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gpo114.pdf | 0 | Mr. BOUCHER. | The subcommittee will come to order. Much has been said about the costs that are associated with mandatory federal actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, concerns about the costs of regulation were raised during this subcommittee's hearing 1 week ago today which focused on the various capand-trade measure... |
gpo114.pdf | 1 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Upton. The gentlelady from Wisconsin, Ms. Baldwin, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 2 | Ms. BALDWIN. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am delighted to have Lord Stern and our subsequent panel of expert witnesses before us today. It is your work and your studies that have framed the discussion on climate change, and you have conveyed a message of urgency on us to act to lower greenhouse gas emissions in a quick and meaningful... |
gpo114.pdf | 3 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Ms. Baldwin. The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Whitfield, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 4 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Well, Chairman Boucher, thank you very much for conducting this important hearing on Climate Change: the Cost of Inaction. Obviously, this subject matter is vitally important to not only our country but the entire world. I would say that cap-and-trade systems have come into vogue because many people say they are politi... |
gpo114.pdf | 5 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you, Mr. Whitfield. The gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Dingell, the Chairman of the full Energy and Commerce Committee, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 6 | The CHAIRMAN. | Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing today. It is a very important one, and your leadership in the matter of global warming and other things under the jurisdiction of this committee has been exemplary, and I want to commend you and thank you. The hearing today addresses a very important topic, the risks we ... |
gpo114.pdf | 7 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Dingell. I understand that Mr. Markey intends to waive his opening statement, and instead have 3 minutes added to his question time for the first witness. I am assuming that is correct. |
gpo114.pdf | 8 | Mr. MARKEY. | I request that. Thank you. |
gpo114.pdf | 9 | Mr. BOUCHER. | We will note the gentleman's waiver. Now, now, now. I am going to recognize somebody else while I still have a measure of control here. The gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Walden, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 10 | Mr. WALDEN. | Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this hearing and the others that you have held. They have been most informative with really expert witness, and while I have to step out for another meeting here in a few minutes, I do have the testimony and plan to return. Obviously, we have heard a lot about climate cha... |
gpo114.pdf | 11 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Walden. The gentlelady from California, Ms. Matsui, is recognized for 3 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 12 | Ms. MATSUI. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am very pleased to be here today, and thank you for calling a hearing on such an important issue. I would also like to thank today's panelists for coming today to share their expertise and add to our understanding of the risk and potential cost of climate change. All of us here today represen... |
gpo114.pdf | 13 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Ms. Matsui. The gentlelady from Tennessee, Ms. Blackburn, is recognized for 3 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 14 | Ms. BLACKBURN. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do want to thank you for holding the hearing, and I want to thank our witnesses who are taking their time to come and testify before us today. Assuming for the moment that climate change is happening, then the questions before this committee and in this hearing would be what should we do abou... |
gpo114.pdf | 15 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Ms. Blackburn. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gonzalez, is recognized for 3 minutes. The gentleman waives his opening statement and will have 3 minutes added to his questioning time. The gentleman from Washington State, Mr. Inslee, is recognized for 3 minutes. He also waives his opening statement. T... |
gpo114.pdf | 16 | Mr. MELANCON. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you holding this hearing. I come from south Louisiana, and we have one of the fastest sinking coastlines in the world. When we hear of the cost of climate change legislation, it is easy to forget what it will cost to do nothing. The State of Louisiana has crafted its own impressive... |
gpo114.pdf | 17 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you, Mr. Melancon. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Burgess, is recognized for 3 minutes. REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS |
