The New Nation - Internet Edition

Gary Gardner and Michael Renner

When leaders of the 20 largest economies gather in Washington this week, a centerpiece of their deliberations should be a Global Green Deal that capitalizes on the current economic crisis to build economically and environmentally sustainable economies.

The perfect storm of today's economic, environmental, and social ravages requires a robust, multi-pronged response. Indeed, the challenge for global political leadership, including U.S. President-elect Obama, is not merely to kickstart the global economy, but to do so in a way that creates jobs and stabilizes climate, increases food output using less water and pesticides, and generates prosperity with greater equality of incomes. Successful political leaders will be those skilled at identifying synergies among today's hydra-headed problems and using them to craft powerful global coalitions from such constituencies as business, labor, and community organizations.

This broad approach will require a conceptual blueprint evocative of America's 1930s New Deal-but more audacious in scope and vision. The United Nations Environment Programme has recently called for a transformation of the global economy so that it works for the broad majority of humankind, within boundaries set by the planet's rate of resource renewal and waste-absorption capacity. This historic moment calls for not merely repairs to our hyper-productive, yet ailing, economy, but for a new approach suited to the realities of a heavily populated and environmentally stressed world-a Global Green Deal that shifts the focus from growth to development, and that is geared less to providing consumerist superfluities than to ensuring that nobody's true needs go unmet.

A Global Green Deal would have several strategic objectives:

· Transition to a renewable energy economy.

· Make renewable energy sources the dominant feature of the world's energy system, and systematically phase out reliance on fossil fuels. Wind and solar technologies are not just more environmentally benign than oil, coal, and nuclear power, but also more jobs-intensive. Alternative forms of energy already provide employment to more than 2 million people worldwide, and continued rapid growth will likely multiply these numbers in coming years.

· Launch an efficiency revolution.

· Doing more with less is one of the surest paths to wealth creation, and environmentalists have a great many ideas to raise energy and materials efficiency. Indeed, some European analysts have asserted that a tenfold increase in resource productivity is possible. Transport, housing, industry, and utilities are ripe with opportunities for huge efficiency gains. A "dematerialization" of economic activity requires far less mining and logging, and thus permits a sharp reduction in their environmental impacts.

· Invest in green infrastructure.

· Revolutionizing the electrical grid, creating transportation systems that are less reliant on automobiles and embrace rail and mass transit, and encouraging settlement structures that are compact, not sprawling, will stimulate economic activity, create millions of jobs, and free us of unnecessarily high levels of energy and materials use.

* Make materials circulate.

Analyst Walter Stahel of the Product Life Institute has pointed out that the front end of an economy-extractive activities such as mining, logging, oil drilling, and fishing-tends to use less labor and create more pollution than manufacturing and maintenance activities. A circular economy emphasizes durability, repairability, recycling, and remanufacturing, squeezing more value out of the resource base and generating greater employment. Companies will thrive on helping their customers derive the most functionality and service out of a product, rather than merely seeking to maximize sales.

* Work for a fairer distribution of wealth within and across borders.

According to the International Labour Organization, two-thirds of countries for which data are available underwent an increase in income inequality in 1990-2005 between the top 10 and bottom 10 percent of wage earners. Management-worker pay disparities rose to new heights. CEOs at the S&P 500 leading U.S. firms averaged $10.5 million in 2007, 344 times the pay of the average American worker. (And the top 50 U.S. hedge- and private-equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, some 19,000 times as much as the average U.S. worker.) Just three decades ago, CEO pay averaged only 30 to 40 times the pay of the average worker.

Translating these goals into reality will require smart regulations, tax shifts, subsidy reforms, mandates, incentives, and an ecologically-inspired industrial policy. A powerful first step is for governments to ensure that prices "tell the ecological truth"-ending the free ride that fossil fuels have enjoyed vis-à-vis renewables and ensuring that the air and water pollution, health impacts, and climate destabilization inherent in burning oil, natural gas, and coal are fully reflected in the price of energy.

Carbon taxes and similar measures accomplish this goal. Governments can use the resulting revenues to lighten the tax burden falling on labor in the form of payroll taxes. Such an ecological tax shift, which has been carried out on a limited basis in Europe, would encourage job creation. Other measures might include tax credits for companies that reduce their energy and material intensity or that step up their recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing activities-with double the tax break to those firms that use their savings to hire more employees.

