And now the Senate steps up to the plate

It's not a home run by any stretch of the imagination, but the Senate's counterpart to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill (a.k.a. ACES) that the House narrowly passed earlier this year at least gets global warming onto first base. There's bad and good in the awkwardly titled Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, of course, and it still won't get us anywhere the kind of greehouse gas emissions levels than even the conservative climatologists say are necessary. The differences between the bills are worth exploring.

The sections that most pique my curiosity are devoted to emissions offsets. It's a subject that gets much attention in the Senate bill than in ACES, which is both a plus and a minus. Without offsets, goes the conventional wisdom, there's no way U.S. industry can hope to meet its emissions targets. (Which are slightly more aggressive than the ACES bill.)

The problems with offsets are too numerous to enumerate here. Even advocates of systems that allow individuals and corporations to claim or buy credit for someone else's emissions-reductions efforts acknowledge them. For example, New Scientist magazine recently included the purchase of carbon offsets in a list of things you can do to "Better Your World." But unlike most of the other suggestions, it comes with big question mark: "Does it do any good?"

There are three general sorts of offsets. One involves investing in projects that directly cut emissions. Tapping methane from Brazilian landfills, for instance, or giving Mongolians cooking stoves that burn firewood more efficiently. The reductions in emissions can be measured and so appear clear-cut. But in some cases these projects would have happened even without your money. If so, then nothing has been offset.

Another type aims to soak up greenhouse gases from the air. Planting trees is the favourite, because they absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, and the amount removed from the air is measurable. But how long will the offsetters look after the trees? If the forest isn't permanent, your offset is at best delaying, rather than preventing, warming.

The third sort of offset is the least certain, but potentially the most valuable. Many offsetters now invest in green energy in developing countries: wind turbines or solar panels in African villages, for instance. If the panels deliver electricity to people who didn't have it before, no emissions have been directly prevented. But if it works so well that neighbouring villages invest in similar schemes, then it could help pave the way to a low-carbon future.

In other words, setting up an offset project is the easy part. Ensuring the carbon emissions say out of the ecosystem requires perpetual monitoring -- or eternal vigilance, if you will. This is much harder, and more expensive, than tearing down a coal-fired power plant and replacing it with a solar-thermal generating station.

The senators responsible for the new bill -- Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are the ones most closely associated with it, but they're not claiming sole authorship -- at least recognized this problem. They wrote 16 sections to deal with eligibility, verification and oversight. Here's the first four:

Section 731. Offsets Integrity Advisory Board. Establishes an independent Offsets Integrity Advisory Board composed of scientists and others with relevant expertise, to review the offsets program and provide recommendations to the President on: offset project eligibility, scientific uncertainty, quantification methodologies and related issues.

Section 732. Establishment of Offsets Program. Directs the President to establish an offsets program and requires that regulations ensure offsets are verifiable, additional, and permanent.

Section 733 Eligible Project Types. Requires the President to establish and update a list of offset project types that are eligible under the program, taking into account the recommendations of the Offsets Integrity Advisory Board. Projects types for consideration include fugitive methane emissions from coal mines, landfills, and oil and gas distribution facilities; agricultural, grassland, and rangeland sequestration and management practices; and changes in carbon stocks attributed to land use change and forestry activities.

Section 734. Requirements for Offset Projects. Requires that for each offset project type, the President establish standardized methodologies for: determining additionality; establishing activity baselines; measuring performance; and accounting for and mitigating potential leakage. Establishes requirements regarding the permanence of offset projects and crediting periods, and procedures to address reversals, including penalties.

The question is, will this be sufficient? Will the regulatory authorities -- there's even an "Office of Offsets Integrity within the Department of Justice to: supervise and coordinate investigations and civil enforcement of the carbon offsets program" -- do a better job than those responsible for ensuring our financial system didn't get caught stealing too many bases?

Carbon sequestration, by the way, suffers from the same flaw. It's hard to guarantee that carbon dioxide injected into aquifers deep below the surface will stay there. The Senate bill pays lip service to the notion that carbon capture and sequestration are critical elements of climate change mitigation, but awards CCS researchers a mere $1 billion a year over a decade, so there's at least one concession to the laws of physics. As one commenter put it on this blog recently:

There's an entropic cost to do the separation of CO2 from the waste stream and it will always be significant. Depending on how you do the calculation- temperature and methods matter, but I think it's at least 15% of the energy generated. Spending money will not overcome the laws of thermodynamics- you may just find a way to do it a bit more efficiently.

The consensus seems to be that the CEJAPA (ugh) is better than many had feared, and in some ways it's a marginal improvement on ACES. The Center for Biological Diversity likes the fact it maintains the EPA's power to regulate emissions, for example. 1Sky calls it "a positive first step." The Alliance for Climate Protection likes it, too. Both nuclear and coal advocates will probably like it, given the prominence both get in terms of subsidies and attention.

But it looks like whatever Congress passes this year -- if anything -- will rely heavily on existing power generation portfolios and carbon offsets, neither of which represent real change.

Still, it could have been worse. The theoretical good news is the recession, by reducing global emissions something like 2.6% last year, has given us almost two extra years of breathing room. The actual length of the window of opportunity to act before setting catastrophic climate change in motion is, of course, little more than an educated guess and could easily be off by two years. So it would be foolish to ease up on the pressure to do something substantive as soon as possible.