potential for REDD corruption is dangerous.” Realizing these fears, a $100 million scandal involving false carbon credits swept Papua New Guinea this summer.

“Logging companies may turn into carbon companies,” warns conservationist Rob Dodwell, who notes that only efforts that strengthen local communities rather than reward multinational corporations have any chance of being fair, sustainable, or trustworthy. An international framework to solve deforestation cannot ignore the “links between the exploitation of natural resources and the funding of conflict and corruption.” In other words, storing carbon must not be the only reason to save the forests.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) have been leading efforts in the U.S. Senate to confront international deforestation. In February, Lugar said he hopes the United States will “exercise leadership in protecting forests and responding to the risks of climate change”:

Deforestation is a critical national security challenge because of its connections with threats from climate change and food security.

The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), passed by the House in June, “provides funding for tropical countries to prepare and implement plans to reduce deforestation, as well as for achieving these reduction goals.” ACES establishes private and public financing from polluters to prevent deforestation, and would create an “International Climate Change Adaptation Program within the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide adaptation assistance to the most vulnerable developing countries.”

Last week, Sens. Kerry and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Senate version of ACES, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. The international forestry provisions in the bill “echo those originally included in the House bill,” though it “would allow international offsets to account for a quarter of projects annually rather than the half called for in the House bill,” thus making the private offsets program more reliable, and shifting more responsibility to public deforestation projects.

Read more at the Progress Report, the daily email newsletter from the Think Progress and Wonk Room team.

We collected emissions reductions proposals in the public domain up until September, 2009 – and found that even if these were fully implemented they would be far from sufficient to meet the goal of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels at or below 350 ppm, reaching instead about 716 ppm CO2 and 944 CO2e by 2100. These proposals would not be sufficient to limit warming to 2°C over pre-industrial temperatures, creating instead approximately 3.5°C of temperature increase by 2100.

As top climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf explained at the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress in March, even limiting global warming to two degrees Centigrade above historical levels — 1.3 degrees (2.3 F) above current temperatures — isn’t as safe as Russian roulette. However, the scientists behind the analysis recognize that taking action is dramatically better than business as usual. Andrew Jones writes that this finding could also be described in a positive light — “New Analysis Shows Growing Commitment to a Global Deal Will Help Stabilize Climate“:

Following the “current proposals” path is much better than “business as usual” path. Many countries have offered concrete proposals, others (like China) are looking more encouraging, and the results add up. About 3100 gigatons of CO2e would be kept out of the atmosphere between now and the end of the century, resulting in CO2 levels 239 ppm lower and the world a full degree C cooler by 2100 (3.5 degrees C vs. 4.5).

The leaders of the world’s top economies — and greatest polluters — are now meeting in Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit. The chair of the International Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta have now made a dramatic appeal to those leaders to “reflect this imperative” that “that temperatures should not be allowed to exceed 2 degrees Celsius and that, as a consequence, global emissions must be reduced 50 percent by 2050.”

The Climate Initiative analysis provides evidence that even that target is likely insufficient to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius. The G-20 should accept scientific reality and recognize that the goals they are now debating represent a minimal effort to stave off planetary catastrophe.

When the planet heats up, it will be time to slip into something more comfortable – like the SurvivaBall. A self-heating, self-cooling and self-powered pod, the SurvivaBall is designed by top scientists to weather all of the effects of climate change to keep its user alive through catastrophe. Even though it makes its occupant resemble a giant tick, it’s also luxurious – “Like a gated community for one,” claims the SurvivaBall’s site. And only for the low price of $100 million!

Although the demonstrators of “Halliburton’s solution to global warming” hoped to reach the United Nations headquarters, they were detained by New York City police. However, CNN’s Jeannie Moos was able to file a report on the pranksters’ novel approach to a planet under siege. Watch it:

Just as Yes Men activists were detained on Monday “when they handed their own version of the New York Post (headline: ‘We’re screwed!‘) to the paper’s conservative owner, Rupert Murdoch, the group’s founder was arrested during the roll-out of the SurvivaBall.” After all charges were dropped, Yes Men founder Andy Bichlbaum has been released.

The most immediate threats from climate change are in the form of storms of increasing intensity, such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma; greater incidence of drought and floods that make traditional livelihoods unsustainable; and increased conflicts over access to limited resources. The war in Darfur derives, in part, from conflict over scarce resources as the desert expands. Other dramatic impacts are also predicted in the long term, such as the disappearance of island states like the Maldives. Estimates of the numbers of people expected to be displaced by climate change range from 50 million to 1 billion over the next 50 years. By comparison, there are currently 41.2 million people displaced by conflict.

Ken Bacon’s gift to the future comes at a tragic moment in his life. As he discussed in an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for health care reform, he has life-threatening brain cancer. Ken’s choice to establish this center in a time of personal crisis is a tribute to his integrity and passion for the world he has spent his life making a better place. “The most voiceless people in the world are probably refugees,” Nick Kristof writes, “and for the last decade one the great spokesmen for them has been Kenneth Bacon, the head of Refugees International.”

China’s energy sector gets a bad reputation because of its heavy reliance on coal, which accounts for 80 percent of its electricity supply, and its continued appetite to expand coal power capacity at a rate of two coal power plants a week. While all of this is true, it’s not the full story.

The plants that China is currently building are some of the most efficient in the industry. And as the Wall Street Journal reported today, China has a concurrent program of shutting down small, inefficient coal plants:

The National Energy Administration said Thursday that since 2007 it had closed 54 gigawatts of coal- and oil-fired power plants as part of the cleanup plan. That would amount to about 7% of China’s current electricity-generating capacity.

According to the Associated Press, this capacity translates to a closure of “7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule.”

These reports come a few days after Greenpeace China released a report entitled “Polluting Power: Ranking of China’s Power Companies,” which analyzes China’s ten biggest power companies across various metrics such as coal consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and share of renewable power. In sensationalistic fashion, Reuters tried to put an unhelpful gloss to Greenpeace’s report by proclaiming in a headline “Emissions of 3 big China power firms exceed UK,” conjuring images of ecological apocalypse. The Guardian has a similar headline.

No doubt, China’s reliance on coal makes it a leading carbon emitter, but this is hardly news. To say that “greenhouse gas emissions from the three biggest Chinese power firms in 2008 were higher than those of the entire United Kingdom” is rather meaningless without context.

