They’re undermining us again?

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee voting through a provision that would kill the U.S. military’s ambitious biofuels program. Last night, the Senate Armed Services Committee did the same, and worse. It voted not only to block purchase of any fuel more expensive than fossil fuels, but to “prohibit the construction of a biofuels refinery or any other facility or infrastructure used to refine biofuels unless the requirement is specifically authorized by law.” Congress micromanaging military energy strategy: What could go wrong?

“But David,” you’re saying, “Democrats have a majority in the Senate. The committee has 14 Democrats and only 12 Republicans. How could this happen?”

Jim Webb (D-Va.)

Check out the list of Dems on the committee. It’s a Who’s Who of cravens, warmongers, and preening faux centrists — some of the most reliably disappointing Dems in the Senate. But last night, only two of them voted against energy security and the best judgment of U.S. military leaders. (It goes without saying that every Republican voted against innovation; it’s now reflexive for them.) The two Dems flipped the final vote [PDF] 13-12 in favor of overriding the military.

Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)

What ostensible Democrats had the vindictiveness, myopia, and dishonor necessary? Why, Jim Webb (Va.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), of course. Webb has long been a big booster of oil and coal, but voting to constrain military strategy in the name of preventing competitors to fossil fuels is low even for him. Manchin is, by all accounts, just dumb as a box of hair. His close election in 2010 convinced him that to survive he has to lunge right at every opportunity, so he lunges with abandon. He’d probably shoot a pool of algae with a rifle if his brain trust told him to. Above all, he is a servant of the coal industry, which needs to block biofuels as way to bully the military into using expensive and polluting coal-to-liquid fuels.

James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Webb and Manchin, self-serving jerk and belligerent dunce, find their mirror image in the leaders of this backroom Republican insurgency against U.S. military policy: Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Inhofe’s against clean energy because ARGLE BARGLE. McCain, though, used to be in favor. He used to talk about climate change quite a bit. Proposed a bill or two on the subject, as I recall. But ever since he lost to Obama, he has been increasingly bitter.

John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Now he says, “Adopting a ‘green agenda’ for national defense of course is a terrible misplacement of priorities” and “the president doesn’t understand national security.” National security, to an overcompensating narcissist like John McCain, means war, threatening war, or doing something “tough” to show the world we’re ready for war. He doesn’t see how using less oil fits into that.

It is an unbelievable rebuke and insult to military leaders for Republicans in Congress to do this, but then again, Republicans in Congress have always had more fealty to fossil fuels than the military. Just imagine what will happen after November 2012!

The bill — the Pentagon budget for next year — still has to pass on the floor of the House and Senate, and then go to conference committee, and then to the president’s desk. At any of those junctures, these amendments could be stripped out. But things aren’t looking good so far.

Fill ‘er up — with biofuels? (Photo by U.S. Army Africa)

The U.S. military’s “going green” is not a singular phenomenon. There are several different things going on under that rubric, with different rationales and different effects. Some of them make such obvious strategic, economic, and environmental sense that no one really can, or does, oppose them. But one in particular — the biofuels initiative — is much less clear-cut. Before discussing that, though, let’s try to pick apart and categorize the green initiatives underway at the Department of Defense.

First off, there are attempts to reduce fossil-fuel use in the theater of war, mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, through more efficiency (insulated tents, LED lights) and the use of distributed renewables. These efforts directly enhance battlefield effectiveness. They make fighting units lighter and faster. They reduce the need for fuel convoys, saving lives and money. They are unimpeachable — even Republicans in Congress will hesitate to second-guess the military’s tactical logistics decisions.

Second, there are attempts to make U.S. military bases more independent of civilian power grids, which are vulnerable to accidents, blackouts, or attacks. In part this is being done by generating power on-site. Solar power for bases has become far more affordable, thanks to plummeting solar-panel prices, but there are also experiments underway with wind, geothermal, and biomass. Bases are also increasing energy and waste efficiency and experimenting with smart microgrids. These efforts seem somewhat more vulnerable to political attack, but I’ve not yet heard of any.

