 My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We're very glad to have you here this afternoon. This is the first congressional briefing that EESI is holding in this new Congress. So we are very glad that you are here, and particularly as we look at this very, very important topic, which has been studied by many for quite a number of years, but it has been slow, I think, to garner the kind of public attention it truly deserves. So we are very glad to have absolutely key people here this afternoon to really have a discussion about short-lived climate pollutants and efforts underway to really look at that and find ways that they can really be reduced and really provide huge benefits both in terms of looking at climate but also in terms of providing multiple benefits in many different areas. So to start off our discussion this afternoon, I want to first turn to Laura Haynes, who is the Senior Environment and Energy Policy Advisor for Senator Tom Carper. Senator Carper has long been interested in this important topic, which you will be hearing much, much more about this afternoon. Thank you, and I want to say thank you to EESI, especially Blaise Sheridan and Liz Lewis in our office for helping to put this together. I told Blaise that this is great for Friday, and he should put more of my briefings together. And thank you again for letting me to say a couple words. Since coming to the Senate, Senator Carper has been working on legislative efforts to address climate change, as you know, as a coastal state and a very low-lying state, I think actually the lowest-lying state in the nation. So we were already seeing the dangerous effects of carbon pollution through sea-level rises, superstorms like Sandy and droughts affecting our agriculture community. As global temperatures rise, we're just going to see more and more of this. And we're going to see billions and billions of dollars of disaster relief needed. And so this is something that, again, the Senator has been very focused on. We must work together towards solutions when state cannot curb these emissions alone. National, as we'll say, global action is needed. Senator Carper has often said we do not need to choose between a clean environment and a strong economy. We can take common-sense actions now to address climate change. And that's why Senator Carper has been so engaged in reducing short-lived climate pollutants like black carbon and HFCs here at home and abroad. These reductions have climate gains, but also have clean air and economic gains. Reducing black carbon is a great example of a win-win solution. In 2009, Senator Carper, along with Senator Inhofe, introduced and passed legislation that asked the EPA to report to Congress the health and climate risks of black carbon. I think it may be one of the only climate bills that Senator Inhofe is the lead cosponsor on. From this report, we found that indeed black carbon is extremely bad for our lungs, our overall health, and for the climate. And just a few weeks ago, a follow-up report from 31 scientists around the world concluded that black carbon is the second most important climate-forcing agent next to CO2. Fortunately, the report also found that cleaning up diesel engines and cook stoves is the best way to reduce black carbon. These are things we know how to do and to do well. For diesel engines alone, we have developed technology in this country to reduce emissions by over 90%. New engines are required to have this technology for our existing diesel fleet, maybe on the roads and in use for 20 years or more. That's why Senator Carper working with Senator Vornovich, who is the lead there, on the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, which provides incentives to clean up these dirty diesel engines. This is a great program that is near and dear to my heart and to Senator Carper's heart because it's the really best bang for your buck programs under the Clean Air Act. For every dollar we spend in cleaning up diesel engines, we actually receive $13 back in health and economic gains, plus now we know there's huge climate gains as well. I applaud the administration for engaging other countries on black carbon and encouraging reductions abroad, but want to remind them that we have 11 million of our own engines here at home that need to be cleaned up. Funding DERA is a simple way to address health and climate change all in one action. We have common sense solutions to addressing other short-lived climate pollutants, but just need a clear market signal for investment and deployment. In addition to black carbon, Senator Carper has been heavily invested in reductions in HFCs in this country and abroad. Seeing the success of the Montreal Protocol in addressing ozone-declining substances, he believed we could use a similar framework here at home to address the ramp up of HFCs. As the lead author of the HFC title in the Lieber-Warner climate bill, which was wrapped into future climate bills, he believed using marking forces could drive the deployment here at home. Unfortunately, as you all know, we were not successful in passing a comprehensive climate bill, but we are seeing market signals all across the globe, like in Japan and Europe, that are incentivizing the development of HFC alternatives. Even here at home, CAFE standards for greenhouse gas emissions have driven HFC replacements in our vehicles. Again, we should continue our efforts abroad to send a global market signal, and again we encourage the administration to do so through the Montreal Protocol. But I also believe we have authorities under the Clean Air Act to do more here at home. And just some parting words, we may not all agree on what is the cause of climate change, or maybe if climate change is a hoax or is an existence. But I think what we can all agree on is the need for greater energy security, for clean air, and the need for economic growth. And a lot of these things we'll be talking about today do all three. So, thank you again. For some of you who are standing over here, if you want to come up here on the dais, please feel free to come up here so that you don't have to stand. It's your big chance, right? Remember this day. Could you just move down so some other folks, please? And I must also tell you that with regard to our topic today in terms of looking at short-lived climate pollutants, that we should also remember that Rolling Stone just did an article. So I would encourage you to take a look at that because, as I said, the issue had not really been gaining as much popular attention as it should. But perhaps this is a harbinger of many more outlets starting to really report on how important looking at things like black carbon and methane and hydrofluorocarbons really are and the difference that it can make. So now I will turn to our next speaker who is Dr. Drew Schindel, who is a climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. But he is also the chair for the Scientific Advisory Panel for the International Coalition that has been established. The Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Live Climate Pollutants. That coalition, an international body that was announced just about a year ago, it was last February when it was announced at the State Department with its beginning number of international country members. Drew is, again, helping lead that scientific understanding of that panel for that very, very important international coalition. Drew. Well, good afternoon, everybody. And I am going to try to cover some of the key aspects that I think are important about some of the short-lived climate forces and their, primarily their physical science, but also some of the implications that come from the physical science. And obviously I won't be able to do everything that's necessary in a few minutes. But we'll have time for questions at the end. So I wanted to motivate why we would be interested in climate in the near term. The climate community often focuses on some target like the year 2100. And that is an extremely important target. Climate damages are potentially catastrophic as you move out to century time scales. But climate change is also really happening right now. And one of the lines shown here in this blue is the September minimum in Arctic sea ice. And people have, this has gotten a lot of attention in the press. We know that the sea ice is melting, declining extremely rapidly, about a third of it's gone. But there are a lot of other things that are