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Unpatriotic Lies About Energy Solutions

2008-07-03T21:16:17Z

I'm sick of it.

There's a new campaign with a bumper sticker slogan that's attracting a lot of attention because it offers easy solutions to our oil-addiction woes. You may have seen it: Drill here, drill now, pay less.

Sheer deception.

Drill here: We already do drill here, and we've been drilling more and more. As a House Natural Resources Committee describes in this analysis, the number of domestic drilling permits has almost doubled in the past five years, and from 1999 and 2007 the shot up 361 percent. Almost 80 percent of oil in federal offshore areas is open for leasing.

Drill now: We do that already, as described above. But in terms of new production, this is a non sequitur. Drill years from now is more like it. Even the American Petroleum Institute has admitted that it would take 7-10 years to bring new production online.

Pay less: Fat chance. As I have talked about before, this is about saving pennies at the pump, assuming oil companies decide to pass the savings along to consumers like us (which is hardly a sure thing). From 2005-2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. oil and natural gas production grew at four times the rate as consumption. Did prices drop? Nope. This also ignores the global oil marketplace of 80 million barrels a day. Any new production that America can bring online, given that we hold a paltry two percent of global reserves, is a drop in an enormous bucket. In fact, what they don't tell you is that we export plenty of the oil we produce domestically, while importing even more of the stuff. That's the reality of a gigantic global marketplace for this commodity.

My friend Tom Friedman has clearly also had it with the lies, which shines through in his recent piece about the folly of President Bush proposing to prolong our addiction by drilling offshore:

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

What is especially frustrating about this scam is that it ignores the greatest opportunity we have to protect consumers: Driving up the fuel-efficiency of U.S. transportation.

How does the oil saved by doing that compare to what we'd get with more drilling? To find out, NRDC added up oil savings from four commonsense efficiency measures (inflating our tires, requiring more efficient tire designs and high fuel-efficiency performance standards for cars and trucks) and compared them to the oil we'd get from opening up new offshore and Arctic drilling areas. Here's what we found:

Know what this means?

It means that this fourth of July, true patriots should sport bumper stickers that say: "Unshackle America from OPEC and Big Oil: Boost fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks."

Happy fourth of July, everyone!

Snake Oil: Deceiving the Public, Underestimating American Ingenuity

2008-06-19T21:41:09Z

There has been a lot of talk recently about lifting the moratorium on oil drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. Hearing about proposals like this always leaves me a little stunned because we have been speeding down this road for the past eight years (and let’s face it, a lot longer than that) and gas prices are still skyrocketing. These tired ideas will have no immediate effect on gasoline prices and negligible benefit in the future.

The fact of the matter is, drilling requires long lead times. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently estimated that if the ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve were lifted, oil production would not start for a full decade. Not a sound strategy for relieving pain at the pump today.

And beginning production is not a great goal either. Oil producers will not achieve maximum production until long after production begins. For the Arctic Reserve, EIA expects that if the ban is lifted in 2008, maximum production will occur in 2027. To that extent the argument for drilling grossly overstates the supposed relief that will result.

Not surprisingly, the advocates of more drilling have been conspicuously silent on the benefit that consumers might enjoy. That is because they will be small if there are any at all. Again, the EIA’s recent Arctic Reserve analysis suggests that in 2025 as production approaches its maximum, consumers will see a 3.3 cent per gallon reduction.[1] To be fair, others like Bill Scher point out that there is nearly twice the amount of oil off shore than in the Arctic Reserve. If we assume double the benefit for drilling offshore, we still get only a 6.6 cent per gallon reduction.

We should not open up pristine areas for a drop in the bucket when we have proven ways at our fingertips to save gas through efficiency and shift our focus on moving beyond oil.

The government’s own data illustrates that we simply cannot drill our way out of this problem. Instead, we need to make our transportation sector smarter and more efficient. Greater vehicle efficiency and rail and bus transit investments will not only take pressure off of world oil markets, they will also lower gas bills, which is what really matters to households.

Drilling advocates' conclusion that drilling is the best solution suggests highly pessimistic assumptions about American ingenuity and spirit.

[1] Based on comparison of motor gasoline price between Energy Information Administration Reference case and mean Arctic Reserve Case. See “Petroleum Product Price”, table 12 at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/index.html

The Roots of Our Painful Oil Addiction

2008-06-09T22:45:46Z

Hear that sound? It's the shattering of records. Oil prices rose to nearly $140 per barrel in the oil futures market, driving the national average gas price to $4 a gallon for the first time, hitting those with lower incomes hardest. And GM fell below one-fifth of U.S. vehicle sales. These are of course linked, and as my colleague Roland Hwang has written new global warming policy would help to alleviate the painful repercussions for Detroit automakers and gasoline consumers.

