>> Rich Howarth: Well good afternoon, everybody.
And welcome to the Leading Voices Series.
My name is Rich Howarth.
I'm professor in the Environmental
Studies program and it's my pleasure
to welcome Mr. Todd Stern back to Dartmouth.
Mr. Stern is a member of
Dartmouth's class of 1973.
He went on to the Harvard
Law School but then went
on to an illustrious career in public service.
In recent years, he served as the special envoy
for climate change at the State Department
where me plays a lead role in developing
U.S. international policy on climate.
He's President Obama's Chief Climate Negotiator.
Mr. Stern is also deeply involved in all of
the processes surrounding the development
of domestic climate and clean energy
policy in the Obama Administration.
Now going back in time, during the Clinton
years, Mr. Stern served as the Staff Secretary
at the White House where he was a gatekeeper
of sorts in relation to issues of domestic,
economic and National Security
policy, bringing various documents
and whatnot to the President for decision.
He also was put on various special assignments,
and these included an assignment to deal
with climate policy in the Clinton years.
So from 1997 to 1999, he coordinated the Clinton
Administration's Initiative Fund Global Climate
Change acting as the Senior White House
negotiator for the Kyoto Protocol.
Mr. Stern brings extensive experience in the
private sector to his work in government.
Before joining the Obama Administration,
he was a senior fellow at the Center
for American Progress and a
partner at the law firm Wilmer Hill.
He's a member of the Council
of Foreign Relations.
He's taught at the Kennedy School of Government
and he's a -- he holds appointments at the --
an appointment with the German
Marshall Fund of the United States.
Today, he is going to talk to us on the theme
of International Cooperation on Climate Change,
the Path Forward and I look
forward to his presentation.
[ Applause ]
>> Todd Stern: Hello everybody.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate the introduction and I want to
say, what a pleasure it is for me to be back
at Dartmouth, back on campus, back in Hanover
and it is particularly gratifying for me
to be able to return here in a capacity that
allows me contribute, at least a little bit,
to the vibrant intellectual give and take
for which Dartmouth is so well known.
So thank you for the invitation and for the
chance to walk around the green a little bit
and down some familiar paths and for the
opportunity to spend some time with all of you.
I am especially glad that this Leading
Voices Series has decided to devote one
of its sessions this year to climate change.
The truth is, that I think public
consciousness of this issue has faded
in recent years despite the ongoing drum
beat of evidence, month after month,
year after year that the globe is
warming and our climate is changing.
Media coverage about climate change
is down almost 40 percent since 2009
and public attention has diminished
according to any number of recent polls.
Attention to the issue has even appeared
to wane in typically green Europe.
I saw in one of my various trips, a column
in the financial times it
started a sentence saying,
with climate change off the political
agenda, people aren't talking
about it anymore in the way that they were.
And those who are talking are too often yelling.
An issue that should concern us all and
that is likely to undermine our wellbeing
and disrupt the world of our children has
become the latest political hot button.
Viewed by too many in political life
as a third rail they can't touch.
Climate change has long been a
partisan issue but when you see a parade
of conservative candidates publicly recanting
the apostasy of having acknowledged at one point
that global warming is real, you
know you've entered wonderland.
This is not healthy.
We can talk past each other, close our ears, put
our heads in the sand or join the local chapter
of the Flat Earth Society, but here's
the thing, the atmosphere doesn't care.
Its temperature will continue its
inplacable rise, with all the consequences
that that entails, unless we act to stop it.
Michael Gerson, George W Bush's
trusted and excellent speechwriter
and advisor wrote a telling piece
in the Washington Post earlier this year
called, "climate in the Culture War."
He analyzed how the issue of climate
change has reached its current toxic state
and then said this, "however interesting
the sociology may be it has nothing
to do with the science at issue.
Even if all environmentalists were socialists
and secularists, and insufferable and partisan
to the core, it would not alter the
reality of the earth's temperature."
And that reality has been demonstrated over
and over again, most recently in the work
of the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature
Project led by Dr. Richard Muller,
who began his comprehensive assessment as a
avowed climate skeptic and ended it convinced
by the clear evidence that global warming is
happening and is caused by human activity.
He actually had interesting opt ad recounting
his experience in the New York Times just
in the last few days called, "The
Conversion of a Climate Skeptic."
And his conclusion is emphatically
shared by the best and brightest
of the global scientific community including
our own National Academy of Sciences.
Whether we look at the steady increase in global
temperature, the buildup of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere to the highest level in a half
million years, the march of warmest ever years,
nine of the ten warmest ever
has occurred since 2000.
The dramatic shrinking of mountain glaciers
and arctic sea ice, the accelerating rise
in sea level and acidification of our oceans.
The tale told by the evidence is
consistent and it is compelling.
These things matter.
They warn of droughts and
floods and extreme storms.
They warn of shortages of food and
water and National Security risk.
They warn of what 11 retired generals and
admirables - admirals wrote about in 2007,
climate change becoming "A force multiplier for
instability in some of the most volatile regions
of the world," and these things
also warn of the catastrophic --
the threat of catastrophic
and non-linear change.