A second idea is to use government procurement power to create large-scale markets for green technologies and employment generation, overcoming barrier-to-entry and chicken-and-egg problems that often bedevil innovative approaches. From the local to the national level, governments around the world spend trillions of dollars on public purchases every year. Intelligent use of procurement programs, coupled with expansive consumer product labeling and information campaigns, can play a critical role in ramping up economies of scale that render green products cost-competitive.

Public works programs, a third tool in government's toolbox, may be useful in both urban and rural settings, at least on a temporary basis. In rural areas, they could focus on reforestation and measures to halt soil erosion and adapt to climate change. Coupled with the promotion of organic agriculture as well as land reform, such programs can help create more resilient rural economies. In urban areas, they could focus on efforts to establish green belts, rehabilitate park and other green areas, modernize infrastructure, and build or expand pedestrian zones and biking lanes.

Fourth, retrofitting existing buildings will slash heating and cooling needs and would be a boon for the world's 111 million construction industry jobs. Germany's experience-government and private investments to weatherize apartments created or saved 140,000 jobs in a five-year span-is instructive. But a Green Deal would go far beyond housing for the world's middle class to combine greening measures with efforts to provide decent housing for those marooned in the world's teeming slums.

Strategic investments in greening the auto industry could also pay major dividends. Having focused on churning out gas-guzzling SUVs, some of the major manufacturers, like GM, are now struggling for survival. Governments could inject resources into the industry under the condition that R&D and commercialization efforts are unequivocally devoted to developing high-efficiency vehicles, while mandating that new models achieve fuel efficiency on an ambitious upward sliding scale. In recognition of the "built-in" consumption levels of existing inefficient fleets and the normally slow turnover rate, governments could pair such efforts with programs that buy up inefficient vehicles.

However, transportation policy needs to look beyond the auto industry and commit to a major revival of inter-urban rail and urban mass transit networks. Expanding and modernizing such systems and their infrastructure would offer an alternative to a car- and airplane-focused approach, stimulate innovation, reduce air pollution, and provide large numbers of well-paying manufacturing jobs.

Finally, the financial industry's rescue effort should be leveraged to turn the financial sector from a purveyor of the debt-driven consumer juggernaut into a force for green development. Such a re-orientation would seek to overcome the problem of high up-front costs for more efficient appliances and equipment by developing sustainable credit programs. In a greening economy, advantageous credit terms would be made available for weatherizing houses, installing solar panels, purchasing more durable and efficient goods, and other transactions that promise green dividends. So-called "location-efficient mortgages" are being offered in a small handful of U.S. cities. In essence, they offer preferential mortgages in areas that are well-connected to public transit and walkable. Used widely, they can counteract the sprawling settlement structures that are at the base of automobile dependency.

Where might the money come from?

The origins of the current crisis are found in the "overgrowth of financial assets relative to growth of real wealth," as University of Maryland professor Herman Daly has put it. Nonetheless, a global credit crunch threatens to starve even legitimate business and household needs and could trigger mass unemployment. This raises a key question: can capital for a global green rescue effort be mobilized?

Despite the global economic contraction, the answer may well be yes. The $700 billion committed to the U.S. financial bailout, plus additional large sums marshaled by other countries, suggests that governments can raise sizable sums of capital in emergency situations. Any number of large pools of capital might be tapped to fund a Green New Deal, if the right incentives were set in place. Here are a few ideas:

* Military spending-The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that world military spending in 2007 ran to a record $1.3 trillion -45 percent higher in real terms than a decade earlier. The United States alone is spending about $700 billion per year on maintaining the Pentagon and conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a world with no major power conflicts, a substantial portion of these budgets would be better dedicated to a Global Green Deal.

* Sovereign wealth funds-Oil rich nations and governments with large trade surpluses held $2-3 trillion dollars in wealth in 2008. Why not design incentives for government holders of such capital to invest in a Global Green Deal?

* Tobin Tax-Trade in the world's currencies amounted to $3.7 trillion daily in 2007. Why not institute a Tobin tax-a levy named for its earliest proponent, economist James Tobin-as a way to raise Green Deal revenue? Even a minimal tax on foreign exchange transactions could bring in many billions of dollars, as well as dampen destabilizing currency speculation.

