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Cheap at Twice the Price: EPA’s New Analysis of House Climate Bill

2009-06-24T03:03:35Z

With the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) poised for an historic vote in the House of Representatives on Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a new analysis of the costs of implementing the legislation. This analysis finds that the bill would be even more affordable than indicated by EPA's preliminary analysis released in April. Highlights include:

The overall cost of implementing the bill will average $80-$111 per household per year--less than $10 per month. EPA's preliminary analysis had estimated $98-$140 per household per year.
Allowance prices will be only $13 per ton in 2015, rising to $16 per ton in 2020. EPA's preliminary analysis had estimated $13-17 in 2015 and $17-22 in 2020.
A 10 year delay in the availability of international offsets would only increase allowance prices by 3 percent. This is an important new finding because EPA's preliminary analysis had been criticized as overly optimistic about the prospects for quickly scaling up the offsets program.
Household electricity and natural gas expenditures are reduced by 7% in 2020 due to the energy efficiency and consumer protection provisions of the legislation. This is consistent with the conclusion of NRDC's analysis which shows that the legislation will reduce consumer's electricity bills in most states.

EPA's analysis, along with the CBO estimates released on Monday, totally discredit opposition claims about the high cost of this critical legislation. And neither EPA nor CBO attempt to account for the economic benefits of reduced environmental damage stemming from the pollution reduction achieved by ACES and the international leadership it would enable for President Obama.

This is a bargain that we truly can't afford to pass up.

updated 6/24 at 11:34 with added fourth bullet and link

Distributing Allowance Value II: 80% for Consumers and Public Purposes

2009-05-29T18:50:31Z

Rob Stavins of Harvard has posted a very useful analysis of the way allowance value is distributed in the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act reported by the Energy and Commerce Committee last week. Rob adds theoretical rigor and an important quantitative summary to my previous post on the subject. His analysis shows that, contrary to widely held perceptions, ACES distributes the vast majority of allowances for purposes that are clearly in the public interest. His key conclusion is:

...the totals become 79.9% for consumers and public purposes versus 20.1% for private industry, or approximately 80% versus 20% - the opposite of the "80% free allowance corporate give-away" featured in many press and blogosphere accounts. Moreover, because some of the allocations to private industry are - for better or for worse - conditional on recipients undertaking specific costly investments, such as investments in carbon capture and storage, part of the 20% free allocation to private industry should not be viewed as a windfall.

I don't agree with all of Rob's comments, but his bottom line conclusion is spot on and crucial. Far too many members of the press and even some well-meaning environmental advocates have adopted the highly misleading narrative that the Waxman-Markey bill "gives away" 85% of the allowances to industry based on a simplistic reading of the fact that only 15% of the allowances are explicitly auctioned at the beginning of the program. As Stavins puts it:

...we should be honest that the legislation, for all its flaws, is by no means the "massive corporate give-away" that it has been labeled. On the contrary, 80% of the value of allowances accrue to consumers and public purposes, and some 20% accrue to covered, private industry. This split is roughly consistent with the recommendations of independent economic research.

Watching a Master at Work

2009-05-22T20:05:07Z

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) shepherd the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) through the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The motion to "favorably report" the bill passed 33-25 after four grueling days of debate within the Committee, but it was the culmination of years of preparation and months of intensive work by Chairman Waxman, Energy Subcommittee Chairman Markey (D-MA), and their incredibly dedicated staff. When the final vote tally was read the standing room only audience of lobbyists, environmental advocates, and Congressional staff gave the Committee a well-deserved standing ovation for its efforts.

We have posted lots on the substance of ACES here, and next week we will post a review of the amendments adopted during this week's "markup" of the legislation. Today, I just want to focus on process. Over four days Chairman Waxman kept the Committee in session for 37 hours and considered 94 amendments. Republican opponents had threatened to require the entire bill to be read out loud and to offer more than 400 amendments in order to block Committee action. But in the end, not only did Chairman Waxman achieve his goal of reporting comprehensive clean energy and climate protection legislation before Memorial Day, he won the respect of supporters and opponents alike for the way he handled the process. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the Committee, and a fierce opponent of limiting global warming pollution, was remarkably gracious in defeat. He praised Chairman Waxman for running a fair and open process and commended the majority and minority staff for their hard work.

Throughout the markup Chairman Waxman alternated consideration of Democratic and Republican amendments. The Democratic amendments were all pre-negotiated before they were offered and were designed to address specific concerns of wavering Members and build support for the bill, without undermining its effectiveness or breaking up its coalition of supporters. Republicans used their turns to offer amendments designed to score political points rather than improve the bill. Many followed the pattern of the Shimkus (R-IL) amendment: If X happens then all the other provisions of the legislation are null and void. In Mr. Shimkus' case, X was the closure of two or more coal mines. Other amendments had triggers based on electricity price increases, unemployment rates, or other statistics that opponents alleged would be made worse by the legislation. Mr. Barton insisted on a roll call vote on each amendment, and each was defeated. Chairman Waxman maintained his equanimity throughout.

