Climate Progress

Dan Weiss, the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, has written an excellent piece on why we can expect a series of inevitably flawed economic analyses of the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) in the coming months:

Many of these studies will likely predict that the reductions of greenhouse gases required by the cap-and-trade system will lead to huge hikes in electric rates, reductions in jobs, and all sorts of other economic havoc.

But these studies also have one other common element: They will eventually be proven wrong once the program is underway.

These studies base their cost assumptions on existing technologies and practices, which means that they do not account for the vast potential for innovation once binding reductions and deadlines are set. The Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act anticipates the need for innovation and creates economic incentives to spur engineers and managers to devise technologies and methods to meet the greenhouse gas reduction requirements more cheaply.

This isn’t the first time that pollution control studies have produced inaccurate predictions about the future. Remember what analysts predicted about acid rain controls from 1989 to 1990?

And the article continues on to review that history and then look at the important reports of McKinsey & Co and Nicholas Stern, which makes clear the cost of action is far, far lower than the cost of inaction.

If you’re interested in the IPCC’s take on this — they explain why the literature is clear that action is not costly — this post summarizes what they report.

Last week the Center for American Progress began a series called “It’s Easy Being Green” meant to recognize the steps communities, individuals, and organizations are taking to transform our country’s energy-use. Last week’s column featured a new kind of neighborhood:

Pringle Creek Community in Salem, Oregon, named the 2007 Green Land Development of the Year by the National Association of Home Builders, may be the greenest neighborhood in the country. It uses 35 sustainable goals to guide planning and construction, including building an entire neighborhood of carbon neutral homes, encouraging contractors to use biodiesel, and creating a community garden.

All development homes can employ a geothermal heating and cooling system that reduces heating bills to a quarter of conventional costs, and homes outfitted with solar-generating photovoltaic cells can bring their bills to zero.

The new homes, built while preserving 80 percent of existing trees, are constructed with 100 percent Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber. Neighborhood streets use porous paving permitting 90 percent of rainwater to go through asphalt and concrete, eventually entering the aquifer as clean water.

A custom home nearing completion is listed for $432,000. The 1,460-square-foot home scored 103 points from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, which is the highest score ever recorded by LEED.

The community is also working on a sustainable living center that will serve as an educational tool offering hands-on and experiential learning, and social and educational events.

Despite having campaigned as a green governor and introduced a ‘green’ energy plan, Virginia’s Governor Tom Kaine is not living up to his claims. While Kathleen Sebelius (KS) is withstanding intense heat from industry lobbyists and state legislators for her opposition to a coal plant expansion, the only campaign promise Gov. Kaine is keeping is to Dominion Power, which gave at least $135,000 to his campaign.

As Glenn Hurowitz notes over at Huffington Post - energy-efficient light bulbs just aren’t enough…

Meanwhile, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano is celebrating the world’s largest solar plant slated for construction 70 miles outside Phoenix.

The plant has been named Solana, and will have a capacity of 280 megawatts, “enough to power 70,000 homes while avoiding over 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases” the company said. Construction of the Solana Generating Station will create about 1,500 construction jobs, and it would employ 85 full-time workers once it’s operational, Abengoa Solar said.

A few thoughts come to mind. I’d like to think the difference is that Arizona has a renewable portfolio standard, while Virginia does not (nor Kansas) - hence the battles. But, as we’re seeing in Kansas right now, the difference is that oh-so-tempting-mistress, money.

But their money is heading the wrong direction. Coal shouldn’t be paying for permission to build; they should be paying for permission to pollute (or trying to figure out how to pollute significantly less). Some argue that carbon constraints would devastate industries like coal because the changes they’d have to make would be too expensive.

Grant me a crazy thought here: Is it just me, or have they got a lot of money they’re throwing around irresponsibly? How would those numbers line up? Candidate donations, bribes to universities, the cost of supporting presidential primary debates, lobbying the Hill, PR campaigns … versus what it would cost to invest in researching carbon capture technology, scrubbers, biomass co-firing retrofits, or preparing for a carbon cap.