* Fossil fuel subsidies-These are estimated at $150-$250 billion each year. Oil companies are highly profitable, and their product is toxic to climate stability. Why not remove government supports and pledge those funds to a Global Green Deal? And a tax on "windfall" oil profits, carbon taxes, or proceeds from the auction of carbon allowances could all serve the same dual purposes.

* Insurance industry-The cost of weather-related natural disasters is on the rise, and is considered a "strategic threat" to the insurance industry. Between 1980 and 2004, the cost of such events totaled $1.4 trillion, of which $340 billion were insured. The industry may have a strong incentive to contribute to the climate stabilization piece of a Global Green Deal.

* Treasury bonds-Bonds are commonly used for a variety of purposes, and could be dedicated to green investments. For instance, China's government has supported hundreds of energy conservation projects since 2006 in part by issuing treasury bonds.

* Private Capital Flows-The energy industries alone invest several hundred billion dollars each year in fossil fuel-related projects; a share of that capital could be redirected to energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives.

Moving a Global Green Deal agenda is not the work of a single leader or even a small group of governments. Instead, it will require an overhaul of global governance at least as great as the one that occurred after World War II, when the United Nations and the Bretton Woods financial and economic institutions were founded to establish a new era of global stability. Today, a new international policy architecture is needed that includes issues such as climate change and other environmental issues that are central to the health of the global economy.

This includes a fresh direction for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to promote green and equitable development, and innovative arrangements for cooperative green technology development and sharing of best sustainability practices. In January 2009, a group of governments will establish the new International Renewable Energy Agency. IRENA is to become a key driver of the large-scale adoption of renewables around the world. Paired with an organization to promote international cooperation on energy efficiency, IRENA could become the core of Green Deal global governance.

This is a tall order in this severely challenged and constrained world, but the G20 meeting later this week is the ideal venue to begin this process. It is typically during times of crisis, not contentment, that humanity rises to new challenges. The present circumstances likely present a brief window of opportunity-a chance to shuffle the deck and create a more just and green civilization for a crowded world. Let the work begin.

(Gary Gardner and Michael Renner are senior researchers with the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C.)

Cities from Beijing to New Delhi are getting darker, glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas are melting faster and weather systems becoming more extreme, in part, due to the combined effects of human-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs) and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These are among the conclusions of scientists studying a more than three km-thick layer of soot and other manmade particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean.

On November 13 the team, drawn from research centres in Asia including China and India, Europe and the United States, announced their latest and most detailed assessment of the phenomenon. The brown clouds, the result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, says the report.

This is because ABCs lead to the formation of particles like black carbon and soot that absorb sunlight and heat the air; and gases such as ozone which enhance the greenhouse effect of CO2.

Globally however brown clouds may be countering or 'masking'the warming impacts of climate change by between 20 and up to 80 per cent the researchers suggest.

This is because of particles such as sulfates and some organics which reflect sunlight and cool the surface.

The cloud is also having impacts on air quality and agriculture in Asia increasing risks to human health and food production for three billion people.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said: 'One of UNEP's central mandates is science-based early warning of serious and significant environmental challenges. I expect the Atmospheric Brown Cloud to be now firmly on the international community's radar as a result of today's report'. The phenomenon has been most intensively studied over Asia. This is in part because of the region's already highly variable climate, including the formation of the annual monsoon, and the fact that the region is home to around half the world's population and is undergoing massive growth.

But the scientists today made clear that there are also brown clouds elsewhere, including over parts of North America, Europe, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin which also require urgent and detailed research.

'Combating rising CO2 levels and climate change is the challenge of this generation, but it is also the best bet the world has for Green Growth, including new jobs and new enterprises from a booming solar and wind industry to more fuel efficient vehicles, homes and workplaces. Developed countries must not only act first but also assist developing economies with the finance and clean technology needed to green energy generation and economic growth,' said Mr Steiner.

'In doing so, they can not only lift the threat of climate change but also turn off the soot- stream that is feeding the formation of atmospheric brown clouds in many of the world's regions. This is because the source of greenhouse gases and soot are often one and the same-unsustainable burning of fossil fuels, inefficient combustion of biomass and deforestation,' he added.

Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, head of the UNEP scientific panel which is carrying out the research said: 'I would like to pay tribute to my distinguished colleagues, drawn from universities and research centres in Asia including China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand as well as Europe and the United States.'

'Our preliminary assessment, published in 2002, triggered a great deal of awareness but also skepticism. That has often been the initial reaction to new, novel and far reaching, counter-intuitive scientific research,' he said.

'We believe today's report brings ever more clarity to the ABC phenomena and in doing so must trigger an international response-one that tackles the twin threats of greenhouse gases and brown clouds and the unsustainable development that underpins both,' added professor Ramanathan who is based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California.

'One of the most serious problems highlighted in the report is the documented retreat of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the headwaters for most Asian rivers, and thus have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia,' he said.

'The new research, by identifying some of the causal factors, offers hope for taking actions to slow down this disturbing phenomenon; it should be cautioned that significant uncertainty remains in our understanding of the complexity of the regional effects of ABCs and more surprises may await us,' added Professor Ramanathan.

Highlights from Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Regional Assessment Report with Focus on Asia

Five regional hotspots for ABCs have been indentified.These are:

East Asia, covering eastern China; The Indo-Gangetic plains in South Asia from the northwest and northeast regions of eastern Pakistan across India to Bangladesh and Myanmar; Southeast Asia, covering Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam; Southern Africa extending southwards from sub-Saharan Africa into Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe; and The Amazon basin in South America.

There are hotspots too in North America over the eastern seaboard and in Europe-but winter precipitation tends to remove them and reduce their impact.

Around 13 megacities have so far been identified as ABC hotpots. Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran where soot levels are 10 per cent of the total mass of all human-made particles.

ABCs can reduce sunlight hitting the Earth's surface in two ways.

Some of the particles such as sulphates, linked with burning coal and other fossil fuels, reflect and scatter rays back into space.

Others, also linked with fossil fuel and biomass burning, in particular black carbon in soot, absorb sunlight before it reaches the ground. The overall effect is to make 'hot spot' cities darker or dimmer.

'Dimming'of between 10-25 per cent is occurring over cities such as Karachi, Beijing, Shanghai and New Delhi Guangzhou is among several cities that have recorded a more than 20 per cent reduction in sunlight since the 1970s For India as a whole, the dimming trend has been running at about two per cent per decade between 1960 and 2000-more than doubling between 1980 and 2004.

'In China the observed dimming trend from the 1950s to the 1990s was

about 3-4 per cent per decade, with the larger trends after the 1970s,'

says the report.

Impact on Cloud Formation and a Further Dimming Effect Regions with large concentrations of ABCs may be getting cloudier which can also contribute to dimming but data are not sufficient to quantify this effect.Particles and aerosols in the ABCs may act to inhibit the formation of rain drops and rainfall. 'The net effect is an extension of cloud life-times,' says the report.

Masking the Impacts of Climate Change ABCs shield the surface from sunlight by reflecting solar radiation back to space and by absorbing heat in the atmosphere.

These two dimming phenomena can act to artificially cool the Earth's surface especially during dry seasons. The pollution can also be transported around the world via winds in the upper troposphere (above 5 km in altitude).

As a result global temperature rises-linked with greenhouse gas emissions-may currently be between 20 per cent and 80 per cent less as a result of brown clouds around the world says the report.

If brown clouds were eliminated overnight, this could trigger a rapid global temperature rise of as much as to 2 degrees C.

Added to the 0.75 degrees C rise of the 20th century, this could push global temperatures well above 2 degrees C-considered by many scientists to be a crucial and dangerous threshold.

Thus simply tackling the pollution linked with brown cloud formation without simultaneously delivering big cuts in greenhouse gases could have a potentially disastrous effect.

The science of ABCs, woven with the science of greenhouse gases, is not

simple and may be behind some highly complex warming and cooling patterns witnessed on continents and in different regions of specific countries.

The masking of greenhouse warming by ABCs may in part be the explanation for the lack of a strong warming trend over India since the 1950s during the dry season which runs from January to May.

ABCs may explain in part why the warming trend in India's nighttime temperatures is much larger than the trend in daytime temperatures.

