North Korea won't tell its citizens this, but the Hermit Kingdom is broke. Luckily, ever-ingenuous Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il and his government have a new plan -- sell carbon offsets for cold hard cash. The isolated Stalinist enclave has a series of hydropower projects that it hopes to leverage with the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme, which allows developing countries to partner with typically richer countries looking to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The industrialized countries (or companies from such countries) earn carbon credits, while the host country gets cash from the sale of these credits.

Since 2006, over 2,000 projects have been approved -- according to the New York Times, 40 percent of the projects are located in China and most involve hydropower. In 2008, carbon credit transactions totaled close to $7 billion.

According to Reuters, North Korea is looking to get approval for three hydro power plants of 7-8 megawatts in the northeast part of the country.

North Korea -- currently facing sanctions over its nuclear weapons program -- faces serious challenges in selling carbon offsets. Aside from serious economic mismanagement, Reuters lists a whole host of reasons why these projects might not make it past the brainstorming stage:

"Even if they open up, who in the world wants to pay for North Korea that is blamed for its nuclear weapons programme?" said Choi Soo-young, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

Cho said the UN needed to prevent outside cash going into its nuclear development activities, while Luckock, of global law firm Norton Rose, said: "Their limited access to hard currency has to be a concern for buyers - the damages clauses will carry limited weight without some security there."

Another challenge is that North Korea would have to make public its energy consumption and generation data and disclose information on the amount of energy linked to the hydro project.

"Annual inspection, constant measurement and energy flow posting on the [UNFCC] website - all these things are new for North Korea," [Bernhard] Seliger [of the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany] said.

North Korea has a history of serious flooding disasters, although these might be better solved through fixing the country's drainage systems and reversing the effects of enormous deforestation.

Of course, enabling North Korea's nuclear program might be good for the environment in other ways: NASA recently used computer simulations to prove that a "limited" nuclear war might temporarily halt global climate change.

We all know that China's energy needs are expanding rapidly, as the country builds the equivalent of two Chicagos from scratch every year and many utilities companies are seeing their business expand 30 percent or more annuallly. 

But it's not only China that's going to be building a lot more new power plants. Speaking Wednesday at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy, one of America's largest power companies, made this prediction: Through a combination of (expected) tightening in carbon controls and normal wear-and-tear, he expects that 100 percent of the power plants operating in the U.S. today will be shut down by 2050.

In other words, America, too, will be building a whole new power infrastructure over the next 40 years. 

That's surprising enough, but Rogers went on to make the case for the U.S. and China cooperating  -- or at least, the private sectors in both countries cooperating -- in power sector solutions. Consider: Both countries are reliant today on coal (the U.S. derives 50 percent of its energy from coal, whereas China derives 80 percent). Together the U.S and China consume 42 percent of total energy consumed in the world, and are responsible for about 40 percent of global carbon emissions. China is building new power infrastructure, and America will have to replace or retrofit the majority of its existing power infrastructure. Since we share some similar challenges, and operate at similar scales, couldn't we learn something from each other in the process? 

For instance, ENN, a large Chinese power company, is piloting a smart (eco) city in Langfang, 30 miles south of Beijing. The project will be built over the next year, and Rogers is watching closely to see what lessons his company might learn from the experiment. In other ways, Duke Energy and ENN are already collaborating directly, especially in research. While it's true that intellectual property concerns will scare off many other potential collaborations, it's also worth pointing out one thing American companies can gain from partnering with Chinese companies: know-how about scaling-up and bringing down costs for deploying new technology. Such lessons, born of trial and error overseas, may be worth bringing home to Wichita. 

Another thing that unites the U.S. and China: No one knows what's next.