Their spending choices certainly don’t make me think “Oh poor coal” once we put a price on carbon. And as for Gov. Kaine - we had higher expectations,and in this era of scrutinizing coal, shame on you if you thought you could fool your constituents and environmentalists.

– Kari M.

Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, in an absurdly titled column, “Obama’s Missing Ideas,” proves once again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Obama’s ideas about climate solutions are probably the very last place one can find something missing.

Obama has a terrific climate plan, full of winning ideas, as I have blogged many times. Yet Mallaby, claims that “good ideas are actually quite scarce. Just take a look at climate change.”

Mallaby’s “case” is based on two climate ideas many people have always thought were lame (which he never actually bothers to link to Obama), one climate problem that is pretty straightforward to solve, and one idea Mallaby thinks is new that is in fact quite old, is not really a climate idea, and as such has limited climate benefits.

First he says, “A couple of years back, ethanol was touted as a good answer to global warming.” Uhh, no. Corn ethanol, which is what he attacks, was not considered a “good answer to global warming” by any energy or climate expert I have ever met. To the extent climate advocates even tolerated the fuel, it was strictly as a bridge to cellulosic ethanol. To the extent that corn ethanol was supported on policy grounds by politicians [as opposed to support for the farmers or a desire not to offend Iowans], it is primarily from people who are concerned about our dependence on imported oil, not global warming.

Does Mallaby even know that Obama supports “a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard” which would block any fuel that increases greenhouse gas emissions — or that he supports accelerating the development of cellulosic (i.e. low-carbon) ethanol? These are good ideas.

Next Mallaby complains about “carbon trading with developing countries”:

The system developed under the Kyoto Protocol allows companies in the rich world to pay companies in the poor world to reduce emissions. This sounds like another smart idea: Emissions can be cut cheaply in developing countries, so we get to reach our climate goal without too steep a financial penalty. But emissions trading with developing countries has been a bust. China has deliberately designed factories to release prodigious quantities of greenhouse gases, then pocketed billions for redesigning them.

Well, first off. This is not, as Mallaby claims, “carbon trading with developing countries” — since they don’t buy any carbon permits from us. This is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Second, lots of people, including me, always thought this was a dumb idea. I don’t know what Obama thinks of the CDM — among his dozens of climate ideas, he does support “international offsets under the carbon cap to promote the transfer of low carbon energy to developing countries.” That is perfectly reasonable.

Mallaby’s conclusion: “So two apparently excellent climate-change ideas have been rudely pierced.”

My conclusion: “Two lousy/dubious ideas in theory have been shown to be lousy/dubious in practice.”

In either case, I don’t see how this reflects badly on Obama’s climate ideas. As if to underscore my point, Mallaby veers his SUV off the road entirely….

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Trillions turn green - Market Watch. “Nearly 50 leading U.S. and European investors representing more than $8 trillion of assets met on Feb. 14 at the United Nations to lay out a timetable for their commitments to global climate change and to call on governments and other investors to act with their money as well.”

US Should Speed Up Energy Efficiency Plans - IEA - Reuters. “The US government needs to move more quickly on plans to boost automobile fuel efficiency standards, improve efficiency of power plants and take hard action on heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the International Energy Agency said Friday.”

Follow Germany’s lead, invest to save energy - The Telegraph (UK). An interesting spin on modernizing (and making efficient) the building sector (responsible for 39 percent of U.S. emissions - except this is in Germany/UK).

Easing concerns about pollution from manufacture of solar cells - Physorg.com
The study hasn’t been released, but it will be worth keeping an eye out:

Solar energy has been touted for years as a safer, cleaner alternative to burning fossil fuels to meet rising energy demands.

However, environmentalists and others are increasingly concerned about the potential negative impact of solar cell (photovoltaic) technology. Manufacture of photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium and produces carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming.

In the new study, Vasilis M. Fthenakis and colleagues gathered air pollution emissions data from 13 solar cell manufacturers in Europe and the United States from 2004-2006. The solar cells include four major commercial types: multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film cadmium telluride.

The researchers found that producing electricity from solar cells reduces air pollutants by about 90 percent in comparison to using conventional fossil fuel technologies.

