I was optimistic when I began reading the Washington Post op-ed on climate change by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), current chairman of the House Science Committee. He began with a plea for a thoughtful and objective discussion of climate science. But like Lucy snatching the football away from Charlie Brown, he quickly dashed my hopes as he proceeded to provide a one-sided view of the state of climate science.

Rep. Smith neglected to acknowledge that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and 18 U.S. professional scientific societies [PDF] agree that climate change is real and that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from human activities are now the primary driver of it. He also forgot to mention sea-level rise, which is already increasing the risk from every storm to coastal communities in Massachusetts and around the nation. There was no mention of the shift in rainfall patterns to more extreme downpours, or that the ocean’s chemistry is changing [PDF] as it warms up and absorbs carbon dioxide.

The extreme weather events of the past few years go unmentioned in Rep. Smith’s piece. Americans have watched homes engulfed by wildfires, crops decimated by drought, and infrastructure twisted like a pretzel during Superstorm Sandy. Last week, an analysis estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid a $96 billion bill for cleanup after climate-related disasters in 2012 alone. I recently launched a new House Natural Resources Democrats app that shows the costs of extreme weather, both in terms of dollars spent and lives lost.

Curiously, Rep. Smith’s climate piece ignores the global temperature records of NOAA and NASA that show 2010 as the hottest year on record since 1880, and the decade ending in 2009 as the hottest decade on record. He also ignores the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study conducted by independent — and formerly skeptical — scientists who also found that global land temperatures have been increasing and that heat-trapping gases are driving that rise. Instead, he relies on a temperature record produced by U.K. scientists that he [PDF] and other Republicans have previously — falsely, it turns out — accused of conspiring to alter temperature data. Choosing the temperature record that best fits your argument, especially when it is from a group you questioned just a few years ago, hardly seems objective.

I would welcome, as Rep. Smith writes, a “legitimate evaluation of policy options” by Congress for dealing with climate change and its impacts. Indeed, it was my honor to lead then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, where we held more than 80 hearings and a rigorous bipartisan discussion on both climate science and climate solutions. Sadly, when Tea Party Republicans took control of the House in 2010, one of the very first things they did was eliminate the Select Committee.

One thing I learned in hearing after hearing in the Select Committee was how investing in climate solutions will create jobs in America. The public has learned the same lesson. That is why there is such strong support for improving energy efficiency and using more wind, solar, and natural gas, all ways to reduce carbon pollution. Rep. Smith failed to mention any of those technologies. He instead focused on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry dirty tar sands from Canada to a tax-free haven in the Gulf of Mexico. From there, Canadian oil giant TransCanada may export that oil to other countries. That would leave America with all the environmental risk and little economic reward while increasing emissions of dangerous heat-trapping gases that are warming our planet.

This would be just another cry from the fringes if it weren’t mainstream Republican thought on climate change. It’s a disappointing fall for the party that once saw President Nixon launch the EPA, President George H.W. Bush introduce a cap-and-trade system, and Sen. John McCain write a market-based climate bill.

Yet last Congress was easily the most anti-environmental session in history. House Republicans even put the scientific finding that climate change is real up for a vote, and then voted against reality. So far in 2013, we’ve seen the same story, with Republicans pushing Keystone XL, blocking the EPA nominee, and questioning climate science at every turn.

This cycle of climate-change denial and fossil-fuel boosterism won’t end until Americans demand that it does. Demand action; demand reality; demand it now.

“Oops.”

Gulf Coast oil refiners and chemical processors say that a lot, but regulators are doing precious little to rein in what the industry euphemistically calls “upset” emissions.

Upset emissions are inadvertent releases of chemicals by industrial operations when something goes awry. And things seem to go awry awfully frequently. An ExxonMobil refinery in Baton Rouge, La., was averaging two accidental releases every week during one grim stretch.