We need to ask — how big are these firms? It is certainly not the case that China’s biggest three power plants are matching the entire UK in carbon emissions. China’s three biggest utility companies, with fleets of hundreds and hundreds of power plants accountable for 30 percent of the entire power supply for China and its 1.3 billion people (30 percent x 1.3 billion = 390 million), match the carbon emissions output of the entire economy of the UK and its 61 million citizens. Viewed in that light, China isn’t doing that badly.

The Greenpeace report is actually much more balanced and hopeful than the Reuters and Guardian headlines indicate. It rightfully points out the challenges that China’s biggest power firms face in terms of carbon emissions and environmental costs, but it also recognizes China’s achievements in increasing coal combustion efficiency and increasing renewable energy share in certain circumstances, in addition to its active program of shutting down plants.

Sensational headlines conveying half-truths can do much more harm than good. If we are to actively engage China in international energy and climate cooperation, we need to have an accurate understanding of what’s really happening there on the ground.

If you believe recent media reports, the two international climate change meetings held last week in L’Aquila, Italy, at best failed to do anything and at worst signal that no serious progress will be made on a global climate agreement this year. If true, this is bad news. According to the byzantine rules of the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, a successor to that treaty must be decided this December at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The good news is that many of the assessments of these meetings are incomplete, if not inaccurate. A New York Times editorial last week described the recognition by the world’s major carbon emitters that temperatures should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as an “aspirational” goal. They concluded:

But with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won’t carry things very far.

However, the Times based its argument in language from a draft of a declaration — not from the document itself. This weakened, “aspirational” language was struck in the final version of the document, rendering this claim obsolete.

All in all, the twin declarations emerging from the G-8 and the Major Economies Forum (MEF) indicate that progress has been made on the road to Copenhagen. So why the rush to publish such dour reports from Italy, whether accurate or not? It’s simple: Invested parties had unrealistic expectations of meetings, which have no binding impact on the upcoming U.N. summit.

There were, of course, disappointments. Developed countries in the G-8 failed to agree on the medium-term goal of reducing reductions targets by 2020. Developing nations, especially China and India, refused to embrace the long-term goal of halving global emissions by 2050, a cap most of the world’s leading scientists believe is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

But if we only focus on what did not happen, we miss seeing the achievements made in a very short amount of time. When the United States rejoined the global discussion on a new climate treaty in January, it triggered an 11-month countdown to solve the most complicated problem humanity has ever faced. For the 16 countries responsible for 80 percent of carbon emissions to recognize even one marker of failure — a rise in temperature over 2 degrees Celcius — is fantastically impressive. A week before the Italy meetings, negotiators doubted that this language would make the final cut.

Some will argue that it’s easy to agree on an abstract target like limiting planetary warming. But the G-8 struck an appropriate balance in creating objectives that are both ambitious and achievable. Industrialized countries finally determined their fair share of long-term emissions cuts: 80 percent by 2050. Plus, U.S. President Barack Obama prudently hedged on setting a 2020 emissions target. The Markey-Waxman climate change bill, which includes emissions cuts, is working its way through Congress. While it does, the president should not signal that he will preempt or undercut the legislature.

What about China and India’s apparent intransigence to halving emissions by 2050? The fact is that the United States cannot criticize their behavior. If a Chinese leader had promised to join the world eight years ago in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and then reversed course — as former President George W. Bush did in 2001 — the United States would hardly agree to his demands now. So it is with China and India. It will take incentives, diplomacy, and, most of all, time to bring about world-saving targets from them.

Ultimately, the most promising parts of last week’s agreements received only marginal coverage. The MEF announced that developed countries will double clean-energy funding for developing nations — putting pressure on those countries to commit to emissions reductions in exchange, as agreed upon at the Bali summit in 2007. Additionally, the participating countries agreed to determine how they will finance their plans by the G-20 meeting in September.

The countries assembled last week didn’t get everything settled on the first go around. But in light of their accomplishments, we should hold off on our rush to proclaim failure.

In an exclusive interview with Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, I discussed the challenge of ensuring a successful climate partnership with China, now the world’s greatest annual emitter of global warming pollution. Ahead of his visit to Beijing next week to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Stern was asked if he will discuss the problem of accurately accounting for carbon emissions — known among climate negotiators as “measuring, reporting, and verifying” (MRV). Stern replied that the way China’s actions “might be quantified” will “absolutely be part of the discussion,” but explained that he considered specific accountability mechanisms a lower-level concern:

I don’t think we’re going to be having a kind of textual discussion at this point with the senior people that I’m going to be dealing to actually try to be drafting what the text of an MRV provision would look like in an overall agreement. But implicitly that will be an important part of the discussion, because transparency and what the numbers add up to, whether it’s China, the US, Europe, Japan, or Brazil, it’s highly important, because it’s the thing that tells us if we’re going to be on track to do what we need to do over the next several decades.

Watch it:

In fact, MRV has to be the foundation of a new global accord to solve the climate change problem — if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But one has to really wonder if China is up to the task. Much has been written about the lack of accountability, transparency and enforceability in China’s governance system. Moving towards a system of open information and transparent reporting, let alone accountability, will require a real cultural shift. Building the capacity to accurately collect and report emissions data — potentially politically sensitive for Chinese institutions — will be a long and gradual process that must reach into the provincial and municipal and local levels.

The challenge is especially daunting, considering that 55 percent of the population remains in underdeveloped rural areas where local governments have scarce budgetary and technical resources. Cooperative efforts like the pilot carbon registry in southern China are fantastic starting points because they demonstrate success at a smaller local level. As the Chinese become more comfortable with the concept of an accountable carbon registry, such efforts should be extended, accelerated, and replicated in other parts or sectors of China.

In the interview, Stern also recognized China’s impressive efforts on clean energy but also cautioned that China must do more. The International Energy Agency projects that China is on course for a 70 percent increase in emissions to 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2030. If China commits in some kind of international agreement to efforts that change that outlook, “that could be highly important”:

What we’ve said with respect to China and other major developing countries is that they need to take a set of real actions, that they should be able to quantify them, that they need to commit to them in an international context, and that they need to add up to something that puts us on track to be in the general vicinity of what science tells us we need to do. So, the IEA projection is just a business-as-usual projection, not taking into account policy changes and policy measures that we hope the Chinese will do. They’ve already, as I’ve said, they’ve done a lot, but they need to do a lot more. So, if they do a bunch of things and if that turns out to be a substantial move off their business-as-usual curve, that could be highly important.

If China is going to play constructive role a new global consensus in Copenhagen, it is apparent that China is going to have to commit to a course that takes it down from this trajectory.

