More details about the forthcoming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill are bubbling out. Here's the latest from Congressional Quarterly, though keep in mind this Senate proposal is still in flux:

As expected, the measure would set a mandatory cap on carbon emissions across the economy but apply different sets of regulations to different polluting sectors….

• An economy-wide cap on carbon emissions that would begin in 2012, with a target of reducing carbon pollution 17 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

• Separate caps on carbon emissions by the electric utilities and manufacturing sectors, which would have to buy permits to pollute from the federal government.

• A straight fee or tax, paid by consumers at the pump, on transportation fuels. The levy would be linked to the carbon content of the fuel and the price of carbon in the other markets.

• A combination for the regulated sectors of a “cap and trade” model, under which polluters could trade pollution permits on an open market, and a “cap and dividend” model, which would return revenue from the sale of permits directly to consumers.

• Direct rebates to consumers of half the revenue from the sale of pollution permits.

• Delay until 2016 in starting the phase-in of carbon caps on manufacturers.

• Application of a “carbon tariff” to imports of goods from countries that do not regulate their carbon emissions.

• A “hard collar” on the price of emission permits of no less than $10 per ton of carbon emitted and no more than $30 per ton. The government would keep a strategic reserve of 4 billion credits, and would flood the market if the carbon price exceeded $30 per ton. The price would be indexed to inflation rates and rise over time.

• A threshold of 25,000 tons of carbon per year before a polluter would be subject to regulation.

• A single federal system to cap emissions, pre-empting separate state limits.

• Sections or titles devoted to oil refining, farming, coal, clean energy innovation, and increasing production of nuclear energy and oil and natural gas drilling.

Honestly, this sounds pretty similar to the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House last June. See this chart from Brad Johnson for a side-by-side comparison. Like the House bill, the Senate proposal aims to cut emissions 17 percent by 2020—which is, as I've mentioned before, a much weaker goal than many scientists have said is needed to stave off drastic climate change. That said, it is the short-term target the United States committed to at Copenhagen.

The most obvious difference from the House bill is that utilities and manufacturers and refiners would all get regulated separately, rather than placed together under one big cap-and-trade system. From an economic standpoint, that's less efficient, but this patchwork approach appears to have been crafted in the hopes of placating oil companies. We'll see whether it sells politically. Meanwhile, it's possible that the Senate bill would auction off a greater fraction of pollution permits to emitters, raising more money that could be refunded back to households. But without hard numbers, it's impossible to tell.

One potential red flag here is the price collar. In theory, a price collar for a cap-and-trade system makes sense—after all, carbon prices are likely to fluctuate as permits get traded, and you don't want carbon prices to shoot up so high that they crunch the economy and cause riots. But a lot depends on how the price ceiling is designed. If the government just starts selling an infinite supply of additional permits once prices rise above $30/ton, that would bust the overall cap—more permits means more overall pollution. On the other hand, if the government sets aside a reserve of allowances in advance and uses those to prevent prices from skyrocketing, that doesn't affect the overall cap. The House took the latter approach.

In any case, a lot about this bill will no doubt shift in the months ahead. For one, legislation always get torn apart and weakened in the Senate; getting 60 votes to beat a filibuster is an ugly process. What's more, consider the flurry of stories this week about how the Chamber of Commerce's chief lobbyist, Bruce Josten, thought the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill was "largely in sync" with industry demands. And yet, judging from the early rumors, the proposal doesn't sound radically different from the House bill (which the Chamber loathed). Surely both things can't keep being true, right?

In The New York Times today, Andrew Kramer has a fascinating piece about how Russia's nuclear industry is trying to promote small reactors—similar to those used to power Soviet-era subs—as a source of cheap low-carbon power for the rest of the world. Here's the upside:

[O]nce the science is perfected, such reactors are potentially far less costly to build per unit of electricity generated than traditional nuclear power plants. This is no small matter, as upfront capital expenses form the largest cost of nuclear power, skewing its competitiveness with coal.

That's still a ways away, though—even enthusiasts for miniature reactors don't expect them to be ready for at least a decade. Meanwhile, here are some of the… kinks that need to be worked out:

The design [Akme] chose is peculiar for being cooled not with water but a molten lead alloy. In fact, the Soviet Union was the only country to deploy liquid metal reactors at sea. Introduced in the 1970s, they packed enough power to propel submarines more than 45 miles, or 72 kilometers, an hour under water. In fact, they were so powerful they compelled NATO to design an entirely new class of torpedo just to have a hope of hitting the new submarines, known as the Alfa Class.