In addition to the current economic hardship caused by these trends, we need to keep in mind that our national security is also undermined by overdependence on this strategic commodity. A stark reminder of this fact: We are now very close to Osama Bin Laden's outlandish target price for oil about ten years ago, as my friend Anne Korin of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security reminded a Senate committee in recent testimony.

This is not news, of course. But what may surprise some readers is the history behind this Faustian bargain spans half of the twentieth century, back to a symbolically important 1945 meeting between FDR and the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud (accompanied by his slaves and an astrologer) aboard a U.S. battleship in the Suez Canal. There are no transcripts from the meeting, but this was a priority for FDR in the last months of his life because of what lies beneath the sands of the kingdom: The world's vastest reserves of petroleum.

Our entanglement with the Middle East stretches back to the eighteenth century, as historian Michael Oren documents in his masterful history Power, Faith and Fantasy. But the past six decades have been particularly costly, both in dollars and in lives.

This is the topic of an excellent, timely new documentary, Blood and Oil, which puts Hampshire College Professor Michael Klare's body of work on the screen for the first time. The historical thread he documents marches from FDR, through Truman (shown here speaking on this topic before Congress)...

...through President after President into the present.

Klare also boldly forecasts a future where conflicts over this resource spread into Africa, with the U.S. military becoming entangled there too. Klare's historical analysis is certainly bracing and enlightening, so his predictions are worth a listen.

The main takeaway lesson from the film is that we really need our elected leaders in Washington to break away from this twentieth-century pattern of slavish oil addiction. And as switchboard readers know the best way to do this is to drive down our Goliath-sized demand for this commodity. This would shore up national security, take a huge strain off our military, and give consumers a way off this gas price rollercoaster.

One final note: Thank you to the documentary producer for the stills from the film included in this blog post.

Cities Racing Against Global Warming

2008-05-29T14:03:21Z

We all love rankings. Who's up? Who's down? What would change the picture?

Today, the Brookings Institution -- a think tank -- released a first-of-a-kind ranking (full-disclosure, I was a reviewer): They rated the 100 largest U.S. regions based on their carbon footprints (since carbon dioxide is the most voluminous by far of the global warming pollutants). Media outlets across the country, as well as the AP, have reported on the study.

There are some surprising results. The top ten cities are:

Honolulu (HI)
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana (CA)
Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton (OR-WA)
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island (NY-NJ-PA)
Boise City-Nampa (ID)
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (WA)
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (CA)
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (CA)
El Paso (TX)
San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos (CA)

And the bottom ten:

Knoxville (TN)
Harrisburg-Carlisle (PA)
Oklahoma City (OK)
St. Louis (MO-IL)
Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro (TN)
Louisville (KY-IN)
Toledo (OH)
Cincinnati-Middletown (OH-KY-IN)
Indianapolis (IN)
Lexington-Fayette (KY)

The first thing that jumps out is that seven of the top ten are on the West Coast, with four from California alone. In the bottom ten, three are at least partly in Kentucky and two in Tennessee. My home region of Washington (D.C.), which is south of the Mason-Dixon line, ranks a sad 89th. So these lists seem to pit the West against the South. What's going on?

When getting under the hood of rankings, the first thing you look for is what was measured. In this case, the time span covered was 2000-2005 with focus on passenger and freight transportation and energy consumption from residential buildings. As the Brookings researchers candidly admit, this omits about half the picture: Commercial buildings, industry and other transportation modes (such as planes and transit). On the other hand, the rankings provide a fair indicator of energy use for transportation and electricity, energy-efficiency as well as dependence on fossil fuels (i.e., coal, oil, natural gas).

What are the overall findings?

Large regions stack up pretty well in terms of per capita emissions. These regions account for two-thirds of U.S. population but only 56 percent of emissions from highway transportation and residential buildings in 2005.
Carbon emissions from these sectors are also growing slower than the national average in these major metro areas: From 2000-2005, they grew 7.5 percent vs. the national rise of 9.1 percent.
There are big variations in per capita emissions among these areas. The biggest contrast is Lexington-Honolulu, where an average resident in the former is responsible for 2.5 times as much carbon emissions as the latter (in transportation alone). Notably, the biggest per capita emitters are for the most part east of the Mississippi (with many in the South, as noted above), with Oklahoma City (high-emitter) and New York City (low-emitter) standing out as exceptions.
Development patterns and rail transit access matter. Compact, smart-growth development and the existence of rail transit are decent predictors of a city's ranking.

