Global Warming

Like many in Washington, I spent Saturday night at home watching C-SPAN as the House debated and ultimately passed a major healthcare reform bill. It was about as exciting as the legislative process gets: a special weekend session, with heated debate over a controversial amendment, impassioned statements from virtually every House heavyweight, and a vote that came down to a thin margin, with a single crossover.

This banner moment marks the closest that the United States has ever come to overhauling its woefully expensive, inefficient, and incomplete healthcare system -- and it felt like a victory. But it marks just one step in what promises to be a long and detailed legislative process. Now, the Senate votes on its healthcare bill, then the two bills are merged, and then both chambers vote again. The remaining process will be highly prone to filibusters from Republicans (and, sigh, Joe Lieberman), and will require extensive negotiation. And this comes after months of wrangling in the Senate and House committees.

While healthcare reform takes its time to pass, two other big bills wait on the sidelines, and governments across the globe wait with them. Indeed, the Senate is, in effect, filibustering the world. 

The first back-burnered issue is immigration reform. During his campaign, Obama promised that he would enact comprehensive legislation during his first year in office. It was a heady pledge -- President George W. Bush tried to pass reform during his final term in office, and failed. But it won Obama the support of organizations like the National Council of La Raza and plaudits from governments in Central America, Mexico, and Canada. Then, earlier this year, Obama ingloriously shelved it, laying down a big-bill priority rank with immigration reform taking the bronze. Congress hasn't even started to tackle the issue -- no bills, cosigners, or committee votes yet -- spurring disappointment across the United States' borders and further afield.

The second and vastly more important issue is cap and trade. The House bill passed in June, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing it onto the floor as soon as she had the votes. But leaders in the White House and Congress decided to cool it to preserve votes for healthcare, and Congress won't make law until sometime early next year.

This delay means that the United States will be something of a weak actor at next month's U.N. Copenhagen conference on climate change. Global leaders will hash out the details of a worldwide plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to attempt to stave off anthropogenic climate disaster. Obama will not be one of them because of, well, Congress.

The United States has said any climate change agreements it makes must comport with U.S. law, and U.S. law isn't ready yet. So, Obama has said he will not attend. In the meantime, the United States has actually attempted to weaken many of the most important measures. Washington, under Obama as under Bush, remains the most recalcitrant major player on climate change, even more so than big-emitter Beijing.

European governments, as well as many others, are bewildered if not piqued. During her address to both chambers of Congress last week, for instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implored lawmakers to tackle climate change "without delay." It was a futile plea, and half of the lawmakers didn't bother to clap.

This isn't to say that Washington should have different legislative priorities, or should have put climate change or immigration reform before healthcare. It isn't to say that Obama should have stepped out on those issues before Congress enacted law. It isn't even to say that Congress should move faster, though I often wish it would.

It is simply to note that the United States is used to waiting for its legislative process to work. The rest of the world isn't. On climate change, especially, the Senate is not just holding up U.S. legislation, but global action. And it remains unclear what that means for foreign policy.

Getty Images

Dan Drezner howls at the Maldives government's brilliant stunt of holding an underwater cabinet meeting (more photos here and here) to make the case that "if we can't save the Maldives today, you can't save the rest of the world tomorrow," and wonders if "a rational, cost-benefit analysis of how to allocate climate change resources between mitigation and adaptation" would really redound to the benefit of such small-island countries.

I doubt it -- and the world has already pretty much already decided to let these nations drown. Back in 2007, when I attended the U.N.'s high-level meeting on climate change, one of the issues on the table was what level of global warming we could all tolerate. Was it 1 degree celsius, which was already upon us? One-point-five? Two?

The island countries, which have their own caucus in the General Assembly, were calling for 1.5 degrees (and still are). I remember being shocked, however, at their level of disorganization. Given that climate change is such an existential threat to them, why did they only announce their press conference on the matter 15 minutes beforehand, and why did they only send their U.N. ambassadors, rather than the heads of state? I think I was one of three members of the press in attendance.

The Maldives' new president, Mohammed Nasheed, seems a little more media-savvy than his predecessor, the dictator Mamoon Abdul Gayoom. He has to be: The highest point in the Maldives is just under 8 feet, and the country's average elevation is somewhere between 4 and 7 feet. But that's the average -- most of the country is still lower than that, and the U.N.'s climate panel estimated in 2007 that sea levels would rise anywhere from 7.2 to 23.2 inches, which would make the Maldives extremely vulnerable to storm surges or major sea swells (it should be noted that the U.N. report emphasized that its sea-level projections were "not an upper bound"). If current trends hold, by the end of this century, the bulk of the country's 300,000 inhabitants will have to find other places to live.

But in calling for the 1.5 degree target, Nasheed seems to be fighting a battle he's already lost. In the end, a rough scientific and political consensus has settled around 2 degrees -- and even with that, very little has been done to make the emissions cuts needed, and there are certainly no binding commitments to do so. Would 2 degrees of warming doom the Maldives? I don't know. But it sure looks to me like the world's power brokers are willing to roll the dice on this one.

Climate change conference The Manchester Report has revealed a surprising suggestion not only to curb, but also to reverse carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere: Add lime to seawater.

