CS3 In the News
Whenever there’s an extreme weather event, from a hurricane to a record drought, the question always arises: Is it climate change?
MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel told Here & Now's Robin Young that it's hard to know for sure, but it is clear that as coastal waters warm up, storms will carry more rain, due to the added water vapor.
This NOAA satellite image taken on Monday shows Hurricane Sandy off the Mid
Atlantic coastline moving north. (AP/NOAA)
The policy community has long prophesied about the coming water wars. But don't expect them anytime soon. More likely, tensions over access will merely exacerbate existing regional conflicts.
By: Shlomi Dinar, Lucia De Stefano, James Duncan, Kerstin Stahl, Kenneth M. Strzepek, Aaron T. Wolf
Right: Looking south over the Mediterranean and down the Nile, from the International Space Station. (NASA / flickr)
The world economic downturn and upheaval in the Arab world might grab headlines, but another big problem looms: environmental change. Along with extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, and other natural hazards, global warming disrupts freshwater resource availability -- with immense social and political implications. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report, Global Water Security, assessing hydropolitics around the world. In it, the authors show that international water disputes will affect not only the security interests of riparian states, but also of the United States.
In many parts of the world, freshwater is already a scarce resource. It constitutes only 2.5 percent of all available water on the planet. And only about .4 percent of that is easily accessible for human consumption. Of that tiny amount, a decreasing share is potable because of pollution and agricultural and industrial water use. All that would be bad enough, but many freshwater bodies are shared among two or more riparian states, complicating their management.
Of course, the policy community has long prophesied impending "water wars." In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon warned that "water scarcity ... is a potent fuel for wars and conflict." Yet history has not witnessed many. In fact, the only official war over water took place about 4,500 years ago. It was a conflict between the city-states of Lagash and Umma in modern day Iraq over the Tigris river. More recently, there have been some close calls, especially in the arid Middle East. About two years before the 1967 War, Israel and Syria exchanged fire over the Jordan River Basin, which both said the other was overusing. The limited armed clashes petered out, but the political dispute over the countries' shared water sources continues. In 2002, Lebanon constructed water pumps on one of the river's tributaries, which caused concern for downstream Israel. The project never provoked any formal military action, but with peace in the region already precarious, verbal exchanges between the two countries prompted the United States to step in. Both parties eventually accepted a compromise that would allow Lebanon to withdraw a predetermined amount of water for its domestic needs.
In short, predictions of a Water World War are overwrought. However, tensions over water usage can still exacerbate other existing regional conflicts. Climate change is expected to intensify droughts, floods, and other extreme weather conditions that jeopardize freshwater quantity and quality and therefore act as a threat-multiplier, making shaky regions shakier.
So what river basins constitute the biggest risks today? In a World Bank report we published in 2010 (as well as a subsequent article in a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research) we analyzed the physical effects of climate change on international rivers. We modeled the variability in river annual runoff in the past and for future climate scenarios. We also considered the existence and nature of the institutional capacity around river basins, in the form of international water treaties, to potentially deal with the effects of climate change.
According to our research, 24 of the world's 276 international river basins are already experiencing increased water variability. These 24 basins, which collectively serve about 332 million people, are at high risk of water related political tensions. The majority of the basins are located in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. A few others are located in the Middle East, south-central Asia, and South America. They include the Tafna (Algeria and Morocco), the Dasht (Iran and Pakistan), the Congo (Central Africa), Lake Chad (Central Africa), the Niger (Western Africa), the Nile (Northeastern Africa), and the Chira (Ecuador and Peru). There are no strong treaties governing the use of these water reserves in tense territories. Should conflicts break out, there are no good mechanisms in place for dealing with them.
By 2050, an additional 37 river basins, serving 83 million people, will be at high risk for feeding into political tensions. As is the case currently, a large portion of these are in Africa. But, unlike today, river basins within Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and Central America will also be at high risk within 40 years. Some of these include the Kura-Araks (Iran, Turkey, and the Caucasus), the Neman (Eastern Europe) Asi-Orontes (Lebanon, Syria, Turkey), and the Catatumbo Basins (Colombia and Venezuela).
CROSSING THE NILE
Among the larger African basins, the Nile has the greatest implications for regional and global security. Tensions over access to the river already pit Ethiopia and Egypt, two important Western allies, against one another. Egypt has been a major player in the Middle East Peace Process and Ethiopia is an important regional force in the Horn of Africa, currently aiding other African forces to battle Al-Shabbab in Somalia.
Over the years, a number of international water treaties have made rules for the basin, but they are largely limited to small stretches of it. In particular, only Egypt and Sudan are party to the 1959 Nile River Agreement, the principal treaty regarding the river. Egypt, which is the furthest downstream yet is one of the most powerful countries in the region, has been able to heavily influence the water-sharing regime. Upstream countries, such as Ethiopia and Burundi, have been left out, hard-pressed to harness the Nile for their own needs.