A power company executive was quoted
in the New York Times last week saying,
"We've got the storm of the
century every year now."
And it's starting to look that way.
Consider, a searing heat wave struck Moscow in
2010 spawning massive wildfires killing tens
of thousands and cutting Russia's
wheat crop by 40 percent contributing
to a sharp spike in world food prices.
The 2010 floods in Pakistan were
the most expensive natural disaster
in Pakistani history killing nearly 2000
people, affecting 20 million and causing 9
and a half billion dollars in damage.
Heavy rains triggered floods and landslides
in Columbia in 2010 and again in 2011 killing
over 600 people and causing nearly
7 billion dollars in damage,
the largest natural disaster
in the nation's history.
The Queensland's flood in 2010 and 11 was
Australia's most expensive natural disaster
with a price tag as high as 30 billion dollars.
In 2010, the second "hundred year drought" in
five years in the Amazon led to net emissions
of 5 billion tons of CO2, a stunning amount
when you realize that that's roughly equivalent
to a 5th of all global CO2 emissions
produced that year from burning fossil fuels.
In Greenland, more ice melted in
2010 than any time since the start
of accurate recordkeeping in 1958.
This year, Colorado, is ebossing
has been ravaged by wildfires
that have burned an area six
times the size of Manhattan.
In 2011, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and
Minnesota all had record-breaking wildfires
and Texas lost an area to fire larger than
Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
And of course, we are all
aware of the severe drought
that is currently scorching nearly 40
percent of the continental United States.
The largest stretch of country
that dry in nearly half a century
and affecting 88 percent
of our nation's corn crop.
Now scientists will tell you correctly that
they cannot attribute any particular event
to global warming because nature doesn't
leave that kind of signal but they also say
that these are exactly the kinds of events that
we can predict for a warmer world; and remember,
these are events that we are seeing
now with temperatures up since 1900
about 1 point 3-degrees, compared
to much, much larger increases
that are predicted if we
don't take strong action.
In short, while there is certainly
much more to understand, and there is,
about climate phenomena and how they work,
a levelheaded assessment of what
we know already should impel us
to act with vigor and determination.
Today, I'm going to talk about where we
stand both internationally and domestically
and offer some thoughts about where we need
to go in our efforts to limit climate change.
I just taught a class so my
voice is getting a little thin.
Let me begin in the international
arena and I want to make,
I want to make a preliminary point.
Climate change negotiations are very difficult.
They are difficult, first, because
climate change is not a conventional
environmental issue.
It implicates virtually every aspect of
national economies including industry, energy,
transportation, agriculture, and forests.
So limits on emissions make countries nervous
about economic growth and development.
This is an economic issue every
bit as much an environmental issue.
Negotiations are also difficult because
of the multilateral climate body,
the U.N. framework convention on climate
change, includes over 190 countries.
These countries are grouped into various blocks
with criss-crossing agendas and priorities.
There are long standing north south
resentments that continue to rile the debate.
Negotiations are governed by a consensus
rule of procedures, which in effect,
enables any small handful of
determined countries to block action.
So this is inherently challenging stuff.
Right now, we are at an interesting
juncture in light of what occurred
at the negotiating session that
happened in South Africa last December.
The juncture from which we can look
back and reflect on what we've learned
over the past three years and
from which we can look ahead
to a revised model of international
climate action.
At the time President Obama took office in
early 2009, is also the time that I came
in to my possession, hopes were
running high around the world
that a major new treaty would be concluded
in December of that year in Copenhagen
at the annual meeting of the so
called Conference of the Parties
of the U.N. Framework Convention.
Conference of the Parties being referred to
in the vernacular as the C.O.P. It is one
of these meetings, by the way, every
year so the first one goes back to 1995
and Copenhagen was number 15 and we're
heading toward number 18 in December.
We believed, however, from the outset that these
high hopes were built on a dubious foundation.
The prevailing paradigm of climate
negotiations was still that a firewall existed
between developed and developing countries as
they were defined in the original 1992 treaty.
With all specific obligations to cut
emissions assigned to developed countries.
This paradigm is embodied
in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol
and the Berlin Mandate in
1995 that gave rise to it.
The U.S. never thought that this paradigm
was legitimate and in 1999 we saw it
as an unworkable basis for moving forward.
As a matter of substance, you cannot meet
the climate challenge by focusing only
on developed countries when developing
countries already account for some 55 percent
of global emissions from fossil fuels
and will account for 65 percent by 2030.
Indeed, if you throw in the manufacture
of cement, which is a big producer
of greenhouse gases, developing
countries already account
for something like two-thirds of emissions.
You cannot build a system
that treats China like Chad
when China is the world's
largest second economy.
Largest emitter.
Second largest historic emitter, will be twice
the size of the U.S. in emissions in a few years
and is even caught up to the European Union in
per capita emissions according to recent number
from the Nederland's Environmental
Assessment Agency.
And this is, by the way, no
knock or criticism on China.
Their economic success is remarkable
and they have surely lifted more people
out of poverty faster than
any other country in history.
They are also determined to become the
world's leading producer of renewable energy.
