Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Tom Laskawy

Some fries with that? Once you’ve been super-sized, it’s hard to go backPolitical reporter Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has a new must-read piece on the obesity epidemic. Ambinder comes at the issue from the perspective of a former obese person, though he himself notes that his “cure” of bariatic surgery is risky, expensive, and one that can’t be considered a blanket solution for the general population.

He also raises the chilling but very real possibility that the current generation of the medically obese (i.e. those with a body-mass index reading of over 30) may never succeed in returning to a more normal weight. Scientists have learned how tenaciously the body guards its resources, even when body weight far exceeds what’s needed for survival.

But Ambinder is not without hope. In fact, he also wrote an accompanying blog post summarizing his priority list for tackling the problem. And two of his elements refreshingly face the often overlooked issues of class and stigma head on:

Recognize that what separates skinny people from fat people is luck, and not willpower. Either your genes or your unchosen social environment, will provide a shield against the pressures of the default obesogenic environment. If you’re part of a chronically stressed population, have little or no access to quality public infrastructure, find yourself growing up in a dysfunctional family, and have limited social mobility, the chances that you’ll be able to summon some magical reserve of willpower is slim to none. If you’re white, upper middle class, tend to be hopeful about improving your lot in life, and have the time and resources to diet and exercise, you might be able to find a weight loss regimen that works for you. Either way, don’t give yourself credit, and don’t blame other people who aren’t as lucky.

Deal with stigma on its own terms: so long as there are fat people, there will be fat stigma. Fat stigma is a dangerous health problem in an of itself. Since we collectively perpetuate it, we ought to collectively be more aware of how harmful it is, and channel that energy into stigmatizing those specific institutions and entities that actually make us fat and profit from doing so.

This issue of luck is crucial. The food industry and others who hate regulation want the debate to revolve around personal responsibility. But if just doing the “right thing” isn’t enough, i.e. if obesity could happen to anyone, then it’s harder to argue against universal policies to address it. It’s easy to get caught up in the science and forget these larger, more psychological factors. Indeed, anti-obesity stigma and the cult of personal responsibility interact in pernicious ways. It’s hard to have much desire to help those you stigmatize. Understanding the amplifying nature of these two trends is crucial.

Meanwhile, the article itself includes some of the first indications that Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity initiative may turn out to be a velvet glove over an iron fist:

A few weeks after Obama announced her plan, I asked Susan Sher, her chief of staff, whether the first lady was trying to encourage cooperation, rather than attacking the industry for, say, advertising. “It is clear that this is just a first step, and for example, the totally voluntary commitment that the beverage industry made is a terrific first step,” Sher told me, referring to a recent agreement that would put calorie counts on the front of soda bottles and cans and on vending machines. “But the FDA may have more-stringent requirements in the future, so I think that everything that’s happened so far shouldn’t be viewed as the end of the game in any respect. We didn’t make demands, and I think that the first lady is very clear that that is not her role, that you have a lot of federal agencies involved in regulations — the FTC will probably have a say about this as well, in terms of advertising. So this was really a lot of industry deciding, at least at some level, ‘We want to be part of the solution, not just part of the problem.’” A few weeks later, the FDA—led by Margaret Hamburg, another New York City veteran with a strong nanny streak—warned 17 food manufacturers that their food labeling made misleading health claims that needed to be corrected. This was the most significant FDA enforcement action on such matters in more than a decade.

Perhaps the Obama administration’s strategy for this policy will mirror the health care negotiations—make the effort to cooperate, even coopt the other sides issues (like the need to show some amount of personal responsibility) and when that all proves insufficient, tax, regulate and otherwise act decisively. Ambinder ends with the same question we all have about obesity and the White house: Is Michelle Obama willing to take the gloves, velvet or not, off?

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Note to Environmentalists: Economists are on your side

by Doug Kendall

Following
last Friday’s announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens will retire from the
Supreme Court at the end of this term, President Obama hailed the Court’s most
senior Justice as “an impartial guardian of the law.” This description is
certainly accurate, and is perhaps best illustrated by Justice Stevens’
numerous rulings in environmental cases.

First,
it is worth remembering that Justice Stevens came to the Court in 1975, at the
dawn of the modern environmental movement and amid a heady time for
environmentalists in the courts. Just a few years earlier, in a dissent
from the landmark case Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), Stevens’ predecessor, Justice William O. Douglas, had famously argued
that natural resources such as trees and rivers should have “standing,”
positing that if corporations are permitted to represent their interests in
court then so too should other inanimate objects. Meanwhile, in cases of
statutory interpretation, judges on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the
D.C. Circuit had developed a number of doctrines that allowed them to
aggressively second-guess agency decision-making in order to realize the broad
and ambitious goals of environmental statutes. These developments invigorated environmentalists, but they also
introduced a sense of permissive creativity into a rapidly growing body of
environmental law, and exposed judges who made pro-environmental rulings to
allegations of judicial activism.

Justice
Stevens, by contrast, firmly rejected the idea that environmentalism was some
sort of transcendental force that gave judges special powers to enforce broad
statutory goals on their own and overrule regulatory agencies. Most
famously, in Chevron v. NRDC (1984), he
wrote a majority opinion for the Court that sternly rebuked the D.C. Circuit
for substituting its judgment for that of the Reagan EPA, which had sought to
give industry more flexibility in meeting their Clean Air Act obligations.
Though a bitter defeat for environmentalists, Chevron, which holds that
judges must defer to agencies when they make a reasonable judgment about an
ambiguous law, is rightly hailed today as a landmark of both administrative law
and judicial restraint.

Those
same principles—deference to the plain language of statutes and concern about
judicial restraint—are the hallmarks of Justice Stevens’ other landmark
environmental rulings, which have rightly earned Stevens the enduring gratitude
of the environmental world. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter Of Communities For A Great Oregon (1995), Justice Stevens wrote for a six -Justice
majority in reinstating the portion of the Endangered Species Act that protects
endangered species’ habitats, which had been struck down by the D.C. Circuit
(which by then had been taken over by Reagan and Bush appointees). This time, Justice Stevens’ opinion corrected
the D.C. Circuit’s narrow reading of an environmental statute by finding that
the language and intent of the Endangered Species Act was clear in forbidding
changes to habitats that will harm endangered species.

In
2002, Justice Stevens wrote another rule-of-law environmental opinion in Sierra
Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a “takings” case
that followed a 15-year period during which the Court’s conservatives, led by
Justice Scalia, had been remarkably inventive in trying to transform the
Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment into a barrier to environmental
laws. Rejecting this bending of the Constitution’s meaning, Justice
Stevens garnered another six-Justice majority in upholding land-use protections
put in place to save Lake Tahoe. The
ruling returned the Takings Clause to its more limited role as a guard for securing compensation for landowners when
the government exercises its power of eminent domain.

Finally, and
perhaps most famously, in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), Justice Stevens
relied on Chevron and the unambiguously broad terms of the Clean Air Act
in holding that the EPA may regulate greenhouse gas pollution using its
existing authority under the Act. This ruling has allowed the Obama
Administration to aggressively combat global warming without waiting for
further action by Congress, setting into motion a chain of regulatory actions that has led to the nation’s very first nationwide auto emissions
standards aimed at greenhouse gases, and may soon lead to the nation’s first
restrictions on CO2 emissions from power plants.

Justice Stevens should be remembered as a great justice
in environmental cases, not because he bent the law to favor environmental
outcomes, but rather because he insisted that the law itself, which dictates
environmental outcomes in many cases, be followed. 

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by David Roberts

“We don’t want to mix messages here. I’m all for protecting the Earth, but this is about energy independence.”

—Sen. Lindsey Graham, on why he, Kerry, and Lieberman won’t be releasing their long-awaited climate bill on Earth Day

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by Tom Philpott

An April 13, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) announced the four winners of its second annual “Growing Green” awards, designed to honor leaders in the sustainable-food world. The  four categories were “thought leader,” “producer,” business leader,” and “water steward.” Over the next few days, I’ll be interviewing each of them. In this interview, part one of a four-part series, I speak with Fred Kirschenmann, who took “thought leader” honors.

