'Generation E' Is Leading Campus Sustainability Revolution

NWF's Campus Ecology program has released its anticipated study of Generation E: Students Leading for a Sustainable, Clean Energy Future, which highlights the unique and critical role college students play in the climate flight.

Published just weeks before the international climate negotiations kick off in Copenhagen, Generation E is a story of student and youth leadership.The report highlights 165 college and university examples in 46 states, covering 35 categories of creative student effort. American students are stepping up and responding to the challenge of climate change.

Generation E illustrates the creative ways our campuses are responding to the shift toward a sustainable, clean energy future.

“‘Generation E’” stands for the three “E’s” of sustainability: ecology, sustainable economics, and social equity,” said Julian Keniry, Senior Director of Campus and Community Leadership. “It also stands for a tremendous amount of energy and excitement on college campuses today. The values of sustainability define and unite the current generation like no other issue of our time.”

An executive summary and the full Generation E report, including a list of 165 highlighted schools, are available online at www.nwf.org/GenE.

Campuses featured in Generation E and all other schools are encouraged to enter NWF's Chill Out competition this fall. Chill Out: Campus Solutions to Global Warming is a competition that rewards and recognizes all the cool things campuses are doing to reduce the impacts of global warming.

To enter, students, faculty and staff need to submit a two minute video that shows how their college or university is working to reduce global warming pollution. Entry forms are at CampusChillout.org.

Two New Threats to Polar Bears & How You Can Help

We're learning some alarming new data about just how fast polar bear habitat is melting away in the Arctic Circle. According to National Snow and Ice Data Center data, Artic sea ice extent has slipped below 2007's historic lows for about a week now.

Take a look at the latest satellite imagery, noting the huge gap of open blue sea just off Alaska's coast where ice should be. The 1979-2000 median ice level is outlined in red (click to enlarge):

Keep in mind that the 1979-2000 median line already reflects a steady decline in Arctic sea ice. What's worse, reduced sea ice cover has an amplifying effect on global warming. While ice reflects most of the sun's rays, dark sea water absorbs the heat.

But even considering the long, steady decline, the recent drops are absolutely stunning. Take a look at the annual trendline, with sharp declines in 2007 & 2009:

“The loss of Arctic sea ice has huge implications for polar bears,” said Dr. Doug Inkley, our senior scientist here at the National Wildlife Federation. “U.S. Geological Survey studies and models indicate that two thirds of polar bears will disappear by 2050, due to ice loss.”

The alarming Arctic Sea ice loss comes at a crucial moment for America's polar bears. The federal government has just proposed designating more than 200,000 square miles of sea, ice and land as critical polar bear habitat. The designation won't save polar bears by itself, but it could give them a fighting chance. And with global warming slowly eating away at their hunting grounds, polar bears need all the help they can get.

But there's a catch -- the U.S. Interior Department may allow Big Oil to drill more in the same area. Drilling would not only disturb habitats polar bears need to raise their young, it would increase the risks of devastating oil spills.

Please take a moment to email the Interior Department right now. We need to keep our commitment to protecting polar bears.

Our Chance to Shut the Door on Aquatic Invasive Species

Ocean freighters that discharge ballast water from ports around the globe into the Great Lakes have infected America’s freshwater seas with a plague of foreign species. Invasive species introduced into the Great Lakes have spread across the country and made it as far as California.

The invaders — such as zebra mussels, quagga mussels and round gobies — have disrupted fisheries, killed thousands of water birds and triggered toxic algae blooms that threaten public health and wildlife.

Now we have a chance to end the practice of ocean freighters using the Great Lakes as a dumping ground for filthy ballast water from around the world. The Coast Guard is taking comments on a proposed rule that would make ships sterilize their ballast water -- but not quickly enough to shut the door on new invasive species.

The Coast Guard needs to hear from you. Take action to keep invasive species out of America's waters.

