Climate Progress

If you don’t watch the debates on CNN, you are really missing something. CNN has set up a dial group of uncommitted Ohio voters. At the bottom of the screen CNN then shows the graph of the reaction by men and women as they rate statements they like or don’t like.

McCain seems to think his strong support of nuclear power is a big political winner for him, since he has brough it up three times in the first hour. But every time he talks about nuclear, he flatlines with both men and women. They simply are unethused about nuclear power, which is no surprise.

At best, people consider nuclear power as castor oil, something your parents made you take that is supposed to be good for you. At worst, people think it’s a source of radioactivity they’d like to stay far away from.

Frankly, McCain has been flatlining for most of the debate, which I suspect post-debate audience polls will reflect, though he seems to be doing better this debate than the first one.

My quick analysis on the Dingell-Boucher draft climate bill is “likely no CO2 cut until near 2030.” Here are various initial comments from

• NRDC
• Lots of Environmental Groups
• Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee
• Wilderness Society
• Greenpeace

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Future generations cry out to today’s leaders, “You can’t offset this problem, you need to solve it yourselves!” Rip-offsets are the new opiate of the masses — and the politicians.

John Dingell (D-MI), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Rick Boucher (D-VA), chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, have released their long-awaited discussion draft climate legislation (bill text, summary, memo, and allocation chart here). Despite the fact that neither of them are particularly known as leaders on this subject, they write:

Politically, scientifically, legally, and morally, the question has been settled: regulation of greenhouse gases and United States is coming

Dingell and Boucher proudly announce that after holding some 27 hearings, “This draft is the culmination of nearly two years of intensive work on climate change by the Committee and marks an important step in our ongoing effort to address this increasingly serious problem.”

The bill “covers approximately 88% of US greenhouse gas emissions, and would reduce covered emissions to 6% below 2005 levels by 2020, 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, and 80% below 2005 levels by 2050″ — in theory.

In practice, of course, actual domestic reductions in the near term and the midterm will not come anywhere near that level because the bill adopts the mother of all cost containment measures, rip-offsets, much as the Boxer bill did (see here and “Boxer bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“) and much as John McCain’s plan does (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).

I’ll let other people focus on the bill’s various goodies, including the strong push for energy efficiency and clean technology, and its complicated allowance formulas (the draft proposes four options). I’ll focus on the staggering amount of rip-offsets:

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July saw another sharp drop in vehicle miles traveled (aka VMT) according to the Federal Highway Administration’s monthly report on “Traffic Volume Trends.”

Lost in all the news about the financial meltdown and the election is the report that Americans drove 3.6 percent less, or 9.6 billion miles fewer, in July 2008 than July 2007. Okay, maybe it wasn’t lost in all the news — it looks like the FHA didn’t bother issuing a press release (see here). I guess even they are blasé about reductions in driving that just a few months ago would have been record-setting.

In any case, the moving 12-month trend-line remains striking:

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No, 450 is not politically possible today. Nor is 550. Nor is action sufficient to stave off 1000 ppm and 6°C warming.

OK, that was clear before because Congressional conservatives can certainly block the necessary action and demagogue the energy price issue — and they obviously intend to (see “Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us“).

But I think the financial bailout bill story has yet more sobering lessons:

1. Multi-hundred-billion-dollar-sized government action happens only when there is a very, very big crisis. Yes, lots of people out there think happy talk about clean energy and green collar jobs is mainly what you need to get a massive government spending program. Not gonna happen. The happy talk can help sell the needed policies, but without the crisis, it leads nowhere.
2. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a crisis to be “very, very big” is that it must be labeled as such by very serious people who are perceived as essentially nonpartisan opinion leaders. In this case, it was the panic from people like uber-billionaire Warren Buffet and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and even people like CNBC’s Jim Cramer (yes, he shouts a lot, but he called this meltdown a year ago and has a lot of credibility with the media).
3. In addition, bad things must be happening to regular people right now. It was quite interesting that the House in particular voted down the original bailout but reversed itself in large part because of the ensuing stock market meltdown and in part because they started to hear from all of the small and large businesses in their districts that the credit market was freezing up.
4. The credible people must say that the government action is going to solve the problem. This is a crucial point also missed by lots of people. If Buffet and Bernanke and Cramer said the sky is falling but your plan ain’t going to stop it, then your plan is dead, dead, dead.

What does this say about the climate and peak oil predicament?

