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A joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI), China Watch reports on energy, agriculture, population, water, health, and the environment in China—with an emphasis on big-picture analysis relevant to policy makers, the business community, and non-governmental organizations.

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Climate Road Trip: An Indian Movement for Change

11 hours 9 min ago

by Anna da Costa

Anna da Costa, co-director for the India Climate Solutions Project, reports on the launch of the Indian Climate Solutions Road Tour, aimed at catalyzing and inspiring climate change solutions across India.

As clocks ticked past midnight on December 31, signaling the start of the new year, a group of seven passionate individuals from India and around the world gathered in the eastern city of Chennai to begin an epic climate journey.

The team was embarking on a month-long road tour across India to raise awareness about local climate solutions and to empower Indian youth on one of the greatest challenges of our time: global climate change.

Representing an expanding network of youth and young professionals known as the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN), the travellers will traverse more than 3,500 kilometers through 20 cities to reach India's capital, Delhi, on February 4. They will be accompanied by a solar-powered electric band, Solar Punch, and will travel in a medley of alternatively powered vehicles, including solar plug-in Reva electric cars, a sustainably produced plant-oil powered truck, a solar-roofed jeep, and a waste vegetable oil-powered van.

The group's message is clear: climate change is real, but many of the solutions to this challenge already exist-with the greatest solution of all being the human capacity to act.

During visits to colleges and schools in each city, the team will conduct structured climate leadership trainings to encourage young people to create solutions in their local communities, envisioning and acting on the future they wish to see. To support communication of solutions, the travellers will document the innovative approaches they encounter, along with additional commentary, on their website. Events held in each city will celebrate local climate solutions, honoring the most inspirational and innovative expressions of this message through dance, music, and art.

The Climate Solutions Road Tour is the first call of its kind to India's youth. It is a positive, collaborative, and questioning search for a future that youth can aspire toward, take a lead on, and be proud of. It is also the launch of IYCN's India Climate Solutions Project, which will continue to highlight some of India's most transformative climate solutions as well as conduct campus-based leadership programs across India moving forward.

The project aims to accelerate the uptake of climate change "best practice" and innovation across sectors in India. It will also provide a forum for dialogue around how to capture low-carbon opportunities most effectively, and to demonstrate that India has a unique opportunity to become a low-carbon leader. Most crucially, such a climate response can support environmental sustainability, economic development, and energy security simultaneously.

With the clear and unflinching international message that 2009 must be a year for change globally, and in the face of the ongoing collapse of the global auto industry, the team is also turning outward and calling on decision makers around the world to seize this unique opportunity to become a low-carbon leader, transforming automobiles to run on zero-carbon systems.

The importance of true international collaboration and a solutions-based climate movement is beyond question. This urgency is particularly great in light of the upcoming Copenhagen climate negotiations in December, where an ambitious, equitable, and effective successor to the Kyoto Protocol needs to be established.

It is clear that we have the potential and opportunity to address the climate crisis, yet there is still a vast gulf between our knowledge and action. The Climate Solutions Road Tour aims to start the year with a cohesive, positive, and impactful call to India and the globe, encouraging us all to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Updates from the road will be posted daily on the group's Climate Solutions Blog. The trip itinerary is also posted online.

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Eye on Earth: 2008 in Review

December 30, 2008 - 09:56

From promises of "green jobs" on the U.S. campaign trail to record-setting global investments in renewable energy, the year was marked by an international mobilization to address the world's most daunting environmental challenges and forge a green economy. While the science is clear that the time to address catastrophic climate change is now, a turbulent year - including food crises, natural disasters, and financial ruin - demonstrated the difficult road ahead.

Here is a collection of some of the major sustainability news stories from throughout the year, as well as some of the best ideas for a more sustainable 2009 and beyond.

January

Transportation: Indian auto manufacturer Tata unveiled its $2,500 "people's car," the Nano, raising concerns about more crowded roads and rising vehicle emissions.

Clean Coal: Wave of the Future or Empty Rhetoric?

December 29, 2008 - 08:04

Through rustic images of America and a call for technological ingenuity, "clean coal" media advertisements became pervasive across the United States this year.

The coal industry promises an abundant and cheap energy solution that also protects the environment. Yet the clean coal solution to climate change is not currently economical, leading many environmentalists to criticize the advertisements as deceptive.

To shed some light on the clean coal debate, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, reviewed how much the industry is actually spending on climate change solutions. The study found that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity - 48 coal and utility companies - is investing $3.5 billion into projects that capture and store emissions, including many projects that have yet to begin.

In order for coal to remain an energy option in a warming world, international observers say the research funding for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the leading clean coal technology, must increase. Otherwise, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise to levels of irreversible damage if the current rate of coal burning continues.

"[Coal companies] use ‘clean coal' as if it's a magic wand: wave it and coal emissions will go away," said Daniel Weiss, the center's director of climate strategy. "They're claiming this is the solution, but they're not investing very much in the future."

A Political, Financial, and Rhetorical Feud

The industry group quickly countered the study with a U.S. Department of Energy list of more than 80 projects that capture, monitor, or mitigate carbon emissions.

The list's only completed CCS project, however, is a North Dakota natural gas plant that pipes emissions to Canada, where they are used to push oil out of the ground. Researchers are closely monitoring the project in hopes that it will help further other CCS efforts.

The coal industry prefers a more general definition of "clean coal," including any coal-fired power plant that features higher energy efficiency and emits fewer pollutants such as soot and sulfur dioxide.

In addition to fueling a terminology debate, the coal industry lobbied, effectively, to prevent federal legislation this year that would have capped U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and required utilities to include more renewable energy sources in their energy portfolios, Weiss said.

"For all of the industry talk about CCS, their strategy is to delay any binding emissions until CCS is ready," Weiss said in phone conference with reporters. "If they have their way, it will be a very long time from now."

The study also compared the companies' 2007 profit, $57 billion in total, to their CCS research. "For every $17 that goes to their pockets, $1 goes into solving global warming," Weiss said.

Meanwhile, the coal coalition spent some $50 million on its clean coal campaign this year, up from $15 million in 2007, a spokesman said.

The companies are not required to dedicate more resources to CCS technology. When project costs are shared with the U.S. government, at least 20 percent of the cost must be covered by industry, which the companies have so far followed, according to Bob Kane, an Energy Department technical advisor for carbon management.

Current Funding "Nowhere Near Enough"

International agreements will likely influence greater CCS investments. The world's eight largest industrialized nations, the G8, agreed this year to establish 20 CCS demonstration projects by 2010 [PDF]. The United States said it would sponsor at least half.

The G8 asked the International Energy Association to assess how these targets could be met. It concluded in October that, "current CCS spending and activity levels are nowhere near enough to achieve the G8 goals." In addition to the base costs of CCS power plants, $20 billion is needed for near-term demonstrations, the report said.

The U.S. government has already dedicated at least $1.9 billion to CCS projects, according to Weiss's study. Further funding requests stalled in Congress this year.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama supported "clean coal" during his presidential campaign, calling for "five ‘first-of-a-kind' commercial scale coal-fired plants with carbon capture and sequestration." Congress also may include CCS funding in the massive stimulus package that will be debated early next year.

Elsewhere, the European Union agreed this month to fund 12 pilot commercial CCS plants with proceeds from carbon trading, part of an agreement to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2020. Germany launched a 30 megawatt pilot CCS coal-fired power plant in September - the world's first.

Kurt Waltzer, carbon storage development coordinator with the Boston-based Clean Air Taskforce, said at least $100 billion of research and development is necessary to meet the G8 CCS targets and to slow the increasing levels of global greenhouse gas emissions, especially from China.

"There needs to be a significant amount of federal and private money on the table," Waltzer said. "We need to realize CCS is necessary for the climate. And if coal wants to survive, they need CCS as well. In a sense, we're all in the same boat."