-By Jeff Alexander, NWF Great Lakes Regional Center

Off-the-Charts Cute: Baby Otter Video

Otters are so cute, you could take a video of one reading the classifieds and it would be entertaining. But a baby otter? Playing with toys?

"The Eyes of the World are on the U.S."

Over the weekend, we learned world leaders are scaling back expectations for the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit. Here's what Jeremy Symons, National Wildlife Federation senior vice president, had to say about the decision at Politico's forum, The Arena:

If there were ever any doubts about the global significance of Congressional action to enact a clean energy and climate plan for America, the run-up to Copenhagen should erase them. The eyes of the world are on the United States, which has the greatest capacity to lead the green economy renaissance that will lower pollution levels and safeguard our children’s future. Copenhagen remains a critical moment to engage all nations in a more ambitious global effort that keeps pace with the latest climate science.

With Senate action on clean energy legislation now delayed, a successful outcome at Copenhagen would be akin to a successful visit to a tailor to buy a new suit. You pick the fabric and style, take measurements and agree on a date to make the final adjustments and close the deal. Similarly, the nations of the world should come out of Copenhagen with an agreement on the architecture and timeline that will shape the final deal. The extended timeline should be months, not years. It should give Congress the time needed to get a strong clean energy and climate bill to President Obama for his signature in early 2010, but also recognize that delay increases the cost of the climate response and the risk of climate disasters.

President Obama needs to provide the leadership to take full advantage of Copenhagen and ensure a successful outcome. And the Senate needs to recognize that prompt action on a U.S. climate bill will not only repower America’s economy with clean energy, but also galvanize global cooperation on climate change.

Learn more about NWF's international work in our Climate Change, Deforestation & Agriculture section.

Consequences of Copenhagen, Part II: Local Efforts

Today we present part 2 of a 4 part series on the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, where leaders from around the globe will come together to negotiate a new global climate treaty.

The Boulder Bubble

Local governments vow to press ahead with emissions reductions regardless of the outcome at the upcoming Copenhagen talks. Can those efforts carry the day if international negotiations devolve to bickering and stalemate?

By Douglas Fischer, Daily Climate Editor

Here's what this affluent Rocky Mountain city of 100,000 does about a revenue shortfall in the darkest economic hour since the Great Depression:

It raises its carbon tax.

The city just west of Denver was the first in the nation to slap a levy on carbon emissions so it could meet Kyoto Protocol obligations. As it became apparent this summer the city was slipping and needed more cash to revitalize emissions-cutting programs, town leaders raised the modest tax – tacked to city utility bills – to its maximum.

With diplomatic efforts to seal a post-Kyoto accord approaching a decidedly uncertain fate this December in Copenhagen, state and local leaders pushing their own emissions reductions efforts see only one choice: Proceed.

The number of cities and regional governments undertaking this transition to a low-carbon economy is growing. These efforts, leaders vow, will continue whatever the outcome of political debates in Copenhagen, Brussels or Washington, D.C.

There are, in other words, two trains heading out of the station: Those driving local change are confident their programs will continue to accelerate even if global discussions get waylaid in Copenhagen next month.

"The community is on board with this," said Sarah Van Pelt, author of Boulder's climate action plan who is now a special projects coordinator for the city's environmental division. "Right now our biggest detractors are saying why aren't we doing enough."

San Diego is tying recycling, water use and energy efficiency to climate; Berkeley, Calif. has rewritten property rules to boost solar installations; New York and California are shifting state policy to encourage a new, low-carbon economy. Twenty-nine other states have some sort of a renewable fuel standard, requiring utilities to mix a certain percentage of those fuels into their power mix.

"If nothing happens on the federal level, it's unfortunate but it's not the end of the world," said Cara Martinson, legislative analyst for the California State Association of Counties. "We'll start to see a lot more of these regional activities. It'll start to be a bottom-up approach if the national framework breaks down."