gpo114.pdf | 18 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Burgess. The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Barrow, is recognized for 3 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 19 | Mr. BARROW. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for having this hearing, and I want to thank the witnesses for participating in this hearing. I detect a certain pattern in the almost two dozen hearings this committee has had over the course of this last Congress on this subject. We seem to get the sobering facts as to whe... |
gpo114.pdf | 20 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Barrow. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Barton, the ranking member of the full committee is recognized for 5 minutes. REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS |
gpo114.pdf | 21 | Mr. BARTON. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am delighted to have this hearing. I think it is important to put as many of the facts, or at least what people perceive to be the facts, on the record as possible, and I think you are doing an excellent job of that. I am very pleased to see the witnesses that here today. I have read abstract... |
gpo114.pdf | 22 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Barton. The gentlelady from California, Ms. Harman, is recognized for 3 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 23 | Ms. HARMAN. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to our witnesses. I am pleased to participate in yet another careful learning experience on this subcommittee. It is important that we have as much information as possible before we go forward. In that connection, I want to commend Mr. Burgess for his opening comments, and I look fo... |
gpo114.pdf | 24 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Ms. Harman. The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Shimkus, is recognized for 3 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 25 | Mr. SHIMKUS. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to welcome, also, our panelists. This is a great committee, because the members do their homework. They are very diligent, so we are going to ask hard questions, hopefully, and we shall get hard answers back, and I think it will help us through the process. I have great respect for the c... |
gpo114.pdf | 26 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Shimkus. All members have now had an opportunity to make opening statements, and we welcome our first witness to the hearing today. Lord Nicholas Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He serves as an advisor to the U... |
gpo114.pdf | 27 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Another minute or two would be fine, Lord Stern. |
gpo114.pdf | 28 | Mr. STERN. | That is very kind. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The cost of action: 1 or 2 percent of GDP, around 1 percent if we try to control at 550 parts per million as the eventual stabilization, a bit more, say 2 percent, if we try to control at 500. Others have confirmed these estimates since the Stern Review was publishe... |
gpo114.pdf | 29 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Lord Stern, thank you very much for that very thoughtful testimony and for expanding this subcommittee's understanding of the costs of climate change, both the cost of acting and also, important to your points, the costs of not acting. You note in your report that fossil fuels, by the year 2050, will continue to compri... |
gpo114.pdf | 30 | Mr. STERN. | Basically, economists do believe in the market mechanism. I think it is important to get the incentives right and let the market come up with the best technologies. But I do think that carbon capture and storage for coal, in particular, is of enormous importance. Coal is responsible, around the world, for 40 or 50 perc... |
gpo114.pdf | 31 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much. You mentioned in your testimony the importance of international collective action to address the global problem of greenhouse gas emissions, and I know that in the course of your work, you have had extensive conversations in developing countries and China, and perhaps most of the point of this ques... |
gpo114.pdf | 32 | Mr. STERN. | I am much more optimistic, Mr. Chairman, on a strong response than I would have been 2 years ago. I have been working in India for 35 years and living there for quite extended periods. Both on policy and in rural areas, I have been working and living in China for nearly 20 years on and off. Two years ago those countrie... |
gpo114.pdf | 33 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Lord Stern. The gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Upton, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 34 | Mr. UPTON. | Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciated your testimony, Lord Stern, and I too am one who wants to see us reduce greenhouse gas emission, and I think as a Nation we have made some pretty good strides proving that it is not business as usual over the last couple of years. I would note that Ms. Harman and I passe... |