Late last year, when Mr. Waxman won a Democratic Caucus vote to unseat Mr. Dingell and take over the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee some worried that the aftermath of the leadership fight would interfere with getting things done, but Chairman Waxman immediately took steps to repair his relationship with Mr. Dingell, naming him Chairman Emeritus, and giving him responsibility for developing health care reform legislation, an issue on which they see eye to eye. Others worried that Mr. Waxman is too liberal to successfully steer complex global warming legislation through the relatively conservative Energy and Commerce Committee. As Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Mr. Waxman had earned a reputation as a bit of a bomb thrower due to a series of hearings in which he hauled corporate executives and government officials before his Committee and thoroughly embarrassed them to expose one form of wrong-doing or another. Mr. Waxman had been using his oversight role to maximum effect. Energy and Commerce is a legislative committee, and legislating requires a different approach. Yesterday Chairman Waxman proved that he is a master of the art.

Distributing Allowance Value

2009-05-16T03:40:40Z

The comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation, which is expected to move through the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week, establishes a limited number of carbon emission permits (aka "allowances") as the means to enforce a declining cap on the pollution that causes global warming. These allowances are a valuable public asset and how they are distributed is one of the critical questions Congress must decide in crafting legislation. The discussion draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, released on March 31st intentionally did not address this issue, saying that the allocation issue would be resolved through discussions among Committee members. This afternoon Chairman Waxman and Chairman Markey released their revised proposal (H.R.2454, the Chairman's mark for next weeks Committee meetings) which includes the allocation proposal that emerged from these discussions. Here's a first look.

The allocation proposal focuses on four main goals: (1) protecting consumers, (2) avoiding outsourcing of jobs and emissions in energy intensive industries, (3) promoting energy efficiency and advanced technology deployment, and (4) reducing deforestation and facilitating adaptation to the impacts of global warming that can no longer be avoided. As with other aspects of the bill, Waxman and Markey had to make significant compromises to develop a proposal that can pass out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, given that they can't rely on any Republican votes and many Democrats on the Committee come from districts where coal and oil interests have enormous political sway. Nonetheless, the proposal solves the allowance puzzle in a way that avoids large windfalls, protects low- and moderate-income consumers, and builds political support.

As I discussed in a previous post, there are many strongly held views about the "right" way to allocate emission allowances and undoubtedly everyone, including NRDC, will find fault with some aspects of this proposal. As the debate unfolds, it's important to remember that without a cap there is no guarantee of emission reductions and no allowance value to divide up.

More detail on the four main slices of the allowance pie follow:

1. Protecting consumers

The mark allocates 30% of the allowance pie to electricity retailers and 9% to natural gas retailers. These local distribution companies (LDCs) are regulated by state agencies and are required to use the value of the allowances they receive for the benefit of their customers. This approach avoids the risk of large windfall profits seen in Europe when competitive electricity generators were given allowances for free but raised their (unregulated) prices anyway, reflecting the market value of the allowances they have to use to compensate for their emissions. Consumers will see the greatest benefit from these allocations if utility companies use a portion of their value to invest in all cost effective energy efficiency improvements. The mark requires natural gas distributors to use at least one-third of the value of the allowances they receive to invest in cost-effective energy efficiency measures; inexplicably no similar requirement applies to electricity distributors.

Low- and Moderate-income households will be further protected from the indirect costs of the program by auctioning 15% of the allowances and returning the revenue to them through tax credits and other benefits.

2. Preventing outsourcing of energy intensive industries

Steel, cement, and other energy-intensive manufacturers argued that the energy price increases created by capping carbon emissions could cause them to shift production to countries without similar programs, outsourcing both jobs and emissions. The allocation proposal addresses this issue by adopting an approach introduced by Congressmen Inslee (D-WA) and Doyle (D-PA), which would allocate allowances to energy-intensive trade-exposed firms based on how much output they produce in the United States. This means that if a firm reduces its output or shifts production overseas it receives fewer allowances, creating an incentive to invest in improving the efficiency of domestic production instead. The proposal sets aside 15% of allowances for this purpose and would initially allocate to each firm an amount based on 100% of average emissions per unit of output for each sector.