But many environmentalists do not embrace the still unproven technology. Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's national coal campaign, said that the notion of "clean coal" still does not address the environmental damage caused by coal extraction. Last week, for instance, 2.6 million yards (2.4 cubic meters) of lead-laden coal waste spilled onto homes in rural Tennessee, one of the worst coal accidents in U.S. history.

"There is a campaign of disinformation saying there is such a thing as clean coal," Nilles said. "It simply doesn't exist."

Ben Block is a reporter with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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Opinion: Department of Green Labor

December 22, 2008 - 08:02

In announcing that he intends Hilda Solis to be his Secretary of Labor, President-elect Barack Obama made good on his campaign pledge of change: Not only will this choice likely bring relief from the anti-union and anti-worker policies of his predecessor, but it will also reinforce that environmental issues will be key to ensuring good employment.

Congresswoman Solis, representing California's 32nd District since 2000, has distinguished herself by her support for labor rights and environmental justice causes. Specifically, she has been a strong advocate for the Employee Free Choice Act and for green collar jobs - jobs that protect the environment and offer decent pay and working conditions.

Introducing her in Chicago on December 19, Obama said, "For the past eight years, the Department of Labor has not lived up to its role either as an advocate for hardworking families or as an arbiter of fairness in relations between labor and management. That will change when Hilda Solis is Secretary of Labor. Under her leadership, I am confident that the Department of Labor will once again stand up for working families."

New directions are desperately needed. November 2008 saw the steepest job loss in the United States in 34 years. Since the start of the current recession in December 2007, 2.7 million people have lost their jobs, raising the total number of unemployed to 10.3 million and the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent. But adding those involuntarily working part-time or otherwise just marginally part of the workforce, as many as 17.2 million people were "underemployed" as of September.

With the exception of the late 1990s, real wages for low and middle-income earners have been largely stagnant since the early 1970s. Productivity gains far outpaced median hourly compensation. And now the economic crisis threatens the livelihoods of millions more people.

An ambitious economic stimulus clearly is needed to banish the ghosts of a new Depression. A conventional approach of priming the pump, however, would only sharpen the problems on another front - more production and consumption imply a growing draw on resources, more pollution, and rising carbon emissions at a time when drastic reductions are called for.

Fortunately, the notion of building a green economy is attracting growing numbers of proponents. Obama has promised to create five million new jobs by investing $150 billion over ten years in clean energy. A variety of recent studies (most recently by the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors) support the conclusion that a greener economy will be good for employment.

The next Labor Secretary will play a critical role in this transformation. In addition to scaling up R&D and investments in green manufacturing, building construction and energy, a green workforce is critical. Appropriate training and skills programs are needed, and employees and unions need to be seen as valued partners in greening the workplace instead of as enemies.

Green employment has to hold promise not just for high-skilled individuals like engineers and technicians, but also for the broad mass of blue collar trades like sheet metal workers, plumbers, carpenters, and others. And, as groups like Green for All argue, there is a need to fashion green jobs development into a ladder out of destitution for those who have been sidelined by the global economy.

Obama's transition Web site indicates that the incoming administration is planning to increase funding for federal workforce training programs, and directing them toward green technologies in manufacturing industries and in building weatherization.

Hilda Solis appears to be the right person to lead such efforts. She was the author of the Green Jobs Act of 2007 (H.R. 2847), legislation intended to provide up to $125 million to establish national and state green job training programs, including a provision for "Pathways Out of Poverty" - job training in disadvantaged communities. H.R. 2847 became part of the "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007," signed into law in December 2007.

How to rescue the economy from the Scylla and Charybdis of economic and environmental crisis will likely be a battleground for the new administration. Solis' solid support for labor and environmental causes may well clash with positions taken by others holding fast to more traditional, free-trade and pro-business views.

Obama may often find himself in a position of needing to reconcile diverging perspectives among his team. But the incoming President understands that rebuilding the economy in the face of climate calamity requires an approach that works not just for business but also for labor. When asked about the worker occupation of Chicago's Republic Windows and Doors factory that brought into sharp relief the gap between Wall Street bailouts and Main Street suffering, he commented that "the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments that they have earned - I think they are absolutely right. What's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy." The occupation ended days later after Republic's creditors restored financing to the company.

Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research organization. He is a co-author of the recent Worldwatch report Green Jobs: Working for People and the Environment.

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Clean Development Mechanism in Flux

December 22, 2008 - 05:59

Emissions-reducing projects continued their steady rise across the developing world this year, with investments growing especially in China, according to a U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) annual report.

But U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change administrators who oversee Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects acknowledge that, despite the increased number of investments, the process is generally flawed. A significant overhaul is expected in the years ahead.

CDM projects were created under the Kyoto Protocol to allow industrialized countries to meet their emissions-reduction targets through low-emission investments in the developing world. It was also designed to assist the global spread of clean energy.

As of late November, 4,237 CDM projects were validated, registered, or sought registration. The number of projects nearly doubled this year; 2,809 were recorded in 2007, the report said [PDF].

Even with the increased investments - due mostly to the expansion of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme - the CDM Executive Board acknowledges that significant system reforms are needed.

"Despite steady progress, indeed much success, the Executive Board and all of its support bodies must address with renewed urgency in 2009 the task of improving the CDM," said Lex de Jonge, vice chair of the CDM Executive Board, in a December report [PDF].

The CDM process is largely criticized for failing to ensure greenhouse gas reductions. Some projects provided polluters with offset credits despite the fact that many projects would have occurred regardless of the CDM investments, the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted in a December report. In addition, the CDM process does not prevent developing countries from supporting projects that contribute to climate change - most projects, in fact, are located in rapidly industrialized countries.

The CDM process is also burdened with bureaucratic delays - about 29 percent of projects that are registered or undergoing review are idling, the International Emissions Trading Association said in its 2008 State of the CDM report. And the CDM Executive Board is accusing some of the largest CDM auditors of improperly validating projects.

Still, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said the CDM experience demonstrates "great success" of international collaboration on climate change. "The challenge now is to streamline it and overcome some of the hurdles," Steiner said in a press release. "By 2012 we estimate that over 8,000 CDM projects may be up and running or in the pipeline, generating financial flows from North to South of well over $30 billion."

Ongoing negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol will significantly affect the CDM future. Among the proposals that climate negotiators will discuss at next year's climate summit in Copenhagen is the possible tying of future CDM credits to a sector-wide reduction of emissions. For instance, China's entire electricity sector would have to reduce emissions in order for electricity-related CDM projects to sell their credits on the carbon market.

"The CDM of the Copenhagen agreement will be very different from the CDM of the current state, especially for major emerging economies," said Jake Schmidt, director of international climate policy programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

At this month's climate negotiations in Poznań, Poland, African delegates lobbied for new rules that encouraged a wider geographical range of CDM projects. More than three-quarters of current projects are located in Asia and the Pacific region, with China and India by far receiving the lion's share of investments.

The emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, and Mexico collectively receive about 76 percent of CDM projects. In Latin America, the percentage of cumulative projects jumped from 2.2 percent in 2007 to 19 percent this year. Projects in other regions of the world are on the rise, but the distribution has proportionally remained about the same, according to the UNEP report.

Negotiators are also discussing whether CDM projects should include avoided deforestation and building retrofits. So far, renewable energy projects account for 63 percent of CDM projects, with hydroelectric, biomass, and wind the most common, the UNEP report said.

The number of projected Certified Emission Reductions, offsets sold to companies or traded in carbon markets, rose to 2,900 this year. Each is equivalent to 1 ton of avoided carbon dioxide.