In terms of climate change, ultimately the world is going to need targets that it can meet. It can’t be general, vague approaches. We’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take concrete actions if we are going to deal with a potentially cataclysmic disaster. And we are seeing progress in Congress around energy legislation that would set up for the first time in the United States a cap and trade system. That process is moving forward in ways that I think if you had asked political experts two or three months ago would have seemed impossible. So I’m actually more optimistic than I was about America being able to take leadership on this issue, joining Europe, which over the last several years has been ahead of us on this issue.

Continuing, Obama explained that the “large carbon footprints” of the United States and Europe — 25 tons of greenhouse gases per person and 10.6 tons respectively — make it difficult to convince the developing world to take action:

As I told Chancellor Merkel, unless the United States and Europe, with our large carbon footprints, per capita carbon footprints, are willing to take some decisive steps, it’s going to be very difficult for us to persuade countries that on a per capita basis at least are still much less wealthy, like China or India, to take the steps that they’re going to need to take in controlling carbon emissions. So we are very committed to working together and hopeful that we can arrive in Copenhagen having displayed that commitment in concrete ways.

China and India’s carbon footprints, by way of contrast, are 5.7 and 2.2 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent per person, according to the Yale Environmental Performance Index.

We’re starting later! It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the reality. We can’t rewrite the last eight years, so we’re starting later.

Watch it:

Recent scientific papers have defined the global warming challenge as keeping cumulative global greenhouse emissions between 2000 and 2050 below a trillion tons. Only by staying below that threshold is the world likely to avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures. When asked, Stern dismissed the differences between the Waxman-Markey targets and what the Europeans want as resulting in “only one or two parts per million” of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He argued that the key question is what the “major developing countries” like China, India, and Brazil achieve:

There’s a very big difference between whether the major developing countries do a lot and don’t. There you have not one or two parts per million but a big difference. Eighty percent of the growth in emissions going forward for the next several decades is going to come from the developing world.

We are the first to admit, recognize, and talk about our own historic responsibility. The U.S. is the biggest historic emitter of greenhouse emissions. We have a huge responsbility to take leadership, to take action, and to move forward. But, having said that, if you look at the trajectory from now on — hugely weighted toward the developing countries.

The short answer to your question is that I think we can be quite consistent with those sort of scientific goals provided everybody gets in the act.

When asked about the concerns of legislators like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) about the potential for job loss due to a cap on global warming pollution, Stern also said that climate policy offers “a lot of gain” by driving the “transformation to a clean energy economy,” and noted the free allowances given to exporting industries in the Waxman-Markey legislation. He concluded:

It’s a fair question. We don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage. But the real, most important way in the long run — whether or not it’s immediate or not, but in the slightly longer run — to address these questions is to have an international agreement that has all the parties involved and all the parties taking real action.

China, and other developing countries, do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking, but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to – internationally – that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the lessons of science. While this choice may be the more difficult one in the immediate term, it is in fact the road to prosperity and success.

In a new memo, CAP’s Andrew Light and Julian Wong explain the impressive gains China has made in building a clean-energy economy, though like Stern they note China is “not there yet.” Stern heads to China on Saturday with “John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, David Sandalow, DOE’s lead international official, and others from Treasury and EPA” for a four-day mission.

Todd Stern’s remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Thanks John. It’s a great pleasure to be back at CAP. I’m one of only, say, 3 or 400 people in this town who owe more than they can say to John Podesta – although I probably have a longer and richer pedigree in that department than most. In a nutshell, when it comes to commitment, integrity, toughness and smarts, John writes the book and the rest of us just do our best to keep up. I am honored to be here.

John and the CAP team have been at the forefront of the climate and clean energy debate for years, taking the fight to those who say we can’t, we shouldn’t, we don’t need to, it will cost too much, we should go slow; and promoting a comprehensive vision of a low-carbon future that strengthens the U.S. economy and protects our security and environment. It might seem second nature now to many of us to think of climate change as the spur to a low-carbon transformation of the global economy – a transformation rich with economic opportunity. But it wasn’t always so, and it was CAP that led the way toward this new understanding.

Of course, the need for action could hardly be more evident. With every passing month, the news from the natural front seems to get worse. Broadly speaking, we are seeing a convergence of two problematic sets of numbers – those showing global CO2 concentrations rising substantially faster than even the worst case scenarios of recent models and those indicating that dangerous climate impacts are likely to happen sooner than scientists used to think.

And we are all too familiar with the accumulating evidence of change: Among many other things, Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected. The melting of permafrost in the tundra raises the risk of a huge methane release, with dangerous feedback potential. The Greenland Ice Sheet is steadily shrinking. Sea level now threatens to rise much more than previously anticipated, and water supplies are increasingly at risk with the melting of glaciers in Asia and the Western Hemisphere.

These facts on the ground send a simple and stark message: the status quo is unsustainable. That may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the obvious is resolutely overlooked. It seems to me that anyone who wants to argue about how policy measures — such as the Waxman-Markey bill for example — are in some way too onerous should be required to explain what they would propose instead. Because the unspoken assumption of these critics — that we can carry on as we are — is just not so.

Let me turn now to our diplomatic challenge, which occupies most of my time and attention. Climate change, of course, is a quintessentially global issue that demands a global solution. So while the critical first step must be to put our own house in order with a comprehensive, mandatory national program — which the President and his congressional allies are endeavoring to do — the problem can only be solved globally.

Broadly speaking, we are pursuing our strategy on three related fronts. First, we are fully engaged now in the Framework Convention negotiating process itself. We have a team in Bonn right now for the second of several negotiating sessions this year. You can’t get a global deal done relying only on the Framework Convention process, but you also can’t get there without it. It is an essential part of the whole.

Second, we have established an invigorated dialogue among 16 of the largest economies — including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa and Indonesia – through our Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which will meet in July in Italy immediately after the G8 meeting. We have now had two preparatory sessions — one in Washington, and one, last week, in Paris — and a third will take place later this month in Mexico City. I have long been persuaded — and wrote about it back in my CAP Fellow days — that it is crucial to have a small forum of the major economies that can meet on a more intimate basis and at a higher level than is possible in the Framework Convention negotiating sessions. These meetings can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat, but they do allow for an important, candid dialogue.

Third, we are focusing on key bilateral relationships, and none is more important than China. China may not be the alpha and omega of the international negotiations, but it is close. Certainly no deal will be possible if we don’t find a way forward with China. And here, as in so many aspects of climate change, we are faced with both great challenge and great opportunity.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of normalization of US-China relations, and since President Carter and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping signed that historic document, China has undergone an astonishing, world-changing transformation.

