Questions from Journalists

QUESTION: There are water shortages in the West and a drought in the Southeast. Do you expect to see drought becoming more widespread throughout the U.S., especially in areas where normally there would not be significant drought?

DR. PERSHING: The current science is a little bit ambiguous with regard to drought. Most of the projections predict that some parts of the country will see an increase in water and some a decrease.

I was in Minnesota recently, which is part of the Midwest Governors’ accord climate change structure. One of the things they’re worried about is an inadequate water supply for farm communities. Minnesota is known as the land of a thousand lakes, so it is telling when officials are thinking about a future that includes water duress.

Water is driving the climate debate in Arizona and in places you would not expect, like New York City. I’ve noticed a phenomenal increase in water stress around the country. It will be a big issue in the years to come.

QUESTION: What various economic sectors are having a major impact on climate change? I’m particularly interested in transportation and a related one, travel, along with construction and real estate.

DR. KETE: The big untapped resource in terms of ways to reduce greenhouse gases and slow the growth in greenhouse gases is in thinking about the built environment, particularly in cities and the way we travel within cities. Many U.S. cities, European cities, and increasingly developing country cities, are starting to focus on all the ways to reduce the amount of travel to move people and goods around. We’re a long way from a ubiquitous set of strategies.

But, there is a set of design principles that are gaining prominence in Europe. And here, Arlington County is a model for transit-oriented corridors, along with Portland, Oregon. In New York City, more people don’t use cars there than any other place in the country. Developers know the benefits of building along transit corridors.

DR. PERSHING: The aviation industry is the most rapidly growing sector in terms of transport emissions. The only group to have regulated aviation emissions or to even be proposing it is the European Union. My sense is that the regulations will not pass through the International Aviation Transportation Association meetings largely because the U.S. and developing countries are blocking it. There will most likely be restrictions, however, which will translate into higher prices in and out of Europe.

MR. LASH: The biggest short-term opportunity with respect to air travel is actually better management of the planes on the ground. The second biggest is better air traffic control. Then, you get to technology changes. The most interesting thing I’ve heard recently is that laboratories are working on the gasification technologies for creating liquid fuels from cellulose that could become jet fuels. I don’t think we’re going to see that in the next five years. In a decade, we might actually be talking about a biofuels mix for jet fuels.

QUESTION: Next year is a political year. Even if the country elects a Democrat as president, if a certain number of senators manage to block action, then nothing would happen on climate. Looking ahead, how many years does the world have before it becomes impossible to reverse the most dangerous climate impacts?

MR. LASH: The political problem in the Senate is that you need 60 votes to pass legislation. It’s very hard to get to 60 without any votes from senators who are from states that are coal-dependent. Negotiation will have to provide some incentives to coal-dependent states.

One way would be to allocate some portion of the emissions rights to existing facilities producing electricity – which will reduce the cost to meeting cap-and-trade requirements. There are a number of environmental disadvantages to doing that, but I feel certain that Congress will use that instrument to reduce the costs for some of the Southeastern and Western states that are highly coal-dependent.

Another way would be to accelerate the construction of carbon-capture and storage demonstrations, especially in regions that are highly coal-dependent. You could guarantee major investments in energy efficiency so that when electricity prices go up, electricity use will go down, and the impact on the consumer is basically negligible. I think all those things will happen in the legislation. Each piece will be designed to gain one or two more votes. The legislation now is probably only six or eight votes short of what is necessary.

DR. PERSHING: There is an interesting debate that has been raging in the last couple of years around whether or not and at what point we would know if we reached the climate tipping point. From the scientific perspective, that means we end up seeing a very rapid acceleration in the kinds of changes that would reach the point where we couldn’t easily slide back. We would no longer see steady growth. At some point, climate changes ramp up exponentially.

I believe that we may be in the middle of it. It’s very hard for me to imagine the extent of Arctic ice cover we witnessed last September, down 30 percent from the previous year – without suggesting that we passed some kind of a threshold. It’s very hard for me to imagine that the kinds of droughts we’re seeing in the Southeast are not a large change as opposed to some small, incremental shift. Australians are discussing whether the aberration was not the drought but the wet period, and wondering if the country is back into a long-term dry period.

These impacts are consistent with what we would expect to see if we were to reach a tipping point. The problem with this kind of shift is you can’t know until after the fact. You can’t tell if you’ve got a distinction between some steady progression and some series of events, or you’ve got some rapid and unprecedented change. My own background is in geology. The geologic record is fraught and full of these intermittent but very rapid changes. Knowing whether those are natural or human-induced is one question. The odds are good that we’re going to see a rapid change if we keep going in this direction; whether we’re already there, or whether it’s at two degrees or one-and-a-half degrees is probably still unknown.