Ben Block is a reporter with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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OPINION: Letter to the New Education Secretary

December 19, 2008 - 10:13

Worldwatch is pleased to publish this open letter from prominent education and environment leaders urging the newly nominated U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan, to consider the importance of education in carrying out President-elect Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

Dear Mr. Duncan:

Congratulations on your nomination. As you jump into the daunting challenge of bolstering our sagging education system, you have a powerful opportunity presented by the need to create a carbon-free economy.

President-elect Obama has astutely perceived the linkages between climate change, economic stimulus, energy security, and job training by declaring that the transition to a green economy is his "top priority." The missing link in this system is the critical role that education can play in quickly making the green economy a reality. By working with him to include a major role for education in his green economy plans, you'll help advance his agenda - and yours.

Transforming our nation's economic, energy, and environmental systems to move toward a green economy will require a level of expertise, innovation, and cooperative effort unseen since the 1940s to meet the challenges involved.

Creating millions of new green jobs through targeted investment and spending is one thing; filling those jobs with qualified candidates is quite another thing. This transition will require a massive job training (and retraining) effort on the part of business, government, and education if it is to scale up quickly.

But green manufacturing workforce development programs are just one piece of what is needed; the green economy will not be driven by manufacturing workers alone. Architects, engineers, planners, scientists, business managers, financial experts, lawyers, entrepreneurs, political leaders, resource managers, and many others, as well as workers - not to mention environmentally literate consumers - will all be needed to drive the green economy.

American workers, managers, and professionals at all levels and in all sectors must understand the foundations of a green economy as represented in leading environmental and sustainability education programs. These foundations call for redesigning the human economy to emulate nature: operating on renewable energy, creating a circular production economy in which the concept of ‘"waste" is eliminated because all waste products are raw materials or nutrients for the industrial economy, and managing human activities in a way that uses natural resources only at the rate that they can self-regenerate (the ideas embodied in sustainable forestry, fishing, and agriculture).

To produce such a literate workforce and citizenry, America will need to make major new investments in our educational systems to implement the green economy and keep new green jobs from migrating out of America.

It has been well proven that an investment in education and innovation - in human capital - is without a doubt the best investment that can be made in long-term, across-the-board economic growth.1 Public investments in education for a green economy will more than pay for themselves, just as the post-Sputnik education programs did in the 1950s and ‘60s and the G.I. Bill did in the 1940s.2

In addition, "Education for a Green Economy" is a politically unifying strategy:

A serious commitment to global competitiveness and innovation appeals to a wide range of stakeholders: Americans concerned with security and energy independence, economic development, climate change, and the environment; blue-collar workers and citizens calling for increasing investment in new "green jobs"; parents, students, and teachers; clean technology and green venture capital firms; and the academic community.

Recent legislation authorizing investments to support sustainability programs in higher education, improve education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and build healthy, high performance "green schools" (both K-12 and higher education) have passed with broad bipartisan support, but have yet to be significantly funded.

We, the undersigned, therefore respectfully urge you to support the following proposed Presidential agenda as it pertains to your department:

An Action Agenda for a Healthy, Just, and Sustainable Economy

• The President should announce a sweeping initiative to support education as a cornerstone of our new clean energy future. This initiative should be part of an economic stimulus package with a focus on green jobs and green education to help Americans of all ages, all backgrounds, and all walks of life transition to the green economy.

• The President should launch a series of White House Conferences on Creating Healthier, Greener Communities and Economies. Conference themes, co-sponsored with key federal agencies, would focus on building a more equitable and green economy, promote social equity, and support service learning to engage youth in greening local communities.

• Support a national goal of 100% of renovation and new school construction to meet "Green Schools" Standards by 2012. Declare a Department of Education policy to support a national goal that 100 percent of newly constructed or rehabilitated schools (both K-12 and higher education) to become "Green Schools" to lower energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, and provide opportunities for formal and non-formal environmental education.

• Support legislation to direct 1% of climate change cap-and-trade revenues to education for a green economy. This comprehensive education bill would advance education for a green economy through major adjustments to K-12 education, school-to-work programs, higher education, professional re-education, and consumer and public education, in order to equip our American workforce and citizenry with the needed skills and knowledge to maximize environmental and economic gains in the transition to a green economy. Related legislation to significantly expand and improve environmental education in our public K-12 schools (the No Child Left Behind Act) should also be supported.

• Establish a strong record of funding existing education programs through the President's budget requests for the University Sustainability Program, environmental education programs at the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the new Energy Efficiency Grants and Loans program at the Department of Energy.

• Make new Administration appointments:

a. Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Education, Education for a Green Economy

b. Senior Policy Advisor to the NOAA Administrator, Climate Change Education

c. Environmental Education Advisor, Council of Environmental Quality

d. Senior Policy Advisor to the Director of the US Peace Corps, Sustainability and Environmental Education

• Direct all federal resources agencies to develop and conduct "education for a green economy" and climate change literacy training for all personnel to familiarize them with challenges, needs, and appropriate responses for each agency.

One of the most hopeful signs for the future is the rapidly developing consensus that investment in a clean/green economy is the best way to improve national security, create millions of jobs, restore U.S. economic leadership, and stop large-scale climate disruption that could undercut modern civilization. It is time to reorient the education system to make this a reality-humanity is depending on us.

With our best wishes for your success,

David E. Blockstein, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Council for Science and the Environment

Judy Braus, Senior Vice President of Education, National Audubon Society

Antony D. Cortese, Sc.D., President, Second Nature

Kevin J. Coyle, Vice President for Education, National Wildlife Federation

Brian A. Day, Executive Director, North American Association for Environmental Education

James L Elder, Ph.D., Director, Campaign for Environmental Literacy

Christopher Flavin, President, Worldwatch Institute

Judy Walton, Ph.D., Acting Executive Director, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education

[1] Dr. Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has demonstrated that spending on education generates the largest number of jobs (23.1 per $1 million dollars in spending) of any government spending.

[2] According to the Subcommittee on Education and Health of the Joint Economic Committee, every dollar invested in the G.I. Bill generated $6.90 in returns, and the total added value to national economic output was estimated to be nearly $200 billion.

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U.S. Agriculture Nominee Attracts Controversy

December 19, 2008 - 08:28

President-elect Barack Obama nominated the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, to serve as his secretary of agriculture earlier this week.

If approved, Vilsack will oversee the world's most productive farmlands, and therefore, some of the world's most daunting environmental challenges. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will influence decisions of ethanol production and global food shortages, growing meat demand and livestock-related greenhouse gases, genetically modified organisms and organic agriculture, rural poverty and agribusiness consolidation.

Vilsack critics say he supported larger farms more than local, organic food production during his two decades in government. Yet observers from Iowa also describe the Democrat as a centrist who balanced the demands of farmers, environmentalists, and industry groups.

"I honestly believe he will listen to a broad sense of voices, having been through a lot here in Iowa," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

The nomination angered some environmental groups, mostly from the organic community, because of Vilsack's support for large agribusiness and biotechnology.

"Vilsack's nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration," said Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association, in a press release.

Vilsack signed legislation in 2005 that preempted local cities and counties from restricting the sale of genetically modified seeds. Yet, according to the Center for Rural Affairs, he reportedly said biotechnology corporations should prove their products are safe before the seeds become available on the market - a more stringent requirement than the law currently states.

The organic association also opposes Vilsack's nomination for his record on "aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations." When Vilsack was governor from 1998-2006, the number of hogs per farm in Iowa - the No.1 live animal exporter in the nation - rose from about 800 to more than 1,800 [PDF]. Meanwhile, the number of hog farms fell almost 50 percent.

As a state senator, Vilsack voted for a 1995 law that almost excluded livestock operations from public nuisance lawsuits because of significant demands on the plaintiffs. The Iowa Supreme Court later overturned the law as "flagrantly unconstitutional."

