From the Fallows article I mentioned yesterday:

The group has sponsored research on sequestration, on post-combustion capture, and on the “cleanest” of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies—“underground coal gasification.” In this process, jets of air (or pure oxygen), sometimes with steam or various chemicals, are blasted into coal seams deep underground. They interact chemically with the coal to produce a gas that flows back up a pipe and can be burned. It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned.

“And this can be very cheap,” Sung told me. “You don’t have to mine the coal. You don’t have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried.” Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today’s standard dirty power plant.

This is fascinating. The coal industry serves as a double whammy: it has money, which means lobbying power, and that lobbying power opposes renewable energy because it competes with coal. But it also employs a bunch of people, which means all those people, and their families, oppose a shift to renewables too. Say what you will about green growth, I'm fairly sure that in the power industry, a major wind or solar installation is going to employ far fewer people than a coal plant with associated mining activity (though to be fair I need to check that. I'm simply assuming there are only so many openings for solar panel squeegee-ers). But what if coal started employing fewer people? Could that significantly change the political calculus?

Carbon capture and storage

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is somewhat controversial, for two reasons, I think - one reasonable and one less so. The technology basically involves capturing emitted carbon from power plants and pumping it into geological reservoirs where it'll hopefully sit for... a while.

The reasonable reason to be skeptical about CCS is that we don't really know how well this will work. Will the carbon stay underground? Will it start leaking out? If so, how fast? Who knows?

My personal opinion is that that second, somewhat less reasonable reason, is that major supporters of climate action feel CCS is cheating. They view it as a dodge, a way to go on using bad coal to make power when the right thing to do is to commit to true renewables. As such, CCS is morally wrong. There is something to this in a sense. In the long term, what we need is to transition our energy systems, not find stopgaps that support the existing system.

However, that doesn't matter, because the thing is, coal's not going away. The equation goes like this:

1) Coal is bad. No, seriously, really bad.

2) But having no electricity is even more bad.

3) Energy needs in places like China are growing so quickly that even going gangbusters on true renewables won't eliminate the need to also build a bunch of new coal plants. China (and eventually others) will need to build both if it wants to meet its future electricity needs.

3) Therefore, if we don't find a way to make coal less bad, we're all screwed.

Without CCS, we lose. It doesn't matter whether we like the technology and the principle behind it or not. James Fallows wrote a fairly high profile article on this recently, but he merely popularized it; I've heard this story kicking around for at least a couple of years.

It's somewhat depressing, then, that I've seen two articles within the last couple of weeks on failures in major CCS projects. The Australian Zerogen project is apparently being abandoned, and the UK Powerfuel project went into administration through lack of funds.

On the plus side, there's one American project that still appears to be on track. And Fallows sees lots going on (and moving fast) with clean coal in China. So, as with renewables, perhaps we can hope for a convenient deus ex China.

Natural gas

Natural gas is an interesting industry from a climate perspective. It emits, but less than either coal or oil. It has been seen by some as a bridge fuel on the road to renewable energy. In the short term, I think it benefits from emissions controls. In the long term, it suffers - but my guess (and it's a pretty off the cuff guess) is that the long term here is at least 10-20 years.

It's also been in the news a lot. On the one hand, the US has seen recent large growth in available reserves: there's a lot of gas to be had in the US. This means it's selling for incredibly cheap prices at the moment. On the other hand, there's record demand in the UK. The problem here is that natural gas can't be conveniently shipped around the way oil can. So you pretty much have to build a direct pipeline (not very practical from the US to Europe, but this is how Russia gets its gas to the European market) or liquify it and ship it in tanks. The latter option requires special facilities, and to date not a lot of those have been built, although plans are in the works for more as the tension between isolated supply and isolated demand grows. Result: markets for gas are isolated right now. Some specifics:

1) The EU relies heavily on Russia. The three largest holders of gas reserves have historically been Russia, Iran, and Qatar. Geographically, they could all conceivably be linked to the EU by pipelines, but in practice, only Russia has. Iran is too unstable. Qatar is probably stable enough, but is hemmed in by problem states: Iran, Iraq, Syria.