They're doing a great deal at home.
But the Chinese emission numbers do
mean that if we are going to be serious
about taming climate change we need to
include in any kind of international agreement
that we are engaged in negotiating all the
major emitters, both developed and developing,
accounting for some 80 percent of global
emissions and then build out from there.
Further, apart from the substances,
a matter of U.S. politics,
any agreement that would require action by us
and not by emerging economies would be
dead in the water in the U.S. Senate.
Remember that all the way back in 1997,
the Senate voted 95 to nothing for the
so called Byrd-Hagel Resolution declaring
that the U.S. should not accept commitments
to reduce greenhouse gases unless developing
countries accepted such commitments as well.
And that was at a time when the balance
between developed and developing was a lot more
in toward developed than it is now.
Securing Senate support for climate
agreements is difficult under any circumstances
but unless all major countries are seen as
committing to real action it will be hopeless.
Of course, actions of different
countries need not be the same.
Addressing climate change is never
a one size fits all proposition,
but actions by all need to be seen as fair.
With this in mind, our focus for the climate
meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 was clear.
First, while we supported the objective of
negotiating a new legally binding agreement,
we made clear that we would only consider such
an agreement if it fully included at least China
and the other emerging economies.
Second, whether the product of Copenhagen
was to be a legally binding agreement or not,
we thought it crucial that all major players,
developed and developing, agree to real action,
commit to take real steps, even
if that commitment was political
and moral commitment rather
than a legal commitment.
And third, we thought it important that
everyone's implementation be subject
to genuine transparency so that
all countries could have confidence
that others were acting as well.
If you look at the major climate meetings of
2009, 10 and 11 through this lens you will see
that we accomplished quite a lot.
Copenhagen is often remembered for its chaos,
for the spectacle of world leaders
improvising an agreement in the final hours
to avoid meltdown and for the dashing
of over inflated expectations,
but it was also important.
The Copenhagen accord included for the
first time agreement by all major countries,
developed and developing, to implement
a set of listed actions and to do
so with international transparency.
It thus struck a blow against
that firewall I alluded to.
It also ushered in a new
more bottom up structure
in which countries put forward
their own pledges.
The structure we thought was essential
for bringing in the emerging economies
in a manner roughly parallel to
the industrialized countries.
Copenhagen also included important
provisions on funding, technology
and forest provision -- forest protection.
Although the full conference of the parties in
Copenhagen refused to formally adopt the accord,
owing to the hard opposition of a small handful
of countries, the next year's meeting in Cancun,
Mexico, adopted a fleshed out 30 page version
of the original 2 page Copenhagen accord
and with full support by
the parties at that time.
Last December's meeting in Durban South Africa
took further steps to make the Copenhagen
and Cancun agreements operational for
the period up to 2020, writing guidelines
for the transparency regime,
outlining the structure and functions
of the New Green Climate Fund and taking steps
to set up a new technology center and network.
But the headline out of Durban was something
else and that was an understanding reached
in another short decision, which
has been dubbed the Durban platform,
to negotiate a new legal agreement
by 2015 taking effect after 2020.
For us, the pivotal features of the Durban
platform that will shape the contours
of any new agreement negotiated under it are
that it is to be applicable to all parties.
That's the language right from the decision,
and that it applies in the world of the 2020s.
Applicable to all matters because it means
that that 1990s firewall, according to which,
an effect obligations were applicable to some
but not to all, that that firewall is finished.
The 2020s -- the 2020s matter because
by that time we will be 30 years removed
from the original 1992 division
of countries, making that division
with each passing year ever more anachronistic.
And none of this means that all countries will
be expected to limit emissions in the same way.
Differentiation among countries, among parties
is accepted as a premise of climate diplomacy.
It's built right into the original treaty.
But in the world of the Durban platform
it can no longer be the differentiation
of two distinct categories of countries.
Rather, it will have to be the differentiation
of a continuum with each country expected
to act vigorously in accordance
with its own evolving circumstances,
capabilities and responsibilities.
Now, these initial observations about the Durban
platform are only the start of the discussion.
A live and active debate is just
beginning about the kind of legal agreement
that should take affect after 2020.
For many countries, the core assumption
about how to address climate change is
that you negotiate a treaty with finding
emission targets stringent enough
to meet a stipulating global goal,
in this case, holding the increase
in global average temperature to 2-degrees
centigrade above pre industrial levels.
And that treaty in turn drives national action.
This is the kind of unified field
theory of solving climate change.
You get the treaty right.
The treaty dictates national
action and the problem is solved.
Now, this is entirely logical.
It makes perfect sense on paper, but the trouble
is it ignores the classic lesson that politics,
including international politics
is the art of the possible.
Nations, as a rule, do not act in ways they
see as contrary to their core interests
or in disregard of what a great British
colleague of mine once described
as their compelling constraints whether
those constraints are economic or political.
If countries are told that in order
to reach some stipulated global goal,
they must accept targets that their
own leadership sees as contrary
to their core interests in
growth and development,
those countries are likely to say no.
These basic facts of life -- and they're
very much a part of climate negotiations --
suggest that the likelihood of all
relevant countries reaching consensus
on a highly prescriptive
climate agreement a low.
