The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The joint Industry/DOE Workshop on the Interactions of Climate and Energy was designed to bring the providers of climate information and services together with users and representatives of the oil, gas, coal, and electric utility sectors of the U.S. energy industry. Primary discussion topics included current uses of climate data, the perceived impacts of climatic anomalies on the energy sector, ways to improve the uses of climate data, and recommendations for future research by the climate community. This opportunity for such interaction generated a universal agreement among the participants that more frequent exchanges between the providers and users of climate information be planned and that better communication between the providers and users of climate data and services be established. The workshop proceedings, which is being published by the Department of Energy, presents studies on the application of existing data to the diagnosis of the climatic component in energy supply and demand and the short-term prediction of regional scale energy requirements. Staff members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) and Climate Analysis Center (CAC) review the currently available climate data and services. Four panel reports identify and enumerate the impacts of climate on each of the segments of the energy industry and offer recommendations for improvements, further research, and, in some cases, concepts for practical demonstrations of immediate potential value to the pertinent energy sector. The panel findings and the presentations of the invited speakers contain several common themes: the need for improved data formats, the significant potential benefits of increased lead time for the seasonal climate forecast, and the necessity for improved accuracy in the forecasts of monthly and seasonal means and extremes of temperature and precipitation. Workshop participants fully recognized the difficulty of making “real” progress on some of these commonly stated objectives; however, they also recognized that the benefits of striving to achieve these goals may, indeed, be sufficiently great to justify the quest for progress through focused research efforts.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach to post-Kyoto climate negotiations that could provide a way out of the apparent deadlock between developed and developing countries. This is an urgent issue as the world already appears to be close to a level of climate change that could be considered "dangerous". Design/methodology/approach-The paper explores the potential that control of short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane, tropospheric ozone, and soot could have, in addition to steep cutbacks in industrialized nations, to both mitigate global warming and overcome political stalemate in the international climate negotiations. Findings-Although rarely mentioned in climate discourse, reducing emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases offers a cost-effective way of actually reducing the radiative forcing in the atmosphere, while at the same time producing substantial subsidiary benefits such as improved urban air quality. The paper suggests leveraging this potential in the post-Kyoto treaty in order to "buy time" to address the arguably more difficult problem of essentially eliminating fossil-fuel related CO 2 emissions, which will ultimately be required to truly bring climate change under control. While high-income countries work on steep cutbacks of all greenhouse gas emissions, middle-income nations could make significant additional contributions by undertaking commitments to control only short-lived greenhouse gases until they reached a threshold level of per-capita GDP, at which point they would cap and begin reducing all greenhouse gas emissions. Originality/value-This paper recognizes that political tradeoffs will have to be made in negotiating the next climate treaty, and offers a way of approaching these tradeoffs that could minimize resulting environmental damage.

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