by Eric Roston
First things first: Recent political
difficulties for the president and key colleagues in the Senate have
not removed energy and climate issues from the White House and majority’s agenda. Obama told business executives yesterday that the
U.S. economy must start “to put a price on carbon pollution.” He touted
his White House’s activities on energy efficiency, nuclear power,
solar, and oil drilling, but reiterated his pre-election call for a comprehensive policy: “The only certainty
of the status quo is that the price and supply of oil will become
increasingly volatile; that the use of fossil fuels will wreak havoc on
weather patterns and air quality.” Obama made news about a year ago at
the Business Roundtable, site of yesterday’s remarks, when he reminded
everyone that he preferred a market-driven climate policy that
auctioned “carbon credits” to polluters rather than a policy that gives
them away.
The climate leadership troika in the Senate—John Kerry, Lindsey
Graham, and Joe Lieberman—continues to spar with the conventional
wisdom that the Senate doesn’t have the momentum to take on climate
right now, particularly when health care is still unsolved. They
continue to find a compromise approach to legislation that would put a price on carbon.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the agency
will implement its new greenhouse gas regulations slowly, with smaller
qualifying firms not needing to regulate until 2016. The largest firms
would comply before 2013. Jackson emphasized these dates in a letter to eight Democrats from coal-producing states
who expressed concern about the rules. The EPA’s actions are of concern
to the majority of Republican senators, 35 of them, and three moderate
Democrats. That’s the size of the group that supports Sen. Lisa
Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to turn back the EPA’s rules. The
agency faces legal challenges elsewhere, most prominently from the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and the states of Texas, Virginia, and Alabama.
EPW ranking member Sen. James Inhofe released a GOP report into the UEA email controversy, and will pursue further investigations
into whether climate scientists violated any federal laws. The report
can be accessed here [PDF]. Readers can read around the professional literature to evaluate its conclusions here.
Best-thing-ever-ism: Nothing will ever
break your heart like new large-scale energy technology. That’s because
there’s so much is possible but we haven’t yet been able to either
close the carbon loophole that would make them economically
competitive, or scale up the true “game changers.” There’s a messianism
that accompanies many new technologies. This week saw some seductive
new ideas that promise to be the energy sector’s latest Best! Thing!
Ever!
“Where will the U.S. get its electricity in 2034?” That’s the headline of a Scientific American interview with the head of Black & Veatch, an analysis firm that just
published a report answering this question in two words: natural gas.
The head analyst gave this assessment of how surveyed players in the
power market understand the problem of pricing carbon: “Looking at the
survey and what’s going on in the industry, regardless of people’s
personal or political opinions they want to move towards a lower carbon
footprint for the power sector. A lack of legislation right now in some
corners creates more concern.”
“We believe we’ve developed a new type of nuclear reactor that can
represent a nearly infinite supply of low-cost energy, carbon-free
energy for the world.” That’s what the head of TerraPower, a firm
developing an advanced nuclear reactor that uses depleted fuel. The project has the backing of Bill Gates, who gave a recent talk about the technology.
A start-up clean energy company with a brightening name and marquee backing launched publicly this week. For eight years, Bloom Energy has quietly developed
and tested its solid oxide fuel cell, which uses natural gas to
generate electricity for eight to ten cents a kilowatt hour.
Independent estimate put the price at 13 to 14 cents a kilowatt hour,
higher than the U.S. average of 11 cents. Google, Wal-Mart, and Bank of
America are beta-testing units. The company’s founder, KR Sridhar has
raised $400 million and expects that customers can earn back their
investment in three to five years. Earth2Tech.com has a useful overview of what’s known about Bloom’s technology, with further links.
Seething is believing: If you’re reading
this, it’s likely because you’re inclined to read something like this.
That’s a glib reduction of research conducted by the Cultural Cognition
Project, anchored at Yale Law School and recently discussed by NPR’s
Christopher Joyce and Reason‘s Ronald Bailey.
This very interesting research observes with precision just how deeply
people are inclined to accept facts that reinforce what they already
believe. The report itself can be found here.
Researchers tracked how individuals’ opinions about global warming and
other topics change as they are given more and more information about a
topic. This example is relevant to a central topic in climate policy.
In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the
dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants
that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial
pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate
science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says
Braman, “they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious
problem.”
It turns out global warming is a serious problem. After weeks or
months of public confusion over what IPCC errors and the UEA emails
mean in the big picture, dispassionate media commentators are beginning
to step in and do what they are supposed to do: Filter spam out of the
public discourse. That’s not something mass media are particularly good
at, given their bent toward “exaggerating denialism.”
Long gone are the days when a newspaper editorial could sway an
election. This week a couple of the heavyweights weighed in with some
clarity on the climate confusion, none more notable than the Washington
Post’s Monday editorial.
The paper’s op-ed editor distinguished himself last year by running
several factually incoherent columns by George Will, including this one on Sunday. In this episode, Will demonstrates his ability to rip
fragments from elsewhere as a stand-in for science journalism. Bill
Chameides, dean of Duke’s Nicholas School, handily dismantles the
problem here.
This week’s ed board effort is a fine, mature piece analyzing what
non-experts can hang on to amid activists’ polemics on every side. The
ed board hit particularly hard Virginia, whose attorney general last
week challenged the EPA’s current effort to regulate greenhouse gases: “To see Virginia’s newly elected attorney general join in this
know-nothingism is an embarrassment to the state.” The New York Times ran an editorial relatively upbeat about international climate policy negotiations,
given the recent exit of chief U.N. negotiator Yvo de Boer. (de Boer
revealed this week that his new job at accounting giant KPMG was lined
up before Copenhagen in December.)
Andrew Revkin, of Pace University and the New York Times’ DotEarth blog, invited readers this week to go “Back to Basics on Climate and Energy,” an attempt to find common ground amid all the bad vibes.
Ideally, the “climate scandals” of 2009-2010 will result in a
stronger general understanding of climate science that allows the U.S.
policy conversation to occur with greater intellectual honesty from
however many sides you think there are.
Related Links:
Common weed killer chemically castrates frogs, study finds
Sen. Inhofe’s latest attack is on climate scientists, not just science
Coffee hit by global warming, growers say
