15th Conference of the Parties - Climate Change Conference
The sessions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are open to Parties of the Convention and Observer States (Governments), the United Nations System and observer organizations duly admitted by the Conference of the Parties. In addition, accredited press is allowed to cover the proceedings of the Convention.
Participation in COP15 is restricted to duly nominated representatives of Parties, observer States, admitted observer organizations and accredited press/media. The sessions are not open to the public.
COP 15 comprises a number of sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies of the Convention, its Kyoto Protocol, bilateral and multilateral meetings as well as side events and exhibits.
Five Parties have recently made proposals for a protocol under the Convention pursuant to Article 17 of the Convention.
The secretariat has also received twelve proposals by Parties for amendment to the Kyoto Protocol pursuant to Articles 20 and 21 of the Protocol.
Senate Watch, China: Bingaman, Cantwell, Casey, Dorgan, Klobuchar, Lugar, Murkowski, Rockefeller, Whitehouse
Senators respond to China’s recent emissions reduction announcement of lowering greenhouse gas intensity by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. Several senators continue to move away from the legislative structure passed by the House of Representatives, and supported by President Obama and most industry advocates of reform.
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)Maria Cantwell (D-WA)E&E News Bill Wicker, a Bingaman spokesman, said the chairman supports the economywide cap-and-trade approach for reducing emissions but also sees some merits in the other ideas. Additionally, several panel members on both sides of the aisle have signaled interest in legislative options beyond the cap-and-trade bill approved earlier this spring in the House and now up for debate in the Senate. “We thought it’d be a good idea to step back and put all of the different policy options into a single hearing,” Wicker said.
E&E News By the time we’re done with financial regulatory reform, everybody’s head is going to be spinning and they’re going to be saying, “Oh my gosh, how can you prevent this from happening again?”
Robert Casey (D-PA)People are moving more toward something that’s much more streamlined. The bottom line is you don’t want to have added volatility to the market when trying to solve [the emissions] problem. And that’s clearly what the futures trading does. It adds volatility. What you want is a predictable price so that people can move forward and diversify.
E&E News There’s a lot of verification we’re going to have to see before I’d embrace it [China’s announced GHG commitments] and say it’s as positive a development as the Chinese would hope we’d say it is. I’m a little skeptical is maybe the fastest way to say it.
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)So if we’ve got problems here in terms of working that out and making sure there are enough emission allowances for us to do what we need to do here, you can imagine how much more complicated it gets internationally.
E&E News Some will make the case that if you do financial reform that setting up a Wall Street trading system on carbon securities is less dangerous. I am not interested in setting up a trillion-dollar carbon securities market to tell us what the price of energy is going to be.
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)E&E News It’s pretty clear to me that our nation is going to continue to use our most abundant resource, which is coal, but we’re going to use it differently. And the question is how do we do that. How do we find the science, technology and research capability to allow us to continue to use coal in a manner that would decarbonize it or use it in a much lower manner? This [CCS funding report] was a unique exercise and a unique product of thought, where several stakeholders have come together on a single issue. . . [It will provide] beneficial pathways for future legislation.
Richard G. LugarE&E News The idea would be while the body is working on financial regulation, then during that same time we’ll be getting the energy, the bipartisan group working on energy.
Lisa Murkowski (D-AK)E&E News I’d not be comfortable if the Copenhagen progress report relied on billions of dollars [in international assistance] anticipated from the U.S. budget that we’ve not debated and will be very contentious.
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)E&E News Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), offered Bingaman praise for keeping an open mind to alternatives. “Everyone assumes cap and trade is the only way to go,” Dillon said. “There’s been a demonization or marginalization of anyone raising other options.” As for Murkowski, a onetime supporter of cap-and-trade legislation, Dillon said, “She’s not promoting one idea over another yet. She’s exploring the options.”
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)E&E News The Chinese are a mystery that way. They enter negotiations always with an advantage because nobody knows what they’re going to do, what they’re going to say, or whether they mean it.
E&E News Unfortunately, we start from a position where there’s fairly considerable basis for skepticism on the enforcement side [for China emissions reductions], which means the administration has got to come up with a pretty solid program. It doesn’t matter what their numbers are if they don’t have to prove them.
Politico If we don’t provide those other technologies a level playing field, we provide an unfair advantage to the nuclear power industry at the expense of the American economy at large.