The report ends with a host of policy recommendations. This is where the relevance to Congress becomes clear. Cities can't move up this ranking -- which I hope Brookings will revisit regularly to benchmark progress by cities -- without fundamental changes in federal policy.

The two big bills on the table are the Climate Security Act and the 2009 renewal of federal transportation policy. Presidents and legislators must shape those two policies, which will allocate hundreds of billions of public investment to various purposes, so that they help boost the efforts of cities to tackle global warming.

Getting Gas Price Relief

2008-05-20T17:03:36Z

Pulling up to the pump nowadays is about as much fun as a trip to the dentist. But is the pain we feel really worse than previous price runups? In a word, yes. The average price of gasoline has recently hit record highs, shown in inflation-adjusted terms in the graph below. The most memorable previous price jump occurred in the early 1980s due to shocks to the system courtesy of OPEC, the global oil cartel.

Price runups are mostly about crude oil as shown in the graphic below from the Department of Energy (by comparison in 2005 crude oil was 48 percent of the total).

We are now in uncharted territory in these markets, with analysts offering a variety of explanations. Regarding supply, what is clear is that in the past decade, OPEC has reasserted its ability to set prices (OPEC now controls about 40% of the market), and has adopted an explicit strategy of regulating prices. Re: Demand, what is clear is the thirst for oil is growing in industrialized countries like the U.S. and taking off in the nations where one-third of humanity resides: China, and to a lesser degree India.

As much as 90 percent of this resource belongs to national, not private, oil companies. As of 2004, the largest of them (Saudi Aramco) owned about 260 billion barrels of oil. ExxonMobil’s reserves are less than five percent of that. Small wonder that President Bush “ain’t too proud to beg” the Saudis to increase production.

What we’re overlooking is our power in the marketplace: We overshadow every other nation in oil use, accounting for about one-fourth of total world consumption. This means we have an outsized influence on prices, since we have “monopsony power” as an economist would say, which is the buyer’s equivalent to a seller’s monopoly power. This means that to tackle high prices we should turn from playing to our weak suit in the marketplace – control over supply – and trump OPEC by chipping away at our 20-million-barrel-a-day oil habit.

So how do we do that? First, we can take some commonsense -- and painless, especially compared to shelling out $4 a gallon for gas -- personal actions. NRDC has joined more than a dozen sponsors, including unusual ones (again, we’re in uncharted territory with these prices) like auto and manufacturers and even the oil industry, in a campaign called the “Drive Smarter Challenge.”

The campaign, organized by the Alliance to Save Energy, offers a series of tips for cutting gasoline use and costs. Just go to the website and type in the make, model and year of your car – and you will immediately see how much you can reduce your gasoline costs this year by adopting up to six smart driving measures. You’ll get common-sense tips, money-saving coupons, and fresh ideas that will result in less money moving from your wallet to your gas tank. For example:

Keeping your tires properly inflated improves gas mileage by around 3 percent, saving up to 20 gallons of gasoline, or almost $65.

Fixing a car that is noticeably out of tune or has failed an emissions test can improve its gas mileage by an average of 4% —saving up to 25 gallons of gasoline and up to $80. Fixing a faulty oxygen sensor can improve mileage by as much as 40% — saving up to 250 gallons of gasoline or up to $800.

You can save up to 12 gallons of gasoline per year, or almost $40, by removing an extra 100 pounds of “junk in the trunk” of your vehicle.

NRDC estimates that if every one of us took several simple steps like these we could improve gas mileage by perhaps 10-20 percent, which would reduce fuel consumption by 9-17 percent. This would save about 1.5 million barrels per day, or five times as much as the extra production from Saudi Arabia in response to the President’s plea.

These steps will buy some short-term relief. A bigger step would be to buy a hybrid if you’re in the market for a car. For example, a Toyota Camry hybrid boosts fuel economy by about a third compared to the conventional version, which assuming a gas price of $3.72 a gallon saves about 600 bucks a year. For other side-by-side comparisons go to this government web site.