But this Cold War design is not without its drawbacks. A Norwegian environmental group and authority on nuclear waste in the Arctic, the Bellona Foundation, says the lead alloy coolant tended to freeze in emergencies. Then, the reactor became an inaccessible block of lead, steel and waste. ...

Today, hardened liquid metal reactor cores litter the Arctic. While small, they still weigh hundreds of tons. No facility exists to melt out the lead alloy, which is itself lethally toxic, and extract the spent fuel rods. They remain an unsolved legacy of the Soviet submarine program; several are stored at a naval yard in Gremikha, on the Arctic Sea near Norway, according to Bellona.

The waste issue seems like a huge problem here. In a typical reactor, spent fuel is removed from the reactor and stored separately. Few countries have really figured out how to dispose of their radioactive waste once and for all, but at least it's doable in theory (building a long-term geological repository is technically feasible, even if it's politically thorny). By contrast, with these old Soviet sub reactors, the spent fuel and reactor were often just frozen together in one piece. The plan? Wait until someone dreamt up a clever engineering scheme to process the waste. And they're still waiting.

(Flickr photo credit: mwl_sd_ca)

In recent years, climate scientists have started paying a lot more attention to the role of forest fires. Everyone understands how fires can contribute to global warming: Trees suck up and sequester CO2 as they grow, and they release all that carbon back into the atmosphere when they burn up. But how big an impact do these fires have? Quite a bit: Last April, a major study in Science estimated that as much as 20 percent of the carbon-dioxide that humans have put in the air since industrialization has come from deforestation fires—people intentionally setting forests ablaze to clear land for farms or development. (Slash-and-burn agriculture is still rampant in places like the Amazon.)

That's intentional deforestation. But what about accidental wildfires? Turns out, those are a big deal, too. Back in 2007, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder used satellite observations to estimate that large-scale fires in the United States pump out about 290 million tons of CO2 each year—equal to about 6 percent of the emissions caused by fossil fuel use. Worse, as the planet keeps heating up, those wildfires are expected to become more frequent—partly because the hotter, drier temperatures make forests more flammable, and partly because the warmer climes are leading to bark beetle infestations, which chomp through forests and turn them into kindling. It's a vicious cycle.

In any case, NCAR has just put out yet another study on the subject that has a more positive spin. As it turns out, many of those large-scale wildfires could be avoided or contained through the use of "prescribed burns." If land managers periodically set smaller, controlled fires that cleared away the underbrush in the forests, they could reduce the chances of bigger fires breaking out and protect the bigger trees. (By contrast, land managers in the West have frequently taken to suppressing fires altogether, which has led to extremely dense forests that are, unfortunately, very vulnerable to big wildfire outbreaks—especially as temperatures rise.) Here's the key finding:

The results showed that carbon emissions were reduced by anywhere from 37 to 63 percent for the forests that had been subject to prescribed burns, depending on the vegetation mix and location of the forests. Overall, carbon emissions for the 11 Western states were reduced by an annual average of 14 million metric tons. That is the equivalent of about 0.25 percent of annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, or slightly more than the annual carbon dioxide emissions from all fossil fuel sources in some less-populated states, such as Rhode Island or South Dakota.

That's a pretty significant improvement, even if it's not going to solve all our carbon woes. Though these prescribed fires could also help slow down that pesky warming/beetle/wildfire feedback loop that we're already starting to see out West.

I've written a fair bit about black carbon, a form of soot created by incompletely burning biomass. Wood cookstoves in the developing world are one big culprit. The dark soot particles settle on snow and ice and absorb more sunlight; recent studies have found they contribute quite a bit to Arctic ice-melt and the wilting of Himalayan glaciers. All told, black carbon is estimated to be responsible for about 20 percent of current man-made global warming—behind only CO2, which currently accounts for about half.

The good news, though, is that the soot only lingers in the atmosphere for a few weeks (unlike CO2, which stays in the air for about 100 years on average), so there's an opportunity to make quick headway on climate change. That was the theme at a House hearing on the subject yesterday, at least. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate expert at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, told Congress: "Reducing black carbon emissions by fifty percent today will lead to a fifty percent reduction in the heat trapped by them within a few months."

Not bad. And the fixes are readily available: filters on diesel engines to capture soot, plus more efficient cook stoves for the developing world. What's largely needed are a few new diesel regulations in rich countries, plus some financing for soot-reduction projects abroad. (One expert pointed out that the EPA currently has the authority under the Clean Air Act to retrofit diesel engines in the United States, but the program doesn't have nearly enough funds to keep up with requests.) The climate payoff would be quick, and there'd be substantial health benefits too—soot pollution has been linked to rash of respiratory infections, and by some counts causes 7 percent of child deaths worldwide.