Senate Watch: Bingaman, Boxer, Lincoln, McCaskill, Merkley, McCain, Murkowski, Reid, Rockefeller, Sanders, Whitehouse 1
Numerous Democrats are voicing opposition to acting on climate change.
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)The Hill “We’ve got all kinds of difference of perspective of where the Senate is and where the votes are and where the Senate should try to move,” Bingaman said of his meeting with the other chairmen. Bingaman, the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he would be willing to pass energy legislation separately from a cap-and-trade bill to address climate change.
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)E&E News It’s pretty clear that there seems to be a developing consensus that we want a more flexible opportunity for all countries to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions. The idea that the only test of a country’s ability to achieve greenhouse gas reductions is whether they adopt a formal cap is just not necessarily the appropriate measure.
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)The Hill “I’d love to get it done tomorrow,” said Boxer, who acknowledged others are less intent on moving that quickly.
Claire McCaskill (R-MO)The Hill “I’m not in a hurry to do that,” she said of climate change legislation. “I think the energy bill we did in the Senate Energy Committee gets us a long way toward job creation and moving us from an old-energy economy to a new-energy economy, which is really what the objective is — lowering carbon output and lessening dependence on foreign oil.”
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)Wall Street Journal It’s really big, really, really hard, and is going to make a lot of people mad. Climate fits that category.
John McCain (R-AZ)Politico There are folks who would say, ‘Well, let’s just shut down coal-powered plants.’ That is not going to happen. You are not going to have 60 votes in the Senate to shut down coal.
Lisa Murkowski (D-AK)Wall Street Journal The delay was “just a matter of reality, they can’t get anything done at this time,” said Sen. John McCain, who has previously supported climate legislation. He has said he wouldn’t support the current Senate proposal because of disagreements over its handling of nuclear energy.
E&E News You know what, we’d get blamed at Copenhagen if we acted or if we didn’t act. It is what it is.
We’re obviously not going to be doing that [passing a climate bill] prior to Copenhagen. Do we walk into Copenhagen with this label that the U.S. has failed?
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)The Hill When asked Tuesday about the timing for climate change legislation, he told reporters that “we are going to try to do that sometime in the spring.”
The Hill Most of the country doesn’t know what cap-and-trade is. They have no idea. I would say half the Senate have no idea what cap-and-trade is and could not explain it.
He said climate legislation should not reach the floor before July of next year, putting the controversial bill on the schedule only months before Election Day. “You have to get this stuff out to the American people before you change their lives, and we are not paying any attention to that,” Rockefeller said.
Rockefeller said his state would be the most affected and that his residents need more time to know what the bill is about. “Right now they don’t, and therefore they are terrified and furious, and I don’t blame them,” he said.
National Journal I’ve got a responsibility to let them know what their options are. But nobody can talk about options right now. I think my problem with climate change right now is that it’s a subject that relatively few people know about. It’s sort of an elitist subject.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)Politico They don’t have a deal until they get the coal-state senators, and they are a long way from doing it. They’re going to need us to pass a bill.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)Politico “I’ll do everything I can to oppose that,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said of the lowered targets.
Politico I think there’s a danger that coal interests will demand such a large share of the proceeds of the bill that it creates a backlash. So I think they’ve got to be aware of their own prudential limitations.
Senate Watch: Cardin, Conrad, Dorgan, Graham, Grassley, Kerry, Lieberman, Lugar, Murkowski, Rockefeller
As international leaders let the timetable for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol slip to 2010, Republicans call for “starting from scratch” as Democrats and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) hope that spring will be a final deadline for passage of climate legislation.
Ben Cardin (D-MD)Kent Conrad (D-ND)E&E News Conventional wisdom is that you have until the spring to get controversial issues moving. If not, it’s difficult to see getting through closer to the elections.
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)E&E News I’m encouraged by it. Senator Kerry has certainly been good at reaching out. He’s been very serious about reaching out. We’ve been sharing things with him. We have more to share. He’s very good at listening, which is the best way of succeeding around here.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)Politico Good policy is going to be left behind by the insistence that the climate change bill has to be done first or together.
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)E&E News We don’t want it to slip into the summer.
E&E News But I do appreciate what Lindsey Graham is trying to do in the sense of nuclear and more offshore drilling.