And this reality in turn argues in favor
of a more flexible approach that starts
with nationally derived policies.
Back in 2009, Australia put forward a
proposal for a so-called schedule structure.
It's lingo borrowed from the trade world
in which each country would
offer up its own commitments.
Such a scheme could be legally
binding at an international level.
It could be legally binding in a sense
that whatever commitments countries were putting
forward were legally binding nationally in terms
of their own laws and regulations.
Either of those are possible.
This kind of approach would have a far
better chance of being broadly acceptable
to all parties, but the risk of a
system like this is that the policies
and targets countries put
forward prove to be too modest.
So the question is whether a
system could be structured,
this kind of a system could be
structured but could be done in a way
that would increase its over all ambition.
For example, the system might include a
six-month period after countries submit initial
or tentative offers in which other
governments and experts and people
from civil society could
react and urge modifications.
But the fundamental question of how to
encourage ambition in an agreement that is
at the same time broadly inclusive seems
to me, to be the fundamental challenges
that we will face in designing a new system.
The keys to making headway in this early
conceptual phase of the new agreement is
to be open to new ideas that can work in the
real world and to keep our eyes on the prize
of reducing emissions, not to
be hung up on old orthodoxies.
In addition, we have to develop
an agreement that builds
in the capacity for modification over time.
Remember, we're talking about an
agreement that would be completed,
an instrument that would be
completed by the end of 2015
but would not take effect
for at least five years.
No one in 2015 is going to have
a full understanding of what sort
of reductions will be possible that many years
in advance and moreover unforeseen changes
to the good, in technology, let's say in
the mid 2020s, they make mitigation offers
that were put forward in
2015 or even 2014 obsolete
so the new agreement should give
countries flexibility to modify
and update their mitigation commitments spurring
more and more aggressive action over time.
In addition to dynamic nature of development
around the world, means that expectations
for individual country action can
no longer be frozen or in time.
The developing country of 2015 may
be the top five economy of 2025.
This kind of flexible legal -- evolving
legal agreement cannot, could not guarantee
that we meet a 2-degree goal but insisting
on a structure that would guarantee
such a goal will only lead,
in my judgment, to deadlock.
It is more important to start now with a regime
that can get us going in the right direction
and that is built in a way that maximally --
that is maximally conducive to raising ambition,
spurring innovation and building political will.
Now, I want to shift gears slightly.
As much as we need to make the U.N.
climate regime work effectively
and promote aggressive real world
action, we also need to recognize
that the U.N. body can't do everything.
So we should expand the field of
international engagement to include other,
more informal groupings, smaller
groupings of countries prepared to act
in ways that can make a real difference.
The point of such coalitions is not to negotiate
agreements, debate the meaning of treaty clauses
or grand stand about the imagined
sins of our rivals but to act.
To produce results.
To get something done and
efforts like these are starting.
In 2009, the countries of the G20 agreed
to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.
We collectively spend nearly 500 billion dollars
a year on such subsidies with only about 15
or 20 percent of them going
to the bottom 40 percent
of the population in developing countries.
These are largely perverse incentives
bolstering already lucrative energy sources
that we need to use less of, not more.
There are certainly far better
ways to deploy our funds.
The G20 countries now need to follow
through and implement what was a very good
and very constructive commitment
but now they need to implement it.
By the way, that was a proposal that
was driven by the United States.
The Major Economies Forum on Energy and
Climate is a group of 17 major developed
and developing economies that
we established in 2009 building
on a structure created by President Bush.
The MEF as we call it and as we
established it has a two track mission first
to facilitate negotiations in the U.N. climate
body and to focus on action that this group
of countries accounting for some 80
percent of global emissions do on our own.
In 2009, the MEF spawned a new coalition
that's known as the Clean Energy Ministerial.
It's led by energy ministers
of essentially the same group
of countries and a few additional ones.
And focused on spurring the
development of clean technologies.
We think that the MEF also has real potential
to drive a much more aggressive
agenda going forward.
Focused on large-scale actions.
Kind of like the fossil fuel subsidy pledge,
that this group of countries
can undertake on our own.
Another example.
In February, Secretary Clinton announced a new
effort, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition,
committed to reducing what I call
short-lived climate pollutants.
Such as methane, black carbon,
that's basically soot and HFCs.
Together, these agents usually regarded
as small, a small part of the problem
but if you put them all together, they account
for over 30 percent of current global warming.
They also account for millions of
premature deaths and extensive crop losses.
We started with six countries
and have already grown to some 20
and we just started this in February.
So we already have some 20
countries and 10 non-state partners.
We have set up a science
advisory panel and brought
on other key players, like the World Bank.
And so far have 20 million
dollars in committed funds.
We are implementing scaled up real world
initiatives to attack large sources of emissions
such as methane from landfills
and from oil and gas production.
Black carbon from heavy-duty diesel
engines and HFCs that are used
in refrigeration and air conditioners.
Still another example.
Global research alliance on agricultural
greenhouse gases was launched in 2009,
now includes 30 countries led by New Zealand.