2) Russia also relies heavily on the EU. Once you sink billions into building fixed pipelines to your primary market, you have some serious incentives to play nice (although Russia has still pulled a few stunts.) However, my impression is that Russia would find it somewhat easier to diversify than the EU; it's got a huge potential market - China - on its other border. There have been Russia-China pipeline projects planned in the past, and I haven't fully followed up on them, but they seem to have run into problems and stalled out a lot. I'm not entirely sure why this is, honestly; it seems like a very logical move.

3) Gas is probably a weaker lobby than it could be in the US. If it could export effectively, that would give it markets in Europe and China, as well as strengthening prices domestically. Overall, it'd become a more important and more prominent industry. That could be good for building an emissions reduction coalition - in part because a lot of US natural gas is dealt with by US oil companies. So theoretically this could blunt their commitment to opposing emissions controls. This I'm very unsure about, though. I don't fully understand the structure of the gas market yet.

Why a multi-round treaty process?

[Today's actual post!]

There seems to be a general attitude in large-scale environmental negotiations that the right way to approach them is to try to get lots of people to sign on to relatively light requirements, and then hold multiple subsequent rounds of negotiation in which you slowly ratchet things up. This is actually sort of an intuitively satisfying model, I think - I mean, it seems like how you might intuitively approach a hard issue - but I've had oddly little luck finding scholarly discussion of treaty-making that discusses this attitude explicitly or breaks it down into an actual theoretical process. I'm sure it must be out there, because the attitude definitely exists and someone must have tried to fit a theory or theories to it, but I haven't yet been able to find them. I've thought of three possible ones, though:

1) Best diplomatic practice: one could postulate that the best (or even, only practical) way to get large concessions is to stair-step toward them: secure one set of small concessions at a time, using each as the new baseline from which to launch a renewed negotiation.

2) Harnessing learning effects: one could postulate that one can, at any given time, only get people to commit to relatively small expenditures; however, each execution of each commitment causes learning, which reduces costs and ambiguities, freeing up resources for another round of commitments. Hence, negotiation should be built to encourage and accommodate that process.

3) Normative spiral: Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink have proposed a "spiral model" for uptake of norms such as human rights at the state level, which could also apply here. Without going into it in detail, basically the model postulates that uncooperative states can be pressured into making small tactical concessions. Although these concessions are initially viewed as onerous and externally imposed, after a period of adjustment and acculturation, the state takes them up as its own norms and begins to behave in manner consistent with the concessions, viewing the new regimen as part of its normal behavior and identity; this in turn makes it more open to taking further steps. In other words, a spiral in which initial concessions change states, creating space for further concessions, and so on. If we view environmental treaties as promulgating norms of environmental behavior, we can imagine this spiral process occuring through the treaty process, with each round consolidating and building on the effects of the prior round.

But I haven't actually found an instance yet of any these explanations (or others) being mobilized to provide a formal theoretical underpinning for actual observed practice. Surely they must be, and I just haven't found it.

Basically, we're screwed

[Wednesday's post! Which is appropriate, as it is full of woe.]

I have this theory that there are really only two (successful) ways out of treaty negotiations* - at least, environmental and economic negotiations (I'm uncertain whether defense treaties fit).

Let me approach this backwards, by talking about why I think the climate change negotiations have been so relentlessly unsuccessful. My belief is that this has been the case because the issue area combines two characteristics that, in combination, close off the two standard success routes.

First, the issue area is systemic rather than bounded. By this I mean that the implications of a major energy transition promise upheaval throughout virtually all areas of industry and human life. There are potential losers in every industry. (Of course, there are also by the same token potential winners in every industry - but the losses are easier to engage with than the gains, which are ambiguous and difficult to predict; and humans are risk averse to start with.) In a bounded issue area, a limited set of arenas is affected, meaning that potential losers are a limited set.

In bounded cases, it is therefore easier to build a coalition of supporters from industries and arenas that are not subject to direct disruption from the proposed treaty, assuming any reasonably large or widespread potential gain from a treaty. The area of ozone depleting substances was this sort of area: it ultimately only required disruption of a small subset of the economy. In a systemic issue area, there is no potential coalition of unaffected supporters to be accessed. You have to try to convince lots of people who will be affected that they will ultimately be winners from the deal. That's much harder, as long as the path to winning remains ambiguous. And, of course, the more systemic an issue is, the larger its total costs likely are, which makes everything harder in a general way.

