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A love of delicious farm votes beef crosses ideological boundaries

In December, ranchers fell into a panic over a nonexistent EPA proposal to tax methane emissions from cows. By February, panic was replaced by giggling: how could they every have worried over something so crazy as a "cow tax"? And now, to demonstrate how badly misplaced their fears were, a Democratic and Republican Senator have joined together to enshrine in law the sacred principle that American cows shall never be taxed. Smell the bipartisanship.

Including cattle in a cap-and-trade system is, of course, a fine idea. From an environmental perspective, cattle are a major source of a wide range of ills: methane emissions, land use changes, nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia emissions, etc. If you tally up the negative impacts of beef on human health and productivity, the societal cost of cows climbs even higher.

From an economic efficiency perspective, it generally doesn't make sense to exclude sectors from a carbon cap. We want emissions reductions to come from the fastest, lowest-cost sources available, and it's hard to imagine anything cheaper or lower-cost than reduced beef consumption. It takes decades to shut down a coal plant. It takes no time at all to not eat a strip steak. Moreover, energy is a primary input to just about every sector of the economy. The same can hardly be said for tender, delicious short ribs.

TVA: making Bozo look good

"Last week, I called TVA a bunch of arrogant Bozos. I guess I should have said arrogant clowns."

-- Sen. Tim Burchett, at a Congressional hearing on the Tenn. coal ash spill, explaining that he meant no offense to Bozo the Clown

Envisioning a future without disposable hotel pens and Timex watches

You know that point when you realize that you just can't keep buying more crap? Many families call it "December 26." Thomas Friedman calls it the Great Disruption. Saul Griffith has a more compelling framing. A sustainable future society, he says, will be a Rolex and Mont Blanc society. That is, when you are born, you get a Rolex and a Mont Blanc pen. And that's it. No Swatches to match your outfit. No gimme-pens from the Holiday Inn. It's an appealing aesthetic.

Coal is the enemy of the human remains

"I wanted to secure in my mind that this cemetery was OK. I found out it wasn't OK. It was gone."

-- Walter Young, a resident of West Virginia whose great-grandmother's grave was moved, without his knowledge, by a coal mining company -- the company has no record of where they moved it

Why electric utilities like coupling

Writing from the Eco:nomics conference last week, David noted that at least one utility CEO is pretty down on decoupling:

Michael Morris, CEO of American Electric Power ... said "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down."

David appropriately questioned whether AEP is really so agnostic with respect to falling revenues. But Morris does raise a larger, quite accurate point. Namely, many electric utilities aren't decouplers. Given the prominence that decoupling has come to play in many state and federal policies, it's worth taking the time to understand why.

Decoupling is often framed as a way to get rid of the utility disincentive created by energy efficiency. With large fixed costs, small reductions in revenue can have big impacts on equity returns. This has historically made many utilities work really hard to incentivize inefficient use of their services, from special all-electric rates to exit fees, declining-block pricing schedules, and standby tariffs. (Don't worry about the jargon -- the unifying feature of all of the above is that they penalize any customer who has the temerity to invest in energy efficiency.) It has also made the regulated electricity industry the biggest opponent of sensible energy use.

Eliminate the "coupling" of revenues and equity returns -- so the theory goes -- and you eliminate utility hostility to efficiency.

What year will coastal property values crash?

Coastal property values won't wait to (permanently) fall until sea levels have actually risen four or five feet, as they almost certainly will by the end this century on our current CO2 emissions path).

Coastal property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community and of opinion-makers -- along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public -- realize that it is too late for us to stop four to five feet of SLR. And remember, if we don't get on the sustainable sub-450-ppm path soon, then people will quickly come to understand that SLR won't stop in 2100. Seas will continue rising post-2100 perhaps 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries until we are ice free and seas are 250 feet higher. And that makes protecting most coastal cities very, very difficult and expensive.

One of the points of my post "Ponzi, Part 1," of course, is that we haven't hit that critical mass of knowledge yet. If we had, the world would be engaged in a massive, desperate effort to avert catastrophe.