This is more generous than necessary. The original Inslee-Doyle proposal called for allocating based on 85% of average emissions. The principle should be to allocate enough to level the playing field between domestic and international producers. This may require much less than 100% of average emissions as firms can pass some of their increased costs along to their customers and as more countries adopt comparable programs. This is particularly true for oil refiners, who are likely to pass most if not all of their costs on to consumers. Nonetheless, they receive 2% of the allowances, which would cover about two-thirds of their emissions.

3. Promoting energy efficiency and advanced technology deployment

States would receive 5-10 percent of the allowances (depending on the year) to promote investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy production. This includes funding for building code enforcement and for building retrofit programs which have the potential to substantially reduce consumer energy bills and the overall cost of complying with the emission reduction targets. Unfortunately the funding levels are much less than what is needed to capture all of the cost-effective energy efficiency potential.

Additional allowance value is set aside for promoting carbon capture and disposal, advanced vehicle deployment, clean energy job training, and university-based energy research.

4. Reducing deforestation and facilitating adaptation

The mark provides 5 percent of the allowance value for activities to reduce tropical deforestation with the goal of achieving emission reductions equal to at least 10 percent of U.S. emissions in 2005. By funding these activities through allowance value, in addition to the offset market, this program will produce emission reductions over and above those generated by the cap itself.

The mark also provides emission allowance value to facilitate adaptation and clean technology transfer. Funding for domestic adaptation comes from 2 percent of the allowances for the first 10 years of the program and then increases to 4 percent in 2022 and 8 percent in 2027. These resources are split evenly between natural resource adaptation and helping vulnerable communities, including through public health preparedness. Funding for international adaptation and clean technology transfer similarly ramps up from 2 percent of the allowance value to 4 percent in 2022 and 8 percent in 2027.

The days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over

2009-04-29T02:35:54Z

Yesterday I had a chance to attend President Obama's speech to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). This is the first time since JFK that the president has addressed the Academy during his first 100 days in office and President Obama used the occasion to set a goal of increasing national investments in science and technology to 3 percent of GDP-a level not seen since the Kennedy administration's post-Sputnik push.

Naturally the nation's top scientists in attendance loved this, but the biggest applause line in the speech was

On March 9th, I signed an executive memorandum with a clear message: Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over. Our progress as a nation - and our values as a nation - are rooted in free and open inquiry. To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life.

After eight long years when we were lucky if science was in the back seat rather than left in the dust, President Obama has turned the country in a dramatic new direction during his first 100 days in office. Here is a sampling of some of his more significant moves:

Appointing a scientific dream team: John Holdren as Science Advisor, Steve Chu as Secretary of Energy, and Jane Lubchenco as Administrator of NOAA. All world class scientists and inspired choices.

Restoring the rule of law and the role of science at EPA. In her first act as Administrator Lisa Jackson sent a message to all EPA employees laying out her priorities. First and foremost that EPA policy would be driven by science and would follow the law. On her first full day on the job the president directed her to reconsider the Bush administration's refusal to allow California to implement its clean car law. More recently she proposed a formal finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Exactly what the law and science require.

Investing in clean energy and economic recovery. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus bill, provides the largest single investment in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable transportation systems in American history. This legislation has already put people to work manufacturing high-efficiency windows, insulating homes, and installing wind turbines.

Laying the foundation for healthy economic growth. President Obama's budget establishes three domestic priorities that he advances at every opportunity, including his address to the NAS yesterday: clean energy, health care reform, and investing in education. There can be no sustainable prosperity in America or anywhere else unless we get these three things right.

Solving global warming. Public investments in clean energy through the stimulus bill and the budget can only take us so far. President Obama understands that we also have to mobilize private investments by closing the carbon loophole that allows energy companies to dump unlimited amounts of heat-trapping pollution into our atmosphere for free. He used his first address to a joint session of Congress to call for legislation to make clean energy the profitable kind and cut carbon pollution 80 percent by midcentury.

This is a great start. With President Obama's continued leadership I'm convinced that we can enact comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year that will not only put science in the front seat, but will also restore American leadership in the world.

Inaction Is Not an Option

2009-04-21T01:12:25Z

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) had a great editorial in Roll Call today. In it he argues for clean energy and climate change legislation to "make our region and our country stronger."

This is important because Senator Brown is one of the key Midwestern Democrats in the Senate whose vote is crucial to getting the 60 that will be needed to break an inevitable filibuster. Last year Senator Brown voted against ending a filibuster on the climate legislation that was then before the Senate. This year he is making the case for acting now:

Some people would say that our current economic crisis compels us to delay action on comprehensive climate change legislation. I disagree. Inaction is not an option. Capping carbon emissions can create new jobs in a clean energy economy. Without action, we face dangerous consequences. We risk the health of our citizens, the viability of our coastal areas, the productivity of our nation's farms, forests and fisheries, and the long-term economic and national security of our country.