We're a part of it.
It is dedicated to reducing
emissions from a sector,
agriculture that currently produces
15 percent of global emissions.
These initiatives and others like them are
not a substitute for multilateral action
in the UNF triple C but our mission,
our fundamental mission with regard
to climate change has to be to produce results
on the ground and if initiatives like
these can help us get things done,
then my view is, more power to them.
Now -- after a brief drink of water -- now,
I'd like to turn for the remaining time,
to domestic politics and policy, which
are directly and importantly related
to anything that happens internationally.
We know that international
agreement on climate is critical
because climate change is a
quintessential global commons problem
where countries won't act unless they
have confidence that their partners
and competitors are acting as well.
But the real key to bringing down emissions
is national action and the action that is
at the heart of the matter is the transformation
of the energy base of our economies.
So let's take a quick look at
what the United States has done
over the past three and a half years.
Although large-scale legislative
action was blocked in 2010,
President Obama has accomplished a
great deal through executive action.
In the transport sector, accounting for some
35 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,
the President has put in
place historic new standards
that will nearly double the fuel economy
of our cars and light trucks to 54
and a half-miles per gallon by 2020.
Dan Becker, a long time climate
activist and director
of the Safe Climate Campaign called it -- it
was quoted in the New York times calling it --
"the single biggest step that the
American government has ever taken
to cut greenhouse gases," and we've also
introduced the first ever efficiency standards
for heavy duty vehicles.
In the building sector, accounting
for 40 percent of U.S. emissions,
the Department of Energy, led by our Noble
Prize-winning Cabinet Minister Steve Chu is
leading an aggressive effort to boost the
efficiency of buildings through stepped
up appliance standards that
will affect virtually everything
that uses energy inside buildings.
And this effort is making a difference already.
In 2005, the Energy Information Agency
projected that CO2 emissions from buildings
by 2030 would increase 53
percent as compared to 2005.
So this year, the same agency, the EIA,
made a projection for on the same issue,
the energy in buildings, over the
same time period, 2005 to 2030.
IEA now projects a 2 point 4
percent decrease in building energy
in that time period rather
than a 53 percent increase.
A part of this is attributable to
slower economic growth but only a part.
Better energy efficiency is a big, big factor.
In the power sector, EPA recently
issued regulations for CO2.
Carbon. For new power plants that cannot be
net using coal unless the resulting emissions
are captured.
So the standard way in which coal has been
used in power plants can't be done anymore
for newly built plants, unless,
and this is a possible --
this is a real technology that is possible,
the emissions are essentially
stored, captured and stored.
Boosted by major investments
under the 2009 recovery act,
the U.S. has also doubled renewable energy
during the President's first term from sources
such as wind, solar and geothermal.
And the Administration is also
pursuing a multitrack R and D approach
under the leadership again of Steve Chu of the
Department of Energy and this includes first,
funding a new agency that's known as ARPA-E
to support early stage research aimed
at developing game changing energy technologies.
ARPA-E gets its name from
being modeled on this --
the famous DARP, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which is responsible for a host
of innovations to include the Internet, stealth
technology used for defense and so forth.
Second part of the three-part harmony on R and
D is the creation of energy innovation hubs.
These are large mission-oriented research
efforts that bring together top researchers
from academia, industry and
government laboratories.
The first three hubs were for
energy efficient buildings,
nuclear reactors and fuels made from sunlight.
The President recently proposed three
new hubs for smart grid technologies,
batteries and energy storage
and critical materials.
All of these things some of
them sound quite technical.
They are technical but they are very important
to the use of energy and the reduction
of the use of energy in this country.
Third prong of the strategy on R and D,
establishment of 46 energy frontier research
centers mostly university-led teams working
on basic research to overcome technical
impediments to clean energy development.
This R and D effort, at the end of the day,
may prove to be more important
than anything else we're doing.
The best hope for really containing climate
change is likely through major advancement
in technology and so government R and D is
crucial and there are plenty of people who walk
around and insisting that the only thing
government should do is get out of the way
and let the private sector do everything but
our history tells a very different story.
Technological step change has been aided by
government engagement over and over again
in our history from railroads to the
interstate highway system, aviation,
telecommunications, the Internet and so forth.
More recently federal research
support helped lay the groundwork
for more horizontal drilling techniques that are
in the midst of revolutionizing the production
of natural gas and the altering
U.S. energy landscape.
Natural gas is not perfect but it's half as
polluting as -- in terms of climate change --
as coal and so this is an important development.
One final point, since 2006, according
to the International Energy Agency,
U.S. CO2 emissions have fallen 7 point 7
percent, which is the largest reduction
of any country in the world in that time period.
Meanwhile, the latest figures from --
these are confusing initials acronyms.
The energy -- the International Energy Agency's
based in Paris International Agency and Energy.
The Energy Information Agency is a U.S. agency.
It's the statistical agency for energy.
And the EIA, EIA's latest figures for
the four months ending in March show
that U.S. emissions are 14
percent lower than in 2005.
A lot of that difference between what
the international agency reported,
the 7 point 7 percent decrease, which
is the numbers are about a year old,
and these new numbers are
precisely the switching of fuel
and power plants from coal to natural gas.
