Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

The effort of Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft comprehensive clean energy legislation that caps global warming pollution has brought some positive words from Big Oil and their political allies. In particular, the senators are considering a proposal by ConocoPhillips, BP America, and Exxon Mobil to exclude petroleum producers and refiners from a carbon market and instead levy a carbon fee. “Once you have oil people saying, ‘We can live with this, this was our idea,’ then hopefully everybody else begins to look at this thing anew,” Graham told reporters. “That’s the hope.” However, the American Petroleum Institute’s Jack Gerard explained that the “support” from the oil industry for a carbon fee on petroleum will come in the form of “signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change”:

Industry officials said they too welcome the discussions of a carbon fee as part of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman effort.

“Clearly it softens the reaction and increases the likelihood that a number of people who’ve been forced to push back will be much more cooperative in the dialogue,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

Gerard said that the carbon fee approach would yield net environmental benefits, while giving consumers the most transparent signal they can get about what the costs are from the program. Unlike the House bill’s cap-and-trade system, oil companies would pass through the costs with signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change.

In other words, the oil industry likes the idea of legislators embracing a carbon fee plan — a plan originally proposed by oil companies — because they’ll be able to blame “U.S. efforts to deal with climate change” on high gas prices. And that is what they’re already doing, with full-page ads in Politico and Roll Call that attack Congress for “new energy taxes”:

Congress will likely consider new taxes on America’s oil and natural gas industry. These new energy taxes will produce wide-reaching effects, and ripple through our economy when America — and Americans — can least afford it.

These unprecedented taxes will serve to reduce investment in new energy supplies at a time when most Americans support developing our domestic oil and natural gas resources. That means less energy, thousands of American jobs being lost and further erosion of our energy security.

Our economy is in crisis, and we need to get the nation on the road to economic recovery. This is no time to burden Americans with new energy costs.

The direct target of this ad is the Obama administration’s effort to remove $80 billion in loopholes and subsidies for the oil industry, which allowed them to reap windfall profits while helping destroy the American economy under Bush. Even now, rising oil markets are threatening to cripple the fragile recovery. There’s simply no evidence that these subsidies have helped necessary exploration or protected American jobs — instead they’ve fattened corporate profits at taxpayers’ expense.

If the oil industry is willing to launch false attacks on the removal of tax loopholes as “unprecedented taxes,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure how they’ll portray a carbon fee.

One can bet they won’t mention that even a very strong price on carbon only marginally affects consumer gas prices. Modeling by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 of a scenario equivalent to emissions reductions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent cuts by 2050 found that oil producers would pay most of the pollution fees, not consumers. In fact, after an initial rise in consumer prices in the first decade of implementation that could be offset by increased fuel economy standards, MIT projects consumer gas prices would decline:

 

 

The price of gasoline has fluctuated between two and four dollars a gallon in recent years, whereas the effect of carbon policy is only cents on the gallon. Yet every cent is one that stays in the American economy going to create jobs and maintain our infrastructure, instead of flowing overseas to countries like Iran and Nigeria. Quite simply, putting a price on carbon is a fundamental threat to the power of the oil industry over the U.S. economy.

Related Links:

Big Oil uses fake ‘Americans’ to attack fake ‘energy taxes’

Stupid things senators are saying about the Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman proposal

Murkowski wants to save Alaska by destroying it

by Michael A. Livermore

Some small hope has been renewed for a climate change bill
out of Congress this year. But if the
legislative process fails to produce a law, Obama’s regulatory levers will
become more and more important—and how they evaluate new rules will come under
scrutiny.

So is it a problem that industry groups are meeting with key
regulatory officials in the White House in much bigger numbers than
environmentalists?

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is the
powerful behind-the-scenes agency that review cost-benefit analyses of major
environmental regulations like CAFE standards or coal ash regulation. Before
rules like these are put into action OIRA reviews agency analysis to see if the
rule is economically beneficial.

A quick scan of OIRA’s public meeting records shows
that, since President Obama took office, industry and trade associations have
held many more meetings with OIRA than advocacy NGOs or unions-something like eight
times as many.

If OIRA were turning down greens in favor of business
interests, this would be a major cause for concern. But, according to the folks in that office,
they take every meeting requested to discuss regulations under review. That means the reason for the lopsided
meeting log is a lack of requests from groups working for stronger protections.

Some progressive groups see OIRA as a major problem. Some even point to the imbalanced meeting
docket with suspicions of a biased OIRA.
And it is true that over the past thirty years, the office has been
known to use cost-benefit analysis in a biased way. The book “Retaking
Rationality” outlines the ways the office has been used to unfairly slow
down or block new rules, and push through deregulation.

But there are good reasons to think that under President
Obama, and his OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein, OIRA is singing a different
tune.  Recent evidence is here,
here and here.

For many regulations, when economic analysis is applied
without bias, the numbers come out on the side of public interest.  Used fairly, it is a powerful tool for
environmentalists.

But this tool can’t achieve anything if environmentalists
are afraid to use it. While it is
understandable for groups to feel discouraged by past misuse of cost-benefit
analysis, they should make sure they are not giving industry a leg up in the
regulatory process with a new administration.
Under President Clinton, green groups missed a major opportunity to
reshape how cost-benefit analysis is used by failing to engage in the process-a
look at the past year shows that we are in danger of history repeating itself.

Over the next months we will learn whether Congress as an
institution is up to tackling climate change.
If it is not, more energy will be channeled into the regulatory
process. That will mean that industry
interests will continue to dump resources into pressuring the Administration,
including OIRA.  If environmentalists
want to have more success with regulation than they are currently having in
Congress, they cannot let good opportunities to influence the process pass them
by. Instead, greens should be taking an
opportunity to gain ground: they should work with OIRA to forge an unbiased
cost-benefit analysis while they can.

And that starts with setting up some meetings. 

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by Ashley Braun

Passetti via Flickr

You may snort at the news, but it’s the real snuff: Cocaine is hard on your sinuses, but it’s not crazy fun for the planet either. Celebs’ favorite nose candy is knocking down rainforest in party favor of coca plants, thus speeding up climate change.

In fact, “for every few lines of cocaine snorted in a London club, four square meters of rainforest is destroyed.” That’s hard to take. Why don’t users drop the bad habit and drink cocaine or hit up some killer cheese instead?

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Is ‘Birdemic’ the best/worst apocalyptic thriller of all time?

by Erich Pica

On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant.

The next week, the Vermont state Senate voted overwhelmingly to shut down Vermont Yankee when its current license expires in 2012.

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas (R) called the timing of the nuclear loan guarantee announcement and the Vermont Senate’s decision “ironic.”  More than just some coincidence, though, the Vermont Yankee situation demonstrates that from the mining of uranium ore to the storage of radioactive waste, nuclear reactors remain as dirty, risky, and as costly as they ever were.  If President Obama’s recent enthusiasm for nuclear reactors has led you to believe otherwise, you’ve bought in to the administration’s greenwashing of nuclear.

President Obama has justified his proposed $55 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors by misrepresenting nuclear reactors as the largest “carbon-free” energy source in the United States.  That’s like saying McDonald’s should be put in charge of a nationwide obesity campaign because it’s the largest restaurant in the U.S. that sells salads.

The argument that nuclear is “carbon-free” conveniently omits the entire process of mining uranium, which produces greenhouse gases, along with other pollutants.  In Virginia, where a study has just been commissioned to determine its safety, uranium is mined in open pits.  This destroys topsoil and increases runoff, which contaminates drinking water with cancer-causing toxins.