also happening and are happening really at an alarming rate. One of these is the snow cover in the northern hemisphere. And you can see that in just about 30 years ago in the 1980s, the typical cover was about 9 million square kilometers. In the last few years it's been more like 3 million square kilometers. And this is a huge enormous change in the planet we're living in now. And I could go on and on, intensity of storms in the North Atlantic, frequency of very hot days throughout the summer. All of these things are already happening right now. Rainfall is shifting and if you're trying to grow crops, that's really important. So 2100 is obviously a really critical target. We have to keep in mind the long term change that can have enormous impacts. But near term climate is also an important thing to be worried about. So climate change is driven by a lot of different things. Carbon dioxide is the single leading cause of climate change today. I think that's pretty much unequivocal in the scientific community. But there are a lot of other factors playing a role as well. And in particular what we're here for today is to a large extent these three factors. This is a chart from the last IPCC assessment which gives the relative impact on the total change in radiation, reaching the earth versus going back out to space due to emissions. So it's not due to concentrations but emissions which is really what you might make a policy to deal with. How much is coming out of particular activities. And you can see on that chart that the circled ones here are methane, carbon monoxide and black carbon. The key thing about the three of these particular pollutants is they're all red. They're all leading to warming. Everything on the red side is warmer. The total from those three is roughly the same magnitude as carbon dioxide. So these are not just a tiny little piece of the pie. These are important players in the overall climate change issue. And all three of these degrade air quality. And that's really distinct from something like CO2. It's also distinct from the HFCs. And so I'm not going to talk as much about the HFCs because they're a little bit less complicated in the sense that they don't degrade air quality. But the HFCs, some of them anyway, as well as these three are also relatively short lived. And that's really the key distinction from a physical science point of view as far as climate. CO2 lasts a long time. It influences climate on very long time scales. These all influence climate on short time scales. So we knew that. That's been kind of in the scientific community for at least a decade or so. And what's come out and become more clear over the last few years is that, I'll just go back for a second, is that if you look at these few pollutants here, you might be able to do something really practical about it. So what the goal from some of the recent work has been is to figure out using current technology, what kind of bite can we take out of those three? There are a lot of sources of methane like digestion from cows that we don't have a technology to reduce that. So you can't just say it's caused this much climate change. That's how much we could gain if we deal with it because we can't necessarily deal with it. And black carbon is never emitted on its own. So it's kind of irrelevant in some sense what it does by itself. You want to know what it and everything else that comes out when you have some dirty burning, a big plume of smoke, all kinds of stuff is coming out. So what's been done more recently is to screen all the different kinds of current technologies and figure out what you could actually do if you took those technologies like we just heard about. The diesel technologies developed in the United States and in use here and in Europe, but not necessarily in use everywhere around the world. What could you do? So I was part of a study that UNEP organized where we looked at about 400 different controlled technologies and we came up with the answer that a really very small set of these were the kind of win-win measures that are so interesting that can both reduce climate change in the near term and improve air quality. And about half of these have to do with controlling methane. Methane leads to production of ozone in the lower atmosphere. So it's not directly affecting air quality but indirectly via ozone is affecting ozone which influence its toxic to both people and plants. Reducing methane released to the atmosphere can be brought about especially in the fossil fuel sector where we have technology to capture leaks. We have technology to reduce the amount that's vented and flared during extraction. Also waste management, agriculture, etc. The other half of these measures really have to do with dirty burning. Incomplete combustion that releases a lot of BC but a lot of other stuff too. So you can see one of the diesel switches we're talking about up there in the upper right. There's a lot of stuff that comes out of these and that's diesel is one of the key measures where we know we can have a big impact on climate because it's ratio of black to organic carbon. One of the other compounds that comes out is very high. But cook stoves, also you can see a traditional cook stove down there in the lower right. A woman cooking over a three stone fire and if you substitute for something like this a more modern cook stove, these have been implemented in Senegal in this example and that really can change the amount of emission and of course they're far more efficient. The way you deal with most of the black carbon from incomplete inefficient burning is to make that burning more efficient. So we have a whole list of things with, as we just heard, diesel and cook stove replacement being two of the key measures that can reduce black carbon. If you put all of these things together and really look at what you might do to climate you get results like this where you get a projection of warming, there we go, of warming going just steadily up and up and up passing the nominal two degree target in the middle of the century only a few decades from now and then just continuing to rise and if you put in place measures to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted you actually see there's very little change over the next few decades and in the long term they're fantastic. They really reduce the rate of increase of planetary temperatures but it takes a long time so that's really the opposite of what you get from putting in place measures to reduce methane and black carbon which have this big effect in the near term slowing the rate but in the long term the rate goes back to kind of what it would be otherwise and it's only by doing the two together that you keep the planet anywhere near below two degree C. So these are really complementary type of actions you might want to take from a physical science point of view. I won't go into all of the different results from the scientific literature in great detail but just one more here is that in addition to that global kind of picture I just showed from a regional point of view you get something very interesting which is that the temperature change, the mitigation of warming when you control black carbon and methane is you know it's not evenly distributed about the planet it's a bit stronger typically in areas with a lot of snow and ice because black carbon darkens the snow and ice surfaces so it has an enhanced effect there but it's relatively uniformly distributed. When you look at the public health benefits though you can really see here the avoided mortalities the premature mortalities are greatest in South Asia and in Central Africa which is where a lot of the cook stoves and a lot of the really dirty diesel are currently in use and a similar story with the agricultural yield increases so it's really those places that go to the trouble of reducing their emissions that take the actions realize the health benefits via air quality the climate benefits are more distributed but the health benefits really are local and we've done some economic valuation we already heard some results on that that the diesel type of measures can give you 13 to 1 gains we found similar things for many of these measures for the methane there's a value due to the avoided climate change value due to the health impacts and value due to agriculture and this comes out to roughly about $3,500 per ton with the cost of most of these abatement measures in order of magnitude