This moment is "one of the most uncertain times in the history of our industry, and I've been a CEO for 22 years," Rogers said. He was referring in large part to the looming question of whether the U.S. Congress will regulate carbon in the future (see Ryan Lizza's piece, "As the World Burns" in this week's New Yorker for an enlightening, if depressing, inside look). Happily, in my opinion, he's now assuming the question is not if, but when. Surely, at some point in the next, oh, 50 years -- the anticipated lifespan of a power plant -- Congress will tighten the carbon belt. Or at least that's the calculation he's making.

This week's quiz question:

The world's deepest offshore oil-drilling platform sits in how many feet of water?

a) 5,280 feet (1mile)    b) 6,600 feet (1.25 miles)    c) 8,000 feet (1.5 miles)

Answer after the jump …

Read on

As Congress reconvenes the most recent of the BP executives' unenviable appointments in Washington this afternoon, a word about Tony Hayward's current inquisitor: California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. There's an interesting symmetry between today's hearing and one that Waxman held a quarter century ago, when he was a subcommittee chairman. The news peg, then as now, was an unprecedented environmental catastrophe: the December 3, 1984 chemical leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, which killed over 3,000 people. And then as now, Waxman (whose committee drafted the House climate change bill last year) was engaged in a protracted, long-odds battle for a game-changing piece of environmental legislation: the expanded pollution regulations that would eventually be signed into law as the 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act.

Among the pollutants that Waxman was hoping to regulate were the same categories of air toxics that had caused the Bhopal disaster, and shortly after the incident he and his staff pulled together a field hearing in West Virginia, near another Union Carbide plant that produced the same chemicals as the one in Bhopal, and posed similar risks. It was a canny political set piece, and while the Clean Air Act reauthorization wouldn't make it into law for years, the spectacle whipped up by the Bhopal hearing prompted Congress to pass a precursor law requiring chemical plants to inventory and disclose their toxic emissions. It was a milestone in environmental regulation in the United States: Never before was anyone but the chemical companies understood the sheer quantity of the toxic pollutants, 2.7 billion pounds of which were emitted in 1987 alone.

I bring all of this up because in several ways, Waxman is working from the Bhopal playbook today. In The Waxman Report, the autobiography he published last year, the congressman distills the lessons of Bhopal for the sort of long, grueling legislative crusades that are his stock in trade:

In contrast to what many people imagine, legislative debates rarely occur within fixed parameters, or at least not for very long -- the center is constantly moving. In the years it can take to pass a major piece of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the terms of debate often shift significantly. Sometimes the balance shifts gradually and by design, such as from a sustained lobbying effort. At other times, the shift happens suddenly and without warning, the consequence of a new president, a shake-up in Congress, or a major news event that recasts public opinion.

The BP spill has certainly recast public opinion on oil drilling, but its implications for broader environmental policy, particularly a future energy and climate change bill, are far from clear. At the New Republic, Bradford Plumer offers a particularly gloomy reading on the response to the spill among American politicians and the public; plenty of other pundits have noted that in his widely panned Oval Office speech earlier this week, President Obama was conspicuously reluctant to tie the disaster to specific policy goals.

But keep an eye on what comes out of today's hearing. Waxman and his House colleagues are less central to the future of a climate bill than their opposites in the Senate, or the president. Still, the guy knows how to make use of a disaster.

Plugging BP's catastrophic oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as you may have heard, is difficult. But how difficult, exactly? Nearly a month ago, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay compared it to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines."

In the weeks since, the executives, engineers, government officials, and sundry experts who have descended on the Gulf may or may not be much closer to fixing this thing, but they have gotten pretty good at describing just how difficult fixing it is. Here's BP Managing Director Bob Dudley:

"Like arm-wrestling between two equally strong people."

Energy analyst Byron King, riffing on McKay's original:

"It's like doing brain surgery using robots under a mile of water with equipment that's got 30,000 horsepower of energy inside of it."

Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University:

"It's kind of like pushing toothpaste through an obstacle course."

James J. O'Brien, professor emeritus of Meteorology and Oceanography at Florida State University:

"It's like trying to unclog a toilet while you're standing on a ten-foot ladder with a long stick attached to the plunger."