The uranium-enrichment process also emits greenhouse gases and is highly wasteful.  Eighty percent of the ore that goes through the enrichment process ends up as waste.  And this is to say nothing of the lye, sulfuric acid, and other caustic agents that must be used to turn the uranium into reactor-ready fuel.

While on the surface, the steam billowing from the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor is less harmful than the toxic smoke that spews from a coal plant, nuclear reactors still create byproducts that are dangerous to human health and welfare.  There’s also the huge problem of radioactive nuclear waste, which can stay hot for hundreds of thousands of years. Storing the radioactive waste isn’t just a security threat; there’s potential for radioactive chemicals to leak, as they are in Vermont and at other aging reactors around the country.

Spent radioactive waste continues to sit at reactor sites and wait for a scientific breakthrough that is 50 years overdue.  But a long-term waste storage solution doesn’t exist.  The Yucca Mountain facility, the government’s radioactive waste repository project in Nevada, was marked by billions of wasted dollars, numerous legal challenges, and fundamental infeasibility.  President Obama recognized Yucca Mountain’s failure and cut the funding for it in 2009.  Secretary of Energy Steven Chu followed up by issuing a request last week to revoke Yucca Mountain’s application to be licensed as a waste repository.

In Maryland last month, President Obama told us the United States needs to build new nuclear reactors to keep up with France’s nuclear investments.  But France has had its own problems with radioactive waste contamination.  The government has had to close down entire rivers because of leaks.

In the same speech, President Obama also used China’s nuclear growth to greenwash his administration’s push for more nuclear reactors.  But his argument doesn’t stand up.  The United States already gets a greater percentage of its energy from nuclear reactors than China will after it reaches its target for nuclear growth, and China has pledged to invest even more toward increasing its solar and wind output.  The goal of the United States should not be to build more nuclear reactors, but to make them irrelevant through our own investment in truly clean, renewable sources of energy.

In another inapt comparison, President Obama contrasted the emissions from a nuclear reactor with the emissions from a coal plant.  But that false dichotomy ignores the cleaner and safer forms of renewable energy that exist and will do more to reduce greenhouse gases.  Worldwide, renewables have actually outpaced nuclear reactors in energy capacity and fossil fuels in investment.

The $55 billion in taxpayer money the Obama administration wants to risk on more nuclear reactors would produce a far greater return if spent on truly clean, renewable energy.  Building new nuclear reactors would be the most ineffectual method to reducing greenhouse gases, whereas building more wind turbines or installing more photovoltaic solar panels would not only do a better job at mitigating climate change, but would create more jobs.  President Obama’s nuclear industry bailout instead pushes us back to the energy future of the 1950s and gives cover to the nuclear industry to continue to be lax on safety enforcement and lethargic in technological advancement.

President Obama has said that “environmentalists and entrepreneurs” should no longer retread the same arguments about nuclear energy.  But Vermont Yankee shows us that there’s nothing new in nuclear that merits revisiting; clean and safe nuclear energy remains an “Atoms for Peace” pipedream.  There may be a shiny green coat of paint on the cooling tower, but dangerous chemicals still leak from the pipes.

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Trouble mounts for Entergy following radioactive leaks at Vermont nuclear plant

by Debra Eschmeyer

Of
the 50 or so food and farm conferences I’ve attended in the last several years,
the Drake Forum for America’s New Farmers: Policy
Innovations & Opportunities held March 4-5 in Washington, D.C.,
rises to the top. Actual farmers—not just commodity crop growers but
innovative “agripreneurs” like Xe Susane Moua from Minnesota and Rosanna Bauman from
Kansas—got to tell the USDA what they needed to survive.

But
were policymakers listening? Many of the invited speakers with a political row to hoe seemed to be concerned about one segment of farmers in particular.

Farm building in southwest Story County, Iowa.Photo: cwwycoff1 via FlickrSecretary
of Agriculture Tom Vilsack kicked off the conference with the message that to
preserve and grow rural America, which is the heart and soul of this country,
we need to stop thinking about big versus small and start thinking more
inclusively. He shared the usual dismal statistics—the increased
unemployment in these areas, the lower per-capita income, and how more than 57%
of rural counties have shrunk. All to say, what we’ve been doing to conserve
and grow rural America isn’t working.

Among
the alternative strategies the administration has launched recently is the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, intended to shore up the shrinking numbers of farmers. There are
tremendous opportunities to build on local and regional supply chains through
connecting local products to local consumption, Vilsack noted, but then quickly
followed with “it’s not the only answer, though.”

Bill
Even, South Dakota’s Secretary of Agriculture, picked up that thread. He
began by asking the Republicans in the room to raise their hand: a paltry 5 out
of 200 shot up. After praising the USDA’s Know Your Farmer initiative for
helping to reconnect society to the soil, he got to the message that he
repeated throughout his 10-minute speech: “Don’t disparage one type of
agriculture”—by which he meant conventional, large-scale industrial “production”
agriculture. Quoting his mother, he said that “blowing out someone else’s
candle doesn’t make yours burn brighter,” and echoing Vilsack, he ended
with how “this is a big tent for all types of agriculture.”

I
presented at the Drake Forum on behalf of beginning farmers (along with Zoe
Bradbury, a young farmer and Grist contributor)
and to share how Farm to
School programs offer
a new, stable market for farmers and an opportunity to teach agriculture
literacy to youth. After Dan Durheim from the American Farm Bureau Federation made comments
along the same lines as Even and Vilsack, I felt it necessary to make a pointed
comment to the closing plenary:

There
seems to be a common thread throughout this panel, that started off with the
Secretary’s welcoming remarks that there’s plenty of room at the USDA and in
food and farm country for all types of agriculture, and to not be down on
certain practices. But if we had done that in the 1860s,
we never would have abolished slavery because slavery “worked” for
plantation owners. When atrazine is creating infertile rural populations, it’s
not about “blowing out a candle”—it’s about putting out a fire.

I found the chutzpah to make that comment because I had Even’s
children in mind; he had mentioned his 16-year-old son in his remarks. Being a
Midwesterner, however, I felt the need to tell him later that I wasn’t
attacking him personally, just the logic he used to come to what I thought was
a short-sighted conclusion, to which he responded, “yeah, you kind of
threw me under the bus.”

Even
had started his presentation with, “To understand where someone stands, you
need to know where they stood,” so I outlined my own
rural conservative roots and told him I come from a farming family. I wanted
him to see that I am not just some liberal academic
pointing fingers at farmers, but that we share in
many ways a common background from which I have diverged. While yes,
there “is room for” all types of agriculture, I believe we must acknowledge
that some types of agriculture are broken—making us and our land sick, and
draining our rural communities of youth.

Even
said he agreed with me. That if agriculture doesn’t make sense “economically,
scientifically, or socially, then it has to change.”

He said he was meeting Tuesday in South Dakota with a group called “Ag
Unity,” which he implied is to bring opposing groups working in their
proverbial rural silos together. But the
only description I can find of Ag Unity is for “an umbrella group of
some 20 agriculture-related groups” that sounds a lot like they’re all
hailing from the same side of the commodity-focused production fence.

Phrases like “big tent” and “ag unity” make for
good speeches but bad policy when it comes to the next generation of farmers. Real unity is about finding common
ground for “mother nature and the workers, the reapers and the threshers, the
seedlings and the raindrops, the bakers and the truckers, the ranchers and the
farmers, the butchers and inspectors, the cows and special cheffers,” as the
fifth graders from Elysian Charter School sang in “Who Put That Burger on Your Plate?” (the winning video in last year’s “Real Food Is” winning Farm to School contest). And that’s going to take leadership that’s not afraid to level the
growing field through targeted procurement and research funding.