As I’ve written about before, in the months and years ahead we can and must secure our energy future by doing much more to cut our oil use, among other things by adopting higher performance standards for vehicles and fuels, boosting investment in public transportation, and putting global warming pollution caps in place. Even the Administration admits that higher prices mean that proposed fuel economy standards could be ratcheted up. And freeing up states to adopt California's vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards by 2020 would also boost efficiency higher than the target set in last year’s energy bill, as my colleague David Doniger has described on his blog.

And of course key to long-term energy security is enacting the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which a new analysis shows would save more than three million barrels of oil a day by 2030 via incentives for a shift to cutting-edge technologies such as plug-in hybrid cars and clean biofuels.

Connecting the Dots: Security and Climate Change

2008-04-25T18:07:07Z

Another analysis was just released, this time by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in Britain, making the case that climate change would be a driver for serious conflict around the globe, describing among other events that as stress increases on energy and water resources nations would struggle to cope with the consequences. The author goes so far as to state that "If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries..." and that Islamic extremism could be fueled by climate-exacerbated "economic failure in North Africa."

This new report joins others with similar theses, most notably "The Age of Consequences" using Churchill's quote about the danger of inaction in World War II) from the Center for Strategic and International Studies which includes scenarios for warming including a catastrophic one with Mad-Max-style effects, and the ongoing work from the Center for Naval Analysis which has described climate change as a likely "threat multiplier."

These connections between security and climate make sense when you consider a compelling new framework for understanding the way nations evolve to be more stable and open: The J curve (see below).

The idea is elegantly simple, and creator Ian Bremmer includes a number of case studies in his book showing that it works as a method for understanding how national political and economic systems develop: When a country is very autocratic, like North Korea, it is pretty stable. As it begins to open up, as in Saudi Arabia, it slides down the stability axis. And when it hits the depths, it could either push up the right side of the curve towards more openness and stability as happened with South Africa after apartheid or it could fall of the map entirely, disintegrating as Yugoslavia did. On the far right are very open, stable societies like the U.S.

The trough is a perilous place for nations, and climate change could help plunge already unstable ones into it.

This is a new and powerful link between security and climate, joining well-developed oil-specific ones that NRDC and the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security covered in our 2005 Securing America report. It underscores, yet again, the urgent need for strong policy to help get us off oil and stabilize the climate.

No Free Ride

2008-04-18T20:31:21Z

Gas taxes, federal and state, are key revenue sources for public investments in transportation infrastructure and operations. At the federal level, the gas tax has been around since 1932, although it wasn't actually made exclusively available for transportation purposes until the 1956 Interstate Highway bill. A brief history is available here.

The federal gas tax has been the static -- at 18.4 cents a gallon -- for fifteen years now. And revenue has taken a hit in recent years with demand growth slowing down in reaction to high crude oil prices driving up gasoline prices. Consumers are buying more fuel-efficient cars (number of hybrids on the road: One million and counting) and even driving less.

The laudable policy enacted in the last energy bill should accelerate the trend towards less oil-derived fuel use by requiring manufacturers to provide more efficient car and truck choices for consumers and by ramping up production of biofuel alternatives to gasoline. And hopefully we'll see more such policy, further reducing the oil intensity of our economy.

Meanwhile, inflation has driven up costs of materials and labor needed to build and repair infrastructure. And in the case of public transportation, energy prices have driven up operating costs since buses and rail are mostly fossil-fuel-dependent.

All of this adds up to a crisis for transportation finances and funding. How to move forward?

As my friend and colleague Kaid Benfield has written, the first priority should be to make sure we make better use of scarce revenue.

Second priority should be to come up with new means of funding investments. The biggest idea out there is a shift to a mileage-based road user charge, a concept which Oregon is pioneering (fitting, since it was the first to adopt a gas tax). The state just completed a successful trial run with almost 300 participants. Advantages include the ability to use the same system for collecting revenue, i.e., charging users at the pump, and a pretty tight connection between use of infrastructure and the charge. The last is of interest to those of us concerned about climate, since the incentive will be to reduce driving which reduces global warming pollution.

A potential drawback is that vehicles would get charged the same amount, whether they are large or small, gas-guzzling or not. This, however, can be remedied as explained by Professor David Forkenbrock, one of the leading experts on this policy who is currently field-testing this idea in six regions across the country. His idea, explained in a paper presented at this year's meeting of the Transportation Research Board, is to vary the fee charged not just by mileage but based on the type of vehicle.

He also proposes charging more based on congestion. This is another pricing idea that Switchboard readers have read about before thanks to Rich Kassel, who has been championing the cause in NYC. And again, this is of interest to those of us concerned about the environment because it provides a disincentive for driving and therefore pollution.