———-

Fred Kirschenmann: an original agri-intellectual gets his due. Fred Kirschenmann is a long-time organic farmer with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of
Chicago and positions at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture University and New York-based Stone Barns
Center for Food and Agriculture. As such, Fred proudly embodies the title of “agri-intellectual,” a term derisively coined by conventional farmer Blake Hurst in the right-wing magazine The American.

While industrial agriculturalists might sneer at Fred, for me and for the broader sustainable food movement, he serves as a kind of intellectual mentor. He is superb at giving a bird’s eye view of the food system—the great flows at energy, capital, and goods that align to put food on our plates. No one who has listened to one of his hundreds of talks over the past several years walks away without understanding that the current system is hopelessly reliant on cheap and abundant fossil energy. If that uncomfortable fact has become common knowledge within the movement and even outside of it, it is largely do to Fred’s decades-long efforts. More importantly, he is expert at identifying the ecological niches and synergies that create smarter, less wasteful, yet quite-abundant systems. You leave Fred’s talks awed at the vastness of the task ahead of us—yet also hopeful in the knowledge that change is afoot. Fred comes by his big-picture view of the world honestly—he grew up on a farm in the vast plains of North Dakota. In the 1980s, he established himself as a agricultural pioneer by taking Kirschenmann Family Farm, all 3500 acres of it, organic. Just after the announcement of his “Growing Green” prize, I caught up with Fred via phone at his office at Stone Barns.

Grist: What ideas floating around the agriculture world are you most excited about?
Kirschenmann: For one, the Land Institute and their research in perennializing grain crops is terribly important because we’ve got to do a better job of maintaining the biological health of our soil and perennials would do a much better job of that. The Land Institute, in doing its research over the last thirty years, has developed some varieties now that are looking good. In fact, they’re making some flour from perennial wheat varieties that they’ve developed.

The Land Institute has proposed a fifty-year farm bill to the USDA, to now really move this forward, which I think is a very creative idea. I don’t know whether they [the USDA]  will pick up on it or not. But that’s one idea that’s out there that I think is going to become so important, particularly as energy costs go up, etc.

Another exciting idea is what individual farmers are doing all around the world now: converting from high input/output systems of agriculture, the basic industrial model, to models that are based on what I call biological synergies, that is where they have a diversity of plants and animals in which the waste from one species becomes the food for another. And they’re producing much more food because it’s not a monoculture, so there are more food products coming off per acre, and doing it at vastly reduced energy costs.

Given all the trends in ag happening now—the emerging ecological models you’re talking about, the continuing dominance of industrial food—where do you see U.S. agriculture in twenty years?
Well, there are two major movements. There’s this movement in a new direction: recognizing that we need to now shift from an industrial agricultural model to an ecological agricultural model. And that’s gaining some traction, [though] it’s still a small part of our agricultural system. And then on the other side there’s the effort to buck up the industrial model with new technology. And of course the ecological model is now becoming just popular enough that it’s starting to serve as a threat to the old model. This is typical of any change,—it’s the way change has always happened historically: you have those who resist the change and want to keep the current system going, and those who recognize we need to change and side with the change.

There are farmers and processors and other people in the food who have made huge investments in the industrial model. So they’re going to understandably—and we should expect—that they will continue to try to defend that model as long as they possibly can. And I think we should be appreciative of that and reach out and try to work with them.
But in the long run, given the fact that our industrial model is so dependent on cheap energy, when you look ahead 10, twenty years, it’s just not going to be viable, in any way I can see. So I think that in twenty years, what we’re going to see is an agriculture that is much more diverse, because you’re going to need those biological synergies as a way of making those systems work. I think the farms are going to be somewhat smaller because when you operate farms on an ecological basis, you need more intimate knowledge about your local ecology if you’re going to manage it well. And I think that a food system is going to be more regionalized. I have to say I’m not a big advocate on the local food concept because it sort of limits you to a radius of, say, like 150 miles.

When you think about it as a total food system, because NYC has some 30 million people. You’re going to feed them all from 150 miles around NYC? Probably not. North Dakota only has 630,000 people in the whole state. If they all ate from 150 miles, 90 percent of the farmland would probably lay idle. So, we have to think about this. I think we’ll evolve to a regional concept in which people become more engaged in their own food systems in their own regions—systems that are appropriate to their own place.

What can citizens do to help bring about this transition to a more ecological farming style?
I’m glad you use the word citizen. I like to use the phrase “food citizen” because right now, we’ve all come out of this 200 year culture of industrialization and so we tend to think of ourselves in special categories: so we’re either farmers and producers, or we’re consumers. But increasingly now, as people want to know where their food comes from, they’re becoming more engaged and involved.

So we’re starting to see now farmers and consumers sitting down together as food citizens and thinking about what’s the food system that works for them. And CSAs and farmers markets are the beginnings, the starting point, of that kind of model.

I think that what ordinary food citizens in their own communities can do is a couple of things: one, when they go to buy food in their supermarket, and they’re not sure about where the food comes from or whether it is what they want, they should ask to talk to the manager of that food section and ask the questions that they have. One of the things that people don’t often realize [is] that in the food business, the ordinary customer has a lot of power because people who are in the food business understand perfectly well, that when they lose a customer, they can’t replace the loss of that customer by getting their existing customers to eat more.

Now, if you’re manufacturing computers, and you lose a customer, you can always get your existing customers to upgrade more often or whatever. You don’t have that flexibility in food. So, studies have been done which indicate when 15 people go into the same supermarket, in the same week and ask for the same product, they will almost invariably get that product on the shelf.

So that can do that, and they can also begin to think about producing some of their own food, turning part of their lawns into a garden, like Michelle Obama did. Whatever it takes-become more acquainted, take more charge, more control. Almost everyone could do that. Even if we live in an apartment in NYC, there’s probably some place where you could put a raised bed and grow some food. 

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by Bruce Nilles

Several coal industry executives withstood some heat today during a hearing before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “The Role of Coal in a New Energy Age” hearing featured a slate of four speakers who attempted to defend their industries—with one denying anthropogenic global warming -as part of the clean energy future of the U.S.:

Gregory Boyce, President and CEO, Peabody Energy Corporation
Steven F. Leer, Chairman and CEO, Arch Coal, Inc.
Preston Chiaro, Chief Executive for Energy and Minerals, Rio Tinto
Michael Carey, President, Ohio Coal Association

We had some folks tweeting from inside the hearing, and here are two choice quotes from the testimony of the coal industry representatives:

“All that we’re asking is that the (Environmental Protection Agency) step back and reconsider its endangerment finding… There needs to be another independent review of the data to put to rest all of those issues.” – Gregory Boyce

“The role for coal in the new energy age is greatly hampered by the regulatory assault waged by the Obama Administration and in particular, the Environmental Protection Agency.” – Michael Carey

There was extensive “rah-rah-ing” for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology during the hearing, but even Michael Carey of the Ohio Coal Association admitted that “CCS is 15-20 years away from commercial deployment.”

Activists brought the hearing to a halt proclaiming “coal is dirty!”Photo: Flickr via Greenpeace, with permissionThe testimony was briefly interrupted at the start by several youth activists who walked to the speakers’ table wearing facemasks, dumped lumps of coal on the table, and then displayed their blackened hands while another activist in the back of the room yelled, “COAL IS DIRTY!” until security escorted them from the room.

Once testimony started again, the Peabody, Arch and the Ohio Coal Association reps made it clear that any U.S. move to cut its carbon pollution would have little effect on global warming. The three all talked about the need to reduce emissions and how they are working on reductions emissions via CCS. But they were also clear in their position that they should not have to cut emissions until CCS is ready. Committee member Rep. Jay Inslee had a great answer to that: “That’s like saying when people stop robbing banks, then we will put a law in place to make robbing banks illegal. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Beyond that, the three also demonstrated that they continue to push for new coal plants despite the threat of global warming. The three also took swipes at the Clean Air Act’s authority over greenhouse gases, as it’s no surprise the coal industry would love to block EPA’s ability to protect the public’s health and safety by enforcing limits on global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act – limits reaffirmed by the Supreme Court almost three years ago

Thankfully, at least Rio Tinto’s Preston Chiaro had some positive statements on global warming and clean energy. The company is part of USCAP, and Chiaro said the company wants cap-and-trade in order to bring more stability to its business: “We will either shape policy, or we will have policy thrust upon us.”

