More angles on the Copenhagen climate talks

An aide to one of the delegations claims that the Chinese intentionally scuttled last week's climate conference. James Fallows comments.

MEANWHILE, Thomas Friedman writes about Denmark's own progress on cutting carbon emissions. And two researchers from the Netherlands, Gert Jan Kramer and Martin Haigh, argue that in order to head off disastrous climate changes, we need to not only focus on coming up with new technologies but also pay attention to how quickly they can be deployed on an industrial scale:

To combat climate change, the world's entire energy system needs a major overhaul before the middle of the century. But can we build new energy supplies that quickly? Some argue that with the right incentives we can see similar rates of change in the energy system as have been seen in information technology. So most of the debate focuses on how much the transition will cost and who will foot the bill. Here, we argue that cost is less important than the rate at which existing low-carbon energy technologies can be physically deployed. Because the scale of the energy system is so huge, it takes time to build the human and industrial capacity to achieve substantial deployment.

The authors of this Nature article worry that even in Shell's fairly optimistic alternative energy scenario, "Blueprints," the rollout of new energy sources won't be enough to achieve the greenhouse gas emissions that are needed:

Even with all these policies in place, the CO2 concentrations achieved in the Blueprints scenario fall short of environmental ambitions. An even tougher goal of stabilizing CO2 concentrations at 450 p.p.m. — as climate science recommends — would require a largely decarbonized energy sector by 2050. Our best chance of beating the deployment laws requires efforts on multiple fronts, as Blueprints shows, but going beyond those optimistic projections remains an even more significant challenge.

One implication of the deployment laws is that more action is required on the demand side to increase efficiency and curtail consumption. The good news is that demand-side solutions are subject to different laws. In principle, everyone in the developed world could use less energy tomorrow. The bad news is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to restrain our appetite for more energy. No climate actions are easy and none of them is quick.

AND FINALLY, when I lived in Las Vegas, one of the issues that concerned me was the bureacratic hurdles that slowed the progress of solar energy projects in the state. And while I care passionately about the environment, I think protecting the desert has to be balanced with the impacts climate change will have around the globe. So even as I understand Diane Feinstein's motivation, I'm worried about the effects of her proposed legislation that would limit solar projects in the Mojave.