Over the past 30 years the Chinese economy has grown at 10% per year, raising per capita income from $400 to $5000, lifting 600 million people out of poverty.

Beijing and Shanghai now have per capita incomes topping $10,000, which rivals or exceeds that in many Eastern European countries.

China is now the world’s 2nd largest economy and 2nd largest trading power after the United States.

China has also become America’s largest foreign creditor, with $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves.

This burst of economic activity has been driven by the largest domestic migration in human history. Every year, 15 to 20 million rural residents move to the city in search of a better way of life. Housing these people has made China the locus of fully half of global construction, with China building two Bostons worth of housing — every month.

Urbanization also creates massive employment needs and a strong commitment among Chinese leadership to maintain economic growth. Yet in recent years, Chinese growth has become less sustainable, both environmentally and economically, and Beijing’s ability to meet its long-term development goals pursing a business-as-usual strategy is now very much in doubt.

And all this economic growth of course has had far-reaching consequences for China’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 1992, when China signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, China emitted 2.5 Gt of CO2, half of the U.S. total. Today, China emits over 7 Gt of CO2 per year, surpassing the US as the world’s largest emitter.

Moreover, China is rocketing up the emissions curve, while the United States is flattening out. Based on recent trends, the IEA predicts Chinese CO2 emissions will reach 12 Gt by 2030, a 60% upward revision from their estimates just a few years ago.

These numbers are so large that they will profoundly affect the ability of the world even to come close to holding the global concentration of greenhouse gases to a level most climate scientists advise. Consider: according to recent modeling done for Project Catalyst, even if every other country in the world besides China reduced its emissions by 80% between now and 2050 — a thoroughly unrealistic assumption by the way — China’s emissions under business-as-usual assumptions would alone be so large as to put us on a track to global concentrations of 540 ppm of CO2, and a 2.7 degree centigrade temperature increase — far above what scientists consider safe.

And this energy-intensive, coal-driven growth has had toxic consequences for China’s environment and public health. Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, particulate pollution in Beijing is six times higher than in New York, and premature deaths from respiratory disease are estimated in a joint World Bank/China research project at 750,000 per year. Water pollution is just as bad — 90 percent of the aquifers in China’s cities are polluted, and more than 75 percent of river water in urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing. Moreover, on any given day, 25 percent of the particulate pollution in Los Angeles is made in China, as is the acid rain problem in Japan and Korea. Pan Yue, a former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, famously said a few years ago – “The economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.”

Chinese leadership has increasingly come to recognize the importance of changing course, for many reasons – climate change, energy security and the pressing need to clean up its environment, but also because of the country’s daunting employment needs. With U.S. consumers tightening their belts and Chinese exports declining, Beijing needs a new engine of job creation. And the industries responsible for most of China’s emissions growth don’t create many jobs. The five most energy-intensive industries in the country account for nearly half of China’s CO2 emissions, but employ only 14 million people combined. That’s less than they did a decade ago and a drop in the bucket in a labor pool of 770 million.

And so China has taken significant steps to rebalance its economy towards labor-intensive services and manufacturing, improve its energy efficiency and reduce its emissions. For example, China’s current five-year plan includes the goal of reducing the energy intensity of the economy 20% by 2010, and the aim of increasing the share of renewable energy in the primary energy supply to 15% by 2020. China has implemented increasingly stringent auto emissions standards, stronger than our own, and its domestic stimulus package contained substantial clean energy investments. And there are many other initiatives underway, including an intensive focus on producing electric vehicles, and a new commitment to develop solar power. Already, China is one of the world’s leading producers of both wind and solar technology.

Thus, the impression that China refuses to take action is both inaccurate and unfair. Yet China can and will need to do much more if we are to have any hope of containing climate change.

In essence, China faces a choice. It can stick to its time-honored talking points and cite provisions of the Framework Convention, Kyoto Protocol, or Bali Roadmap to support the proposition that, as a developing country, it isn’t required to commit to significant measures to bring down its greenhouse gas emissions. This approach, indeed, is at least partly reflected in the Submission China sent in to the Secretariat of the Framework Convention in late April. Alternatively, China can take a new path, recognizing the need to make significant international commitments, against the backdrop of a robust, productive collaboration with the United States, among others.

While I think the right choice is clear, we shouldn’t underestimate the dilemma for China. Though China now, in effect, straddles the developed/developing country divide – a developed country in its big cities, a much poorer, developing country in the far-flung countryside – it has always been and seen itself as a developing country. The developed/developing country separation is deeply woven into the fabric of climate change diplomacy. The Montreal Protocol (on ozone depleting substances), by contrast, provided that developing countries would assume the same kind of obligations as developed countries, with just a 10-year delay. But the working assumption of even the advanced developing countries in the world of climate change is that they should enjoy at least a decades-long exemption from the kinds of obligations accepted by developed countries.

In addition, many in China fear that limits on emissions would constrain economic growth, job creation and the country’s capacity to continue its impressive rise.

And yet the choice of clinging to the old principle of assuming no obligations is not sustainable.

It is not sustainable environmentally because China and the other major developing countries are on a track to produce more than 80% of the growth in emissions during the next several decades. If they don’t develop genuine low-carbon pathways for growth, the climate change problem will spin out of control.

It is not sustainable economically because the economic race in the years and decades ahead will be won by those who have reacted nimbly to the imperatives of the low-carbon transition. Those who seek to hold back the tides will lose out: as the evidence of climate change grows increasingly dire, high-carbon goods and services will, before too many passing years, become untenable, replaced by the low-carbon alternatives of a new era.

It is not sustainable politically because developed countries who do agree to take strong action won’t long accept a world in which economic competitors are allowed to free-ride with respect to CO2 emissions.

China, and other developing countries, do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking, but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to – internationally – that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the lessons of science.

While this choice may be the more difficult one in the immediate term, it is in fact the road to prosperity and success. China has abundant opportunities in the short term to reduce energy demand through improving efficiency and rebalancing its economy. Right now, China emits about 4 times as much CO2 as the United States and 6 times as much as Japan or the EU for every unit of GDP. Partly this reflects an economy much more heavily weighted to energy intensive manufacturing than services, partly it reflects inefficiency, partly an over-dependence on coal.

What China can do – and many in Chinese leadership clearly recognize this – is not to stop growing, but to grow smarter. The only way China will meet its development needs in the long run is to a) rebalance its economy away from polluting industry towards job-creating services, b) increase the efficiency with which industry and buildings consume energy and c) find alternatives to coal or ways to use it cleanly. In short, it is not a tradeoff between economic growth and environmental protection. China must do both.