"We continue not to really come forward and recognize the impacts of more and more concentration of animals in our state," said Susan Heathcote, water program director for the Iowa Environmental Council, a lobbying group that represents more than 70 state organizations. "That is a big disappointment."

But the Humane Society of the United States supports his nomination, citing his responsive record on various animal rights measures. Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said he was not "extremely familiar" with Vilsack's record on factory farming, but Vilsack was the Humane Society's top choice, nonetheless.

"When you consider the other possible choices - like Rep. John Salazar and former Rep. Charlie Stenholm, who are closely aligned with the agribusiness industry - it becomes clear just how meaningful it is that someone like Vilsack was selected instead," Makarian said in an e-mail. "We expect him to be a reasonable and moderate voice on factory farming issues, and not someone who will automatically side with the knee-jerk positions of agribusiness."

As governor, Vilsack supported water pollution controls, renewable energy, and livestock market reforms.

After farm runoff contributed to growing problems of water pollution throughout the state, Vilsack expanded the state's annual water monitoring budget from $33,000 to $3 million. In his second term, he hosted a multi-stakeholder water summit that resulted in a new state water resources council.

"He really took on issues of impaired water and water quality, and it became...a pretty high profile focus of his administration," Heathcote said.

The agriculture secretary will have to collaborate with rural landowners in efforts to expand renewable energy resources such as wind, solar, and geothermal nationwide. As governor, Vilsack strongly advocated alternative energy and helped usher some of the world's largest wind energy companies to his state - now the country's third largest wind energy producer.

Yet it was large clean energy corporations, more than local landowners, that generally profited from the investments, according to Iowa Renewable Energy Association board member Ed Woolsey.

"His forte is not working with landowners or farmers," said Woolsey, president of Green Prairie Wind Development and a Union of Concerned Scientists consultant. "His forte is working with big business and regulatory agencies to smooth the way for them to install large developments."

The energy policy that has captured most environmentalists attention has been Vilsack's strong support for ethanol. The next agriculture secretary will inherit the Bush administration's mandates for high ethanol production - 10.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol is required next year and 15 billion gallons by 2015.

Vilsack acknowledged ethanol's limitations, however, in a Rolling Stone interview after he announced his presidency in 2006. "Frankly, corn-based ethanol is not necessarily the wave of the future," he said. "Ethanol may be, but corn is not. There's not enough corn. There needs to be focus on switchgrass, on municipal waste, on timber, on other ways to produce ethanol that is more efficient."

Sustainable agriculture advocates [PDF] had hoped someone from within their community would be picked for the job. Despite the organic community's apparent disappointment, Vilsack garnered the support of several national environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and National Wildlife Federation.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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Vietnam May Revisit Two-Child Population Policy

December 17, 2008 - 03:00

The government of Vietnam will decide on December 22 whether to penalize parents who have more than two children, reinitiating a coercive population policy it abandoned in 2003.

"We are considering an adjustment to our policy appropriate to the circumstances of the country," Truong Thi Mai, chair of Vietnam's Parliamentary Committee of Social Affairs, confirmed on Saturday. "The Parliament Standing Committee will decide the week after next."

Ms. Mai, a leading figure in the government debate who sits on the influential Standing Committee, was attending a weekend conference of the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Hanoi. She declined to provide details of the proposed policy adjustment, but said it was brought about by continuing poverty in rural areas associated with families with more than two children.

Asked whether the policy would violate the principles of family planning voluntarism, an approach that Vietnam government representatives agreed to at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Ms. Mai responded that the government "has consulted all international laws to which Vietnam is a party" and had discussed the proposed policy change with the United Nations Population Fund. The 1994 agreement lacks the status of international law.

UN sources confirmed that discussion and characterized the initiative as a return of population policy influence by government forces who believe Vietnam's decline in fertility - it fell from 3.8 children per woman in 1989 to less than 2.1 today - is among its greatest social successes. The fertility rate has not risen significantly in recent years, but some Vietnamese officials nonetheless fear that a population "boomlet" may be occurring.

If approved, the new policy would impose fines on parents for any third and higher-order children, the UN sources said. Government officials and parliamentarians are already required to have no more than two children, risking advancement or continued service if they have more.

Initiation of the proposed new policy may also reflect the recent breakup of what had been a ministry devoted to population, maternal health, and child welfare, according to the UN sources. These three functions have since been split into three departments and divided among ministries, weakening the influence of former ministry officials committed to family planning voluntarism.

The Vietnamese two-child population policy had been in effect in the 1990s and until 2003, when - in part due to international pressure against coercive family planning policies - it was replaced with a policy encouraging a "small-family norm" throughout the country.

Reinstatement of the two-child policy would be reminiscent of the longstanding one-child population policy of China, Vietnam's northern neighbor, which requires that most parents have no more than one child or face fines or other penalties. Despite this policy, China's fertility averages around 1.8 children per woman, indicating widespread exceptions to or evasions of the policy.

Vietnam's fertility rate rose slightly around the time its two-child policy was relaxed in 2003, but demographers judge the increase insignificant and doubt it stemmed from relaxation of the policy. The fertility rate has since fallen back to 2.1 or slightly lower, according to UN sources.

Fertility rates that stay consistently at two children per woman allow a population eventually to stop growing in the absence of significant net immigration. Most eastern Asian countries have experienced rapid fertility decline in recent decades, to roughly two children or fewer, due to the increasing popularity of small families and improved access to family planning services in the region.

Robert Engelman is Vice President for Programs at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, published in 2008 by Island Press.

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OPINION: From Deadlock to "Yes We Can"

December 15, 2008 - 11:29

The message emerging from the climate negotiations in Poznań, Poland, last week was clear: the world has a long, rocky road to travel over the next year if it is to achieve the kind of far-reaching agreement that will be needed to stave off devastating climate change.

It was apparent on arriving in Poznań that this was not an auspicious venue for the final Conference of the Parties before the crucial Copenhagen Conference a year from now. The smell of sulfur was heavy in the air in this largely coal-dependent region of Central Europe. And the pall cast by the economic calamity that has overtaken the global economy weighed even more heavily on government officials contemplating the investments needed to combat climate change. Even European leaders, who have been the champions of climate policy over the past decade, decided to weaken their own climate commitments just as the Poznań meeting was coming to a close.

The failure of industrialized countries to curb their own emissions-and to provide funding to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change-created an acrimonious atmosphere in Poznań. Developing-country delegations spent much of their energy angrily denouncing the failures of the richer nations, and the pleas of everyone from small island country leaders to Al Gore to focus on common interests rather than short-term squabbles seemed to fall on deaf ears as negotiators fought for the interests of their own nations.

But despite the sulfurous atmosphere, the glimmerings of a brighter future were also visible in Poznań. Many developing-country leaders indicated increased willingness to take action to address climate change-and growing awareness that they have a crucial role to play if a habitable planet is to be salvaged. Mexico, an oil-producing country, surprised delegates with its announcement that it would cut emissions in half by 2050, and Brazil did the same with its pledge to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 70 percent over the next decade. If this trickle of new commitments can be turned into a torrent over the next year, the chances of a successful outcome in Copenhagen will improve markedly.

The real key to success in Copenhagen can be summarized in one word, however: "Obama." Although neither the President-elect nor his representatives were in Poland, he was a shadow presence at the climate talks, as virtually all agreed that U.S. leadership was the key to overcoming the well-worn stalemate now in place. The President-elect's conviction that building a low-carbon economy can create thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs stands in stark contrast to the dynamic of protecting old-line industries such as steel production and coal-fired power plants that dominated the Poznań negotiations.

The big test for Obama on climate policy is whether he can transform the politics of avoiding sacrifice into the politics of competing for the economic opportunities that will come from building a sustainable global economy. For the world's climate, there is only one answer: "Yes we can!"

Christopher Flavin is President of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C.

