Clinton foundation energy efficiency plan: An offset by any other name ...

New financial instruments may one day plug cities' building codes into global carbon market

Posted by Adam Stein (Guest Contributor) at 9:44 AM on 17 May 2007

The William J. Clinton foundation has arranged billions in financing to help a coalition of sixteen cities cut urban emissions by applying a range of energy efficiency measures to aging buildings.

Efficiency measures tends to get lumped in under the heading of conservation, but they really deserve to be their own full-fledged category of solutions to global warming. If conservation is simply doing less of a polluting activity, efficiency is doing the same activity with less energy. Turning off the lights is conservation. Screwing in a compact fluorescent light bulb is efficiency.

Efficiency measures deserve their own category because they are among the most important strategies for reducing emissions. Emissions reductions from efficiency projects are immediate (which is good), they are often cheap or even free (which is great), and they don't require individuals to make significant changes to behavior (which is important to quick adoption, no matter how much we might wish otherwise).

Details of the Clinton plan are unclear, but it appears the financing will take the form of a series of interest-bearing loans to be paid back through savings from energy reductions:

The financial instruments for paying for the upgrades are being designed by the Clinton Climate Initiative, set up by the foundation ...

The upgrades would be done by four international energy-services companies that are already seeing a booming business in such conversions. They would guarantee a particular level of energy and monetary savings for particular projects under the plan.

The financial instruments are still being designed, but they already have a name: carbon offsets. An exotic flavor of offset, to be sure, but offsets still the same.

To succeed, the plan will need to put in place all the normal machinery for offsets: a means for establishing emissions baselines, a set of approved protocols for reducing emissions, a measurement and verification procedure for tracking reductions, and a central registry to ensure emissions aren't double-counted.

These are problems that have been solved in other contexts, and it is exciting to see new flavors of offsets being developed. The Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism has identified over 200 categories of emissions reductions. Of these, 65 relate to energy efficiency.

This sounds like a lot, until you realize how narrowly defined most of these measures are. For example, Method 31 pertains to the capture of waste heat from iron kilns.

Improving the efficiency of city buildings is obviously much more important than improving the efficiency of the world's iron kilns. The immediate benefit of the Clinton program is the billions of dollars steered toward energy efficiency. But the long-term importance will more likely be the development of new techniques for plugging efficiency projects into global carbon markets.

For story: Clinton foundation energy efficiency plan: An offset by any other name ...
13 Comments | Post a Comment

umm...

Improving the efficiency of city buildings is obviously much more important than improving the efficiency of the world's iron kilns.

I'm not sure what the exact percentage breakdown is, but I definitely see a problem with that statement.

Iron kilns: several thousand degrees, many of these are larger than almost all commercial buildings, and there are many of these as well. Seems a bit archi-centric (I'm going to trademark that one sometime).

by atreyger at 10:16 AM on 17 May 2007

Not offsets

Because somebody else does not get to burn more carbon for each unit produced. Which means that in case of measurement error, you still reduce carbon emissions.

In other words by NOT turning this into offsets, you have a much greater margin of error. If the project produces few savings than projected, someone gets hurt financially but you still save energy just less than projected. Whereas if an offset is oversold, you actually increase carbon emissions.

by Gar Lipow at 10:21 AM on 17 May 2007

City building vs. iron kilns

Building overall consume more energy than any other sector. So in that sense buildings are more important than industrial improvements. Of course we really need to do both.

by Gar Lipow at 10:40 AM on 17 May 2007

Exciting!

I hope the next step - after municipal buildings - will be apartment buildings. When the tenant pays the electricity bill, landlords have no incentive to buy energy-efficient appliances no matter what time horizon they're looking at. It would be wonderful if some clever financier could solve the split incentives problem.

by eriqa at 10:43 AM on 17 May 2007

Happy to be archi-centric

atreyger --

The linked article claims that energy use in buildings accounts for a third of greenhouse gas emissions. I don't actually know what percentage of worldwide emissions are from iron kilns, but saying that the energy efficiency of buildings is much more important is probably actually an understatement.

Gar --

Cap and trade is not a necessary feature of an offset system. When you have a financial instrument representing an emissions reduction, that by common agreement is called an offset.

