The U.S.-China Carbon Accord: a Nod to the Competitiveness of the Green Economy, but Primarily Poltical

As we enter a second day where the U.S.-China climate accord fills the newspaper gobbling up precious column inches you have to hand it to Obama: he has flipped the conversation off the abominable performance of his party in last week's midterms and reestablished his relevance. And that is the way to look at the carbon-reduction agreement with China: foremost it is a strategic move on the political battlefield of the homeland; it elicits hostile reactions from the Republican leadership in Congress that paints them as knuckle-draggers sucking on billionaire Koch brothers tits at the same time it galvanizes important segments of the Obama-Coalition voters Democrats will need in 2016.

A set narrative regarding the Obama-Xi Jinping climate deal is already taking shape. First, the numbers. The United States has already pledged to reduce carbon emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama plans to achieve this through limits on tailpipe and power-plant smokestack emissions implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The deal announced the other day in Beijing commits the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions further to between 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

China has agreed to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 as well as shift 20% of its energy supply to clean, renewable sources.

The positive of the bilateral accord is presented in unsigned Gray Lady editorial, "A Major Breakthrough on Climate Change":

The climate accord represents a startling turnaround after years of futile efforts to cooperate in a meaningful way on global warming. It sends two critically important messages, one to the world and the other to the United States Congress. China and the United States together account for about 45 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their new commitments are thus almost certain to energize other countries to set more ambitious targets of their own before negotiators meet to frame a new global agreement at the climate summit meeting in Paris in December 2015. 

In the United States, the agreement cuts the ground from under people like Mitch McConnell, the next Senate majority leader, and others who have long argued that there is no point in taking aggressive steps against greenhouse gases as long as major developing countries refused to do likewise. This argument effectively undermined Senate support for ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The climate deniers in Congress will find other reasons to oppose a strong climate strategy, and are doing so even now. But the “China” argument has effectively disappeared.

Throughout the stories written about the climate deal with China these two points are consistently made: 1) it provides a strong impetus for something of substance coming out of the global negotiations in Paris next December, and 2) it rights a wrong, salves a wound that goes back to the Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. Senate failed to ratify because of any limits placed on China.

But I think the real positive of the agreement is one that Bill McKibben mentions in his assessment of the deal, "The Big Climate Deal: What It Is, and What It Isn’t," which appeared yesterday, namely, the Green Economy is already here:

These numbers are easy — if you were really being cynical, you could say they’re trying to put a floor under the retreat from carbon, to manage a retreat from fossil fuels instead of really putting carbon on the run. The Germans, for instance, will be moving in on 60 percent of their energy from clean sources by the mid-2020s, when we’ll still be cutting carbon emissions by small increments.

Germany, one of the planet's key industrial economies, and one of its most competitive, proves that the cutting edge is green energy. This is all about economic advantage among the big players. Germany has shot far out ahead, and what China and the U.S. are doing with the bilateral agreement is, as McKibben says, putting "a floor under the retreat from carbon."

The big negative is that the deal isn't big enough. As Henry Fountain and Jonathan Schwartz point out in  "Climate Accord Relies on Environmental Policies Now in Place":

Experts said that the emissions reductions in the agreement would not be enough to enable the world to keep global warming below the target of a 2-degree Celsius, or 3.6-degree Fahrenheit, rise in global temperatures that was adopted at a climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.

Two-degree temperature rise is an important marker because once you hit it there's no going back; we're cooked, so to speak.

Fountain and Scwartz also point out a lack of commitment of other big players internationally:

Beyond the reductions, they said the deal was important for what it showed the rest of the world, particularly other large carbon emitters like India and Russia, in advance of a meeting in Paris next year to negotiate a new climate treaty. 

“It shows that the two big dogs in the room are taking the issue seriously,” said Kevin Kennedy of the World Resources Institute, a think tank. “It provides a real opportunity for the start of what could become a race to the top.” 