The details will matter, of course. Senator Brown will rightly insist that climate legislation be designed in a way that encourages reinvestment in Ohio's manufacturing base, rather than outsourcing jobs and pollution to countries that have not yet enacted similar policies. This can be accomplished with the judicious use of a portion of the value of emission allowances established under a carbon cap to support efficiency improvements in energy intensive manufacturing plants. As Senator Brown says:

Done right, climate change legislation will improve our nation's competitiveness by creating new jobs and developing new technologies.

NRDC looks forward to working with Senator Brown to make sure we get it right, and get it done this year.

Recycling Scary Numbers to Protect the Status Quo

2009-04-01T23:15:10Z

Yesterday Congressmen Henry Waxman and Ed Markey released a "discussion draft" of the American Clean Energy and Security Act - a comprehensive energy and climate proposal that would create good jobs, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change by repowering our economy with clean energy. My colleague David Doniger provided a first read of the bill on Switchboard.

Opponents apparently didn't bother to look at the draft before firing off their prepared talking points. They are trying the same old tactics polluters used to argue against the Clean Air and Water Acts: throwing around a lot of scary numbers about energy prices. But history shows such forecasts have little to do with reality - a survey by the Economic Policy Institute showed that past industry claims about environmental compliance costs have been overblown by anywhere from 30%- 2,900%.

Dig a little deeper and it's clear that the numbers now being hurled into the climate policy debate have nothing to do with the legislation that this Congress is beginning to consider.

Opponent tactics include:

Tossing around wild estimates of the cost of emission permits that are four or five times higher than the best government estimates.
Assuming that the value of carbon emission permits just disappears from the economy when, in fact, it goes back into consumers' pockets through energy efficiency and clean energy investments and rebates.
Ignoring the economic benefits from reducing air pollution and avoiding the damages from global warming, including stronger storms, floods, and droughts.
Excluding from their analyses important parts of the proposed policies designed to limit the costs.
Hiding the fact that even their worst-case scenarios actually show robust economic growth for the US economy under a carbon cap, with most analyses showing imperceptible shifts from business as usual trends over the long term.

What's a more realistic picture? Limits on global warming pollution won't go into effect until 2012. That means there will be no impact on energy prices while we're in the depths of the recession - zero impact in 2009; zero impact in 2010; zero impact in 2011. In 2012 energy price increases would average less than 5 percent and total household energy costs - including heating fuels, electricity, and gasoline - would increase by about the cost of a small pack of gum per day according to the most credible and up-to-date government analysis of a similar proposal offered last year. That analysis did not fully account for the opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of our homes, businesses and transportation system. With smart incentives to invest in energy efficiency upgrades, such as those in the Waxman-Markey proposal (which no one has had time to directly analyze yet), consumers can quickly cut their energy use by at least 10 percent, resulting in a net reduction in their energy bills. Even bigger savings -- 30 percent or more - can be made as they replace obsolete appliances and inefficient vehicles with state-of-the-art models. So efficiency investments can lower energy bills in the short run and translate into big savings down the road.

Even in the worst-case scenarios peddled by opponents of limits on global warming pollution the economy, personal income, jobs, and other key economic indicators all grow robustly under a cap and trade bill. In fact, the economist behind a study sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) acknowledged that climate legislation would delay the GDP increase we can otherwise expect by 2050 by a mere three months.

What's even better news is that comprehensive energy and climate legislation will create and protect millions of good paying "green" jobs across the nation - insulating homes, installing solar energy systems, manufacturing batteries for hybrid cars, and building wind farms, among other occupations - helping restore our economy to full employment more rapidly than would traditional energy investments. That's because for every million dollars spent on clean energy three to four times as many jobs are created than if the same amount of money was spent on fossil fuels. Clean energy development employs more people to build, deliver and install equipment, and these paychecks go into their pockets instead of coal and oil company coffers.

The long-term benefits will also be profound: sustainable growth, greater security, and a cleaner, more stable environment for all of us and our children to enjoy.

Cap and…Invest or Dividend?

2009-03-03T14:56:43Z

Last week President Obama galvanized the debate about how to ensure an economic recovery with clean energy investments by calling on this Congress to deliver global warming legislation for him to sign. The administration followed this up by releasing a budget that assumes revenues from a cap-and-trade program starting in 2012. This would build on the economic stimulus bill by immediately giving clean energy investors long term certainty and additional technology deployment incentives. In 2012-hopefully well after the economy has recovered-carbon caps would go into effect, giving the government sustained revenue from the sale of pollution allowances to pay back the Treasury (see Investing in Our Recovery).