And partly because of these
new drilling techniques
which have helped drive down the price of gas.
Now, there are many reasons for this overall
U.S. emissions decline that I'm talking about.
Some relate, of course, to the broader economy.
The economy is growing slower, you burn
less fuel and you have lower emissions.
And some of it relates to the fuel
switching that I just talked about.
We have a fly that wants to -- seeing
if he wants to say something here.
[laughing] But these statistics -- but
they also relate to measures that we talked
about undertaken by the Obama Administration.
And let me say, these are
statistics that very few people
around the world would have
predicted probably even a year ago.
In short, the President has made real progress
on climate and clean energy on the strength
of his executive authority,
but for the action of --
action of the scale that we need to
transform our economy, there is no substitute
for national legislation; and this
truth brings us back to the question
of the political challenge of climate change
in our country because national legislation
of scope and reach requires a broad
base of engaged public support.
Such support is not easy to come by.
Climate change by its nature
is a tough issue politically.
It involves -- if you stop and think about
it, short-term costs for long-term benefit.
Its dangers seem distant and can be crowded
out by the more pressing concerns of the day.
It's complicated and the
link between global warming
and natural disasters often feels uncertain to
people precisely because scientists can't say
that global warming caused
this particular event.
There can also be a sense, I think,
of issue fatigue that can set in,
born of the difficulty of making rapid progress.
The natural propensity of the pressed give
equal time to both sides of any issue even
when the evidence lies overwhelmingly
on one side can leave people confused.
And then, of course in addition,
ideological interests have worked overtime
and fairly successfully to make this issue in
the minds of many politicians too hot to handle.
What I think we need is a straight
talking, straight shooting conversation
that explains what's at stake in
climate change and why we need action
to accelerate the transformation
to a clean energy economy.
We can and we should make clear that there are
immediate non-climate benefits to doing this.
Building America's competitive
future since clean energy will be one
of the defining industries of the 21st century.
Making our air cleaner.
Protecting our health against
conventional pollution.
But we also need to make
clear that the severe risks
of climate change make this
transformation essential if we care
about sustaining our health, our
prosperity and our National Security.
Climate change is what makes the transformation
of our energy system an engagement
of necessity, not an engagement of choice.
On December 12th, of last year, the
economist wrote in its online blog,
that 100 years from now, this is a quote.
"One hundred years from now, looking back,
the only question that will appear important
about the historical moment in which
we now live is the question of whether
or not we did anything To
arrest climate change."
Now, I, myself, wouldn't go that far.
We are surely dealing with other seismic issues
in this historical moment that we live in,
but the underlying point
of the blog is on target.
While potent issues of the moment
will always command our attention,
we must also take the long view acting
now to avoid crisis down the road.
So we need to present the case
both the short-term benefits
and the longer-term imperative
in a sober and persuasive way,
not alarmist but not pulling punches either.
The benefits of action are
manifest and the costs manageable.
We also need to go beyond the usual
suspects to find trusted figures,
including people from business and the
military who can speak to a broad constituency.
My own conviction is that if you had the 500
CEOs of the fortune 500 companies in a room
and you talked to them about climate
change the vast majority would recognize
that this problem is real, serious
and calls for a concerted response.
Exactly what that response should be is
a subject -- fair subject for debate.
But if we can at least establish the
priority of developing such a response,
we will have taken an important step forward.
Finally, we need energy, the
humankind, which can be found
in large supply in places like this.
In Dartmouth.
Campuses across the country.
Among young people who's stake in what we do
now about climate change couldn't be higher.
Your future is now.
Paving the way for broader national
and international action on climate
and energy won't be easy for all the
reasons that I have already outlined,
but it can be done and we need to start.
Once again, thank you very much for the
invitation to come back to wonderful Hanover
and to share some thoughts and if anybody
has questions, I'd be happy to take some.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Mr. Stern: I'll drink some
water while you're thinking.
Yes.
>> Audience Member: [inaudible]
>> Mr. Stern: You know I --
thank you for the question.
I'm -- Oh I'm sorry, the question was,
I forget the name of the organization.
>> Audience Member: The American
Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.
>> Mr. Stern: The American Council for an Energy
Efficient Economy ranked the U.S. 9th among
nations in energy efficiency behind such
other countries as both the U.K. and China
and basically what did I think about that?
So it's a good question and I have
to tell you that I saw that headline.
I have not looked at it closely.
I have -- I would like to understand
what the metrics are that they use.
There's no question at any number of other
studies that I've seen that China, for example,
is much less energy efficient than many
countries including the United States.
It's not close.
So it may be that that study is looking at
some recent rate of improvement or something.
I'm not actually sure.
Look, energy efficiency is highly
important part of the puzzle.
Energy efficiency is what's going on in the fuel
efficiency standards that I've talked about.
Energy efficiency is what's going on in the
appliance standards that Secretary Chu is
so aggressively pushing for buildings.
Energy efficiency is the thing
which some level costs the least
because it may indeed cost something to
put in the initial investment but usually
over some period of time and usually
not a vast period of time you make back
in savings what you spent up front.