Annual mean temperatures in mainland China have risen by over one degree C in the past half century.

However the trends have not been uniform with the Tibetan Plateau and the north, northeast and northwest of China experiencing the highest temperature rises.

Conversely southwest and central eastern China has experienced a strong cooling trend of between 0.1 to 0.3 degrees C per decade.

'The combined effects of greenhouse gases, ABCs and rapid urbanization are required to explain the complex pattern of warming and cooling trends in

China,' says the report.

Impacts on Weather Patterns Including the East Asian Monsoon The large heating and cooling effects of ABCs respectively in the atmosphere and at the surface, combined with the impacts of greenhouse gases, may be also triggering sharp shifts in weather patterns.

This is being aggravated by dimming over the Northern Indian Ocean versus the relatively clean Southern Indian Ocean setting up new gradients in surface sea temperatures and surface sea evaporation rates.

ABCs, along with the global warming may thus be acting to trigger significant drying in northern China and increased risk of flooding in southern China while in part also triggering other environmental and economic effects.

Overall decrease in monsoon precipitation over India and Southeast Asia by between five and seven per cent since the 1950s.

Since the 1950s the Indian summer monsoon is not only weakening but shrinking with a decrease in early and late season rainfall and a decline in the number of rainy days.

In both China and India extreme rain events of more than 100 mm a day have increased.

In both India and China very heavy rainfall of more than 150 mm a day has nearly doubled.

The Hindu Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers provide the headwaters for the major river systems including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yangtze rivers.

The Ganges basin is home to over 400 million people and holds 40 per cent of India's irrigated croplands.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that the glaciers have shrunk 5 per cent since the 1950s and the volume of China's nearly 47,000 glaciers has fallen by 3,000 square km over the past quarter century.

Glaciers in India such as the Siachen, Gangotri and Chhota Shigiri glaciers are retreating at rates of between 10 and 25 metres a year. The retreat has accelerated in the past three and-a-half decades.

The Gangotri glacier alone provides up to 70 per cent of the water in the Ganges.

ABC solar heating of the atmosphere, due to the absorption of soot and black carbon pollution 'is suggested to be as important as greenhouse gas warming in accounting for the anomalously large warming trend observed in the elevated regions' such as the Himalayan-Tibetan region says the report.

Decreased reflection of solar radiation by snow and ice due to increasing deposits of black carbon is emerging as another major contributor to the melting of ice and snow.

Elevated regions of the Himalayas within 100 km of Mount Everest experience large black carbon concentrations ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand nanogrammes per cubic metre.

Impacts of ABCs on food production and farmers'livelihoods may be many.

However there remains a great deal more research to undertake in terms of crops at risk and the precise role various ABC-linked effects-separately or in combination with those of greenhouse gases-may or may not be having.

Possible effects may include Damage to crops as a result of increased ground level ozone. In Europe a threshold concentration at which damage can occur is deemed to be 40 parts per billion The report says that in parts of Asia ground level ozone can reach 50 parts per billion during February to June and peaking again between September and November at 40 parts per billion The studies suggest that growing season mean ozone concentrations in the range 30 - 45 parts per billion could see crop yield losses in the region of 10 - 40 per cent for sensitive cultivars of important Asian crops such as wheat rice and legumes A recent study translated such impacts on yield into annual economic losses estimating that for four key crops-wheat, rice, corn and soya bean-these may amount to around $5 billion a year across China, the Republic of Korea and Japan Other effects may include damage linked with the various acidic and toxic particles from brown clouds depositing on plants from the atmosphere Reduced levels of photosynthesis and thus crop production due to 'dimming' Brown clouds contain a variety of toxic aerosols, carcinogens and particles including particulate matter (PM) of less than 2.5 microns in width.

These have been linked with a variety of health effects from respiratory disease and cardio-vascular problems.

Outdoor exposure: Increases in concentrations of PM 2.5 of 20 microgrammes per cubic metre could lead to about 340,000 excess deaths per year in China and India Indoor exposure: the World Health Organization estimates that over 780,000 deaths in the two countries can be linked to solid fuel use in the home Economic losses due to outdoor exposure to ABC-related PM2.5 has been crudely estimated at 3.6 per cent of GDP in China and 2.2 per cent of GDP in India.