On the investment side, regardless of the pricing mechanism(s), revenue must go to build more energy-efficient transportation alternatives for consumers, in lieu of driving.

The bottom line, as Fred Hiatt said in a Washington Post op ed about the recent setback for congestion pricing, is that new ways of pricing roads are inevitable. And it's up to you and me, and others who care about the environment, to make sure that they cut pollution.

50 Simple Things

2008-04-15T22:59:47Z

I cut my teeth on environmental work volunteering with the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) back in 1991. This was in the wake of 1990, a remarkable time which included the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, Congress amending the Clean Air Act, and SEAC hitting a high watermark by bringing 7,000 students from 50 states to the huge Catalyst conference at the University of Illinois.

1990 was also the year that a cool book chock-full of advice for protecting the environment sold like hotcakes: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Earth, self-published by John Javna and Julie Bennett.

Now, thanks to the hard work of the original author and his two teenaged kids Sophie and Jesse, this classic has been updated, enhanced and published under the same memorable title.

As a newly-minted father, I was touched by his rationale for launching this project, as he described it in the introduction:

"In 2006, my 13-year-old daughter, Sophie, started to become environmentally aware. She began asking why we didn't compost anymore...and why I didn't bring cloth bags to the supermarket. One day, I started to tell her why it didn't matter [John had become disillusioned since 1990] --why all the well-meaning recycling in the universe wouldn't stop global warming. But I stopped in mid-sentence. It was weird--I found myself staring, literally, into the eyes of the next generation, the person I had written my book for years before she'd been born. It dawned on me that I couldn't afford to be cynical-- I had to keep trying because I love this planet.

That epiphany was the genesis of the book you're holding in your hands. It's a father's effort to reclaim the Earth for his children, and yours."

The book as re-conceived has 50 specific issues, and progress with resolving each would have a big effect. And there is a partner with whom readers can collaborate on each issue. Some partners are small, like Seacology and Eco-Cycle, while others are big like Sierra Club and -- I'm honored to say -- NRDC.

NRDC, specifically our Move America Beyond Oil project, is the partner for #20: Too Much Gas! which calls for saving gasoline and therefore oil.

As the piece we helped John to write makes clear, and as I've written about before, getting higher fuel economy standards as we did in last year's energy bill is a good start, but there's a lot more we can do. Individually, we can inflate our tires, tune our engines, avoid idling, and take other measures. In terms of policy, the federal government must stop obstructing California and other states from moving forward with standards that will cut more pollution and save more gas, as my colleague David Doniger has discussed on these pages.

The book offers practical suggestions like these for saving gas and provides interesting background and facts on this and a host of other important environmental issues. John and his kids deserve huge kudos for this production, and I urge you to check it out and to track this issue on NRDC's new web page designed specifically for our partnership with the Javnas.

Just Plane Wrong

2008-04-14T22:44:52Z

I love to fly.

No surprise, given my upbringing as a "global nomad" or a "third culture kid" who grew up in a half-dozen countries, attending 7 different schools from K-12. In fact, one of the books I'm reading now is a fascinating exploration of what that our lives feel like (since it is not as rare as you might think): The Global Soul, in which skilled scribe Pico Iyers chronicles his visits to people and places, seeing them afresh as if the entire world is a foreign land.

However, flying in today's world faces a problem: It is a relatively intense fossil energy user, and therefore carbon emitter, and its emissions are growing rapidly. That's why the Select Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence asked me to testify at a hearing about this sector cleverly named "From the Wright Brothers to the Right Solutions: Curbing Soaring Aviation Emissions."

In my testimony, I walk through demand-side issues, including the fact that -- unlike our cars and trucks -- aviation has done a pretty good job of increasing fuel economy of air travel, increasing it by some 70 percent in 40 years. This is in part due to higher efficiency of aircraft and operations. However, the trend of saving energy has slowed in recent years, so there's definitely room for further improvement. For example, we need more planes like Boeing's brand-new 787 which will consume 20 percent less fuel than comparable planes, and air traffic control is in desperate need of overhaul to reap the fuel-savings from more efficient routing thanks to satellite-based navigation. And there is also room for a shift from planes to trains for short-haul trips, which will ease congestion at airports and on the sector generally and provide a much needed boost for rail in this country.