What the United States must be willing to do, for its own sake as well as China’s, is to meet China halfway and develop a genuine, collaborative partnership on climate change and clean energy.

If the two goliaths on the world stage can join hands and commit each other – at the highest levels – to a long-term, vigorous climate and energy partnership, it will truly change the world.

So we need to press forward with our own efforts to enact a broad-based, mandatory program to drive the clean-energy transition and limit our emissions. And that includes promptly enacting strong legislation to cap carbon pollution.

We need to listen and not just lecture.

We need to make clear that we support China’s growth and development and have no desire to constrain it through climate change commitments or in any other way.

We need to acknowledge the impressive steps the Chinese have already taken to promote low-carbon development and the new ones that will be coming off drawing boards soon.

We need to set our minds to joining with China in an active, real partnership, on the principle of mutual benefit.

And we need to recognize that if we aren’t careful, we may spend the next few years pushing China to do more, but will then spend all the years after that chasing them, as they hurtle profitably down the road to the low-carbon transformation.

On Saturday I will be leaving for China with John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, David Sandalow, DOE’s lead international official, and others from Treasury and EPA. We aim to get just this kind of partnership started. It’s the kind of partnership Secretary Clinton discussed with the Chinese during her trip in February, on which I joined her. It is a partnership that can form the basis of a global transition to clean energy. And it is a partnership that can become a constructive, positive anchor in our long-term bilateral relationship with China.

There is much work to be done. China has an important choice to make. And so, in different ways, do we.

Thank you very much.

I and two colleagues at the Center for American Progress put up a column yesterday about how the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act “would achieve more carbon reduction than first meets the eye,” strengthening the chances of a rapprochement with China and Europe in international climate negotiations. Our column was cited the same day in a story in the New York Times by Mike Wines — who never contacted us — on Pelosi’s visit to China:

American officials have already rejected the Chinese proposal as unattainable. The Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning research organization, said in a report published Wednesday that the House legislation was unlikely to win enough Chinese support for the two nations to present a united front at the Copenhagen talks in December.

The point of our column is in fact the opposite. Wines’ article at best takes out of context one of the premises of our arguments and at worst seriously distorts the thesis of our piece. What we argue is that there is a way the US and China can come together at Copenhagen, even with the differing expectations on midterm targets, and that the current House legislation could be sufficient to get us there.

What we call for is, first, counting the complementary efficiency, intensity, and other allied programs, in addition to the actual midterm cap goals in Waxman-Markey, to show the legislation could potentially get us closer to what China and Europe wants from us than at first it may appear.

We use, among other things, recent World Resources Institute data on the bill to demonstrate this. Next we argue that one could use a similar approach (which we call “carbon cap equivalents”) to demonstrate that China is making progress on emissions cuts and further counter the argument that Waxman-Markey should not be adopted because “China won’t do anything.”

Of course, at present there is a gap between China and the US on midterm expectations — they want 40 percent cuts below 1990 levels from us by 2020 as opposed to Waxman-Markey’s 17 percent cuts below 2005 levels by 2020 — but use this only as a premise to set up our argument about a better accounting of what Waxman-Markey could actually get us. We even state explicitly that the gap between Chinese expectations and the Waxman-Markey bill is no reason to believe we are at an impasse for an agreement at Copenhagen.

In short one would be hard pressed to give a more distorted representation of our piece. If the paragraph is supposed to suggest that there is a rift between us and Pelosi on this issue it simply isn’t the case. No one would deny that the numbers are different between Waxman-Markey and what the Chinese now claim that they want. The point is that we’re with the supporters of the bill in seeing a way forward to an agreement with it.

The French government is welcoming the “new atmosphere” that the Obama administration brings to international climate negotiations, but is looking for results. Brice Lalonde, France’s chief climate negotiator, sat down for an interview with reporters in Hotel Willard’s Cafe du Parc, following the Major Economies Forum convened this week in Washington, D.C. Lalonde dismissed corporate pressure to block green economy legislation in the United States as an “arrière-garde” doomed, in time, to irrelevance, saying that the “economic center is moving.” While expressing great optimism for eventual success, Lalonde explained that the international community is looking for Obama to go farther than his campaign pledge for 2020 emissions reductions:

Politically it’s very important for the U.S. to go under 1990 levels by 2020.

Lalonde indicated that the means for achieving that symbolic target doesn’t have to be solely through domestic reductions, but could include international mechanisms. The World Resources Institute estimates that the Waxman-Markey Clean Energy and Security Act may achieve reductions of 20 to 38 percent below 1990 levels, if all complementary policies and offsets to the mandatory reductions are considered. Even before the Copenhagen treaty negotiations this December, he said, “We could go very far on forest issues.” He expressed great optimism that the U.S. Senate could take the lead on legislation to deal with tropical deforestation. “A deforestation agreement could be fantastic. You could have a bipartisan agreement on that.”

The participants at the Major Economies Forum were very aware of the implications of the global recession, and believe that “green recovery plans are the beginning of fighting climate change.” Lalonde described the fiscal and financial debt bubbles, and concluded, “Climate change is also a debt.”

Dismissing the argument that emissions reductions would kill the coal and oil industries, he expressed confidence that corporate resistance to action would fade: “It’s finished.” The hydrocarbon industries would continue to prosper in a clean energy economy, he said, discussing the numerous chemical and industrial uses of coal: “It’s a shame to burn it.” However he recognized that policy makers need the support of the public, and sounded almost resigned when asked about the American public’s low priority for action on global warming. “You had Katrina already,” he replied.

Despite his optimism and respect for the “Dream Team” that the U.S. now has on climate change, Lalonde was sober about the challenges facing small island states that face likely annihilation even with a 50% reduction in total emissions by 2050. “It’s going to be difficult to catch up with the eight years we’ve lost.”

Su Wei, China’s chief climate change negotiator.

This week the Obama administration convened a meeting of 17 of the world’s major economies in a forum on global warming outside of the ongoing U.N. climate change process. Though the history of this Major Economies Forum is somewhat tainted, it may well provide a useful opportunity to engage China on global warming, on its way to surpass the United States as the world’s number one carbon emitter. Recent statements by top Chinese officials evince a new openness to adopting targets to reduce the rate of growth in carbon emissions:

Su Wei, a leading figure in China’s climate change negotiating team, said that officials were considering introducing a national target that would limit emissions relative to economic growth in the country’s next five-year plan from 2011.

