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Economics malpractice, climate and poverty, oil sands nightmares, and more WSJ dipshittery

• Max Schulz demonstrates how economics is typically used in the energy debate: "There's an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they're big losers." As though the "economic standpoint" is some static, univocal thing. Douchebag.

• A nice report from Brookings on a woefully under discussed topic: Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor.

• National Geographic has an in-depth examination of the horror that is Alberta's oil sands program. Excellent journalism, albeit the stuff of nightmares.

• Shockingly, the oil and gas industry opposes the Obama administration plan to eliminate some taxpayers subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

• A while back, Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the editorial board, characterized Obama's concern over climate change as a "soppy indulgence," and said of climate science: "We don't really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere's component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability." Stuart Gaffin, an actual climate scientist at Columbia University, responded in a blog post, pointing to actual science. In turn, Jenkins retrenched in a blog post of his own, with a bunch of absurd harumphing and misdirection. Gaffin responded again, decimating the smoldering remains of Jenkins argument with a torrent of scientific citations.

This is typical of many other exchanges between ideologues and scientists about climate. The galling thing, with this one as with most of them, is that the scientists are correct, by any reasonable assessment, and yet the ideologues can just go on saying whatever they want, in widely read editorials. There simply is no winning here. It's really hard to see what the scientists should do.

The EPA announces its plan for a national greenhouse-gas reporting system

As Kate reported, the EPA is moving forward with its long-delayed national reporting system for greenhouse gas emissions. They estimate that it will cover 85 to 90 percent of total U.S. emissions. The agency set the reporting threshold at 25,000 tons of carbon, which will exempt individuals and small businesses, but will apply to all other industrial and commercial sources of GHG emissions.

That includes ethanol factories, by the way, which should provide further proof that the whole ethanol boondoggle won't play a meaningful role in addressing climate change. Also included in the survey will be Confined Animal Feeding Operations (aka factory farms) due to their "manure management" practices. Being tagged as a massive source of GHG emissions certainly won't make their business model any more sustainable.  However, the EPA -- clearly stung by the controversy over the non-existent "cow tax" proposal -- leaves exempt from its inventory "GHG emissions from enteric fermentation from cattle," aka cow farts.

In fact, aside from manure (to be fair, no small contribution) most agricultural sources of emissions won't be counted.  The other exemptions include:

... rice cultivation, field burning of agricultural residues, composting, and agricultural soils would not be covered under this reporting requirement. The challenges to including these sources in the rule are that available methods to estimate facility-level emissions for these sources yield uncertain results, and that these sources are characterized by a large number of small emitters.

In other words, "biological" sources of emissions that are still the result of industrial production are left out.  Despite this, the EPA maintains that this inventory will indeed be almost totally comprehensive. If the Danes are right, however, and a single cow emits four tons of methane in burps and farts a year, you have to wonder if the EPA is letting livestock producers off the hook too easily. Still, with chemical plants and fuel production covered under the reporting system, the climate impact of most of industrial agriculture's "inputs" such as diesel fuel and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, will be measured. All in all, it's a reasonable place to start.

What's the rush on addressing climate change?

New York Times columnist David Brooks, on which priorities -- health-care reform, energy, global warming, and education -- Obama should abandon:

"As for what policies I'd drop from the to-do list because of the crisis, at this point I'd have to say all of them."

We need to reform America's food safety system from the farm up

Another day, another disaster...

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his classic book The Jungle, awakening America's consciousness to the horrors of corruption in the U.S. meatpacking industry with the story of Chicago's stockyards. The Jungle so shook the American people's confidence in how their meat and food was processed, that President Roosevelt created the Food and Drug Administration to quell public outcry.

Fast-forward a hundred odd years later and all evidence points to the fact that we are living in an era of food crisis that rivals that of the turn of the last century. Regretfully, America's modern food system has become The Jungle 2.0.

Indeed, there have been prodigious grumblings from Washington, D.C., over food safety issues in the past months. Thanks to the current peanut butter fiasco from the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America, our nation is once again in the throes of a record food safety recall, signaling that we need a serious overhaul of our nation's food safety system and the industrial food model.

America's current food system has the potential to create an epidemic food safety crisis much larger than that even Sinclair or Teddy Roosevelt could imagine. For a variety of reasons, including the corrosive influence of agribusiness corporations and lack of government funds, staff, and training, we now live in a world where food safety in America is on the verge of facing a collapse similar to those of our recent financial, mortgage, and housing industries.

Jim Rogers' chutzpah, geothermal's promise, Larson's carbon tax, and efficiency's returns

• Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy and prominent member of USCAP, says that it's a bad idea to refund carbon auction money back to taxpayers. Instead, the vast bulk of the money should be given to public utility regulators. Really, he said that.

• According to a new report from Credit Suisse, geothermal power now has a lower cost-per-kilowatt-hour than coal. ScientificAmerican takes a look at the report and finds that it contains several important caveats (it presumes reasonable interest rate financing, doesn't include explorations costs, etc.). Even with the caveats, though, this is heartening stuff.