Note: The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is collecting policy recommendations and ideas for a Beginning Farmer Bill for the 2012 Farm Bill via email.

 

Related Links:

Are you a farmer at heart? Start a ‘Crop Mob’

Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 7

Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 6

by David Roberts

Technology will not teach this puppy how to behave. Bad adorable puppy!Tim PopUp via FlickrOn Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons of coverage. The solution got none. This is entirely typical. As Fleck says, “The problem space gets more attention than the solution space.”

So let’s do something about that! Let’s take a look at this under-covered solutions piece.

I’ve been saying over and over lately that changing behavior is as important as changing technology. Yet behavioral science is neglected relative to technology R&D. Everyone understands the importance of scaling up wind, solar, and geothermal power, but when was the last time you heard a policymaker or pundit talk about scaling up the practical application of knowledge about how human beings think, interact, and make decisions?

In their paper, “Behavior and Energy Policy,” Hunt Allcott of MIT and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard argue for taking such knowledge seriously:

Just as we use R&D to develop “hard science” into useful technological solutions, a similar process can be used to develop basic behavioral science into large-scale business and policy innovations. … What has been missing is a concerted effort by researchers, policy-makers, and businesses to do the “engineering” work of translating behavioral science insights into scaled interventions, moving continuously from the laboratory to the field to practice. It appears that such an effort would have high economic returns.

That last sentence is a bit modest given the numbers Allcott and Mullainathan marshal. They’ve taken a close look at the results so far from behavioral programs in the field and the results are fairly astonishing.

Start with the most basic test: how much does it cost for a given climate solution to eliminate (abate) a metric ton of CO2 emissions? With plug-in hybrid vehicles, that ton costs around $12. With wind power, it’s $20. With carbon capture and storage at coal-fired power plants, it’s $44.

How much does that same ton of CO2 abatement cost using these behavioral programs?  -$165. No, that’s not a typo. It’s a negative sign. As in: $165 worth of profit per ton of carbon pollution reduced.  If similar programs were expanded nationwide, Allcott and Mullainathan estimate a net value—savings minus costs—of $2,220,000,000 a year. Of course much research and testing remains to be done before it’s clear whether these programs perform equally well at scale, but as a first approximation, that’s not too shabby.

Incidentally, some of the data comes from programs run by Opower, a Virginia-based company that works with utilities to apply behavioral science in a way that delivers energy efficiency. I’ve mentioned them before, and as it happens, President Obama visited them on Friday. “You can see the future in this company,” he said. (Why isn’t that a bigger story?)

Here’s Opower’s solution to reducing energy use:

High-tech, huh? Put a chart like that on utility bills and you get about a 2 percent average drop in energy use. And it hardly costs the utilities anything! They already have the data. It’s just a different way of presenting information, informed by good social science. As social psychologist (and Opower adviser) Robert Cialdini said when I talked with him, there’s more than 50 years of scientific research on this stuff. It just hasn’t been communicated broadly or translated into policy.

Time to start translating! Allcott and Mullainathan offer three policy recommendations.

First, governments can provide funding for potentially high-impact behavioral programs as part of their broader support for energy innovation. A bill under consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3247, would establish a program at the Department of Energy to understand behavioral factors that influence energy conservation and speed the adoption of promising initiatives.

Side note: that bill, HR 3247, was sponsored by Washington’s own Rep. Brian Baird (D). He got it passed out of House Science and Technology Committee but right-wingers, led by Glenn Beck, pitched a fit, saying it was government mind control. The teabaggers created such a distraction that the bill was subsequently withdrawn. I’m going to chat with Baird about the episode later this week.

Moving on:

Second, through market incentives, policy-makers can encourage—or fail to encourage—private-sector firms to generate and utilize behavioral innovations that “nudge” consumers to make better choices. Historically, economists and policy-makers have focused on how regulation affects relative prices … In practice, however, firms interact with consumers in many ways in addition to pricing.

And finally:

Third, government agencies often provide independent information disclosure, such as vehicle and appliance energy-efficiency ratings. This helps catalyze private-sector innovation by allowing firms to credibly convey the financial value of energy efficiency to consumers. The effect of information on choices, however, depends critically on how the information is conveyed, and government agencies should carefully consider behavioral factors in the disclosures they control.

For example: the EPA rates fuel efficiency according to miles per gallon (MPG), which turns out to be misleading in all sorts of ways. (See: “The MPG Illusion.”) If it instead reported based on gallons per mile (GPM), it would better inform consumers about the real value of efficiency and thereby lead to better choices. Most importantly, it would cost EPA virtually nothing. It’s just a matter of applying knowledge about how people tick.

———

Nerdy addendum

When considering interventions, policy-makers usually focus on price, or information about prices. As Allcott and Mullainathan note, this focus derives from the the rational choice theory of traditional economics. (I’ve harped on that lately too—here, here, here, and here.)

Problem is, behavioral psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated that the rational-choice ideal no longer holds water. John M. Gowdy of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in “Behavioral Economics and Climate Change Policy,” puts it this way:

The axioms of consumer choice—the starting point of traditional economic theory—have been re-cast as testable hypotheses and these assumptions have come up short as defendable scientific characterizations of human behavior. It is no longer tenable for economists to claim that the self-regarding, rational actor model offers a satisfactory description of human decision making. Nor do humans consistently act “as if” they obey the laws of rational choice theory …

… Ironically, the rational actor model seems to be most appropriate for animals with limited cognitive ability and perhaps humans making the simplest kinds of choices. For the most important decisions humans make, culture, institutions, and give-and-take interactions are critical and should be central to any behavioral model.

Much of behavioral economics has been devoted to debunking rational choice theory, but a positive alternative is just beginning to emerge, a kind of unified theory of human behavior that harmonizes research from economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Read Gowdy’s fascinating paper for more on that.

———

Some previous posts that touch on all this stuff:

Making buildings more efficient: looking beyond price
Making buildings more efficient: It helps to understand human behavior
Why Bill Gates is wrong
Never mind what people believe—how can we change what they do? A chat with Robert Cialdini

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Challenging conventional wisdom on renewable energy’s limits

China’s changing energy economy

What are your best ideas for saving energy at home?

by Elizabeth Becker

When will we finally break through this damn glass ceiling?U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced an important new climate change financing group last week, but out of the 19 people named, no women were included. This is unfortunate because women will bear the brunt of the effects of climate change and are key to any climate solutions. 

The group is tasked with investigating potential sources of revenue to support developing countries in their efforts to cope with the impacts of climate change and the shift to low-carbon development pathways. The Copenhagen negotiations in December called for $30 billion in climate financing for 2010 to 2012, ramping up to $100 billion annually by 2020.

The secretary-general’s choices for the advisory group will bring intellectual energy and political gravitas. The group is chaired by U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. It includes two additional heads of state, ministers of finance, and leaders of central banks. Taking part are financier and philanthropist George Soros and economist Sir Nicholas Stern. It includes equal representation between industrialized countries and developing countries (though only two smaller, highly vulnerable developing countries). But what it does not include at all is women.

Leaving women out is unfortunate and reflects a persistent bias in climate change decision-making roles. It is also unwise given the ultimate objective of the advisory group. This elite club will frame and shape climate change financial flows to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. We know that women are disproportionately represented among both of these groups and are often on the front lines of climate change.   In developing countries, because of their role as primary providers of food, water, and fuel for their families, women are both the most affected by climate change and a pivotal force for building responses to direct climate impacts.   We also know that women are frequently the decision-makers about household consumption, and represent an increasing share of wealth around the world.