The budget provides a brief outline of the administration's approach: cap global warming pollution; auction all the emission allowances; invest $15 billion per year in clean energy; and return the rest of the revenues to consumers. This is (surprise, surprise for those of us who have watched previous presidents ignore their campaign promises) totally consistent with what then-Senator Obama said during the campaign. The budget goes slightly further than the campaign platform by indicating that about $65 billion of revenue from allowance auctions will be returned as a dividend to consumers in the form of the "making work pay" tax credit. If allowance prices start at $20 per ton total revenue would be about $120 billion per year. A footnote in the budget indicates that additional revenue beyond the $80 billion specifically allocated would be used to help vulnerable communities, businesses, and families transition to a clean energy economy.

Putting these details in the budget shines a spotlight on the $6.4 trillion question: How should the value of emission allowances be used?

There are three basic approaches:

1) Give emission allowances away to polluters for free ("grandfathering");

2) Auction emission allowances and return the money to consumers as a tax reduction or rebate ("dividending");

3) Use the value of emission allowances to promote the goals of climate legislation, including promoting clean energy deployment and adaptation to unavoidable consequences of global warming ("investing")

Before discussing the merits of these approaches, it's important to emphasize something that often gets lost in the debate: The most important environmental driver in all this is the cap itself. No cap, no emission reductions and no allowance value to divide up. This doesn't mean environmentalists have no stake in how allowance value is allocated-it does mean that we need to be nimble in response to the evolving allocation debate and not lose sight of the original objective of cutting global warming pollution.

Just a few years ago most policymakers assumed that all emission allowances would be grandfathered. After all, that's what Congress did in the sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade program established by the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act and it seemed to work fine. There are, however, two big differences: (1) At the time the sulfur dioxide cap was established, the covered electricity generators were all regulated monopolies. This meant that state Public Utility Commissions could ensure that electricity rates reflected only actual compliance costs, which were relatively low due to the free allocation of allowances. (2) Carbon dioxide allowances are worth about 100 times as much as sulfur dioxide allowances. These arguments by themselves may not have been enough to shake the presumption for grandfathering, but the European Union did us a big favor by going first and establishing a carbon trading program (the EU ETS) that grandfathered allowances in its initial "learning" phase. The result was that power producers reaped windfall profits because they received free allowances and then raised power prices to reflect their potential resale value. In order to prevent thse windfalls in the future, the EU is moving toward auctioning its emission allowances and most politicians have abandoned the idea of grandfathering most allowances.

As a counterpoint to grandfathering, a growing chorus of voices is advocating "cap and dividend." The great appeal of this idea is its simplicity: Auction emission allowances and return the revenue to the public through a tax rebate - or dividend from granting private firms permissions to use a public resource (the atmosphere) to dispose of their carbon dioxide waste. The theory is solid, but in practice the idea becomes much more complicated when advocates are confronted with the need to address disproportionate impacts on low income consumers who are too poor to pay taxes and on coal-dependent parts of the country. Moreover, there are important climate protection goals that dividending simply doesn't address.

Another approach to using the allowance value for public good is "cap and invest." Investing some of the allowance value to kick start the transition to a clean energy economy will allow emissions to be reduced faster and more cheaply than under a cap alone. The cap provides the backbone for the effort required to cut U.S. emissions at least 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050, but by itself the cap won't achieve these emission reductions at the lowest possible cost because the cap does not address two key barriers to repowering our economy with clean energy.

On one side (the left hand side of the abatement cost curve shown here) there is a large menu of energy efficiency measures that are already cost effective but are blocked from widespread use by market barriers (Why upgrade the efficiency of a commercial office building or rental home if the tenant pays the utility bills? How can a consumer demand a more fuel efficient version of a vehicle if the manufacturer does not offer that option? How can more efficient industrial motors compete when firms routinely demand 2 year paybacks during capital budgeting?)

On the other side (the right hand side of the abatement cost curve shown here), strong innovation policies are needed to ensure a continuous flow of new cost-reducing technologies to help us finish the job of driving down emissions over coming decades. Many advanced low-carbon energy supply technologies have the potential to be cost effective if they were deployed at scale, but private firms systematically under invest in bringing technologies across the "valley of death" between government-funded basic research and development and full commercial maturity (Why invest billions to build the first full-scale carbon capture and storage facilities if other firms will be able to benefit from your experience with technology integration at scale, educating the public regarding carbon sequestration, and developing a workable interface with regulators?)

Finally, resources are needed to achieve emission reductions from sources that are not covered by the cap and to facilitate adaptation to the consequences of global warming that can no longer be avoided. This includes vulnerable communities at home and abroad, as well as the natural resources on which they depend.