Indeed, mopping up black carbon such a no-brainer that not even conservatives really object. At the hearing, James Sensenbrenner, the committee's ranking Republican, agreed that both parties should support soot-removal. But he then went a step further and said we have a choice between tackling black carbon and tackling CO2, and we can only do one, so black carbon it is. Most of the scientists on the panel pointed out (politely) that Sensenbrenner's either-or view wasn't even remotely logical, and that both black carbon and CO2 needed to be addressed. Still, getting rid of black carbon is a smart short-term fix, and it's nice to see that that, at least, has support across the board.

(Flickr photo credit: Manny Pabla)

Does it matter where carbon-dioxide is emitted? From a climate perspective, at least, the standard answer has always been, "Not really." Carbon-dioxide mixes pretty evenly and uniformly throughout the atmosphere, so that the heat-trapping gases coming out of a factory in China have the same effect on global temperatures, pound for pound, as the greenhouse gases emitted by, say, cars in Delaware. (This is in contrast to a number of other air pollutants, whose effects are often localized—sulfur dioxide only causes acid rain in discrete areas.)

But a new study just published in Environmental Science and Technology by Stanford's Marc Jacobson adds a slight twist to this standard view. Older research has found that local "domes" of high CO2 levels can often form over cities. What Jacobson found was that these domes can cause serious health impacts in the area: Among other things, they worsen the effects of localized air pollutants like ozone and particulates, which cause respiratory diseases and the like. As a result, Jacobson estimates that local CO2 emissions cause anywhere from 300 to 1,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. And presumably the problem's much worse in developing countries.

It'd be interesting to see more work on this subject, because if true, it slightly complicates the logic of a cap-and-trade system for emissions. After all, the idea behind a carbon-trading market is that a ton of CO2 has the exact same effect no matter where it's emitted—be it a factory in rural North Dakota or a power plant in L.A. But Jacobson's work suggests that the two aren't totally equal—that ton of emissions from the power plant in L.A. has a much bigger impact on human health. Now, maybe trying to account for those disparities would just make a cap-and-trade system hopelessly complicated. Still, Jacobson argues, they should at least be considered.

(Flickr photo credit: Stefan Gara)

Although the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill in the Senate still hasn't been finalized, let alone unveiled, the rumors that have crept out so far (namely, that the bill's going to abandon cap-and-trade and go for a multi-sector approach, where different of polluters—refiners, utilities, manufacturers—are each regulated differently) have already sparked a fair bit of discussion.

First, over at Solve Climate, Julia Harte interviews a number of economists who argue that the Senate's patchwork approach is bound to be less efficient than a simple price on carbon that applies equally across the board. That's true enough, but economists don't really get a vote in the Senate. The bill is going to be a lot messier than is optimal in order to mollify industry opposition and avoid a filibuster. Maybe things would be different if there were more conservative legislators out there who agreed that climate change was a problem and were pushing for a simple, streamlined carbon price (since, in theory, that'd be the conservative, market-friendly response to the problem). But no such luck.

Secondly, Dave Roberts points out that the price on carbon isn't the only component of a climate bill. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House had a whole slew of complementary measures, including renewable-power requirements for utilities, efficiency standards that are projected to reduce (yes, reduce) consumer bills 7 percent by 2020, and so forth. So what about the Senate? Well, the energy committee already passed a bill full of complementary measures last year, and it's dismal: "As a standalone bill, it does virtually nothing for renewables, boosts efficiency a middling amount, and dumps a bonanza of subsidies on offshore drilling, nuclear power, tar sands, oil shale, and natural gas." Not exactly promising.

(Flickr photo credit: wallyg)

Yesterday, Gallup released a poll suggesting that Americans seem to be less and less concerned about climate change. Here was the big headline-grabbing chart:

So why the rise in skepticism? Was it those Climategate e-mails? All those news stories harping on a few small errors in the IPCC's report? Sure, it's possible that both episodes could've affected public opinion, even if neither was significant on the merits. Still, it's interesting to look at the crosstabs of the poll, as Josh Nelson does, and note that skepticism about global warming is almost exclusively on the rise among political conservatives. Two years ago, for instance, 50 percent of conservatives believed climate change was already happening—that's now down to 30 percent.

I'd guess it's just as likely that political dynamics are a big driver here, as opposed to, say, a handful of e-mails from East Anglia. After all, climate change has become increasingly identified as a Democratic cause—in no small part because it's one of Barack Obama's main agenda items. And, on the flip side, you have key Republicans like John McCain and Charlie Crist facing primary challenges and edging away from what was once a signature issue for them. Energy issues have become far more partisan of late, which could explain the sharp uptick in skepticism over the past year and a half.