But it remains unclear whether that will happen. In India, the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has signaled that it will not announce a reduction target for emissions cuts. India has long maintained that it should not be required to commit to such goals.

The must-read story is Coral Davenport's "In Climate Deal With China, Obama May Set 2016 Theme"; she offers a compelling account that the Obama administration is guided primarily by politics here. First off, Obama's climate-plan architect is none other than John Podesta, Clinton eminence grise who soon plans to leave his White House post to manage Hillary's presidential campaign:

The architect of Mr. Obama’s climate change plan is none other than his senior counselor, John D. Podesta, who is likely to leave the White House next year to work as the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. 

The climate plan that Mr. Podesta has drafted for Mr. Obama is expected to serve as a blueprint for Mrs. Clinton’s climate change policy, should she run.

Climate change is a wedge issue for suburban swing voters, as potent as welfare queens were for Reagan Democrats. As Davenport says,

President Obama’s landmark agreement with China to cut greenhouse gas pollution is a bet by the president and Democrats that on the issue of climate change, American voters are far ahead of Washington’s warring factions and that the environment will be a winning cause in the 2016 presidential campaign. 

A variety of polls show that a majority of American voters now believe that climate change is occurring, are worried about it, and support candidates who back policies to stop it. In particular, polls show that majorities of Hispanics, young people and unmarried women — the voters who were central to Mr. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 — support candidates who back climate change policy. 

But Republicans are betting that despite the polls, they can make the case that regulations to cut greenhouse pollution will result in the loss of jobs and hurt the economy.

***

As evidence, Republican strategists point to their recent wave of victories in this year’s midterm elections, when they campaigned aggressively against Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations. 

But Democrats are increasingly emboldened by polls showing that in national elections, candidates who push climate change policies will win support from voters. 

According to a 2013 poll by Stanford University, 73 percent of Americans believe that the earth has been warming over the past 100 years, while 81 percent of Americans think global warming poses a serious problem in the United States. In addition, 81 percent think the federal government should limit the amount of greenhouse gases that American businesses can emit.

Twenty-one percent of Americans think producing electricity from coal is a good idea, while 91 percent of Americans think making electricity from sunlight is a good idea.

A 2014 poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that majorities of women, minorities and young people support candidates who strongly endorse climate action. That poll found that 65 percent of Hispanics, 53 percent of blacks and 53 percent of unmarried women support candidates who back climate change action.

Thomas Edsall in his midterm postmortem, "The Demise of the White Democratic Voter," argued convincingly that GOP success was due to the national party's ability to muzzle the Tea Party knuckle-draggers, the troubadours of "legitimate rape" and the global-warming deniers who provide the incendiary soundbites that not only drive Democrats to the polls but also prompt fickle suburbanites to let their inner liberal run free. As Edsall frames it:

Republicans are not satisfied with winning 62 percent of the white vote. To counter the demographic growth of Democratic constituencies whose votes threaten Republican success in high-turnout presidential elections, Republicans have begun a concerted effort to rupture the partisan loyalty of the remaining white Democratic voters. Their main target is socially liberal, fiscally conservative suburbanites, the weakest reeds in the Democratic coalition. These middle-income white voters do not share the acute economic needs of so-called downscale Democratic voters and they are less reliant on government services.

The Republican strategy to win over these more culturally tolerant, but still financially pressed, white voters is to continue to focus on material concerns – on anxiety about rising tax burdens, for example — while downplaying the preoccupation of many of the most visible Republicans with social, moral and cultural repression.

These are the very voters who believe in climate science and can see that converting to a Green Economy is a job creator that makes the U.S. more economically competitive. The Koch brothers who didn't appear to be such an enormous albatross in the midterms -- because Democrats often ran away from criticism of the oil and gas industry -- will not fair so well in 2016.

The next card for a suddenly more potent POTUS to play will be on immigration. Once that is done, the GOP will be effectively boxed for the next two years. The electoral science is largely settled: a presidential candidate can't win with Latino support in the high-twenty-percent range (Romney) or low-thirties (McCain).

