Panel I and II of a Hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee

HEADLINE: PANELS I AND II OF A HEARING OF THE SENATE COMMERCE, SCIENCE AND TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE
 
SUBJECT: GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
 
CHAIRED BY: SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ)
 
PANEL I JOS DELBEKE, EUROPEAN COMMISSION
 
PANEL II ANTONIO BUSALACCHI, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL; STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, STANFORD UNIVERSITY; TOM M.L. WIGLEY, NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH
 
LOCATION: 253 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:
SEN. LAUTENBERG: Yeah, Mr. Chairman, thanks very much for holding this hearing. And I want to commend you and Senator Lieberman for initiating some action on dealing with the problem. I was in Antarctica a couple of years ago, went to the South Pole, and at that time was shocked to learn that so much of the world's fresh water is stored in a single place, and that in the evening you could almost hear the ice groaning as it shifted. And when we see the reduction of the ice cap there and the magnitude that it is, to me it says, Sound the alarm -- let's get something going here. We all have experienced these aberrations in climate change. I happen to have been in Europe, Mr. Chairman, for a short stay this summer, and the temperatures in Italy were over 100 degrees, and incredibly uncomfortable.

So, Mr. Delbeke, I would ask you this -- and thank you for being here -- with the cap and the trade program that we have, what influence might U.S. participation have? Certainly it would enlarge the marketplace and negotiating place, but what do you think the -- how important an impact do you think it would have if the U.S. joined in the world marketplace?

MR. DELBEKE: Thank you very much. On the last question, I think the impact would be tremendous, because there are facts related to the environment and the facts related to the economy and the competitiveness. I will not hide that despite the fact that our overall costs are down, that of course -- and below 0.1 percent of GDP, that the impact on different sectors may be indeed more important than the 0.1 percent may suggest. So we have distributive effects.

And in technology-intensive sectors, and in the field of new energy technologies, and new technologies that allow to embody energy efficiency requirements more strictly, we see a lot of positive news following our climate agenda. But there are also energy -- parts of the energy sector, part of the energy-intensive industry, take -- in products like steel and aluminum, et cetera, where energy use is vast -- where our companies are very much worried about their competitiveness, knowing that this allowance trading is going to start on the 1st of January, knowing that they have to be very competitive in the global markets. And they convey to us constantly to make the point to which major players in the world, including you, that it would be most helpful if a global environmental problem is being sorted out with a global effort that would minimize distortions also in the market in which they operate.

So I think a possible decision by the United States to go for the act that you are discussing these days would be tremendously welcomed in Europe, and indeed in the rest of Europe as well.

May I also indicate that the political environment within which we have been discussing the new laws and directives -- that not everybody in Europe is 100 percent enthusiastic because of its distributive effects, but that everybody was prepared to get started, to have a system up and running that will be the architecture for future emission reductions over decades. So testing out that architecture and being pragmatic has been a very important element that was creating a coalition that was vast from green NGOs up to companies who feel responsible for what is happening in the world. So getting started, having this on the 1st of January 2005 -- if not perfect, at least getting started, and optimize and review elements that may have to be reviewed, because this or that element was underestimated, has been a strong element around the political -- or present in the political debate that we have had around this directive.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Have -- this may be a little outside your field, but has there been a lot of review with your contact about the impacts of nuclear energy generation versus fossil fuel-generated energy? Because it's quite more popular in Europe than it is here, and I just wonder whether you have done an analysis about that.

MR. DELBEKE: Thank you very much. This hasn't been an element, in particular because several member states of the EU have already decided to phase out nuclear as part of their energy mix. And that will undoubtedly have an impact in the fuel mix and the greenhouse gas emissions related to energy use. So nuclear has not been advocated as the way out of the problem, but has been incorporated into the debate in saying, Well, look, if we are going to phase out the nuclear installations that we have today in Europe, in important countries such as Germany or the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, et cetera. This will have an impact, and an emissions-trading regime would help us very much to have that impact again incorporated into the economy in an as-smoothly way as possible.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Thank you.

MR. DELBEKE: And of course I could mention as well that in the current emissions-trading scheme that is adopted by the council, nuclear installations are not covered, because they do not have emissions of CO2. So they have a slight comparative advantage, compared to power installations that do have emissions of CO2, and that are covered by the cap and trade system that we are developing. So in strict terms they are not part of the equation, but of course in overall economic terms they have a slightly beneficial treatment, because they do not fall under the scheme.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D-NJ): Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Wigley, you too were included in Senator Inhofe's commentary on the floor of the United States Senate. He repeatedly quoted from your writings stating that you believe that science in support of climate change is unsubstantiated. Is that a correct appraisal of what it is that you said?

MR. WIGLEY: No, that's certainly not a correct appraisal at all. I believe he implied that some work that I published with a co-author of mine a year or so ago suggested that the science behind climate change was unstable and therefore could not be trusted.