I'm pretty sure you're aware of this, because you routinely use the term "offset" in reference to the voluntary market, which does not in fact allow anyone to "burn more carbon."

www.terrapass.com/blog

by Adam Stein at 10:48 AM on 17 May 2007

Voluntary market

voluntary market mimics the carbon trading market. Also it is explicitly used as an offset against some other emission--just voluntarily. What makes it an offset is not being a financial instrument but being offset against some other consumption.

From what I gathered, this is NOT being used to offset against consumption. The financial return is from energy savings. It is not part of a carbon market.

You are playing unconvincing semantic games. "All carbon offsets are financial instruments with x type of financial characteristic" does not mean "all financial instruments of x characteristics are carbon offset". "IF (A THEN B) AND B: THEREFORE A" is a classical logical fallacy.

The reason The Clinton Foundation is not calling them offsets is because they are not offsets.

This is now a test of your future credibility. You have made a demonstratable error. Are you going to insist on a Bushlike defense of a position anyone can see is wrong, or admit you have overstated your case?

by Gar Lipow at 11:25 AM on 17 May 2007

OK, OK, I admit it...

...I'm not really sure what you're talking about. But we do know people at the Clinton Foundation; we've talked with them about this project; and we know that they are exploring ways of incorporating the carbon markets into this initiative.

So, with all of my future credibility at stake, I feel pretty OK with everything I've written.

For the wider community of people who aren't trying to spring weird gotchas on me based on word games, I'd also stress that the point of the post is not whether the word "offset" is the best one to describe the Clinton initiative. The point is that efforts to create financial instruments based on carbon reductions (don't call them offsets!) rely on a broadly analogous set of mechanisms regardless of what technologies or areas of the economy they touch. As these new, um, definitely-not-offset instruments are developed and perfected, they will link up to the global carbon market. (Which is good, for a number of reasons.)

www.terrapass.com/blog

by Adam Stein at 12:13 PM on 17 May 2007

OK then I'm the one who was wrong

If you have information that was not on the website that Clinton is going to hook these up to the carbon market, then they are offsets. I wasn't playing semantics. Nothing you or the web site said led me to think they are going on the carbon market; I thought you were defining something that was not going into a carbon market as an offset.

However to make sure I'm not misunderstanding you again:

we know that they are exploring ways of incorporating the carbon markets into this initiative

means that all the money the raised was done WITHOUT taking the carbon markets into account? Financing to date has been entirely based on energy savings?

by Gar Lipow at 12:27 PM on 17 May 2007

I Taped My Pipes

Yesterday, I went to Home Depot and got some pipe insulation. I sheathed the hot water pipes leaving the boiler in my one bedroom apartment with the insulation, and then taped it up with duct tape.

Now heat is not lost from the boiler through the pipes. Also, my room will not heat up as much in summer.

Can I have a Nobel Prize?

by jabailo at 3:27 PM on 17 May 2007

No Nobel Prize...

...but congratulations and thank you for taking a positive step.

by eriqa at 4:19 PM on 17 May 2007

Iron Kilns

Approximately 4% of the world's total energy production is used in iron kilns. (Not often called Iron Kilns, most often called Blast Furnaces)

- Source: International Iron and Steel Institute (IISI), "Energy Use in the Steel Industry"

by GtoeOne at 6:39 AM on 18 May 2007

Heating/cooling buildings

Is this really the largest GHG source?

It seems likely. I know transportation is around 25% of GHG emissions in the US.

A new geothermal heating scheme I have discovered could take care of the heating, and the same old direct circulation of geothermally cooled fluids could take care of the cooling. Inexpensive and deceptively simple solutions.

Not the kind that the large companies operating under this plan would consider. Too bad. This seems to be the norm, it keeps the capital necessary for solving problems flowing in the wrong direction. To the corporate bottomline.

Instead capital needs to be invested in building after building until energy efficiency and GHG reduction starts to take hold on its own.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 8:01 AM on 18 May 2007

2005 EIA Stats

Eneregy use by sector:
Residential 22%
Transportation 28%
Commercial 18%
Industrial 32%

by GtoeOne at 10:46 AM on 18 May 2007

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