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Fears of Energy Price Increase Delay 9-State Pollution Pact    •

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    On Climate Change, a Change of Thinking
    By Andrew C. Revkin
    The New York Times

    Sunday 04 December 2005

    In December 1997, representatives of most of the world's nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a binding agreement to cut emissions of "greenhouse" gases.

    They succeeded. The Kyoto Protocol was ultimately ratified by 156 countries. It was the first agreement of its kind. But it may also prove to be the last.

    Today, in the middle of new global warming talks in Montreal, there is a sense that the whole idea of global agreements to cut greenhouse gases won't work.

    A major reason the optimism over Kyoto has eroded so rapidly is that its major requirement - that 38 participating industrialized countries cut their greenhouse emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2012 - was seen as just a first step toward increasingly aggressive cuts.

    But in the years after the protocol was announced, developing countries, including the fast-growing giants China and India, have held firm on their insistence that they would accept no emissions cuts, even though they are likely to be the world's dominant source of greenhouse gases in coming years.

    Their refusal helped fuel strong opposition to the treaty in the United States Senate and its eventual rejection by President Bush.

    But the current stalemate is not just because of the inadequacies of the protocol. It is also a response to the world's ballooning energy appetite, which, largely because of economic growth in China, has exceeded almost everyone's expectations. And there are still no viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases.

    Then, too, there is a growing recognition of the economic costs incurred by signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.

    As Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a proponent of emissions targets, said in a statement on Nov. 1: "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge."

    This is as true, in different ways, in developed nations with high unemployment, like Germany and France, as it is in Russia, which said last week that it may have spot energy shortages this winter.

    Some veterans of climate diplomacy and science now say that perhaps the entire architecture of the climate treaty process might be flawed.

    The basic template came out of the first international pact intended to protect the atmosphere, the 1987 Montreal Protocol for eliminating chemicals that harmed the ozone layer, said Richard A. Benedick, the Reagan administration's chief representative in the talks leading to that agreement.

    That agreement was a success, but a misleading one in the context of climate. It led, Mr. Benedick now says, to "years wasted in these annual shindigs designed to generate sound bites instead of sober contemplation of difficult issues."

    While it was relatively easy to phase out ozone-harming chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons, which were made by a handful of companies in a few countries, taking on carbon dioxide, the main climate threat, was a completely different matter, he said.

    Carbon dioxide is generated by activities as varied as surfing the Web, driving a car, burning wood or flying to Montreal. Its production is woven into the fabric of an industrial society, and, for now, economic growth is inconceivable without it.

    Developing countries - China and India being only the most dramatic examples - want to burn whatever energy they need, in whatever form available, to grow their economies and raise the living standard of their people.

    And the United States - by far the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases - continues to say that emissions targets or requirements would stunt economic growth in both rich and poor nations. All this has turned the Montreal meeting, many participants have conceded, into, at best, a preliminary meeting on how to start over in addressing the threat of global warming.

    Indeed, from here on, progress on climate is less likely to come from megaconferences like the one in Montreal and more likely from focused initiatives by clusters of countries with common interests, said Mr. Benedick, who is now a consultant and president of the National Council on Science and the Environment, a private group promoting science-based environmental policies.

    The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.

    Enormous investments in basic research have to be made promptly, even with the knowledge that most of the research is likely to fail, if there is to be any chance of creating options for the world's vastly increased energy thirst in a few decades, said Richard G. Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit center for energy and environment research.

    "The train is not leaving the station, and it needs to leave the station," Mr. Richels said. "If we don't have the technologies available at that time, it's going to be a mess."

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    Fears of Energy Price Increase Delay 9-State Pollution Pact
    By Anthony DePalma
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 29 November 2005

    With delegates from all over the world meeting in Montreal on an international treaty to cut greenhouse gases, negotiations for a separate pact among nine Northeastern states have been prolonged by worries that controls on emissions could drive up the price of energy.

    The nine states had planned to announce a final agreement on the plan this week, coinciding with the meeting in Montreal.

    But Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, one of the nine states, has pushed the discussions past that deadline. He said he was concerned that the plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the region, and then reduce them by 10 percent, would raise the cost of electricity too much and hurt businesses and customers.

    Governor Romney said that he supported some of the plan's provisions, and that he was committed to reducing the state's reliance on foreign oil. But he insisted that the plan have price controls on what power plant operators would pay to exceed their pollution allowances under the agreement, called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, to check rapidly rising energy costs.

    "We're seeing huge rate increases now in the cost of energy," Governor Romney said in a telephone interview yesterday. "To add to that burden for the purposes of symbolism is something our business community is not about to undertake."

    This would be the first such cooperative action by the states in the nation, but its impact on climate change would be limited. It would, however, represent a significant challenge to the Bush administration, which does not support the international treaty to control greenhouse gases, and it would increase pressure for a national emissions reduction program.

    Rhode Island is prepared to follow the lead of Massachusetts in demanding price caps, said Jeff Neal, a spokesman for Gov. Donald L. Carcieri.

    New York, which initiated the regional plan, and New Jersey oppose setting caps on prices for pollution allowances. They argue that caps are not needed to protect customers and can dampen incentives to develop cleaner alternatives. The other states in the pact - Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont - have indicated that they are willing to go ahead without a price cap.

    The delegates meeting in Montreal this week are assessing the progress of attempts to reduce greenhouse gases since the treaty took effect in February, and are considering further reductions.

    "This would be a terrible moment for this agreement to fall apart," said Seth Kaplan, senior lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation of Boston. He has been involved in the regional negotiations since Gov. George E. Pataki of New York began the initiative more than two and a half years ago.

    Under the regional pact, a market-driven system would be created to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from more than 600 electric generators in the nine states.

    Each state would have its own emissions cap, and power plant operators would each be permitted to emit carbon dioxide up to a certain level. The operators would be encouraged to use the cleanest plants in order to stay under the limits, and would be free to trade excess allowances. About 25 percent of the pollution allowances would be sold or auctioned to plant operators who exceed the caps.

    The states have just completed a new study that found that if money raised by the sale of pollution allowances were used to pay for aggressive energy efficiency programs, the average annual household bill would actually fall by more than $100.

    Governor Romney said he had not seen the new study.

    Besides a cap on the price companies would have to pay for extra pollution allowances, the governor said he had other objections to the plan. He said Massachusetts' allotment of the regional emissions total was too small, and that 25 percent was too high a percentage of pollution allowances to be sold.

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