The appropriate mix of investments, dividends, and adaptation support will change over time. Directing allowance value to clean energy investments is most important in the early years of the program when it is essential to break down long-standing barriers to energy efficiency and begin learning-by-doing in supplying renewable energy. This support should be phased out as the clean energy market matures and the rising price of carbon takes over as the main driver of further emission reductions. As directed clean energy investments decline the allowance value dividend to consumers should increase. At the same time, adaptation needs will grow as the global warming already in the pipeline manifests itself and the most severe impacts become clear. It is impossible to anticipate the most important uses of allowance revenue over the very long term, so by default all allowance revenue should be returned directly to consumers after, say, 15 years, unless specific programs are reauthorized by Congress.

Finding the right mix between "invest," "adapt," and "dividend" is one of the key economic and political issue in the design of climate policy. NRDC is working hard to shed light on the implications of different approaches through our Cap 2.0 project, but in the end this is a decision that Congress must make. As environmental advocates we need to recognize that the mechanism is secondary to the objective: solving global warming.

###

I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my NRDC colleague Rick Duke to this post.

Cold Comfort

2009-02-16T21:37:36Z

George Will gets one thing right in "Dark Green Doomsayers" published in Sunday's Washington Post. Scientific predictions aren't always right. But ironically his suggestion that scientists systematically overstate the risk of environmental harm in general, and global warming in particular, was undermined by a news article published by the Post the same day reporting that many scientists now believe the predictions of the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) probably understate the risks we face.

Will bases his case largely on quotes from the popular press suggesting that during the 1970s scientists were predicting global cooling. The reality, as carefully documented in a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is that there was an active debate among climate scientists at the time, but most of the scientific literature pointed to global warming as a result of rising concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Nothing like the comprehensive assessments of the IPCC existed and the science panels that looked at the emerging literature of the 1970s concluded that global warming was likely. Now we know its happening and that scientists have, if anything, been too cautious in their predictions.

The Post's news story reports on a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in which Chris Field points to data showing that global warming pollution rose faster than expected from 2000 to 2007 and evidence that global warming itself will unleash even greater quantities of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane from forest and tundra ecosystems, amplifying the warming effect of direct emissions. The IPCC has been cautious about including the effects of these feedback loops in their forecasts because they are difficult to quantify.

The lesson is that selective citations can be used to support almost any claim. After all, individual scientists advance the field by suggesting novel hypotheses and then testing them. Many of these hypotheses will be rejected; some will be incorporated into the scientific mainstream. But scientists as a group are cautious. So when the IPCC predicts serious consequences from global warming unless emissions are rapidly curtailed, its cold comfort indeed that a few newspapers in the 1970s speculated about possible global cooling.

Tom Friedman Has a Way with Words

2009-01-08T15:04:30Z

The Senate Environment Committee got the 111th Congress off to a great start yesterday with a briefing on spurring economic recovery through green tech investing by Tom Friedman, the author most recently of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist behind Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and Google.

Their message was clear and compelling. In fact, this was the best panel I have ever attended on global warming, energy, and the economy. And I have attended a lot of panels. Friedman led off by focusing on five major challenges-energy and natural resources supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss-arguing that the good news is that all of the problems can be solved with a clean and efficient Energy Technology (ET) revolution. Not a completely novel point, but the way Friedman delivers the message is unparalleled. One clever turn of phrase after another, yet he manages to do it without seeming too clever. Watch the video here.

John Doerr followed up with real world stories about green tech entrepreneurs who have the potential to transform ET over the next 15 years the same way Silicone Valley entrepreneurs (many with financial backing from Doerr himself) transformed IT over the last 15 years. He then offered a comprehensive set of six policies needed to support the ET revolution:

Unified National Smart Grid
Put a PRICE on CARBON and a CAP on Carbon Emissions
National Renewable Portfolio Standard
Utility regulations (and incentives to drive efficiency, decoupling
Get serious about funding R&D and D at scale
Double the number of qualified engineers graduating from U.S. universities

Read his prepared statement here.

Chairman Boxer and six members of the committee (including new members Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley) engaged in a lively discussion with the panel. The most important question was asked by Senator Tom Udall: Should we start now or should we wait for the economic crisis to abate? Both Friedman and Doerr argued for starting now, both through the economic stimulus bill and by putting a price on carbon to create the needed incentives to put people to work deploying ET at scale. This critical issue is addressed head on and in more detail in a policy brief NRDC released yesterday. The key point is that if a carbon cap is enacted in 2009 the actual emission limits and price on carbon would not kick in for several years. In the meantime the future value of emission allowances can be used as a kind of collateral to mobilize immediate ET investments, putting people back to work now.