While that is a small step, it’s a significant one. China and the five other major emitters among developing nations — India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico — were not required to accept mandatory carbon emissions caps under the Kyoto Protocol, as they did not put the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing current increases in global temperatures. The United States alone is responsible for nearly 30 percent of all cumulative global warming pollution. Nonetheless, this exception for developing countries was a key part of the unanimous Senate objection to U.S. ratification of the treaty. The China exception remains at the core of congressional objections to an international agreement on climate change.

Enticing direct negotiation with the major emitting developing nations — especially China — is critical to getting a global climate change agreement inside or outside of the UNFCCC process. There are many indications that China is ready to talk — and even more that China is already taking action.

China is ahead of the United States in terms of its own green stimulus package. It’s a much bemoaned talking point in these discussions that China has far surpassed U.S. capacity in solar cell production since 2005. Chinese leaders are “investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy.” China is spending twice as much as we are in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on green jobs and a green recovery despite the relatively larger size of the U.S. economy.

As China’s political climate changes, its physical climate is getting hotter as well. In January 2008, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was held in Beijing, a megacity that is already severely swept by dust storms from western and northern regions every year. Shrinking glaciers are starting to cause serious water problems and more intensive damage in the country’s mountainous regions — problems that will soon stress the country’s capacity for short-term mitigation. Just as in the United States, the consequences of climate change are increasingly felt immediately and understood through direct observation rather than being confined to climate modeling.

Joint technological capacity building may be the best road to a new global energy future and help to stimulate the set of climate change agreements which will move us there. Xie Zhenhua, Vice Chairman of the National Development Reform Commission, reiterated that China’s commitment to accepting nationally appropriate reduction goals depends on receiving technology assistance. In Todd Stern’s testimony earlier this month he made it clear that the first priority for the United States in these meetings will be to push along the conversation on technology transfer as a key component of acceptance of emissions caps by the developing major emitters. Such proposals should be discussed now and followed up at the next Major Economies Forum this July in La Maddalena, Italy following the G-8 meeting.

The official Chinese position on climate change remains — you broke it, you fix it. But a creative nudge on the U.S.’s part and a subtle shift in Beijing’s position could open up some real movement in the diplomatic lead up to global climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Read the extended version of this post, “Rise of the Green Dragon?,” at the Center for American Progress.

At the G20 Summit in London on April 2, the 20 largest economies in the world, from the United States and the European Union to Russia and China, will discuss a response to the global financial crisis. Using a study first presented at the Center for American Progress, Germany will argue that a coordinated effort by the G20 to fight climate change will be essential to fighting the global recession. “Towards a Global Green Recovery: Recommendations for Immediate G20 Action,” by Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PICIR) and Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics (LSE), notes that the G20 has the power to “trigger a global green recovery”:

As G20 countries account for roughly three quarters of global gross national product, energy consumption and carbon emissions, their combined efforts constitute a critical mass to trigger a global green recovery.

As the nation with the largest economy in the G20 and with one of the top greenhouse gas emission levels, the United States has a particular responsibility to act. The recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act devotes one of every ten dollars to making the kinds of green investments recommended by the Center for American Progress’s Green Recovery report and this new Potsdam-LSE report, according to an advance copy acquired by the Wonk Room.

The authors note that “the costs of action are likely to be much less than the costs of inaction.” Stern, who concluded in 2006 that a failure to address climate change could lead to “a 20% reduction in consumption per head, now and into the future,” has warned that more recent findings show his report actually underestimated the threats of climate change.

This new report accordingly states that “the risks from any given global temperature increase are greater than previously thought.” Even as “emissions are increasing at a faster pace,” “the planet’s capacity to sequester carbon in natural sinks is decreasing.” Therefore, “seven strategic areas for G20 action” are identified to build a global green recovery that will address short term economic decline while emphasizing a long-term strategy of sustainable growth:

1. Implement across-the-board energy efficiency improvements
2. Convert to low carbon economic infrastructure through physical upgrades
3. Support clean-technology markets in renewable energy and energy efficiency
4. Initiate flagship projects to improve technological knowledge and increase innovation
5. Enhance international research and development (R&D) efforts, including international collaborative projects
6. Incentivize investment in low-carbon growth by setting a global price of carbon
7. Coordinate financial and climate change mitigation efforts

Specific recommendations include:

– “Ensure that new infrastructure investments are ‘climate-proof,’ i.e. that they take into account the impacts of unavoidable climate change”

– “Review and amend national procurement guidelines with the aim of going ‘carbon-neutral‘”

– “The development of a G20 Strategic Energy Technology Plan . . . which could serve to streamline R&D efforts globally”

– “Appoint ‘Energy and Climate Sherpas‘ to coordinate follow-up meetings and ensure that momentum in developing policies is maintained”

Edenhofer and Stern recommend “linking regional schemes” to limit global warming emissions in the manner of the International Climate Action Partnership, a 2007 coalition of 15 countries and regions that have already implemented or are actively pursuing the implementation of carbon markets through mandatory cap and trade systems. Interlinked regional carbon markets can “pave the way for the negotiations on a global climate agreement, which will take place in Copenhagen next December.”

The world’s fossil-fueled economy is now sagging dangerously even as its continuation will make climate change unmanageable and catastrophic. By making strong investments in climate-friendly sectors, “Towards a Global Green Recovery” declares that “a global green recovery can deliver immediate and long-term economic benefits, cut the risk of dangerous climate change, reduce energy insecurity and competition for natural resources, and prepare the ground for a successful post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009.”

If Congress acts right away to pass President Obama’s Recovery package and then takes decisive action this year to institute a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions – as many of our states and many other countries have already done – the United States will regain its credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to lead the world in shaping a fair and effective treaty. And this treaty must be negotiated this year.

Not next year. This year.

The hearing is being webcast live on C-SPAN.org. Below is the full text of former Vice President Al Gore’s testimony as prepared for delivery to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:

We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis.

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home – Earth – is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

Moreover, we must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization at a time when our country must simultaneously solve two other worsening crises. Our economy is in its deepest recession since the 1930s. And our national security is endangered by a vicious terrorist network and the complex challenge of ending the war in Iraq honorably while winning the military and political struggle in Afghanistan.

As we search for solutions to all three of these challenges, it is becoming clearer that they are linked by a common thread – our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels.

As long as we continue to send hundreds of billions of dollars for foreign oil – year after year – to the most dangerous and unstable regions of the world, our national security will continue to be at risk.

As long as we continue to allow our economy to remain shackled to the OPEC roller coaster of rising and falling oil prices, our jobs and our way of life will remain at risk. Moreover, as the demand for oil worldwide grows rapidly over the longer term, even as the rate of new discoveries is falling, it is increasingly obvious that the roller coaster is headed for a crash. And we’re in the front car.

