Last week Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton announced the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants. The United States joins with Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, and the United Nations Environment Programme; Congressional approval is not required. From the State Department fact sheet:
The pollutants targeted by this initiative remain in the atmosphere for only a few days to a few years after they are emitted. This is very short when compared to CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for approximately a century. This “shorter” atmospheric lifetime means that actions to reduce emissions will quickly lower atmospheric concentrations of these pollutants, yielding a relatively rapid climate response. Of the pollutants that will be targeted by this initiative, methane and black carbon stand out for their significant contribution to climate change, while HFCs are a rapidly increasing climate threat.
I want to like this idea. Really, I do. But I have serious misgivings.
Initially, anything that can be done is better than nothing at all. As the New York Times reports, "Officials hope that by tackling these fast-acting, climate-changing agents they can get results quicker than through the laborious and highly political negotiations conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or U.N.F.C.C.C. That process, involving more than 190 nations, grinds on year after year with incremental political progress but little real impact on the climate." If the UN process on climate is stalling, the US Congress is going backwards. So, if what I'll call the Short Lived Program has any forward momentum at all, that's more than either the UN or Congress can do.
"Researchers have identified about a dozen ways to significantly control black carbon and methane emissions. Soot can be reduced by installing filters on diesel engines, replacing traditional cookstoves with more efficient models, modernizing brick kilns and banning the open burning of agricultural waste. Methane can be captured from oil and gas wells, leaky pipelines, coal mines, municipal landfills, wastewater treatment plants, manure piles and rice paddies." Reduction of HFCs is harder; HFCs, used in refrigerants instead of the ozone-layer-destroying CFCs, are mostly manufactured in China and India, both of which have resisted efforts to find acceptable substitutes.
However....
1. Imperialism much?
The Short Lived Program, shorter: We're going to go into other countries and tell them to toss their traditional cookstoves and brick kilns, and stop burning their agricultural wastes. We're going to go into Vietnam and Thailand and tell them to aerate their rice paddies. And they're going to listen to us...just like they listen to us on mosquito nets. And clean water. And AIDS. And deforestation. And a lot of other ideas. If we're lucky.
This may, or may not, end well.
Since this is a State Department plan, it consists of action within other countries. However, many of the actions that would reduce the short-lived pollutants can also be taken within the United States. C2ES has developed a range of policy suggestions that the United States could implement to reduce soot, methane, and HFCs. All are done within United States borders...or should be, while the State Department tells other countries how to clean up their acts.
The World Wildlife Fund, while praising the concept, warns that the black carbon initiative should not block real carbon action:
‘The fact is that the big emitters like the US and Canada that are advancing this initiative have done very little to reduce CO2 emissions, the primary cause of global warming’ said Samantha Smith, Leader of the WWF Climate and Energy Initiative.
“‘Now they have developed a plan that shifts the focus to others - developing countries in particular. While support for poorer countries is important, their primary responsibility should be to cut their own emissions and address the global challenges posed by climate change.”’
2.
Short lived, or short?
The three greenhouse gases in question are all considered "short lived," meaning that they decay within decades, compared to carbon dioxide's 800-year time span. However, some boosters of the Short Lived Plan claim that quick action on these gases buys the world time to deal with the elephant in the room. Center for American Progress leaders opine: "Action now on these gases can have relatively fast benefits. A study in Science last month by an international team of 24 scientists, led by NASA climate modeler Drew Shindell, estimated the effects of initiating 14 methane and black carbon control measures. Combined with other greenhouse gas reductions, these measures would reduce total projected warming by half a degree" by 2050. (Emphasis added.)
Even blunter, the Washington Post holds out the Short Lived Program as one of two policies that would buy the world time for carbon-free technologies to catch up, as if the process of educating people in other countries is something that happens quickly and easily.
Where will the world be in 2050? Here's the catch to the Short Lived Program: by 2050, either we've figured out how to cap emissions and are holding course more or less steady at 2 degrees C, or we're in a scenario that is not stable and not compatible with an organized global community. In which case, reducing soot and methane to buy time is rather like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
3. $12 million? Really?
Compare this to the effort, largely successful, to eradicate polio: $120 million pledged from Rotary International in 1985, $9 billion to date, and some observers questioning whether complete eradication is worth the money. Both polio eradication and control of the short-lived gases require substantial education of people in other countries.
Again, with feeling: $12 million? That's all?
I want the Short Lived Program to work. One of the few hopes I see for humanity is if India, the African countries, and other nations with nascent industrial structures can leapfrog over the fossil fuel stage, much as African nations generally skipped the land line communications infrastructure and went straight to cel phones. Aside from climate, the changes are healthy - women who don't hunt daily for cookstove wood, and families who don't breathe soot, will improve their lives.
At the same time, I don't want to delude myself that changing the habits of people in other countries will buy the United States time to change its carbon-spewing ways.
But if this is such a great idea, surely we can find more than $12 million?
And if it's a small idea, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that it is the last best hope of humanity.