The White House has released a report charting progress on several energy fronts that is clearly aimed at setting the stage ahead of President Obama's expected announcement next Monday of the first regulations restricting carbon dioxide from existing power plants. (It's been a very long journey — abetted by an important Supreme Court decision – since President George W. Bush tried to restrict carbon dioxide from such plants and quickly reversed course.)
One interesting facet of the report, "The All-Of-The-Above Energy Strategy as a Path to Sustainable Economic Growth," is how much of the progress it describes — particularly in reductions of petroleum and coal use — came as a complete surprise. (Read "Why Energy Forecasting Goes Wildly Wrong," a recent paper in the Journal of Energy Security, for some background on this consistent phenomenon.) Here's one graph that shows how this works:
There's plenty of value in the report besides the reminder not to pay too much attention to predictions. But I still think the president needs to do more than proclaim "all of the above." Among other things, Obama needs to spell out more clearly how he plans to clamp down on leakage from natural gas production, sustain investments in basic energy research despite lower energy prices and also overcome barriers to the deployment of non-polluting energy technologies.
On a related front, it'll be interesting to see if the White House tries to use the power plant rule as leverage in moving beyond the fight over the increasingly irrelevant Keystone pipeline extension. In 2011, I wrote, "This particular pipeline has a good chance of dying on the vine in any case if and when easier, less expensive sources of transportation fuel come online" and that appears to be what's happening.
Over all, the report, and the hints of what's coming next week, show that the White House is largely on a wise track. And it's a track that synchronizes well with an important pitch for a new post-treaty approach to climate negotiations outlined by former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle in Yale Environment 360 last week. Wirth and Daschle see failure ahead if the goal in late 2015 at talks in Paris is a binding document:
Rather than strive for an elusive, binding global treaty, the idea is to encourage countries to make strong national commitments in their own economic self-interest and then roll those up in the Paris agreement, which would not take the form of a treaty and thus would not need to be ratified. Countries would be motivated to take these actions in response to competition, both economic and political; international peer pressure; and the aspirations of their own people. The overarching goal is to spur national action to bend the carbon curve downward in a meaningful and measurable fashion, giving greater certainty to the private sector to innovate and invest in low-carbon technologies. This is the world's best option for accelerating progress and averting catastrophic climate change.
It's a remarkable and creditable shift away from the 20th-century approach, which focused on binding, but unenforceable, targets and timetables that would never be accepted by the countries that mattered most (the United States and China). "A triumph of climate pragmatism," indeed.
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