On the other hand, maybe it's just a bad idea to read too much into climate polls. As Dan Weiss has noted, Americans have been deeply confused about whether or not there's a scientific consensus on climate change for more than a decade—and yet majorities still favor clamping down on greenhouse gases. Public opinion is odd.

It's difficult to find a precise estimate, but the world produces somewhere around 300 billion pounds of plastic waste each year. I can't summon up a good mental picture of what that entails, but the fact that there's a whole island of plastic garbage at least the size of Texas swirling in the Pacific may give a rough idea. Worse, many plastics take forever to degrade—and when they do, they end up as minuscule particles that get absorbed into the food chain.

So that's not ideal. But what can be done? In theory, it's possible to recycle many plastics, but that's not cheap or easy—most of the seven varieties can only be recycled at very high temperatures, which requires a lot of energy. In most areas, it's largely just PET bottles that get recycled, and that involves a fairly inefficient process of shredding the plastic into little flakes. Plus, it's usually not possible to recycle plastic more than once—PET bottles don't usually get turned back into PET bottles, they get "downcycled" into unrecyclable items like pipes or fence posts—so even recycling can't prevent landfills and oceans from piling up.

Anyway, that's all to point out that this new discovery from scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Stanford University is pretty fascinating. The researchers say they've developed a "dirt cheap" organic catalyst that can build up and break down plastics over and over again. (By contrast, the metal catalysts currently in use contaminate and degrade the polymers over time, making them unrecyclable.) Saudi Arabia's already planning to put the idea to use by developing a plant that recycles PET bottles more efficiently.

Still, it seems way too early to say whether these green plastics will catch on. As Katie Fehrenbacher points out, the market for substances like biodegradable plastic is still a tiny sliver of the overall plastics industry, and a lot will probably depend on what sorts of policies toward plastic waste spring up in the future. For now, at least, it's not really a top issue.

(Flickr photo credit: seaotter22)

For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Elisabeth Rosenthal has a smart piece looking into Spain's failed experiment with solar-power subsidies. What happened was that in 2007, the Spanish government announced a new policy of "feed-in tariffs" for solar power. Anyone who built, say, a solar-thermal plant or installed photovoltaic panels on their roof could sell that electricity to the grid for above-market rates. But the subsidies turned out to be way too generous, and hence way too popular—solar makers from around the world stampeded into Spain, and the country reached its 2010 target in the first year alone.

That may not sound like a problem, but it was. The tariffs are paid for by a surcharge on electricity, so consumer bills went way up. And the solar subsidies were so generous that even inefficient, badly designed plants could turn a profit. So, last year, Spain had to pull back and slash the tariffs—which, in turn, caused the solar industry to crumple, with factories shutting down all across the country. (The industry is slowly starting to recover, but it will take time.)

What's odd is that this could have all been fairly easily avoided. Germany also has feed-in tariffs for solar power, and hasn't seen the same frenzied boom and bust, mainly because the German system was better designed. In Germany, the prices offered to renewable producers aren't nearly so lavish, and the rates actually decrease each year, so as to encourage solar- and wind-makers to keep improving efficiency. (The idea is that eventually costs will tumble down and renewable power will be able to compete without public support, once it finds its footing.) And there's a cap on total installation. As a result, Germany has seen rapid growth in its solar industry without a bubble.

P.S. If you're interested, Mariah Blake had a terrific piece about feed-in tariffs in the Washington Monthly last year. Most U.S. states rely on flat standards to promote renewable energy—wherein utilities have to generate a certain percentage of their electricity from renewables by a certain date. Feed-in tariffs offer some advantages—they're especially good at promoting distributed power, since any household can install a solar panel on their roof and profit from it—but, as Spain shows, if they're not designed well they can go badly awry.

P.P.S. Craig Morris has a good post adding a couple of useful nuances and clarifications.

(Flickr photo credit: Darrell Godliman)

It's fairly straightforward to measure how much carbon dioxide a given country is emitting within its own borders. Just count the factories and power plants and cars and so forth and tally up all that pollution. But what about outsourced emissions? After all, the United States and Europe consume a whole bunch of goods manufactured overseas, and those emissions usually get chalked up to developing countries like China. So who bears the responsibility here?

