This article was written as a response to Senator John Kerry's Aug31 Op-ed on the Huffington Post, which I submitted to the same outlet but was not published.  Here it is a few months later, when we have seen how far the Senator bill (co-sponsored by Kerry, Boxer and Kirk) comes to answer the urgency that Kerry himself seemed to stress in his Op-ed.

===================

In his Aug31 article in the Huffington Post, Senator John Kerry pressed the case of climate change presenting a grave threat to America’s national security.  He was right on point.

However, ultimately he missed the point on several accounts:

First, readers came away with the impression that, as devastating as climate change would be to the already troublesome areas of the world, the threat to America will be mostly through “a much more dangerous world” in which America has to exist.  The little village in Alaska that had to move due to melting ice shelves just won’t be seen by most Americans as representing their own fate.  What he failed to mention was the over 50 days of 100+ degrees temperature /year in the Dakotas, and the over 180 days in the 90s in FL, and the water shortage throughout much of the US – devastating agriculture year after year would certainly constitute a national security issue, wouldn’t it?

But, we could forgive such an oversight as Senator Kerry specializes in foreign relations – perhaps he didn’t intend to gloss over the very real, domestic threat of drought and desertification, coastal city inundation, famine, pandemics, heat waves deaths, riots and general social unrest… that would all threaten our national security FROM WITHIN.

Second, he stated “Scientists have warned that anything above 450 ppm (parts per million carbon dioxide) -- a warming of 2 degrees Celsius -- will result in an unacceptable risk of catastrophic climate change.”

By this he implies that 450 ppm equates a warming of 2^oC, and that a CO2 level at or below 450 ppm would be acceptably safe.  How terribly wrong!!

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4^th Assessment Report in 2007, 450 ppm CO2 corresponds to a best estimate of 2.1°C warming, with a likely range of 1.4–3.1°C warming above pre-industrial levels.  The odds of exceeding 2^oC is about 50%.

I doubt any parents would send their children on a school bus with 50% chance of crashing.

Yet, even 50% is an optimistic estimate of our chances if we reached 450 ppm.  IPCC readily admitted that they did not model non-linear processes, such as the breaking up of ice sheets, the release of methane from tundra and under the sea bed, etc., all of which would cause rapid amplification of warming.  The fast loss of Arctic sea ice (as Kerry pointed out), and a myriad other rapid changes Earth is experiencing, at the present level of 387 ppm CO2, clearly indicates that we are already at a dangerous level and must draw down CO2, not further emit.  I.e., we need to go to negative emissions quickly.

Confirmations that warming is proceeding rapidly at current greenhouse gas levels come faster than we could process.  Around the same time of Kerry's op-ed, scientists at MIT, in Kerry’s home state, discovered that methane (a greenhouse gas 25x the potency of CO2) is very likely spewing out of vents in the sea floor at flow rates up to 1 million times faster than previously thought. This likely explains the recently observed plume of 4,200 feet high at the seafloor off the Northern California Margin, the large numbers of methane chimneys and plumes observed around the Arctic since last year, and possibly even the sudden spike in atmospheric methane concentration after a decade of leveling off.

In fact scientists found that 450(+/-100) ppm CO2 was the boundary condition between an ice-free planet (where sea level was over 220 feet higher than today) and one with ice, in the Earth’s history.  In other words, we risk a 220 feet sea level rise at possibly as low as 350 ppm.  That, is the reason why Bill McKibben calls 350 the most important number for humanity. (350.org)

Which leads to my last point, that is, the anticipated Boxer-Kerry bill, the Senate version that is not expected to deviate dramatically from the House-passed American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACESA), would likely aim for a greenhouse gas emission reduction target that is far, far short of what would be required to even stay below 450 ppm.

The reason?  We are told that it is not politically feasible to do any better.

Senator Kerry, if only you would talk honestly about the real odds of our survival that such a weak bill would provide, if only you would talk about the kinds of sweeping actions that are absolutely needed to increase our chances – nothing short of a war time mobilization to preserve civilization – if only you would talk about that, what makes you think what it takes will be anything but “politically feasible”?

Here is the scoop:  The emissions cap in ACESA would, under the best, impossible circumstances, reduce US emissions by 1% below 1990 levels by 2020, the international standard reference year that the bill’s authors carefully avoided using.  IPCC stated that developed countries need to reduce their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, to stabilize at 450 ppm (after briefly reaching 500 ppm).

Even the small emission (not concentration) reduction that ACESA does claim to aim for is severely compromised by the massive giveaways of emission permits to polluters, by astronomical offset credits (which are largely shams, and which Friends of the Earth calls climate “suicide”) that polluters could cheaply purchase instead of reducing their emissions, by grandfathering existing coal-fired power plants and permitting numerous new ones with no emission restrictions for years to come, by the tens of billions of dollars handed out to the coal and nuclear industries instead of investing in wind and solar, and by incentivizing biomass incineration and allowing biomass carbon emissions to be completely invisible to the law (thereby threatening the decimation of our forests, and the release of forest carbon into the atmosphere).

Perhaps worst of all, the basic framework of ACESA is a cap-and-trade scheme, that is prone to market gaming and profiteering by Wall Street, potentially causing market collapse of unprecedented scale.  Cap-and-trade is proven ineffective, and when applied to the huge carbon emissions problem, is extremely complex and non-transparent, highly fraud- and influence- prone, very inefficient in implementation, and in some ways even creates perverse incentives to increase, not decrease pollution. More here. See a great resource here and here.

It is incomprehensible that Congress is fixated on such a hell-bound scheme, when they could choose much simpler, more robust and superior alternative approaches, such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax-dividend, or fee-bate, that imposes a fee for each ton of CO2 content at the source of extraction or importation (as opposed to regulating tens of thousands of downstream emitters), and returns the revenue in equal shares to consumers to defray the increased cost of everything, while providing a strong price signal that encourages a shift to the consumption of less carbon-intensive goods and services.  British Columbia has implemented just such a system without hurting the re-election of its implementer or his ruling party.  France has also unveiled such a system, and the entire Scandinavia has been applying stiff carbon taxes for years (currently $187/ton CO2 in Sweden – compare that with around $10/ton starting price for ACESA) while their economies did not suffer.

Indeed, as Kerry stated, “The decisions we make in coming months will determine whether we meet this challenge head-on and prevail or if we are to suffer the worst consequences of a warming planet.”

Senator Kerry, do you mean it? Do you get it?  Please don’t lead us to a dead end!

Maggie Zhou, PhD.
Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities -
project Secure Green Future
www.climateSOS.org