That’s according to an analysis by The Center for Public Integrity, which found that upset emissions are more prevalent than industry admits or government knows. Some highlights from the center’s investigative report:

[A 411-barrel chemical leak last year] has played out again and again at the sprawling, 2,400-acre ExxonMobil Baton Rouge complex, which encompasses an oil refinery and a chemical plant, and dwarfs the Standard Heights community. The leak marks the 1,068th upset emissions event at the compound in the last eight years, according to a database of incident reports compiled by the Bucket Brigade. Of these events, 172 involved benzene, a carcinogen that can trigger headaches, dizziness and rapid heart rate.

Exxon’s chemical plant had 265 of all incidents. At the refinery, the data show 803 accidental releases over these years; at its height, the facility averaged two a week. …

The steady hazards extend far beyond Baton Rouge. In the Gulf states of Texas and Louisiana, the vast number of plastics, power and gas plants provide an on-the-ground case study of a national problem.

“Non-routine” upset emissions have become regular occurrences at oil refineries, chemical plants and manufacturing facilities.

The upset emissions can pose serious health risks, but the oil and chemical companies say there’s nothing to worry about.

Dr. Mark D’Andrea, at the University of Texas Cancer Center, began tracking 4,000 residents exposed to the poster child of all upsets — the “40-day Release” at the BP refinery, in Texas City, which belched 514,795 pounds of benzene and 20 other pollutants throughout the spring of 2010. Earlier this year, D’Andrea unveiled preliminary data showing the residents have “significantly higher” white-blood cell and platelet counts than their Houston counterparts. The data suggests BP’s release may have increased their risk of developing such cancers as leukemia, the doctor says.

In a statement, BP says it does “not believe any negative health impacts resulted from” its 40-day release. “To our knowledge, the University Cancer Centers’ pilot study does not support a claim for any plaintiff alleging injury from that flaring and has no relevance to those claims,” the company wrote, referring to pending litigation filed by 47,830 residents and workers against BP alleging health ailments caused by the release. D’Andrea has not been hired as an expert witness for either side in the case, but has testified in pre-trial discovery.

For more, read the full report in all its grotesque glory.

Los Angeles got a new mayor this morning: City Councilmember Eric Garcetti beat City Controller Wendy Greuel, a fellow Democrat, more handily than expected in a historically low-turnout race (a pathetic 19 percent of L.A. voters cast ballots). He takes office July 1.

Garcetti, a Rhodes scholar and L.A.’s first Jewish mayor, has big shoes to fill: Will he carry on current Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s celebrated efforts to combat L.A.’s image as a smog-choked, car-worshipping, freeway-entangled sprawlsville?

So far, the signs point in that direction. Some have criticized Garcetti for being too friendly to business interests, but he sees working with developers as a necessary component of the smart-growth strategy he’s pursued to revitalize once-blighted areas of Hollywood, Echo Park, and Silver Lake, his home turf.

Villaraigosa did not endorse a candidate in the race. But Garcetti earned the support of the Sierra Club, which called his environmental record “unmatched”:

He authored the nation’s largest green building ordinance, the nation’s largest local clean water initiative, and legislation making L.A. the nation’s largest city with a solar feed-in-tariff. He nearly tripled the number of parks in his district by finding innovative ways to create 31 new neighborhood parks. He led the effort to pass the plastic bag ban and Low Impact Development Ordinance.

In an interview with Zócalo (in which he also revealed that the chupacabra fills him with terror), Garcetti said the toughest political fight he’s endured was a failed campaign to create veloways, bicycle lanes along the freeway: “Probably would have been a really bad idea for asthma and health to have bike lanes alongside five-lane freeways … It’s a wonder I’m in politics.”

But he’s still a big backer of bike culture. At a mayoral forum last year, Garcetti pledged his commitment to CicLAvia, a recurring event that closes miles of L.A. streets to cars. He said he hopes to make it a permanent monthly tradition. At the same forum, “Garcetti thanked cyclists for introducing bike culture, urban farmers for introducing community gardens, [and] business owners for repurposing dead alleys” and “reiterated his commitment to the human experience, pointing to mass transit as an opportunity to embrace geographical equity so that bus riders in South L.A. have the same opportunity to enjoy public art, comfortable transit stops, and shade as other passengers.”