So climate change is systemic, and that makes it hard. Do we have examples of successful systemic treaties that might suggest how we could get out of this trap? Well, kind of. I would argue that both the WTO and the EU are systemic deals. And here's the second problem. Both of these deals probably succeeded in large part because the benefits they provide are club goods - you cannot access them without signing on. This can force nations to sign on even when they're facing systemic effects. But a climate treaty would provide a public good; there's no pressure to agree.

So: treaties have two escape routes to success. If they're bounded, you can escape via domestic support from unaffected parties. If they're not bounded, you'd better hope they're either a club good or can be transformed into one somehow. Thus far, all the treaties I've looked at fit into one or the other of these (or are an epiphenomenal result of one of the starred options below). If they're both systemic and public, you might be screwed - and that's climate change.

Lately I feel I should tag all my posts with either "optimism" or "pessimism".

* There are also two ways to get a desired outcome that don't really require treaty negotiations: have a hegemon who can force everyone to do what they want, or have an actor or set of actors that are independently motivated to provide your public good whether or not others cooperate. Neither of these applies to climate change either.

How well is China doing?

I've been on a bit of a posting holiday while recovering from being sick and miserable, but hey, I'm back!

There's been a few interesting things in the news of late. No, no, not about Cancun. Here's one thing:

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/12/14/chinas-incipient-renewables-boom/

Earlier this semester I was up at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs talking with Mark Levine, a fairly senior guy up there who's group leader for their China Energy Group. He knows, in other words, a lot about what China's doing in terms of clean energy. Someone in the group asked him, in essence, whether China made everything the developed world was trying to do irrelevant because of its potential to simply blow everyone else out of the water in terms of emissions. His response was that he didn't think so at all; in fact, he said, they'd been doing analysis and his opinion based on that was the China was much closer to peaking its emissions and beginning to climb back down than most people thought.

I wasn't sure what to think about this - Mark Levine strikes me as a knowledgeable and pragmatic guy, but that was a pretty optimistic statement - but this seems like a supporting data point, with China set to beat its own targets in solar and wind for 2015 and 2020, and "Provincial plans to build out nuclear, rail and wind far exceed[ing] national targets."

This is a nice bit of optimism for its own sake. But it cheers me for another reason. Many people would say the most critical factor in making the Montreal protocol on ozone depleting substances work (Montreal being the gold standard for a successful prior environmental treaty) was that one large player had incentives to move ahead unilaterally: the US essentially decided it was economically worthwhile to go ahead with reducing ODS on its own. That unilateral movement overcame learning barriers and brought down costs for relevant technology, such that eventually joining in on action became economically sensible for more and more countries. Increasing numbers of signatories over time, and increasingly rigorous commitments over time, effectively tracked the falling costs of action as more players joined in and costs came down. (That's one story, anyway - not necessarily the emphasis every analyst would give.)

The mechanism here is a little different, I think. It's not so much that China has decided it is economically sensible to concentrate on zeroing out emissions. I have a research slave - er, undergraduate research assistant - that I'd set to learning about energy industry drivers in India. What he said to me recently was that it didn't seem like there was much competition between different parts of the energy industry; solar didn't compete with coal, because India is growing fast enough that it needs as much as it can get of each. This is true, as well, of China.

But whatever the driver, it's heartening that there IS a driver for the widescale unilateral installation of large amounts of clean power. Whether China can engage in near-term radical emissions reductions or not, its widescale installation plans, if fulfilled, will bring down costs and overcome learning barriers for other countries, such that more of them might be in a position to do so. Even if China doesn't sign in the near term, China's work might lead to more signatures on a more rigorous emissions reduction treaty.

Sneaky carbon leakage problems

I was remarking to my advisor the other day that one thing low-carbon electricity had going for it was that it's hard for international leakage to occur. Leakage is a potential problem in manufacturing in carbon-restricting countries: if reducing the amount of carbon produced in manufacturing a car means that the manufacturing becomes more expensive, then that manufacturing and its attendant jobs may leak out to other countries that haven't chosen to regulate carbon.

