Climate Dawn

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

          --Arthur Hugh Clough

San Francisco -- You might be surprised to learn that I think climate protection may have posted its best quarterly results ever in the last three months of 2011. After all, the year as a whole saw the world move ever deeper into Al Gore's "Era of Consequences", with an unprecedented concentration of extreme weather events. And didn't we learn at the end of the year that in 2010 industrial civilization had unleashed record amounts of greenhouse pollutants into the atmosphere?

So what was so great about Q4 of 2011?

Quite simply, the world provided that, if we stick at it, we can do it. After 40 years of U.S. government inaction, the Obama administration completed setting a comprehensive set of carbon emission standards for cars and trucks, standards that, overall, will reduce the carbon footprint of a mile of driving by more than 50% by 2025. It took three rounds of reform -- one by Congress before Obama took office, one in his first year that dealt with the years leading up to 2017, and the final round just promulgated. But combined with investment incentives for vehicle electrification, ongoing innovation on the fuels side, a struggle that the Sierra Club launched back in the 1980s has finally come to fruition -– absurdly inefficient American vehicles will no longer be a big part of the climate problem. (Not everyone was thrilled of course -- The Wall Street Journal was its usual hectoring self.)

Nor, it turns out, will vampire power plants be with us forever. It took 20 years for the EPA to finally confront the truth that the utility lobby had snookered Congress back in the 1970s into allowing the indefinite operation of filthy coal-fired power plants belching not only carbon but also mercury, soot, sulfur, and other toxins into the atmosphere. The pretext? Any day now they were going to be retired and thus did not warrant cleaning up! On December 21 President Obama finally signed EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's silver stake: a firm standard requiring that mercury and other toxic pollutants finally be cleaned up -- or shut down as originally proclaimed. How much of America's carbon belching coal fleet will go down because of the mercury rule is not clear -- some estimates were 50 GW, a sixth of the total fleet. But the mercury rule doesn't stand alone -- a whole series of other federal and state and local actions are making clear to utilities that if they can't burn coal clean then they can't burn it at all -- and the result is going to be a huge step-down in CO2 and other pollution from America's power plants.

The president, confronted with a bought-and-sold big-carbon majority in the House of Representatives, finally called one his opponents' repeated bluffs. When the House insisted that the price of extending unemployment insurance and social security tax moratoria was a rapid decision on the Keystone Tar Sands Export Pipeline, the President took the challenge, and then made it clear that a rushed, rapid decision would have to be -- "No."

As a result of these three victories, the U.S. is poised not only to meet the 17 percent pollution curbs that President Obama promised in Copenhagen by 2020, but to go beyond them -– because these regulations and limits set the stage for further reforms, and show that we can really change the long-term emissions trajectory of an economy in ways that are good for both health and prosperity.

Meanwhile, in Durban, an absence of U.S. leadership, plus ambiguous signals from China combined with resistance from Canada, Japan, and India, might easily have derailed climate diplomacy altogether. Instead, while the Durban UN Climate Conference made no fundamental breakthroughs, the world stuck at it. And back in Brussels, the European Union stuck to their guns by insisting on their admittedly inadequate proposals requiring airline passengers, the world's richest, to take responsibility for their climate emissions even when they were over the ocean. Thus far the courts have supported this modest, but symbolically critical signal -- climate pollution is going to have a price.

What these five successes have in common is their connection to a quality that doesn't often get discussed when we worry about global warming –- tenacity.

The auto carbon standards and the mercury rules were the fruit of 60 combined years of tenacity -- largely led by the Sierra Club. Ongoing UN Climate diplomacy and the EU's aviation rule symbolize the tenacity of the world community --disorganized though it is. And the rejection of the Keystone Pipeline must summons our movement's future tenacity -- for as long as global demand for oil is out of control, the motivation to find some way to get Canada's tar sands to world markets at whatever ecological price will be overwhelming. The tar sands battle is not over.

Tenacity is the Rodney Dangerfield of virtues -- we underestimate it. It maintains a peculiar relationship to time. Unlike bravery or generosity, fed by crisis or sudden opportunity, tenacity must hang on during long fallow seasons and droughts, when it almost seems pointless. Tenacity is the ultimate expression of hope and faith. And just as the scientists warn us that reversing climate disruption will take a long time, and that the price for the pollution we have already unleashed will be with us for many lifetimes, so too the path for reversing our climate folly has a long arc, something we often lose track of.

In the last quarter of 2011 that arc of common sense broke through to the surface -- because important chunks of the human community have been sticking at the task of climate rescue.

So here's to tenacity -- the virtue we need more of. May the year 2012 be filled with it.

And lest you think that the opening quatrain of this blog -- which I have used before in this blog and elsewhere, ever since it sat on my college dorm wall -- is from a soppy Victorian sentimentalist, let me give you another, highly apropos quote from Arthur Hugh Clough:

"Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat, When it's so lucrative to cheat."

Occupy couldn't have said it better.

To my readers: This is the last edition of Taking the Initiative that will appear on the Sierra Club's website, as I have stepped down as chairman of the Club. This blog will continue to appear on Huffington Post.

Letter from Durban

Durban, South Africa -- The conversation here about the formal negotiating track of COP17 ranges from gloomy to cynical. The lack of American leadership is palpable. Most disturbing is that Todd Stern, the U.S. negotiator, on behalf of the Obama administration, is pushing very hard to delay beginning global negotiations on an eventual climate protection regime until 2020 -- even though there is virtually unanimous scientific agreement that what matters most is not the world's trajectory after 2020 but the pathway we take over the next nine years. A letter signed by 16 groups to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenges the U.S. negotiating positions on legal mandate, the Green Climate Fund, and long-term finance.