But the big problem is with supply of energy for this sector. The Air Force is driving hard to get a liquid coal industry off the ground, to provide a substitute for increasingly costly conventional-oil-derived jet fuel. But liquefying coal, as I've written about before, is a bad bargain: It may slake our thirst for transportation fuel, but at tremendous cost and environmental consequences. Just for starters, it is about twice as carbon-intensive as conventional fuel.

On top of the substantive problems, as a practical matter the Air Force is responsible for less that two percent of the total market, and as a report commissioned by the Department of Defense (DoD) itself found, "DoD is not a sufficiently large customer to drive the domestic market for demand and consumption of fossil fuel alternatives..."

There are better approaches to aviation as we enter carbon-constrained airspace, some of which are covered by my friend Tom Collina in a recent op ed which also explains why global warming is a national security concern. As Tom writes, low-carbon substitutes such as sustainable biofuels are a better alternative.

Better still is driving down the energy intensity of the sector further through more efficient technology and air traffic management, shifting some goods and people movement to oil-efficient rail, and freeing up energy for aviation by moving the rest of the transportation sector -- which after all consumes nearly 90 percent of the fuel -- beyond oil via more efficiency and low-carbon substitutes. EPA can help steer the course toward good outcomes such as these, and in fact NRDC and others have petitioned the Administrator to take action to cut global warming pollution from aviation.

And then we can all rest easier when we board a plane, knowing aviation has a smart flight plan for a carbon-constrained world.

Pulling Out ALL the Stops

2008-02-26T22:57:52Z

A New York City blog saw me quoted in the Wall Street Journal on February 5th talking about the need to face pollution caused by ever-increasing driving of our cars and trucks.

As I told the reporter, there is growing interest among environmental groups, which makes sense in the wake of the success (finally!) of the multi-year struggle to boost average fuel economy of our vehicle fleet.

While I appreciate the passion about the need to address how much we drive, I want to re-emphasize what I've said here and here, among other places: Scaling up our response so that it's proportional to the epochal challenge posed by our combustion of liquid fossil fuel in transportation requires more efficient vehicle tech, cleaner energy as well as less traffic on our roads.

The next best time to tackle the last item, as I told Joe White at the Wall Street Journal, is in the federal transportation bill. This juggernaut, up for renewal in 2009, will invest hundreds of billions of dollars of federal gas tax revenue in plans and projects.

This infrastructure is the hardwiring that helps determine whether transportation helps or hinders our efforts to tackle climate change. One way to think of this is to compare a highway to a coal-fired power plant. Both will be around for decades, and both yield huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution on a daily basis. We need to avoid locking in a high-pollution future via federal transportation investments.

I've worked on the issue of better investment of our tax dollars at NRDC and elsewhere, a necessary if insufficient means to provide Americans with more transportation choices so we aren't forced to spend so much of our day in traffic.

Happy that others care about this passionately too.

Energy Strategy? What Energy Strategy?

2008-02-20T18:34:46Z

Oil prices hit $100 a barrel again yesterday due to market jitters, a move that will translate into more pain for struggling consumers. This is in part due to unfortunate, hard-to-control factors, notably supply cutoff threats from Hugo Chavez and a refinery explosion in Texas.

But there's no denying that as a country we have made ourselves especially vulnerable to such incidents. How so? By abdicating the responsibility to adopt a national energy strategy aimed at reducing our overwhelming dependence on production of a resource that largely lies underground in other nations.

I had the privilege of going to lunch with a military leader yesterday who had the perfect perspective on our nation's self-imposed predicament. He quoted Sun Tzu: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

The International Energy Agency (IEA) indicted this approach in a new publication reviewing U.S. energy policies. Among other findings, they noted that:

A fundamental problem is the absence of a clear link at the federal policy level between energy, environmental and security policies. While individual policies and measures address aspects of each of these three fundamental requirements, they are not consistent, and the United States energy policy as a whole is not doing well at balancing the three Es of economic development, energy supply security, and environmental protection. This lack of a balanced policy is contributing to the continued high and growing dependence on fossil fuels, a situation that is almost unique among IEA member countries, which in turn contributes to increasing import dependence, and worsening the environmental impacts of energy use. These two issues are interdependent, and addressing the environmental impact of energy use, in particular reducing the emissions of CO2, will automatically help lower the growing import dependence of the United States. (emphasis mine)

A short, more scathing assessment of the new fuel economy standards is also in there:

The IEA commends the decision by the US government and congress to pass the Energy Bill in December 2007, and with it the significant increase in CAFÉ (the corporate average fuel economy) standards. But it comes after almost two decades of inaction on this front, and the final standards will not be achieved before 2020. Given the technologies being implemented in vehicles today, it is doubtful whether such a long time-frame is really necessary to allow carmakers to adapt and it will leave consumers with vehicles that fall short of the technological possibilities. (emphasis mine)

These words and $100 a barrel oil are a wake-up call, requiring actions like the ones I wrote about in an Op Ed piece this past weekend.