Rio Tinto also at least believes that humans are causing global warming, unlike Carey of the Ohio Coal Association, who used part of his testimony to rip the science and refer to the anti-global warming Petition Project (which has been debunked, by the way).

The hearing’s website stated the intent well:

For the first time in recent memory, the CEOs of America’s top two coal mining companies, and a leading international company, will come to Capitol Hill to answer questions on their positions on climate change, clean energy policy, and the challenges that currently face their industry.

“Just as our national energy policy is at a crossroads, so, too, is the coal industry,” said (Committee Chair) Rep. Edward J. Markey. “Whether it’s climate science, the viability of ‘clean coal,’ or safety concerns, I believe Congress requires answers from the coal industry on their ability to be a part of our clean energy future.”

Reps. Markey and Inslee did a phenomenal job taking the coal industry to task for their global warming doubts and for the industry’s accusations that the government is assaulting them via regulation – when Congress has in fact been including billions for CCS in its recent energy and climate bills.

“If there is a ‘war’ being waged here, it’s being waged by your industry against our grandchildren,” said Inslee at one point. “Is it fair for the coal industry to be able to put CO2 in the atmosphere at zero cost?”

So while the speakers attacked all they could – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and even the reality of global warming itself – Reps. Markey, Jay Inslee and others held their feet to the fire.

It is clear that the coal industry continues to wear blinders while living in the past. Coal is not a part of our clean energy future.

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by Agence France-Presse

A sea turtle swims along the Great Barrier ReefPhoto courtesy The Lightworks via FlickrSYDNEY—Australian police on Wednesday vowed to “throw the book” at two crewmen from the Chinese coal carrier that ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, smashing coral and spilling oil, and damaging the famous marine park.

Australian Federal Police allege the men were the master and chief officer-on-watch onboard the Shen Neng 1 when it rammed into a coral shoal inside the World Heritage-listed area at full speed on April 3.

Oil from a huge Chinese ship which grounded in the Great Barrier Reef has hit a world-renowned nature sanctuary, officials said Wednesday, raising fears for seabirds and baby turtles now hatching there.

Clean-up crews and environmental experts were helicoptered to North West Island, a breeding site for hundreds of thousands of seabirds and turtles, where clumps of oil have fouled about one kilometer (half-a-mile) of beach.

The 230-meter (750-foot) Shen Neng 1 leaked about two tonnes of oil after blundering into the reef on April 3, angering officials who have promised stiff punishment. The giant coal-carrier was refloated and towed away on Monday.

“It hasn’t come ashore in large globules or carpets,” Patrick Quirk, general manager of Marine Safety Queensland, told public broadcaster ABC.

“Our advice from the rangers on the island is that it’s at the top of the tide line in patches, and that gives us some comfort. But we need to get our specialist beach clean-up experts and they’ll report to us immediately what is there and if needed we’ll fly out more people to the island.”

Queensland’s state transport minister Rachel Nolan said initial reports described only a “very small amount” of oil. However, Environment Protection Minister Peter Garrett feared oil may also have hit other islands.

“I’m certainly very concerned that some of the neighboring islands there, like Tryon Island, might also have also been contaminated,” he told the ABC.

Conservationists describe North West Island as a globally important nesting site for seabirds and green and loggerhead turtles, which are currently hatching and travelling down the beach.

Darren Kindleysides, director of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said even small amounts of oil can affect wildlife.

“We’re not talking about a supertanker going aground and releasing tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of oil,” he said.

“But we are talking about oil reaching a coral key which is globally important for seabird breeding and the nesting of green and loggerhead turtles. Unfortunately this is the time of year we have turtle hatchlings going down the beach … so that is a real concern.”

Australian officials have expressed anger after the Shen Neng 1 blundered into part of the world heritage-listed reef at full speed, accusing the crew of taking an illegal route.

About two tonnes of oil spilled out of the giant ship when it rammed into Douglas Shoal, creating a three-kilometer slick.

The vessel also carved a kilometers-long gouge in the delicate coral reef which experts say could take 20 years to recover.

Officials are probing claims ships ferrying Australia’s booming resources exports to Asia are taking short-cuts through the world’s biggest coral reef, which is already under pressure from rising sea temperatures and pollution.

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by David Roberts

I’ve been reflecting a bit on this post I wrote yesterday on Paul Krugman’s primer on climate economics. Long story short, I wish I hadn’t written it. Not because I’m not interested in (and obviously somewhat exercised by) the role of rational choice theory in mainstream economics, but because it wasn’t the main point I was trying to make and the cause I am trying to advance isn’t well served by a tribal war with economists. I have this tendency, when a blog post occurs to me, to think, well, before I explain that I need to explain that, and before that I have to lay that out, and so on, until I end up writing what amounts to a very long introduction … to a blog post I never end up writing. Grist is littered with such introductions.

In this case, though, I actually want to write the post itself. So I’m going to start at the end rather than the beginning.

Win-win-ssshhh

My frustration is as follows: There are many policies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions while improving economic productivity—so-called win-win solutions. Since it is widely agreed that we need to reduce GHG emissions, you’d think this would be big news. You’d think such policies would top every think-tank wish list and thrill the pundit class. You’d think economists, in particular, would be discussing and studying them at every opportunity.

But alas it is not so. In fact win-win policies are among the least discussed topics in mainstream climate politics. The economic research and case studies that vouchsafe them find little representation in the modeling that EPA, EIA, CBO, and others use to assess climate legislation. Most legislators talk like they’ve never heard of win-win policies or even considered the possibility. Activists beat the drums for them but often lack the vocabulary to make good economic arguments; regardless, DFHs aren’t taken seriously by Village arbiters of intellectual credibility.

Lack of attention can doom such policies. They face a highly asymmetrical situation. In energy markets, incumbents have incredible advantages. They are the beneficiaries of a century’s worth of public infrastructure investments, to say nothing of decades worth of tax breaks, subsidies, lax regulatory enforcement, and political largesse. Incumbents are insulated from competition by a thick web of regulations, accounting practices, and simple habit. They have an enormous interest in maintaining their advantages, whereas the benefits of changing the status quo are often widely distributed, so there is rarely a powerful lobby to push for it. For these reasons and more, it’s very difficult to build support for policies that benefit the public interest at the expense of a particular industry. Losers cry louder than winners cheer.

It is the job of progressives to build support for such policies—support sufficient to dislodge energy incumbents in the name of the public interest. That’s what progressive politics is, to me anyway. But it would be nice to get more help from economists, who for better are worse are often viewed (and view themselves) as neutral judges of the prudence and quality of public policy.

Narrow-band spectrum

Put aside, for a moment, economics as it manifests to a student of economics, or a professional inside the field. In any field of inquiry there is diversity, and sure enough there are economists doing great and innovative work on environmental problems. Instead, let’s talk about economics as it manifests in public discussions and political processes. In the U.S., the spectrum of economically reputable opinion (or sphere of legitimate controversy) runs roughly as follows.

On one side there are conservatives, who argue against any regulatory, legal, or legislative reform that might threaten energy incumbents. They do so under the banner of “small government,” with recourse to Chicago school economics. (In reality today’s conservatives are, in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s words, “business friendly,” which means something close to the opposite of “market friendly.”)

In the “middle” are “centrists” who argue against any regulatory, legal, or legislative reform that might threaten energy incumbents because “Americans are suffering” and “it’s not a good time to raise energy prices” and, you know, the deficit. (The climate bills that passed the House and the Senate Environment Committee would reduce the deficit and lower energy bills. But whatever.)