In 1999, with increasingly vitriolic rhetoric between Egypt and Ethiopia sidetracking regional development, the World Bank stepped up its involvement in the basin. It helped create a network of professional water managers as well as a set of investments in a number of sub-basins. Still, the drafting of a new agreement stalled: upstream countries would not compromise on their right to develop water infrastructure while downstream countries would not compromise on protecting their shares. In 2010, Ethiopia signed an agreement with a number of the other upstream countries hoping to balance against Egypt and Sudan. More recently, the country has also announced plans to construct a number of large upstream dams, which could affect the stability of the region.
By 2050, the environmental state of the Nile Basin will be even worse. That is why it is important to create a robust and equitable water treaty now. Such a treaty would focus on ways to harness the river's hydropower potential to satiate the energy needs of all the riparian states while maintaining ecosystem health. The construction of dams and reservoirs further upstream could likewise help even out water flows and facilitate agricultural growth. Projects such as these, mitigating damage to ecosystem health and local populations, would benefit all parties concerned and thus facilitate further basin-wide cooperation.
UP IN THE ARAL
Another water basin of concern is the Aral Sea, which is shared by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The basin consists of two major rivers, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya. During the Soviet era, these two rivers were managed relatively effectively. The break-up of the Soviet Union, however, ended that. The major dispute now is between upstream Kyrgyzstan and downstream Uzbekistan over the Syr Darya. During the winter, Kyrgyzstan needs flowing water to produce hydroelectricity whereas Uzbekistan needs to store water to later irrigate cotton fields.
The countries have made several attempts to resolve the dispute. In particular, downstream Uzbekistan, which is rich in fuel and gas, has provided energy to Kyrgyzstan to compensate for keeping water in its large reservoirs until the cotton-growing season. Such barter agreements, however, have had limited success because they are easily manipulated. Downstream states might deliver less fuel during a rainy year, claiming they need less water from upstream reservoirs, and upstream states might deliver less water in retaliation. Kyrgyzstan, frustrated and desperate for energy in winter months, plans to build mega hydro-electric plants in its territory. And another upstream state, Tajikistan, is likewise considering hydro-electricity to satiate its own energy needs. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan is building large reservoirs.
Although these plans might make sense in the very near term, they are inefficient in the medium and long term because they don't solve the real needs of downstream states for large storage capacity to protect against water variability across time. In fact, both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, along with Kazakhstan, will see substantial increases in water variability between now and 2050. And so, the need to share the benefits of existing large-capacity upstream reservoirs and coordinate water uses through strong and more efficient inter-state agreements is unavoidable.
A stabilized Aral Sea basin would also benefit the United States. With its withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington has been courting Uzbekistan as a potential alternative ally and provider of stability in the region. The Uzbek government seems willing to host U.S. military bases and work as a counter-weight to Russia. Kyrgyzstan is also an important regional player. The Manas Air Base, the U.S. military installation near Bishkek, is an important transit point. The country is also working with the United States to battle drug trafficking and infiltration of criminal and insurgent groups. Regional instability could disrupt any of these strategic relationships.
If the past is any indication, the world probably does not need to worry about impending water wars. But they must recognize how tensions over water can easily fuel larger conflicts and distract states from other important geopolitical and domestic priorities. Since formal inter-state institutions are key to alleviating tensions over shared resources, it would be wise, then, for the involved governments as well as the international community to negotiate sufficiently robust agreements to deal with impending environmental change. Otherwise, freshwater will only further frustrate stability efforts in the world's volatile regions.
SHLOMI DINAR is associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations and associate director of the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. LUCIA DE STEFANO is associate professor at Complutense University of Madrid and researcher at the Water Observatory of the Botín Foundation. JAMES DUNCAN is consultant on natural resource governance and geography with the World Bank. KERSTIN STAHL is senior scientist at the Institute of Hydrology in the University of Freiburg. KENNETH M. STRZEPEK is research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. AARON T. WOLF is a professor of geography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.
Maputo — Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the United Nations have warned that Mozambique's infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent due to climate change.
According to MIT's Ken Strzepek, "in developing countries - and particularly in Africa - they are building their infrastructure at a very fast rate. They are also the most vulnerable to climate change impacts like flooding".
The researchers closely studied the projected change to Mozambique's climate and found that "it was clear that flooding and sea level rise would be two critical threats to the economy, and in particular to roads needed to transport food from rural farms to city populations".
Strzepek argues that "it would make sense for the government to spend the money now to build the roads in a way that makes them less vulnerable in the future".
Published in the "Review of Development Economics", the research on Mozambique finds that "climate change through 2050 is likely to place a drag on economic growth and development prospects. The economic implications of climate change appear to become more pronounced from about 2030. Nevertheless, the implications are not so strong as to drastically diminish development prospects".