Thomas Bickel, deputy chief engineer at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories:

"It's like trying to do an operation on the moon."

Andy Bowen, an oceanographer at Woods Hole, on the area of the seafloor where the leak occurred:

"It's sort of like being in the Grand Canyon with the lights out and in a snowstorm."

Dudley again, on the gas that's escaping with the oil:

"It's like a soda can, shaking it up and popping it off ... it's difficult to measure."

Does BP have someone on staff coming up with these all day? Does the company have Thomas Friedman on retainer?

Help us out here -- there must be more of these lurking among the talking points.

Jamal Saghir, the director of the energy, transport, and water programs at the World Bank responds to a Foreign Policy article by Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

Mr. Radford's recent column "Banking on Coal" provides a highly misleading and inaccurate picture of the World Bank Group's efforts to help countries fight poverty and develop energy sustainably.

He asserts that the World Bank Group is funding coal projects to the detriment of renewable energy (RE). Wrong. Our RE and energy efficiency (EE) financing levels are at historic highs -- over 40 percent of total fiscal year 2009 energy financing.

He says the Bank has been increasingly subsidizing coal projects. Wrong. Our fossil fuel share of financing has been declining for years, and two thirds of our fossil fuel financing is for natural gas, the cleanest fuel for base-load supply. Mr. Radford cites 2008 as a big year for coal financing, but neglects to mention that in fiscal year 2009 our coal financing then dropped 62 percent. Mr. Radford says that Bank fossil fuel financing is twice what we finance in RE/EE projects. Wrong again. In fiscal year 2009 we financed more RE/EE projects (over 40 percent) than fossil fuels (about 32 percent).

Over the last six years, coal represented 7.5 percent of all World Bank Group financing for energy. In some years it was as low as one or two percent. And fully a third of the spending on coal is to clean up inefficient, polluting old plants, something that surely Greenpeace would not want us to stop.

Mr. Radford criticizes the Bank's recently released draft energy strategy. We haven't issued a draft strategy. What we are doing is consulting in an open way with key stakeholders, including civil society organizations, whose input will help us to write a draft strategy next year.

Mr. Radford's criticisms lack context. He says that the Bank-financed projects are a significant source of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Wrong. Our projects are a minuscule fraction of the global footprint. The new proposed South African project he criticized will use the cleanest super-critical technology and has $750 million in financing for renewable energy and low carbon energy efficiency components that otherwise would not be part of the project.

We're proud to be a leader in advancing environmental financing innovation, such as the Climate Investment Funds ($6.3 billion pledged with $3.2 billion in investment plans already endorsed to support more than $30.5 billion in clean technology projects), the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, climate risk management products, and "Green Bonds."

The bottom line is that for our 186 member countries, our primary focus is fighting poverty. There are 1.6 billion people living today without access to electricity. Under very limited, case-by-case situations with strict criteria, and when alternative lower-carbon technologies are not immediately available, we will support least cost, carbon-based energy solutions. And we will do this as an interim measure while we continue to help a country prepare for a cleaner energy development path in the medium term.

The Indian plant he references will have lower emissions than the average for OECD countries (2005). Turning away from South African or Indian aspirations for affordable energy means turning away from energy for schools and hospitals and homes in those countries. It's particularly ironic for Mr. Radford in the United States to criticize our very modest portfolio when half of U.S. electricity comes from coal. While the World Bank Group is working to support low carbon paths, Mr. Radford advocates a double standard that will help ensure poor countries will not cooperate in addressing global climate change.

The World Bank Group is committed to fighting poverty and supporting economic growth and opportunity in a sustainable manner. Our increased lending for renewable energy and energy efficiency and our innovative financing demonstrates that we are serious about it.

See the World Bank's climate site here. 

John Moore/Getty Images

The headline on this story reads: "Obama will go to Copenhagen to clinch deal."

