Overview – The Met Office in the UK reports that 2010 is on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year in the instrumental record. Other science, based on massive data, supports that view. (See graphic above and NOAA’s annual State of the Climate report.) Meanwhile, the Post-Copenhagen international climate negotiations continued and culminated in Cancún in what almost all the participants and observers characterized as a balanced package of decisions and a restoration of faith in the multilateral process. In the United States, a climate and energy package crashed and burned in the Senate. (For more from me, see posts here, here, here and here, and also this excellent article from The New Yorker.) President Obama was not fiddling, however, and the administration produced a number of advances: on cars and greenhouse gases, on renewables and energy efficiency through the Department of the Interior and Department of Energy, at Lisa Jackson’s EPA, on sustainable development, and even on sustainability at DOD.
Governments and businesses across the world continued the drive toward the Technology-Driven Economy. In transportation, this was the year of the breakthrough of the electric vehicle. On fossil fuels, natural gas is making huge strides owing in no small part to the controversial use of hydraulic fracturing. (We like natural gas because it’s got a much smaller carbon footprint than coal and oil.)
Most Unexpected Event – I would venture that the Gulf of Mexico disaster was pretty unexpected – it was one of the biggest oil spills in history, nearly approaching the Exxon Valdez in scope and impact. It threw the Obama Administration into some disarray in managing the response but it also produced a new awareness of the dangers of fossil fuels.
Perhaps rivaling the spill, was the apocalyptic heat wave that so harmed Russia and Ukraine this past summer. It was not by any means entirely unexpected by climate scientists and activists, but it certainly got the attention of millions of Eastern Europeans, including Russia’s President, Dmitri Medvedev: “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”
Persons of the Year – This is a tough one. Barack Obama won, hands down, in 2009, and he and his agencies did more good things in 2010. Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC; Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico; and Patricia Espinosa, his foreign minister and the President of COP 16, all deserve recognition for the excellent work they did on climate negotiations during the year and at Cancún.
But I would give the persons of the year award, posthumously, to Hermann Scheer, a truly extraordinary visionary on renewable energy, and to Stephen Schneider, one of the bravest and most influential climate scientists in the world for four decades. Their contributions are really incalculable. If we’re here in 500 years, you will find Scheer and Schneider in the pantheon.
What to Watch in 2011 – First of all, don’t hold your breath for the US Congress to produce legislation on climate change. That’s not on. We may have a tepid but reasonably useful outcome like a Renewable Portfolio Standard. What you will see is witch hunts in the House of Representatives, controlled again by the Republican Party, focusing on EPA’s regulatory role on greenhouse gases and on climate science. It will not be pretty. The Obama Administration, however, will stick to its programs in a moderate, measured but sure and steady way.
Internationally, we will see considerable progress on bringing key initiatives on finance, adaptation, forestry, technology transfer, and Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) forward. COP 17 in Durban may well produce a binding legal agreement on emission reductions. Short of that, it will certainly further the critical programs that are beginning to mature.
Finally, I think that the message of economic opportunity represented by clean technology and sustainable development – as thoroughly embraced, for instance, by Californians in 2010 – will really begin to resonate worldwide. Expect more investment in clean tech, including the application of distributed generation solutions in the developing world, and look for any number of science and technology breakthroughs in everything from renewables to transportation to agriculture.
As the good Miranda would have it:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
We’ll see.