Build Up of Heat-Trapping Carbon Dioxide is Accelerating

2008-09-27T19:15:21Z

Despite two decades of talking about slowing global warming the actual rate at which heat-trapping carbon dioxide is building up in the atmosphere is accelerating according to new data released yesterday. Juliet Eilperin's story on this research made page 2 of the Washington Post and focused on the rapid increase in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion during this decade. These data are indeed alarming. They show that CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation have now reached 10 billion tons per year, which is above the worst-case forecast made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a few years ago.

But these emissions could be cut if governments, particularly in the U.S. and China, get serious about global warming action, rather than just talk. Even more disturbing are the data showing that the natural ocean sink for CO2 is slowing down, which we can't do anything about. Details are provided in an excellent presentation that Pep Canadell gave at an AMS briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday. The slowdown is due to rising ocean temperatures and falling ocean pH, both of which impede the ability of the ocean to absorb more CO2. The bottom line is that with emissions rising and removals declining the average annual increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has jumped from 1.5 parts per million per year (ppm/yr) during the 1990s to 2.0 ppm/yr since 2000. The increase last year was 2.2 ppm.

These numbers are important because they are a direct measure of how rapidly the blanket of heat-trapping gases is thickening. While there is substantial uncertainty about deforestation rates and the size of the natural sinks, and some uncertainty about fossil fuel emissions, we can measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with great accuracy. And the atmosphere doesn't lie.

Smart Bikes

2008-09-19T23:18:25Z

Washington DC has a great new way to get around. Based on a system pioneered in more than a dozen European cities, SmartBikeDC is the first automated bike sharing program in the U.S. For an annual membership of only $40 you get a smart card which gives you unlimited access to bikes from any of the 10 downtown locations. The coolest thing about the system is that you don't have to return the bike to the same place you got it from. The computerized system keeps track of all the bikes and checks you in when you drop your back off at any of the stations. You can also keep a bike for up to three hours at a time, so if you are going to lunch at a restaurant that's not right next to a SmartBike station, just lock up your SmartBike outside and return it when you are finished (I keep a lock in my office to use for this kind of trip).

I have been using the SmartBike system for the last two weeks and I love it. Its faster than using the Metro to get around downtown, cleaner and cheaper than using taxis, and good exercise too. I'm no purist. I'm sure I will still take a taxi occasionally, particularly in the dead of winter and the heat of summer, but SmartBikes are a great additional option.

The bikes are very well designed for urban use, with chain guards, fenders, an easy-to-use three-speed gear shift, and a luggage rack equipped with a bungee to hold your briefcase. Getting and returning bikes is a snap-it takes just a few seconds to get a bike and returning is even faster. My only complaints are that I would like to have a gear between second and third and more SmartBike stations, particularly on Capitol Hill. I assume the system will expand if enough people sign up. So if you're in DC, please subscribe. If you live somewhere else, ask your city council to catch up.

“All of the Above” Is Not an Energy Policy

2008-07-24T22:56:15Z

Some members of Congress are trying to lift the moratorium that protects parts of our Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic Wildlife Refuge from harmful oil drilling. They are giving a token nod to the real solutions – energy efficiency and renewables – and calling this skewed package an “all of the above” energy plan. In fact, “all of the above” is the very same irresponsible energy non-policy that has gotten us into the mess that we are in today. This energy proposal is nothing more than the oil and coal industry’s wish list with lip service for renewable energy sprinkled in. It would not lower gas prices, but it would hurt all Americans by making global warming worse, increasing heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) by more than 500 million tons per year compared to a responsible approach.

“All of the above” supporters claim that drilling off our precious coasts and in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge could lead to production of as much as 4 million barrels per day (nearly two decades from now). According to the Energy Information Administration, these claims are wildly exaggerated. However, even if they are taken at face value, the alternative of producing the same amount of oil using CO2-enhanced oil recovery would sequester 200 million tons of CO2 per year.

The “all of the above” plan also calls for producing 2.5 million barrels per day from oil shale. Again, there are many reasons to doubt the feasibility of this claim, but if it could be done it would not only devastate the heart of the Rocky Mountains, it would require so much energy to extract oil from the rock that CO2 emissions would be increased by another 300 million tons.

The “all of the above” plan also calls for repealing environmental standards for government fuel procurement to open the door to coal-to-liquids plants with double the carbon dioxide emissions from conventional petroleum. While the plan does not have a specific target for coal-to-liquids production, the coal industry has promoted a plan to mine an additional 1.3 billion tons of coal per year to produce 2.6 million barrels per day of liquid fuel as well as other energy sources. The result would be massive destruction in the coal fields and an increase in carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping 2.6 billion tons per year.