gpo114.pdf | 35 | Mr. BOUCHER. | You are doing that. |
gpo114.pdf | 36 | Mr. UPTON. | Let me stop and let you respond to that, and then, I guess I am going to be out of time. |
gpo114.pdf | 37 | Mr. STERN. | Thank you very much. The potential in the United States for technological progress all of us non-Americans have great respect for. We will still have cars as we go to 2050 and we try to cut back on carbon emissions. We will still have electricity, but we have electricity which is generated in a close to zero-carbon way... |
gpo114.pdf | 38 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Upton and Lord Stern. The gentlelady from California, Ms. Matsui, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 39 | Ms. MATSUI. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Lord Stern, you describe greenhouse gas emissions as the biggest market failure the world has seen, and I ask you as an economist, if we address this failure by applying a price to carbon, how can we best make sure the price is felt by those most able to adopt the necessary corrections, while n... |
gpo114.pdf | 40 | Mr. STERN. | It is clear that if you ration by price, then the people who are poorer find it more difficult than the people who are richer. That is true, whether we think of apples or cars or greenhouse gas emissions. So what do we conclude from that? We conclude that governments have to think about efficient markets to fix this ve... |
gpo114.pdf | 41 | Ms. MATSUI. | You touched on developed countries, and you described some of the ways of how countries might take leadership on the issue of climate change. As you see from your interactions around the world, and you addressed it to a certain degree about how, for instance, India and China have basically said they are looking to us, ... |
gpo114.pdf | 42 | Mr. STERN. | I think the collaborative spirit that you describe is of enormous importance, and it would get a good response. Just to give you one example of the way in which Indian thinking has developed, the Prime Minister, last year, around the G-8 Summit which took place in Germany in June, indicated that India, in terms of emis... |
gpo114.pdf | 43 | Ms. MATSUI. | OK, thank you, Lord Stern. |
gpo114.pdf | 44 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you, Ms. Matsui. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Barton, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 45 | Mr. BARTON. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is our week for British Lords. We had Lord Reed on the oil speculation hearing on Monday in the Oversight Subcommittee, so we have had two Lords in one week. I guess that is a good thing. Anyway, we are glad to have you. Lord Stern, you said in your introduction that you are here as an aca... |
gpo114.pdf | 46 | Mr. STERN. | I work one day a week as a special advisor to the chairman of HSBC on climate change and development issues, and I work half a day a week as vice chairman of the IDEA group, which is looking at carbon market ratings, so that is the involvement. |
gpo114.pdf | 47 | Mr. BARTON. | And those are good things. I am not being negative, but you would tend to benefit, financially, which is not a bad thing, if some of these things that you predict, if we implement policies to try to prevent some of the things that you predict from coming true. |
gpo114.pdf | 48 | Mr. STERN. | I am getting involved in things which I think are very good ideas. I have described exactly what my interests are. |
gpo114.pdf | 49 | Mr. BARTON. | Totally acceptable. I just want the record to show that you have economic interests outside of the academic interest. |
gpo114.pdf | 50 | Mr. STERN. | They are indeed on record in the House of Lords. |
gpo114.pdf | 51 | Mr. BARTON. | I understand that. Now, I want to ask you about this 5 degree centigrade increase from preindustrial levels. The first question is just very, very mathematical. What is 5 degrees in Fahrenheit? Is it about 10 degrees? |
gpo114.pdf | 52 | Mr. STERN. | No, it is 9. Multiply by 9/5. |
gpo114.pdf | 53 | Mr. BARTON. | OK, 9 degrees. Now, what is magic about preindustrial level temperature? Is the assumption that is the perfect temperature? |
gpo114.pdf | 54 | Mr. STERN. | Not at all. I was trying to describe—should I ignore this? |
gpo114.pdf | 55 | Mr. BARTON. | We are not trying to irritate you. That says we have got a series of votes. |
gpo114.pdf | 56 | Mr. STERN. | I thought it might have been something I said. |
gpo114.pdf | 57 | Mr. BARTON. | No, sir. |
gpo114.pdf | 58 | Mr. STERN. | There is nothing magical about preindustrial times. It is just a marker against which you can measure change. So when I was talking about 5 degrees centigrade above preindustrial times, I was saying imagine a world at that particular temperature, what does that world look like? |
gpo114.pdf | 59 | Mr. BARTON. | But you are not stipulating that that is the perfect temperature? |
gpo114.pdf | 60 | Mr. STERN. | Not at all, no. |