less so just like the diesel for much of the methane the value is far greater than what it costs to deal with these things and for black carbon as we've heard again the value is often much greater many of these in fact have net cost savings because as I mentioned what you're doing is using fuel more efficiently instead of having to get lots of firewood to burn in a traditional cook stove you use far less when you have a clean modern cook stove and your costs actually go down if you can overcome the upfront cost of getting the cleaner cook stove so I'll just summarize with some of what I think are the key physical science differences between short-lived and long-lived pollutants and the implications of those as I said carbon dioxide lasts very long time in the atmosphere the short-lived climate pollutants really last a short period of time and therefore have a short climate impact the mitigation difference is that these really come from different types of activities their carbon dioxide reductions are primarily going to be achieved by switching to cleaner sources of power generation large industry transportation and what we're talking about with the short-lived climate pollutants are really distinct as you saw when I went through the kind of measures the impacts then carbon dioxide affect climate on the long term it's really key for climate stabilization over the long time scales but the short-lived climate pollutants are really important for the near term because we don't have much leverage via CO2 on these near term climate effects which is what I was leading with is already happening now if we want to deal with what's happening now the only real choice we have are the short-lived climate pollutants and then of course you get all of these additional benefits due to the air quality change so reducing the implication of all this to my mind is that reducing the short-lived climate pollutants is important to those that are already suffering from the impacts preventing biodiversity loss which is typically a function of the rate of change rather than the absolute magnitude providing some more time to adapt because the changes would take place more slowly and of course these associated air quality health and agricultural benefits so I think this really calls for not doing these kind of things instead of dealing with CO2 but they're really good societal reasons and rationales for dealing with both of these kind of things and to put that in a kind of a nutshell I think the near term climate be a short-lived climate pollutants mitigating those changes is really important for our children's generation mitigating CO2 is really important for our great-grandchildren's generation I think both of those are really key so at the end we will have time for questions and I'm happy to go over anything that I certainly wasn't clear about since I zipped through everything, thank you Thanks, Drew, because that was covering a lot of information in a very quick period of time but in a very clear way and I think one of the most interesting and exciting things is in terms of thinking about actions that can be taken that can deliver benefits in so many ways very quickly which is always something that people are looking for in terms of seeing things that really make a difference right now so and I want to, do we have, let me just ask are there any empty seats over here if so could you if you're sitting by an empty seat could you raise your hand okay so if anybody wants to grab those chairs please could you just keep your hands up so folks could get there okay I'm back there and there are some other seats up on the dais if you would like to go up there so now would be a good chance to do that okay thank you I am very glad that we have UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program co-sponsoring this event with EESI and I am now very glad to introduce Amy Frankel who is the Director of UNEP's Regional Office for North America UNEP has issued reports with regard to looking at black carbon and these short-lived climate pollutants that have been very very important in helping folks understand the issue and UNEP has been heavily engaged working with its member countries around the globe in terms of understanding and figuring out how best to address this issue Amy? Thank you very much and I don't know if anyone wants to move by the press table over there there's a little more leaning space if anyone wants to come around so now it's a real pleasure to be here thanks to EESI and to Senator Carper's office for organizing this I think it's a really great turnout I'm very encouraged to see so many people here and to me I'm a very practical person and I love to see this issue coming along so quickly because it's something we can act on now UNEP actually started this looking at the science with Drew and NASA and others to try to bring attention of policymakers around the world about what the science showed and can we translate that into policy which is a lot of what the United Nations program does and this has really been pretty rapid in UN policy terms because we started I think with an initial assessment scientific assessment maybe four or five years ago and then we launched this initiative one year ago and as you'll see we've grown it very quickly from just a small group of countries now to about 50 different partners so I think clearly there's a lot of realization that this is a very important initiative I was holding the microphone by the way, not the clicker so I won't go over this too much because Drew's already covered it but the point about this is that it's not just about carbon although carbon dioxide although that's been the main focus and the key here is that there are other pollutants that have a huge impact on climate change and the news about these what's so appealing is that the technologies for addressing those pollutants are ones that we have in our hands it's also what's helpful is that there's a lot of co-benefits in terms of some of these figures and these are conservative by the way sort of in a range preventing annually over 2 million premature deaths avoiding at least 30 million tons of crop loss annually the range by the way there is 30 to 140 million acres so tons rather so these are fairly conservative numbers and also bringing down the amount of global warming in a much nearer term I want to point out there's some people who incorrectly say it buys us time and that's not really the right way to think about it it's more as Drew pointed out that if we take action on these pollutants now we will have benefits in terms of cutting the degree of warming but because of the length of time that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere we also have to take action on that at the same time we can't wait for that but the effects are felt sooner these are some of the key aspects sort of how are we going about this it's clearly it's a voluntary initiative it's not a negotiated document I think the key of this is really it's action oriented again it's not about negotiating it's saying look these are benefits that we can feel at home there's many economic reasons to do this we're trying to have a very light governance structure so it's not a big organizationally or institutionally kind of effort building on sound science being very careful that we look at the science as we decide what to do and what's on here it's a very interesting partnership it's really trying to bring in as you'll see many different actors which is important both for buy-in and to make sure that you know there's actions taken in every relevant area this is a picture second from the left you'll see Todd Stern and then second from left is my boss executive director of UNEP at a ceremony with Secretary Clinton and Lisa Jackson and others and these were the first countries to launch the effort in the State Department a year ago that effort has now grown quite a bit it was rapidly taken up by the G8 then the G20 and really as I said it is growing tremendously this just lays out one of the key objectives of the coalition to raise awareness to enhance national new actions so not anything that's already been committed but new actions at the national regional level to promote best practices basically to try to get information out there about what can be done around the world and finally to improve scientific understanding of the impacts and mitigation strategies that's hidden by the slide but that's there