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Hansen to Obama: Support a Carbon Tax

December 15, 2008 - 03:00

Eminent climatologist James Hansen will urge U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to support a carbon tax, in a letter to be sent this week, Hansen said.

Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, is one of the leading voices for a carbon tax to address climate change, rather than backing the more widely used cap-and-trade approach. In his plan, Hansen recommends levying a rising tax on fossil fuels and redistributing 100 percent of the proceeds to taxpayers - a "tax and dividend" approach [PDF].

Obama has preferred a cap-and-trade policy - an economy-wide limit on greenhouse gas emissions that will be lowered over time and that allows polluters to trade emission permits on a carbon market. His most recent climate change speech, delivered last month at a summit hosted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, further emphasized his support for cap-and-trade.

"We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050," Obama said.

Yet Hansen and other carbon tax supporters insist that the debate between the two policies is far from complete.

"Politically, [cap-and-trade] will be convenient, but it will not solve the problem," Hansen said at a Capitol Hill briefing last Tuesday. "We do need a communicator. Obama has the ability and opportunity to do it."

Hansen was the first climate scientist to state publicly that greenhouse gas emissions were causing climate change, at a hearing before the U.S. Senate 20 years ago. He has since become a leading voice on the severity of climate change, urging world leaders to discontinue support for coal and to accelerate the transition to carbon-neutral energy sources.

Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade

Carbon taxes raise the price of carbon-intensive fuels and thereby encourage low-carbon lifestyles. Tax advocates say the approach could be implemented instantly and that it would avoid the interference of interest groups.

Emissions among the industrialized countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol - a treaty that embraces the cap-and-trade approach - have risen since 2000 [PDF]. Analysts cite several reasons for the rise, including the fact that Western European energy utilities effectively lobbied for free pollution permits as part of the European Emission Trading Scheme (ETS).

Also, one of the tools developed under Kyoto to manage the pollution offsetting process - the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - has lacked effective oversight. The United Nations acknowledged last month that the firm that validated nearly half the world's CDM projects lacked proper qualifications.

Another concern is that cap-and-trade mechanisms have led to volatile prices. Whereas carbon taxes contribute some certainty to energy prices - a $100 tax on a ton of carbon emissions would raise coal prices an estimated 14.6 percent, for instance - the ETS carbon price fluctuates on average 17 percent each month, according to Robert Shapiro, a former U.S. under secretary of commerce for economic affairs.

"We're looking at very, very volatile energy prices," said Shapiro, who is currently the chairman of Sonecon, an economic advisory firm. "Business leaders need to know energy prices when they decide whether to invest in more energy efficient products."

World leaders have promised to address the cap-and-trade flaws during the current climate negotiations. The policy is still preferred by some environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Cap-and-trade advantages include that its emissions cap provides a more certain level of greenhouse gas reductions, if the policy is written without major flaws and the program runs smoothly. Environmentalists are lobbying for an emissions cap lower than what was allowed as part of the ETS.

In addition, a carbon tax is not free of potential scandal. Depending on the policy, billions of dollars would be dispensed to energy efficiency and renewable energy firms, or taxpayers pockets, creating potential opportunities for fraud. Also, Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that advocates carbon taxes, notes that polluters have become skilled at finding tax loopholes over the years.

"Gaining Momentum Every Single Day"

Carbon taxes are currently in place, with frequent exemptions, in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, British Columbia, and select U.S. cities. The taxes are generally politically unpopular - national plans in New Zealand and Canada failed to win residents' support. According to a global BBC poll in 2007, about half of the 22,000 people surveyed were in favor of increased fossil fuel taxes, and 44 percent opposed the proposal.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, said carbon tax proponents have to overcome the disinformation campaigns that regularly attack new tax proposals. "Any legislator considering a carbon tax has to prepare the ground more effectively than we have in Canada," he said at Tuesday's Capitol Hill panel. "Stop calling it a carbon tax. Call it a carbon dumping fee or something that makes it seem more like a climate change solution."

Connecticut Representative John Larson has sponsored U.S. legislation that would impose an excise tax on any taxable carbon substance sold by a manufacturer, producer, or importer. The bill currently has support of 12 fellow Democrats. "It's gaining momentum every single day," Larson said on Tuesday. "Twelve members may not seem like a lot, but [three of] these are influential members of the Ways and Means Committee."

Political Success May Need Additional Research

At a time of economic recession, further research may be necessary to galvanize support for the higher energy costs that may accompany a climate change solution, the panel's economists said.

Hansen's letter to Obama will request that the president-elect order a National Academies of Science study of the latest climate science. Such a study should determine the present and future impacts of global greenhouse gas emissions, Hansen said.

"We have the strongest scientific body in the world. He should ask them because the situation is more severe than people realize," Hansen said. "It's even worse than what is inferred from the latest [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] report. A lot of information has become available in the past two years."

A report would also help silence climate change disbelievers, Hansen said. "It would give [Obama] cover. Otherwise critics say it's just a few scientists saying this, or the IPCC is politicized," he said.

The Academies are already developing several climate change-related research projects, however. In October, the Division on Earth and Life Studies began its America's Climate Choices project, which seeks to address how the United States can limit the magnitude of future climate change.

"Overall, I believe the study will meet [Hansen's] concerns," said Thomas Dietz, director of the environmental science and policy program at Michigan State University and vice chair of the project's science panel. "We will address the current state of the science around issues that matter in making decisions about climate change."

Hansen has made available a more detailed draft [PDF] of the letter he plans to send to Obama. His policy recommendations are comments of personal opinion and are not related to his government position, he said.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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Poznań, Days 8, 9 & 10: The Grand Finale

December 13, 2008 - 03:00

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

I am not normally star-struck by big names, but as people like Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC; U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner; and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore appear here in Poznań, I get excited. A few days ago, when I met and spoke with Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, I may or may not have been incredibly flustered.

With all of this star power, I cannot help but hope that the presence of these global leaders will tip the scales in the ongoing closed-door negotiations on a new climate agreement.

But before I discuss today's activities, an update on Days 8 and 9:

On Day 8 (Wednesday), NGOs and delegations continued to discuss key issues, but the Parties were unable to reach consensus on many of them. The "Working Groups" were officially closed in preparation for negotiations at the Ministerial level - the so-called high-level segment of the COP.

The arrival of members of the U.S. Congressional delegation created quite a buzz. I am still amazed at how president-elect Barack Obama has managed to energize and give hope to the entire world, but everyone I met spoke of tempered expectations because the Obama administration has a lot on its plate.

U.S. Congressional staffers held a side event one night, and the medium-sized room had people standing in every available niche. The organizers had to designate an overflow room to accommodate the rest of the crowd.

On Day 9, the high-level segment began, with comments from many of the actors here. U.N. Secretary General Ban falls in the party of believing that the current economic crisis is an incredible opportunity for a green future and a "Green New Deal." He, too, expects the Obama boat to lead the way through the upcoming rough waters of these negotiations. In light of the slow progress so far, he reminded Parties that, "there can be no backsliding in our low-carbon future."

On Day 10 as Ministers began to tackle the remaining issues, the President of Guyana criticized the lack of leadership from industrialized countries at the conference, noting that, "if people say they can only make commitments in prosperous times, what will developing countries say?" And the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, an island nation that is at risk of disappearing under rising seas, stated flat out that, "we [developing countries] cannot sink while others rise" and "Tuvalu as a nation has the right to exist forever." Now that's getting to the core of things.

Al Gore received the most sustained support when he championed the carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration target of 350 parts per million. Keeping in mind the average high caliber of participants here, the response he got was even more impressive.

I'm writing this at 6 p.m. on Friday, Day 10, and negotiations are still going strong. So far, the issue of the Adaptation Fund has been resolved, with Parties granting the Fund's governing board the authority to directly disburse money to developing countries for emissions-reduction projects. The Fund hasn't been formally launched yet, and the issue of disbursement needed to be decided before then.