And so I pose the question in my talks: What year will coastal property values crash?

What can families do to reduce home energy use?

My name is not Earl. I've crossed everything off my list, and I'd like to share what I have learned about home weatherization.

I'll start with my results to date. I spent roughly $400 and achieved a 60 percent reduction in my gas-heating bill for the month of February. That huge reduction is testimony to what an energy hog my house was before I started this project.

My goal is an 80 percent reduction but that last 20 percent isn't going to come easy. To obtain that I will need to install a solar hot water panel in the one sunny patch of yard I have, a heat exchanger on the first floor shower drain, and possibly one of these bad-boy heat pumps. Our hot water accounts for almost 20 percent of our gas use.

Here's my list of weatherized add-ons:

Thomas Friedman's rock-star status

"If rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. I hear the craziest stuff. But it is a sign of a country that is actually exploding with innovation from the ground up."

-- The Mustache on collecting cards from clean-energy entrepreneurs

Can the problems of the developing world be solved by ignoring global warming?

Salon has published my article on the biggest flaw in the strategy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I'm going to expand on that article in a two-parter here.

The timing could not be better with the Tom Friedman "Ponzi scheme" discussion. For while the the richest foundation in the world certainly has taken on the noblest and greatest of challenges -- to help billions of people who "never even have the chance to live a healthy, productive life" (see here) reach that opportunity themselves -- its efforts are ultimately doomed to fail if we don't stop catastrophic warming.

Also, the two men who have donated much of their vast wealth to make it possible, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, are Exhibits One and Two of the "very serious people who are perceived as essentially nonpartisan opinion leaders" who must speak out on climate change if we are to avert the worst (see here).

Yet when we saw them together last summer, they were touring the Ponzi Canadian tar sands, as The Calgary Herald reported (see here):

A source said Gates and Buffett, who in recent months said he favors investing in the Canadian oil sands because it offers a secure supply of oil for the United States, visited the booming hub to satisfy "their own curiosity" but also "with investment in mind."

The tar sands are an environmental abomination that require huge amounts of natural gas to produce fuel with far higher life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than oil. They have rightly been called by Greenpeace the "biggest global warming crime ever seen." The Catholic bishop whose diocese extends over the tar sands posted a scathing pastoral letter in January that challenges the "moral legitimacy" of tar sands production.

Let's look at the Gates Foundation's strategy, and why, despite the noblest of intentions, it is not sustainable (even though, if you search "sustainable" on the Foundation website, you get 96 hits). In the face of the daunting task of helping the world's poor, which has proven such an intractable challenge for national governments and international aid agencies, Bill Gates retains the techno-optimism that drove his unbridled success at Microsoft. In July 2008, Gates went from being full-time at Microsoft to working full-time at the foundation with his wife, Melinda. With about $30 billion in assets as of January, the Gates are targeting U.S. education, childhood deaths, malaria, polio, AIDS and agriculture in poor countries.

On their Web site, Bill and Melinda state that if "scientific and technological advances" are focused on the problems of developing nations, "then within this century billions of people will grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty." Bill and Melinda go on to make Pollyanna, Pangloss and Paula Abdul seem like realists:

Graphic novel adaptation amps up energy message

I hardly dare to write this post, to even edge my pinky toe toward the waters of Watchmen analysis, but I will say this: as a newcomer to the story, I was intrigued by the emphasis on energy. At one point, a major character blasts a bunch of smarmy oil execs, telling them humanity "deserves better than what you've given them." (I committed the entire line to memory at the time, but the movie was so damn long good that I forgot it.)

I brought this up in our news meeting today, only to be met with the response of two staffers far more Watchmen-ucated than I, who pointed out that the energy chatter in the movie does not stem from the original book. That makes sense, considering the, er, altered denouement. Which is interesting itself, since the film was otherwise slavishly loyal to the book.

Alternative energy in The Watchmen: a nod to the current national dialogue, or a convenient replacement for a giant squid? I shall leave it to others to discuss the finer points.