And on the “left” end of the Very Serious opinion spectrum are environmental economists. As far as I can tell, they are working squarely within the neoliberal tradition—markets filled with self-interest maximizers finding optimal equilibria—with the addendum that some transactions produce negative externalities that should be re-integrated into the market via prices. In the context of climate politics, that means they advocate for carbon pricing, lending it an imprimatur of economic legitimacy. Their general equilibrium models show that carbon pricing, like any tax-and-transfer policy, will slightly reduce GDP growth. Their rallying cry to the American public is, quoting Krugman: “Restricting emissions would slow economic growth—but not by much.”

Who, then, advocates for the win-win climate policies outside of carbon pricing? Not Krugman. Not the economists quoted in the newspaper or on cable news. Environmental economists, like most economists in the neoliberal tradition, tend toward skepticism of policies outside pricing. Like Krugman in his NYT piece, they tend to frame prescriptive “command and control” regulation as the only alternative to pricing, and a distasteful alternative at that. (Note the contortions Krugman goes through just to talk himself into accepting performance standards for coal plants.)

But command-and-control regulation is a) usually effective, and more to the point, b) only one of myriad non-price-based climate policies. For example, the only time the words “public investment” appear in Krugman’s piece is when … he uses it as an analogy for carbon pricing. He never mentions reducing fossil-fuel subsidies, reforming utilities, implementing efficiency standards, boosting R&D, updating antiquated zoning codes, pricing congestion and parking … on and on. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your economics!

There are dozens and dozens of economically credible policies that could serve as part of a full-court press against climate change. They desperately need the backing of political and media elites. Economists could do a great deal to advance that cause if they would descend from the theoretical clouds and into the real world, where energy markets are always and already compromised, inefficient, and ripe for both economic and environmental improvement.

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by Agence France-Presse

A pedestrian’s view of the Seine.Photo courtesy Olivier FfrenchPARIS—Parisians longing to take more leisurely strolls along the banks of the Seine may soon get their wish under a plan unveiled Wednesday by the city mayor.

Socialist Bertrand Delanoe wants to ban cars from a stretch of road near the Seine’s Left Bank and reduce traffic on the river’s Right Bank while opening up more space for strollers.

“It’s about giving Parisians more opportunities for happiness,” said Delanoe who unveiled his plan at city hall. “If we succeed in doing this, I believe it will profoundly change Paris.”

Every day, about 40,000 vehicles roar down the two-lane street on the Right Bank of the Seine, taking in scenic views of the Eiffel Tower and passing under many of the capital’s stunning bridges.

On the Left Bank, traffic is not as intense but the streets along the bank form an important link in the capital’s roadway system and shutting them down is bound to cause traffic mayhem.

Delanoe said his plan would involve reconfiguring entire traffic patterns along the Right Bank, between the Louvre museum and the Morland bridge, and setting up more bus routes.

On Wednesday, architects showed off plans for new promenades along the Seine, with wide walking paths, new sports facilities, a flower market, botanical gardens, and even a floating cafe.

Delanoe hopes his plan will be completed by 2012 at a cost of 40 million euros ($55 million).

The lanes along the Seine were built in 1967 and Delanoe has made no secret of the fact that he wanted to shut them down after his re-election as mayor in 2008.

In 2007, he slapped a 50 kilometer (30 mile) per hour speed limit to cut down traffic.

Since he was first elected as mayor in 2001, Delanoe has pushed through several projects to turn Paris into a green city, notably a new self-service bicycle rental scheme called Velib.

The city council is to vote on the Seine banks project in June.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

President Barack Obama
is reportedly
considering about 10 people to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice
John Paul Stevens, although popular consensus has quickly settled on just
three: Elena Kagan, Diane Wood, and Merrick Garland. A National Journal poll of court-watchers picked Kagan as the most likely, with Wood and Garland as the
only close contenders.

Obama’s choice will
have a direct bearing on climate policy, as the court is likely to hear a
number of consequential cases in the coming years. It already affirmed the
EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but the agency is facing new legal
challenges to that authority from the state of Texas, among others. If
Congress passes a climate bill, it would face similar challenges. And towns
such as Kivalina,
Alaska, threatened by the effects of carbon pollution, are pursuing public
nuisance lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, which could be appealed up to
the Supreme Court.

So here’s a look at the
environmental records of these leading contenders:

 

Courtesy Doc Searls via Wikimedia Commons

Elena Kagan

As Obama’s solicitor general, Kagan represents the
U.S. government before the Supreme Court. But because it’s her job to represent
the government’s view, the work doesn’t reveal much about her judicial
philosophy or environmental priorities. And she’s never served as a federal
appeals judge (unlike the other nominees and all current justices), or any kind
of judge, so she has no judicial record to assess.

One indicator of her
philosophy is her six years as dean of Harvard Law School, from 2003 to 2009,
where she helped found the Environmental Law Program.
Kagan lured the highly regarded environmental policy and regulation scholar Jody Freeman from UCLA
to lead the program, one of the most prominent hires of her Harvard tenure.
Kagan also launched an Environmental
Law and Policy Clinic that puts students to work on current cases.

“For many years,
Harvard was not known for a primary expertise in the environmental
jurisprudence, and that changed under Dean Kagan’s watch,” environmental law
professor Jim Rossi told
Greenwire last year.

 

Merrick Garland

The District of Columbia
Court of Appeals judge is considered the insider’s choice—widely known and
liked in Washington legal circles, able to draw support from both Democrats and
Republicans. Former Bush Justice Department official Ed Whelan called Garland
“the best that conservatives could reasonably hope for from a Democratic
President.”

That won’t excite
progressives, but they might appreciate the role he played on the D.C. Appeals
Court in repeatedly smacking down environmental shenanigans from the Bush
administration EPA. In 2004, he wrote the
court’s opinion [PDF] that found the Bush EPA had deliberately dragged its
feet on smog standards, ruling in favor of Earthjustice and the Sierra Club.

 

Courtesy Linda Rux via Wikimedia Commons

Diane Wood

Wood sits on the
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where she’s considered a liberal
counterweight to conservative heavyweight Richard A. Posner. Her signature
environmental mark was defending the scope of the Clean Water Act in Solid Waste Agency
of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The
case questioned whether seasonal and non-navigable waterways should be
considered protected, a dilemma stemming from ambiguous language in the Act.
Wood’s majority opinion held that regulations should apply to such waterways.
The Supreme Court reversed that decision, however, limiting the reach of
clean-water regulation. It’s an issue the court could well examine again.

Wood’s position on that
case might give encouragement to fans of clean water, air, and soil because it
rests on a broad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the foundation of much federal environmental regulation.
Given Chief Justice John Roberts’ ambiguous position on
the commerce clause, Wood’s support could be an asset.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

The Fisk coal-fired power plant, ChicagoCourtesy swanksalot via FlickrChicago Alderman Joe
Moore is taking aim at urban air pollution, introducing a Clean Power Ordinance today that would
force overhauls of the city’s two
coal-fired power plants, both located in Hispanic neighborhoods.

The plan would
introduce new limits for particulates (soot) and carbon dioxide, restricting how
much pollution the plants can release per unit of energy produced. The limits
on particulate matter are similar to those set for new coal plants being built
today. The limits on CO2 are similar to the pollution from a natural gas plant.

“That means essentially
shut down the coal plants and start over,” energy-company spokesman Doug
McFarlan warned WBEZ Chicago.

Right. And the downside
would be?

Here’s the upside: Those
two plants are linked to more than 40 deaths, 550 emergency room visits, and
2,800 asthma attacks annually, according to a 2002 Harvard School of
Public Health study. The asthma hospitalization rate in Chicago is nearly
double the national average [PDF].

It’s not clear that Moore’s
proposal will go anywhere, and Mayor Richard Daley’s skepticism can’t be good
for its chances. Daley says the city lacks authority over power plant emissions, although the EPA in 2008 directed the city to improve its lackluster air quality.

Putting real pressure
on city coal plants would take Daley a long way toward his public goal of making Chicago a
leader in fighting climate change. A Chicago Tribune investigation last year found that Daley’s climate plan leaned heavily on
buying carbon offsets; 87 percent of them sent money to an existing wood-burning
power plant in North Carolina and didn’t help finance any new renewable energy
projects.