It's a dicey question, though the first step is to get a handle on how much carbon pollution actually gets outsourced. And the answer seems to be: quite a bit. A new study by Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science finds that the United States outsources about 11 percent of its emissions abroad, while Japan outsources nearly 18 percent and European nations outsource anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of their emissions—most of it to developing countries. On the flip side, nearly one-quarter of China's emissions, for instance, go into making goods for other countries. Here's a map showing annual net flows (in millions of tons of CO2):

A couple points could be made here. One is that the EU's success in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions looks somewhat less impressive in this context—if European countries are reducing pollution domestically but outsourcing more of it overseas, that's not progress. Mind you, it's not clear that this is true of all EU nations, though one study by the Stockholm Environment Institute found that in Britain's case, at least, outsourced emissions were offsetting a good chunk of carbon reductions.

There's also the question of whether the United States and Europe should pay for these outsourced emissions at all. It is their junk being produced abroad, after all. One possible way to do this would be to slap a simple carbon tax on imports. China, though, hates this idea (since it also benefits from this outsourcing, after all) and would prefer that, instead, wealthier countries help finance low-carbon projects in the developing world directly. These are the sorts of questions that always tie up global climate talks in knots.

For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Since it's Friday afternoon, why not some wild nature facts? This tidbit about Asian giant hornets, courtesy of University of Chicago biologist (and frequent TNR contributor) Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True, is easily the best hornet anecdote I've ever come across:

One of the marvels of evolution is the Asian giant hornet, a predatory wasp especially common in Japan. It's the world's largest hornet—as long as your thumb—with a two-inch body ornamented with menacing orange and black stripes. It's armed not only with fearsome jaws to clasp and kill its insect prey, but also a quarter-inch stinger. ...

One of the hornet's prime victims is the introduced European honeybee. The raid on a honeybee nest involves a merciless mass slaughter that has few parallels in nature. It starts when a lone hornet scout finds a nest. With its abdomen, the scout marks the nest for doom, placing a drop of pheromone near the entrance of the bee colony. Alerted by the mark, the scout's nestmates descend upon the spot, a group of twenty or thirty hornets arrayed against a colony of up to thirty thousand honeybees.

But it's no contest. Wading into the hive with jaws slashing, the hornets decapitate the bees one by one. With each hornet making bee heads roll at a rate of forty per minute, the battle is over in a few hours: every bee is dead, and body parts litter the hive. Then the hornets stock their larder. Over the next week, they systematically ravage the nest, eating honey and carrying the helpless bee grubs back to their own nests, where they are promptly deposited into the gaping mouths of the hornets' own ravenous offspring. ...

But there are bees that can fight off the giant hornet: honeybees that are native to Japan. And their defense is stunning—another marvel of adaptive behavior. When the hornet scout first arrives at their hive, the honeybees near the entrance rush into the hive, calling nestmates to arms and luring the hornet inside. In the meantime, hundreds of worker bees assemble inside the entrance. Once the hornet is inside, it is mobbed and covered by a tight ball of bees. Vibrating their abdomens, the bees quickly raise the temperature inside the ball to about 117 degrees Fahrenheit. Bees can survive this temperature, but the hornet can not. In twenty minutes the hornet scout is cooked to death, and—usually—the nest is saved.

There's video, too, though it can get a bit graphic.

A new study about how methane stores in the Arctic seabed are "destabilizing and venting" is getting a lot of attention. Here's a write-up from the Times:

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming. Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.

Just to clarify a bit: Yes, methane is bubbling up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, but because methane emissions in the area haven't been tracked for very long, it's still not clear whether these are actually new emissions—possibly caused by warming in the Arctic—or whether this leak has been around for centuries and it's just that no one ever noticed it before. But the study notes that there's an "urgent need" to monitor the area better, since there's a decent chance that warmer temperatures could weaken the undersea permafrost even further and allow even more methane to bubble up, causing yet more warming.

So how worried should we be about potential methane feedbacks? Joe Romm offers a dire view: "It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm. ... No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra." That's why the these feedbacks are so unnerving—no one's quite sure how the Earth will respond.

But on the flip side, Dot Earth talks to a few researchers who are a little more sanguine: "But [NOAA's Ed] Dlugokencky, like quite a few other scientists assessing Arctic warming, sees no evidence for a 'tipping point' beyond which this cascades uncontrollably. That doesn’t mean this is impossible, just that there’s no evidence pointing to such a prospect." That's somewhat comforting, though everyone seems to agree it would be incredibly stupid to just keep heating up the Earth and finding out for sure what happens.

Meanwhile, David Archer has a good, sober discussion of the paper at RealClimate. His bottom line: "For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen." So while these methane leaks need a lot more study, they're not cause for panic at the moment. There's enough to worry about when it comes to climate change as it is.