So I made sure to be driving a
hybrid car when I came into my job
and my hybrid car costs a little bit more
than a non-hybrid version of the same car,
but I don't know whether I get the money back
in two years or three years or what it is,
but I absolutely get the money back
because I drive 500-miles an a tank.
So I use a lot less gas.
So it's very important.
I can't speak to the 9th
-- to the ranking of 9th.
I think the U.S. has more to do but is
actually doing quite a bit and the ranking is
at least not consistent with
some of the things I have seen.
Yes.
>> Audience Member: I have two questions
but I'll hold the second one until later.
>> Mr. Stern: Okay.
>> Audience Member: I'll
start the first one now.
I think a number of people would agree that
the U.N. process, after a couple of decades,
is probably going sideways at best and that
-- you mentioned two particular initiatives,
the Major Economy's Forum and G20 and
it's a bit disappointing, however,
that you go to the State Department
website and the last press release
on the Major Economies Forum was like 2010.
There has been very little happening
there and no information at all
if something is indeed happening.
And G20, I don't think even has a website
that addresses these issues and I'm --
that is something that the State Department
could take a huge leadership role in.
What are your thoughts?
>> Mr. Stern: Well, you're telling me
something that I didn't know about the --
[laughter] about the website
for the Major Economy's Forum.
That's our baby.
So there's -- nobody else
is responsible for that.
I would, I would say a couple of
things about it and certainly think
that we should have more information
up there if it's not there.
The MEF, we started the MEF with two purposes
in mind, as I think I said in my remarks.
One is to be a forum where the major
players could get together at a high level.
These are ministerial meetings.
17 or 18 or 19 people sitting around a table
just can have a different kind of conversation
than 190 parties at a lower level.
Speech a fine, microphones
and in a U.N. kind of room.
So we started it so that
ideas could be tested probed.
People could talk to each other.
Not just make speeches to help make progress in
negotiations and that has absolutely happened.
There is never a deliverable, if you
will, out of those kinds of discussions
and we deliberately, from the very
beginning decided that there wouldn't be.
There's Sort of a chair summary that's put out.
I don't see any reason why those shouldn't
be made available but we're not trying
to produce a concrete result
out of that part of it.
The second part of our focus was to
have these countries in their own right,
not as part of a big large organization, focus
on issues that they could work on themselves
that we could work on together,
given that this group
of countries is 80 percent
of the total emissions.
In 2009, there was a bunch of work that
was done early on, first half of the year
on various sorts of technology
road mapping, if you will.
The MEF met at the leaders level that
year in L'Aquila, Italy, the G20, G8,
and the MEF all met together in July, I think.
And at that meeting, the leaders charged their
energy ministers to carry forward this work
that had started in the MEF that gave
rise to this -- Clean Energy Ministerial,
which is an ongoing group that works on all
sorts of things like harmonized standards
for various sorts of electrical
appliances and a whole host of areas.
In the period of time between
2009 and 2010 and 11,
really almost all the MEF
focus was on the negotiations.
We have decided that we want to kind of get
back to this other portion of the MEF focus
and we have started that this
year in our MEF meeting in Italy.
This past April, we had a discussion about
this and are now looking for ideas at scale
and of kind of consequence that we could try
to get this group of countries to work on.
Certainly there -- the message ought to be put
out more but we are quite focused on doing that.
G20, I can't speak to so much.
Yes.
>> Audience Member: Hi.
Thank you for coming today.
My question is about how constantly when
we talk about the legally binding treaty
versus the bottom of flexible approach, the
European countries often would like decide
with having a legally binding treaty.
How does their mind set differ from
the American mind set in this way
because I'm sure they have the
same economic interests that --
because they're just as or many of them are
almost as developed as the United States is?
What's the difference there?
>> Mr. Stern: Or more developed sometimes.
[laughter] There's a really --
it's a really good question.
You're completely on target in your assessment.
The question is fundamentally the
difference between an E.U. approach,
which is very much focused on a kind
of topped on legally binding agreement.
The kind of one that I was
talking about in my remarks
where you have a temperature goal in mind.
You agree to targets that are lined
up to that goal and you go from there.
Look, I think that the -- there
is a significant difference
between the E.U. and the U.S. mind set.
Interestingly, not because we have a difference
in our view about the importance of the problem
and sometimes differences among countries
are more explainable kind of on that basis.
That some countries are more
committed to the cause and some less.
I wouldn't say that's the case
between the U.S. and the E.U..
But I think a couple of differences, one is
that actually the politics are quite different.
You -- your assumption was that they must be
sort of similar because we are at similar levels
of development, but actually
they are quite different.
The green politics, the environmental politics
in Europe are very strong and very influential
so that whereas we in the United States
need to be always mindful of what --
in that art of the possible phrase what is
possible in light of a lot of resistance.
The kind of resistance that
you saw defeating the climate
and energy legislation that
was put forward in 2010.
Made it through the House but not the Senate.
Politics of the issue in Europe tend to
pull governments toward the green side.
It's almost exact opposite of the way
the politics work in the U.S. so part
of it is that but by no means only that.