in terms of the partners as I said these have grown tremendously not only are countries signing up and you might notice too it's developed and developing and there are a number of countries that are we just had meetings with a number of developing countries in the room who are very interested in this Latin America in particular because of domestic issues you know if you've got diesel and soot and health issues which are affecting your population there's a lot of other reasons to take action on these pollutants so we launched it we now have 27 state partners including the EU and many non-state partners you'll see in there importantly the World Bank so you know we've got some significant entities that are involved with this effort now the key here to be a member you have to commit to a couple of things and one is basically you have to commit to taking meaningful action and there are priorities that the advisory council have established in terms of what are the things that really need to happen here and so to sign up you're basically committing to saying yes we're going to take action and identify some actions domestically and commit to being an active part of this partnership in terms of those initiatives there's seven initiatives that we have agreed the parties who are members those seven are reducing the black carbon emissions from heavy diesel and that's one that UNEP is leading with the United States you've got brick production, Mexico's leading and Bangladesh has also signaled an interest in that there's a lot of brick production in those countries landfills and solid waste HFC's has been talked about US has long been a leader on that Nigeria is leading on this issue of oil and natural gas production and black carbon and nothing and then we've got a number of cross cutting initiatives in terms of national action plans which will be done for any of the engaged states and then financing in terms of the governance structure I won't sort of dwell on this too much but it's very light I mean it's trying to be very nimble if you will so we've got this high level assembly which is ministerial level, a working group a small steering committee science panel and a secretariat and secretariat is housed in UNEP where basically it's the support services to make sure that this thing is operating as it should as I just mentioned UNEP hosts the secretariat in Paris there's a trust fund where voluntary contributions are put in right now we have about 16 million people going and we've heard again pledges from a number of countries we're expecting some more funds shortly in fact we hope to carry out this work UNEP is also in addition to hosting the secretariat and working on the science we're also an active partner on some of the initiatives I mentioned diesel we've had a long track record on clean fuels and vehicles work around the globe in partnership with the US government and one of those successes has been working with partners and just an incredible ray and one statistic on that is we've now brought the whole world along to have phased out lead and gasoline in every country of the world except the handful and we're talking about North Korea and a couple of other tough countries but we're going to look at that work in a similar way on diesel diesel in particular is really coming to be seen as a very important area to work so I was interested to hear about the domestic legislation on diesel World Health Organization a couple of quotes there that it affects more people than any other pollutant the estimates of particulate matter to kill at least 3.2 million a year recently classified as carcinogen and I won't get into the science because it's a little more complex than this last slide but essentially there was some recent science showing that black carbon has much more of an impact is much more important than previously thought in terms of its contribution to climate change as I mentioned diesel very important and it's very urgent as well because what's not shown on the slide is the amount of cars and vehicles that are being added in fleets around the world and we're really at a point where there's a lot of investment about to be made in countries especially developing countries with strong economies like China where they're going to be adding a lot to the fleet and this is kind of a key moment in time because once you get diesel buses on the road their life span is going to be let's say 30 years so we're hoping to work urgently over the next five years to make sure that the fleets that get put on are clean have the right kind of there's a lot of different tools we have in the toolkit in terms of the kinds of mitigation measures but it's fairly urgent that we work on this now because otherwise we're going to have more diesel in the atmosphere than less so diesel vehicles is one we're focused on there's also work on freight and on urban what can be done at the urban level through urban policies this just lays us out a bit more the US government is actually leading on the freight component and on the national component it's really about national policies what can be done to ensure that the right signals are in place to have clean fleets so that's a very quick overview of what we're doing and I very much welcome your questions after the end of the panel and our final speaker will talk from a perspective of the State Department in the whole role in terms of organizing helping organize this international coalition which as Amy said was launched just a year ago it was in February when there was this major event held at the State Department that was hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and where there were a number of ambassadors present to embrace getting this whole important coalition underway so I think it is quite remarkable the progress that has been made in this last year and that there is a lot of momentum to really increase the size and the overall capacity and impact of that coalition so to talk about that a little bit we will now hear from John Thompson who is the Deputy Director of the Office of Environmental Quality and Transboundary Impacts at the State Department John? Thank you and thanks for the opportunity to be here and talk about this important topic maybe let me just start I think Drew has spoken eloquently I think to some of the scientific issues and the public health impacts but I guess for me I'm thinking about what motivates countries to take action to deal with the short-lived climate pollutants and intrinsic concern about warming and in particular near-term warming can motivate countries but there are some other very strong motivators here and I think some of this work done by Drew, done by UNEP and other scientists I think has laid out the very clear potential for public health benefits for agriculture benefits for energy security gains and the energy security comes from a lot of different places as you capture methane you can use it as a clean fuel but I think the energy efficiency gains is going to be a common theme through a lot of the initiatives and a lot of the efforts through the climate and clean air coalition you see it in Drew mentioned stoves diesel engines appliances as it relates to HFC alternatives so working together to find ways to capture multiple benefits I think from our perspectives from our perspective is really just a key aspect of this coalition I think that countries can see and the public can see direct and compelling benefits from the things that we're trying to do Drew said this as well but I think he was looking at it from a science perspective and I like how he laid that out but I guess just to be clear this effort it's meant as a complement it's not meant as a substitute for CO2 mitigation this is very much a focus I think on, not entirely but more of a focus I think on near-term warming there need to be additional efforts and there are other efforts looking at the longer term so these are complementary strategies that need to take place as it was mentioned this coalition was launched less than a year ago Secretary Clinton and Administrator Jackson are at the center of this picture with five other ministers and the head of UNEP we've made a lot of progress a year is not that much time I think the good thing is a lot of the things we're focusing on we think are the types of activities that can be implemented relatively quickly but in the timescale for example of bureaucracies of getting other countries to understand