Whether these local efforts can produce the reductions required to avert the worst climate disruption is much debated. Many climate experts are skeptical. The necessary cuts are substantial, they require economy-wide transformation and the initiatives need to be policed by a fixed, enforceable global treaty.

"It's hard to see how they could be sufficient," said Doug Boucher, director of tropical forests and climate initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Copenhagen talks are seen as crucial for several reasons. It's the date the international community – after years of negotiations – set as the time to draw up a comprehensive global solution to climate disruption.

Industry and governments need to know where emissions targets are headed post-Kyoto. December is the last chance to get a treaty ratified and in place before Kyoto expires in 2012, said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Resources Institute's climate and energy team who has been involved in global climate talks for more than a decade.

Local efforts help, she agreed. But the global problem needs a global solution.

"It's a huge problem around the share of the commons in the atmosphere, and it's a very large economic issue," she said. "Countries need to have a sense that other main contributors to the problem – and their competitors – are moving together toward a solution.

"It's more than just the sum of the parts."

California, even more than Boulder, exemplifies local determination to curb emissions regardless of national or international stalemate. The state of 37 million people agreed in 2006 to tackle global warming. It has a mandatory greenhouse gas reporting system covering 90 percent of the state's industrial emissions. By law, the state has to ratchet those emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020 – a 24 percent cut from business-as-usual projections.

But scientists say the world needs to slash emissions 80 percent by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Boulder hasn't met Kyoto's modest target of a 7 percent cut over 1990 levels despite its tax and one of the nation's most eco-conscious populations, though city leaders say they expect to get close.

California faced a $26 billion spending hole earlier this summer that it filled in part by pulling money from local governments. While the state managed to protect many of its climate programs, local efforts aren't so lucky.

"A lot of this stuff might be put on the far back burner for a while," Martinson acknowledged.

California's municipalities, in fact, aren't seen as "agents of reduction" under the state's framework. There's no emissions bar under which cities must slip by a certain date.

"We are looking to forward-thinking municipalities to come up with innovative solutions," said Stanley Young, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board's climate programs.

"They're more nimble, certainly, than the state. In a sense they're able to be the test bed for these new approaches."

But at this point, he said, "it's all voluntary."

Still, cities are laying an important foundation that must be in place regardless of the target ultimately set by global leaders: They're figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to cut emissions.

"Demand-side reduction requires sophisticated implementation. It needs to show up at the local level and show up for the end-user," said Steve Pomerance, the former Boulder City Councilman who helped write Boulder's carbon tax earlier in the decade.

It's no surprise that Boulder would take the lead here.

The city is affluent – near the top 10 percent in the United States in per-capita income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau – and brainy. The University of Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and several other research institutions make the city a hub for science and innovation, repeatedly propelling the city to the top of Forbes' annual list of America's smartest cities. (link: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/250167)

It's also a green city, with a network of dedicated bike and hiking trails and the nation's oldest open-space program hemming development. Trails, sun, snow and mountains draw a young, outdoorsy demographic that boasts one of the most liberal voting records in the West.

In 1982 the city limited building heights that shaded lots to the north to preserve solar access on the neighboring lot. In 1987, long before most city councils had heard of global warming, the city reassessed its water plan to account for lower runoff expected in a warmer climate. It bought a crucial upstream reservoir to secure extra storage.

In 2002, with the Bush Administration stalling, Boulder decided it would meet the Kyoto protocol, and the council quickly concluded it needed a way to pay for the necessary climate change programs. Many argued for a fee, which didn't require voter approval.

Pomerance, a key player in both the solar shading law and the reservoir purchase, pushed for a tax. "Go to the voters. Say straight out here's what you want to do," Pomerance said in an interview. "That way you have a mandate. (Otherwise) you're always swimming upstream politically."

In 2006, 60 percent of Boulder's voters approved the tax.

And the city discovered the hard work had just begun.

