The Best News from 2009

San Francisco -- The last year of the decade may best be remembered for one piece of particularly good news: carbon dioxide emissions from the United States have peaked, are coming down, and (if we keep working) will continue to decline. Although this was partly a consequence of the economic crisis (not a good way to solve the problem), the main reason it happened is because, even though Congress has dithered about passing energy and climate legislation, the rest of America has been acting. 

So, if the first step to get out of a hole is to stop digging, the U.S. has made a start. We're almost ten percent below our peak emissions of CO2. And beyond the short-term numbers -- which do in part reflect the economy -- there's been a stunning change in our long-term emissions trajectory. We've cut our expected level of emissions for 2020 by more than 20 percent -- mostly from permanent reforms of our energy sector. 

Here are the key statistics:

U.S. CO2 emissions peaked in 2005 at 5,971 million tons and remained at about that level through 2007. In 2008, though, they declined to 5,800 million tons. In 2009 they fell even further, to 5,450 tons. We're already 8.5 percent below our 2005 peak. The Energy Information Administration expects a slight increase in 2010 as the economy recovers, but only to 5,532 million tons. 

Back in 2005, we were headed for 2020 emissions of 7,500 million tons. In the latest Energy Department estimate, emissions in 2020 are expected to be only 5,851 million tons -- below our 2007 peak. That's a staggering shift. And the government's estimate assumes that there won't be any improvement in public policy between now and 2020 -- in fact it assumes that the current tax incentives for renewable energy will be allowed to expire!

Why do I think that 2009 is the year in which we can say we know that U.S. CO2 emissions have already peaked and are now poised to start declining?

Look at the year's events. For example, 2009 was the first year in decades when not a single coal-fired power plant started construction. Reliance on existing coal-fired electrical capacity slumped, while renewables and natural gas increased. In August 2009 coal use was down 9.4 percent; gas use was up 8.9 percent. 

And 2009 was also the year that utilities began shutting down a significant number of America's existing fleet of coal-fired power plants. In North Carolina, Progress Energy said it would shut down 11 coal plants by 2017. Duke Energy declared it would retire 18 of its plants over the next decade. Coal shipments from Wyoming continued to decline after peaking two years ago, and experts warned the state that Wyoming has already reached peak coal.

Peak oil consumption -- for the U.S. -- also seems at hand. Reform of the transportation sector accelerated in 2009. The amount of driving Americans do peaked in 2004, leveled off for three years, and began to drop in 2007, well before the economic crisis. 

In 2008 driving declined by five percent compared with a year earlier. With lower gas prices this year, driving increased slightly but not enough to suggest that we are back on an upward path. What's more, the cars that Americans now want to drive get better mileage. The best evidence for this was the Cash for Clunkers program -- even though the rules did not require it, the average new vehicle purchased got 61 percent better fuel economy than the clunker being traded in.

As a result, demand for gasoline declined by about 10 percent. The Energy Department says this change is permanent. Exxon-Mobil agrees, and U.S. oil companies are shutting down oil refineries, after complaining several years ago that they needed to build scores of new ones. In 2009, as five refineries shut, U.S. refining capacity actually declined for the first time.

In spite of all this, energy-sector reform remains the most important policy challenge facing the nation -- whether you are worried about climate disruption, dependence on foreign oil, public health, or America's competitive position in the world. Our energy economy is still underperforming, underinvested, uncompetitive, slow to innovate, and far too dependent on carbon-intensive fuels and technologies. Carbon waste is far easier -- and probably greater -- than the waste in the health-care sector that gets so much attention.

So we still have a lot of work to do. But this year I think we can say we've turned a corner -- even if Congress isn't ready to acknowledge it.

"Polish Rules" and Health Care

San Francisco -- It's stunning how easily both members of Congress and the media -- and all of us -- have slipped into believing that the problem with the health-care debate is that America is deeply divided. When the bill passed the Senate, the New York Times editorialized: "Conventional wisdom holds that the final product will have to be close to the Senate version lest that fragile 60-vote coalition be ruptured." The Times clearly preferred many features of the House bill, but felt it could only tepidly urge that the final bill "would include some provisions from the House bill." 