So far, so good to our ears.

Solar Impulse, the world’s most advanced solar aircraft, is trekking across the United States. It’s already made it from the Bay Area to Phoenix, Ariz. Check out photos from its U.S. flights, and read more about the all-solar plane’s journey.

Have you ever sat on the subway across from a hot guy or girl holding the book you just finished, trying to peek at their left hand and wondering whether it’s kosher to start a conversation? The organization that runs the subways in Prague has a plan that will end these awkward deliberations for good. The company, ROPID, “wants to set aside carriages on some or all of its trains for singles seeking a soul mate,” Reuters reports. It’d basically be like Amtrak’s quiet car, except instead of sitting in silence, everyone will be scanning the car like they would a bar on a Saturday night.

Reuters:

Spokesman Filip Drapal said the initiative was one of the activities the city-owned company hoped would lure people out of their cars and onto public transportation.

“We want to emphasize that public transport is not only a means of travel but that you can do things there that you cannot do in your car,” he told Reuters.

We’re predicting that this service will be most popular in the evening and on weekends, though if there are morning people out there who want to strike up a romantic relationship during their morning commute, more power to them.

America passed a milestone on Monday, according to electric-vehicle advocacy group Plug-In America. That’s when the 100,000th EV was sold in the U.S., the group estimates.

From Plug-In America board member Barry Woods’ blog:

Based on the average US household size, this means that over a quarter million people are now being exposed regularly to the benefits of electric transportation.  The vehicles themselves are reaching an even greater number of people simply by being on the road — perhaps as many as 1 million or more people per day. While much work remains to be done, 100,000 vehicles means that we are ever closer to the tipping point for electric transportation.

And like an EV driver who passes a gas station — and just keeps on driving — the nation is expected to sail past this milestone and keep on snapping up ever more of these clean-running cars. From Treehugger:

In 2011, the first full year with the current crop of plug-ins on the market, fewer than 20,000 were sold. In 2012, that number tripled to over 50,000. And it’s currently expected that more than 100,000 plug-ins will be sold in 2013 alone. Not a bad growth rate for a technology that is still maturing (like personal computers in the 1980s or cellphones in the 1990s).

How good is business for the nation’s electric-auto makers and sellers? A press release from Plug-In America says that the all-electric Nissan Leaf has been outselling all other Nissan models in some markets this year, and that Tesla’s Model S sedan is outselling the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the BMW 7 series, and the Audi A8. For another sign of the health of the EV market, check out Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet from Monday:

Given govt loan repayment this week (prob Wed), Supercharger update will be next week. Work continuing independent of announcement.—
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2013

That’s about Tesla repaying a federal loan nine years before it comes due. From Bloomberg:

Loans for Tesla, Ford, Nissan and Fisker were all awarded from a program created under President George W. Bush in 2007 and implemented by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Tesla plans to use $452.4 million to pay off its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan, with interest, the company said in a statement. … Based on the $25.4 million already paid to the Energy Department, taxpayers may see as much as a $12.8 million profit, based on company filings.

Despite some major hiccups, the electric-vehicle industry is now really starting to rev its engines.

Last week, I posted on the fight between electric utilities and solar advocates over rooftop solar power. Today, I want to pull back the lens and begin to tackle the bigger question: How should utilities work? What’s the right way to provision and manage electricity in the 21st century?

There’s very little public discussion of utilities or utility regulations, especially relative to sexier topics like fracking or electric cars. That’s mainly because the subject is excruciatingly boring, a thicket of obscure institutions and processes, opaque jargon, and acronyms out the wazoo. Whether PURPA allows IOUs to customize RFPs for low-carbon QFs is actually quite important, but you, dear reader, don’t know it, because you fell asleep halfway through this sentence. Utilities are shielded by a force field of tedium.