By leaving their voices out of the critical tasks before this advisory group, the secretary-general is closing out opportunities to explore the widest possible range of creative and innovative sources of revenue on the scale that is needed to address climate change.

The secretary-general himself has noted the need to include women in all aspects of decision-making on climate change. In a speech last September, he called on member states “to foster an environment where women are key decision makers on climate change, and play an equally central role in carrying out these decisions…We must do more to give greater say to women in addressing the climate challenge.”  So why have they been ignored yet again?

The secretary-general and the co-chairs of the advisory group can correct this by expanding the membership of the group to include meaningful representation of female officials before the group’s first meeting in London at the end of the month.

It is impossible to believe that the secretary-general couldn’t find any women with expertise to participate. On today, International Women’s Day, we hope the secretary-general reconsiders the membership of this important group.

 

Elizabeth Becker is a member of the board of Oxfam America.  Suzanne Ehlers is interim president of Population Action International.

Related Links:

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Remaking the Global Climate Framework

U.K.‘s Gordon Brown will help lead U.N. advisory panel on climate funding

by Sue Sturgis

In making the case for a rapid conversion away from heavily polluting
energy sources like coal and nuclear power to cleaner generation,
renewable energy advocates often confront the argument that their
scheme is impossible due to the intermittent nature of sun and wind.

But a groundbreaking study out of North Carolina challenges that conventional wisdom: It suggests
that backup generation requirements would be modest for a system based
largely on solar and wind power, combined with efficiency,
hydroelectric power, and other renewable sources like landfill gas.

“Even
though the wind does not blow nor the sun shine all the time, careful
management, readily available storage and other renewable sources can
produce nearly all the electricity North Carolinians consume,” said
author John Blackburn, professor emeritus of economics and former
chancellor at Duke University in Durham, N.C.. He’s also the author of
the books “The Renewable Energy Alternative” and “Solar in Florida.”

The study was published last week by the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research,
whose executive director, Arjun Makhijani, called it landmark research.
“North Carolina utilities and regulators and those in other states
should take this template, refine it, and make a renewable electricity
future a reality,” he said.

Blackburn used hourly North Carolina
wind and solar data for a total of 123 days in the sample months of
January, April, July, and October, with samples taken at three wind and
three solar sites across the state. Solar and wind power generation
were then scaled up to represent 80 percent—40 percent each—of average utility
loads for the sample months, with the rest coming from the existing
hydroelectric system (8 percent) and assumed biomass co-generation (12 percent).

The
study figured in projected energy efficiency by assuming an annual
utility load of 90 billion kilowatt-hours, slightly less than the
current 125 billion kWh load, and by calculating average hourly loads
from Duke Energy’s 2006 load profile with modifications to show some
reduction in summer and winter peaks due to more efficient buildings.
It also assumed increased storage capacity from a smarter electrical
grid.

In the end, with those conditions met, Blackburn
calculated that the required auxiliary generation from conventional
power plants to fill in the gaps would amount to only 6 percent of the annual
total generation required to meet demand in North Carolina.

“This
goes to the heart of the argument by power companies that have long
dismissed solar and wind as future technologies,” said Jim Warren,
executive director of the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, a
Durham, N.C.-based nonprofit that provided research assistance to
Blackburn.

The study was released just days after a new poll from Elon University in Elon, N.C. found overwhelming public support in
North Carolina for developing the state’s renewable energy capacity.
Nearly 80 percent of the poll’s respondents said they favor new wind energy
facilities in the mountains or on the coast, while more than 83 percent favor
construction of solar facilities.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Using behavioral science to make smarter energy policy

by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I prefer to
buy shoes that will last me a long time rather than buy lots of cheap ones that
consume many resources. Is there an environmentally friendly shoe polish that I
can use to keep my feet looking spiffy for the long haul?

Laine
Washington, D.C.

A. Dearest Laine,

You know one
of the things that thrills me most about warmer weather? The footwear—or, I
should say, the lack thereof. All winter long my poor little tootsies feel so
stifled. Even now, they are wiggling giddily at the very thought of being free.
But, alas, we’re not quite there yet.

So back to
the shoes that do in fact cover your feet
and how to care for said shoes (and I take it we’re talking about leather, no?).
First off, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of shoe polish: Essentially,
be kind to your shoes and try to avoid scuffs, wear, and tear.

Many
conventional, commercial shoe polishes contain toxic suspected carcinogens like
trichloroethylene (irritant to eyes and nose), methylene chloride (can cause
memory loss and liver and kidney damage), or nitrobenzene (affects the central
nervous system and particularly harmful to pregnant women). I have some
thoughts for you on the less-toxic polishing front. And remember, whatever ooze
you choose to use, an old toothbrush makes a great tool for cleaning.

Here are a
few options; let me know how these methods work out for you. Got a
banana? Eat up and then rub the inside of the peel on your shoe—the oils and
potassium are supposed to polish and preserve your shoes. Then buff them with a
soft cloth and compost the peel. Or try rubbing a little olive or vegetable oil
on your shoes and then buffing. Then there are products like Po-Zu’s Soil
Association-certified edible shoe cream made from 100% organic virgin coconut
oil—apparently, it can be used to shine your shoes, condition your hair,
moisturize your lips, and even provide a little snack (let me know how that
works out).

And you can
always just embrace a shabby chic look when it comes to your shoes, and let
them show off what old soles they are—scuffs, dull spots, scratches, and
all.

Footloosely,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Do you know
of any sources of guidance (web or otherwise) on how individuals can invest in
ways that will help the fight against global warming and not reward polluting
industries? What little savings I have is invested in a 401(k) that goes who
knows where. I’d rather be putting my couple of hundred a month into something
that will make a difference and not just a profit.

Neosapiens

A. Dearest Neosapiens,

Thumbs up on wanting to make sure your nest egg is residing
comfortably in a sustainably feathered nest. The phrase that pays when you’re
looking to green your investments is socially responsible investing, or SRI. Before
you take the plunge, read up on sites like Social Investment Forum and Investopedia,
among dozens of others.

Your employer may actually have an SRI fund alternative as
part of its 401(k) options. A 2007 Social Investment Forum survey revealed that
60 percent of benefit plan sponsors intended to include SRI options for retirement
funds by 2010. Wait! This year is
2010. So check in with your HR peeps or whomever handles your 401(k), and if
your employer doesn’t offer an SRI selection, ask about adding one.

Otherwise, you can opt for an investment strategy outside
the confines of your employer-offered plan. You may choose to hit up a green
financial advisor for some sage wisdom—KLD Research is one source for investor screening.

You can also look into companies like Calvert Investments and Green Century Funds, which offer SRI
mutual fund options. Green Your also has a section with
great advice on choosing eco-friendly mutual funds.

As with any investment strategy, SRI doesn’t guarantee any
sort of return on investment, but at least you’ll be able to hold your dollars
accountable for their contribution to the greater good.

Capitally,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Do you have
a Facebook presence?

Sharon R.

A. Dearest
Sharon,

Man, is it
ever stuffy down here in the Grist stacks. Seriously, is it hot in here or is
it just me? Just me, you say? Well, I guess I could use a few more fans—on my Ask Umbra Facebook fan page, that is!

Indeed I do have a Facebook presence and would
love to see your smiling face there. You can become a fan to follow my comings
and goings—and hopefully cool things off a bit here at HQ.