If Obama plays his cards right, as he did in Beijing, the old warhorse Hillary might be bound for the White House after all.

Clues Why Not to Expect Much from Big Green Groups

What is troubling about the announcement this morning of a carbon-reduction agreement reached between the United States and China (Mark Landler, "U.S. and China Reach Climate Accord After Months of Talks") is the lack of reaction to be found on any of the web sites of the main environmental organizations.

The deal as summarized in an opinion piece by Secretary of State John Kerry that appears this morning in the Gray Lady, "China, America and Our Warming Planet: Our Historic Agreement With China on Climate Change," is as follows:

The targets themselves are also important. Ambitious action by our countries together is the foundation to build the low-carbon global economy needed to combat climate change. The United States intends to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 – a target that is both ambitious and feasible. It roughly doubles the pace of carbon reductions in the period from 2020 to 2025 as compared to the period from 2005 to 2020. It puts us on a path to transform our economy, with emissions reductions on the order of 80 percent by 2050. It is grounded in an extensive analysis of the potential to reduce emissions in all sectors of our economy, with significant added benefits for health, clean air, and energy security. 

Our target builds on the ambitious goal President Obama set in 2009 to cut emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. We are on track to meet that goal, while creating jobs and growing the economy, with the help of a burgeoning clean energy sector. Since the president took office, wind energy production has tripled and solar energy has increased by a factor of ten. This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first carbon pollution standards for existing power plants, which account for a third of United States carbon pollution.

The Chinese targets also represent a major advance. For the first time China is announcing a peak year for its carbon emissions – around 2030 – along with a commitment to try to reach the peak earlier. That matters because over the past 15 years, China has accounted for roughly 60 percent of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions world-wide. We are confident that China can and will reach peak emissions before 2030, in light of President Xi’s commitments to restructure the economy, dramatically reduce air pollution and stimulate an energy revolution. 

China is also announcing today that it would expand the share of total energy consumption coming from zero-emission sources (renewable and nuclear energy) to around 20 percent by 2030, sending a powerful signal to investors and energy markets around the world and helping accelerate the global transition to clean-energy economies. To meet its goal, China will need to deploy an additional 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other renewable generation capacity by 2030 – an enormous amount, about the same as all the coal-fired power plants in China today, and nearly as much as the total electricity generation capacity of the United States.

This agreement was fully expected. Prior to Obama's appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Landler clued in his readers that a climate deal between the two largest economies was rumored to be forthcoming, a way to sculpt next year's global negotiations in Paris.

That's why it is bizarre that there is (so far) basically nothing available about the bilateral accord on 350.org (a Tweet that linked to a story, "US and China strike deal on carbon cuts in push for global climate pact," by The Guardian); National Resources Defense Council (a pro forma press release, that is difficult to find on their home page, which was used in The Guardian story -- "Frances Beinecke, president of US-based environmental group the Natural Resources Defence Council, said: 'These landmark commitments to curtail carbon pollution are a necessary, critical step forward in the global fight against climate change. We look forward to working with both governments to strengthen their efforts because we are confident that both can achieve even greater reductions' "); Friends of the Earth (zero); Sierra Club (nothing this morning, though they do have a press release about TPP impasse at the APEC summit in Beijing); and Greenpeace (nothing).

More evidence of sclerosis in institutions (along with organized labor and the Democratic Party) purportedly popular and progressive. Not an encouraging sign going forward that any sustained effort is going to be mounted by mainstream environmental groups against the Koch brothers dominantion of national government.

Ben Adler writing for Grist, "New U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer," is supportive:

Reaching the new emission-reduction targets is certainly technologically possible, and allowable under existing law — as long as Congress doesn’t figure out a way to stop to it. Emissions have already declined, we’ve got new rules on tailpipes, and with the proposed power plant rules, we are almost there already. “I think it’s achievable,” says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “They might have to make some tweaks [to the power-plant targets], but I don’t see it as being a radical rewrite of the goal.”

