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The risks of going it alone
California needs to get it right on climate change policies
Jack M. Stewart, SF Chronicle
California, already a leader in addressing global warming, may soon become the first state to impose mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. State lawmakers are poised to pass Assembly Bill 32 (authored by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles), which calls for a California-only cap on carbon emissions. The stakes are high: Climate change mitigation won’t come cheap, and the economic risks of California going it alone could impact the competitiveness of businesses for years to come.
Industries consuming large amounts of energy — electric power, manufacturing, refining, steel and cement production, among others — would bear the brunt of compliance costs, further disadvantaging California manufacturers whose electricity rates already are 80 percent higher than for manufacturers in other Western states. As such, it behooves us, and our elected representatives in Sacramento, to craft climate change policies that will be sustainable both near and long term, and at the least cost to the economy. That is, we better get it right.
…Energy is a large part of the cost of doing business for manufacturers in California. As a result, California manufacturers have had to become more efficient energy users. Climate-change policies for California should recognize that we already have lower greenhouse gas emissions than other industrialized states and nations, and that the incremental costs — the additional costs of reducing carbon emissions — will be substantial for manufacturers.
AB32 would establish a California-only cap on carbon emissions, significantly undermining the ability of California businesses to compete with businesses in other states and overseas, where there is no cap. It could also have the unintended consequence of reducing emissions here but increasing global emissions — a lose-lose situation. Earlier this year, the governor’s Climate Action Team conceded that if California implements a greenhouse-gas reduction program “without other states,” as now appears likely, “there will be an incentive for production to shift to other states to avoid the cap,” which could result in a situation in which “emissions may decline in the state, only to increase in other states.”
Jack M. Stewart is the president of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association.
(29 Aug 2006)
Disaster-prone China takes heed of global warming
Chris Buckley, Reuters via Yahoo!News
BEIJING – Storms, floods, heat and drought that have killed more than 2,000 people in China this year are a prelude to weather patterns likely to become more extreme due to global warming, the head of the Beijing Climate Center said.
China was braced for further hardship as rising temperatures worldwide trigger increasingly extreme weather, Dong Wenjie, director-general of the climate center, said.
“The precise causes of these phenomena aren’t easy to determine on their own,” Dong told Reuters of meteorological disasters that have caused 160 billion yuan (10.58 billion pounds) worth of damage this year.
“But we know the broad background is global warming. That’s clear. It’s a reminder that global warming will bring about increasingly extreme weather events more often.”
A study issued by China’s chief climate scientists last year predicted that mean temperatures across China were likely to climb, forcing major changes in rainfall, desertification, river flows and crop production.
Yet even as China approaches the United States as the world’s largest producer of the manmade greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, Beijing is set against mandatory ceilings on its emissions, experts said.
“China’s preoccupation is economic development and growth,” said Paul Harris, of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, who studies climate change policy.
(28 Aug 2006)
We can’t reverse global warming by triggering another catastrophe
George Monbiot, The Guardian
Sulphate pollution killed hundreds of thousands of Africans. A plan to use sulphur to fight climate change risks the same
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Challenging a Nobel laureate over a matter of science is not something you do lightly. I have hesitated and backed off, read and reread his paper, but now I believe I can state with confidence that Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 prize for chemistry, has overlooked a critical scientific issue.
Crutzen is, as you would expect, a brilliant man. He was one of the atmospheric chemists who worked out how high-level ozone is formed and destroyed. He knows more than almost anyone about the impacts of pollutants in the atmosphere. This is what makes his omission so odd.
This month, he published an essay in the journal Climatic Change. He argues that the world’s response to climate change has so far been “grossly disappointing”. Stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, he asserts, requires a global reduction in emissions of between 60% and 80%. But at the moment “this looks like a pious wish”. So, he proposes, we must start considering the alternatives, by which he means re-engineering the atmosphere in order to cool the earth.
He suggests we use either giant guns or balloons to inject sulphur into the stratosphere, 10km or more above the surface of the earth. Sulphur dioxide at that height turns into tiny particles – or aerosols – of sulphate. These reflect sunlight back into space, counteracting the warming caused by manmade climate change.
One of the crueller paradoxes of climate change is that it is being accelerated by reducing certain kinds of pollution. Filthy factories cause acid rain and ill health, but they also help to shield us from the sun, by filling the air with particles. As we have started to clean some of them up, we have exposed ourselves to more solar radiation. One model suggests that a complete removal of these pollutants from the atmosphere could increase the world’s temperature by 0.8C.
The virtue of Crutzen’s scheme is that sulphate particles released so far above the surface of the earth stay airborne for much longer than they do at lower altitudes. I
(29 Aug 2006)