these issues move them to appropriate channels and join I think we've actually made remarkable progress with 27 states the other key it's beyond just states I guess there's some major international organizations who are very heavily engaged UNEP I think is playing a very central role both as hosting the secretary but also working in a number of the initiatives we also have the World Bank UNDP, UNIDO these are organizations with global reach they have a presence in a lot of countries around the world and they have experience and practical on the ground intervention so through some of these organizations we have really some remarkable capacity on a global basis to effect change so I think at this point our feeling is the coalition is off to a good start but I think we also need to recognize it is still evolving there are other countries there are other organizations that are interested in participating and the coalition will continue to evolve in that way over time for us I think when we look at the goals of the CCAC I would probably just very very briefly frame them out as it's raising awareness of SLCP impacts and mitigation strategies and I think a lot of this work that Drew and UNEP have done they can really bring these issues home to countries that the mitigation actions that they take can have a direct and compelling impact to public health in those countries and to agricultural productivity and to energy benefits as well the coalition another goal is to enhance national and regional actions I think it can do that in part through promoting best practices we've seen some showcasing as well of successful efforts particularly looking in some developing countries looking at things that work and trying to emulate those elsewhere and I think there's also a focus on getting the science right and improving the scientific understanding of SLCP so that it does inform decision makers in countries to to understand what sort of actions they can take, the policies that they can enact, the incentives that they can create that will promote rapid action in these areas and I think from my perspective and I work in a number of different multilateral fora on different issues from chemicals to waste to air quality and I think this coalition in a lot of ways it has some similar characteristics to things we've done elsewhere but I think there are some very unique things about this the intent of course is to accelerate action on short-lived climate pollutants and it's not to say that nothing is being done there are things that are being done but what can we do to make that move more quickly how can we enable that how can we build that capacity in countries to understand what concerns are, what the problems are and what they can do to move more quickly and rapidly both to deal with near-term warming but also to deal with public health issues as well the idea of the coalition it's not just a government type of approach governments certainly are there we have a lot of governments that are involved but for this to succeed we need more than governments I mentioned some of the international organizations that are involved that are very much playing a key leadership role and have broad on the ground presence we also want to engage the private sector and I think that's key and some of the initiative areas that Amy mentioned I think we've begun doing that to start hearing that perspective from the private sector to understand the art of what is possible to affect change here and we have a number of active non-governmental environmental organizations they help they bring in creative good new ideas and I think sort of the theme of this coalition of being action oriented of pushing for commitment and engagement in getting things done quickly I think a lot of those environmental groups I think the team has very much resonated with them they support rapid action and moving things along as quickly as we possibly can so I think they've effectively brought that perspective into the discussion as well the nature of this organization just to be clear is it's voluntary so in other words the focus here we as governments can get very focused on intergovernmental negotiations so lots of talk and negotiations of specific outcomes as opposed to I think what this is which is a more action oriented we're very much organized in particular initiative areas so practically getting people together in particular sectors in particular problems and find a practical path forward in the near term so I think that to me is something that's fairly unique about this approach and I think it's voluntary and non prescriptive so the circumstances of different countries of different private sector entities are going to be different and I think there's an openness here to work towards a common objective of reducing emissions of these pollutants and I think the motivation here I've mentioned it I won't say much more about it but this fact that there are multiple benefits and that those benefits are compelling to me at least is very much a strong motivating factor I think for countries to engage and I think we've been successful and I think we continue to be successful I think you have very practical and focused and action oriented initiatives organizing this we also have access and a lot of high level attention to this we have ministers who are engaged on this so we have some a lot of bottom up good technical work action oriented work going on we also have a lot of engagement from high levels from ministers who can make things happen in countries a lot faster than a person like me working with other countries can they can send that political message so I think that's something about this coalition that we think can really help make it effective I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the initiatives themselves and I just want to say on this State Department is working very closely in particular with EPA EPA is actually leading or co-leading a number of these initiatives so I want to give due regard to our partners there I'm not going to walk through all the initiatives and in fact Amy talked about the diesel one so I'll jump through that pretty quickly but just to mention a few other things that are going on first is this initiative in municipal solid waste landfills emissions from landfills they account for about 11% of global methane emissions so we're talking about something fairly specific here this initiative is trying to take a pretty comprehensive and holistic look at this sector of municipal solid waste there was some discussion initially a lot of people framed it just in terms of perhaps methane recovery from landfills I think the concept has broadened since then because a lot of the actions that you might want to take you can't necessarily sort of telescope it down just to that one thing there's a lot of work broader work going on with municipal solid waste and how do you do that in a developing country context in a sustainable way and what type of actions can we take that are really focused and targeted that broadly help affect change and I think we're talking about methane and black carbon here so looking at landfill gas recovery waste diversion, open burning which is a huge issue in a lot of developing countries in fact we hear that not just in this coalition but many other places the organization is primarily focused it's a city focus and we have pilot cities there's about 10 that we're looking at right now to begin working with Acra and Ghana Rio de Janeiro are a couple of the starting cities there's a number of others as well these are large cities that have real significant waste problems and there's real opportunity to affect change in a lot of these countries but it's not going to happen without some specific efforts or interventions to enable that so a lot of the work is being done we have some good partners here C40 cities the Clinton climate initiative the global methane initiative is doing a lot of this work and the World Bank there's some efforts to pair cities so in fact some U.S. cities perhaps New York City may end up working with some of these in place and how they can be replicated recognizing obviously circumstances are not identical so let me move on to an initiative area dealing with oil and natural gas production um vented and leaked methane from this sector accounts for somewhere in the vicinity of about 20% of global methane emissions this is an area where we're I think this effort is still