The tax is modest – $11 a year tacked to a typical household's energy bill. This summer the council raised the levy to its maximum, $21 per year for the average household. It will bring in $1.8 million next year.

The city offered home energy audits. It pushed biofuels and rooftop solar. It discounted energy-efficient lighting, furnaces and insulation. And six years in, the city found emissions have grown instead of shrunk.

That's the true difficulty in solving climate change, Pomerance says: World leaders can agree on targets. They can agree on a cap. But then what?

"That's just the first eighth-inch on top of a 10-foot pile of work. There's all these other pieces that have to go along with it," Pomerance said. "I'm a local politico. All I'm looking at is the implementation – 'OK, that's fine, now what do we do?' "

San Diego has taken a whack at that question, too.

Almost two years ago a coalition of environmental groups, utilities, and government agencies decided to combine various conservation and efficiency campaigns into one umbrella marketing effort – Stand for Less.

Nowhere on the campaign's website or advertising materials are the words "global warming" or "greenhouse gas emissions." Instead, the focus is on using less, recycling more, saving water, consolidating errands.

The goal, said Mark Oldfield, a spokesman for the state's Department of Conservation, which is coordinating the effort, is to see whether by tackling these very concrete efforts, a more abstract goal – California's climate change objectives – can be achieved.

"It's a very simple metric," Oldfield said. "We didn't want to make it brain surgery. We wanted to look at it and see clear-cut numbers."

The program is in its infancy. It has set no targets, and its survival is questionable: After spending $1 million on start-up and an initial media campaign, the department saw its advertising budget slashed as California worked its way out of a budget hole.

"Our effort in San Diego is somewhat limited," Oldfield acknowledged. "We can't impact a lot of things directly."

"But we're hoping that by targeting recycling and other things, we can impact indirectly some bigger things."

And this is where an international agreement could truly help, said Morgan, WRI's climate director.

"Local initiatives working very specifically and practically on engaging unions and companies and policy makers in making those shifts are absolutely essential," she said during a telephone interview from the Bonn climate talks earlier this summer.

"You also need to have a national policy. It makes the local job easier – 'If you go for renewables, then you get these tax incentives.' "

"And on the international level, you get a level of ambition that the country is going to work on this with the rest of the world," she added.

"It's really about making people see the interdependencies that exist."

Local leaders certainly don't mean global efforts should be underestimated.

Back in Boulder, city leaders already are looking for goals beyond 2012, when Kyoto expires. Its ability to establish a post-Kyoto target, said Jonathan Koehn, the city's environmental affairs manager, will depend "most certainly" on the city's ability to decarbonize the energy supply.

And that will require an international push.

"We can meet our current target with energy efficiency (measures) and Boulder residents making differences in their everyday lives," he said. "But to move beyond that we have to have move on a different playing field.

"It doesn't mean we stop the local efforts," Koehn added. But no agreement in Copenhagen would prolong the onset of "meaningful and widespread" changes in the near future.

Of course, that near future holds plenty of work – and change – for local governments – with or without a framework.

"The best we can expect from Copenhagen is targets," Pomerance said. "It doesn't solve problems. It just forces you to start figuring out how to deal with them."

"The high-level targets need to be connected to plans on the ground," he added.

"What's going to happen is Congress puts in cap-and-trade, and they're going to crank (carbon limits) down by 2050 – or hopefully sooner – and issue zero permits to coal plants. And the utilities will say, 'Well, what's step two?' "

"That's where the issue is going to show up. What it's going to eventually come down is plan," Pomerance said. "And what it's ultimately going to come down to is what are cities going to do, what are counties going to do, what are states going to do."

Study: Alternative Energy To Produce 1.9 Million New U.S. Jobs

A recent study by three universities provides an estimate of many new green jobs coming from alternative energy development in the U.S.