The Center for American Progress has a good article on the clean energy investment bill that will voted on soon by Congress. Bush and the conservatives have thwarted this effort repeatedly, but it remains an important piece of legislation, especially because:

The new bill includes a production tax credit for wind, geothermal, and other renewables. It allots $250 million more than the previous bill and extends the credit for an additional year to 2011. The bill also renews the investment tax credit for individual home owners and businesses to maintain incentives for solar energy through the end of 2016. Extending these two provisions is essential to the completion of 42,000 megawatts of planned renewable energy projects that are currently in development in 45 states. Without prompt extensions of the tax credits, renewable energy project work stoppages could cost 116,000 jobs.

This is really a no-brainer for those interested in either the environment or economic stimulus.

As all eyes turn toward Texas this week in advance of the Democratic primary, we will see a state that is beginning its transition to a new energy economy. Texas is grappling with a shift the entire nation faces — and as usual, it’s doing it on a big scale.

When it comes to energy and to carbon emissions, Texas is a place of superlatives and contrasts. It has more solar, wind and biomass resources that any other state; but it’s also No. 1 in total carbon emissions.

It is the ancestral home of Big Oil, but it also hosts the world’s largest wind farms. It has a very successful renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS), but it also has two nuclear power plants in the pipeline to provide power to its rapidly growing population.

A year ago in a watershed deal, a private equity firm working with environmentalists arranged a $45 billion buyout of the state’s largest power producer, TXU. As part of the deal, eight of 11 planned new coal-fired power plants were cancelled. However, as many as nine new coal plants remain in the pipeline.

In Texas, we see a contest between conventional and renewable energy resources, and between the past and the future.

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The European Environment Agency (EEA) reports:

Total greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-27, excluding emission and removals from land-use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF), decreased by 0.7 % between 2004 and 2005 and by 7.9 % between 1990 and 2005.

Over the same period, 1990 to 2005, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are up an alarmaing 17%. The EEA report underscores a point I have made repeatedly — the transportation sector remains the toughest nut to crack:

Between 1990 and 2005, greenhouse gas emissions decreased in all sectors except in the transport sector, where they increased significantly.

The EU-15 are down 2% since 1990, whereas Kyoto requires an 8% drop averaged over 2008-2012. This suggests the EU-15 will be buying some tons on the international market (perhaps from their neighbors) if they want to meet their target, which I hope they do — notwithstanding how politically unattractive that must seem to those countries with the richest country in the world refusing to do its part.

If you’d like to see how each country is doing, this figure has all the details (click on it to enlarge, and then click on it again):

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*[”That number does not yet include hybrid sales figures from GM, who does not report them separately.“] Green Car Congress reports:

US sales of hybrids in January 2008 climbed 27.3% to 22,392 units, according to monthly sales reports from automakers…. Toyota’s Prius posted best-ever January sales of 11,379 units, an increase of 37.1% over last January….

Yes, the Prius is half of all (non-GM) hybrids sold!

The reported sales of hybrids represented 2.14% of the more than 1.04 million new vehicles sold in the month.

So there isn’t a lot of price sensitivity to gasoline, but at least there is some.

Why has the United States government spent the last seven years thwarting domestic and international action on global warming while underfunding and mismanaging federal clean technology efforts? Well, if, hypothetically, you were the kind of person who liked to compile top 10 lists to answer questions, certainly Ralph Nader’s campaign during the 2000 election would be fairly high on that list.

Not just because he siphoned away crucial votes from Gore in a some key states — but perhaps more because he spent so much time in swing states saying there was no difference between Bush and Gore, breaking a major promise he had made, while forever destroying his reputation as a truth teller. You try running a tight race when a credible (at the time, anyway) third party is trashing you all the time, demotivating your base.

His 2004 run proves his 2000 run was the triumph over ego over principle. And his newly announced 2008 run conjures up two words: laughable and pathetic. I could go on, but why bother? Everything has passed Nader by, but most especially reality.

If there are any Ralph Nader supporters out there, now is your turn to speak up in defense of him.