Several senators say they would prefer to have a better idea what major developing countries plan to do under the auspices of the U.N. talks before they sign off on any domestic emission restrictions. “That’d make a big difference. If we passed a bill that the rest of the world didn’t follow, then Uncle Sam could soon become Uncle Sucker and export all of our jobs to China.”
Joe Lieberman (I-CT)E&E News If you get into an artificial timeline, then you don’t give people the opportunity to feel they’re being listened to, or their ideas are being processed. Let’s just work it day to day and we’ll see where we are. Maybe something breaks and you move faster than you thought? Maybe something slows you down because you need another figure or analysis? What I feel confident about, and what I think is important for the legislative tracking, if you will, is every day we’re making progress.
Richard Lugar (R-IN)E&E News Lieberman said he hoped Baucus would chime in before Reid sends the overall bill on to CBO and EPA for analysis. “The framework won’t be whole without that.”
E&E News I don’t want to deter for a moment the enthusiasm of this particular conference. But I need some benchmarks of how we measure what occurs. I want to know the costs, what’s anticipated, what the outline really creates at a time when really my constituents and those of my colleagues are talking principally in this country about unemployment, about the recovery of our economy, of how we make headway in terms of conservation efforts to save money.
Lisa Murkowski (D-AK)I don’t see any climate legislation on the table here now that I’d support. We really have to start from scratch again, and I think there are ways of doing that.
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)E&E News Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she is willing to work on climate and energy legislation with the three senators “if they can find some middle path that perhaps we haven’t pursued.” “It depends how it’s handled. If the way EPW handled climate change is the way it’s going to roll out from here, it’s doomed.”
E&E News There’s some possibility of people saying that it’s too controversial a bill in an election year. Which is sort of the opposite of how a democracy ought to work. You go ahead and take your chances on that and you get re-elected. But people’s business comes first.
Senate Watch, Slowing Progress: Baucus, Harkin, Kerry, Lieberman, Lugar
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)Wall Street Journal It’s common understanding that climate-change legislation will not be brought up on the Senate floor and pass the Senate this year.
John Kerry (D-Mass.)AgricultureOnline Quite frankly, I don’t know that we’re going to do anything on it until next year because we have the health bill.
Politico As soon as it is practical with respect to the health care debate and financial regulator reform this legislation will come to the floor of the Senate and the United States Senate will do its part.
Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)Wall Street Journal I don’t want to create artificial deadlines which get in the way of our being methodical about this. The main thing to do here is to build the adequate base of support and consensus.
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)Politico I feel the meetings that Sen. Kerry and Graham and I have had so far that we are making some progress here and we can move it along.
Wall Street Journal I don’t see any climate bill on the table right now that I can support. We really have to start from scratch again.
Senate Watch: Baucus, Kerry, Menendez
Washington Independent I am committed to passing meaningful, balanced climate-change legislation. I am committed to legislation that will protect our land and those whose livelihood depends on it. I want our children and grandchildren to be able to enjoy the outdoors the way that we can today. So I’m going to work to pass climate-change legislation that is both meaningful and that can muster enough votes to become law. [...] Let me be clear. We should work to minimize any job losses. But we should recognize that in the case of acid rain [in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments], the negative [economic] consequences were far less than projected. We should keep this in mind when similar claims are made about the effects of legislation to address climate change.
John Kerry (D-MA)Reuters We can not allow our manufacturing industries to fade as result of trade with countries that refuse to negotiate global solutions to global concerns. We must push our trading partners to do their part to curb harmful emissions and we must devise a border measure, consistent with our international obligations, to prevent the carbon leakage that would occur if US manufacturing shifts to countries without effective climate change programs.
Robert Menendez (D-NJ)DTN Well, EPA is poised to move. Everybody needs to understand that. I’m going to make this as clear as I can: I don’t think anybody is going to wind up [blocking] EPA, because there’s filibuster-proof capacity to prevent that from happening. I’ll personally stand on the Senate floor, day and night, to prevent that from happening. Therefore, success in this is not defined by stopping a Senate bill. The reason is, EPA will then regulate without assistance to coal, without allocation of allowances that help companies to make the transition. And then you’re out there on your own. So the game in town, folks, is here. It’s in the Congress, where we have the ability to mitigate the transitional costs and to be reasonable in the process. That’s something people really need to focus on.