Third, there are efforts to find new liquid fuels for the military’s vast land, air, and water fleets. This one is the biggie, from the standpoint of sheer quantities of energy and money. It’s the most difficult. And it’s also the most controversial, in terms of Republican opposition and environmental risk.

There’s been work on hybrid military ground vehicles, but as far as I know, there’s no prospect of electricity substantially powering ships, planes, and tanks. There’s also very little being done on natural-gas vehicles for the military, at least that I’ve been able to find.

So that means biofuels. A lot of biofuels. Mind-boggling amounts.

Thus far, the military has been careful to avoid biofuel crops that compete with food crops, which are, as all good Grist readers know, a bane — and, climate-wise, not much better than gasoline. Instead, it is trying to stimulate markets in biofuel alternatives like cooking oil, algae, animal fats, and camelina.

It’s a fascinating and laudable effort, but there are two potential problems. First, all these alternatives are wildly expensive. (The algae fuel is $424 a gallon!) That’s to be expected — they’re all experimental. The military’s theory is that it represents a big enough customer to single-handedly create a market sufficient to drive down the cost to competitive levels.

That’s not entirely crazy. The military is the country’s biggest energy consumer: “In fiscal year 2009, the DOD consumed 932 trillion Btu of site delivered energy at a cost of 13.3 billion dollars.” Roughly three-quarters of that went to “mobility fuels” for the fleets. That’s close to $10 billion a year, or, put another way, 360,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s not enormous on a global level — only about 2 percent of U.S. consumption — but it seems large enough to provide biofuels with a serious kickstart. Innovation is never certain, but the military is going about it in a smart way, from labs to field tests.

Still, fuel costs are squeezing DOD’s budget today (see this new briefing from Third Way). Driving down the costs of biofuel alternatives fast enough, at a large enough scale, would be a stunning and, as far as I know, unprecedented achievement.

Which brings up the other possible problem, which is, what if the effort succeeds? It’s one thing to brew a few hundred thousand gallons of algae fuel. It’s another entirely to brew several billion gallons every year. Is there enough cooking oil in all the world’s McDonalds for that much fuel? Enough space to grow that much camelina? These fuels appear benign in their current small-batch phase, but if they were to scale up that much, that fast, it’s hard to say what kind of environmental or social problems might crop up.

Also, the main problem with oil, from a military strategic standpoint, is not so much anything about oil itself, but just the fact that it so dominates the fuel mix. The military is dependent on a single, volatile supply chain over which it has little control. The best move from a strategic standpoint is to diversify. But what if, at the end of all this, the military just ends up dependent on one or two forms of biofuel, with volatile supply chains of their own?

Even if those fuel supply chains are domestic — even if, by some miracle, enough non-food biofuel can be produced within the U.S. to fuel the military — is it really healthy to have the military so dependent on one or two domestic industries? Those would become industries that, for national-security reasons, can’t be allowed to fail or even substantially shrink. They’d be one more addition to the military-industrial complex, one more advocate for military expansion. It’s a recipe for corruption.

None of this is to say that congressional Republicans are right and DOD should just scrap the whole thing. But it is to say that the biofuels initiative is different from the other military “greening” initiatives, more economically and environmentally fraught. Getting lighter and faster on the battlefield saves money and lives; it is self-justifying. Making military bases more self-sufficient is self-evidently a smart strategic move. But shifting from oil to biofuels on a grand scale is a huge, audacious, expensive, and extremely risky gamble. It absolutely warrants close oversight and public discussion.

Photo by the U.S. Army.

The U.S. military recognizes that dependence on fossil fuels is a threat to U.S. strategic influence and its own operational effectiveness. With that in mind, it’s trying to make itself lighter and leaner, reducing energy consumption at bases and on the battlefield while working to develop fuel alternatives for its ship and plane fleets. Republicans have been quietly grumbling about this for a while; now they are openly opposing it. The GOP wastes no opportunity to boast of “supporting the troops,” but that support apparently ends where Big Oil contributions begin.

Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?

GOP tries to block use of cleaner fuels

Last week, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee proposed a new Pentagon budget. Tucked away inside it was a provision that would prohibit the Department of Defense from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than conventional fossil fuels. TPM has the story.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan laments that this provision would kill the $12 million “Green Strike Group” program the Navy is running, which would field a strike group running entirely on biofuels (and a nuclear-powered carrier) for a naval exercise in June. The Navy hopes to have an entire “Great Green Fleet” in the water by 2016.

But the language is far broader than that. It would effectively prohibit military field-testing of any non-fossil fuel. After all, if alternatives were already cheaper than fossil fuels, they wouldn’t be alternatives. The Air Force couldn’t experiment with fuel blends for its jets. The Army couldn’t fuel its “Green Warrior Convoy.” This provision would explicitly ban the military from being an instrument of energy innovation.

GOP tries to push use of dirtier fuel

But wait! There is one expensive alternative fuel that congressional Republicans support. You see, Section 526 of 2007′s Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the military from buying fuel that is more carbon-intensive than crude oil. Earlier this month, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) offered an amendment to an appropriations bill, later passed by the House, that would bar the military from enforcing Sec. 526.

Why, you ask? “Placing limits on federal agencies’ fuel choices,” says Flores, “is an unacceptable precedent to set in regard to America’s energy policy and independence.”

Yes, I’ll let that irony sink in a moment.

Why are Republicans so keen to get rid of Sec. 526? Are there dirtier-but-cheaper fuels the military could be using?

Well, no. Instead, Republicans have seized on the idea of using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to liquid fuel (a technology made famous by Hitler — don’t tell the Heartland Institute). Building a plant to do this requires enormous capital investment, running one requires enormous operational and maintenance investments, and the result is … fuel more expensive than oil. This is to say nothing of the fact that it requires mining and transporting coal on the front end and releases up to 2.5 times as much CO2 as oil when burned.

So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.

If you were cynical, you’d almost think that the issue had nothing to do with Congress’s relationship with the military, or with costs. You’d almost think Republicans just support fossil fuels and oppose clean energy, no matter the context.

Photo by Eric Tastad.

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is incredibly illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Manufacturing jobs return on the wind, with bipartisan support

Since then, Newton has turned itself around, in no small part by attracting several wind-turbine manufacturers, including Trinity Structural Towers and TPI Composites.

It’s not an unusual story in Iowa, which is a leading wind-power state. Almost 19 percent of the state’s power came from wind in 2011 and the industry employs some 6,000-7,000 Iowans. According to wind industry estimates, since the state passed a renewable energy standard in 1983, some $5 billion in wind investment has flooded the state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Over the last eight (!) years at Grist, I have written a great deal about what humanity is doing wrong — in particular, those bits of humanity that live in the United States, and even more particularly, those humanoids who run, fund, or otherwise influence the federal government, known these days as the World Headquarters of Fail. I’ve covered climate change, resource shortages, air pollutants and other unpriced externalities, political dysfunction, bad policy, media irresponsibility, social alienation, and bad television. It’s been a veritable Festival of Fail.

Meanwhile, over the last eight (seriously, eight?) years, I have also frequently mentioned the intense need these days for positive visions of the future — what is being done right, and could be done right, rather than just what’s going wrong. Indeed, a recent post concluded thusly: “In the meantime, the job is to define a new American way of life for young people, so when they take over they won’t view Walmart as akin to church.”

A couple of years ago, I started agitating for Grist to start painting that picture of a positive future. I wanted us to move beyond the tales of defilement and degradation that readers have come to expect from “environmental media” and into something more forward-looking, wide-ranging, optimistic, and, well, helpful. I even wrote a rather turgid internal memo on the matter, the theme of which was that Grist should turn its gaze toward “a future that makes sense.” OK, we as a society are doing it wrong. What would it mean to do it right, to stay within carbon and other resource limits while enjoying a high quality of life?