Smart Grid News.com reports:

"A collaborative study by three universities concludes that U.S. renewable ene rgy policies could create as many as 1.9 million new jobs around the country. In addition, the study shows that those policies would account for an increase in annual household income of more than $1,000 and that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could increase $111 billion by 2020.

While the study has a long-winded title, Clean Energy & Climate Policy for U.S. Growth and Job Creation: An Economic Assessment of the American Clean Energy & Security Act and the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act, the news it presents is encouraging."   See full article.

Annual List of Candidates for Endangered Species Act Released

 

Last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services released their yearly assessment of plants and animals that are candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The good news is that this year, four species were removed from the candidate list as the USFWS decided they no longer require extensive protection!

One success story is that of the brown pelican that has recovered primarily due to the banning of the harmful pesticide DDT.

While this offers some hopeful news for a few select species like the brown pelican, with the looming effects of climate change, the opposite scenario also continues to unfold.

America's wildlife and wild places are already feeling the impacts of rising global temperatures:

• Rapidly melting ice habitats are crippling polar bear and seal populations
• Cold water fish like salmon and trout are at risk as stream temperatures rise
• Large mammals like moose face warm weather stress and increasing parasites such as ticks and brainworms
• Birds that now migrate further north for winter contend with new prey and feeding challenges

Furthermore, an ever increasing number of animal species face difficulty breeding, migrating and providing care for their young as their habitats shrink.

The facts are clear. We can't wait for more species to become endangered. If climate change worsens we will see less butterflies, coral reefs, Florida panthers and mallard ducks.

Labeling a species as endangered might bring awareness and temporary aid, but it will not curtail the greatest threat facing all wildlife today.

By Kolleen Kawa, National Wildlife Federation

Consequences of Copenhagen, Part I: The stakes

Today we present part 1 of a 4 part series on the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, where leaders from around the globe will come together to negotiate a new global climate treaty.

An 'all-in' bet for the planet.

The planet's quickening pace toward irreversible climate change grows far more dire if world leaders fail to find a way to stem emissions this December, experts warn.

By Douglas Fischer, Daily Climate Editor
 

This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim emissions – none of which deliver the necessary cuts – and an altered climate.

Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that, absent international agreement, the children and grandchildren of those living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world's poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet is heading toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

The December talks are, in other words, the last, best chance to change course before chaos descends.

"The choice facing the present generation is an awesome one," said former Vice President Al Gore during a speech before the Society of Environmental Journalists last month. "Never before has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions that will have implications for all succeeding generations."

Failure, Gore added, would be "catastrophic" – not only given the urgency of changes already underway, but because it challenges the efficacy of the rule of law as "an instrument of redemption."

Collapse in Copenhagen could not just become an obstacle to further progress, however. It also might force society to confront choices and decisions few in the scientific and policy world want to face.

"Copenhagen is mitigation," said Guy Brasseur, director of the Climate Service Center in Hamburg, Germany. "If that fails, we move to adaptation and geo-engineering."

Adaptation will require hundreds of billions of dollars on the low end. It will force a vast transfer of wealth, technology and aid from industrialized counties to developing ones. That buys no more than a Band-aid for those most at risk, said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

"We've failed our primary task of preventing harm," said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. "Now we are going to be tasked with protecting those most vulnerable to harm. And soon we are going to be confronted with globally catastrophic harm."

"There really is nothing to do but adapt today."

That's where Copenhagen comes in.

The diplomatic gathering, from Dec. 7 to 18, has one goal: create an "ambitious global agreement incorporating all the countries of the world" to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

It will be the 16th in a line of negotiations extending back 20 years, some more successful than others, all aimed at curbing humanity's appetite for fossil fuel.

There is deep pessimism that it will succeed. Deep divides on how best to tackle the problem exist between developed countries. Even deeper divides separate developed from developing worlds.

But there have been surprises before.

At the 2007 talks in Bali, all signs pointed to failure until delegates awoke the day after the talks were to end and discovered key players had worked through the night to reach an agreement.