Most importantly, as long as we continue to depend on dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil to meet our energy needs, and dump 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, we move closer and closer to several dangerous tipping points which scientists have repeatedly warned – again just yesterday – will threaten to make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable destruction of the conditions that make human civilization possible on this planet.

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

For years our efforts to address the growing climate crisis have been undermined by the idea that we must choose between our planet and our way of life; between our moral duty and our economic well being. These are false choices. In fact, the solutions to the climate crisis are the very same solutions that will address our economic and national security crises as well.

In order to repower our economy, restore American economic and moral leadership in the world and regain control of our own destiny, we must take bold action now. The first step is already before us. I urge this Congress to quickly pass the entirety of President Obama’s Recovery package. The plan’s unprecedented and critical investments in four key areas – energy efficiency, renewables, a unified national energy smart grid and the move to clean cars – represent an important down payment and are long overdue. These crucial investments will create millions of new jobs and hasten our economic recovery – while strengthening our national security and beginning to solve the climate crisis.

Quickly building our capacity to generate clean electricity will lay the groundwork for the next major step needed: placing a price on carbon. If Congress acts right away to pass President Obama’s Recovery package and then takes decisive action this year to institute a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions – as many of our states and many other countries have already done – the United States will regain its credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to lead the world in shaping a fair and effective treaty. And this treaty must be negotiated this year.

Not next year. This year.

A fair, effective and balanced treaty will put in place the global architecture that will place the world – at long last and in the nick of time – on a path toward solving the climate crisis and securing the future of human civilization.

I am hopeful that this can be achieved. Let me outline for you the basis for the hope and optimism that I feel.

The Obama Administration has already signaled a strong willingness to regain U.S. leadership on the global stage in the treaty talks, reversing years of inaction. This is critical to success in Copenhagen and is clearly a top priority of the administration.

Developing countries that were once reluctant to join in the first phases of a global response to the climate crisis have themselves now become leaders in demanding action and in taking bold steps on their own initiatives. Brazil has proposed an impressive new plan to halt the destructive deforestation in that nation. Indonesia has emerged as a new constructive force in the talks. And China’s leaders have gained a strong understanding of the need for action and have already begun important new initiatives.

Heads of state from around the world have begun to personally engage on this issue and forward-thinking corporate leaders have made this a top priority.

More and more Americans are paying attention to the new evidence and fresh warnings from scientists. There is a much broader consensus on the need for action than there was when President George H.W. Bush negotiated – and the Senate ratified – the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and much stronger support for action than when we completed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

The elements that I believe are key to a successful agreement in Copenhagen include:

• Strong targets and timetables from industrialized countries and differentiated but binding commitments from developing countries that put the entire world under a system with one commitment: to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants that cause the climate crisis;
• The inclusion of deforestation, which alone accounts for twenty percent of the emissions that cause global warming;
• The addition of sinks including those from soils, principally from farmlands and grazing lands with appropriate methodologies and accounting. Farmers and
  ranchers in the U.S. and around the world need to know that they can be part of
  the solution;
• The assurance that developing countries will have access to mechanisms and resources that will help them adapt to the worst impacts of the climate crisis and technologies to solve the problem; and,
• A strong compliance and verification regime.

The road to Copenhagen is not easy, but we have traversed this ground before. We have negotiated the Montreal Protocol, a treaty to protect the ozone layer, and strengthened it to the point where we have banned most of the major substances that create the ozone hole over Antarctica. And we did it with bipartisan support. President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill joined hands to lead the way.

Let me now briefly discuss in more detail why we must do all of this within the next year, and with your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to show a few new pictures that illustrate the unprecedented need for bold and speedy action this year.

[SLIDE SHOW]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am eager to respond to any questions that you and the members of the committee have.

In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s UN climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism. The US negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, Paula Dobriansky, and Harlan Watson appeared Thursday evening for a press conference where they largely dodged a series of questions about the last eight years of inaction, obfuscation, and general mayhem. When asked by Fioney Harvey of The Financial Times: “If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn’t happen?” Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental adviser, devised a mindbending response:

I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not. I think we lost a couple of years of work while that decision was being made. It almost didn’t matter which way they came out but we lost a couple years until it was decided whether Kyoto would go forward or not. As soon as it was decided that Kyoto would go forward then countries began to face up to the reality of what they needed to do at the national level to work toward meeting those commitments.

Except, of course, Bush didn’t “face up” to any such thing, instead waiting until this year to propose a global warming plan sufficient only in Bizarro World.

The packed crowd outside the press briefing room watching on monitors erupted in hoots and shouts audible inside. Connaughton soldiered on, continuing for over five minutes, in an excursus on eliminating tariffs for technology transfer, getting a common measure on carbon reduction, and other issues that any climate wonk would love. The high point was midway through in a plea for more cooperation:

Everyone has to come together on these things. It would have been nice. I’m just pleased we are where we are today in fact with a work program not just of negotiation but a work program of cooperative action. And I think that could be more aggressive and move faster.

Watson, who also has claimed to “understand the real world,” gave a much shorter, more existential, even zenlike answer: “I take the world as it is. My only regret is that I’m not twenty years younger, maybe a lot taller, and a lot more handsome.”

Indeed. Who wouldn’t have wanted that?

A Cook Island delegate.

In case there was any doubt about the urgency of getting some kind of agreement out of the next UN meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009, the collection of environmental ministers giving opening statements in Poznań Thursday shared the stage with a giant monitor providing a live “Countdown to Copenhagen.”

Yesterday started the highest level of talks for the two-week UN meeting where delegates have gathered in hopes of making some progress toward the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol scheduled to be decided next year. The initial salvo was surprisingly direct for an event usually bound in a straitjacket of diplomatic niceties.

Alik Alik, Vice President of the Federated States of Micronesia, anticipating a loss of some of these states in the near term, proclaimed at the outset that we must not exceed a 1.5 degree C rise in temperature and then, echoing Jim Hansen and Bill McKibben, argued that we should return to 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2. Georgette Koho, Minister of the Environment for Gabon, said that since Kyoto was hammered out, “little progress of any kind has been made” on climate change. Both repeated the term “tipping point” several times, bringing to bear the dire straits that the developing world already finds itself facing.