Pokily,
Umbra

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by Tom Konrad

A new bill being considered in the Colorado legislature would create “solar gardens.” Solar gardens allow people to participate financially in owning part of a solar array even if they do not have a suitable site on their own property. My reading of the proposed legislation is that subscriptions in a solar garden would be financial securities, and fall under securities laws. That’s probably a good thing.

Solar for everyone

Solar panels are elitist: They cost a lot of money, and only homeowners with good solar access can usefully install them. This means that renters and people who can’t come up with at least $5,000 to $10,000 worth of cash or credit can’t own them. That’s the problem Colorado House Bill 10-1342 (HB1342): Community Solar Gardens aims to correct.

HB1342 defines a community solar garden (CSG) as “A solar electric generation facility with a nameplate rating of two megawatts or les … where the beneficial use of the electricity generated by the facility belongs to the subscribers to the community solar garden.” A subscriber is a “retail customer of a qualifying retail utility who owns a subscription and who has identified one or more physical locations to which to which the subscription shall be attributed” withing the same county or municipality as the CSG. The bill allows subscribers to change the premises to which a subscription is attributed, and also to sell them to other qualifying subscribers, something which is necessary in case a subscriber were to move out of the county or the utility’s territory.

It’s a worthy idea, although local solar installers are concerned that the superior economics of large installations will eat into their market share, by easing the requirements in House Bill 10-1001 for customer-sited generation. People who own perfectly good sites for rooftop solar may instead choose to buy a CSG subscription because of the convenience and potentially lower price. I think fears that residential customers who are good candidates for rooftop solar might instead subscribe to CSGs are overblown. Although the economics may be better, buying solar in Colorado is not yet a great investment because of the cost an return involved. Instead, I believe people are investing in solar because it gives them satisfaction to think that they are using green energy, and because they want to show off their environmental bling to their neighbors. I know that some people are more interested in the bling aspects of solar panels than the economic aspects, because otherwise there would not be a market for fake panels in Japan, although I don’t know of anyone who knowingly bought fake solar panels in the U.S.

Energy sprawl

My greatest concern with the bill is not that it will cause a move towards large installations, but that it will lead to more ground-mounted installations taking up open space, contributing to energy sprawl. No matter what you think about the economics of photvoltaics, one advantage that they have over almost every other type of electricity generation (both fossil and renewable) is that they can be placed on otherwise unused rooftops and other structures, giving a use to otherwise wasted space. Only energy efficiency and conservation have less physical impact on the environment than rooftop solar. Some people have told me that their air conditioner ran less after they put solar on their roof.

Any law which makes solar more likely to be ground-mounted than rooftop is a step in the wrong direction. I think the bill should be amended to prohibit CSGs from being ground-mounted, effectively limiting them to large rooftops and other structures such as awnings for parking lots. This would also have the effect of doing something to limit the practical size of CSGs to available rooftops, which would probably make the solar installers a bit happier.

The secondary market for community solar garden subscriptions

Provisions for a secondary market for CSG subscriptions are included in the bill, since a subscriber moving out of the county in which their CSG is located will not be able to benefit from their subscription. The secondary market and and other security-like characteristics of subscriptions may make them a useful financial tool for small investors. Most importantly, a CSG subscription is (as intended) an excellent hedge against rising electricity prices.

The only real reason to hold a CSG subscription for the long term is as a hedge against rising electricity prices because, like all utility-subsidized solar installations in Colorado, the utility ends up owning the Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which are defined as all the “environmental attributes of the electricity.” Although most people with solar panels don’t understand this, the fact that they cannot legally claim the RECs means that they are using electricity that is just as dirty as any other Coloradan, with the exception of direct purchasers of RECs or Carbon Offsets, such as Windsource or Colorado Carbon Fund subscribers.

Although the secondary market for CSG subscriptions is likely to be very illiquid, it will probably become a good direct indicator of local expectations for utility rates. CSGs will not be much use to speculators, however, because there are restrictions in the bill which limit the investment to only 120 percent of estimated electricity usage at the designated physical location of the subscription. Nevertheless, experienced local market professionals with an understanding of market psychology may be able to make small profits trading subscriptions, since the illiquid and unprofessional nature of the market will likely make prices extremely volatile and subject to strong behavioral biases. When electricity rates are rising, subscription prices will likely overshoot their true value as potential subscribers overestimate future increases, and prices will likely undershoot if falling natural gas prices lead to falling interest in CSG subscriptions.

Allowing investors into the subscription market would probably create a more liquid and stable market for subscriptions, but such an outcome is unlikely because of the general public distaste for speculators. It’s also impractical because of the fact that payments to subscribers are at the retail electricity rate, which is considerably higher than the owners of commercial solar farms are allowed, and hence are effectively subsidized by all utility customers, over and above the direct subsidies given to encourage solar in Colorado.

CSG subscriptions have other aspects that will be familiar to investors. The law allows for the CSG to finance the purchase of a subscription (buying on margin.) It also allows the payments for electricity production to either go to offset the subscriber’s electricity bill, or to go to the CSG sponsor. In the latter case, I could see a small subscriber buying a small subscription, and enrolling in the equivalent of a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP): rather than cash payments, the electricity generation would be used to increase the size of the CSG subscription over time, until the subscriber decided to start taking cash payments. A CSG with a large number of subscribers enrolled in DRIP-like plans might add a new solar module to the farm every month, in order to keep up with the growing subscriber base.

CSG subscriptions could become a valuable financial planning tool for retirees and others on fixed incomes. Because a CSG subscription rises in value with utility rates, an owner would be better able to budget for the utility bill, no matter how wildly electricity prices gyrate. As subscription prices fall with the falling cost of photovoltaics, I can see the purchase of a CSG subscription becoming standard financial advice for retirees.

CSG subscriptions as securities

Although professional investors and speculators will have at most a limited role in the trading of subscriptions, CSG subscriptions may legally be securities. The legal definition of a “Security” is an investment in an enterprise with the expectation of profit from the efforts of other people. If I’m right and the draft law is not changed, CSG subscriptions will fall under Colorado securities regulations. (Because CSG subscriptions cannot be sold outside the state, they are clearly matter for Colorado security regulators.)

For small CSGs set up by community organizations, this is unlikely to have a tremendous impact, because securities laws include a number of exemptions for sales to a small number of related individuals. (Note that this is not intended as legal advice! I am not qualified to give legal advice, and even a small CSG should need to consult with someone familiar with the relevant laws.) For large CSGs with many subscribers, securities law may actually require the delivery of a prospectus and fall under a variety of other rules about communications that apply to the CSG developer and its representatives. In general, this is probably a good thing, since it provides a strong legal framework under which regulators will be able to sanction unscrupulous CSR developers who might be tempted to cold-call unsophisticated utility customers and over-promise the benefits of a small subscription in a solar garden.

Conclusion

The intent of community solar gardens is a good one, because it allows many more people the opportunity to hedge their electricity price risk. The people in most need of such a price hedge, those living on small fixed incomes, generally do not have both the home ownership and credit that installing a solar system requires. So I’m glad to see Colorado pioneering this concept, and it will be very interesting to see how CSGs and the market for their subscriptions evolve when the final bill passes. With luck, and a few people emailing Claire Levy, the bill’s sponsor, that final bill will have been amended to exclude ground-mounted community solar gardens, and help preserve Colorado open space.

I also hope that some among the majority of my readers who are not in Colorado will suggest your own legislators consider local variations of this idea.

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by Ashley Braun

If it weren’t for some seriously nom-nom-y green Oscar noms, I’d be either A.) extremely embarrassed or B.) extremely pumped about the future of enviro films after watching the trailer for “Birdemic: Shock and Terror.” Or both.