It will be necessary to finalize power-plant rules — the centerpiece of Obama’s Climate Action Plan — that are as strong, if not stronger, than what is already proposed. Other components of the plan, like possible rules to limit methane leakage from fracking, don’t have the potential to achieve such big reductions. Still, moving forward with them will also be necessary. 

But any tightening of EPA regulations or introduction of new ones would risk inciting even stronger political backlash or being overturned in court. Even Democrats in fossil fuel–producing red states ran away from the rules in this last election. (They still got clobbered.) Republicans are already mulling ways to impede the power-plant rules by defunding the regulatory process. The stronger the rules get, the more childish they’ll act. And they will have the same reaction to anything else Obama tries to do through executive action.

Coral Davenport had a story yesterday, "Republicans Vow to Fight E.P.A. and Approve Keystone Pipeline," confirming Adler's point. The G.O.P. marinated, as Nader says (and also the focus of a good column by Gail Collins last Saturday, "Republicans ♥ Pipeline"), in oil and gas money will dig in and attempt to hollow out the EPA and flirt with another government shutdown to get Keystone XL passed, thereby pleasing their Koch paymasters. According to Davenport,

Republicans also planned to use their majority to enact legislation requiring the president to approve the Keystone pipeline. Republicans and the oil industry have issued angry calls for construction of the pipeline, which they see as a crucial conduit for oil. 

Environmentalists have campaigned against the project, which they see as a symbol of environmental degradation. Mr. Obama has delayed a decision on the project for years, as the State Department conducted numerous reviews of its impact on the nation’s environment, economy and national security. 

The State Department is now awaiting a decision by a Nebraska court on the route of the pipeline before any decision is made. 

If Republicans send a Keystone bill to Mr. Obama before the Nebraska verdict, the president is likely to veto it. But people familiar with the president’s thinking say that when it comes to climate change policy, Mr. Obama sees the E.P.A. regulations as the centerpiece of his environmental agenda and the Keystone pipeline as a sideline issue. 

Asked about the project at a news conference last week, Mr. Obama said, “I’m going to let that process play out.” Then he added, “And I’m just going to gather up the facts.” 

Republicans were likely to add a Keystone-approval provision to key spending bills, again daring Mr. Obama to veto such a measure. Mr. Obama appeared willing to veto such measures to protect the climate change rules, which could have an impact on the nation’s energy economy for the coming decades. But he may not be willing to do so for the pipeline, a single piece of infrastructure. 

“I think there is probably a deal to be had on Keystone,” said David Goldwyn, who led the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources in Mr. Obama’s first term. “If Republicans attach Keystone to a budget bill, I don’t think he’s so principally opposed to it that he would veto it.”

Previously I entertained the possibility of Obama's acquiescence to Keystone XL causing Bill McKibben to spearhead the creation of a new political party, or a political coalition with the Green Party and some of the existing socialist parties. Now, judging from the lack of reaction to the Obama-Xi Jinping carbon-reduction deal, I'm convinced nothing of the sort will happen.

As for the viability of the bilateral accord, a commentator, cosmicomics, to Adler's piece says it well:

“The real proof will be in the pudding. There’s no way approving the Keystone XL pipeline and additional fossil fuel development is compatible with this pathway.”

The problem isn't just American emissions, but America's contribution to global emissions, so reducing American emissions doesn't help if U.S. policy continues to encourage the development of fossil fuels, which then can be used elsewhere. Obama appears to have a climate policy that aims to reduce emissions, while at the same time promoting an energy policy that increases them. 

“...the reality is that Obama has spent the last six years expanding coal, oil and gas production under his “all of the above” energy strategy. 

'We quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the earth and then some,' Obama told a rally during his 2012 re-election campaign. 

Coal exports have risen on Obama’s watch, with mining companies shipping some 100m tonnes a year for each of the last three years...