But at the beginning of the debate, and even at the end, the general public wasn't that divided on the important provisions they wanted in a health-care bill -- including the infamous public option. There were a solid 55 votes in the Senate for a bill substantially stronger and less patchwork than the one that passed. Those 55 senators, additionally, represent the overwhelming majority of the American people -- 16 of the 20 senators who represent the ten most populous states would have voted for a bill at least as strong as the one that passed the House.

Passing a reform of our health-care system was, and should be, difficult. But the final result of the Senate's work is such a patchwork for one and only one reason -- America's political leadership has accepted "Polish rules" (the ability of a small minority to say "no" to anything) as a given in the U.S. Senate. This routine use of the filibuster goes back only to 1993, with the election of Bill Clinton. The Republicans showed in 2005 that the majority party (even with a much smaller majority) could restore majority rule if it was determined to do so. The Democrats could do the same today, but they don't want to because the power of each individual senator is enhanced by Polish rules.

Back in August, the Times was urging the Democrats to use reconciliation, the budget-related procedure by which parts of the health-care reform could be passed by a majority under current Senate rules.

But even then the Times never made it clear that the future effectiveness of our entire constitutional system depends on ending "Polish rules" in the U.S. Senate. And Senate Majority Leader Reid, like other Democrats, has repeatedly stated his commitment to retain the present system. This will change only when the American people demand that senators start doing what we've elected them to do: vote. That means adopting rules that respect the basic principle of democratic governance -- minorities are entitled to be heard, and majorities are then entitled to decide. 

If Republican senators knew that legislation -- whether on health care or on energy and climate -- were going to pass, then their present strategy of stonewalling and operating like a party-line minority would quickly be abandoned. The hyper-partisanship of the present Senate is a result, as well as a cause, of the gridlock created by the 60-vote rule. It gives the minority party more power as an obstructionist than as a coalition partner. 

If we want to fix American politics, we need to fix Polish rules. Health care is only the latest proof point.

Lessons from Denmark

Copenhagen -- Will Copenhagen's near collapse and half-hearted outcome help or hinder the effort to repair our climate? As a Danish prince once said, that is the question, but we won't know the answer for a while. Was the Copenhagen Accord strong enough to start a virtuous cycle of nations upping their clean-energy commitments? Or, will the profound distrust that brought this conference to the brink of disaster remain the dominant motif of international climate diplomacy? Will the initial pledges of financing for climate solutions in the world's poorest nations translate into ongoing, creative, and reliable financing for climate justice? It will be months, perhaps years, before we find out.

But there are important, if more modest, lessons that we can learn from Copenhagen. Here are my six major takeaways.

U.S. Leadership Is Still Essential

One missing ingredient would have done more than any other to make Copenhagen successful: an ambitious, credible U.S. carbon-reduction target. Yet that's the one tool that obstructionism in the U.S. Senate completely denied to President Obama. As a result, the more ambitious a goal he offered, the less plausible it seemed that he could deliver on it. And although President Obama played this very weak hand with tremendous intensity, he still wasn't able to carry the day in the way that was needed.

The angry and disappointed  reaction to President Obama's speech at the conference illustrates both how central and critical U.S. leadership remains and how weak the President's hand still is because Congress and the country have not yet bought in.

We have to accelerate the transformation of the American economy and the politics of energy and climate -- and the Republican Party's obstructionist strategies in the Senate must begin to carry a price.

Distrust Must Be Overcome

The striking and hopeful thing about the speeches given by the leaders of the major carbon-emitting nations was the firmness with which almost all of them reiterated their unilateral commitment to making significant, if inadequate, cuts in emissions. Not only the U.S., Europe, China, and India but also virtually every other nation that is a significant source of emissions promised to act. Equally striking (but depressing) was their unwillingness or inability to transform these individual intentions into a robust collective response.

The most insightful part of President Obama's weak speech was in its second paragraph:

"For while the reality of climate change is not in doubt, I have to be honest, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance."

Every observer commented on this toxic distrust -- and how it made agreement on even the most basic aspects of the negotiations impossible. This distrust is rooted in decades of broken promises by all sides, but eight years of Bush administration unilateralism has raised it to new heights. President Obama's election was not a magic antidote -- and his administration was inadequately prepared for that reality.

Perhaps the most eloquent speaker on this topic was Brazil's President Lula da Silva, who said that Copenhagen frustrated him because it reminded him of his experiences as a labor negotiator. (Lula was the one major leader who broke new ground and made new promises. One reason for the negative reaction to President Obama's speech was that it followed Lula's extraordinarily generous intervention.)