What do you have to dread look forward to if you catch this latest internet fever?

“Woefully inept actors driv[ing] around in a blue Mustang for what seems like eternity while occasionally fumbling their way through a few lines about Global Warming while poorly animated .gif-birds float motionlessly and make terrible screeching noises.”

—Alex Blagg, blogger/sucker who actually watched the whole thing.

Well? Don’t be a birdbrain, flock to the theaters to see what’s sure to be a cult hit! And, of course, have your hangers at the ready.

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by treehugger.com

Photo: Treehugger

A lot of lessons have been learned over the last decade as architects
and manufacturers try to make modern green prefab affordable and
accessible to a wider audience. A new entry into the market is
Challenger, a modern architect-designed line of houses from Manitoba,
Canada’s Conquest Manufacturing. They recently displayed a new model, the Cube, at the National Home Show in Toronto.

 

Our friends at Treehugger have four reasons (and more photos) proving why the Challenger line does just about everything right.

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by Todd Woody

If you had been driving through North Texas this week you
might have seen a white Dodge Sprinter van circling some of the natural gas wells
and compression stations that have sprung up around the Barnett Shale belt like
boom-time subdivisions.

Drillers tap natural gas by splitting shale through a
process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that injects fluids laced
with chemicals into the rock formations. The proliferation of shale gas
drilling northeast of Dallas has ignited an uproar among residents, some of
whom fear that fracking could be poisoning ground water and polluting the air
with carcinogens. But the industry won’t
disclose all the chemicals it uses and Texas environmental authorities won’t
compel them to do so.

Which brings us back to our mystery van. Inside was a desktop
computer-sized analyzer connected to a translucent tube that snaked out the
roof of the van. The analyzer is made by a Silicon Valley company called Picarro and it provides real-time measurements
of methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. By correlating the data with
wind patterns, Picarro scientists can pinpoint the source of emissions. Oil and
gas operations emit methane, which can also indicate the presence of benzene and
other carcinogens, according to Picarro scientists.

This is an image created by a mashup of the methane concentrations recorded by the Picarro analyzer in Flower Mound, Texas, overlaid on a Google map.A Picarro employee had driven the van to Texas from
California at the request of Wilma Subra, a Louisiana scientist, environmental
justice activist and MacArthur genius grant recipient. Picarro’s director of
research and development, Chris Rella, flew to Texas and joined Subra and
activists from Earthworks’ Texas Oil & Gas
Accountability Project on the hunt for fugitive emissions in the towns of
DISH and Flower Mound.

DISH—the name is capitalized because in 2005 the town
changed its name in exchange for free satellite television from the DISH
Network—is home to about 200 people and a dozen compression stations that
push natural gas from wells into pipelines. As the Picarro van drove around
DISH, concentrations of methane spiked from background concentrations of 1.8
parts per million to 20 parts per million near the compression stations. As the
analyzer recorded the spikes they were automatically plotted on a Google map.

Twenty miles to the southeast in the Dallas exurb of Flower
Mound, methane concentrations near natural gas wells literally went off the
analyzer’s chart, topping 40 parts per million, says Subra and Picarro
executives.

“I see this as very, very beneficial to the environmental
justice movement,” says Subra. “It gives you real-time data and you can
potentially identify the source as opposed to having to collect air samples and
then have them analyzed. You can see the plume on the map and how close houses
are to the compressor stations.”

(Last month, I
took a ride in the same van with Rella to chart methane plumes from oil
refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area. As atmospheric gases are drawn into
the analyzer, laser beams are shot into an “optical cavity” in the machine.
Methane and carbon molecules are absorbed at different wavelengths and the
lasers measure the amount of absorption.)

Unlike other analyzers that require trained operators, the
Picarro machine can run more-or-less on autopilot.

That ease of use and the machine’s ability to take stealthy
and instantaneous measurements could prove to be a powerful tool for
environmental justice activists pressing companies to disclose emissions of
pollutants.

Once activists pinpointed the methane emissions in DISH and
Flower Mound, they presented
their findings to Texas environmental authorities. They also took air
samples to be analyzed for other pollutants.

“We think the day will come sooner than most people realize
when school kids can literally take an analyzer like ours and drive it around
town,” Michael Woelk, Picarro’s chief executive, told me last month. “In a
matter of hours they could put up online a Google map showing methane gas
plumes and other plumes around their community and with that demand that
something be done.”

Picarro, which licenses its core technology from Stanford
University, has sold its $50,000 analyzers to the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the Chinese government and academic scientists.
California is deploying the machines to create the world’s
first statewide greenhouse gas monitoring network.

So why is the company making common cause with the environmental
justice movement?

“We see a real market for our products,” says Alex Salkever, a Picarro spokesman. “We don’t see a
lot of environmental justice groups buying $50,000 analyzers. But the EPA or
another group could give grants for a library of analyzers that get lent out.”

Picarro made inroads with the activist community in January
when company executives attended a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
environmental justice meeting in New Orleans. They met Subra and did a
drive-around of Louisiana petrochemical plants to demonstrate the analyzer’s
capabilities.

“Ultimately, we would be happy if natural gas companies buy
our machines to know what’s going on with their facilities in real time,” says
Salkever. “We see this as a market where we’ll be doing well by doing good.”

Environmental group Earthworks made this video of its stealth monitoring of methane emissions near natural gas compression stations in North Texas.

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by David Roberts

The new HBO show How to Make It In America is pretty good, but by far the best thing about it is the opening credit sequence. When I first saw it I thought it was soundtracked with a particularly righteous soul song from the ‘70s, maybe a Bill Withers b-side dug out of the crates. It’s one of the very few credit sequences I’ve watched twice in a row on purpose.

To my surprise and delight, it turns out I was wrong: Aloe Blacc’s “I Need a Dollar” is the first single off his upcoming album Good Things, due from the Stones Throw label later this year. (While you’re waiting you could pick up his 2006 debut album Shine Through.)

As far as I’m concerned, this is America’s national anthem for 2010. No other song matters.

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by Agence France-Presse

A sage grouse.Photo: Gary Kramer of U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceWASHINGTON—U.S. officials on Friday stopped short of giving endangered species status to the sage grouse, an iconic bird that is at the center of a dispute over oil drilling and other energy development in the western United States.

The Interior Department said the bird merits protection but will not receive it for now because of a backlog of other species which are a higher priority, a move that is expected to allow oil drilling to continue.

The agency “will expand efforts with state, local, and tribal partners to map lands that are vital to the survival of the greater sage grouse … while guiding and managing new conventional and renewable energy projects to reduce impacts on the species,” a statement from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

“The sage grouse’s decline reflects the extent to which open land in the West has been developed in the last century,” Salazar said. “We must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring, and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species’ survival while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources.”

Environmentalists lamented the decision.

“These magnificent birds need Endangered Species Act protection now,” said Michael Connor, California director for Western Watersheds Project. “Without this added protection, the Mona Basin sage grouse will continue to decline.”

Sage grouse have dwindled to about half of their historic range due to habitat destruction, and some scientists warn that the birds could disappear within the next 100 years or less.

The Environmental Defense Fund said the decision “is a wake-up call for landowners, industry, and conservationists to work together to reverse the decline of the bird and the land it inhabits.”

“An endangered species listing is no one’s first choice as a tool to fix broken landscapes,” said Ted Toombs, a spokesman for EDF. “It is really a last resort option to keep species from going extinct. The first, best option to protect species is for conservationists, farmers, ranchers, energy companies, the recreation industry, and other stakeholders to work together on habitat conservation and restoration, so that an endangered species listing can be avoided.”