I think there's also just a kind of
different European mindset with regard
to the way we approach problems
and the kind of instinctive sense
that you have a problem is negotiate a treaty.
I think there's probably some influence in the
way they work in the European Union and so forth
but it is a less pragmatic kind
of approach, I guess I would say,
than the U.S. We're not conceptually
against a legal agreement.
We're really not.
We are trying to be mindful of what is doable.
We are very skeptical about the
capacity of other major players
like China, India, Brazil, and so forth.
The sign up for legally binding commitments.
We are mindful of the extraordinary challenge
of getting anything that's in the nature
of international treaty ratified
in the United States.
So that's -- we, unlike any other country in
the world, have a provision in our constitution
that requires a two-thirds majority vote.
So that's always hard.
I mean, I was saying in the class that I taught
this afternoon, I was pointing out the example
of a law of the sea, which has the support
of industry, support of the military.
Has been around since the 1980s.
Secretary Clinton gave it her
full college try this year.
Testified in the Senate, which is an
unusual thing in a situation like this
and we still couldn't get it done.
If 34 senators who have some notion
of that the U.S. sovereignty or this,
that or the other thing is going to be
in some sense impeded and you get blocked
and so I think that we look at other countries.
We look at our own kind of inherent situation
and we look -- we basically ask the question,
what can we do to help solve the problem?
We can just keep butting heads.
It's got to be legally binding.
China has got to do it legally binding.
We won't do it unless you do it
but then they're not going to do it
and we can just keep butting heads or we can
say okay, maybe there's another way do this.
That's what we did in Copenhagen.
All right.
And in Copenhagen, which was a kind of a chaotic
mess in a variety of ways but quite important,
we and other -- a number of other
countries focused on a different structure
that wasn't legally Binding but
it was quite binding nonetheless.
It was politically and morally binding.
And all countries including China,
India, and Brazil and the others agreed
to take real -- never done that before.
Never agreed to sign up for
anything internationally.
Never. All of a sudden, all of the major
countries said if we will take the following set
of actions, specific and targets, okay.
So you say it's not binding.
You could also ask if it is binding --
I mean, an international relations,
what's actually going to happen?
Probably not going to have a big
enforcement penalties and all that.
You could in theory but it's not likely.
We look and say how can we get something done?
Kind of the American kind of character,
I think, tends to be pragmatic.
If we can't do it this way,
can we do it that way?
Maybe that way is not as good ideally as
the first way but at least we can move.
One more. I'm talking too long.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
>> Audience Member: In your opening remarks,
you mentioned a lot of interesting things
that are happening in regards to public support
and media support towards climate change.
So what are your thoughts on how
can we overcome the fact that images
and narratives tried policies and when it
comes to climate change models and graphs
from scientists are very
abstract, and so therefore,
how can you foster this public support in
an era where we're more afraid of terrorism,
the economy going down or other more concrete
dangers that we can experience right now?
How is there -- is the United States or is
any organization, international or national,
doing anything to bring this
issue to light again?
>> Mr. Stern: Well, that is a really
important question and it's a hard question,
and it is what I was talking about in
my remarks, the inherent difficulty
of climate change in a world where there's
a lot of other things that are pressing.
I guess I think a few things.
I think that we need to drive a more aggressive
conversation about these issues than we have.
I think that -- I take your point about images.
I actually take it and agree with it
but I think it's quite possible to,
in the hands of the right kind
of communications people to,
make things vivid if the effort is put into it.
I think you also have to look for
ways in which what we're doing
that helps climate change
also helps more immediate --
in more immediate ways so there
are in essence co benefits.
I mean if we're trying to build a clean
energy economy that actually is going
to be a very important thing
for U.S. competitiveness
and U.S. job creation in the 21st century.
I mean, China is go whole hog.
I mean China is going to eat
our lunch if we're not careful
on the production and selling
of green technology.
I mean, this is -- this problem
is not going away.
So they need to have cleaner energy
technology is going to be one
of the biggest industries of the century.
So it is an affirmatively good thing and
it's good right now to start doing things
that would improve our competitive
position and make us leaders in that way.
Also, when you reduce various kinds of
pollution that affect climate change, it also --
the pollution has an immediate impact.
If you are reducing the use of coal, you are
also going to reduce pollution that has effects
on health and clean air and water and so forth.
So I think what you can't do -- I think you
can't simply only talk also climate and not talk
about any of the other immediate things.
What you also can't do is try to hide the
climate change element of it and just talk
about clean energy as if there's no
climate component because then there's --
climate at some level is the most fundamental
driver and if you are just going to talk
about clean energy and somebody's
going to say we really don't want to do
that because it costs more money or we create
more jobs if we put more into fossil fuels,
you will have lost the argument
if you hide the climate rational.
So I think you have to do both things.
Look, if I could wave a wand, if I had an answer
that could solve this problem
quickly, I'd be doing it right now.
It is a very, it is a very challenging issue.
>> Audience Member: Well, I
think we should say thank you.
[applause]
>> Mr. Stern: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Mr. Stern: Thank you all very much.
I enjoyed it.
