Sen. John Kerry calls for urgent action to address climate change at Baker Institute conference

Sen. John Kerry calls for urgent action to address climate change at Baker Institute conference

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News Staff

Sen. John Kerry called for immediate steps to deal with the threat of climate change at a conference at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Feb. 9.

“When I ran for president,” Kerry said, “I and many others spoke about the need for a foreign policy that ‘stopped at the water’s edge’ — but four years later, we’re equally concerned about making sure that water stops at the water’s edge too.”

	Sen. John Kerry described his experiences as part of the U.S. congressional delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference on the Indonesian island of Bali. GEORGE WONG

The conference, titled “Beyond Science: The Economics and Politics of Responding to Climate Change,” was co-sponsored by the Baker Institute, the Energy & Environmental Systems Institute and the Shell Center for Sustainability.

Kerry described his experiences as part of the U.S. congressional delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference on the Indonesian island of Bali. He decried the Bush administration as representing “the lone, consistent voice against including any concrete goals for reducing emissions in the final document.” Nevertheless, he said “the ‘Bali roadmap’ does mark real progress toward a post-Kyoto vision” because it “lays out a process for future negotiations, recognizes the importance of the four building blocks to fighting climate change — mitigation, adaptation, financing and technology — and most importantly shows us a path to reach a final agreement in Copenhagen in 2009.” 
 
Kerry also emphasized that the terms of the debate have changed since Kyoto. “The most important question that will determine the future of climate change is how we give life to the words ‘shared but differentiated responsibility,'” he said. Other countries that had resisted calls for action, including China and Australia, are now much more engaged, Kerry said.

The former Democratic nominee for president argued that U.S. leadership is key to reaching international cooperation on fighting climate change. He cautioned that having lost the debate on the science of climate change, opponents of those efforts will now cite economic concerns in an effort to halt them. “But they have it fundamentally wrong,” Kerry said, “the question is not whether or not we pay for climate change — if there was a cost-free way forward, of course we’d take it.” 
 
“The real question,” Kerry continued, “is whether we pay it now in a way that helps us break our addiction to oil, or later on a massive, unpredictable scale in the currency of environmental devastation and human suffering.” The costs, while substantial, are not insurmountable, he said. One report Kerry cited estimated that stringent efforts would cost 0.12 percent of average annual worldwide economic growth until 2050.
 
The debate over costs comes down to “a simple wager,” Kerry concluded. “If we’re wrong, we still have global development, clean air, a stronger economy here at home, healthier citizens and no more addiction to the foreign oil that funds despots and terrorists. If they’re wrong, we face catastrophe.”  

Speakers and panelists spent the rest of the day addressing public policy issues relating to climate change.

Rosina M. Bierbaum, dean and professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, and John P. Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and director of the Woods Hole Research Center, discussed strategies of mitigation and adaptation in confronting climate change.

Holdren called for an array of measures — what he called a portfolio — to mitigate emissions. Among the policy options he mentioned were regulations, incentives, design and implementation of technical alternatives and government expenditure on R&D. Some of these measures involve win-win scenarios, Holdren said, like increasing efficiency and avoiding deforestation. “Integrated strategies for mitigation and adaptation together clearly can drive investment and growth in a whole variety of ways,” he said.

Bierbaum focused much of her comments on how climate change imperils the U.N. Millennium Development Goals aimed at reducing extreme poverty worldwide. “If we continue with business as usual,” she said, “it would lead to potentially serious and potentially catastrophic climate change that will threaten livelihoods and, we would argue, development goals themselves. But, if we muster the will and the technology and the finances to transform our energy systems and to improve the stewardship of our natural resources, we can achieve a sustainable future.”

GEORGE WONG

Speakers and panelists addressed public policy issues relating to climate change.

California’s recent efforts to address climate change were a topic of discussion by several panelists at the conference. Daniel Sperling, an adviser to the state of California on climate and transportation policy, spoke on “The California Model for Combating Climate Change.” Later, John Weyant, professor of management science and engineering and director of the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University, praised a multi-pronged approach to limiting climate change, citing contemporaneous moves by California, the European Union and other government bodies. Above all, Weyant urged policy flexibility.

In a discussion on limiting carbon, Gilbert E. Metcalf, professor of economics at Tufts University, called for a carbon tax rather than a cap and trade system. He acknowledged that while the tax approach is not politically expedient, he believed public opinion is shifting. And although any form of carbon pricing is regressive, Metcalf said such effects can be undone through a well-designed rebate plan for carbon revenue. Peter Hartley, professor of economics and the George and Cynthia Mitchell Family Chair in Sustainable Development, argued that higher general energy taxes would be an effective policy that would capture both energy security and climate change goals. Hartley noted that some of the proposed climate solutions might actually worsen our energy security and that the two goals weren’t exactly two sides of the same coin.

Milo Sjardin, head of New Carbon Finance, North America, on the other hand, laid out the case for a cap-and-trade system. Basing his argument on the European experience, he called cap and trade “the preferred policy measure to ensure emissions reductions” on a global basis. Saying the EU had learned from early failures, he said the EU’s emission trading scheme “has so far been very successful in stimulating the transition to a carbon-constrained economy.”

Scott Nyquist, a director at McKinsey and Co., presented a new study on the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The report found the United States could reduce those emissions in 2030 by 3.0 to 4.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) “using tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies. These reductions would involve pursuing a wide array of abatement options with marginal costs less than $50 per ton, with the average net cost to the economy being far lower if the nation can capture sizable gains from energy efficiency.” Nyquist emphasized the importance of agreed targets for public policy approaches, and called for some form of market mechanism, such as cap and trade or market tax, to ensure a price for any effort to contain climate change.

The conference was supported by the UK Science and Innovation Section, British Consulate-General Houston.