It’s is an unfortunate state of affairs, because this is going to be the century of electricity. Everything that can be electrified will be. (This point calls for its own post, but mark my words: transportation, heat, even lots of industrial work is going to shift to electricity.) So the question of how best to manage electricity is key to both economic competitiveness and ecological sustainability.

It’s time to start talking about utilities. I, your courageous blogger and servant, am going to attempt to lay out, at a high level, how utilities work and why, the challenges facing them, and what a utility more suited to the 21st century might look like. It’s a complicated problem, but I think the basics are approachable by ordinary citizens, who very much need to get involved and speak up on these issues. Occupy PUCs! (You’ll get that joke after you read my next few posts.)

Why utilities are the way they are

OK, so. To understand why utilities need to change, it helps to understand why they are the way they are. That takes us back to the turn of the 20th century, as electricity was just getting a foothold in some big American cities. Small power plants, using reciprocating steam engines to generate electricity, were popping up all over, but the power they produced could reach only about a mile’s distance before fading on the copper lines.

Then along came two technologies that changed our relationship to electricity and have shaped American life ever since.

First, reciprocating steam engines gave way to more efficient, more scalable steam turbines. And second, local direct current (DC) power was joined by alternating current (AC) transformers that could ramp up voltage enough to allow electricity to travel very long distances with relatively little loss. Together, steam turbines and AC transmission lines formed the foundation of the modern electrical system and remain its dominant technologies.

Steam turbines exhibited classic economies of scale. The bigger you made them, the cheaper the power. And with AC transmission lines, you could send the power as far as needed to find customers. To take full advantage of these capabilities, though, you needed scale. The bigger the better.

Economies of scale, with the concomitant need for large, long-term capital investments, made utilities what were called at the time “natural monopolies.” As with railroads, it didn’t make sense to lay down multiple competing networks; it would be wasteful, and neither competitor would be able to capture the full benefits of scale. It was inevitable that one entity would end up provisioning power. And by maximizing the benefits of scale, a monopoly would be best for consumers too.

At the time, however, railroads and other monopolies were notably unpopular, for good reason — they were often corrupt and lawless. Utility folks didn’t want progressive reformers attacking them. It was in everyone’s interest to put a stable structure in place.

So that’s what happened. In the early 20th century, the American people struck a deal with the utilities, an enduring agreement known as the “regulatory compact.” It remains in place, more or less intact, to this day.

Here’s how the regulatory compact works.

In a particular service area, a utility is granted a monopoly; in that area, it is the sole electricity provider. It is allowed to charge its customers whatever rates are necessary to cover costs and provide for a reasonable rate of return on investments. In exchange, the utility has to make investments sufficient to provide reliable, low-cost power to any customer in the area who wants it, with minimal “line losses” (i.e., “leakage” of power from power lines). To ensure the utility does not abuse its power, a public utility commission (PUC) monitors its activities and has to sign off on its rates.

That’s the bargain: The utility provides low-cost, reliable power. In exchange, it gets a captive customer base.

Why the utility structure no longer works

There are a few key things to note about the regulatory compact.

First, note that this arrangement looks almost nothing like a “free market” as envisioned by classical economists. These are entities legally protected from competition, charging government-approved prices, receiving guaranteed returns. It is the most Soviet of economic sectors. (Keep this in mind the next time someone glibly refers to “the market” in discussions of coal or solar.)

Second, note that the utility makes money not primarily by selling electricity, but by making investments and receiving returns on them. If it builds more power plants and power lines, it makes more money.

Add these together and you see the basic incentive structure at work. In most economic sectors, businesses live in fear of competing businesses coming in and providing customers with a better value proposition. They must be vigilant, cut costs, and innovate. That is the power of markets.

But utilities do not fear competition. Their customers cannot live without their product, or purchase it elsewhere. Their profits are guaranteed so long as they can justify their rates to a PUC. All they need to do to increase profits is to build more stuff — more power plants, more substations, more power lines, more.