The paper points out that "economic growth is widely held to depend on the quantity, quality, and orientation of a country's backbone infrastructure", and argues that the vulnerability of future infrastructure is "to a considerable degree, a matter of choice".
The researchers found that improved economic conditions in Mozambique have been felt by most segments of the population and that "the national poverty headcount fell from 69 to 55 per cent during 1997-2009, and infant mortality rates fell from 149 to less than 100 per 1000 births during 1996-2008. Education levels have also improved dramatically".
The authors of the report point out that "with agriculture accounting for about a quarter of Gross Domestic Product and three quarters of employment, improved rural infrastructure is often viewed as critical to future economic growth and poverty reduction".
They argue that "poor infrastructure, large distances, and associated weak market development generate large differences between farm gate and urban prices for agricultural products" and point out that "reducing these marketing margins results in strong poverty reductions, particularly if agricultural productivity rises simultaneously".
The researchers looked at four different climate change scenarios. Even in the scenario where Mozambique has a reduction in rainfall, there is a small increase in flooding although there is no increase in the probability of extreme flooding. In all the other cases, including the "global dry" scenario, the probability of extreme flooding events rises dramatically.
The paper concludes that "while the analysis conducted here does not favour a prophylactic policy of upgrading the road network, it should, in many instances, be reasonably obvious which portions of road are more likely to be subjected to flooding events. The concept extends well beyond roads. Indeed, the vulnerability profile of the large majority of the capital stock in 2050 is endogenous. By gradually channelling economic activity to areas less vulnerable to climate change (e.g. flooding events and sea level rise), the vulnerability of the economy can be greatly reduced, likely at very low cost. Simply accounting for the potential implications of climate change in decisions with respect to zoning and major public investments may be sufficient to substantially reduce the vulnerability profile in 2050 and beyond, when the implications of climate change are projected to manifest themselves with much greater force".
By: Washington Post/Associated Press
The issue:
People love to talk about the weather, especially when it’s strange like the mercifully ended summer of 2012. This year the nation’s weather has been hotter and more extreme than ever, federal records show. Yet there are two people who aren’t talking about it, and they both happen to be running for president.
Where they stand:
In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed a bill that would have capped power plant carbon dioxide emissions and allowed trading of credits for the right to emit greenhouse gases, but the measure died in Congress. An international treaty effort failed. Obama since has taken a different approach, treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the law. He doubled auto fuel economy standards, which will increase the cost of cars but save drivers money at the pump. He’s put billions of stimulus dollars into cleaner energy.
Mitt Romney’s view of climate change has varied. In his book “No Apology,” he wrote, “I believe that climate change is occurring” and “human activity is a contributing factor.” But on the campaign trail last year he said, “We don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.” He has criticized Obama’s treatment of coal power plants and opposes treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the capping of carbon dioxide emissions, but favors spending money on clean technology. Romney says some actions to curb emissions could hurt an already struggling economy.
Why it matters:
It’s worsening. In the U.S. July was the hottest month ever recorded and this year is on track to be the nation’s warmest. Climate scientists say it’s a combination of natural drought and man-made global warming. Each decade since the 1970s has been nearly one-third of a degree warmer than the previous one.
Sea levels are rising while Arctic sea ice was at a record low in September. U.S. public health officials are partially blaming unusually hot and dry weather for an outbreak of the deadly West Nile virus that is on pace to be the worst ever. Scientists blame global warming for more frequent weather disasters, with the World Health Organization saying: “Climatic changes already are estimated to cause over 150,000 deaths annually.” Others put the toll lower.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are trapping more of the sun’s heat on Earth. One study showed that 97 percent of the scientists who publish about climate in peer-reviewed journals say global warming is man-made. So do just about every major science society and institution that has weighed in.
But limiting carbon dioxide emissions from coal and oil would be costly, with billions of dollars in changes to the U.S. economy only a starting point. Similarly the price of not doing anything is extraordinarily high because of costly and deadly extreme weather. People will pay either way in taxes, energy prices, insurance premiums, disaster relief, food prices, water bills and changes to our environment that are hard to put a price tag on, says MIT economist Henry Jacoby.
A NASA study this year found the most extreme type of weather, which statistically should happen on less than 0.3 percent of the Earth at any given time, is now more common. Until recently, the most extreme year was in 1941 when extremes covered 2.7 percent of the globe. From 2006 to 2011 about 10 percent of the globe had that extreme weather, with a peak of 20 percent, the study said. That was before this year’s record extremes started.
The issue of man-made global warming is “totally missing” from the campaign between Obama and Romney, says Jacoby. It should be talked about, he says, because “we’re running a serious risk of passing a much-damaged planet to our descendants.”
By: Michael Vaughan
Two interesting issues that in the banality of the U.S. presidential campaign will likely never be discussed:
1. the extent of the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean is now the smallest observed in the three decades since consistent satellite observations of the polar cap began, according to scientists from NASA;
2. an important study finds a carbon tax would enable the United States to find the means to both close the deficit gap and revive the economy.