The next round of negotiations must focus like a laser on solving the problem of distrust.

Big Oil  Poisoned the Process

The third most significant factor that led to failure -- after the weak U.S. commitment and the accumulated distrust -- was procedural. COP 15 worked (or, more precisely, didn't work) by consensus. That's not the UN norm. Although super-majorities are common in UN processes, even in the Security Council only the major powers have vetoes. The one exception is climate negotiations.

Observers here spent two frustrating days watching inaction while Tuvalu made its (valid) point. At the end of the conference, efforts to make simple changes to strengthen the final accord were blocked by a tiny group of states led by Venezuela and the Sudan.

This is not accidental. At the beginning of the Copenhagen conference, an effort was made, once again, to establish normal procedural rules for the conference, including a three-quarters super-majority requirement. Saudi Arabia blocked it -- as it has from the very beginning.

The Saudis also blocked efforts to establish voting rules because they know that, without them, climate negotiations cannot yield a strong result. Don Pearlman, a former Reagan administration official working at the law firm of Patton Boggs and representing the oil industry-funded Climate Council, appears to have originated this strategy. The poison pill that he and the oil industry planted at the beginning of the UN's climate-negotiation process bore its bitter fruit in the dark winter days of Copenhagen.

Nations Still Think Locally Instead of Globally

There were numerous commentaries on the diplomatic snafus, particularly between the U.S. and China. Clearly there was a power struggle going on -- but there is also plenty of evidence that the Chinese were genuinely offended that, after China had privately offered to commit to a significant reduction in its carbon intensity, the U.S. delegation in Copenhagen continued to message as though China were an adversary. This messaging, of course, was aimed at the U.S. Congress and at Americans worried about China's economic dominance in the manufacturing sector.

Other nations had their own domestic special interests to worry about. India, like the U.S., is almost certainly confident that its emission reductions will be greater than its pledges -- but to say so would reveal that the Manmohan Singh government intends major reforms in India's energy policies, and there are powerful domestic interests that would begin mobilizing against change if Singh were to tip his hand. China had to maintain, above all, the sense that it had not permitted the U.S. to treat it as less than a full partner -- so each U.S. message intended for domestic consumption had to be matched by a Chinese countermove.

We Need to Start the Virtuous Cycles

Still, when the negotiators actually weren't constrained by domestic politics, as in the case of tropical forests, they made real progress. If an overall climate structure had come together, a critical forest-protection plan going by the acronym REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) was negotiated, agreed to, and ready to go. The U.S. even made its first major commitment to fund it, with a billion-dollar offer from Agriculture Secretary Vilsack. But with nothing in Copenhagen that it could be attached to, REDD was shelved.

A source of hope is that once nations start on a low-carbon pathway, it becomes self-reinforcing.It's getting started on the pathway that's hard -- not speeding up once you're on it. So the key is for all the major carbon-emitting nations to begin building their clean-energy sectors as quickly as possible -- the first gigaton of carbon savings is the hardest. If the U.S. had a larger renewable industry and smaller coal and oil industries, the politics of accelerating our transition to clean energy would be very different.

Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit

In conflict diplomacy there's a well-established approach to these kinds of collective-action problems based on distrust: Find some low-risk, win-win steps that will enable all parties to show good faith, and start doing them quickly.Fortunately, climate diplomacy has an extraordinary number of such opportunities. Two have already been agreed to. Ending deforestation by implementing REDD would be an enormous confidence booster. And President Obama's success in getting the G20 to agree to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels was a tremendous second step. But other such opportunities got no serious attention in Copenhagen. A serious effort to curb the short-term climate forcers -- methane, black carbon (soot), and the so-called H gases -- is one. A massive commitment to light the world's off-grid villages with distributed solar power (at less than the cost of the kerosene they currently use) is another. Shifting the world's energy-aid programs from expensive coal plants to cheap energy-performance improvements is a third.

If the Copenhagen Accord is to serve as the basis for something more robust and meaningful -- something that builds on individual national commitments to create a collective, global transformation -- then we need to take these easy steps and demonstrate that we all, truly, are beginning to understand that a low-carbon future is in our own best interest.