When the regulatory compact was established, this made perfect sense. The demand for power was inexorably rising and there was a need to scale up rapidly. Given all the unregulated monopolies at the time, the regulatory compact was actually fairly progressive — at least it provided explicitly for public oversight.

But make no mistake: it was designed to electrify the country, to enable more people in more places to find more uses for electricity. Demand grew so fast that utilities were proposing, getting approval for, and making huge investments right and left, as fast as they could. And everything got bigger. The mania for gigantism reached its peak in the ’70s, with the nuclear craze. Finally, a technology powerful enough to fuel the meteoric rise in electricity consumption that was going to last forever. (Ahem.)

Now fast-forward to the present. The regulatory compact remains the same, the incentive structure it created remains the same, but circumstances in the U.S. have changed in two big, overarching ways.

The first, which has just begun to emerge but will accelerate in coming years, is that demand for utilities’ services is slowing. Depending on which forecasts you believe, electricity consumption may even begin declining in some states over the next few decades.

Why? Some of it is merely the “offshoring” of industrial activity. But a substantial chunk is the recent explosion of energy-efficiency technologies and investments. Alongside that is the maturation of what’s called “demand response,” the ability to shift electricity use forward or backward in time in response to price signals. (Demand response doesn’t reduce total load, but it can reduce peak load; utilities have to invest/build enough to meet peak load, so if you reduce peak load, you reduce needed investments.)

Alongside that, individuals now have the power to generate their own electricity with solar panels and other distributed generation technologies. Utilities do not own that distributed generation; it’s an investment upon which they receive no returns. And it represents a reduction in demand for what they are selling, a reduction in use of their grid infrastructure, and a reduction in the need for future power infrastructure.

For all these reasons, many energy nerds believe that electricity demand in the U.S. will never again rise as fast as it did this century, and might even plateau or fall. But remember, utilities are in the midst of paying off large, 20-plus-year investments. If they get less than expected from some customers, they have to charge the other customers more in order to get the same rate of return. They do not like that one bit (nor do the other customers). Furthermore, the unpredictable rise of all these disruptive technologies casts their future investments into doubt. In the long term, they face the threat of lower profits and, well, shrinkage. They don’t like that one bit either.

And that is perverse, because the other broad change since the early 1900s is a recognition of the threat of climate change and an understanding of the radical reduction in fossil-fuel use required to address it. As a society, we need energy efficiency and demand response. We need distributed renewable energy. We need to cancel out future power plants and transmission lines. All those things are to the good, economically and ecologically. Yet utilities have every incentive to oppose them, as they are direct threats to their familiar, comfortable business model, which has survived nearly a century unchanged.

And so I think we need to do more than fiddle with rate structures or mandate arbitrary levels of efficiency or renewable energy. We need a ground-up rethink of how utilities work, how they are structured, and how they can be reformed in a way that enables and accelerates long-overdue innovation in the electricity space. More on that soon.

Smuggled into the bill President Obama signed to avert a government shutdown in March was a sneaky little rider called the “farmer assurance provision.” It’s since come to be known as the Monsanto Protection Act, being very assuring to the biotech giant, if no one else. It allows farmers to plant genetically modified crops before they’ve been declared safe by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in defiance of court orders suspending planting until environmental reviews can be completed.

Once food-advocacy groups and then the general public found out about the quietly passed provision, outcry against it spread, in the form of petitions and even rare displays of bipartisan solidarity. On Monday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) announced that he’s introducing an amendment to the Senate version of the farm bill that would repeal the Monsanto Protection Act in its entirety.

“The Monsanto Protection Act is an outrageous example of a special interest loophole,” said Merkley in a press release. “This provision nullifies the actions of a court that is enforcing the law to protect farmers, the environment and public health. That is unacceptable.”