That's a touch misleading.

What the headline on this story should really read is: "Obama will go to Copenhagen if and only if his appearance is necessary in order to clinch a deal."

On one hand, this is good news. Even if the United States can't be a strong party in climate change negotiations, it is of vital importance that Obama act as a strong diplomat and negotiator on this issue. The whole world is at stake.

On the other hand, isn't this a bit rich? The U.S. slow-walk on this issue is part of the reason the Copenhagen negotiations have been so fraught. If a comprehensive agreement falters in December, the United States will be in no small part to blame. But its leader might parachute in at the last moment to save the day? Sigh.

LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images

Move over ethanol, there is a new bio-fuel in the world... bunnies.

Thousands of stray rabbits in Sweden are being shot, frozen and then burned for heat. Stockholm even hires rabbit hunters for the task, like Tommy Tuvuynger, a modern day Elmer Fudd.

"We are shooting rabbits in Stockholm center, they are a very big problem," he said. "Once culled, the rabbits are frozen and when we have enough; a contractor comes and takes them away."

Tuvunger is leading the fight to continue sniping bunnies for warmth. Several animal rights groups in Sweden have come out in opposition to the practice, saying that if the rabbits are a problem there are non-lethal ways to deal with them. But Tuvunger is having none of that, "If you do that you only move the problem 100 meters away."

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

Josh Kucera has been blogging this week from newly self-governing Greenland and shares a mind-blowing statistic:

Greenland’s government, using US Geological Survey data among others, says that the mean estimates for its oil reserves is about 50 billion barrels. That number is a bit abstract, so I did some math: The island has about 56,000 people, and if things go as they appear to be going, it will be an independent country some time in the next couple of decades. That means each Greenlander will own about 900,000 barrels of oil.

Compare that to some other oil powers. These are the top three countries in terms of oil reserves per capita:

Kuwait: 39,900 barrels per person
UAE: 37,576 barrels per person
Qatar: 18,071 barrels per person

Yes, Greenland could have 50 times more oil per capita than Kuwait.

There's more.

RFE TransMission shares this truly mind-blowing corporate anthem from Russian gas monopoly Gazprom (with English subtitles):

Sometimes it seems like we just can't win. We finally find a power source that doesn't release fossil fuels, can't be made into a weapon of mass destruction, doesn't pose a risk of flooding and doesn't contain poison gas, and guess what? It tortures goats to death!

Late-night noise from spinning wind turbines on an outlying island of Taiwan may have killed 400 goats over the past three years by depriving them of sleep, an agricultural inspection official said on Thursday.

After the eight turbines were installed in the notoriously windy Penghu archipelago in the Taiwan Strait, a neighbouring farmer reported that his goats had started dying, Council of Agriculture inspection official Lu Ming-tseng said.

Potential Twitter version: Bushies, asleep at switch, drunk on oil, missed boat."  

Meanwhile, guess who's taken up the emerald green mantle?

It might be startling to realize that China is far outpacing the U.S. on green-energy investment."

He is picking up on a recent report by the Washington-based think tank, Center for American Progress: "We Must Seize the Energy Opportunity or Slip Further Behind."

Osnos is, I think, one of the finest correspondents writing from China today. But here I beg to differ. Or at least urge a bit of a reframing.

Yes, China is and has been doing far more on the environmental front than most foreigners realize. Lord knows, this is a point worth emphasizing, and I've certainly beat the drum here myself.

But let's put this in perspective: First, as a general point, China has had ambitious green goals for several years, especially on energy efficiency, but implementation still lags behind reality. Before we cheer, or worry, too much about Beijing's presumed green-technology progress, let's see what actually gets built. Large earmarks for infrastructure, green or otherwise, are particularly susceptible to local corruption. (The shiniest government office buildings in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, were built out of something called the"poverty reduction fund.") Alas, lately we've seen a relaxing of green construction standards in China for the sake of putting economic stimulus money to work quickly. In sum: Setting budgets and targets is easy; follow-through is harder.