But it was Marthinus Van Schalkwyk, Minister of Environmental Affairs of South Africa, who jumped to the strongest direct condemnation of the role that the developed countries, especially the United States, were playing in the discussions in this meeting so far. Starting with his disappointment that a proposal by the Group of 77 less developed countries and China for financial assistance and technology transfer to take on mandatory cuts was “met with silence,” he went on to accuse developed countries of “playing hide and seek” with midterm targeted cuts in emissions.

Calling out the US by name as the most important holdout from the Kyoto process, he argued that we must accept some “legally binding cuts” in order to make any progress toward encouraging emerging economies like China and India to take on mandatory targeted cuts in emissions as well. Given that China and India taking on some cuts is often cited as the biggest hurdle for the US to join this process, as well as one of the reasons the US Senate advised the Clinton administration not to sign Kyoto in a 95-0 sense of the Senate vote in 1997, one can only hope those who may be representing us in Copenhagen next year are listening.

Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Climate Change

Since Monday, one of the predominant topics of conversation among representatives of American non-governmental organizations at this year’s United Nations conference on climate change has been “what’s up with Pew?” In this case the “Pew” is the Pew Center on Climate Change, which is taking the public stance that a “full, final, ratifiable agreement just isn’t in the cards” to succeed the Kyoto Protocol at next year’s much anticipated UN meeting in Copenhagen, as Pew’s Elliot Diringer told the Washington Post.

The message coming from Pew was that the gathered parties here in Poland should not get their hopes up that the US would agree to language next year in Copenhagen since it is “too optimistic,” as Pew’s Eileen Claussen said, to believe we will have a final cap and trade bill through Congress by then. If true, then we will fail in a promissory note floated by John Kerry, Al Gore, and others at last year’s UN climate change meeting in Bali to wait one year for the US to rejoin the international community on fighting climate change. It was with much anticipation then that Pew held a press conference here Wednesday on its views on the future of the Kyoto process.

For half an hour in a crowded press briefing room Roy Manick and Elliot Diringer held firm on the Pew line. According to Roy, while the world should take heart in Obama’s commitment to taking on climate change, this good start won’t get the US to the point where it can embrace final enactment of a treaty by next year’s Copenhagen meeting. Whatever the US brings to Copenhagen will depend on progress in Congress and the predominant line so far on that score has been, “it’s complicated.”

By Copenhagen we should get, according to Diringer, “agreement on the architecture for a post-2012″ treaty once Kyoto runs out. This could include a floor for targets for the next round of cuts for developed countries and some sense of the level of support which developing countries can expect from developed countries. Whether such a minimal outcome could keep China and India in an agreement and eventually lead them to adopt nationally appropriate emissions cuts is anyone’s guess.

However, Pew’s people were unexpectedly sunny about one matter. When asked whether the presence of the Bush administration’s negotiating team at this meeting — led by Paula Dobriansky and Harlan Watson — was complicating the US position in Poznań, Diringer replied that he thought Bush’s representatives were doing “a good job of representing US interests and keeping options open for the next administration.”

Delegates here clearly remember this same team as the ones who almost brought last year’s UN meeting in Bali to a grinding halt. As Gore told delegates then, “The United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali.” There is nothing wrong in principle, I suppose, with expressing public confidence in the US negotiating team. Regardless, at a meeting where the point seems to be an exercise in cooperation, one wonders if praising “representing US interests,” given our history at these meetings where US interests have consistently been represented as at odds with the rest of the world, is a good diplomatic tack to take.

UPDATE: Several members of the US Climate Action Network, an umbrella organization of NGOs focused on climate change, took aim at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s pessimistic message.

Observing that US leadership has moved from an “obstinate obstacle to a creative catalyst,” Union of Concerned Scientists president Kevin Knobloch declared today that “this is no time to be depressing expectations” about action on climate change. “We have a rare opportunity between now and Copenhagen and we cannot squander it.”

National Wildlife Federation president Larry Schweiger said he was “optimistic” that a new White House “can deliver on an agreement at Copenhagen in 2009.” “There is no excuse any more for the US not to act,” added Jennifer Haverkamp of Environmental Defense.

And, when asked about the growing worries at this meeting that Obama’s stated target of returning US CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 was off the mark from the goals set by the EU, Ned Helme, President of the Center for Clean Air Policy, and a veteran of these meetings going back to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, replied that the important thing which would make progress possible at Copenhagen was that “the US target is clear.” “That’s all that really matters,” he said. “As long as our delegates have a clear signal [from the Obama administration] we’re fine.”

So too with concerns that some EU member states, particularly Italy and conference host Poland, were now demanding that EU emission targets were no longer appropriate in the face of the financial crisis. “The targets have not changed,” said Helme, “only the question of who will bear the financial burden of cuts and when.”

UPDATE: In a closing press conference today by Climate Action Network International, an umbrella of environmental organizations working on climate change, Angela Anderson of the Pew Environment Group offered a view diverging from the message earlier in the week offered by the Pew Center on Climate Change. Anderson argued that the good news coming out of this meeting is that we should not worry about the transition to the Obama administration raising a hurdle to progress on a new treaty. “We do have a time line now,” she said, “and that time line is ambitious.”

Anderson offered that the statements from Obama on the priority of climate change for his administration, which Al Gore took time today to read out in an afternoon plenary session, and the statements by John Kerry (D-Mass) delivered personally in Poznan over the last day and a half, offered a clear message that the transition will not stall developing a work plan to salvage an agreement at Copenhagen.

Anderson also praised developing countries for moving forward on an ambitious plan to fulfill the aspirations of the Bali action plan decided at last year’s UN climate change meeting.

Although both groups are funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, Pew Environment Group is separate from the Pew Center on Climate Change. The former is characterized as an advocacy group and the latter as a think tank-research center. Each has separate boards of directors and do not govern each other’s messages. When asked about the difference between the messages of the two institutions in an interview, Anderson said, “It speaks for itself.”

UPDATE Via Climate Progress, the full quotation by Elliot Diringer on the Bush administration:

I think the fact that we are not yet represented by the incoming administration does of course place some limits on what we can do in Poznań. I would not say that because we are represented by the US negotiators here, we’re limiting the outcomes here. I think the US negotiating team is doing a very good job, actually, of representing US interests and keeping open options for the incoming administration. Also, this is a fairly light agenda here in Poznań. There are a few issues to be decided, but really no major definitive issues. So, I think everyone recognizes the US is in this transition phase and accepts that. I don’t think it’s having a major bearing on the mood or momentum here.

Joe Romm responds, “At best, this is a very inartful way of saying that ‘not much was going to happen at Poznań anyway so the Bush team isn’t really screwing things up.’ But, of course, not much was going to happen anyway because of the Bush team!”