While the two contenders are slanging each other about tax returns and birth certificates both surely know that NASA and MIT have to be taken seriously. Mitt Romney (not MIT) made his fortune in Boston and Barack Obama went to Harvard. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has more new technology patents than most countries on Earth. Harvard has been lucky enough to have had among its alums a well-known billionaire who created Facebook plus eight who have became President of the United States.
When evidence becomes undeniable you have to wonder why those who make big decisions won’t discuss the evidence. Intelligent public policy matters. Yet the news is always obsessed about whether the teachers get their new raise or not. Meanwhile there are policy options that make a huge amount of sense that are never discussed, or even mentioned, in the daily news cycle.
The MIT study found that taxing carbon at $20 a ton in the U.S. would generate $1.5-trillion in revenue in a 10-year period, which would reduce corporate and personal income taxes, maintain social services spending and reduce the deficit.
“With the carbon tax there are virtually no serious trade-offs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced,” said John M. Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The study said the carbon tax would lower pollution by 20 per cent by 2050 and prevent oil imports from rising. It would also, most importantly, shift energy markets to clean technology.
Some Republications are coming around to the fact that the United States is facing the expiration of the “Bush” tax cuts in 2013 – the fiscal cliff. Even supply-side economists are reluctantly embracing a fee on carbon emissions. There are many global warming deniers in the GOP but others believe if the U.S. needs to raise revenue, why not just tax global warming pollution? The MIT analysis suggests that a carbon tax would be a more economically beneficial way of raising revenue than payroll or income taxes.
Additionally, the MIT report argues that a carbon tax would accomplish other important objectives. Fossil-fuel use would go down, oil imports would shrink slightly and U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions would decline. A carbon tax is tax levied on all carbon content of fuels. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping "greenhouse" gas. Carbon is present in hydrocarbon fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas – and is released as carbon dioxide (CO2) when they are burned. In contrast, non-combustion energy sources – wind, sunlight, hydropower and nuclear – do not convert hydrocarbons to CO2.
Yet, even with a carbon tax, the United States would still fall short of its long-term climate goals, which involve an 80 per cent cut in emissions below 1990 levels by mid-century. According to MIT calculations, a modest carbon tax, on its own, wouldn’t get the United States close to that longer-term mark; however, it would still make sense as a more economically efficient way of raising revenue.
If an intelligent public policy can improve the economy, reduce trade deficits, help the environment and keep the U.S. from going broke – why wouldn’t it at least be discussed in the election of the so-called most powerful person on Earth?
By: Kieran Mulvaney
As we approach the peak of this year's hurricane season, one question that is frequently asked - particularly in the wake of this summer's succession of extreme weather events - is whether hurricanes are becoming, or will become, more frequent or stronger as climate change strengthens its grip.
It's a question with which atmospheric scientists have been grappling for a relatively short amount of time, and as such the answer is something of a moving target. Were we to consult a climatological Magic 8 Ball, we might get a response like, ‘Outlook Uncertain, But Becoming Clearer.'
So we decided to do better and turn to one of the foremost authorities on the subject, Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2006, Prof. Emanuel has published extensively on the possible linkages between tropical storms and a warming planet, and he guided us through the complex haze of theory, modeling and observation.
DNews: At the risk of asking you to distill complex science into a simplistic soundbite: Is climate change affecting the number and intensity of cyclones and hurricanes?
Kerry Emanuel: Most of us think that we are seeing a climate change signal in the North Atlantic, which is by far the best observed and has been observed for the longest period of time; but I hasten to add that only about 12 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic. The other parts of the world are not so well observed.
What we expect from a combination of theory and modeling is that as the climate warms, the actual total number of these storms should decline globally, but the incidence of the severe Category 3, 4 and 5 storms is expected on the other hand to go up. And we do see some indication that the proportion of hurricanes that are intense around the world has been going up, although our data is a bit tenuous and is not for very long, so nobody has a great deal of confidence in it.
Let me add that, historically it’s the Category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes that do the vast majority of damage, at least in developing countries, so those are the ones we’re concerned about the most.
DNews: Is the theory behind this simply that a warming ocean provides greater energy for these storms to feed on? Is that a fair assessment?
Kerry Emanuel: It’s almost fair. What drives hurricanes is the flow of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, and that is proportional to the difference between the heat content of the two, rather than the absolute temperature in either of them. But it turns out that if you add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – or indeed, if you were just able to increase the amount of sunlight coming in, one way or the other – that increases the difference and so increases the potential for hurricanes, so that they could become stronger, at least theoretically.
DNews: And what would be the reason for the overall number of storms decreasing?