gpo114.pdf | 61 | Mr. BARTON. | OK, now, is 5 degrees centigrade or 9 degrees Fahrenheit increase universal? I mean are we going to have temperatures increase 9 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Virginia and also in northern Wales, or does it vary around the world, and is the impact identical, or is there a different impact in certain regions? |
gpo114.pdf | 62 | Mr. STERN. | There are different impacts around the world. These global averages across land and sea, so one difference would be you would expect rather bigger increases over land than over sea. You would expect bigger increases toward the poles, for example. You would see very differential impacts. Some parts of the world would dr... |
gpo114.pdf | 63 | Mr. BARTON. | But is it fair to say that assuming there is a temperature increase, and I will stipulate that we have certainly proven that there has been a temperature increase, that the temperature difference is going to vary by region and the impact is going to be different by region. Is that a fair statement? |
gpo114.pdf | 64 | Mr. STERN. | It is a fair statement, but it is also important to recognize that the impact of temperature increases are largely through water in some shape or form—storms, floods, droughts, sea level rise—and that is dependent on the whole structure of the planet's atmosphere. You can't look at the impact by just looking at tempera... |
gpo114.pdf | 65 | Mr. BARTON. | OK, now I am down to 3 seconds, so my next question: the economists that have criticized your economic analysis, which I stipulate that you are an expert—I am not casting any doubts about your economic background—have primarily centered on two things. They have centered that you either had no net present-value-discount... |
gpo114.pdf | 66 | Mr. STERN. | Certainly, the attitude that we bring to the evaluation of benefits in the long term, relative to benefits now is clearly a key issue here, because precisely the way in which I opened up my testimony and much of what we have done in the past is going to determine what happens in the next 30 or 40 years, so our actions ... |
gpo114.pdf | 67 | Mr. BARTON. | You have got my permission. I am all for being technical. I love being technical. |
gpo114.pdf | 68 | Mr. STERN. | Let me try to explain it without being too nerdish and heavy. Suppose we had a pure time discount rate of 2 percent. That would mean that if you run that forwards, say, for 35 years, it would mean that we would give a weight to somebody born in 2005 half of that of somebody born in 1970. Given by assumption for this pa... |
gpo114.pdf | 69 | Mr. BARTON. | But that is what we do in most economic analysis. |
gpo114.pdf | 70 | Mr. STERN. | No, not necessarily. We discount in many ways because we think that future generations will be better off than we are, unless we take the ethical view that an increase in a real dollar to them, forgetting about inflation, would be worth less than now to us because they are richer. That is central to the analysis of the... |
gpo114.pdf | 71 | Mr. BARTON. | My time has expired. I want to commend you for trying to be technical and trying to quantify. I happen to disagree with your methodology, but at least you have attempted to put it into a substantive form that there can be a debate on. And I think that is very important because the consequences of actions that we are as... |
gpo114.pdf | 72 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Barton. |
gpo114.pdf | 73 | Mr. STERN. | I would be very happy to have that. Thank you. |
gpo114.pdf | 74 | Mr. BOUCHER. | The subject of discounting future harm to present value was sufficiently important that it was worth taking this extra time in order to illuminate it. We have a series of three recorded votes that are currently pending on the floor of the house. We have approximately 4 minutes for the members to respond to those. The r... |
gpo114.pdf | 75 | Mr. BOUCHER. | We will at this time reconvene, and I am please to recognize, at this time, the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gonzalez, for 5 minutes of questions. |
gpo114.pdf | 76 | Mr. GONZALEZ. | Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, Lord Stern. We truly are appreciative of the insight that you provide us. A couple of observations, and I think I do want to stay, probably, in pretty general terms in my questioning to you. I think that one of the biggest challenges that you and others that believe as you do... |
gpo114.pdf | 77 | Mr. STERN. | We have to be analytical, and we have to look at the difficulties. When you do look at the costs of cutting back, and you think about how to do it well, energy efficiency, of course, saves you money. Avoiding deforestation, if it is done well, need not be costly. Investing in new technologies, using the technologies we... |
gpo114.pdf | 78 | Mr. GONZALEZ. | Thank you very much, Lord Stern, and I yield back. |
gpo114.pdf | 79 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you, Mr. Gonzalez. The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Whitfield, is recognized for 5 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 80 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Lord Stern. We appreciate very much your being with us here today. First of all, I wanted to make a comment about this New York Times article that talks about the European cap-and-trade system, and it said implicitly in 2006 and 2007, the first 2 years of operation of the European cap-and-tr... |