The greater sage grouse currently live in 11 western states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Oil and gas companies have said a designation could freeze drilling in areas of Wyoming and other states that are also sage grouse habitat.

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by Gar Lipow

Mainstream environmentalists tackling the climate crisis prioritize
pricing greenhouse gas emissions over
alternative policies to cool our fevered planet. The ACES
climate bill that passed the House would weaken renewable rules, add
massive offsets, and kill much existing EPA authority to fight climate
change.
The “simple” Cantwell-Collins cap-and-dividend bill focuses on
an auctioned permit system that returns revenues to the public, with a
practically undefined CERT fund the only supplement to this price
mechanism. As most supporters will freely admit, neither
mainstream bill aims at emission reductions anywhere near as large as
science tells us we need. The theory is that if we can pass something
politically practical, then we can fix problems later. Since these
bills claim to be shaped by political practicality, and focus on an
emissions
price, emissions pricing must be incredibly popular compared to
alternative policies. Right?
 
Wrong. Surveys show that the public support rules and public
investments far more strongly and far more consistently than it
supports either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. In the U.S., 70 to 80 percent
of the population support renewable standards, building efficiency
standards, auto efficiency standards, and business efficiency
standards. Over 60 percent still support them even when told that auto, consumer product, and energy costs will rise if they are implemented[1]. That is a critical point. When a large majority
of the public supports a policy if it personally costs them money, this
is strong, solid support.

Surveys comparing carbon taxes to cap-and-trade as a means of
putting a price on emissions give mixed results, with both
cap-and-trade and carbon tax supporters able to point to favorable
results. This discrepancy can be resolved. Both poll poorly, once
people realize that either will raise direct and indirect energy prices[2].

I’m sure that cap-and-dividend and tax-and-dividend supporters will
argue that if their particular viewpoint is just properly explained
they can win just as solid and just as strong public support. And that
may be true. But educating the public is a long process, made harder by
the fact that a large part of the economy is devoted to un-educating
the public. If the public already supports a policy so strongly that it
is willing to pay to see it implemented, that is a distinctly
non-trivial advantage.

In short, if you want to gain popular support for a climate bill,
rather than rely on the back room deal making that has failed so
miserably, there is a strong political argument for focusing on public
investment, like trains and subsidies for weather sealing and
insulation, and on regulations like the CAFE rules. It is not that
these have been ignored, but they have been neither  the main
political nor main policy focus.

My next post will explain why an emphasis on public investment and
rule-based (as opposed to price-based) regulation is better policy than
the reverse. This will be a matter of emphasis, and not opposition to
an emissions price.  But that emphasis is important. Both the ACES
and Cantwell bill prioritized pricing over other types of policy. That
is not the most popular approach, and we will see in the future why it
is not the most effective approach.

Endnotes:

[1] One of many surveys showing around 80 percent support for renewable energy standards:

Barry Rabe and Christopher Borric, Climate Change and American Public Opinion: The National and State Perspective [PDF], (Charlottesville, Va.: Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia, 10-Dec-2008): p14 – Table 19, (accessed 29-Jan-2010).

In the same study, p17 Table 23 shows 77 percent support for auto efficiency standards. Toward the end of the 2008 Presidential election, surveys showed that over 60 percent of both Obama and McCain supporters favored renewable energy and business efficiency standards even if they raised the prices of energy prices and consumer products.

Knowledge Networks of Menlo Park California, McCain and Obama Supporters Largely Agree on Approaches to Energy, Climate Change [PDF]. WorldPublicOpinion.Org. 23/Sep 2008, (DC: International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, 23-Sep-2008): 4-5,(accessed 29-Jan-2010).

71 percent of the U.S. population supports tighter efficiency rules for automobiles, even if that costs them money:

The World Bank and The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, “4.3 Willingness to Support National Steps with Economic Costs,“in World Development Report 2010: Public Attitudes Toward Climate Change: Findings from a Multi-Country Poll, (D.C.: International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, 3-Dec-2009):16,(accessed
30-Jan-2010).

Public support for public investment is harder to measure because polls on the subject are conducted less often. However, there have been some polls on rail. Back in 2006 a Harris poll showed that about 70 percent of the U.S. would like to see rail get the larges share of transportation growth compared to car and airplanes, and the 70 percent of the population also thought this should be funded by local, state and the federal government rather than private enterprise:

Harris Interactive, Americans Would Like to See a Larger Share of Passengers and Freight Going By Rail in Future, (Harris Interactive Inc.,8-Feb-2006), (accessed 30-Jan-2010).

In November 2008, rail won a very important poll—actually voter initiatives and bond issues. 70 percent of transit initiatives on the ballot won, for a total of 75 billion in spending:

Christopher Conkey and Paul Glader, “Mass-Transit Projects Fared Well at Polls,” Wall Street Journal, 12-Nov-2008, A6.

[2] An example of a poll that found a carbon tax
favored over a cap-and-trade system:

Ben Geman, “Is a Carbon Tax Dead?” The Hill, E2Wire – The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog, (Dow Jones, 1-Dec-2009), (accessed 30-Jan-2010).

An example of a poll that found a cap-and-trade system is favored over a carbon tax:

Paul Steinhauser, CNN Poll: 6 in 10 Back ‘Cap and Trade.’, PoliticalTicker, Cable News Network (CNN), (CNN, 27-Oct-2009), (accessed 30-Jan-2010).

The truth is: the public knows very little about either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. When both are explained, the U.S. public supports neither:

Barry Rabe and Christopher Borric, “The Climate of Belief: American Public Opinion on Climate Change: Market Based Policy Options: Public Attitudes Toward Cap-and-Trade v. Carbon Taxes” [PDF], Issues in Governance Studies, no. 31 (The Brookings Institution, Jan-2010):12,(accessed 30-Jan-2010).

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by Fast Company

Photo: Fast Company

So it’s come to this:
Unable to provide basic services for all of his constituents, Detroit
mayor Dave Bing is drafting plans starve his city down to a manageable
size. Using proprietary data and a survey released by Data Driven Detroit, Bing and his staff will pick “winners and losers”
amongst the city’s neighborhoods and seek to resettle residents from
the losers, those deemed most unlivable. With Detroit’s tax base
withering from the implosion of two-thirds of the Big Three, the
housing crisis, and an ongoing exodus, Bing believes he has no other
choice.

“If we don’t do it, you know this whole city is going
to go down,” he told a local radio station last month. “I’m hopeful
people will understand that. If we can incentivize some of those folks
that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation” in
one of the remaining neighborhoods with schools and buses.

Can
Detroit really shrink its way back to greatness (or at least stop the
bleeding)? Part of the problem is that it’s been hollowing out for
decades. A city of 1.85 million residents in 1950, Detroit had just
951,270 as of the last national census a decade ago, and the
next—which is key to obtaining millions of dollars in federal
funding—is expected to turn up only 800,000 this year. Some believe it
might eventually slide to 700,000 before all is said and done. A
quarter of the city is nothing more than vacant lots—40 square miles
of “urban prairie.” Bing plans to shrink the occupied portions further
by tearing down another 10,000 buildings. That should earn praise from
economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, who’s suggested similar policies for other Rust Belt cities. And what will Bing do with all of that
empty space? Turn over as many as 10,000 acres to John Hantz to farm.