 

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by Grist

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by Tom Philpott

Not as sweet as advertised: industrial-scale sugarcane production in Brazil.This is a post about Brazil’s sugarcane-ethanol “miracle,” but I can’t resist starting off with a look askance at our own corn-derived ethanol phenomenon. Has there ever been a “green” technology more ecologically discredited than corn-based ethanol?

It may yield slightly more energy than it consumes during production—but only if you grant a generous credit to distillers grains, an ethanol byproduct now busily being shoveled into CAFOs (and exported to China) as a highly dubious livestock feed. But corn ethanol’s unimpressive energy balance makes it a pathetic candidate to displace energy-rich petroleum gasoline.

Moreover, its total greenhouse gas emissions are likely titanic—a fact limply acknowledged by the EPA and then eventually retracted under industry pressure. For the love of God, the stuff is based on industrial corn—by far our biggest user of soil-degrading synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Yet the corn-ethanol behemoth lurches tediously along, forever demanding, and too often commanding, ever-spiralling amounts of government support and arable land. Sigh.

Too bad we’re not more like Brazil, where they’re displacing petroleum with highly efficient sugarcane-based ethanol …  right? Well, no. In 2006, I co-wrote an article about what Brazil’s much-heralded cane ethanol revolution has to teach the United States. The conclusion: not much.

Now comes this blistering report from Foreign Policy magazine exposing the myth that sugarcane ethanol is some sort of environmental panacea.

Before I get to the details, I want to make the point that the biofuel-as-panacea impulse is only possible in society’s whose citizens fundamentally don’t understand agriculture. Biofuels are hailed as “renewable,” because crops can be grown on the same land year after year. But monocrops destroy soil—properly thought of as a non-renewable resource—and require lots of agrichemical poisons. Therefore, industrial-scale biofuels aren’t renewable. (Whether biofuels can work sustainably in regional niches, as part of a diverse cropping system, is a different question).

Okay, where was I? In the FP piece, author Nikolas Kozloff jumps right to the point in his lead:

While sugar cane ethanol is certainly less ecologically destructive than some other biofuels, the industry’s boosters have overlooked one key fact: You’ve got to plant sugar cane somewhere. One couldn’t pick a worse place to harvest cane than Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. There, sugar cane crops have led to deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.

He goes on to explain that the flattening of the Atlantic rainforest—distinct from the Amazonian one—stands as the original sin of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil. The history of several tropical crops we now take for granted—for example sugarcane and coffee—is essentially the history of razing of that vast forest (twice the size of Texas, with as much biodiversity as the Amazon forest). And this ecological crime was compounded by the use of slave labor, Kozloff reminds us. “The colonists shipped six million African slaves to Brazil to do the cutting,” he writes: surely one of the vilest episodes in human history.

Today, just 7 percent of the original Atlantic rainforest remains—and sugar producers are busily tearing into that precious remnant as ethanol production kicks up. In the last year alone, Kozloff writes, the government has had to fine two dozen companies for illegally clearing some 143,000 acres of Atlantic rainforest to plane sugarcane.

The explosion in cane-based ethanol has potentially dire implications for the Amazon rainforest, too. I shouldn’t have to note that the Amazon is one of the globe’s great climate-stabilizing assets. It’s also home to groups who have been living there for generations—making use of its resources without destroying them. Any “green” fuel that triggers Amazon deforestation and displaces people is an abomination. Even though sugarcane doesn’t do very well in wet conditions, “hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane have been planted in the Amazon,” Kozloff reports. Then there are also indirect effects—cane displaces other crops and pushes them into the Amazon region. Kozloff writes:

In the state of São Paulo, sugar cane has been planted on former pastureland and this has pushed cattle into Mato Grosso. Hundreds of thousands of cattle are moving into the Amazon every year as a result of displacement by ethanol in the state of São Paulo alone, say environmentalists. This migration is becoming all the more likely since one can purchase 800 hectares of land in the Amazon for the price of just one hectare in São Paulo. Additionally, some soy plantations in the center of the country have been turned over to ethanol production, prompting concern among environmentalists that this will lead soy producers to move into the Amazon. And local observers say that sugar cane plantations are already pushing soy farmers and ranchers into the rainforest.

Then there’s the problem of nitrogen fertilizer. As in, sugar requires plenty of it.

The Brazilian ethanol industry uses more than 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year [TP note: compared to about 1.9 million tons for corn-based ethanol] at a cost of about $150 million. At a public senate hearing in Brasilia called to discuss climate change, experts expressed concern that nitrogen fertilizers used in conjunction with sugar cane production yielded nitrous oxide. What’s more, when you cut cane by hand you’ve got to set controlled fires in the fields to smoke out razorsharp leaves, nasty snakes, and tarantulas. In the middle of the night, plantations look like a war zone as burning fields light up the sky and the wind blows billowing smoke clouds far and wide.  Not only do the burnings pollute the air with soot, causing a number of illnesses, but they also release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and nitrous oxide.

Finally, in keeping with the historical tradition of sugarcane production, working/living conditions in sugar fields are brutal.

Today the Brazilian sugar cane industry is centered in the state of São Paulo—drive just an hour out of the city and you can see sugar cane fields stretching for hundreds of miles. Palmares Paulista is a rural agricultural town 230 miles from São Paulo. Behind rusty gates lies a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, weary migrant workers breathe the stale air and try to prepare themselves as best they can for the long day ahead. The cortadores de cana, or sugar cane workers, are crammed into tiny cubicles filled with rickety bunk beds and unpacked bags. They hail from the poverty-stricken, drought-plagued northeast and earn paltry wages.

What the FP piece teaches us is that unchecked expansion of Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry will likely lead to ecological disaster. Cane-based ethanol is no panacea. It may be “better” than it’s corn-based cousin—but that doesn’t make it an ecologically robust product. Pulling down trade barriers and allowing cheap Brazilian ethanol to flood the U.S. market—which same U.S. free-trade advocates are calling for—is no panacea, either.

I will be mocked for my lack of hard-headed realism for saying it, but here is a reality check: the royal road to a climate-stable and energy secure-future lies not in a mad search for “renewable” alternatives to gasoline. Rather, it lies in the direction of conservation and mass-transit alternatives to cars.

 

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by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate’s two principal authors of legislation to battle climate change said Tuesday they were putting the last touches on their bill and hoped to unveil it next week.

“I feel very optimistic about the progress that we’re making. I think that folks are coming together, but there are still some hurdles,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Asked when he and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) would make the measure public, Kerry replied, “We hope next week.”

Graham said he and Kerry were reaching out to colleagues and major players in the climate-change debate with an eye on introducing the legislation, which quite likely will not see major action by the Senate until June.

“We’ve got some more work to do, but hopefully next week,” Graham told reporters. “We’re locking down a few issues, but we’re getting there.”

Introducing the measure would launch a months-long process that would see the legislation’s cost and scope evaluated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency. It would also likely need to be taken up by key committees of jurisdiction, which could modify the bill before a final Senate vote.

The House of Representatives passed its version of the legislation last June, creating a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming—a different strategy than the one being pursued in the Senate.

“Cap-and-trade as we know it is over, there’ll be some limited trading in the utility area,” said Graham, who declined to elaborate.

The Senate and House would have to pass identical legislation to send it to President Obama to sign into law.

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by MAPLight.org

A bill to help rescue miners in emergencies and protect miners’ safety was
defeated in Congress three years ago. After passing the House, the bill, called
the S-MINER Act, died in a Senate committee.

Mining interests, who were opposed to this bill, gave twice as much money in
campaign contributions to House members who voted against the bill as they gave
to members who voted in favor.

In the Senate committee where the bill died, mining firms gave more than
twice as much money to committee members as the unions in
support.

Background

The recent explosion at the Massey Energy coal mine in West Virginia that
killed 29 coal miners has left many bewildered Americans questioning how the
federal government could have prevented this tragedy. It has been reported that
Massey was in violation of safety regulations and that federal regulatory oversight of mining conditions was
lax.