E&E News Right now, plenty of other nations, including China, are ahead of us in manufacturing solar power technology, which better positions them for economic strength in the 21st Century. We have always been a world leader in innovation, and it’s time that we grab this economic opportunity.
Senate Watch: Baucus, Chambliss, Graham, Gregg, Harkin, Murkowski, Nelson, Rockefeller, Specter
Senators lay out their agenda after the Environment and Public Works Committee reported out the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.
Max Baucus (D-MT)E&E News That frees up the Senate, frankly. It frees up all members of the Senate who are interested in climate change, including those on the committee.
I don’t want to say we’re going to do something totally different. I’m respectful of the House allocation.
We have to be sensitive to our own industries, as other countries are sensitive to theirs. I strongly believe that an open trading system benefits all countries. It’d be unwise to retrench.
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)On his idea for triggers for stronger targets That’s something we can work out. Climate change is going to be with us, legislative efforts are going to be with us for a while. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. Plenty of time to work on this.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)Wall Street Journal The actions the EPA has taken and its plans to regulate greenhouse gases are a serious concern. However, EPA’s actions should not scare Congress into passing bad legislation.
Politico Now, it’s time to find a bill that will make good policy. Clearly, there are not 60 votes for that product.
Judd Gregg (R-NH)E&E News I appreciate the committee’s work. Now it’s time to find a bill that can make good policy. Environmental policy needs to be good business policy. If it’s not, there will never be 60 votes.
Tom Harkin (D-IA)Politico It’s hard to vote on a bill that big without knowing what it’s going to do. I don’t think that bill is viable in its present form, because we don’t know what it does.
E&E News on the 50-50 split of allocations to utilities based on retail sales and historic emissions It’s going to be changed. It can’t stay at 50-50. It won’t. It can’t.
E&E News I think it has left clearly a very bitter taste in many members’ mouths about how we’re part of a process on a very important issue. This may stall things out for a period of time.
Politico It dooms that particular legislation. The question is what comes next. We will see what Plan B is.
Ben Nelson (D-NE)E&E News We’ve been talking a lot about starting over with a blank piece of paper. I think this might allow for that. If that’s the case, that’s a positive.
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)Politico I don’t know that I’m playing a key role, but we’re talking. I think that’s important.
Arlen Specter (D-PA)E&E News What they have to understand is that the Senate is not ready to travel at their rate. And that the balance on this is among people like myself who come from coal state and manufacturing states who can’t just sort of meet the Copenhagen deadline. We’ve got to be satisfied that it’s a good bill and I’m not at this point.
Politico I think the bill could have been improved substantially.
Designing a Cap-and-Trade System for the United States
Attention to U.S. climate legislation is increasing on Capitol Hill. In June of this year, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act introduced by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and the Senate is considering a similar proposal by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). With international climate negotiations scheduled in Copenhagen for December, many view U.S. action on this issue as critical to a successful outcome. As a result, the central debate is no longer about the need for action, but about the form our actions will take.
On November 4, the Brookings Institution will host a discussion on a new series of papers on U.S. climate policy design. Each paper tackles a different design topic, but they all share a common set of goals: to acknowledge the complexity inherent in climate policy; to explain the fundamental challenges involved in addressing a particular set of design features; and to suggest a credible path forward, calling attention to tradeoffs where they exist. Panelists will focus on such issues as emissions reduction targets, cost containment measures, oversight of the carbon derivatives market, the allocation of emissions allowances and provisions to mitigate the impacts on trade-exposed industries.
After the panel, participants will take audience questions.
3:30 pm–3:45 am
Welcoming Remarks and Introduction
Charles Ebinger, Senior Fellow and Director, Energy Security Initiative, The Brookings Institution
3:45 pm–5:00 pm
Panelists
- Bryan Mignone, Fellow (on leave), The Brookings Institution
- Adele C. Morris, Fellow and Policy Director, Climate and Energy Economics Project, The Brookings Institution
- Carolyn Fischer, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future
- Richard Morgenstern, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future
- Craig Pirrong, Professor of Finance and Energy Markets Director for the Global Energy Management Institute, Bauer College of Business, University of Houston
To RSVP for this event, please call the Office of Communications at 202.797.6105 or click here.