The owner of an eponymous financial services firm, Hantz is prepared to sink $30 million of his personal fortune into coaxing peaches,
plums, lettuce, and heirloom tomatoes from the ground (or in hydroponic
greenhouses). In exchange, all he’s asking for is free tax-delinquent
land and tax breaks on agriculture. The city is considering giving him
both. Hantz told Fortune he’s aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, valuing it no
differently than outlying farmland. But he also promises to create
hundreds of green jobs, grow a surplus of fresh produce for residents,
attract tourists, and “reintroduce Detroiters to the beauty of nature.”

Get the rest of the story from our friends at Fast Company.

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by Daniel J. Weiss

Senator Lisa Murkowski (D-Alaska) gave a long impassioned speech when she introduced her “Dirty Air Act” – a Congressional Review Act resolution that would overturn EPA’s scientific finding that carbon pollution threatens public health and the environment.  One of her complaints was that the threat of impending EPA Clean Air Act implementation would force the Senate into action without ample time for deliberation.

Today, however, as we seek the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we’re being presented with a false choice between unacceptable legislation and unacceptable regulations. We’re being told, threatened really, to “pass a bill now or the economy will suffer.”

Sen. Murkowski’s aversion to threats, however, does not extend to threats that she makes.  She told E&E Daily (subscription required) that she would oppose a global warming bill unless it included oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska:

Murkowski said yesterday she would not consider voting for the climate package without drilling in ANWR. “I’m still saying ANWR is one of the must-haves,” Murkowski said.

That’s right, Sen. Murkowski issued the type of threat she complains about in her speech.  Unless Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) include Arctic drilling in their global warming bill, Murkowski won’t vote for it.  She made this threat even though Congress rejected Arctic drilling in 2002, 2003, and 2005 – and the Republicans were in the majority the latter two years.

The Arctic would do little to enhance America’s energy security.  The Department of Energy determined that it would take at least ten years to produce any oil from the Arctic.  It concluded that oil from the Arctic – home to America’s last polar bears and porcupine caribou – would make little difference in overall world oil supplies.

Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States.

Despite these facts, Murkowski is willing to condemn the planet to more carbon pollution and global warming if she doesn’t get her way.  And Alaska is the first state damaged by unchecked emissions.

Alaska’s     temperature increased up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit – double the increase in     the rest of the nation.
31 villages are imminently threatened with erosion, flooding, climate     change.  Twelve of these     villages are already being relocated, at a cost of up to $2.4 billion.
Oil     production in the North Slope of Alaska requires ice roads to avoid damage     to the tundra.  The ice road     season has been cut in half over the last thirty years due to warming.

Yet Sen. Murkowski wants to take climate change legislation hostage, to be released only if Arctic drilling is included in the package.  Fortunately, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman won’t capitulate to her demand.  E&E reported:

“That’s a deal-breaker,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “That’s just not going to happen. We’re looking at a lot of things, and that one is a no-no.”

“It’s not in our bill,” added Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Sen. Murkowski’s double standard also applies to the timing of when she will force a Dirty Air Act vote.  During the introduction of her resolution, she made impassioned pleas for prompt action.

The decision to offer this resolution was brought about by what will happen in the wake of the EPA’s decision to issue the endangerment finding. You see, it is not merely a “finding.” It’s actually a floodgate, and under the guise of protecting the environment, it’s set to unleash a wave of damaging new regulations that will wash over and further submerge our struggling economy.

Despite Sen. Murkowski’s claims of urgency to stop the “floodgate” of greenhouse gas pollution reductions EPA is poised to “unleash,” she plans to bide her time for maximum political – and perhaps campaign – advantage. E&E reported:

Murkowski signaled yesterday that the vote might be delayed. She is still looking at mid-March, she said, “but there’s not a lot of time in mid-March. And who knows what’s going on with health care. We’ve got a window of opportunity beyond that that we can advance it, so we’ve got to figure it out.”

Murkowski has a window of several months to call for a vote on the resolution under the Congressional Review Act, which establishes special procedures for disapproving agency rules. The act gives the senator until late May or early June, said the senator’s spokesman Robert Dillon.

“There’s no reason to hurry,” Dillon said. “She’s using the time to maximize her time to talk to senators.”

Her delay also provides an opportunity for Big Oil and other special interests to advertise in favor of the Dirty Air Act, and unleash their lobbyists to personally arm twist senators to support her.  And it provides her with more time to raise campaign cash from oil, utility and other interests while she is doing their bidding.  Murkowski has received the third most oil and gas money this election cycle, with her Dirty Air Act cosponsor Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) first.

So Senator Lisa Murkowski says she wants to block EPA from setting global warming pollution standards because they’re a threat that could force the Senate to legislate.  But she threatens to oppose pollution reduction legislation unless Arctic oil drilling is part of the package.  And she warns that EPA’s establishment of standards poses an immediate threat to the American economy, but Murkowski plans to dawdle before offering her resolution to block EPA to gain political advantage.  Sen. Murkowski’s blatant hypocrisy exemplifies what troubles Americans about their government.

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by Bonnie Azab Powell

Big bird: Meryl Streep as Julia Child in “Julie & Julia.”(Sony Pictures)On Sunday, veteran actress Meryl Streep has a chance to take home her third Oscar, for portraying Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s film “Julie & Julia.” (It’s Streep’s 16th nomination.) As charming as Streep is as the towering, funny-voiced woman who revolutionized American cooking, she deserves more accolades for another role she has played in the history of food in America: that of longtime activist.

Over at the Natural Resource Defense Council’s site Simplesteps.org, Wendy Gordon interviews Streep about her involvement in the environmental and food movements. The two women have known each other since they worked together to publicize the NRDC’s March 1989 report about weaknesses in the regulation of pesticides used in food production. That report launched what was known as the “Alar scare,” the national stampede toward the then-nascent subset of organic agriculture. Streep and Gordon helped create Mothers & Others, a now-defunct group that fought for tougher pesticide residue standards—and eventually saw them passed into law 10 years later. They didn’t stop there, writes Gordon:

We encouraged stores to stock organic products, shoppers to support farmers’ markets and CSAs. We distributed lists of rBGH-free milk and safer food and beverage storage containers. We published dozens of product reports on everything from paints and wood finishes to personal care products, home furnishings and children’s toys. Mothers & Others was transformational, using the power of the concerned consumer to change the marketplace, everything from the way we grow our food to the way we make our stuff. And Meryl was a transformative leader in the environmental health and green consumer movements. She connected the dots for people, brought it home, made it personal.

In the interview, Gordon recalls how industrial agriculture launched a disinformation campaign, led by Elizabeth Whelan and the American Council for Science and Health, that questioned the science behind NRDC’s report on pesticides in the diet of infants and children. And quite shockingly, Streep mentions that Julia Child played a role in it:

I never met [Child], but enlisted her aide in this whole sustainable ag question, and pesticide residues, and everything else, and she was extremely dismissive. She actually was a mouthpiece for Elizabeth Whelan’s group. I said that ACSH was a front for industry, agrichemical industries, everybody not necessarily looking out for America’s health and welfare. She [Julia] went nuts. She was mad, she said “well buh buh buh, this is not a front for industry, we have many reputable scientists on our board,” and blah, blah blah, you know saying the same old thing that isn’t true.

We also learn that Streep set up a Community-Supported Agriculture program for a farm when she was living in Connecticut, and continues to buy mostly organic and local food—she’s a farmers market shopper, and buys grass-fed beef. She’s educating herself about the science behind and controversies around genetically modified foods. And while it’s hard to know what the cranky Child might have made of such concerns, Streep thinks that ultimately Child’s legacy is that of “real food”—that butter and lard are just fine, “as long as it’s a little bit. Moderation and portion size, portion size, portion size – that’s the difference, that’s the whole thing. It’s all about moderation, and real food, you know food that is recognizable.”

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