Here's hoping that the next set of leaders that we send to Washington, D.C. to run things heed the call, because we literally can't afford to be asleep at the wheel anymore.

The Passing of In Business

2008-01-29T15:49:56Z

It's a tough time for print media, with unrelenting competitive pressures from proliferating alternatives for getting news and information on television and online. The magazine In Business: Creating Sustainable Enterprises and Communities became the latest casualty, closing its doors after nearly thirty years in operation.

I subscribed ten years ago, and learned about the activities of socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurs across the country. I learned about new concepts like thinker Bill McDonough's "cradle-to-cradle" vision for closing production loops, putting waste into new products rather than landfills. I learned about application of this concept in eco-industrial parks and deconstruction rather than demolition of old buildings (a much more useful process than the "deconstruction" I learned about in Philosophy classes). I learned about New Urbanism and ecotourism. I even had the privilege, thanks to support from ever-generous editors Jerry and Nora Goldstein, of writing a few articles for In Business.

What distinguished the magazine is that it focussed on small- and large-scale ways to do good and make good. Business trends and activities in the magazine varied from the work of committed activists to save the first Community Service Agriculture farm in Massachusetts, a modest 17 acres worth protecting, to the multimillion-dollar chocolate bar company that protects endangered species, to a cool nationwide trend of reusing abandoned buildings downtown as art studios. In Business was a one-stop shopping place for stories about innovative business ventures that ran the gamut in terms of scale.

While I look forward to receiving its sister publication, the better-known BioCycle, I will now have to hunt down other means to learn what's new in the world of sustainable business. Huge kudos to Jerry, Nora and the staff and advisers at JG Press for running such a useful publication for nearly thirty years. I will miss it.

Algae-Powered Airplanes?

2008-01-23T22:16:09Z

At the end of last year, NRDC joined the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth and Oceana in petitioning EPA to address heat-trapping emissions from aircraft. While its contribution to global warming pollution is small relative to surface transportation vehicles (cars, trucks and heavy trucks), it has an important role given interest among some in the industry -- and even moreso in the Air Force -- in dirtier alternatives to jet fuel from conventional oil.

Thankfully, a daring entrepreneur with a lot of pull is heading in the right direction. Lord Branson plans to fly a plane from London to Amsterdam powered in part by biofuel.

One might ask: What kind of biofuel, and where will it come from? Virgin Atlantic and Boeing, partners in the initiative, aren't saying. This is fueling speculation about a particularly intriguing option: Biofuel using algae as a feedstock, which has been written about before among other places in the pages of In Business magazine.

To learn more, read this great piece by Bruce Falconer for Mother Jones online, "Virgin Airlines: Powered by Pond Scum?"

Setting the Record Straight, Again

2008-01-17T21:53:03Z

"A groundless rumor often covers a lot of ground."
- Anonymous

An old claim has been brought to my attention again. Hybrids pollute more than Hummers because of one component: The battery. Not believable, and definitely not true!

The best tool for debunking rumors like this is Argonne National Lab’s GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) Model. The respected Society of Automotive Engineers dubbed it the “gold standard” model for analyzing vehicles and fuels.

Argonne juxtaposed comparable internal combustion and hybrid cars, and did indeed find that the latter will yield slightly more global warming pollution in the manufacturing process. BUT – production accounts for a mere 10-20% of a vehicle’s lifetime emissions profile. Far more important is 15 years of driving, the average for cars. Take that into account, and you find that a regular car's lifetime emissions are nearly TWICE those of a hybrid.

The “regular car” in this example gets 25 mpg. Since the Hummer is lucky to hit double-digits in mpg its lifetime heat-trapping pollution eclipses the hybrid's.