Since then, in my humble opinion, Grist has done fantastic work in this vein. We’re covering bike culture, livable neighborhoods, urban agriculture, sharing economies, distributed energy, and many other ways people in America today are trying to live better, more sustainable lives. There’s much more that we could do, but we’re moving in the right direction.

It has come to my attention, however, that even as I advocate for a bright-green focus on the future, I continue right on with my own dark-green bitching and moaning about the dysfunctions of the present; indeed, that I’m a giant hypocrite.

In that spirit, my editor has challenged me to put up or shut up on the future-that-makes-sense business. So I’m going to start writing about it regularly, at least once a week or so. I expect to be groping my way forward in the dark (even more than usual!), so my hope is that readers will approach the noodling in a spirit of charity and be moved to join in the discussion.

I’ll be gathering this stuff up in bits and pieces over the next little while, but just a few scene-setting comments.

Young People These Days (YPTD) in the U.S. are emerging from college and starting their adult lives in grim circumstances: a terrible economy, high unemployment, huge student loan debt, stagnant middle-class wages, rising health-care costs, and widening income inequality. The notion that America is in decline has been rather exaggerated, but there’s no denying the cloud hanging over the younger generation.

A great deal of it can be explained by the state of the economy, which affects poll numbers on all sorts of other issues. But I believe there’s also something deeper going on, a sense among young people that America has lost a sense of its collective aspiration. It has lost its future.

There’s an intense conservative grassroots movement in the U.S. fighting for an imagined 1950s status quo. The left in the U.S., such as it is, often seems to be fighting for nothing more than a competing status quo, the late-20th century U.S. welfare state. There is very little shared cultural understanding of what will (or should) come next, even among those subcultures prone to ponder such things.

YPTD — the folks coming up just behind my old ass, basically — represent the first generations who have spent their entire lives online. They are accustomed to radically transparent, egalitarian, meritocratic networks in which any idea (“meme”) can catch on and spread, regardless of the source, in which a geeky kid can have a good idea and almost immediately become famous or rich, in which anyone can learn anything and connect with anyone, in which there is virtually no barrier to entry to becoming a creator or entrepreneur. It is Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere put, literally, into our hands.

When these young people emerge from college into the job market, start building homes and families, or engage in the political system, they encounter a world that is, in many ways, the opposite of the one they grew up in. Our civic institutions are withered, our political institutions bloated, hierarchical, opaque, and acutely responsive to class and ethnic privilege. These institutions, left over from the 20th century, do not make sense to YPTD — especially the vanguard, the cultural creatives.

What are they doing about it? Much of what we think of today as social activism or liberalism grew out of the culture clashes of the ’60s. The counterculture stood outside the gates of the institutions, shouting, marching, and threatening to bring it all down. The backlash has continued ever since.

My sense is that YPTD are not particularly attracted to that model, or to the kind of identity politics that liberalism fractured into afterward. YPTD don’t want to be on the outside looking in. They have spent their lives empowered; they expect to infiltrate institutions and transform them from the inside. They expect to take over. And they don’t seem inclined to join issue-based groups at the same rates as their parents. (The average membership age of the big green groups has been rising for years.) To be online these days is to author an identity through bricolage. Sustainability is a piece of the puzzle for many people, but comparatively few identify as “environmentalists,” partly, I think, because it’s reductionist. I believe in social justice and beauty and humor, but I’m not an -ist for any of them.

Getting to a future that makes sense is not primarily about critique or protest. It’s about imagination, innovation, and hard work. There’s tons of stuff to build. Creating those new social, economic, and technological models does not necessarily look like what we’re used to thinking of as activism, but it is part of the effort, which is far larger than any issue-based movement or lobbying group, larger than politics, larger than any one generation.

I’d like Grist to help illuminate new thinking and new models, spread the success stories, show how various efforts link up. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like. But it will not be “environmental journalism” and Grist won’t be an “environmental website.” But what will it be, and what will we be? I don’t know that there’s a good name for it. I just know it when I see it. There’s something happening out there, something taking shape. We’ll do our best to help it along and bring it to light.