"You don't know the answer before you actually get there, and very often you don't know the answer before the last couple of days," said Doug Boucher, a climate expert for the Union of Concerned Scientists who has participated at several international talks.

"It's really the extreme pressure of the final deadline that gets countries to make the compromises, make the bargains necessary to get to the final agreement."

And there will be pressure.

Previous negotiations all pointed to 2009 as the year to draw a line in the sand, but it's more than just a diplomatic deadline. By virtually every metric – emissions, deforestation, fuel use, land development, economic growth – business-as-usual projections point to catastrophe.

"Civilization will experience the greatest disruption in its history," said Jeffrey Kiehl, a senior scientist at NCAR's climate change research program. "We're applying a forcing to the planet that it hasn't seen for tens to hundreds of millions of years, ... when there was no ice at either pole."

"I don't think we want to go down that path."

The effect of those forcings is a matter of much speculation and study. What has become increasingly clear is that many of the most sophisticated climate models have underestimated the earth's capacity for abrupt and radical shifts – swings that make many of the worst-case economic and climate forecasts from just a few years ago look almost rosy.

A recent report by the United Nation Environment Programme found many upper-range predictions deemed probable over the long term by its climate change panel two years ago are already occurring.

Author and reporter Dianne Dumanoski noted in her recent book, "The End of the Long Summer," that the only thing certain about the coming century is "its immense uncertainty."

"It will take conscious effort to resist taking refuge either in despair – in the conviction that 'it's too late' – or in the alternative, to bask in groundless, sunny optimism that 'we'll figure out something, because science always does.' "

Addressing this planetary emergency will require a new map, Dumanoski said – a rethinking, in effect, of civilization itself. Social systems must be retooled to withstand severe disruption. Climate change must be seen as far more than just an "environmental" dilemma or even an energy issue. Indeed, she added, humanity must come to see that seemingly small, inconsequential choices in every aspect of modern society can have – and are having – a profound and deleterious impact on the planetary system.

"There is no hope for accommodation in the current path," she said.

****

Efforts to change all this are already falling far short of what many analysts consider necessary, said David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Laboratory on International Law and Regulation who studies climate policy. These failings, he wrote in an essay published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, arise from "a political logic that will soon be difficult to rectify." Deep cuts are costly. They are difficult to sustain, require radical change, and will, for many countries, be hard to administer.

Hence the need, many experts agree, for the pressure of a global agreement.

The status quo isn't working, they add: Countries and companies are eyeing each other warily, floating proposals for tepid cuts with the promise of steeper reductions if the rest of the world antes up as well. Australia in August tried to commit to the globe's most aggressive reduction scheme: a modest 5 percent cut in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020 with a promise of a 25 percent cut if other developed nations went along. It never got out of the country's Senate.

In Washington, D.C., climate legislation has been eclipsed by the health care debate, and key Democratic lawmakers say a far-reaching House bill should be sharply scaled back. California's progressive efforts to reduce emissions have been swamped by budget crisis.

"Countries need to have a sense that other main contributors to the problem ... are moving together toward a solution," said Jennifer Morgan, director of climate and energy policy for the World Resources Institute. "Countries will likely not go to the outer edges of what's possible."

But what's possible? The list of chores is daunting.

Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions must be cut 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst disruption. By comparison, the maligned Kyoto Protocol called for the industrialized world to trim emissions between 6 and 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

Emissions from the 40 industrialized nations agreeing to binding cuts are down five percent – on target to meet Kyoto. But that's only because the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic decline of much of the Eastern Europe that has sent emissions in those countries plummeting.

Take out those countries and add developing nations, and global emissions have jumped 10 percent since 1990, according to the United Nations.

What's more, by 2050 the world population is expected to near 9 billion. That's the equivalent of adding 10 more United States to the globe – along with all the roads, fast food joints, sewage treatment plants, factories and power plants, homes and stores that accompany growth.