Oceans play a crucial role in slowing down the process of global warming, currently by absorbing about half of the CO2 released into the air by human activity every year. Doing so, however, dramatically increases marine acidity and threatens ecosystems.

Advocates of the Cquestrate project insist that the added lime produced from heating limestone will not only boost the amount of CO2 absorbed, but will also reduce the water's acidity. If the technique were employed on a large enough scale, proponents argue that it would be possible to return global carbon dioxide levels to their pre-Industrial Revolution amounts. The project's founder Tim Kruger said:

It is essential that we reduce our emissions, but that may not be enough. We need a plan B to actually reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I see that the Obama administration is indicating some flexibility on its climate change plans. Specifically, it might be willing to delay forcing businesses affected by a future cap and trade system to pay for carbon permits. Instead, an auction system would be phased in over time.

I used to think to accept anything less than a 100 percent auction of carbon permits was scandalous. As FP noted in September:

Cap-and-trade systems work by putting a ceiling on carbon emissions, and then allocating permits that give companies the right to pollute a given amount. From an environmental standpoint, it doesn’t much matter how you initially distribute the permits, as long as the cap is stringent enough. But most economists think that, unless you first auction these off in a transparent process, you’re basically enabling a massive corporate giveaway, raising the likelihood that well-connected corporations or industries will get sweetheart deals, and failing to capture revenue that can pay for other priorities.

I was disabused of this notion today by Stuart Eizenstat, a former diplomat who negotiated the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the Climate administration. Eizenstat and I served on a panel this morning at the Carbon TradeEx America conference, a really interesting meeting devoted to exploring the future direction of climate change and its impact on policy, business, and, of course, the environment.

Eizenstat, who testifies frequently on Capitol Hill, was adamant that 100 percent auction was a nonstarter in Congress. There was no way, he said, that corporations would sign on to a climate change regime if they weren't given enough time to adjust to the costs they would incur.

That said, I wonder why the White House would want to signal flexibility this early in the game. Would it be tactically smarter to play your cards closer to your chest in the hopes of getting a better deal from industry in the end? Or is it wiser to try and get business on board from the beginning, so that the opposition doesn't have time to coalesce and build? Readers, what do you think?

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Who'd have guessed it? U.S. President George W. Bush might be going down as the greatest protector of the seas ever. Later today, he is to announce the establishment of the "largest area of protected sea in the world." Commercial fishing and mining will be largely prohibited in protected zones of the remote Pacific that include some of the most biologically diverse locations on Earth.

Critics say that any benefit from the establishment of protected areas will be cancelled out by the effects of greenhouse gases and climate change. Nevertheless, Joshua Reichert of the Pew Environment Group told the BBC that Bush has "protected more special places in the sea than any other person in history."

It just might be another achievement to add to Bush's legacy.

Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Sesame Street, the U.S. television show, used to have a segment called "one of these things is not like the others."

Can you spot the anomoly in this list?

• James Schlesinger
• Charles Duncan
• James Edwards
• Donald Hodel
• John Herringon
• James Watkins
• Hazel O'Leary
• Federico Pena
• Bill Richardson
• Spencer Abraham
• Samuel Bodman
• Steven Chu

You guessed it: Steven Chu is the only name on this list that is followed by the letters P, h, and D. He's also the only one with a Nobel Prize, and the only one who has run a major laboratory. Frankly, he is a badass -- and he will be looking to get things done on climate change.

The current U.S. energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, is the only other scientist on the list, but he has an Sc.D degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Basically, it's the same thing as a Ph.D, but Bodman has long since stopped practicing chemical engineering.

Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The lede of the day was written by Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times, who grabbed my attention with this first sentence:

A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

Interstingly, the report (pdf), put together by the United Nations Environment Program, says that the "atmospheric brown clouds" (ABCs) could be mitigating the impact of climate change on a global basis by as much as 80 percent, though they are in some places amplifying the impacts of greenhouse gases and on the whole are a Very Bad Thing.

Below is a graphic showing different "plumes" where the brown clouds peaked at different times of the year from 2001 to 2003:

The report names 13 "mega-city ABC hotspots": Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi (sorry, guys), Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tehran.

Having lived in Cairo for about a year and a half, I can testify that the air there is simply awful. I used to start coughing as my plane was landing at the airport outside of town, if only out of habit.

(Hat tip: Matt Yglesias)

Cue the "hot air" jokes.

The United Nations plans to go casual for the month of August in a bid to cut back on electricity use. The idea, inspired by a similar initiative in Japan called "Cool Biz," is that you can turn down the air conditioning when everybody isn't wearing wool and stuffy ties:

The campaign calls for raising the thermostats in most parts of the U.N. Secretariat building from 22.2 C to 25 C [77] and from 21.1 C to 23.9 C [75 F] in the world body's conference rooms.

The initiative would save some 2 million tons of steam during the month of August, or the equivalent of 300 tons of carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, [a U.N. spokesman] said.

I love this quip from David Malone, a former Canadian ambassador:

If the rise in the temperature could cut back on the interminable negotiations running late into the evening for often disappointing results, then the outcome of the initiative would be a very good one."

If it works, the U.N. plans to ask its employees to bundle up in the winter. Now if they can just take care of that smoking problem...