Second, on the particular matter of green-energy investment, pretty please stop putting so much faith in the framing of the Center for American Progress. I like CAP. They do good work. But they also have a long-standing habit of beating up on U.S. policy by pointing out that even China is doing more. I'm not against beating up on the U.S., or against giving kudos to China when due. But I am wary of how this formula can lead to exaggerated estimations of what China is in fact doing. (A few years back, CAP put out similar statements when Beijing announced lofty, and as yet unmet, energy efficiency targets.)

Lastly, and most importantly, I think that highlighting the competition angle could ultimately be counter-productive, as fun as it is to envision a U.S. vs China jolly green smackdown. Stressing a rivalry could ultimately lead -- not necessarily in Osnos’s hands, but in looser, more politically-minded interpretations -- to the impression that the race for green energy is somehow a zero-sum game. That any progress made by China (again, let’s be careful to avoid exaggeration here) is somehow threatening to the U.S. Like if the Soviets got to the moon first; oh no. It’s us or them; only one racer breaks the ribbon; get off our green lunar pathway!

Some might argue that Americans do best when their competitive instincts are aroused. But I tend to agree with Charles McElwee, an environmental lawyer in Shanghai whom Osnos cites and whose insights I've long found valuable: Fanning the flames of us-vrs-them-ism -- in the context of global issue that isn't so much a race to win as to survive -- could backfire. It could undercut political support on Capitol Hill for cooperative efforts, technology sharing, and perhaps even climate-treaty negotiations.

For too long, on climate matters, the U.S. and China have been stuck in a dusty stalemate, with both sides refusing to budge first -- especially with regards to seriously considering carbon caps -- while they eye each other as threats, and competitors. Somehow this Gunsmoke scenario needs to end.

Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images

Considering that their states are still technically at war, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso got along remarkably well during their summit meeting in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Wednesday. While palling around on Sakhalin Island at the opening of a new $22 billion LNG plant (the first such plant in Russia), Aso and Medvedev praised the economic cooperation that has helped Russia and Japan strengthen their relationship over the past ten years.

Annual trade has now reached $30 billion, tripling in size since 2004. The first phase of the massively expensive ESPO pipeline, connecting oil reserves in Siberia with Russia's Pacific coast, has been completed and the construction of phase two has been announced. This is rare good news for two economies that have been hit particularly hard by the global financial crisis.

But it's still not all smiles between the two countries. The violent reaction of Vladivostok's workers to the imposition of a tariff on Japanese vehicles in late December displays the importance of Japanese commerce to Russia's remote Far East provinces. More seriously,a Japanese ship carrying ¥12.8 million worth of medical aid at the request of Russian residents on the disputed Kuril Islands was turned away in January because the Japanese delegation refused to show disembarkation cards, a move that the Japanese consider tantamount to recognizing Russian sovereignty over the Kurils. T

The Japanese claim that the Kuril islands -currently under Russian control - are historically Japanese and were seized illegally by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The dispute over the islands has prevented Russia and Japan from signing a peace treaty and officially ending the war.

Until the Kuril issue is resolved, Japan and Russia will continue to be in the contradictory position of building ever closer ties while still officially fighting World War II.

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

This is Larry the monkey. He lives at the Sofia Zoo in Bulgaria, and he's cold. He's also part of this week's FP photo essay: "Russia Leaves Eastern Europe Out in the Cold."

When Russia ceased natural gas flows into Europe through Ukraine on Jan. 7, many people -- and animals -- in southeastern Europe got left in the cold. At the Sofia Zoo, about 1,300 animals were left without central heating, and electric heaters, such as the one Larry is with here on Jan. 12, were brought in. The zoo’s four Siberian tigers, however, appear to be enjoying the colder temperatures.