Going solar in Afghanistan. (Photo by U.S. Marine Corps)

This is my contribution to a dialogue on the military and clean energy being hosted by National Journal.

—

To understand the promise of renewable energy for the U.S. military, it helps to start as far from Washington, D.C., as possible. (This is true for most forms of understanding.) Start far from the politicians, even from the military brass, far from the rooms where big-money decisions are made, far out on the leading edge of the conflict, with a small company of Marines in Afghanistan’s Sangin River Valley.

Not long ago, for a three-day mission out of a forward operating base in Afghanistan, each Marine would have humped between 20 and 35 pounds of batteries. One of the reasons Marines are so lethal in such small numbers today is that they are constantly connected by radios and computers. But radios and computers require a constant supply of batteries, brought by convoy over some of the deadliest roads on earth and then piled on the backs of Marines in highly kinetic environments.

In late 2010, India Company, from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, tried something new. They packed Solar Portable Alternative Communications Energy Systems, or SPACES — flexible solar panels, 64 square inches, that weigh about 2.5 pounds each. One 1st Lieutenant from India 3/5 later boasted that his patrol shed 700 pounds.

“We stayed out for three weeks,” he said, “and didn’t need a battery resupply once.”

This is a small example, of no great economic or geostrategic significance, yet it carries a profound lesson. It is a lesson that, in the unfolding age of energy insecurity, can be expressed as something like a universal law: reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness.

The U.S. Marine Corps prides itself on being the U.S. military’s ship-to-shore expeditionary force — light, fast, and lethal, able to deploy quickly and operate autonomously in hostile or austere circumstances. So they have been the most sensitive to the chafing restrictions of what Gen. James Mattis, a Marine commander in the first Iraq war, famously called the “tether of fuel.”

That tether, the convoys crisscrossing Iraq and Afghanistan, not only slows the Marines and restricts their range of motion, it also gets them killed — one killed or wounded for each 50 convoys or so. And it is wildly expensive. By the time fuel is convoyed up through Pakistan or down through Russia, over the Hindu Kush mountains or across the Amu Darya river, and out from the big bases to the forward bases, sometimes on helicopter, fuel that costs the Marines $3 a gallon at the pump can reach a “fully burdened cost” of as high as $400 a gallon. It’s fair to say that Marines running diesel generators at forward operating bases in Afghanistan are using some of the most expensive fuel in the world.

With that in mind, Marines are field testing insulated tents, portable solar panels, LED lights, and systems to purify and cool local water. I reported on their efforts for a story in Outside last year, and every source I spoke to had the same thing to say: There may be some grumbling about the energy effort in the middle ranks, from officers set in their ways, but among young Marines on the front lines, and among the brass in the top ranks, there is nothing but enthusiasm.

It isn’t about “greening” anything or cooling the climate. “Other people are busy saving the planet; this is about saving Marine lives,” Col. Bob Charette, director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said recently. “I’d kiss a polar bear if it meant getting one Marine off an IED-filled highway.”

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has said that both the Navy and Marines will reduce fossil-fuel consumption by half by 2020. The Army and Air Force have also adopted aggressive goals. The military gets it: Reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness. It’s not only true in the theater of war. It’s true for the great military fleets at sea and in the sky. It’s true for military bases in the U.S. or across the world, dependent on civilian power grids subject to attacks or blackouts.

And it’s not just true for the military. In a time of rising fossil-fuel prices and increasingly apparent climate dangers, the tether of fuel binds all of us — homes, businesses, communities, and whole economies — to a future of vulnerability and instability. Using less energy and generating more of our own is about more than dollars spent or saved. It’s about self-determination. That makes for a more effective military and a more secure, productive society.

Photo by Takver.

Yesterday, I wrote about the issue of public land in the Powder River Basin being leased to coal companies for cheap, so they can strip-mine it and sell the coal abroad at an enormous profit.

