Catastrophic climate change is the primary
preventable threat to the health and well-being of all Americans -- as
readers of this blog already understand and as pretty much everyone
else will figure out in the coming years. Keeping total planetary
warming as low as possible -- ideally below 2°C, which it turn requires
keeping atmospheric concentrations of CO2 below 450 ppm -- will become
the central organizing principle for all U.S. energy, environmental,
economic, and international policy over the next two decades, and will
almost certainly remain so for the next two centuries.
While this is a long-term problem, "What we do in the next two to
three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment," as
IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri warned last fall. Beating 450 ppm is certainly not politically possible now,
as I have argued in a long ongoing series. Indeed, the recent climate
debate in the Senate makes it painfully clear that conservatives are
prepared to go down with the climate ship. The current oil drilling "debate" only underscores how hopeless the climate situation is until progressives occupy the White House.
That said, the next president is almost certainly going to pass some
sort of climate legislation establishing a cap on greenhouse gas
emissions that kicks in around 2015. Again, it won't be easy to pass a
serious bill, but if we had a president who was capable of truly
inspiring people and who actually believes in government-led clean
energy policies, then I think it will happen.
But -- and this is where Biden comes in -- even if that legislation
is strong enough to put this country on the path towards rapid and deep
reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the entire U.S. effort will
certainly fall apart if the next president is not able to negotiate a
serious international treaty that encompasses all major emitters. Yet
it has become increasingly clear in recent months that achieving a
serious, binding international treaty is even more politically
implausible a task than passing serious, binding domestic legislation.
And that is because Russia has emerged as a country that is likely to
be every bit as much an obstacle as China and the United States
currently are.
The Chinese challenge
I have written about China extensively already, and no one should underestimate the difficulty of getting them to embrace the necessary reductions in projected emissions and then in absolute emissions.
But everyone I know who knows the country tells me that the Chinese
leaders understand that global warming will be catastrophic for them --
even if those leaders mistakenly believe they can "go back and solve
climate change after they get rich," which has been the standard
procedure for how Western countries dealt with traditional
environmental problems. Sadly, that approach won't work with climate
because the climate system almost certainly has tipping points.
Also, the Chinese are capitalists and are already poised to become
the leading producer of both solar PV and wind turbines. And they could
run their entire country on baseload solar, if they figure out fast
enough that it is the renewable with the biggest potential as a primary power source and if they return to their strong energy efficiency policies from decades past.
I cling to the view that Chinese could be brought around if their
customers all applied enough pressure to them -- assuming of course
that those customers, including us, are all prepared to take the
necessary measures themselves, which is far from obvious.
Russian recalcitrance
But Russia may be even more problematic, and not just because they
are more self-destructively nationalistic than China (or us). Russia
does not have a good solar resource. But they do have a lot of coal and
oil -- and they very much want to stake a claim to the rich oil
resources in the Arctic.
Moreover, they may (mistakenly) think global warming is good for
them. Since it will create a navigable Arctic and open up "currently
inaccessible energy resources," no less an authority than The Economist has written, "warming is likely to make Russia richer rather than poorer." Sad -- but quite untrue, especially since we are on path to far overshoot any degree of warming that could possibly be beneficial to Russia.
Perhaps the most important climatic tipping point is in Russia
-- the Siberian tundra. If that defrosts, then avoiding the equivalent
of 1,000 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will be all but
impossible. After all the tundra contains more carbon than the
atmosphere does, and much of it would likely be released as methane, a
far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Indeed, we have
some evidence that may have already started.
Russia does have a staggering amount of wind potential,
but it tends to be in the sparsely populated areas. Russia will need to
be convinced that some combination of nuclear, wind, and natural gas
can provide all the power it needs, but the even harder task will be
convincing them not to use all that oil and coal they have.
Indeed, the great challenge for the world in the next three decades
is not so much aggressively deploying low carbon technology -- although
that would not be easy it would certainly be straightforward both
technologically and economically. The great challenge for the world is
political -- convincing countries (and states) to leave a lot of the
cheap fossil fuel resources they have, especially coal, in the ground,
and to agree to import low-carbon electricity from other countries (or
states).
That will require not merely strong domestic action by the world's
richest country, the one that has admitted by far the most cumulative
amount of carbon dioxide. It will also require global leadership by us,
the ability to negotiate one-on-one and collectively with every major
country in the world. The Democratic team now has onboard someone who
not only gets global warming,
but who is certainly one of the most qualified people in the country to
help lead that effort from the White House, which is where it must be
lead from.
And that makes Biden a great vice presidential choice for Obama, the
nation, and the world -- that and the fact that picking him signals the
Democrats might finally put up a strong fight in the face of the
hailstorm of lies and disinformation they face every four years.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