evolving we are making some strong efforts to reach out to the private sector again on a voluntary basis we've had already we had 13 partner ministers sign a statement to reduce venting that's an example of a high level political commitment we get ministers to come in and agree to really take action on this that hopefully translates to change on the ground eventually and I think for those who are familiar with it the global methane initiative the global gas flaring reduction partnership we're going to be drawing on those types of organizations expertise at places like EPA and elsewhere to try to enable changes in this sector I think in the interest of time I will just briefly mention when I think about heavy duty diesel vehicles and engines I tend to think particularly overseas and in large emerging developing countries and I think this is really a concern and something needs to be done because what you're seeing is rapidly growing heavy duty diesel fleets so a lot of large trucking we're seeing very rapid expansion there and I think Amy said it well the question is the best time to make an intervention is before a lot of this growth takes place once a lot of these trucks get on the road it becomes much not to say you can't do anything there are things you can do but if you can get in ahead of time and effect change in a lot of ways that's the most cost-effective best way to effect change so the last initiative I wanted to mention is on HFC alternatives so HFCs are fluids they're used in cooling and refrigeration applications and for foam blowing primarily they're very potent greenhouse gases their use is growing rapidly they're primarily alternatives to substances ozone depleting substances being phased out under the Montreal Protocol this just I don't need to get into the details and you may not be able to see it but the first bar down here is 1990 and so basically we didn't have any of this or very little of it going on back then and by 2002 you see significant growth and by 2010 this is where we are now roughly speaking this is less than 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions so even with this growth it is not at a particularly high level yet that said annual emissions are increasing by about 10 to 15% per year so we're seeing very rapid growth in these sectors refrigeration, air conditioning blowing, solvents, a number of these other applications and this is sort of the perfect example of trying to get in and effects change before there's widespread use of these chemicals now obviously there is some use but there may be some areas where we can really make a difference and avoid the rapid ramp ramp up so this initiative on HFCs it's been going for less than a year but we've already done a number of things we've hosted a couple of technology workshops one in Bangkok last year one in December that was focused on commercial refrigeration technology which is a particularly promising sector we're also conducting a number of case studies to try to put out information about specifically what countries can accomplish in different sectors commercial refrigeration actually being another one that's particularly promising we're also working on inventories with key countries Indonesia for example, Columbia Bangladesh not only to understand what their HFC use patterns are now but to understand what the projections are in the future and what the potential is to avoid the ramp up in their countries that is projected and I think that's the key thing about this coalition is I think ultimately that's what the focus is is to find a way to work together on a voluntary basis to scale up activities that really will make a meaningful difference and I think with HFCs if I looked at Indonesia for example probably the use patterns right now are moderate they're growing rapidly so can we head that off what can we do to head that off so just to wrap up in terms of next step I think the coalition is still evolving what we really want to do is to focus on implementing on the ground actions and effecting change real world change we've got a number of initiatives that are launched that I think have good potential we're looking at some new initiatives like in agriculture we need to recruit new partners both countries but also particularly I would say the private sector to get private sector engagement also colleagues of course from civil society a focus on awareness raising and outreach and I guess maybe just to say again coming back kind of to the beginning a lot of the basis for what we're doing here and the compelling argument for action it starts with the science and the on the ground facts about the multiple benefits of these interventions and I think Drew and colleagues some of the work that they've done we have a science panel in the CCAC it's a lot of I think creating that body of knowledge working with countries working with policy makers decision makers working with the private sector to understand what those benefits are what the policies are that can effect change and to have a full understanding of what those benefits are that's what we think the coalition can do and we're going to continue to work with partners with our colleagues at UNEP to increase the private sector and international organizations to try to to maximize the benefits and the progress we can make on near term warming with this thank you thank you for going through and explaining that and in terms of taking a look at some of the initiatives underway let's open it up now for your questions and if you could please identify yourself when you ask your question okay we'll start right here one part of your question I don't know if you hear this for Latin America can I ask you questions my first question would be there's been a lot of discussion about the net effect of some of the policies reducing black carbon and just improving the relations the first efficiency that they related especially to other sources most of the policies or most of the measures that reduce black carbon reduce also with NO2 which is how it has a cooling effect I've read some part places that the effect is not equivalent to that in general the global effect of reducing the cost of NO2 and black carbon changes has a cooling effect but I've also read some other places where gambling they actually mentioned the result of black carbon and the overall effect was a warming effect so like Dr. Zindal just made me elaborate on the net effect of those policies considering also NO2 and he mentioned also improving the fuel efficiency and combustion efficiency and also to just bring to the table the fact that then you're turning CO2 so that will also have a warming effect so in general terms just what during the press environment and my other question is more related to policy a good thing for people in Latin America about CO2 is that the countries with the money are willing to pay for CO2 reduction in Latin America and in the developing countries because it's a viewable effect but you just showed us a couple of images where we can actually see that the effect is a bit more low compared to the unit or Dr. Thompson would like to elaborate on how you envision an international cooperation policy considering that for this particular short-lived climate pollutants there's going to be more interesting where you change your own like the U.S. is going to be more interested in its own ambition than Colombia is going to be in their vision so how do you envision an international cooperation in this sense? Thank you. So one of the key issues in the science and one of the reasons that there's been so much is because of this mutual so while this here just from the PCC kind of aspect people in Latin America have seen a question where all we can say from science we can say very clearly from that name where they're no longer saying I come to black carbon sources there's really a hierarchy of sources and that's one of the reasons I think they're easing the things that are kind of targeted because that has the highest ratio of lonely black carbon to really evolve it and where I'm determined that it becomes probably a good thing point of view that should be a good thing while I argue that overall it's still a good thing because obviously the one thing that I'm trying to show is how many of the top benefits were really localized why did that and was there are some localization and stuff like that but I think that developing for the developed world if there's an