Kerry Emanuel: This is an interesting question. It bears on a related question, which is, ‘Why don’t we have hurricanes everywhere all the time?’ And the fact is that hurricanes are, fortunately for us, fairly rare. And yet, the conditions for hurricanes are prevalent over much of the tropics through much of the year. We’ve learned in recent decades that what stops most ordinary, run-of-the-mill disturbances from turning into hurricanes is the relative dryness of the atmosphere a couple of miles above the surface. Normally, it’s pretty dry there, but the relevant quantity is the difference between how much water is there, and how much water could be there if the air were saturated, and we call that the saturation deficit. And that deficit increases with temperature.
And because of that, as the temperature gets warmer and warmer, ironically it becomes more difficult to start a hurricane, even though once you start a hurricane, potentially it can become more intense, so you have these two contradictory things going on.
DNews: You mentioned that there is some indication tentatively of some greater intensity in the North Atlantic. Is that a consequence of better data and record-keeping in the North Atlantic, or would one expect a distinction between storms in the North Atlantic and other oceans?
Kerry Emanuel: I wish I could answer that question. I think the data in certain other places, like the western part of the North Pacific Ocean, at times in the past was better than today. We surveyed a lot of those storms with aircraft in the period between about 1945 and 1987, when that stopped for budgetary reasons. And we don’t see such a tight connection between hurricane power and temperature in the western North Pacific that we see in the Atlantic.
We’re not quite sure what is so special about the Atlantic. There are some indications that in the Atlantic kind of an alignment goes on. There are a lot of different things that affect hurricanes, not just temperature. The change in the incidence and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic has been dominated more by temperature, by thermodynamics, whereas in other parts of the world some of these other factors, which are varying quite differently, may be more influential.
I should emphasize that it’s a young science, this connection between hurricanes and climate. We’re making progress and we are beginning to see a consensus developing in certain parts of the problem, but there is still a lot of it we don’t understand.
DNews: You anticipated my next question, which is: is there coming a time when you expect you will have enough of a data set to feel increasingly comfortable with these conclusions?
Kerry Emanuel: Well, the answer is a guarded yes. I think when it comes to the global levels of activity around the world, I can see light at the end of the tunnel, that we may indeed arrive at a consensus. When, on the other hand, it comes down to measures of hurricane activity that people care about – for example, the frequency of landfall of intense hurricanes in North America – whenever you get down to that telescopic level of detail, the models inevitably disagree violently with each other, and so scientists are left without much to go on.
And so when it comes to forecasting the things that people really care about, I don’t think there’s going to be much consensus about that for a very long time. We’re going to form a very strong consensus maybe about things that don’t really matter to people. After all, who really cares how many hurricanes occur in the Atlantic Ocean? We’re really only concerned at the end of the day with landfalling intense storms, and when you get down to that level, all bets are off at the moment.
DNews: My final question then is one you’re probably not comfortable with answering: Assuming a business-as-usual scenario of fossil fuel emissions, do you feel confident in predicting how the intensity and frequency of hurricanes in, say, 2050 might look compared to 2012, or is that a prediction you’re not comfortable with making?
Kerry Emanuel: I’m not comfortable with any predictions. Seeing into the future is pretty tough. I think we have to look at this problem from the point of view of ‘what does society do, and how do we react to this’? As a problem of risk. There’s a rsk that we’re going to have more intense hurricanes. We do know that there is terrific year-to-year volatility with hurricanes; that’s true in the present climate, it will be true in a future climate. So much so that, even if there were a strong global warming signal, we might see it right away in looking at metrics over the entire North Atlantic region, but when we look at metrics that we care about, like hurricane damage – which is caused by a tiny fraction of those events – we would need to wait decades before we see a signal in that.
So we’re in an awkward position. I think hurricane scientists are becoming better and better and better at looking for keys under the lamp, and eventually we’ll find them. But the things people care about aren’t under the lamp, and it will be a long time before we find those.
Let me mention one more thing, and that is that one aspect of hurricanes that people don’t talk about enough is rain. Historically, that’s been a very big killer: for example, the second-most-deadly hurricane in the western hemisphere was Mitch in 1998, and that (deadliness) was entirely due to freshwater flooding. We’ve seen recent examples in the US with Irene last year and Isaac this year. There’s a uniform consensus – one of the few things that we all agree on in hurricane science – that warming the atmosphere will increase the rainfall from hurricanes, and that should be a major concern.
IMAGES:
Hurricane Michael -- seen here on Sept. 6, 2012, with winds of 115 mph, in high resolution infrared imagery from the NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite, was the first Atlantic storm of the 2012 season to reach Category 3 intensity. (NOAA)
Hurricane Isaac video grab (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)
By Ari Natter
WASHINGTON, D.C.--A tax on carbon dioxide emissions could raise $1.5 trillion, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that said the revenue could be used to stave off budget cuts as Congress seeks to reduce a looming federal deficit.
The report, Carbon Tax Revenue and the Budget Deficit: A Win-Win-Win Solution?, released Aug. 27, examined the effects of a carbon tax starting at $20 per ton in 2013 and rising 4 percent annually.
