by Eric Roston
First Things First: President Barack Obama
signed health care reform into law this week, exposing a rarely
acknowledged political pre-existing condition among the pundit class: despite the conventional wisdom, no matter how many years experience a
given observer has had in Washington, whatever political party you
favor—nobody ever really has any idea what’s about to happen. As Sen.
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the other day about the current mood in Congress, “It was bad last
week. It’s going to be bad this week. Who knows what it’s going to be
like next week?”
Passage of a bill widely declared dead shores up the president’s and
his party’s political capital and has prompted an uptick in violent,
intimidating rhetoric among the Democrats’ political opponents in and out of the
blogosphere. Supporters of the various climate mitigation approaches may
feel emboldened,
as if the conventional wisdom shouldn’t count them out either.
People at Work: Top White House advisers
met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Wednesday to chart
out a strategy to move climate legislation through the Senate. Sens. John Kerry
(D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are
expected to release a draft of their bill in April, after the two-week
spring recess that starts tomorrow. The troika has been shopping an eight-page proposal around influential lobbyists, such as the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, according to Politico.
The effort by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman has been the most visible
effort by senators to address climate change, but other approaches will
not be discounted. More specifically, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and
Susan Collins (R-Maine) will not be discounted. The pair has already
written a bill, introduced last November, that would compel heavy industry—predominantly sellers of fossil fuels—to buy carbon
emission permits, and trade them in a market. Auction receipts would be
mostly re-distributed back to consumers. [Click here to download the Nicholas Institute’s recent modeling study of Cantwell
and Collins’ CLEAR Act.]
All eyes turned to Graham after health care passed. Reports
circulated last week that he could walk out of climate-bill negotiations if Democrats passed healthcare reform
through a procedural sidestep called the “reconciliation” process, which
they did. With that bill now law, Graham vows to continue his work with
Kerry and Lieberman (I-Conn.). Passing another major bill right after
healthcare will take much more than Graham’s presence as a negotiator in
a political environment that—however it strains the imagination—keeps
finding ways to become more and more poisonous.
Many Democrats are eager to move on energy and climate legislation
despite the political obstacles. Twenty-two Democratic senators,
including Sens. Cantwell and Sherrod Brown of Ohio,
wrote a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid supportive of a jobs and energy security bill. Ten senators from coastal states
wrote a letter to Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman threatening to pull their
support for the as-yet-unseen bill if it contains provisions for
offshore oil drilling. NPR asks the question, whatever happened to
broader GOP support for climate policy?
Whatever Happened to…: For what it’s worth,
the president’s party continues to find encouragement for its climate
policy from abroad. The U.S. and international climate conversations
merged in Washington this week when Connie Hedegaard, the Danish
minister of climate and energy, visited, meeting
with U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern and chatting up the international
importance of U.S. legislation.
When two presidential candidates promised measures to address climate
change, in the summer of 2008, confidence in America’s first-ever
carbon market shot up to seven dollars a ton. But with international and
domestic negotiations uncertain, prices for a ton of carbon on the
Chicago Climate Exchange have dropped to ten cents. Among those hit hardest by the collapse in prices are
farmers who earned carbon credits through “no-till farming.” When
farmers deploy this practice, CO2 remains trapped underground if farmers
refrain from turning it over. Good practices—and what constitutes “good
practices” can be disputed—aren’t catching up with emissions trends. A
report in Nature this week documents a global rise in emissions from soil.
Civil (Legal) War?: Newsweek profiles EPA administrator Lisa Jackson as a way to narrate for its general
audience the inside-the-beltway machinations occurring in her agency and
on the Hill. Legislators prefer (perhaps by definition) that such major
changes in pollution laws go through Capitol Hill. “Jackson knew that
threatening to act by executive fiat wouldn’t be popular. But she also
knew it would get people’s attention, and maybe prod Congress to act,”
writes Daniel Stone. Murkowski has led opposition to the EPA’s move in
the Senate.
States too continue to hop on board the EPA litigation train. The
federal appeals court in Washington wrapped together the petitions
seeking to beat back the EPA’s endangerment finding. Sixteen states have
joined the battle.
Pennsylvania and Minnesota support the EPA’s finding, and 14 others
oppose it: Alaska, Michigan filed separately, while Nebraska, Florida,
Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah acted together.
Carbon–It’s What’s for Dinner: Monday was World Water Day. National
Geographic marks the event with a comprehensive cover package about this most
personal of all environmental issues (You are mostly water). In the
magazine’s leader, writer Barbara Kingsolver offers a lyrical perspective on our many worlds of water. Water is the ultimate commons.
Earth has a finite amount of it, but an expanding global civilization.
The essay glides toward mention of that seminal work, Garret Hardin’s
“The Tragedy of the Commons.” Kingsolver writes: “Agreeing to
self-imposed limits instead, unthinkable at first, will become the right
thing to do. While our laws imply that morality is fixed, Hardin made
the point that ‘the morality of an act is a function of the state of the
system at the time it is performed.’ Surely it was no sin, once upon a
time, to shoot and make pies of passenger pigeons.” Other articles—and
photos, natch—look at desalination,
California’s water, and the U.K. group WaterAid’s work in southwestern Ethiopia.
About 1,800 gallons of water go into the production of one pound of
beef. The magazine has a nice online interactive graphic showing the “embedded water” in various products. Likewise, how much
CO2 meat production represents came under scrutiny this week. A
University of California, Davis, professor challenged a four-year-old
report that found emissions from meat production represents 18 percent of the global emissions of heat-trapping gases. Frank
Mitloehner told an academic conference that the report, called Livestock’s
Long Shadow, included more variables in its calculation of meat’s
carbon emissions than in the transportation sector emissions calculated
by the IPCC. The apples-to-oranges comparison skews the result, making
it look like meat production pollutes more. In the U.S., transportation
contributes about a quarter of emissions, but pork and beef production
add just three percent of the national total. An author of the report
says of Mitloehner’s study, “I must say honestly that he has a point.”
Sea Is for Climate: Widescale production of
batteries would focus attention on parts of the world not considered
major players in the global energy economy. But a proliferation of
batteries for transportation and stationary use might make Bolivia or
neighboring Chile into the Saudia Arabia of lithium,
a key ingredient batteries. The nearly 4,000-square mile salt flats,
remains of an ancient sea, contain the world’s largest lithium deposits,
waiting to power your electric car.
India and Bangladesh settled a longstanding dispute over a tiny
island with two names by letting the rising Bay of Bengal swallow it
whole. New Moore island (India) or South Talpatti (Bangladesh) stood
just six feet above sea level. The waters have risen in temperature and
height in recent years. The island, which was uninhabited, will continue
to be uninhabited.
Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core
Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue
available at Grist.
Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.
Related Links:
The EPA weighs the hidden costs of carbon
Let’s call setting a price on carbon “puppies”
Dems more trusted on energy than any other issue, continue pursuing polluter-friendly GOP ideas