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Google has come out with a plan to “greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030.” It is one of the most ambitious such plans ever offered by a major US company and deserves a close look by everyone (details here, long CEO speech here). Compared to business-as-usual growth, the plan would reduce:

• Fossil fuel-based electricity generation by 88%
• Vehicle oil consumption by 38%
• Dependence on imported oil (currently 10 million barrels per day) by 33%
• Electricity-sector CO₂ emissions by 95%
• Personal vehicle sector CO₂ emissions by 38%
• US CO₂ emissions overall by 48% (40% from today’s CO₂ emission level)

The cost is high, $4.4 trillion, but savings are even higher, $5.4 trillion, “returning a net savings of $1.0 trillion over the 22-year life of the plan” — not counting the value of carbon credits, which, Google says, would boost the savings to over $2 trillion. And that’s assuming very optimistically that the price of CO2 in 2030 is only $40/ton, which is the European price today. In fact, we’ll probably need CO2 prices twice as large by 2030.

The two most interesting aspects to me are Google’s (inevitable) recognition that cutting oil demand in the medium term is much harder than cutting fossil power generation and, as a result, their call to speed up the retirement of existing vehicles (discussed below).

The Google plan is built around massive and rapid deployment of clean technology:

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NPR’s Living on Earth explores the elements of a green economic bailout here:

As Washington rescues Wall Street, a growing chorus of big thinkers from the left and right are calling for a greener approach– using investment in clean energy and efficiency as a way to stimulate the economy.

Related Posts:

• Mayors report: 4.2 million new green jobs possible
• Green Jobs for a Greening Economy
• Jobs NOT Saved in Maryland
• Time for Green Collar Jobs

John McCain’s new coziness with Big Oil is in many respects just a replay of his old coziness with Charles Keating. In both cases, money and access bought influence. Let’s start with oil.

Last month, Time reported that McCain tapped a “prominent Washington lobbyist,” William E. Timmons, Sr., to run his transition, should he win the election. Who does Timmons and Company lobby for? As of this year, they are getting about $100,000 a quarter from the American Petroleum Institute (API).

More than 20 top McCain advisers and fundraisers have lobbied for Big Oil, including Charlie Black, Senior Political Adviser (whose clients include Occidental, Yukos Oil, Chinese National Off-Shore Oil Corp.) and Wayne Berman, National Finance Co-Chairman (Hess, Chevron, Texaco, API).

What does the access get Big Oil? Let’s see. McCain has almost completely walked away from the climate issue (see “Turns out McCain doesn’t care about global warming“). He picked Big Oil’s dream VP, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. And, of course, back in July, as the Washington Post headline blared, “Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling“:

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

That is a lot of quid for a lot of quo, a lot of cash for trashing his image as an environmentalist or as a reforming maverick. Of course, we’ve seen that the environmental image was always fictional (see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma“).

Yet, the image of McCain as someone who fights against lobbyists, rather than cozies up to them, is also fictional, as the sordid story of the Keating Five (excerpted below) makes clear. The past is indeed prologue:

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Just as McCain has tried to muzzle his Vice-Presidential denier, so too has GM tried to muzzle its Vice Chair denier.

McCain didn’t succeed (see Palin on CBS: “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate” and Palin in debate STILL gets global warming backwards). And GM hasn’t done much better, at least on The Colbert Report (see GM’s Lutz is nuts).

Lutz has now adopted one Palin strategy. If you don’t want to or simply can’t answer a question, then don’t. Here is GM’s Vice Chair of Global Product Development on 60 Minutes yesterday:

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I’m going to (try to) coin a new term here, “rip-offsets,” since I can’t think of a better word for the rip-off offsets the Chicago Climate Exchange is peddling to a gullible public and media.

The Washington Post has a front-page story, “There’s a Gold Mine In Environmental Guilt Carbon-Offset Sales Brisk Despite Financial Crisis,” that echoes articles written a few years ago on the mortgage industry. Sales are way up. Price are rising. Everybody is jumping in. Oversight all but nonexistent.

Yeah, a few of those pesky “Watchdog groups say offset vendors sometimes do not deliver what they promise,” but for most people it’s just one big party:

At the Chicago Climate Exchange, where offsets are sold like pork bellies or stocks, Sept. 23 was the second-busiest trading day in the four-year history of the market.

Buried at the very end of the article is a description of just how worthless many Chicago Climate Exchange offsets are. The article describes an offset so pathetic, so questionable, that it shocked even me, and I already thought most offset are no better than mortgage-backed securities:

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