Still up in the air are two critical issues. One is the source of money for the Adaptation Fund. (See my previous post.) The other is whether carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) should be a viable tool under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

CDM projects are meant to encourage private sector investments in projects oriented toward environmentally friendly development. As Venezuela and other developing countries have suggested, if industrialized countries really want to invest in CCS, they should. And if and when the technology is fully developed, then it can be a CDM project. Until then, CCS should not count under CDM; these projects should be reserved for already-available technology.

As of this writing, the use of CCS is still "bracketed" in the ongoing negotiations. That is, instead of letting the contentious text stall the entire process, negotiators just put the options in brackets and deal with it later.

I imagine it could be quite easy to get enveloped in the negotiation process, lose your grounding, and forget what you are working toward. On my way back to the hotel last night, I had a meaningful conversation with two delegates from Jamaica and Belize. The Jamaican delegate, a meteorologist, painted a picture of a region already suffering from the consequences of rising temperatures. It consisted of more frequent and intense hurricanes; of bleached-out coral reefs that are no longer able to buffer islands from the brute power of these storms (which in turn means even more damage on land); and of more droughts and flooding. In short, climate change is upon us, and we had better act now.

It's clear that the international climate change dialogue has shifted here in Poznań. A work plan for 2009 has been approved, and countries have clarified what they need to do to reach an agreement in Copenhagen next year. While progress has been rather slow so far, COP 15 is next December. That gives Parties 12 months to reach a consensus on a post-Kyoto framework. Is this doable? I think so.

Amanda Chiu is the MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.

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Coral Reef Loss Suggests Global Extinction Event

December 12, 2008 - 03:00

The world is on the brink of a massive extinction event, according to the United Nations.

Rapid releases of greenhouse gas emissions are changing habitats at a rate faster than many of the world's species can tolerate.

"Indeed the world is currently facing a sixth wave of extinctions, mainly as a result of human impacts," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme in a statement.

A study earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science said the current extinction period, known as the Holocene extinction event, may be the greatest event in the Earth's history and the first due to human actions. Unlike previous events, however, extinctions are happening over the course of decades rather than centuries. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of the world's species may go extinct by 2050.

The UN warning accompanies an increasingly frequent round of sobering news about ecosystem failures.

The latest global coral reef assessment estimates that 19 percent of the world's coral reefs are dead. Their major threats include warming sea-surface temperatures and expanding seawater acidification.

Zooxanthellae, the tiny organisms that give coral reefs their vibrant colors, are emigrating from their hosts in massive numbers as oceans heat up, killing themselves and the coral they leave behind - a process known as coral bleaching.

The report, released by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network Wednesday at the international climate change negotiations in Poznań, Poland, predicts that many of the remaining reefs may disappear within the next 40 years if current emission trends continue.

"If nothing is done to substantially cut emissions, we could effectively lose coral reefs as we know them, with major coral extinctions," said Clive Wilkinson, the network's coordinator, in a press release.

Overfishing, pollution, and invasive species continue to be risks as well, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The IUCN declared in October that 38 percent of the 44,838 species it studied across the world are threatened with extinction. Its Red List of Threatened Species considers 22 percent of the world's mammals, 31 percent of amphibians, and 14 percent of birds threatened or extinct.

Steiner's warnings of mass extinction came last week as the U.N. Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals added 21 migratory species to its protection list. Migratory species are among the most at-risk to climate change, according to a UNEP report released last year [PDF].

To its list of protected animals, which include the cheetah and Egyptian vulture, the convention added six dolphin species. Nearly one-quarter of the world's dolphin species are threatened with extinction, mostly due to habitat loss and live capture, according to IUCN.

The demise of coral reefs, however, affects the entire ocean ecosystem - a quarter of all marine fish species reside in the reefs, according to The Nature Conservancy. In addition, IUCN estimates that 500 million people depend on coral reefs for their livelihoods.

The coral reef assessment found that 45 percent of the world's reefs are healthy - providing hope that some species may be able to endure the changes expected from global warming. Marine biologists are now attempting to understand how certain coral reef species can survive warmer, more acidic ocean waters when others are less fortunate.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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Poznań: The Maturing of the Youth Contingent

December 11, 2008 - 09:26

Kyle Gracey wrote the following essay from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

"Any REDD mechanism must be first and foremost a mechanism for forest protection and climate stabilization, not a mechanism by which Annex-I countries avoid domestic mitigation actions."

"Political Leaders - Stop Clowning Around!"

What to make of these two seemingly disparate statements? Answer: they are both the voice of the international youth delegation, an increasingly vocal, organized, and perhaps bureaucratized presence at the ongoing United Nations climate change negotiations.

From minor participation in the early years of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), youth have expanded into a sizable and multifaceted actor within the negotiations. But they have struggled to define their place and optimal role in the international community's efforts against climate change.

Through the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, young people, mainly college students and early professionals, attended the yearly meetings of the UNFCCC's Conference of Parties as a lobbying body - one distinct from the young employees of the traditional civil society organizations often found at U.N. negotiations.

The early youth delegations were typically small in size and limited in number, and they often operated independently or even unaware of similar delegations from other nations. They comprised mainly delegates from wealthier, Western nations.

With each passing year, however, youth participation and organization around the negotiations grew. Youth increasingly organized their participation as unified delegations rather than individual attendees - either by forming loosely associated country delegations, or by creating nonprofits or other legal entities that were organized around attending the negotiations but continued to exist between meetings.

Youth representation began to expand significantly in 2005, when the entering into force of the Kyoto Protocol triggered the first joint meeting of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties and the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, in Montreal. Attendance ballooned from the many dozens of youth previously to hundreds of young people - still largely Western, but increasingly coordinated as a global youth constituency.

Today, though still less diverse than the global population of youth they aim to represent, international youth delegates make up more than 500 of the estimated 10,000 negotiation attendees, and they boast representation from more than 50 nations.

As youth delegations have grown in their size and planning efforts, they have gained notoriety for large, visual activism. They played (melted) ice hockey in swimming pools in Montreal, greeted country delegates in Nairobi with their mouths taped shut to protest the lack of youth on government delegations, and gave swimming lessons and climate emergency kits (malaria pills, relocation coupons, water purification tablets, etc.) in Bali. The second quotation above, the title of a protest march of circus clowns down the streets of Poznań, Poland , shows that youth have been no less willing this year to use demonstration and activism as lobbying tools.

The first quotation, taken from a youth statement in the UNFCCC's Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, shows that youth have also pursued an increasingly complex policy research, writing, and lobbying effort to influence some of the more detailed policy statements under debate. Some youth delegations focus almost exclusively on policy, typically writing and reading in the otherwise empty convention halls far longer into the night than anyone else.

In addition to making several policy statements during the negotiations and engaging country delegations on contentious policy details, youth have this year even begun producing their own daily policy briefing of their analysis of the day's negotiations.

The growth in youth's efforts has not been painless. Some delegations, and the coordinating efforts across delegations, struggle with whether to prioritize activism or policy, with the end result often being that youth decide individually what they care most about pursuing. This can result in novel activities but insufficient support to test their effectiveness.

The growth of the international youth delegation has also led to efforts to develop overarching governance structures to manage and coordinate the actions of the many delegations. Structural efforts in Poznań included not only typical working groups like policy and communications/media, but also the consideration of an internal Secretariat to manage youth delegations throughout the year.

Will youth adopt a UN-like bureaucratic structure? Will this enable more unified messaging and sustained efforts between negotiations? Or will too much structure dampen the creative actions that youth have become known for? Will a greater focus on policy earn their positions more legitimacy with governments, or will it rob them of time to focus on powerful direct actions?