According to the report, such a tax would cut carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2050, encourage the use of renewables, and reduce oil imports.
“Whether we cut taxes or maintain spending for social programs, the economy will be better off with the carbon tax than if we have to keep other taxes high or cut programs to [rein] in the deficit,” John Reilly, an author of the study and the co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
Alternative to Tax Increases, Defense Cuts.
The report, which comes as Congress seeks ways to reduce the federal deficit, says the revenue provided through a carbon tax could provide an alternative to tax increases and cuts to defense spending and social programs, and could allow an extension of the Bush tax cuts that are due to expire at the end of 2012.
However, the report's authors warn that “while in principle it is possible to get very positive results from a carbon tax, in practice” it depends on the specific proposal.
One, the Managed Carbon Price Act of 2012 (H.R. 6338), introduced earlier in August by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), would place a carbon tax on fossil fuels but would set aside most of the revenues to be refunded to consumers, with the remainder being used for deficit reduction (149 WCCR, 8/2/12).
Still, many analysts remain skeptical that Congress has the appetite to enact carbon tax legislation anytime soon.
Climate legislation that would have required mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions passed the House in 2009, but the Senate version collapsed in 2010.
By: Brad Plumer
With the United States facing the expiration of a slew of tax cuts in 2013—the dread “fiscal cliff”—there has been plenty of interest in offbeat tax-reform proposals. And one idea that a few economists keep knocking around is a fee on carbon emissions. After all, if we need to raise revenue, why not just tax global-warming pollution?
A new paper from the MIT Global Change Institute lays out how a carbon tax might work in practice. The authors model what would happen if, this December, Congress enacted a small fee on carbon emissions to fend off a portion of the tax hikes and spending cuts that are scheduled to occur. The carbon tax would be levied directly on fossil fuels—on coal that comes out of the mine, say, or oil that’s shipped in from overseas—and would start at $20 per ton of carbon in 2013, rising 4 percent each year thereafter.
The authors, Sebastian Rausch and John M. Reilly, estimate that this tax would raise $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. If that revenue were then used either to cut income taxes, reduce payroll taxes, or deflect cuts to social-spending programs, the MIT authors find, most Americans would be slightly better off than if Congress simply let the fiscal cliff hit, with the Bush tax cuts and payroll tax cuts expiring automatically. (Using the carbon tax in this way would lead to an 0.02 percent bump in consumption and leisure over time.)
Now, the betting line is that Congress will do something to avert the looming tax hikes and spending cuts, so this isn’t a terribly realistic scenario. Implementing a carbon tax next year would still hurt the economy—it would just hurt slightly less than the fiscal cliff. Still, the broader point of the MIT analysis is to suggest that a carbon tax could be a more economically beneficial way of raising revenue than, say, payroll or income taxes. So even if Congress waited until 2014 or 2015 or whenever the U.S. economy has recovered, replacing other taxes with a carbon tax could still provide a minor economic boost (see the first graph below).
A carbon fee usually gets criticized for hurting poorer Americans the most—they spend the biggest slice of their income on gasoline and other energy-intensive products, after all. But Rausch and Reilly found that a lot of the distributional effects depend on what Congress does with the revenue, as shown in the chart below:
CTCorp = carbon tax used to cut corporate tax rate, CTPersInc = carbon tax used to cut income tax rate, CTPayroll = carbon tax used to cut payroll taxes, CTTransfer = carbon tax used to bolster social welfare programs like Medicaid
The green line shows how different income groups would be affected in 2015 if the carbon tax was used to fend off cuts to social welfare programs like Medicaid. Lower-income Americans would benefit significantly, while wealthier Americans would take a small hit. By contrast, the red and blue lines show the effects if revenue from the carbon tax was used to cut the corporate tax or personal income tax—in those cases, higher-income Americans would come out ahead. If, however, a carbon tax was used to cut payroll taxes—that’s the black line—then the welfare effects in 2015 are more or less neutral.
The MIT report argues that a carbon tax would accomplish a few other things as well. Fossil-fuel use would go down, oil imports would shrink slightly, and U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions would decline. On that last point, however, it’s worth noting that the carbon tax proposed by the MIT study only gets the United States a fraction of the way toward its long-term climate targets, as shown in this graph:
Blue line: MIT reference case with no carbon tax. Black line: EIA reference. Green line: Scenario with MIT carbon tax in place.
With the carbon tax proposed by MIT (that’s the green line in the chart above), U.S. emissions would be 14 percent below 2006 levels by 2020 and 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2050. That’s lower than if there was no carbon tax at all.
Yet the United States would still fall short of its long-term climate goals, which involve an 80 percent cut in emissions below 1990 levels by mid-century. According to MIT calculations, a modest carbon tax, on its own, wouldn’t get the United States close to that longer-term mark. It might make sense as a more economically efficient way of raising revenue. But the tax would either have to be hiked dramatically or combined with other clean-energy measures in order to make a significant dent in tackling global warming.