In June of 2007, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced the Supplemental Mine
Improvement and New Emergency Response Act (S-MINER) Act, which, according to the Congressional Research
Service, would have supplemented existing mining provisions in the Federal Mine
Act to require: “(1) emergency response plans to incorporate new technology; (2)
the Secretary of Labor to require the installation of rescue chambers in
underground coal mines; and (3) accident response plans to provide for the
maintenance of refuges.”

Miller chairs the House Committee on Education and
Labor, which issued a report stating: “The S-MINER Act aims to prevent disasters
and, in cases where disasters do occur, to improve emergency response. It also
aims to reduce long-term health risks facing miners, such as black lung.”
Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) explained the bill was necessary because the 2006 MINER Act
provisions had not been effectively enforced. So far, I am concerned that the
slow pace of reform is leaving America’s miners at risk. We’ve made progress.
But [the Mine Safety & Health Administration (MSHA)] has not moved
aggressively to implement all of the provisions of the MINER
Act.”

Opposition

Two months after introduction of the bill, the Crandall Canyon mining
disaster occurred, killing six miners in Utah. Even after this tragedy
highlighted the dangers of industry standard practices and deficiencies of
regulatory oversight, the mining industry continued to oppose the bill. The
National Mining Association’s Vice President for Safety, Health and Human
Resources testified before the committee. “To be forced to respond to an
additional layer of statutory requirements at this time will undermine the
progress that has been made on miner training and other vital objectives of the
act. It is premature to consider imposing further legislation before the full
impact of the original MINER Act can be comprehensively evaluated.” Further
opposition cited concerns about energy independence and job losses. Congressman
Don Young of Alaska (R) argued, “If this bill was to become law, mines will be shut
down. They will be shut down.” The Bush Administration also strongly opposed the
bill, claiming that “several of the regulatory mandates in the
S-MINER bill would weaken several existing regulations and overturn regulatory
processes that were required by the MINER Act and are ongoing.”

Money and Votes

After four amendments were considered and three passed, the House passed
the S-MINER Act in January 2008. The bill subsequently died in the Senate
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. The HELP Subcommittee on
Employment and Workplace Safety, chaired by Sen. Murray, met to consider the
bill. Only three members were present for the hearing. No further action was
taken on this bill.

For the House vote, 25 House Democrats and nearly all House Republicans voted
against the bill. On average, House opponents received 103 percent more money from mining interests than House
members voting Yes (an average of $12,526 to each member voting No, $6,174 to
each voting Yes). Democrats voting No received 197 percent more money from mining interests than their
colleagues voting Yes (an average of $16,314 to each Democrat voting No, $5,489
to each votin g Yes).

Seven House Republicans, including West Virginia’s Shelley Capito, supported
passage of the bill, although they received little campaign funding from unions,
the primary special interest MAPLight.org found to be supporting the
bill.

Members of the Senate HELP Committee received 122 percent more from the
mining interests than from the unions (see table below). Only three committee
members represent states that have a significant mining industry. Sen. Murray
received more than twice as much money from mining interests than any other
Democrat on the committee, although her state of Washington is not ranked as a
top mining industry state.

Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey and board member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has spent millions
of dollars in personal funds to support judicial and state political campaigns,
including $3 million in an attempt to buy a West Virginia state Supreme Court
justice. Nearly another $400,000 was disbursed by Massey’s employees,
including Blankenship, over the last four election cycles to state and federal
candidates, according to query results from a new Sunlight Foundation transparency database. Also, see the Center for Responsive
Politics’ Capital Eye blog for more information about contributions and
lobbying expenditures by Massey and its CEO.

Contributions (2003-2008) from interest groups that supported and opposed
the S-MINER Act to members of the Senate HELP Committee in the 110th

Congress

Senate HELP Committee
Member

Party

State

State Rank in
Mining Production

$ From
Supporting Interest Groups

$ From
Opposing Interest Groups

Isakson, John

R

GA

20th

$0

$97,500

Murray, Patty

D

WA

32nd

$42,000

$74,141

Hatch, Orrin

R

UT

6th

$0

$73,350

Murkowski, Lisa

R

AK

10th

$0

$72,850

Enzi, Michael

R

WY

3rd

$0

$68,600

Burr, Richard

R

NC

26th

$0

$63,449

Alexander, Lamar

R

TN

28th

$0

$45,800

Roberts, Pat

R

KS

25th

$0

$40,300

Bingaman, Jeff

D

NM

16th

$10,000

$33,400

Clinton, Hillary

D

NY

24th

$24,500

$22,700

Coburn, Thomas

R

OK

31st

$0

$22,299

Gregg, Judd

R

NH

47th

$0

$11,800

Dodd, Christopher

D

CT

44th

$18,500

$9,000

Allard, Wayne

R

CO

12th

$0

$7,500

Obama, Barack

D

IL

19th

$29,500

$7,000

Brown, Sherrod

D

OH

21st

$65,250

$6,000

Harkin, Thomas

D

IA

33rd

$23,850

$5,550

Mikulski, Barbara

D

MD

29
th

$26,000

$4,500

Reed, John

D

RI

49th

$11,000

$4,000

Kennedy, Edward

D

MA

39th

$4,500

$0

Sanders, Bernard

I

VT

48th

$46,800

$0

Total

$301,900

$669,739

Methodology

Campaign contributions data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics’
OpenSecrets Open Data. Date range of contributions is: Jan. 1, 2003 –
Dec. 31, 2008. According to MAPLight.org, manufacturing unions and mining
unions supported the S-MINER Act and the following interest groups opposed: coal
mining, metal mining and processing; mining; mon-metallic mining; and stone,
clay, glass and concrete products. Contributions to the presidential campaigns
of members of Congress are not included.

The ranking of state mining production is from Table 2 of the National Mining
Association’s report on The
Economic Contributions of U.S. Mining in 2007.

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by Lester Brown

One way to correct market failures is tax shifting—raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complementary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world’s taxpayers provide at least $700 billion in subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. As the Earth Council study Subsidizing Unsustainable Development observes, “There’s something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”

A fishing trawler.Photo via winkyintheuk via FlickrThe perverse nature of harmful subsidies is especially apparent in the case of oceanic fisheries. Partly as a result of these subsidies, there are now so many fishing trawlers that their catch potential is nearly double the sustainable fish catch. Three fourths of ocean fisheries are now being fished at or beyond capacity or are recovering from overexploitation. If we continue with business as usual, many of these fisheries will collapse. The cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada is a prime example of what can happen. Long one of the world’s most productive fisheries, it collapsed in the early 1990s and may never recover.

In the end, governments need to eliminate fishery subsidies. Shifting these subsidies, which encourage destructive overfishing, to the creation of marine parks to regenerate fisheries would be a giant step in restoring oceanic fisheries. A U.K. team of scientists led by Dr. Andrew Balmford of the Conservation Science Group at Cambridge University has analyzed the costs of operating marine reserves on a large scale based on data from 83 relatively small, well-managed reserves. They concluded that managing a network of marine reserves governing 30 percent of the oceans would cost only $12–14 billion—much less than the $22 billion in harmful subsidies that governments dole out today to fishers. Balmford said, “Our study suggests that we could afford to conserve the seas and their resources in perpetuity, and for less than we are now spending on subsidies to exploit them unsustainably.”

Falling water tables pose another problem that could be partly addressed through subsidy shifting. The drilling of millions of irrigation wells over the last half century has pushed water withdrawals beyond recharge rates, in effect leading to groundwater mining. The failure of governments to limit pumping to the sustainable yield of aquifers means that water tables are now falling in countries that contain more than half the world’s people, including the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States.

In some countries, the capital needed to fund a program to raise water productivity can come from eliminating subsidies that often encourage the wasteful use of irrigation water. Sometimes these are energy subsidies, as in India; other times they are subsidies that provide water at prices well below costs, as in the United States. Removing these subsidies would effectively raise the price of water, thus encouraging its more efficient use.