But right now, in any reasonably sizable country, electricity pretty much has to be manufactured locally, because we don't have storage and transmission technologies that are efficient enough to make moving electricity long distances economically sensible. It isn't really vulnerable to leakage. You can't ship your electricity production to China, even if you make it more expensive to produce at home.

Efficient long-distance transmission is something that most people see as a useful development for transition to a low-carbon economy, because it increases overall efficiency of the grid (saving emissions directly), increases grid flexibility, and could allow exploitation of otherwise inconveniently located green resources (for instance, parts of Russia are quite sunny and could be prime solar generation sites, but these parts of Russia are largely quite far from the population centers.) I was speculating, however, that an unintended consequence of real advances in efficient long-distance transmission could be to allow for leakage of electricity manufacturing to less carbon-controlled countries.

Another sneaky potential problem pointed out by my Russian renewable energy book is a potential shift of manufacturing of renewables technologies to high-carbon manufacturing sites. Per Overland and Kjaernet:

There is also a more negative scenario, in which Russia instead uses heavily subsidized energy from abundant coal, natural gas or nuclear power to produce renewable energy input factors such as silicon [for solar panels] and hydrogen. Some  Russian actors are already thinking in this direction. For example, the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is the main shareholder of the conglomerate Basic Element and the world's biggest aluminum producer Rusal, has aired the idea of establishing polychrystaline silicon production at Sosnovy Bor outside St. Petersburg. The point would be to take advantage of the cheap energy from the nuclear plant located there.

(Overland and Kjaernet, Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation, 2009)

The larger point here, I suppose, is that transition from a low-efficiency high-carbon economy to a high-efficiency low-carbon environment involves massive shifts in the location of and control over important resources, business interests, and so on. The way those shifts flow through the global economy will be complex and unpredictable - though a lot of those unpredicted outcomes will look like inevitable reactions to existing interest structures once we're analyzing them in hindsight.

Defender of the fur seal!

Having sung the praises of work-blogging elsewhere, it remains the case that there are days when nothing major really gels. So let me quote you Henry Elliott talking about the fur seals. Henry Elliott was an early conservationist who reported on the fur seal crisis and became a major advocate for them, working with policy makers on solutions to the sealing problem. In fact, according to IMDB there's a 2005 documentary called Henry Wood Elliott: Defender of the Fur Seal!

Here he is on private interests' influence on international cooperation around fur seal conservation:

That these facts were not presented by our agents and 'experts' to the Paris Tribunal was due to the ignorance of them by those men: they were not equal to the proper conduct of this case, either in making it up in Washington, or in presenting it to the Court. President Harrison was duly warned, in the spring of 1891, of that serious deficiency in these agents and 'experts.' But he ignored the warning; the lessees [private entities with interests in sealing] were pleased with them: and that settled it in the departments!

...this [conservation measures] was attempted in 1895 and again in 1898 by the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives: but that bill was defeated in the Senate by the agents of the land and sea butchers of this herd. ... They have made no open argument in defence of their infamous work - they cannot; but they have suborned departmental officials, Senators and Congressmen to that end. 

Private interests must be entirely eliminated from the situation now and forever...

 (Henry W. Elliot, "The Loot and the Ruin of the Fur-Seal Herd of Alaska," The North American Review, 1907)

So hey - the idea of distortion of environmental regulation by private interest pressure and the use of industry-backed "experts" presenting inadequate and inaccurate facts: at least a hundred years old! Surprising? I'm not sure if I find it so or not.

Fur seals

I’m turning back to reading about actual treaties for while. Currently I’m reading about the background to the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, which, for reasons I won’t bore people with at the moment, I think might be a useful case.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the population of the large Alaskan fur seal colony dropped from around 5 million to around 120,000. This was due in large part to pelagic sealing; that is, sealing carried out in the ocean from ships, largely by other nations such as Britain/Canada. The US, which owned the land on which the seals lived and bred, had the motivation and capacity to husband this resource by restricting hunting – as long as the seals stayed on land. But the US had no control over the seals when they were in the open ocean, where they fed. Sealing in the ocean quickly descended into a classic tragedy of the commons situation. And with the seal population dropping rapidly and not under its control, even the US, which otherwise preferred to husband this resource, had incentives to maximize its share of the dwindling resource by hunting as rapidly as possible on land.