By: Zack Colman
Taxing carbon would generate $1.5 trillion, potentially giving politicians cover from making politically difficult decisions on taxes and social spending cuts, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released Monday.
A carbon tax would take pressure off Congress to find “tradeoffs” between closing the deficit gap and reviving the economy, according to John Reilly, an author of the study.
“Congress will face many difficult tradeoffs in stimulating the economy and job growth while reducing the deficit,” Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
“But with the carbon tax there are virtually no serious tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced.”
The study found that taxing carbon at $20 per ton would generate $1.5 trillion in revenue in a 10-year period. That could be used to reduce corporate and personal income taxes and maintain social services spending, all while reducing the deficit.
The study said the carbon tax also would lower pollution by 20 percent by 2050, compared with 2006 levels, and prevents oil imports from rising. It would also shift energy markets to clean technology, a sector to which the United States has already devoted much capital, the report said.
Sebastian Rausch, an assistant professor of energy economics at ETH Zurich, co-authored the study with Reilly. The study assumed full employment and was based on an earlier Congressional Budget Office report that used a $20-per-ton carbon tax.
Conservatives and liberals alike have recently explored the possibility of a carbon tax.
Right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted informal discussions on the topic in July. GOP leadership, however, firmly dismissed the idea of a carbon tax following reports about the AEI talks.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) introduced carbon tax legislation in August, the revenue from which would be used to pay down the deficit and to offset cost increases. That proposal largely mirrors one from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned.
The risk of ozone damage, scientists said, could increase if global warming leads to more such storms.
“It’s the union between ozone loss and climate change that is really at the heart of this,” said James G. Anderson, an atmospheric scientist and the lead author of the study.
For years, Dr. Anderson said, he and other atmospheric scientists were careful to keep the two concepts separate. “Now, they’re intimately connected,” he said.
Ozone helps shield people, animals and crops from damaging ultraviolet rays from the sun. Much of the concern about the ozone layer has focused on Antarctica, where a seasonal hole, or thinning, has been seen for two decades, and the Arctic, where a hole was observed last year. But those regions have almost no population.
A thinning of the ozone layer over the United States during summers could mean an increase in ultraviolet exposure for millions of people and a rise in the incidence of skin cancer, the researchers said.
The findings were based on sound science, Dr. Anderson and other experts said, but much more research is needed, including direct measurements in the stratosphere in areas where water vapor was present after storms.
“This problem now is of deep concern to me,” Dr. Anderson said. “I never would have suspected this.”
While there is conclusive evidence that strong warm-weather storms have sent water vapor as high as 12 miles — through a process called convective injection — and while climate scientists say one effect of global warming is an increase in the intensity and frequency of storms, it is not yet clear whether the number of such injection events will rise.
“Nobody understands why this convection can penetrate as deeply as it does,” said Dr. Anderson, who has studied the atmosphere for four decades.
Mario J. Molina, a co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for research in the 1970s that uncovered the link between CFCs and damage to the ozone layer, said the study added “one more worry to the changes that society’s making to the chemical composition of the atmosphere.” Dr. Molina, who was not involved in the work, said the concern was “significant ozone depletion at latitudes where there is a lot of population, in contrast to over the poles.”
The study, which was financed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, focused on the United States because that is where the data was collected. But the researchers pointed out that similar conditions could exist at other midlatitude regions.
Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, who reviewed the study for Science, also called for more research. “One of the really solid parts of this paper is that they’ve taken the chemistry that we know from other atmospheric experiments and lab experiments and put that in the picture,” he said. “The thing to do is do field work now — measure moisture amounts and whether there is any impact around it.”
“The connection with future climate is the most important issue,” Dr. Cicerone said.
Large thunderstorms of the type that occur from the Rockies to the East Coast and over the Atlantic Ocean produce updrafts, as warm moist air accelerates upward and condenses, releasing more heat. In most cases, the updrafts stop at a boundary layer between the lower atmosphere and the stratosphere called the tropopause, often producing flat-topped clouds that resemble anvils. But if there is enough energy in a storm, the updraft can continue on its own momentum, punching through the tropopause and entering the stratosphere, said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When Dr. Anderson produced data about five years ago clearly showing these strong injections of water vapor, “I didn’t believe it at first,” Dr. Emanuel said. “But we’ve come to see that the evidence is pretty strong that we do get them.”
At the same time, he added, “we don’t really understand what determines the potential for convection in the atmosphere,” so it is difficult to say what the effect of climate change will be.
“We’re much further along on understanding how hurricanes respond to climate change than normal storms,” Dr. Emanuel said.
The use of CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, was phased out beginning in the late 1980s with the signing of an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, but it will take decades for them to be cleansed fully from the atmosphere. It is chlorine from the CFCs that ultimately destroys ozone, upsetting what is normally a balanced system of ozone creation and decay. The chlorine has to undergo a chemical shift in the presence of sunlight that makes it more reactive, and this shift is sensitive to temperature.