Thanks to my colleague Luke Tonachel for passing along this analysis, and for adding some points to keep in mind when considering environmental downsides of batteries:

All cars use batteries and the elements for those batteries, whether lead in conventional vehicles or nickel in today’s hybrids, are mined. Mining is not without environmental problems.
Lead is more pervasive and therefore more toxic than nickel.
Nickel batteries, like lead batteries, can be recycled.
The use of nickel metal hydride batteries enables the hybrid car to exist because lead batteries would be too big and heavy to provide the same performance in a hybrid that they have today.
Nickel batteries will soon by transitioning to lithium batteries. Lithium batteries can be even more environmentally benign. Lithium is not toxic and lithium batteries can pack more power into each pound of cell than nickel metal hybrid batteries, enabling cars to use more clean electrical energy and less gasoline without weighing down the vehicle further. Some cars in Japan already have lithium batteries and they will likely be in US vehicles in the next couple of years.

Denial – It ain’t just a river in Egypt

2008-01-16T18:02:19Z

As I’ve written about before, confronting the scale of our oil addiction – 21 million barrels consumed daily, and increasing – requires many steps. Congress and the President signed an energy bill that makes a dent via boosts in fuel-efficiency and shifts to substitutes. But it’s just a start, since it will save less than ten percent of projected oil consumption in 2020.

And this week there’s evidence that denial is once again flowing through Washington.

As required by the pork-barrel $300-billion transportation bill passed in 2005, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission released its report on the future of the system of roads, rail and bike/pedestrian paths supported with your federal tax dollars. This is the first major salvo in the transportation bill debate.

There are laudable ideas in the report including creative ideas for financing transportation and a commitment to oil-efficient trains, as noted by the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) in a statement, and as my friend Michael Replogle of Environmental Defense (ED) rightly states the report attempts to grapple with the fact that the “system is broke and broken” in part by supporting fundamental reforms as well as innovative ways of financing the system which would reduce pollution.

But in terms of the environmental implications – most notably heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions due to oil consumption – it misses the mark. First, the report claims to cover three legs of a stool. The first leg? Speeding up environmental reviews, so-called “streamlining” or as I call it, “steamrolling”. This issue came up during transportation bill fights in 1998 and 2005. Based on my research on this issue -- I testified about a streamlining bill back in ’02 -- I can attest to the fact that project delays are mostly due to other factors (inadequate funding and poor project design among others), and that the way to steer clear of environmental controversy is to get the public MORE involved by investing in more outreach as well as high-tech tools for showing what a completed project looks like. The fact that this is one-third of the proposed legislative reform program is, frankly, ludicrous.

As noted by NARP and ED the other two legs have redeeming traits including innovative pricing mechanisms (tolling, congestion pricing) that should help reduce pollution, a commitment to intercity passenger rail, a recognition of the need for tackling freight movement, some additional funding (but only two percent more than in the current program) explicitly devoted to environmentally beneficial programs, as well as important (albeit vague) promises to address metropolitan area concerns and the dearth of solid performance standards for transportation programs.

But the report has already been tarred for its most controversial recommendation buried towards the end of the report (but not missed by the press): a 40-cent-a-gallon gas tax hike. And this recommendation bookending those for environmental streamlining, neatly sum up what’s wrong with the entire thing. Streamlining assumes that faster is necessarily better. A big gas tax hike assumes that more is necessarily better. Both assumptions are wrong.

I agree with the commission that we need a leap of progress beyond the last two “echo-TEA” bills, which stuck with the framework of 1991’s landmark Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). To achieve it, the next bill must address the climate challenge, which is barely mentioned in the report. It must address the oil-addiction challenge, which is only mentioned as part of an energy security partnership with the Energy Department to develop alternative fuels. It must address the challenge of suburban sprawl, which chews up open space, threatens water quality, and puts a strain on public infrastructure budgets. And it must provide Americans with more transportation choices, so that when you and I walk out our front doors to run an errand or commute we aren’t constrained to one option – driving our car or truck -- as is the case in the vast majority of U.S. neighborhoods.

To do this, the bill must commit to a key metric, which is a must-have if we are to kick the oil habit and solve the climate threat: It must slow, stop and reverse the growth in vehicle miles of travel, which have been inching steadily upward for decades now.

Can’t be done without negatively affecting consumers and the economy? Not so. Portland, Oregon, a thriving metropolitan area, is doing it. And there’s an analogous feat that seemed impossible, or at least improbable, just a few decades ago: Decoupling energy consumption from economic growth. National energy intensity of the economy has been dropping since the 1970s. And some states – notably California – prove that this trend can (and should) be accelerated using public policy, without ill effects for the economy.

The transportation law expires next fall. Now is the time to sift the wheat from the chaff in reports like this, and use the former to help build a new, better, transformative program.