The international community attempted a number of rounds of solutions to this, and it took quite a while to find one that worked in a lasting way.

The first multilateral solution was an attempt to control destructive sealing by introducing a set of regulations, created by a European arbitration court, that limited the season during which seals could be hunted (banning hunting between May and July – since hunting was impractical during the long Alaskan winter, this effectively limited hunting to August, September, and parts of October), and limited the weapons with which they could be hunted (no firearms).

Both of these probably looked like good ideas when they were enacted (many hunting restrictions limit hunting to a restricted period in the fall; firearms are more effective killers and thus banning them should reduce kill sizes).

Both turned out to actually accelerate the depletion of the seal herds. The months of August, September, and October are the months during which female seals care for their pups, going out into the open ocean repeatedly to hunt and returning to feed pups. Concentrating hunting during the fall meant an absolute slaughter of these female seals; and each female killed on the ocean counted double or triple because pups left behind were unable to care for themselves and died. And while pelagic sealers had originally used firearms to hunt, once these were banned, they discovered that spears were actually more effective. Firearms discharges would scare seal herds away, but spears were quiet and hunters could go on killing without causing widespread flight.

What’s the lesson? Pick your poison:

1) Regulation is never the answer. Externally imposed solutions are typically stupid because they are typically promulgated by people who aren’t part of the activity in question and don’t fully understand it.

2) We should regulate but do so slowly, after months or years of careful study. Moving quickly means making mistakes that may cost is more than waiting would, while moving slowly allows us to do things like study the cycles of seal life to determine what kinds of restrictions would be most effective.

3) We should move quickly to experiment with solutions (regulatory and otherwise). Mistakes are unavoidable - how could we have known that banning firearms wouldn't be effective until we tried it? - and therefore we need to be aware that a period of unproductive or limited-productivity experimentation is inevitable.

Voting by coal-powered states

It's Monday, I'm sick, and I just finished running a colloquium. Hooray! Here's some more quick thoughts on state interests and voting. Today's question: does the list of states that get more than 80% of their power from coal better predict climate legislation voting?

The short answer: No and Maaaaaaybe.

From last post, the list of coal power states is: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. To this, I add Hawaii, the only state which gets most of its power (75%) from oil.


With regard to the House, the picture using this list is actually almost exactly the same as the picture using coal production. 65% of Democrats from coal-power states voted for climate legislation, vs. 85% among states that get less than 80% of their power from coal. This compared to 66% yes votes from coal-producing states. To the extent that there's an effect, it appears to be almost exactly the same level (caveat: this list of states seems to me to be a slightly bluer - or at least more purple - list, so perhaps the effect IS stronger, but is masked by a difference in ideological background noise.)


With regard to the Senate, my best guess at the picture of probable voting should a future bill actually get a vote looks like this:


Likely Yes
Akaka (HI)
Inouye (HI)

Maybe
Brown (OH)
Bayh (IN)
Rockefeller (WV)


Lean No and Likely No
McCaskill (MO)
Byrd (WV)
Conrad (ND)
Dorgan (ND)


To me this looks much like the Senate list from the coal production analysis; there's definitely grounds for claiming an effect though there are more Senators from these states that are willing to talk than I might naively have predicted. It feels to me like there's a hair more effect here - one fewer "yes", one more "no" - but that's just a feeling gathered from reading about these senators' positions and it may or may not be valid. In this analysis, the role of Montana is played by Hawaii.


In what should probably be a standard disclaimer, I should note that I'm under no illusions that any of this is going to plausibly yield anything statistically significant.

State power mixes

I spent most of today finding and putting together raw data on state-by-state breakdowns of electricity generation mix. I can now report:

Coal:
There are 15 states for which coal makes up 60% or more of electricity generation: Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming.