investment in finance and communication that needs to be developed they might do that more slowly but developing nations might certainly have a lot of information on black carbon I would like to direct you to the international global atmospheric chemistry project that came out January 15th so just I guess last week or two weeks ago they, it was a four-year study with 31 scientists across the globe looking at this issue because black carbon there has been so many uncertainties and again they have said that black carbon is the second most important individual climate warming agent after carbon dioxide that's quoting the report and they do focus on cleaning up diesel and cook stoves those two items are if you do address those that you are having a global warming benefit if you will so you're countering global warming so those, if you are targeting cleaning up diesel and cleaning up cook stoves so again as Drew said that the science is evolving but I think there is a coalescing that at least if you address diesel and cook stoves you will be having a net benefit I just want to add to the second question well first what we haven't talked about at all and it's complex but the Arctic is one thing I wanted to raise which is black carbon has also been identified as a key pollutant of concern in terms of Arctic impacts and in that case in fact most of the black carbon in the Arctic countries comes from Russia and well most of it comes from Arctic Council countries which are eight countries around the Arctic circle but Russia has the most and so that's having an impact on other Arctic countries so it's not just within the boundaries let's say of a particular country but then as Drew was pointing out there's many reasons why countries will be interested in seeing other countries take action in terms of global climate impacts and localized impacts because of security issues and so on if for example there's more direct black carbon let's say and so it impacts on snow and issues of reflectivity and quicker loss of those sources that's going to raise a whole suite of other issues in terms of water conflict etc so there's many other motivations for action globally which I think is why this is taking off so rapidly and obviously we've been seeing really huge changes in the Arctic in terms of the impacts that's been reported over and over again in terms of how quickly we are seeing warming there glaciers disappearing glacial fields ice fields disappearing etc did you want to comment or add anything else Drew on that? Okay any other questions right here first? Thanks thanks for that question I guess I think a couple thoughts in terms of I mean I think you're asking a resource question about the US government and what we're what we're doing and how we see the future I think there's a couple answers to that I think there's been a fairly extraordinary commitment I think to make efforts to organize this coalition by a number of different governments and international organizations and I think the US has been at the center of that and I think both at state and particularly our colleagues at EPA if you look at a lot of the activities that are taking place and nearly all of them there's a significant level of US engagement so I think we're we're fully committed to engaging and helping out I think it's kind of a mix there's some areas where we have an enormous amount of domestic experience and expertise that we can share with others and I think there's some other areas I mean one of them that I might give you as an example would be brick kilns certainly we have some expertise in that area here but there's other areas in the world and Mexico in particular has a wealth of experience in how to do that in a developing country context so I think from a resource perspective we've been very heavily engaged and will continue to do so we've provided a significant amount of funding and would intend to continue to provide financial support as well to the coalition you asked specifically about sort of a domestic commitment on SLCPs and I don't we're not really doing that in the context of this I think the focus here is on how can we work together again in a voluntary context to make real and significant progress and so I think that's more the mantra and the mindset here as opposed to exactly another paradigm of talking particularly about domestic targets and those types of things there are other four where those discussions take place and can take place this is more of an action oriented on the ground type of approach I think from our perspective so I think that's where we come from I'm not really sure in terms of could this model be used elsewhere maybe I don't know I think there are some aspects of this that I think are particular both to near-term warming and the multiple benefits that make this particular type of intervention we think will be particularly effective so I'm not sure I would be cautious just to sort of use a one-size-fits-all approach that said you know there are elements of this that are probably applicable to other problems not just climate change but other areas you know engagement of the private sector and international organizations in key countries in a very focused and action oriented type of approach but I think overall we think this model works well here I'd be hesitant to draw too many conclusions beyond that thanks other questions or comments okay over here first and then back so so that maybe their office could send a letter or something like that to Reza talking about black carbon power plants are not a huge source of black carbon they are a huge source of socks and knocks mercury and CO2 I would assume burning oil will probably be some black carbon from there but actually not very much so that actually when we first started addressing this issue in 2009 I thought power plants would be a bigger part but actually it's more incomplete combustion of your diesel engines and your older diesel engines cook stoves and burning wood and such so for this I would be interested in knowing what the DC state implementation plan would be and how that would you know that's again that's more looking at particulate matter national ambient air quality standards and such so not quite this issue but I'm happy to talk to you after this thank you there was a question okay go ahead basically go ahead and can you say it again really quickly so that you guys have found any for a closer time that you may have in your program as a policy mechanism or a great solution because you have your specific approach I can I can talk about HFCs in the language that we put together we looked at the CFCs and how effective using market forces there in title I believe title 6 in the Clean Air Act to reduce CFCs in this country has been very effective and so we kind of carried that on to apply to HFCs you're dealing with similar the same constituents really and so we felt it was a prime you know the constituents are used to that market they're used to trading a perfect way to kind of carry on what is existing now to address a more climate centric pollutant rather than an ozone centric pollutant so that's probably a great example here at home we also use the acid rain program for SO2 for power plants that has been one of the most effective climate excuse me for those programs I think the original the end costs and time frame was we got it done half the time that we thought we would and at a fifth of the costs so again that's a great example of you know why I think there has been inclination for my boss to use cap and trade for power plants to reduce CO2 really built on what we did with the acid rain program because it was so successful and I'll let others talk more about that or other cap and trade programs I think it makes sense to trade emissions in one location versus another because they really do have the same impact I think if you were to extend that to something like black carbon you would run into the challenge that emissions in different places have the same impact emissions near say a snow or ice covered region can be much more important or you know emissions in a place where it rains a lot will not stay in the atmosphere as long because they get washed out by the rain so it's really different in different regions and then the most powerful effect of black carbon is this strong influence on human health and I think it would be ethically very difficult to work out an equitable way where you'd say oh well in this area