On the climate front, carbon emissions could be cut in scores of countries by simply eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. If its $37-billion annual subsidy were phased out, the World Bank reports, Iran’s carbon emissions would drop by a staggering 49 percent. This move would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in India by 14 percent, in Indonesia by 11 percent, in Russia by 17 percent, and in Venezuela by 26 percent.

Your tax dollars at work?Some countries are already doing this. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany reduced its coal subsidy from a high of 6.7 billion euros in 1996 to 2.5 billion euros in 2007. Coal use dropped by 34 percent between 1991 and 2006. Germany plans to phase out this support entirely by 2018. As oil prices have climbed, a number of countries have greatly reduced or eliminated subsidies that held fuel prices well below world market prices because of the heavy fiscal cost. Among these are China, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

A study by the U.K. Green Party, Aviation’s Economic Downside, describes subsidies to the U.K. airline industry. The giveaway begins with $18 billion in tax breaks, including a total exemption from the national tax. External or indirect costs that are not paid, such as treating illness from breathing the air polluted by planes, the costs of climate change, and so forth, add nearly $7.5 billion to the tab. The subsidy in the United Kingdom totals $426 per resident. This is also an inherently regressive tax policy simply because a part of the U.K. population cannot afford to fly, yet they help subsidize this high-cost travel for their more affluent compatriots.

While some leading industrial countries have been reducing subsidies to fossil fuels—notably coal, the most climate-disrupting of all fuels—the United States has increased its support for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. Doug Koplow, founder of Earth Track, calculated in a 2006 study that annual U.S. federal energy subsidies have a total value to the industry of $74 billion. Of this, the oil and gas industry gets $39 billion, coal $8 billion, and nuclear $9 billion. He notes that today these numbers “would likely be a good deal higher.” At a time when there is a need to conserve oil resources, U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing their depletion.

A world facing economically disruptive climate change can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. Shifting these subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power will help stabilize the earth’s climate. Shifting subsidies from road construction to rail construction could increase mobility in many situations while reducing carbon emissions. And shifting subsidies from building logging roads to planting trees would also reduce carbon emissions while helping protect and restore forest cover worldwide.

In a troubled world economy where many governments are facing fiscal deficits, tax and subsidy shifts can help balance the books, create additional jobs, and save the economy’s eco-supports. Tax and subsidy shifting promises greater energy efficiency, cuts in carbon emissions, and reductions in environmental destruction—a win-win-win situation.

For more information on economic restructuring see “Lowering Income Taxes While Raising Pollution Taxes Reaps Great Returns” at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch10_ss2.

Adapted from Chapter 10, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

Data and additional information available at www.earthpolicy.org

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by Jen Harper

While it’s true that an airplane bathroom isn’t necessarily anyone’s
idea of a five-star restroom experience, it does come as a welcome relief 30,000
feet above the ground after two in-flight club sodas. So imagine your surprise
when, after scrambling over your fellow passengers and down the narrow aisle with
a full bladder, there’s a flight attendant there with an outstretched hand, not
to somehow assist you with your bathroom experience (you’ve been doing it quite
well for years now all by yourself), but to collect the toilet tax. Yep, that’ll
be one euro to use the airplane bathroom if you’re flying Ryanair, an Irish
airline with routes across Europe and Morocco. No cash on hand? Sorry, you’re
SOL—perhaps literally.

The airline, which also announced a “standing room only”
section for its planes last summer to fit more passengers on board, is reducing
the number of toilets on the plane to one to make more room for seats. And,
indeed, the eco-savvy set already knows that using the bathroom at the airport
is more environmentally friendly than the airplane potty (every flush in the plane’s
lavatory uses enough fuel to run a car for six miles, since airplanes use
powered vacuums instead of gravity to flush), but coin-op loos? Come on.

Seriously, though, here’s the best part of this
story:

“The whole idea of making people pay for a bodily
function is crazy. There are easier ways to make an extra euro,” says Steven Soifer, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and co-founder of the American Restroom Association and Shy Bladder Center.

Yes, there’s an American Restroom Association and Shy
Bladder Center. And yes, I’m 8 years old.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

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by Glenn Hurowitz

In case you didn’t have enough reasons to dislike the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov looks at how they’re using revenue from illegal logging to finance attacks on U.S. troops (though, via some monumentally twisted logic, the article actually blames the logging ban, rather than the Taliban forces doing the logging and profiting from it):

Giant piles of prime timber line the roadsides along the Kunar River valley. The cut wood, valued at tens of millions of dollars, has been slowly rotting away since 2006, when President Hamid Karzai banned logging and lumber sales in Afghanistan.

The decree was designed to preserve the nation’s dwindling forests. But, American military commanders and civilian officials say, this well-intentioned prohibition has led to disastrous consequences: giving a powerful boost to the Taliban-led insurgency and helping to turn Kunar into one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces … Logging has continued unabated here since Kabul imposed the ban. But now the industry is largely supervised by the Taliban.

They skim off the profits and use the smuggling networks established to haul Kunar’s trees into neighboring Pakistan to transport weapons and men, American officers say. As a result, logging clans are now part and parcel of the insurgency … Troops in the area come under fire almost every day, prompting artillery at the squadron’s main base to fire deafening volleys at insurgent positions.

The article notes that logging has shrunk Afghanistan’s forest cover 50 percent since 1978, which led President Karzai to impose the ban. But it implies a horrible choice: that further deforestation, with all its negative consequences, may be the price of loyalty.

There is another option that could both save Afghanistan’s forests and put these eastern Afghan tribes on the side of the Americans: include financing to reduce illegal logging and incentivize international forest conservation in climate legislation (and pass the legislation). These financial incentives would make forests around the world worth more alive than dead—giving landowners and local communities strong cash-on-the-barrel reasons to keep their forests standing.

This financing was actually included in the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, which set aside five percent of the revenue from climate legislation for forest conservation, with a focus on reducing illegal logging. It was also included in the legislation passed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, but the oil industry is trying to raid these funds so it can continue to pollute for free.

Not a surprise, I suppose, given that the oil industry is trying to block clean energy and climate action that could reduce the Iranian military dictatorship’s income by $100 million per day. But Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman have an opportunity to ensure that U.S. troops in Afghanistan—already contending with heroin-financed Taliban attacks—don’t have to also worry about illegal logging as well.

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by David Roberts

Illustration by Michael Freimuth and Kyle PoffMany people, including me and, um, Al Gore, have recommended Paul Krugman’s primer on climate economics. It’s a top-notch introduction and a welcome antidote to the ignorance and hysteria that characterize most media coverage of climate policy. Read it!

In describing environmental economics, however, Krugman simply passes along many of its flaws. Economist James Barrett identified a few of them. I want to echo and reinforce one of the points he made.

“Not that bad” ain’t good

The great sin of conventional economics is the assumption of rationality. According to rational choice theory, individuals act to maximize their self-interest; ergo, markets based on free exchange of goods and services will yield maximally efficient distribution of resources. A free market is, in German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s terms, the best of all possible worlds. Most of what economists miss about energy can be traced to to the lingering effect of this assumption.

Now, every time I bring this up, people come out of the woodwork to tell me I’m constructing a caricature, and everybody knows about market failures. Which is ironic, since the people who bitch about rational choice theory more than anyone I know are economists. (Again: see James Barrett. Or anything Dean Baker‘s ever written. Or the entire field of behavioral economics.) What they tell me is that the most common macroeconomic models still rest on the assumption of rational choice; that the most influential names in the field still work with the assumption; that new approaches are still marginal and viewed with skepticism by modelers; and that laypeople’s understanding of economics is heavily colored by it.

Anyway, the assumptions of rational choice theory are the only way to explain something like this—and that’s one of a dozen articles I could cite. They are the only way to explain the results of the economic models used by the CBO to score climate legislation. They’re the only way to explain the conventional wisdom in D.C. that climate legislation is all about costs. After all, as Barrett says, “with everyone constantly and correctly optimizing their behavior, there is nothing the government can do to make us any better off.”