Also yesterday, the feds held a “competitive lease sale” for the South Porcupine Tract, which contains almost 402 million tons of mineable coal.

Guess how many companies bid in this “competitive auction”? One: Peabody Coal, the company that filed the original application [PDF] for the lease.

This was actually the second auction for the tract. The first ended with no sale because BLM rejected Peabody’s lowball offer of $0.90 a ton. The winning price in Thursday’s sale? $1.11 per ton.

Again: $1.11 per ton.

The price of a ton of Powder River Basin coal on U.S. spot markets? $9.15 per ton, as of May 11.

The price of a ton of coal exported to China? It averaged $97.28 per ton [PDF] in 2011. It’s now up to $123 per ton.

And exports are only likely to go up:

So, to summarize: You, the U.S. taxpayer, just leased another huge chunk of your land to Peabody Coal at $1.11 per ton of coal. Peabody will strip-mine that land and take the coal to China, where it will sell it for over $100 per ton. Peabody pockets enormous profits*, the U.S. taxpayer gets devastated land, and China accelerates global warming.

And it’s all being pushed through by the Obama administration.

Happy Friday.

——

* Now, obviously, $1.11 per ton is not the sum total of Peabody’s costs. They also pay BLM some production royalties and rental fees. And of course it costs them money to mine the coal and ship it to China! Nevertheless, the notion that $1.11 per ton is “fair market value” for coal that Peabody is going to tell for over $100 a ton is a sad joke.

Why are we handing Big Coal our bacon?

The most important thing you can read this week is Joe Smyth’s post on federal coal leasing. I realize “federal coal leasing” is not a phrase to quicken the pulse, but it’s a Very Big Deal.

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the situation the U.S. coal industry is in: domestic electricity use has leveled off, utilities are switching to cheap natural gas and wind, and the EPA is finally cracking down on dirty old coal plants. All that leaves U.S. coal in a pinch. Their main hope for the future is to increase coal exports. That’s why the fight over coal export terminals matters.

Arguably, though, the coal-export fight is secondary. From a climate-hawk point of view, it would be better just to leave the damn coal in the ground.

Is that even within our power as concerned U.S. citizens? As it happens, yes, it is, because we own much of the coal! The coal that companies like Peabody are itching to export comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. And most of the land in the Powder River Basin is owned by the federal government — that is to say, it’s owned by you and me.

The federal Bureau of Land Management leases the land to coal companies at bargain-basement prices, so they can strip-mine it and export the coal at a profit. Does that sound like good public policy to you?

You really should read Smyth’s whole post for the details, but here’s the important bit:

The BLM’s role is critical because unlike other regions such as Appalachia, Powder River Basin coal is mostly owned by the federal government, and BLM is supposed to ensure that coal development there “is in the best interests of the Nation.” But without proper oversight, the BLM has been offering this federal coal to companies like Peabody, Arch Coal, and Cloud Peak Energy for bargain rates. Over the last 30 years, this has amounted to a $28.9 billion subsidy to the coal mining industry and helped coal maintain its large share of US electricity generation by keeping coal prices artificially low, as explained in a report [PDF] and legal brief [PDF] by Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. These low prices have also helped the Powder River Basin soar from just 5% of US coal production in 1970 to almost half today — even though the Federal Government no longer classifies the region as a coal-producing region. If this sounds absurd, that’s because the BLM’s process for leasing US coal is skewed to benefit coal mining companies, lacks proper oversight and public participation, and is basically corrupt — check out the WildEarth Guardians for more info. [my emphasis]

Speaking of that corrupt BLM process, there’s a lease auction happening today — BLM is selling off the “South Porcupine Tract,” which contains “an estimated 401,830,508 tons of mineable coal.” But the size of this lease is modest relative to the huge expansion of leasing the administration announced last year. When all that newly leased coal is burned, it will contribute 3.9 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, more than half what the U.S. emits in a year. (See also Joe Romm on this.)