I just feel like it's too expensive so a lot of people will die here but it's cheaper to reduce them over somewhere else so I think that it doesn't make so much sense it might make sense in sort of a small area like California has regulations to lower its BC or a single district or a city but internationally I think that that is probably not a useful way to go with the black carbon measures just to echo that when we were dealing with several of the comprehensive climate bills we found that as well and black carbon we had worked to put black carbon in there as more of a an offset or a mitigation it was kind of an additional on top of the cap and trade program that was in place so kind of either you could do it on top of what you're doing or you know maybe have an alternative compliance and we already do alternative kind of with settlements here at home with our power plants actually dealing with PEM we power plants sometimes do additional part of their settlement instead of paying a fee they may put in money into cleaning up diesel to account for all the PEM that they've been putting up in the air kind of a co-benefit there so you know we kind of already done this that in this country so we hands it over here why don't we take all of your questions and then we'll try and answer them all together we'll start here first sure hi everyone Susan Anenberg from the US State Department and US EPA I was an author on both the UNEP report and the EPA's black carbon report to congress and this is really more of a comment actually I just wanted to mention that we found in both of those reports that of the black carbon mitigation measures available today clean cook stoves would actually have by far the greatest health benefits and so there's an effort under way to address cook stove emissions through the climate and clean air coalition we're lucky to have Sumi Mehta from the global alliance for clean cook stoves so I'll just let her comment on that effort hi so just to add I think on behalf of the global alliance for clean cook stoves I wanted to just note that we're very very pleased to be part of this coalition it's amazing how much work has been done over the past year and I just wanted to emphasize to people because I think there's appropriately been given a lot of attention to both the diesel and the cook stoves part of this but just to let people know that within the coalition this real effort to engage really internationally across both the north and the south I mean we're actually in the process of finalizing now across the different countries and members on the proposal that's going to be related to cook stoves but this really includes not just the cook stoves in the global south but also the heating stoves in the north which are also quite responsible for a lot of emissions that have very important local impacts so look forward to when that's being finalized thank you this session I think is very important we support this we launched the partners National Rebellions Financing in New York and in TIA recently my question is about the kind of advisory support we might be seeking I was at an institute event five years ago right here in the United Kingdom and we talked about dangerous climate change and the possibility that they're going to be reversible and unmanageable and at that time based on calculations by California IPCC scientists NASA in a hardware about six gigatons of climate pollution were needed to be reduced within the decade today based on what I've seen the recent information from Jim Hansen and other scientists about 18 gigatons with that perspective that's about 12 million green buildings with a 40% reduction it's about 5 million commercial green buildings in the U.S. and my question was would strategic planning or adoption of your mitigation measures which obviously are political I'm not sure if there's a lot of manufacturers here like HFC manufacturers sure you want would it be useful to point to due diligence released at the New York Stock Exchange that talks about the growing damages from climate change both the United Kingdom and the Bush 2 White House talked about damages in all sectors and more recently we're seeing systemic financial risks in many markets especially insurance with about 400 billion damages last year the Chief Risk Officer pointed out that if it keeps going it could be the end of insurance that's 10% of GDP of capital markets can't function of insurance so my question would be is that kind of information as part of your strategic work maybe with your partners and advisers would work well each one of our speakers would like to comment on it or not I think that always makes sense of bringing everyone in the tent when you mention the HFC producers actually they are supportive and partly because they're wanting to move on to the next thing there's a little company in Delaware called Dupont you may have heard of and they already have developed and we have developed actually in this country the alternative to HFCs we're not producing it here again because we don't have the market yet so I think again a lot of these things are working with businesses putting the market signal out enough time for us to get there and hopefully encouraging the manufacturer and the jobs or the changing buildings here Honeywell has been big on that trying to bring all that together so I'll just add two points on the cookstows now we didn't talk too much about it but UNEP is a partner in the cookstove initiative and so we're very supportive of course of those actions on the how to get involved I should have said a little bit more about this first of course looking at we've highlighted some of the benefits in terms of the avoided costs but I do think it's compelling when people start to look at the hard economic data in terms of why this makes sense whether it's you know CO2 or any of these short-lived climate pollutants so we'd welcome that kind of data and in terms of getting involved as you could see there's quite a lot of opportunity to be involved with this initiative both in terms of the science panel but we also have what we call non-state partners and so if you are an entity whether it's a business private company an NGO or other scientific organization there's an opportunity to come on board so please if you'd like to talk to me about that later go up to our website there's definitely an opportunity for that John or Drew go ahead just the only thing I would add there is that we did in the numbers I showed we tried to include some valuation of climate damages and different pollutants and different time scales and of course this is really very dependent on what you assume about the value of the distant future versus the near future so I don't think there's any real agreement on that but there's certainly been a lot of work to take that into account when you get to something like this emissions gap and having to reduce say 18 gigatons virtually every projection produced by the people that make these kind of scenarios of what carbon emissions are likely to do assumes that GDP throughout most of the world increases and therefore pollution is controlled so this is already an assumption there and by taking these aggressive measures now it makes a big difference in how you get to that point but that point achieving a low clean air world is already assumed so it doesn't help you reduce that 18 if you were to make the opposite assumption that this is never going to happen then unfortunately your gap is even larger and then this would help but yeah you'd have a longer way to go another sobering thought and I also want to say thank you for raising the specific cook stove issues and I also know that there is design de Keflin underway with regard to designing ever more efficient wood burning stoves because recognizing the importance that that can make both in terms of improving efficiency and really reducing soot black carbon from that source as well and so we would be very very interested to look at sort of the progress over the course of the next several months in this next year in terms of the kinds of actions that are taken and what we're seeing in terms of success stories so I want to thank all of our speakers this is really really informative and thank you all very very much for being here and we hope to see you on Tuesday at a briefing that we're doing looking at renewable energy what's happening both domestically and internationally and why thank you very very much