Twilight Greenaway explained the background of this special-interest loophole for Grist last year:

As it stands now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can suspend planting while the environmental impact of one of these crops is being assessed. Or that’s how it’s been in theory at least.

And it is what happened in 2007 when a federal judge overturned the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa, in response to a lawsuit filed by farmers and the Center for Food Safety. (Planting of alfalfa resumed again in 2011 when the USDA fully deregulated the crop.)

In the case of GMO sugar beets, another hotly contested crop, planting was supposed to be suspended, but by the point that suspension was ordered, the market had been cleared out and there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds. As we reported recently, “America faced the prospect of a 20-percent reduction in that year’s sugar crop. In response — and in defiance of the federal judge’s order — the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.” Now, all this back and forth could be moot to most farmers (unless a crop is officially, finally deemed unsafe — and well, that hasn’t happened yet).

The problem with planting GMO crops before they’ve been proven safe is that doing so doesn’t only affect the fields in which they’re sown; cross-pollination is a common concern for farmers trying to practice sustainable agriculture and maintain their organic status in an industry dominated by GM seeds. Cross-pollination can even bring legal troubles for unsuspecting farmers, Tom Laskawy explains:

[I]f you’re a farmer, GMO seeds can literally blow in to your fields on the breeze or just the pollen from GMO crops can blow in (or buzz in via bees) and contaminate your organic or “conventional” fields. And if that happens, Monsanto or Syngenta or Bayer CropLife maintain the right to sue you as if you had illegally bought their seed and knowingly planted it.

In an appropriately Orwellian twist, the companies even call such accidental contamination by their products “patent infringement.”

Merkley’s amendment attempts to help the USDA cling to what small scraps of control it still has over the biotech industry. He plans to push for a floor vote on it, according to The Huffington Post. Stay tuned …

It’s easy to get paranoid when you’re riding a bike alongside drivers who, despite commanding vehicles much bigger and faster than yours, seem uninterested in your safety or survival. Sometimes it feels like they’re out to get you. Or at least like they’d be happy if you got hurt.

And apparently, that paranoia is not entirely unjustified. In the U.K., for instance, one driver bragged on Twitter about knocking a person off his bike with her car:

In this case, bike activists who monitor social media for anti-cycling comments alerted the police, who told Way to report having being in a collision. (We can just imagine her whining “but I did report it! I told everyone on Twitter he deserved it!”) But it is creepy that anyone would be so excited about potentially injuring another human being.

And, for what it’s worth, “road tax” isn’t really a thing in England. There’s a car tax, but funds for the upkeep of roads come from general taxation. Everyone’s paying for them, and everyone should get to use them without fear someone will assault them with a two-ton vehicle and then sneer about it online.

Gold mining today is far from the charming, if soggy, practice of standing in a river and trying to sift out gold nuggets. Today, miners sift out gold from a river of cyanide, basically: They mine rock with tiny concentrations of gold in it, crush it up, and use cyanide to pull the gold molecules out. This is terrible for the environment, as you might imagine. Mother Jones pulled these statistics together a few years ago:

Mining gold to create a single 1/3-ounce 18-karat ring produces at least 20 tons of waste and 13 pounds of toxic emissions.

Those emissions contain 5.5 pounds of lead, 3 pounds of arsenic, almost 2 ounces of mercury, and 1 ounce of cyanide.

But now scientists think they’ve come up with a way of extracting gold using a compound much more benign than cyanide. Instead, they think they can use cornstarch.

During a bit of esoteric chemistry research, a group of scientists who were trying to make cubes out of molecules of gold and starch found that instead they kept making needles. Each needle was made of thousands of nanowires, Popular Science reports, and each nanowire had a string of gold atoms inside.

In other words, they found accidentally that they were able to isolate gold from all the other stuff around it. Now they’re working on developing this into a cheap way to extract gold commercially. It won’t solve all of gold mining’s problems, but any time you can switch out cornstarch for cyanide in an industrial process, you’re doing well.