Lamentably, Krugman’s article reenforces that conventional wisdom. He concludes that pricing carbon is the Ultimate Climate Policy (maaaybe we can tack on a few performance standards for coal plants). According to mainstream economic modeling, a carbon price will inhibit GDP growth. Krugman’s cri de couer is as follows: “Restricting emissions would slow economic growth—but not by much.” Freeeeeedooooom!

“Not as bad as you might have worried” may be a convincing argument to pointy-headed intellectuals, but it hasn’t exactly gotten the public fired up. To boot, it’s almost certainly incorrect. Krugman simply ignores the panoply of policies proven to boost economic productivity and reduce emissions.

They exist! Long ago, in the Dark Ages (1997), over 2,500 economists, including nine Nobel Laureates, endorsed “The Economists’ Statement on Climate Change.” The second of three propositions in that statement was:

2. Economic studies have found that there are many potential policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions for which the total benefits outweigh the total costs. For the United States in particular, sound economic analysis shows that there are policy options that would slow climate change without harming American living standards, and these measures may in fact improve U.S. productivity in the longer run. [Emphasis mine.]

One of the original drafters of the statement? A future Laureate and MIT professor by the name of Paul Krugman. If he believes there are policies that reduce emissions and improve productivity—surely good news—why didn’t he discuss them in his piece?

Our fallen world

There are two ways of going after the rational choice assumption.

One is to say that even in ideal market conditions—low barriers to entrance and exit, perfect information, and the rest—human beings are “predictably irrational.” We undervalue gains relative to losses; undervalue future utility relative to present utility; misunderstand large dollar amounts and long time spans. Even in ideal markets, there’s a place for public policy to correct maladaptive features of human cognition. I think that argument—a staple of behavioral economics—is legit, and winnable.

But my objection to Krugman’s take on climate economics is even more basic. To see what I mean, consider this passage:

If there’s a single central insight in economics, it’s this: There are mutual gains from transactions between consenting adults. … Free markets are “efficient”—which, in economics-speak as opposed to plain English, means that nobody can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

…

But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities”—costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions—any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

Perhaps inadvertently, Krugman reveals how environmental economists seem to think of their work. Assume a free market filled with exchanges among “consenting adults.” Then introduce a negative externality—say, CO2 emissions. What’s the proper response? Viewed in that light, obviously the right response is to put a price on the externality. Done! That’s why the environmental economist’s approach to climate policy always seems to be: price carbon and get out of the way.

But … and this is a gargantuan but (quit snickering) … why would you assume a free market? Are there free markets in energy anywhere in the world? If so I’m not familiar with them. Everyone involved in energy markets is always and already operating within a skein of existing market distortions. We live in a fallen world.

More mechanics, less theory

Start with the fact that U.S. electrical utilities are a nightmare of overlapping regulations and jurisdictions, some deregulated, some semi-regulated, some regulated monopolies. Or start with the fact that the global oil market is dominated by state-owned enterprises. Or start with the fact that governments, particularly militaries, are among the largest purchasers of energy. Right on down the line, you find “free” markets distorted by overlapping local, state, and federal regulations, tax breaks, political favoritism, and public infrastructure choices. Very often existing distortions serve the interests of incumbents. (See, e.g., Matt Yglesias on “Mandatory Sprawl.”)

However people in energy markets may behave inside this web of constraints, distortions, and politicizations, it’s not going to be well-captured by models based on rational choices within perfect markets. Yes, economists can tell us how a free market will react to a cap-and-trade system. But can they tell us how the network of regulated monopoly utilities in the South will respond to it? That’s what I want to know!

What we need from economics is fewer theorists and more mechanics, people who understand how energy markets actually work and can offer informed counsel about how to make them work better. I want economically credible strategies that can help us get from here, our fallen, compromised, dirty world, to there, a freer, more sustainable world.

For instance, I’d love for an economist who understands the U.S. utility market, its structure and political history, to model the benefits of various utility reforms. I’d love for more economists to wake up to the vast, untapped potential for efficiency in commercial and industrial buildings, and model how various policies might realize that potential. More broadly, I’d like more economists to question the imperative for growth and start thinking about different models of prosperity. I’d like more economists to incorporate research on human happiness and welfare, to model changes the aren’t captured by GDP. And so on.

There are economists out there doing all this stuff, but theirs are not the voices that find their way into media and public discussion. Whatever may be going on in academia, in popular culture an extremely crude, reactionary sort of economic folk wisdom continues to dominate. Environmental economists could do more to challenge that folk wisdom, but often they’re too busy trying to prove that they are Very Serious Economists and not DFHs. Me, I’m ready for some hippie economics.

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The problem with a green economy: economics hates the environment

by Agence France-Presse

Photo courtesy Yuriy via FlickrSYDNEY – A Chinese ship that spent nine days stranded on the Great Barrier Reef gouged a two-mile scar in the coral that could take decades to recover, a top expert said on Tuesday.

David Wachenfeld, chief scientist at the body overseeing the heritage-listed marine park, said the Shen Neng 1 coal carrier had been grinding against and crushing the reef after it veered off course and smashed into it on April 3.

Officials have expressed anger over the incident and accused the crew of the ship, which was refloated late on Monday and towed away, of taking an illegal route.

“This is by far the largest ship-grounding scar we have seen on the Great Barrier Reef to date,” Wachenfeld told public broadcaster ABC. “This vessel did not make an impact in one place and rest there and then was pulled off. This scar is more in the region of three kilometres long and up to 250 meters wide.”

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed anger at the accident, which also leaked about two tons of fuel oil into the pristine seas. “It is still an absolute outrage that this vessel could’ve landed on the Great Barrier Reef,” he said. “We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding out how that happened.”

An approaching storm hurried authorities into refloating the 750-foot ship—the length of two football fields—after nightfall on Monday. They pumped compressed air into its bunkers and pulled it free using tugboats. Officials said the rescue had been carried out without adding to the initial oil spill, which created a two-mile slick.

Divers were due to assess damage to the ship, still carrying 68,000 tons of China-bound coal, which has been towed to a nearby island.

But concern on Tuesday focused on the plight of the reef, which was left plastered with toxic anti-fouling paint from the ship’s hull.

Divers “have found significant scarring and coral damage. They’ve also found quite a lot of anti-fouling [paint] spread across the reef,” Russell Reichelt, chair of the marine park authority, told ABC radio. “It is a concern because it’s designed to be toxic and stop things growing on ships. We’ve already seen observations where anti-fouling paint that’s been scraped off onto the reef is killing corals in its vicinity.”

Officials have promised to investigate allegations that ships have been taking shortcuts through the world’s biggest reef, which covers 137,600 square miles off the east coast of Australia and is a major tourist draw.

On Monday, three crew members from another large carrier appeared in court on charges of entering a restricted part of the reef without permission, and were bailed to reappear on Friday.

Conservationists say the incidents highlight the risk to Australia’s environment posed by rocketing resource exports to Asia, which are fueling a strong recovery from the global financial crisis.

The reef, which is visible from space and is one of the world’s foremost ecological treasures, has already come under pressure from rising sea temperatures and pollution.

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by Agence France-Presse

James CameronBRASILIA – Director James Cameron was in Brazil on Monday to lend his Avatar success to the fight against a controversial dam project he denounced as an “ecological disaster.”

Cameron, who made a pro-environment message central to his blockbuster film, urged Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to stop construction on the Belo Monte dam in the country’s Amazon jungle.

“I would challenge him to be a hero” by halting work on the project, Cameron told a media conference in Brasilia, standing alongside actress Sigourney Weaver, who starred in Avatar and Cameron’s earlier Aliens.

Activists have tried to portray the construction of the dam, and opposition to it by indigenous people who would be displaced by it, as strikingly similar to the Avatar storyline, in which feline-featured natives on a moon fight against militaristic strip-miners from Earth.

Cameron, who has long had a fascination with marine and jungle environments, said, “Huge dams are a 20th century idea in the 21st century: it’s a dinosaur’s idea.”

Belo Monte, he said, “is going to be an ecological disaster,” and he asserted that “the knowledge of indigenous people, who learned how to live with nature,” is one of Brazil’s biggest resources.

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