Of these, there are 8 states that derive more than 80% of their power from coal: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Would this list be a better predictor of voting than coal production was?

Oil:
There is 1 state that derives more than 60% of its power from oil: Hawaii (75%). There are no other states that derive more than 20% of their power from oil (even Alaska derives only 17% - its biggest single power source is natural gas).

Natural Gas:
There are 2 states that derive more than 60% of their power from natural gas: Nevada (69%) and Rhode Island (98%).

Nuclear:
There is 1 state that derives more than 60% of its power from nuclear: Vermont (74%). Interestingly, there were an additional 7 states for whom nuclear makes up the single largest fraction of their power from nuclear: Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia (though in several cases that meant only 30-40%).

Hydroelectric:
There are 2 states that derive more than 60% of their power from hydroelectric: Idaho (80%) and Washington (70%).

Non-Emitting/Renewable:
There are 11 states that derive more than 50% of their power from non-emitting sources (nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal): Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington. Of these, only 4 derive more than 60% of their power from non-emitting sources: Idaho, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

If you eliminate nuclear, the 11 drops to 3: Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. If you keep nuclear and add in emitting but renewable sources such as wood and biomass, you gain Maine.

Wind and Solar:
The top users of wind power currently are Iowa (14%), Minnesota (10%), North Dakota (9%), Colorado (6%) Kansas (6%), Oregon (6%), South Dakota (5%), Texas (5%), and Wyoming (5%). Go plains states.

The top users of solar power currently are Nevada (0.46%) and California (0.32%). That includes both photovoltaics and solar thermal. Ouch.

Miscellaneous:
New York is the most diversified state, the only state that derives at least 10% of its power from four different sources.

Russia!

Russia is a depressing topic for climate people. I had hoped that Indra Overland and Heidi Kjaernet's Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation (2009) would dispell the gloom a bit, but it largely hasn't, because it largely hasn't convinced me that anything about the picture I posted yesterday is majorly wrong.

For example: Overland and Kjaernet identify the northern settlements as some of Russia's highest-potential niche opportunities for renewable energy, because these areas tend not to be connected to the existing grid and whose power needs must therefore currently be served by expensive and doubtless logistically annoying shipments of diesel fuel. Renewables such as wind, they suggest, would be a natural solution to this problem. Moreover, these settlements isolation from the main grid and its subsidized natural gas prices would reduce competition that would challenge renewables.

However, here are the obstacles that these relatively optimistic authors list for this high-potential niche:

1) Corruption: there's a local black market based around the value of the diesel fuel, which can be skimmed and sold/traded by local power (literally and figuratively) brokers. This corrupt network would likely resist change. "In some locations with largely non-monetized economies this phenomenon is so widespread that diesel functions as the main currency..." (40)
2) Bureaucratic incentives: which, for reasons I'll elide, make it difficult to actually figure out what each community needs and uses in terms of energy, thus complicating effective planning and strongly discouraging private investment.
3) Population trends: population in the far-flung northern regions is declining, a trend which Russia tends to encourage. Why should Russia want to invest in a shiny new energy system for these low-value, declining areas?
4) The geography itself: such remote settlements will also have difficulty bringing in maintenance staff and spare parts for renewable energy installations in a timely manner, making them a less than optimal testing ground for a somewhat experimental renewable energy system.

Whew. And this is for a high-potential niche.

Thus far, I see two additional rays of sunshine from this book.

First, it argues that the renewables resources picture is not as bad as it looks in some ways. For instance, although Russia is largely northerly, it has a climate which in large swathes of the country leads to high proportions of clear days. Solar panels don't need heat, they just need solar radiation (in fact, they function less well at high temperatures). So that's interesting. It doesn't change the fact that the Russian economy's huge reliance on fossil fuels is a huge obstacle; but perhaps at least there aren't two huge obstacles. (Caveat: this book takes a relatively optimistic tone - so take with a grain of salt, here. In particular, it doesn't engage with the issue of winter and daylight hours.)