Responsible leaders make responsible choices. “All of the above” is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

Patriots v. Oilers: Advancing the Climate Legislation Ball

2008-06-07T18:03:40Z

I know the NBA finals are still underway, but a football analogy seems much more apt.

Legislation to cap and reduce global warming pollution didn’t get across the goal line after obstructionist tactics blocked serious consideration of the Climate Security Act, as Frances Beinecke described yesterday. Nonetheless, the process of bringing the Climate Security Act to the U.S. Senate floor advanced the prospects for enacting the federal legislation we need to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

This isn’t obvious from the press coverage or from tuning in on C-SPAN. Most of the week that the Climate Security Act was supposed to be considered by the Senate was chewed up by procedural shenanigans, such as opponents requiring the entire bill to be read into the record (which took nine hours), and by bickering over who is responsible for $4 per gallon gas.

Behind the scenes, however, preparations for Senate floor consideration of the bill caused Senators and their staff to focus on the details of global warming legislation, many for the first time. This not only increased understanding of the legislation, it surfaced the key issues that must be ironed out before a federal climate bill can become law.

A roadmap to these issues can be found in an interesting letter authored by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and signed by nine other Democrats, mostly from Midwestern states. The letter says that these Senators would require changes to the bill before they could support final passage, and highlights eight issues that need to be addressed, including impacts on the economy, technology funding, and the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. All but one of the Senators signing the letter voted to end the filibuster against the bill so that these issues could be considered in a structured amendment process. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) voted no, citing announcements of plant closings in the last week that could cost Ohio 10,000 jobs.

The irony is that the Climate Security Act has provisions intended to address all of these issues, particularly as modified by the substitute amendment developed by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner after the original bill cleared the Environment Committee. The Stabenow letter, as well as amendments filed by these and other Senators, shows that the bill’s sponsors and supporters still have a lot of work to do to explain these provisions and address remaining concerns without undermining the legislation’s environmental integrity.

Equally important, Patriots must rally to demand decisive action to curb global warming pollution and build a new energy economy that will free us from dependence on oil, so that political leaders are motivated to resolve any outstanding issues, rather than use them as excuses for inaction. We are going to need a great ground game to beat the Oilers and get effective legislation across the goal line.

Danger Zone

2008-03-27T13:25:58Z

Jim Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, put global warming on the policy agenda with his 1988 Congressional testimony that he was 99% confident that a long term global warming trend was underway and that heat-trapping gases were probably to blame. Many scientists at the time thought Hansen had gone a bit too far and it took about a decade for consensus scientific assessments to catch up with Hansen’s foresight. Almost two decades later Hansen has compiled a remarkable track record of publishing testable hypotheses that have been born out by subsequent data.

Now Hansen is upping the ante again with his conclusion that current concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about 385 ppm) are already in dangerous territory and that we should be aiming to lower concentrations back to 350 ppm, rather than aiming to stabilize them at about 450 ppm, as I and many other advocates of climate protection have previously called for. Many will again feel that Hansen has gone too far, but given his track record Hansen’s latest conclusions must be taken very seriously. And few would argue that we wouldn’t all be better off had we responded more forcefully to Hansen’s first warning.

Hansen lays out the scientific case for a 350 ppm target in a carefully reasoned draft paper available on his Columbia University web site. Using evidence from Earth’s long-term climate history he shows that when all climate feedbacks are considered, particularly those associated with changes in ice sheets, the sensitivity of global temperatures to increases in heat-trapping gases is twice as large as predicted by climate models that include only fast feedbacks. The implication is that the longer CO2 concentrations remain above 350 ppm the greater our risk of passing the point of no return where the feedbacks take over and propel us to a “different planet,” far outside the range of natural variability seen during the entire history of the human species.

This would be very depressing except that Hansen tells us there “is no reason to be so glum.” The key to getting out of the danger zone is to phase out emissions from the use of coal as rapidly as possible—by 2030 according to Hansen. Hansen says this does not necessarily mean phasing out the use of coal; it means that continued reliance on coal requires use of technology to put the carbon it contains back underground. And the first rule of getting out of a hole is to stop digging, which means it’s simply folly to build new conventional coal plants that don’t capture their CO2. If emissions from coal are phased out by 2030 Hansen finds that most, but not all, conventional oil and gas reserves could still be used and still allow us to return to the 350 ppm target. So it’s a good idea to keep pristine areas off limits to development and unconventional fuels, such as tar sands, shale oil, and liquid coal, should be off the table.

Twenty years ago Jim Hansen went out on a limb to warn us that pollution-driven global warming was underway. We mostly ignored him to our everlasting regret. He is out on a limb again. If we ignore him this time we may find that we are all on the limb with him and that it is being sawn off.