As Smyth writes, this travesty is finally starting to get some attention from politicians like Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D). They are asking why U.S. taxpayers should subsidize coal companies to degrade Western port towns to export coal to Asia where it will accelerate climate change. That makes sense for no one other than the coal companies.

The BLM’s own justification for the lease doesn’t even make sense, as Smyth explains:

Keep in mind that in its Record of Decision [PDF] for [today's] South Porcupine lease, the BLM justified the decision by asserting that doing so would help “meet the national coal demand,” and that “The public interest is served by leasing the South Porcupine LBA tract because doing so provides a reliable, continuous supply of stable and affordable energy for consumers throughout the country.” At a time when coal’s share of US electricity generation has dropped 19% in one year to just 36%, and Peabody’s CEO is touting plans to profit from “the global coal supercycle,” even the twisted logic of BLM’s coal leasing process falls apart. How exactly is it in the “best interests of the Nation” to sell coal that belongs to US taxpayers at a discount so Peabody can strip mine and ship it to Asia? [my emphasis]

That’s a damn good question.

My question is, where’s the climate movement on this? More than Keystone XL, more than individual coal plants, more even than coal export plans, this seems to be where the real action is. The entire climate fight over coal is an attempt, often by indirect means, to keep the damn coal in the ground. And yet here’s a bunch of coal in the ground that U.S. citizens already own, and it’s being sold by an allegedly climate-concerned administration to coal companies for no particular public benefit. It seems like a place where concerted pressure could have an effect.

Why isn’t this the center of the climate fight right now?

The U.S. coal industry is flailing. Utilities are stampeding from coal to natural gas and coal mining companies are seeing their stock prices plunge. The industry is responding the way it always has to threat: blaming government regulation and pouring money into influence peddling.

Judging from their latest efforts, however, they have very little to work with. The latest flail is to try to make a big deal out of the fact that the Obama administration recently added a bit on “clean coal” to its “all of the above” energy page. It’s Energywebpagegate! Or something.

From such thin threads is America’s Power attempting to weave an attack:

This aims for pathos but reaches only as far as pathetic. Even putting aside the absurdity of trying to make a website update into matter of Great Significance, the attack rests on a crude bait-and-switch that only the most gullible Tea Partier is going to miss.

In his campaign, Obama talked regularly about “clean coal.” By that he meant the common understanding of the term: coal plants that capture and sequester their CO2 emissions.

The EPA regulations decried in the middle section of the video do not affect “clean coal” in any way. They impose emission rules on dirty coal — coal plants that do not control their mercury, SO2, and/or CO2 emissions. It is dirty coal plants that are retiring right now, not “clean coal.”

The administration added a bit on clean coal to its website, but it only serves to call coal’s bluff. All actually existing coal in the U.S. is dirty. If the industry can actually build “clean coal,” why, it won’t be affected by EPA regulations! In fact, Obama’s own stimulus bill set aside $3.4 billion help “clean coal” along.

The ad speaks to the coal lobby’s desperation to blur the difference between clean and dirty. When it began, America’s Power touted itself as a “clean coal” group. But as this ad campaign makes clear, that was always a fig leaf, a bit of rhetorical slight-of-hand. It’s just a lobbying group for the coal industry.

Coal with CCS remains fantastically expensive and, in the U.S., rarer than a untelevised Kardashian. In terms of U.S. electricity markets, it is a non-entity. Its use in politics, by Obama and the coal industry alike, is as a symbolic gesture.

In reality, what we suffer from in the U.S. is dozens of old, dirty, unregulated coal plants that are sickening and killing people and accelerating climate change. Obama hasn’t — politically speaking, can’t — come out explicitly in favor of getting rid of them. But he’s never spoken in favor of them either, and his EPA has done more than any EPA in decades to finally clean them up. That’s entirely separate from his support for the “clean coal” unicorn.

So, to summarize: Obama is for “clean coal” and against unregulated dirty coal. There is no inconsistency, no flip-flop or backtrack, no hypocrisy. It’s not even that complicated.