As youth consider their growing role in the climate change negotiations, these questions weigh heavily on many a young delegate's mind. Given their likely continued role in the talks, these decisions will shape youth's impacts for many negotiations to come.

Kyle Gracey is the Chair for SustainUS - The U.S. Youth Network for Sustainable Development and a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

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Poznań, Days 6 & 7: More Cash for Adaptation?

December 10, 2008 - 11:14

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

"Contact groups" have been meeting since late last week, meaning that international climate negotiations have now gone behind closed doors. One of the key negotiations, and arguably the most important decision that might come out of Poznań, revolves around the Adaptation Fund and Article 9 of the Kyoto Protocol - the review and possible updating of the treaty.

Under Article 9, Parties to the Kyoto Protocol will, "periodically review this Protocol in the light of the best available scientific information and assessments on climate change and its impacts, as well as relevant technical, social and economic information.... Based on these reviews, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall take appropriate action."

One of the areas under examination is funding for adaptation projects - efforts by countries to address and adapt to the wide-ranging impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to worsening droughts. Currently, the Kyoto Protocol calls for a 2-percent levy on all funding used to support projects under the treaty's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a tool that allows emitters in wealthy countries to ‘offset' their own emissions by investing in emissions-reducing projects in the developing world. That 2 percent is automatically put into the Adaptation Fund, which supports adaptation projects in developing countries that are Parties to Kyoto.

Negotiators are currently considering extending the 2 percent levy to the treaty's two other emissions-reduction "mechanisms": Joint Implementation (essentially, CDM projects for the former Soviet transition countries) and the emissions trading system. This could occur during either the first Kyoto commitment period (ending in 2012) or the second (beginning in 2013).

Aside from the 2 percent CDM levy, the Adaptation Fund currently has only one other funding source: voluntary contributions from individual countries. By extending the levy to all three Kyoto mechanisms, the cash flow to the Fund grows. The timing of implementation is also important, as it relates directly to the time-sensitive nature of adaptation. Already, many countries are seeing changes due to climate change and need help now.

Environment ministers and other key government officials are now arriving at the conference, and high-level negotiations commence on Thursday. Because Party delegates have not been able to agree on an outcome for the Adaptation Fund discussion as of yet, negotiations on this topic are expected to make their way up to these tables.

On a different note, I attended an eye-opening "side event" on potential low-carbon pathways in India's energy future, sponsored by the Delhi-based NGO The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). (Side events are events put on by groups accredited with the UNFCCC and run concurrent to the official meetings.) Panelists included TERI Executive Director Leena Srivastava, R.K. Pachauri (TERI Director General and Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Nobuo Tanaka (Executive Director of the International Energy Agency), and Harlan Watson (Senior Climate Negotiator of the U.S. Delegation to Poznań). Pachauri is also a contributing author to the upcoming Worldwatch report State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World and will be attending the State of the World 2009 briefing in Washington in January.

Srivastava painted an interesting portrait of what India is and could be. The country has a population of more than 1.1 billion and an installed electricity generating capacity of around 150 gigawatts (GW), compared to the United States, with a population of just under 306 million and approximately 1,000 GW. Over half of India's rural population does not have access to electricity, and already this system is over-taxed. Oil reserves are extremely limited, a cohesive transport infrastructure for natural gas does not exist, and coal reserves are expected to last only another 40 years.

Despite all of this, energy demand continues to grow with development. Given current rates of consumption, TERI projected that India would exhaust its domestic fossil fuel reserves by 2016 or 2017, pressing that it does not have the luxury of time to wait until after these dates to transform to a new energy-secure path. If India still relies on fossil fuels by then, it would have to depend almost solely on energy imports, a serious breach of energy security.

In TERI's most ambitious scenario for energy transformation, two-thirds of India's electricity sector, roughly 800 GW, could be served by solar energy (both photovoltaics and solar thermal) by 2031 or 2032. Large and small hydropower could produce almost 200 GW, followed by wind at slightly over 100 GW and nuclear at 100 GW. Other fuels could be used to a lesser extent. Fossil fuels would account for a much smaller portion of the pie.

To reach this scenario, India would unwaveringly go beyond its "common but differentiated responsibilities" defined under the Kyoto Protocol, and bring its "equitable right" of 2 tons of emissions per capita down to a far more rigorous 1.3 tons per capita by 2031. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in 2030 would be about 75 percent lower than under the business-as-usual case, and total systems costs would be about 11 percent lower.

Amanda Chiu is the MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.

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Automakers Go Electric

December 9, 2008 - 03:00

More electric-powered vehicles will be commercially available in the next three years, according to U.S. automakers.

As part of funding requests to Congress last week to avoid bankruptcy, U.S. automakers promised to improve their models' fuel efficiency and to offer more alternatives to gasoline-burning vehicles.

Ford Motor Company announced that a battery-operated electric van would be available by 2010, and a similar all-electric sedan would be on sale by 2011. The company plans to offer further details at next month's North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

The announcement adds Ford, the world's fourth largest vehicle manufacturer, to the international race to offer the world's first economically competitive plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle.

The world's top two manufacturers, Toyota and General Motors, had already made clear their intentions to transition toward electric vehicles. Toyota is expected to unveil a plug-in version of its popular hybrid-electric Prius at the January auto show. GM has rested its company's future on the Chevy Volt, the world's first electric vehicle to use lithium-ion batteries.

"We have 1,200 researchers and engineers trying to get that car to market as quickly as possible," said GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner at a House of Representatives panel on Friday. "We're hustling like crazy to get the car to market by 2010."

Ford also emphasized its earlier promises to shrink down the size of its vehicles. According to the company, production of smaller, Ford Focus-sized vehicles will increase more than 20 percent by 2012.

Toyota is one step ahead of its American competition. The Japanese company announced earlier this year its 1/X concept - a plan to produce smaller versions of its plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, beginning with a Prius design that is twice as fuel efficient and about one-third the weight of Prius models currently on the road.

The growing support for electric vehicles may appear that automakers have singled out hybrids and plug-in hybrids as the automobile technologies of the future. At an Electric Drive Transportation Association conference last week in Washington, D.C., however, manufacturers made clear that governments should not rule out hydrogen fuel-cell technologies, the major alternative among future vehicle designs.

"Don't choose winners and losers. No one is that smart," said Edward Cohen, vice president of government and industry relations at America Honda Motor Company. "Don't tell us what specific technologies to make. Just tell us what parameters we need and let the flowers bloom."

Most major automobile manufacturers are developing hydrogen-powered vehicles, which the U.S. National Research Council estimates may become commercially viable by 2023. GM [PDF] focused on its fuel-cell developments in its recent report to Congress. Ford [PDF] and Chrysler [PDF], however, did not include these investments in their descriptions of future projects.

If Congress approves the $38 billion in low-interest loans requested by the three U.S. Automakers, the United States and European Union will both be supporting their industries' transitions to less environmentally damaging vehicles. Last month, the European Commission provided European automakers with 5 billion euros ($6.35 billion) to help speed the development of alternative fuel and high efficiency vehicles as part of an economic stimulus package.

The funding would help develop electric vehicles' main roadblock: batteries. The durability, weight, and cost of the more advanced lithium-ion batteries still must be addressed for electric vehicles to be competitive with traditional cars, according to automakers.

"We have not solved the battery question yet by any stretch of the imagination," said Edward Kjaer, director of electric transportation for Southern California Edison and a former marketing manager for Mazda Motor of North America.

As automakers advance the vehicle technologies of the future, the infrastructure to support these vehicles is slowly developing.

California-based Better Place announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii last week to place electric-vehicle charging stations throughout the islands by 2012. In the past year, Israel, Denmark, the Australian state of Victoria, and the San Francisco Bay area have also reached agreements with the company.