• Shell Oil now has a climate change blog. So far, it's surprisingly good and substantive.

• Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) has introduced a carbon tax bill to the House (updating and improving a similar bill from 2007). It would start with a $15/ton tax, which would rise $10 per year, and it would refund all revenue to taxpayers through payroll tax rebates. $10 billion a year in tax credits are also made available to cleantech R&D and investments. The guys at the Carbon Tax Center love it. They say one of the prospective losers is "cynics who said the U.S. could never enact a meaningful carbon tax." But the U.S. won't enact this one either, so ...

• The Berkeley National Laboratory has an interesting report out: "Financial Analysis of Incentive Mechanisms to Promote Energy Efficiency: Case Study of a Prototypical Southwest Utility (PDF)." (I know, sounds fascinating, right?) It runs through scenarios whereby a utility aggressively pursues energy efficiency, based on various policies (decoupling, performance standards, etc.). What does it do to rates? Equity? Shareholder returns? Here are the key conclusions:

Free beer

Now Republicans are framing their total-deregulation, fossil-happy, drill-and-burn energy policies as "no cost stimulus."

Sometimes my powers of snark just fail me.

Feed-in tariffs, Chu off-message, MPG v. GPM, and the prospects for solar PV

I have about three months worth of unattended tabs open in my browser -- over 100, at last count. Ridiculous, I know. I figure now that comments are turned off on our site (it's weirdly quiet in here!), I'm going to do some speed blogging to get them all cleared away in anticipation of the torrent of news coming down the pike.

• In Florida, an odd-couple pair of legislators -- Rep. Keith Fitzgerald (D-Sarasota) and Rep. Paige Kreegel (R-Punta Gorda) -- are collaborating on a bill that would push Gainesville's innovative feed-in tariff program statewide. Fitzgerald wrote the bill; Kreegel is chair of the state's House Energy & Utilities Policy Committee. They view feed-in tariffs as an economic stimulus and jobs program. Naturally utilities oppose them.

• I know Chu Worship is the order of the day in green circles, but I'm sorry to say that most of what I've seen of our new Energy Secretary's communication with the public has been, IMHO, counterproductive. Like this. Does the Obama administration really want to be encouraging the myth that progress on climate is dependent on scientific and technological breakthroughs? Or this. Does the administration really want to be encouraging the notion that a recession is a bad time to pass a price on carbon?

• What's the deal with the MPG Illusion? The arguments for shifting to GPM (gallons-per-mile) seem compelling, but this doesn't seem to have taken off or spread at all.

• Climate change is threatening some of the world's most valuable archeological sites.

• Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have produced a fascinating report on the installed costs of solar voltaics (PDF). Here are the main conclusions:

Always use WWII metaphors

RealClimate has an excellent post for aspiring climate bloggers, "Advice for a young climate blogger." It has some incredibly useful advice and warnings, including "Bad things can happen to good bloggers."

But there is one bullet point that I think is misleading:

Don't use any WWII metaphors. Ever. This just makes it too easy for people to ratchet up the rhetoric and faux outrage. However strongly you hold your views, the appropriateness of these images is always a hard sell, and you will not be given any time in which to make your pitch. This is therefore almost always counter-productive. This can be extended to any kind of Manichean language.

Silly. You should probably avoid Nazi metaphors, but in fact WWII is the only plausibly-close metaphor for the scale of effort needed to stabilize at or below 450 ppm and preserve a livable climate [see here or my book].

Indeed, at the press conference I participated in with Greenpeace and Sen. Sanders today (details to come), Sanders himself said that we have the technology to do this today (or will very soon) -- which is of course a central point of this blog, but what we most need to do is deploy, deply, deploy:

I think there is an enormous amount of technology out there ... Go back to December 1941. America had to completely retool its economy in two years. So don't tell me it can't be done.

And one of the most important scientific studies published last year (see here) concludes with this key paragraph:

Oprah to save Appalachia with her mighty army of suburban moms?

If Oprah does a segment on mountaintop removal mining, Big Coal is f**ked.

Is consensus on 'energy gap' enough to get past disagreement over climate change?

As you've likely noticed, comments are turned off here at Grist, as we transfer to our shiny new site. If you have thoughts on this post or anything else, email them to me at droberts at grist dot org.

I think Andy Revkin gets something importantly wrong in this post on DotEarth -- which gets back to one more point I wanted to make about the Eco:nomics conference.

Andy's post is about how the cranks at the ongoing Heritage climate "skeptic" conference agree with climate realists that there's an "energy gap" and a need for substantial energy innovation. So we can all move forward together!

Now, I think on a broad level this is true. You don't have to take climate change seriously to see the need for big changes in our energy situation -- you could be concerned about national security (quite common), concerned about dwindling fossil fuel reserves (less common), or concerned about stagflation brought about by high energy prices (weirdly rare). John McCain, back in his Reasonable Conservative phase, used to make the same point: even if we're wrong about climate change, we should do this stuff anyway.

But how far does this agreement get you? Far enough for a shared political or economic agenda?