gpo114.pdf | 81 | Mr. STERN. | The cap-and-trade system in Europe is young. The first phase ended at the end of 2007, and the second phase has already started. The price of carbon dioxide in the second phase now is around 25 Euros or $30 a ton. |
gpo114.pdf | 82 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Forgive me for interrupting. I don't want to be rude. We have these time constraints. But would I be correct in saying that, yes, the CO2 emissions were higher in 2006 and 2007 than they were before? |
gpo114.pdf | 83 | Mr. STERN. | Yes, they gave away too many permits and that is one lesson which I think has been learned. |
gpo114.pdf | 84 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | And you hope in the future that you will be able to correct those problem and be able to make the CO2 emissions less. |
gpo114.pdf | 85 | Mr. STERN. | Yes, you can recognize the problems and see how to correct them: give away less permits. |
gpo114.pdf | 86 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Now, recently we met with a group of Chinese, and I know we had a lot of discussion about China and India, and they indicated that within the last 3 years, in each of the last 3 years, the amount of electricity produced in China from a new coal technology, producing electricity, new coal plants coming online in each of... |
gpo114.pdf | 87 | Mr. STERN. | The Chinese population is 20-something times that of the U.K., and it is growing very much faster, so that figure isn't particularly surprising. I don't have the U.K. coal figure in my head. I guess it is around 25, 30 percent, but I would prefer to communicate that later, because I don't have it. |
gpo114.pdf | 88 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Would you have any idea about Europe as a whole, what percent of all of Europe's electricity is produced from coal? |
gpo114.pdf | 89 | Mr. STERN. | I am guessing 35, 40 percent. But again, I would want to be a little careful about that and would not want those numbers, particularly, on the record. I would prefer to come back to you. |
gpo114.pdf | 90 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | The purpose of this hearing and series of hearings is looking at the costs of not doing anything versus the cost of doing something, and I was reading this article, they said you had quoted in your review Professor Richard Tol 63 times, who is supposedly one of the leading environmental scientists in the world, and he ... |
gpo114.pdf | 91 | Mr. STERN. | I think both of those gentlemen are wrong. And when we worked out the cost of action, we did it in a bottom-up way, in looking at the different kinds of actions you could take, in carbon capture and storage, going into the future, wind and so on, renewables, and we built it up as best we can. Subsequent work, as I said... |
gpo114.pdf | 92 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Well, you understand the dilemma that we are in. We get different views on the damages of not doing anything, versus the costs of doing things. Here in America, 52 percent of our electricity is produced from coal, and what is going on in China and elsewhere and most of these cap-and-trade systems are biased against coa... |
gpo114.pdf | 93 | Mr. STERN. | The answer for that is very much in our own hands, and if we are slow, then it will take much longer. I think the fastest we could get really strong evidence and experience and show what works and what doesn't on a commercial scale is probably 7, 8, 10 years, but only if we move ahead very strongly and get those demons... |
gpo114.pdf | 94 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | And you do think it is absolutely necessary that we do it? |
gpo114.pdf | 95 | Mr. STERN. | I do. It is a reality that coal will be used, and we have to try to use that in as clean, efficient, safe way as possible. |
gpo114.pdf | 96 | Mr. WHITFIELD. | Thank you. |
gpo114.pdf | 97 | Mr. BOUCHER. | Thank you very much, Mr. Whitfield. The gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Markey, is recognized for 8 minutes. |
gpo114.pdf | 98 | Mr. MARKEY. | Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much, and thank you, Lord Stern, for your outstanding analysis and your service to the planet. You are one of the world's great citizens. Thank you. You have worked to quantify the economic impacts of failing to address global warming, which are staggering. Can you expand on the human face... |
gpo114.pdf | 99 | Mr. STERN. | It is difficult to put a quantitative human face, but we can describe the kinds of events and get a feeling for how big they are. I mentioned in the discussion earlier today the consequences of the retreating glaciers on the Himalayas for flooding in Bahia, where the death toll last year was very high. I am sorry I don... |
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