Last week, I wrote about my quest to buy a new car. We’re sick of our minivan/land yacht and want something smaller and more fuel-efficient that will nonetheless fit our whole family (and our dog) for our daily city commute.

I received all sorts of helpful advice/tips/info in the comments on that post. It made me appreciate anew the great community we have here at Grist.

After so many years of doing this, I’ve even come to appreciate the more … enthusiastic feedback. I learned that I should get a new wife because mine complains too much, that I should get rid of my dog, or leave the dog at home, that I should stop being a cosseted hypocrite and start getting my kids to school and doing my errands by bus or bike, and that above all, I should never, ever say anything nice about cars generally or any car specifically and that by doing so I have disgraced myself, disgraced Grist, and most likely disgraced the baby Jesus.

Thing is, the way I was shopping for a car — seeking a balance of features, comfort, and fuel efficiency — is what I take to be the “normal” way Americans shop for cars. Many Americans care about fuel-efficiency, and some about sustainability, but very few care enough for those qualities to trump all other considerations. And fewer still are willing to rearrange their daily lives around the inconveniences of sub-par public transit systems in order to avoid the sin of car ownership.

The dolorous monks among the commenters reflect, I fear, what the great mass of non-environmentalists expect from environmentalists: scorn, condescension, and above all, judgment. When I tell civilians that I write for an “environmental website,” they immediately take on a guilty mien and start shifting from foot to foot, stammering about how they try to recycle, as though they’re trying to apologize for or justify their daily habits. They expect me, as an environmentalist, to be a kind of monk, full of virtue and contemptuous of their lack.

It is not a role I want any part of. And it is not to environmentalism’s benefit that people think of it that way, as a kind of ascetic order standing outside U.S. consumer culture, condemning those within as weak and fallen.

David’s new Prius, bathed in Seattle’s uncharacteristic May sunshine.

Anyway, thanks to the many people who weighed in with constructive insights, on- and off-line. I know that tens and tens of you are following this quest with bated breath, so I shall herewith report the results. I’m afraid it’s not very exciting. In fact, we made what is, for people in our circumstance, the most boring, predictable choice conceivable. We’re basically a Portlandia skit.

We bought a used Prius.

In the end, we couldn’t justify the ecological impact or financial cost of buying a new car. There is, I admit (even if the green righteous will not), a powerful attraction to buying a new car. It’s a big, shiny new toy! It’s got all the new tech widgets. Everything works just so. And that smell …

David’s kids like the new car.

But ecologically speaking, a huge chunk of a car’s impact comes in manufacturing. And economically speaking, it loses a huge chunk of its value the minute it drives off the lot. There’s just no way to justify buying a new car. I say that as someone who wanted, and kind of still wants, to do it.

The question then became: Where can we find high in-city gas mileage in a used vehicle? And on that metric, nothing compares with a Prius. Not even close. There are some small cars that can get up to the mid- to high-30s on the highway. A VW Jetta TDI wagon, for instance, gets great highway mileage. But for city driving — which is 95 percent of what we do — nothing beats a hybrid. The very best gasoline or diesel alternatives are a good 10 mpg lower in the city. There are Honda Insights around, but they’re too small. We don’t want an SUV, so the Escape is out. There are lots of new hybrid hatchbacks, but very few used ones. So …

Forest fits in the new car.

I borrowed a friend’s Prius and drove around for a while with my dog in the back. And while the hatch area is not as spacious as it would be in a Prius v (sigh), it’s plenty big. The dog will be fine.

So there it is: We’re getting a black 2009 Prius with about 35,000 miles on it for around $20K ($2K or so under blue book). We view this as the medium-chill choice: good-enough. My wife didn’t get the tan interior she wanted, but she got leather seats (easier to clean!). I didn’t get the cargo room I wanted, but I got enough. And we’re getting up to 50 mpg in the city, which is pretty damn sweet.

Anyway, thus is my car saga, come to a close. Thanks for following along!