And the reason for making that statement was because the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their most recent report, differed fairly substantially from the projections made in the previous report of 1995-'96.

In the paper that we published, we tried to break down the reasons for those changes into a number of different factors. And the primary reason was not related to our understanding of the climate system, not related to the development or lack of development of climate models. It was related to our understanding of how people globally would respond to the emissions of sulfur dioxide.

Now, sulfur dioxide produces more particles called aerosols in the atmosphere, which have a cooling effect. And in the earlier second-assessment report on projections of the emissions of sulfur dioxide, the pollution effect of those emissions was not accounted for, and so their emissions rose very substantially and caused a substantial global cooling, offsetting the warming due to greenhouse gases.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Dr. Wigley, I assume that your answer was no.

MR. WIGLEY: Yeah, absolutely. (Laughter.)

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Thank you very much. The science is befuddling to those of us who only think about war and peace and budgets and things of that nature, but so much respect to all three of you for the presentation that you made and for the work that you've done.

Let me ask you a question. If we were -- if the United States was to join in the Kyoto principles, could you see an impact from that coming in fairly short term, if we were to sign on and join in the pact on Kyoto? Anyone.

MR. WIGLEY: Well, I'm sure there would be an impact if we were to sign on. I mean, certainly it would allow multilateral trading, particularly with the European Community. And that would be a positive development, because the trading scheme is a way of making the economics much more efficient.

There is a small avenue for some sort of trading through what's called the clean development mechanism, but that's not really directed towards countries like the United States. So there would be an advantage. It would broaden the playing field and make the global situation economically more efficient.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Dr. Schneider?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Yes. That's another area where there's been a lot of distortion. People suggest if the only thing we do in the next 100 years is Kyoto, that in 2100 the world will only be two-tenths of a degree cooler than it otherwise would have been, so why do we spend all this money to get the same amount of warming four years later?

No one in the scientific community that has been involved in these credible assessments like the IPCC or the National Research Council has ever said that Kyoto is the final and only step. In fact, it's been clear again and again and again in report after report after report -- highly stable, by the way, science over the past 25 years -- and, in fact, in testimony before this committee and others, that in order to keep the atmosphere concentrations of carbon dioxide, for example, below doubling above pre-industrial level, that we would have to cut something on the order -- and Tom has done many calculations on this himself -- of about 50 percent by mid-century to typical business as usual, and we'd have to go down nearer to zero in the next century.

The good news is we have a century to do that. The bad news is, the longer and longer we delay the process of beginning to develop the relative carbon-free energy at reasonable prices, the more expensive it becomes to do it when you have to do it, decades from now.

So the answer I would give you to Kyoto, or, as well, to this bill, is while there will be skeptics and critics who will say that its overall impact on global warming reduction is relatively modest, that's true in the short run.

But, you know, all journeys begin with small steps. And if one does not begin the process of sending positive incentives to the incredible industrial and technological machinery in the United States and other countries, it'll be that much longer before we invent the low-cost technologies that are necessary to deal with the problem over time, when the really big cuts start to occur decades from now.

So getting started in a cost-effective manner and sending the right incentive signals is very important. And that's why I personally wish that we would be involved with other nations through the Kyoto process.

And, in fact, because of the presence of the United States during the negotiations in the 1990s and early 2000s, Kyoto added a number of mechanisms, so-called flexibility mechanisms, that allow us to have much lower-cost trading and other actions than otherwise would happen. So I think we've already taken long, good steps in that direction. This bill reflects those very components.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Mr. Chairman, one other question. I mentioned before that I'd been to Antarctica and saw what this incredible reservoir of fresh water was. I think 70 percent of all the fresh water in the world was stored there, and it was being dissipated as these cracks and fissures and float-offs, if I can call them that, occur because it just melts into the sea, and the consequence would have been higher water levels and just loss of that precious resource.

In that visit, I went to Australia also, and it was a (ready?) conversation about how children going to the beach had to wear hats and full bathing suits and everything else and that Australia had the highest rate of melanoma, skin cancers, of any country, developed country, in the world.

More recently, I read something about the ozone layer, the hole in the ozone layer, and that it was seen to be closing. Is that an observation that any of you have heard about? I read it in the paper, and I just want to know what might be causing that. Is there some improvement that we're making that would permit that to happen?

MR. BUSALACCHI: There have been comments in the press about its closing, but I think what it showed is that was an example, another example, of natural variability going on in the region; experiencing some extremes, but you can't point to any sort of human influence on that.

I'd like to go back to your last question, though. I think we really can have an impact in the short term, especially with respect to short-lived species, be it black carbon, aerosol, even methane. And I think the Montreal protocol taught us that we can work in an international context and have a positive impact on the environment.

SEN. LAUTENBERG: Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, all of you.