Second, Russian businesses have begun investing in polycrystalline silicon production facilities. Polycrystalline silicon is the stuff used to make solar panels - as well as a lot of computer components. As uses of this material increase, manufacturers are facing shortages. It'll be an increasingly important base material as time goes on. If Russian business really gets into this material it could be come an important industry. (The caveat here is that their global share is still quite small, so who knows? Plenty of other countries are investing too.)

In addition to this, Russia's current new polycrystalline silicon facilities are being built to serve the Chinese and US markets. Of these two, I'm most interested in the former. Russia has a lot of obvious interests in being able to make money in China, and geography gives them one natural advantage. Some of those products are ones that could be pulled by an emissions reduction drive on the part of the Chinese - natural gas, polycrystalline silicon, nuclear technology? So, if China really commits to emissions reduction (which, arguably, it has already begun to do), could it pull Russia with it? Or more accurately, how much could it pull Russia with it?

There you go: the most optimistic things I have to say about Russia.

Interests at the country level

Let's talk about country-level interests in climate negotiations!

There are really six entities that matter in climate negotiations. In roughly this order of importance, they are:

1) China
2) The US
3) The EU
4) Japan
5) India
6) Russia

You can argue about the order of importance of the last three. Quite possibly India should go above Japan, but I tend to think India appears to have more influence in this area than it actually does, because it can free ride off of some of what China does.

I tend to subdivide these countries into three groups, as follows:

1) Looking for Green Markets: The EU and Japan

Both of these entities have significant existing technological dominance in renewable energy technologies. This makes sense; both of them have little in the way of fossil fuel resources, and thus are particularly vulnerable to energy security issues. Therefore, both invested early and effectively* in green tech - the EU countries more in renewable energy, and Japan more in efficiency technologies, is my impression. This means both countries have two major interests in an emissions-reduction treaty: first, it will increase the market size for products where they have, at least at the moment, technical dominance. Second, with little in the way of domestic fossil fuel resources, they'll be among the first to be forced to transition off of fossil fuels anyway. Therefore, they have an interest in a treaty that will smooth out the potential competitive disadvantage of transitioning before everyone else by requiring countries to transition along with them.

2) Stalling for Time: The US and China

Both the US and China share significant domestic fossil fuel resources - especially coal - and up-and-coming renewables industries. It's in their interests (or their short-term interests, at least) to hang on to their access to cheap, plentiful coal for as long as possible. And even assuming both countries buy that it's in their long-term interests to do something about climate, it's still in their short-term interests to stall and emphasize research funding and innovation over emissions caps right now, since this could give them time to achieve a greater level of dominance in the renewables and efficiency technology industries, before those markets really take off.

3) Wild Cards: India and Russia

In the long term, India could look a lot like China; right now, it doesn't. China is thinking and working hard on making green technology a profitable future area for it. India isn't, or at least not nearly at the same level. Although India is talking a fair amount about renewables, it's lagging on actual performance; the only major Indian success in green tech is Suzlon, which is a mid-range player in the already crowded and fairly mature field of wind turbines. I don't get the sense that India has figured out how it would make money off a green "revolution"; how it does (or IF it does) will determine how it jumps in the long term. In the short term, it's clearly in India's short-term interests to be obstructionist on emissions reduction; it needs to develop, and has little to sell.

Russia is a wild card for a different reason - because it's hard to imagine what possible benefit Russia thinks it might get from action on climate change. Its economy is largely based off the sale of fossil fuels, and (while it may or may not be true) it's easy to argue that climate change's actual effect on Russia will be more mixed/equivocal than outright bad. Russia is a wild card because it's my belief that if climate change action ever gets going seriously, it could also be seriously destabilizing to Russia. I see only two rays of hope: first, in the short term, natural gas is cleaner than coal or oil, so if, in the short term, climate change action leads to a shift from these to natural gas as a first step, this will benefit Russia. Second, Russia does have some capital in nuclear power, which could be part of the solution.

So! Tomorrow, more on Russia. I have an entire book, which I'm halfway through, entitled Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation, and it's by two very optimistic Scandinavians named Overland and Kjaernet.


* Actually, the US has also invested quite a lot in fossil fuel alternatives research; but not so effectively. I believe this is partly because corn ethanol turned out to be a very bad bet, but I'm unsure if that's the whole story.