Indeed, it's the growth that's the problem, most climate experts argue. America's average per-capita carbon footprint is about 20 tons of planet-warming emissions a year. A typical European's is 10 or 12 tons. In China, 4 tons and growing. But some three billion people worldwide emit less than a ton a year. (A sustainable global per-capita footprint – one that avoids the worst warming – is about 4 tons per person, scientists figure.)

Those three billion are the poorest of the poor: they heat with wood, cook with dung, have little or no access to electricity or clean water.

How to let them partake in a First World economy without cooking the planet is another major stumbling block awaiting delegates in Copenhagen.

****

For the scientists, their job in some ways is done. Climate disruption is now a political question, an economics issue, a security threat.

"Clearly it's hard to think how we could better present the case," said Brasseur, the Climate Service Center director. "The science has been very clear."

"It is now up for society to decide."

And signs do suggest society is starting to decide: China is talking with the U.S. on emissions reductions and has launched a Green Revolution with the goal of catching Europe by 2020. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, who assumed the EU presidency in July, has called on European nations to tax carbon emissions regardless of global negotiations.

There is time, Brasseur said, but not much: If delegates cannot seal the deal in Copenhagen but can make sufficient progress to deliver an agreement within five years, the talks can be considered successful.

WRI's Morgan, who has spent a decade playing key roles at UN climate talks, takes a harder line. After December, there is not enough time to get a treaty ratified and in place by 2012, when Kyoto expires, she said. Countries and industries need to know what market mechanisms and signals will be in place post-Kyoto.

Amid the contention, there is one bright spot: Industrialized countries have realized they have an obligation to help the world's poor, said Huq, the London-based adaptation expert.

Of the many pieces to the climate treaty puzzle, this is the area closest to agreement, Huq said. He is confident Copenhagen will produce some consensus on this point.

"There is simply no way (delegates) can look themselves in the mirror and not do anything about it," he said. "This now is no longer disputed territory."

In some ways, that's the great irony of climate change. So many of the initial impacts from a carbon-intensive lifestyle are first hitting those who use the least amount of carbon: Drought in the Sahel, floods in Bangladesh, changing agriculture patterns in India, parts of Asia and Africa, increased water stress for millions living downslope of the Andes and Himalaya.

That will change, scientists predict, and discussion over how to adapt will move quickly from the Third World to the First.

Soon – absent steep cuts and the pressure of a global treaty – politicians across the United States will confront questions that make budget woes and health care costs seem downright quaint, said Brasseur.

"Where will I get my water? What is my strategy (for adaptation)? .... How am I going to have enough food to feed all of California?" he said, rattling off a hypothetical list.

By then the solutions may carry a frightful cost.

"The later we take action, the more we have (climate) impact," Brasseur said.

"And that impact is going to be irreversible."

Two New Reasons to Break Our Oil Addiction - Now

We're getting two major reminders this week about how urgent it is for America to break its addiction to oil. First, Tropical Storm Ida came ashore along the Gulf Coast, cutting energy production:

Marathon Oil Corp (MRO.N) had shut its Ewing Bank production platform after evacuating workers, a spokeswoman said on Sunday. The Ewing Bank platform can produce 11,700 barrels of oil and 10.5 million cubic feet of natural gas a day.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, which takes in an average of 1 million barrels of foreign crude from cargo ships daily, stopped offloading tankers shortly after noon CST Sunday (1800 GMT) due to deteriorating sea conditions, according to a spokeswoman.

The news sent already-jittery oil markets jumping, pushing prices up $2 a barrel. And the problem is only expected to get worse, as global warming fuels more intense hurricanes.

If all that wasn't scary enough, the Guardian (UK) reported a whistleblower's warning that the world doesn't have nearly as much in oil reserves as we think:

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

Learn more about how you can protect our future -- for our children and for America's wildlife -- at the National Wildlife Federation's Climate Action Center.