Who Knew?

• Pages: 22-22

Page 22 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, July/August 2009

noTice & commenT

“It is no longer a choice

between doing a bill or doing

nothing. It is now a choice

between regulation and

legislation.”

— Representative Edward

Markey (D-Massachusetts),

co-author of the House global

warming bill that was voted out

of the Energy and Commerce

Committee

up a lot of reserve cash

to provide for the risk of

the loans going bad. . . .

In late 1994, [J. P.

Morgan] pitched the

idea of selling the credit

risk to the European

Bank of Reconstruc-

tion and Development.

So if Exxon defaulted,

Exxon needed to

open a line of credit

to cover potential

damages of $5 billion

resulting from the 1989

Exxon Valdez oil spill. J.

P. Morgan was reluctant

to turn down Exxon,

which was an old client,

but the deal would tie

the EBRD would be on

the hook for it — and in

return for taking on the

risk, would receive a fee

from J. P. Morgan. Exx-

on would get its credit

line, and J. P. Morgan

would get to honor its

client relationship but

also to keep its credit

lines intact for sexier

activities. The deal was

so new that it didn’t

even have a name: even-

tually, the one settled

on was “credit-default

swap.”

— e New Yorker

Who Knew?

A Last Chance to

Save the Planet?

To limit climate change to two

degrees Celsius, which is be-

coming the new consensus position

on the maximum tolerable warming,

humanity must not burn more than

one fourth of the world’s remaining

coal reserves. at’s the conclusion

of two studies recently published in

Europe. “Humans must not emit

more than 1 trillion tonnes of carbon

into the atmosphere if we are to have

a 50:50 chance of limiting global

warming to two degrees,” as New

Scientist cogently put it. How long

will that take? One study predicts we

have 40 years, the other 20 years to

replace coal with a less-polluting en-

ergy source. “While a lot of oil and

natural gas can be burned, certainly

not much at all of coal reserves can,”

said one of the scientists.

So it is unfortunate that the

Waxman-Markey bill voted out of

the House Energy and Commerce

Committee favors coal over oil and

natural gas. “Under Waxman-Mar-

key, electricity distributors would get

the largest share [of free allowances],

with the rest divided between energy

intensive manufacturers, carmakers,

natural-gas distributors, states with

renewable-energy programs, and so

on,” according to e Economist. “Oil

f‌irms, with only 2 percent of the per-

mits, feel hard done by.” Duke En-

ergy, a power company with a large

f‌leet of coal-f‌ired plants, is “enthusi-

astic” about the bill.

Meanwhile, the news on climate

change continues to worsen with each

new study. Sea levels are rising twice

as fast as the United Nations thought

just two years ago. “e reason for

the rapid change in the predicted rise

in sea levels is a rapid increase in the

information available,” according to

e Economist. e dif‌ference is un-

derstanding of the Greenland and

Antarctic icecaps, which are melting

at an accelerating pace.

Rising sea levels threaten not only

coastal humanity, but also are swamp-

ing notions that we can adapt our

way around climate change. e Na-

tional Academy of Engineering has

concluded that no matter how well

they are built, f‌lood walls and levees

will not be able to save New Orleans

from another Katrina event. e en-

gineering panel made an interesting

distinction: existing f‌lood protection

measures are meant to ensure against

a hundred-year event. But in densely

populated areas, failure of the f‌lood

control system would be so cata-

strophic that it obliterates ordinary

risk calculations.

Meanwhile, another form of ad-

aptation took a hit when a group

of Indian and German researchers

attempted to sequester carbon by

geo-engineering — an expedition to

dump huge amounts of iron into the

Southern Ocean, where phytoplank-

ton would be stimulated, absorb car-

bon, and eventually drift down to the

seabed. But unfortunately the bloom,

although successfully created, turned

out to be a meal ticket for a type of

crustacean called copepods. ey ate

the plankton before it could accom-

plish its task.

In a recent interview in e Pro-

gressive, Rajenda Pachauri, chair of

the Nobel Prize–winning Intergov-

ernmental Panel on Climate Change,

had this to say when confronted with

the apocalypse upon us: “e west-

ern lifestyle will have to change.” Not

only must poorer countries f‌ind a

new development path, but western

countries themselves must alter their

lifestyles. Otherwise, catastrophic

temperature increases are likely. How

likely is such an increase? e 2007

report by the IPCC predicted a rise

from anywhere between 2 degrees C

to 6.4 degrees C this century. Some

scientists fear that we will reach 4 de-

grees C in only 40 years. “Tempera-