So getting away from the formal negotiating process and focusing on the opportunities that the world has to move forward is almost essential to maintain sanity. This morning my sanity fix comes from a spirited dialogue on how to make good on the UN's promise that 2012 will finally be the year in which the world seriously tackles the shameful reality that 1.2 billion people have no access to electricity.

It's not because they can't afford the daily cost -- the poor spend about four times as much on the miserable light they get from kerosene lanterns as they would need to equip their homes with a modern home solar system. But they can buy kerosene, in a bottle, by the day -- and at the moment they would need to pay for ten years' worth of solar electricity at a time. They can neither afford the upfront cash nor access the kind of public-utility model that you and I take for granted. (You didn't pay the costs of the power plant and transmission lines that electrify your house on the day you moved in -- but for those off grid, until recently, there was no other choice.) The poor don't light with kerosene because it is cheap -- they are poor in part because they must rely on expensive kerosene. And they stay trapped in poverty because without electricity it is very difficult to break into the economic mainstream.

But now the cost of solar cells, batteries, and LED light bulbs has plummeted, so off-grid solar is far cheaper than it was even two years ago. And neat new technologies are enabling companies to distribute solar systems that can be routinely topped up like cell phone minutes, so that the poor can pay as they go, rather than up front.

Former Irish President Mary Robinson argues this morning that to rescue climate diplomacy we need to nest it in the broader context of sustainable development -- that successors to the Kyoto climate pact need to be seen in the context of next year's Rio +20 conference. She believes that if the EU and other advanced countries see emerging economies commit themselves to moving forward on a broader and more domestically energized green-development agenda, then they will be more likely to raise the ambition of their own climate goals. Here at Durban, the Sierra Student Coalition is beginning exactly that kind of foundation building, working on trainings in campus organizing with Chinese, Australian, and South African youth, and reaching out to Latin youth to prepare for RIO +20.

Jay Naidu, the pioneering South African labor leader and later one of Nelson Mandela's cabinet members, who managed the cell phone revolution here, argues passionately that the world now has the technologies, the funding, and the capacity to end, once and for all, the scandal of households without modern energy -- but that what we lack is popular demand: "We need a global movement around the right to energy security. Now that we have the tools to give everyone electricity, failing to provide it is simply not acceptable.

So although the formal negotiating process is a disappointment -- particularly the U.S. role -- the opportunities we face keep increasing, along with the challenges. Can Durban be the turning point?

Once More into the Breach, Dear Friends

Munich -- The International Herald-Tribune has deveoted its entire business section to the pending Durban climate talks, where I'm headed in a few hours. The story on the failure of the industrial world to keep the promise that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton flew to Copenhagen two years ago to make -- that $100 billion in climate aid would be provided to the poor nations -- is titled "A Pledge That Didn't Meet Its Potential."

In recent weeks, the UN has issued two major reports in an effort to move the process forward. One, from the global climate science community, makes clear that climate chaos has already been unleashed, and that increasingly frequent extreme climate events are already putting human communities at risk.

The other, from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), estimates that the necessary cuts in 2020 emissions to put the world on a course that would limit global warming to 2 percent is 6 gigatons of carbon dioxide -- but that keeping the gap that small will require that nations meet the commitments they have already made, including the U.S. commitment of a 17 percent cut in its emissions (likely to be achieved, but not through a single national policy, in my view) and the $100 billion a year in climate aid (not looking as good.)

The UNEP then says that this remaining 6 gigaton gap can be closed if the global energy sector is reformed in the following ways:

• Improving energy efficiency: Primary energy production would need to drop up to 11 percent from business-as-usual models in 2020, and the amount of energy used per unit of GDP would need to fall 1.1 to 2.3 percent each year from 2005 to 2020.
• Up to 28 percent of total primary energy would need to come from non-fossil sources in 2020 (up from 18.5 percent in 2005).
• Up to 17 percent of total primary energy in 2020 would need to come from biomass (up from about 10.5 percent in 2005).
• Up to 9 percent of total primary energy in 2020 would need to come from non-biomass renewable energy (solar, wind, hydroelectricity, and the like).
• Non-CO2 emissions would need to fall by up to 19 percent by 2020.

The UNEP calculates that the average cost of removing a ton of carbon dioxide in this scenario is modest -- $34/ton. (For comparison, that's equivalent to $0.34/gallon of gasoline). And the UNEP's reforms are well within the range of what's technically feasible and even affordable. So the job can be done. But are we serious about doing it?

The signs leading into Durban are not good. The U.S. and Japan are proposing to postpone any kind of global climate negotiations until 2015 -- clearly too late to ensure that the world meets the 2020 target. They have now been joined by India and Brazil. Europe and the poorest countries -- which will suffer most of the consequences of inaction -- want to complete a global agreement by 2015.

China is positioning itself as the bridge-builder between the two camps and has also launched a major public relations initiative highlighting its own domestic clean-energy efforts. The Guardian concluded that China is engaging in "both a last-ditch attempt to salvage a deal and a political insurance policy aimed at minimising blame -- and most likely deflecting it to the U.S. -- if the talks break down." But China has fought back vigorously against efforts to get it to eliminate its strategy of continuing to produce (and then get paid by UN to destroy) highly climate-destructive refrigeration chemicals.

Meanwhile, China's highest stated priority for the talks -- getting a second round of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol from the industrial world -- is being rebuffed by Canada, Russia, and Japan.

So this doesn't look like the conference of the desperately needed breakthrough -- but if the world can really make progress on $100 billion in climate aid, keep the tropical forest process (flawed as it is) moving forward, and begin to grapple with the reality that the new economics of coal, oil, and clean energy mean that the incremental price for going green keeps getting smaller,  then we might begin to sustain a virtuous cycle, even in the face of the Great Recession. But with the Euro teetering, getting enough focus and bandwidth makes even those modest goals challenging.