Another California start-up, Coulomb Technologies, is also installing charging stations in the San Francisco Bay area, although at a smaller scale. Company CEO Richard Lowenthal said he faces a chicken-and-egg predicament.

"Nobody wants to invest in infrastructure now because they don't see the cars," Lowenthal said at last week's automobile conference. "But we worry that people won't buy cars without the charging stations."

Electric utility experts predict that utilities may not currently be able to handle the additional demands of electric vehicles on the grids. But if the infrastructure is updated with "smart-grid" technology that limits the times that vehicles are charged to the hours of lowest demand - a transition that is already under way across Europe and the United States - electric vehicles would be easily managed.

If such a shift occurs, electric vehicles could considerably decrease net greenhouse gas emissions if utilities also transition to using renewable energy sources. Half of motor vehicle energy needs in 2030 could be met with a 10-percent increase in power supply, according to the new Worldwatch Institute report, Low-Carbon Energy: A Roadmap.

Initiatives [PDF] to install hydrogen fueling stations are also spreading in the United States and beyond. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger originally envisioned a highway of hydrogen fueling stations every 20 miles (32.2 kilometers) along the U.S. west coast. Those plans have since been scaled down to urban clusters, specifically around Los Angeles, according to Robert Wimmer, Toyota North America's national manager.

Iceland installed the first hydrogen fueling station in 2003 as part of its plan to become the world's first "hydrogen society." Other global efforts include 12 stations in 11 Japanese cities and a Scandinavian highway project that plans to link hydrogen initiatives in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.

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Mid-Point, Poznań: Risky Business

December 8, 2008 - 09:20

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

On Day 4 of the international climate change negotiations, discussions continued to move briskly. Highlights included a workshop that examined climate change risk and vulnerabilities.

The Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) hosted the workshop on strategies for risk management and risk reduction, which include risk sharing and transfer mechanisms such as insurance. This may sound like a peculiar way to consider climate change, but risk analysis, management, and reduction provides Parties with a quantitative way to consider the magnitude of necessary mitigation actions.

Because governments are nearly always working with limited resources, it can be very helpful to consider climate change's impacts in terms of the likelihood that change will occur as well as the potential damage (or benefit) it causes. Factors to consider include the perception of the risk as well as some quantitative value of the impact of that risk, whether positive or negative. Generally, that value is measured monetarily, because we understand the value of money pretty clearly. Understanding risk is a valuable way to make optimal and rational decisions.

The general structure for workshops begins with an opening statement by the chairperson, presentations from either Party delegates or outside experts, discussion among the Parties and sometimes presenters, and concluding remarks by the chairperson. At this workshop, experts from the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, the Informal Task Force on Climate Change of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, and Munich Climate Insurance Initiative presented the delegates with ways to take effective adaptation and disaster-response measures.

Climate change can exacerbate and increase the number of large-scale disaster events, such as hurricanes and floods, as well as lead to progressive problems like sea-level rise. International disaster support varies depending on the type and prominence of the disaster. Delegates from Bangladesh offered an interesting comparison: international support for the December 2006 Indian Ocean tsunami received on average $7,000 per victim, whereas the Bangladesh flood in 1998, which inundated two-thirds of the country, received only $3 per person in international aid.

Many countries spoke in support of climate change insurance and additional measures to help regions adapt and improve their disaster response. Interestingly, disasters occur when a natural hazard (i.e., earthquake, flood, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, forest fire, etc.) overwhelms human abilities to cope or contain the impacts. Obviously, timely and effective disaster response is crucial in disaster-prone regions of the world, the majority of which tend to be in developing countries. Worldwatch discusses many of these challenges in its 2007 report, Beyond Disasters.

Developing-country delegates highlighted their nations' vulnerabilities to natural hazards and noted that their lack of capacity to respond effectively worsens the effects. Suggestions for risk and disaster reduction measures included an early warning system that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives during the 2006 tsunami, more coherent and orderly disaster response and management plans, and better outreach efforts to educate people about natural disasters.

Insurance, meanwhile, can help a disaster-affected region get back on its feet. "Reinsurance" is essentially insurance for the insurance companies, and it is becoming increasingly connected with climate change as extreme weather events become more frequent. Having a safety net such as insurance has been linked to additional moral hazard as well (i.e., that people with insurance may take greater risks than they would otherwise because they know they are protected). But as Koko Warner of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative said, "Insurance is not appropriate for every risk," depending on local and national circumstances as well as the nature of the risk.

Many Parties proposed using the Framework for Action from the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Hyogo, Japan, to complement the UNFCCC in building resilience to disasters. Resilience in the face of climate change is also the focus of a chapter in Worldwatch's State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, coming out in January.

In their responses during the workshop, participants placed a big emphasis on capacity building, particularly for least-developed countries and small island developing states. Among the lingering issues was the question of what role national banks, insurance companies, and reinsurance companies can and will play in our uncertain future. Insurance can be present from the local level all the way to the international level. And joint programs on international and regional coordination would add value to the partnership.

In other conference news, contact groups have begun meeting, which means that negotiations are now going on behind closed doors. More to come...

Amanda Chiu is the MAP Sustainable Energy Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.

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Poznań, Days 2 & 3: What’s Your Shared Vision?

December 4, 2008 - 09:37

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

Here in Poznań, the pace and quality of formal dialogues picked up very quickly in Days 2 and 3. I want to highlight the continued discussion on a "shared vision" for the Copenhagen climate change agreement, which spanned both days. I sat in on the workshop the first day, and the conversation was quite interesting and substantive.

Acronyms run wild here, and for good reason. For the curious, the workshop was for the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, or AWG-LCA. The purpose of the AWG-LCA is to begin the process of delineating the new international agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the 2nd commitment period (after 2012), to be decided in Copenhagen next year. There are two AWGs (the other one is the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol, or AWG-KP). These Working Groups allow for more focused discussions

During the AWG-LCA workshop, a number of countries - also known as the Parties to the UNFCCC - presented their view of what the "shared vision" should be, often reminding each other of the principles defined in the Article 3 of the Convention. In brief, Article 3 states, and the presenters reiterated, that:

actions should be taken to "protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities";
industrialized countries should lead the world in "combating climate change and other adverse effects";
special consideration should be given to developing countries because they are the most vulnerable to "adverse effects of climate change";
Parties should have a risk-averse mindset for any measures related to climate change, despite any "lack of full scientific certainty" (the precautionary principle);
sustainable development is good and desired and is a right that all Parties have; and
Parties should "promote a supportive and open international economic system" that would complement and enhance sustainable development.

China, citing the equity language of Article 3, mentioned the need for eventual "global per-capita emissions convergence" - the idea that, at some point in the future, all countries in the world should have similar per-capita emissions as a matter of climate equity. But this concept did not pick up momentum, at least not in the workshop. We'll see if anything changes, because this is still an ongoing discussion. India has long been a supporter of convergence as well.

Developing countries spoke up as they applied more pressure to industrialized countries to take the lead in addressing climate change, a principle also stated in Article 3. Brazil, however, called for non-Annex I Parties (i.e., developing countries) to deviate from their baseline emissions and start reducing their emissions as well. The EU seconded this call, but I think the statement from Brazil resonates a little more with developing countries.

India stressed the need for equity in development issues as well, and an Indian delegate even said, "If the deal in Copenhagen is not an equal deal, then there is no deal." (In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, which is consensus based, all Parties must agree for there to be any deal.)

India also brought up the "polluter pays principle," reminding industrialized countries of their responsibilities because they have historically contributed the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Being told over and over again that climate change is mostly your fault (even if it is) can be frustrating, but developing countries keep bringing this up because industrialized countries have not - and are not - doing enough.

Japan highlighted technological, lifestyle, and infrastructure innovations as tools to mitigate climat