Dr. Anderson and his colleagues found that a significant concentration of water vapor raises the air temperature enough in the immediate vicinity to allow the chemical shift, and the ozone-destroying process, to proceed rapidly.
“The rate of these reactions was shocking to us,” Dr. Anderson said. “It’s chemistry that was sitting there, waiting to be revealed.”
Dr. Anderson said that if climate change related to emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane led to more events in which water was injected well into the stratosphere, the effect on ozone could not be halted because the chemistry would continue. “It’s irreversible,” he said.
If CFCs had not been banned, the ozone layer would be in far worse shape than it is. But by showing that CFC-related ozone destruction can occur in conditions other than the cold ones at the poles, the study suggests that the full recovery of the ozone layer may be further off than previously considered.
“The world said, ‘Oh, we’ve controlled the source of CFCs; we can move on to something else,’ ” Dr. Anderson said. “But the destruction of ozone is far more sensitive to water vapor and temperature.”
By Eric Niiler
As world leaders gather to assess the planet's health, most reports are gloomy, save for a couple bits of good news.
The world's political and environmental leaders gather in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow to assess the state of the planet's health 20 years after the first such gathering in 1992. But if science is any guide, Earth still needs some help.
Several new climate studies reveal various aspects of the same foreboding problem: the atmosphere continues to warm, glaciers continue melting and seas keep rising.
But there is a tiny bit of good news -- the United States and Europe have been able to cut their heat-trapping industrial emissions by switching to less-polluting natural gas, driving fewer miles and of course, sinking into an economic recession where fewer factories are working across much of the globe.
And while North America's mild winter, warm spring and, in some areas, hot June can't be blamed on global climate change, extreme weather events do grab the public's attention. Even though it's not entirely accurate to link climate and weather, perhaps that's not a bad thing, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Science Center in New York.
"People spend a lot of time talking about the weather and love to do so," Schmidt said. "It's an odd thing because as scientists we are using people's interest in weather and weather extremes to talk about something that is connected, but isn't quite the same."
Schmidt said that rather than focusing on extreme blips in weather, it's instead important to look at changes in temperature over the long term. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are doing just that, and reported that the past 12 months from June 2011 to May 2012 were the hottest since record-keeping began in the 1880s. The month of May 2012 was the second-hottest on record (2010 was first). And it looks like 2012 will barge into the top three hottest calendar years on record as well.
At the same time, there is occasional "noise" in the Earth's climate system, explained Ronald Prinn, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That means that the linear warming trend could stagger a bit from year-to-year, or decade-to-decade depending on the cooling effects of cloud cover or the ocean's ability to soak up heat.
"If you take a 10-year running average," Prinn told Discovery News. "It's clear that world has been warming for a hundred-plus years."
Some climate skeptics have pointed to the world's forests as a likely carbon "sink" that could suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and other such gasses from burning fossil fuels. But a new study by researchers in California found that scenario might not be so simple.
As soil warms up, they found, it releases carbon dioxide made from microbes that decompose dead leaves and fallen trees. About one-third of that release comes from older soil, more than 10 years old.
"While that older material is not going to decompose really fast, there's an awful lot of it," Susan Trumbore, a University of California, Irvine, scientist who led the study, told The Washington Post.
That means that at some point in the future, the world's temperate forests could switch from a carbon sink to a carbon faucet, increasing the vicious cycle of rising CO2 causing even more CO2 to be released.
Another new study finds that Chinese officials may be cooking the books when it comes to carbon emissions.
United Kingdom-based researchers found the gap between what Chinese state authorities report as the nation's industrial emissions and the aggregate of provincial reporting has widened to 1.4 gigatons, that's about 5 percent of the world's entire CO2 emissions budget. Local officials may be padding the books to show more industrial output, while national authorities want to appear more environmentally-friendly to the West.
Either way, the new figures wipe out any gains elsewhere.
"The trends are pretty bad," Schmidt said. "All of the flattening in Europe and the U.S. are being more than matched by increases in China and India."
Despite the recent gloomy news, experts say there are solutions: replacing individual dung-burning stoves in Chinese homes with more efficient centralized power plants; developing more efficient cars, homes and light bulbs in the West; and continuing to shift away from coal as a prime energy source in both the United States and China.
"Nobody wants (another recession) as a solution to the climate issue," Prinn said. "We don't want to be hurting our economies. We need to develop new energy sources."
Unless the world gets a handle on its fossil fuel habit, experts say there's likely to be more extreme events like floods, droughts, heat waves and tropical storms.
"Without climate change we would be seeing extreme heat waves once every 100 years, now it's more on the order of 10 times in 100 years," Schmidt said. "That's going to increase. The dice are loaded, and we're loading them even more."