The Brookings Institution
Falk Auditorium
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Senate Watch: Boxer, Harkin, Kerry, Lugar, Lautenberg, Voinovich
Senators attempt to negotiate the partisan battle over moving the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) forward.
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)E&E News We think this is going the extra mile for our friends on the other side, and we really hope they’ll return to the table. They have every reason to do that.
John Kerry (D-Mass.)E&E News I believe that Americans will accept higher prices as necessary for increasing our energy security and making necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but they also expect that the burden should be shared across the country.
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)E&E News Over the years, whether it was with the leadership of Senator Jack Heinz, Senator John McCain or Senator John Warner, we’ve made progress on climate change when we’ve been able to overcome partisan divisions. We’ve never needed to do that more than today.
Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)E&E News [Boxer’s planned markup] would not be constructive as far as progress on the bill is concerned. I suspect that there’d be no particular reason for many members to support it.
George Voinovich (R-Ohio)E&E News Their behavior challenges everything that we’re about here: “If you don’t like it, turn your back and walk out.” It’s almost like school children over there.
E&E News I think we’ve made it pretty clear that we want a complete analysis of the bill. It’s been made clear to her that’s what we want. I think it’s a sensible approach because of the fact this is probably the most important piece of legislation this committee has undertaken since the Clean Air Act itself, maybe even more important.
Senate Watch, Targets and Allocations: Bond, Byrd, Carper, Casey, Dorgan, Graham, Inhofe, Murkowski, Rockefeller, Specter, Vitter, Voinovich
Robert Byrd (D-WV)E&E News It’s a smaller pie. People want to know what’s going on. We’re still trying to figure out how these complicated, cockamamie schemes are going to work. Anything that’s that complicated is by definition highly suspect and the more I hear, the more I suspect.
Tom Carper (D-DE)Reuters Byrd praised Boxer’s additions in the bill that put more focus on clean coal technology. But he warned, “I will actively oppose any bill that would harm the workers, families, industries, or our esource-based economy in West Virginia.”
Robert Casey (D-PA)E&E News Carper said he would pursue his measure to cut power plants’ emissions of soot, mercury, SOx and NOxas stand-alone legislation if it does not make it into the bill. “One way or another,” he said.
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)Politico The target’s certainly a change from where the House was, and that’s going to be a subject of debate.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)Politico We’ll see what they put together in EPW, but I think it’s going to be very hard for them to pass legislation unless they have substantial discussions with moderate senators and address their concerns.
The Hill This administration is not going to allow offshore drilling for oil and gas unless it’s part of some bigger deal. I don’t think you’ll ever have offshore drilling for oil and gas until you marry it up with emissions controls. They don’t have 60 votes for environmental policy in the House and the Senate because it’s bad for business. All of these bills, I couldn’t support because they’re cap and trade legislation that really does put us at a competitive disadvantage.
Lisa Murkowski (D-AK)Washington Post Science is not settled! Everyone knows it’s not settled!
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)E&E News An exercise akin to doling out pieces of a pie. But as climate legislation is developed in the Senate, we’re faced with a hard reality. There aren’t enough pieces left to satisfy the groups vying for them to repeat this process a second time.
Arlen Specter (D-PA)Reuters An aide to West Virginia Democratic Senator John Rockefeller said the tougher emissions goal is unrealistic and harmful as there is not enough time to deploy the carbon capture and storage and energy efficiency technologies.
David Vitter (R-LA)Politico New West Politics “There is a great deal to be gained by certainty so people can make plans. If the EPA continues to have flexibility we don’t know where we are. . . . That’s really our job.
Heritage This legislation represents a new tax in the order of more than $1,700 per American household annually, and, if it’s passed, American families can expect to see considerable increases in the cost of electricity, gas, food and utilities. It is clear that most Americans families’ standard of living will be reduced if this cap-and-trade bill is approved by Congress.
George Voinovich (R-OH)The greatest opportunity for investment in new technologies is revenue generated from increased domestic energy production. Recent analysis suggests that increased domestic resource production could generate $8 trillion in GDP, $2.2 trillion in incremental tax receipts and perhaps two million jobs or more – all without borrowing a dime or increasing taxes even a penny.
NASDAQ California is going to make out like a bandit with this legislation. To jam this thing through here is not going to be good and America is going to be very, very upset about it.