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Kids go crazy for the great taste of climate policy!

I’ve been over at the big Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C. this weekend, where thousands of young adults are here to ignite change on climate change policy. They’ve been holding panels on climate issues, workshops on activism, and training sessions for lobbying Congress. These college and high school students have filled the entirety of […]

South Carolina misses an opportunity for energy efficiency with Duke's Save-A-Watt program

I recently interviewed a guy who explained his approach to long-term contracting to me as follows: "always structure your contracts to ensure that your counter-party makes money, and you'll never have a bad contract negotiation." It's a great point, too often lost by those who are convinced that all negotiations are zero-sum games.

Lest one think that hard-nosed, selfish negotiating is limited to greedy financial types, I bring you this story from South Carolina, where a change in utility regulation to incentivize energy efficiency was blocked by environmentalists and consumer advocates on the grounds that it would give too much money to utilities. It seems to me that they have made a big mistake.

Regulated utilities have no incentive to invest in energy conservation or generation efficiency. Moreover, they have no incentive to encourage their customers to make investments that would save them money, since the standard guaranteed-return + cost-pass-through pricing model doesn't let them keep the gain.

This doesn't make utility managers bad guys; it just means that they are responding to a bad set of signals. If your parents give your big brother a cookie every time he punches you, your big brother is not entirely to blame for the welts on your arm.

Jim Rogers knows this, and proposed his Save-A-Watt program to give his company, Duke Energy, a financial incentive to encourage their customers to conserve. Consumer advocates and environmentalists opposed, broadly on the basis that we shouldn't pay utilities to do things they're supposed to do anyway. The South Carolina utility commission agreed:

... they objected specifically to the heart of the plan: Duke's request to get a financial return for power plants it doesn't have to build.

To be quite clear, Duke has many flaws. They like expensive coal plants. They've tried to do some things that look an awful lot like gaming carbon markets. And they are a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the BS-machine that is ACCCE.

But that doesn't mean we can't give them credit for trying to reform the rules, so that they can sever (however partially) the disconnect between the interests of their shareholders and their customers (not to mention the environment). It seems a shame to me that those efforts were blocked in the name of the environment and consumer.

Ultimately, this issue is much bigger than Save-a-Watt, Duke, and South Carolina. Our regulatory system desperately needs reform, and effective reform will necessarily create massive wealth transfers away from those who benefit from the status quo. It was ever thus, and is why vested interests are always so conservative. Those who seek reform therefore have four choices:

Carbon policy = tax cut

A final note about cap-and-trade auction revenue in Obama's budget.

I know some folks (see Sean) object to the whole notion that climate policy should be viewed as a means of raising (and spending) revenue. And there are good policy reasons to fear the conflation.

Still, political reality being what it is, I can't help but think this is a stroke of genius. What you've got now is a tax cut for 95% of American workers, paid for by wealthy industries and individuals. It's flipped the "war on the poor" attack on cap-and-trade completely. Now blocking carbon legislation is a war on the poor.

"Mr. Inhofe, why do you oppose a tax cut that will help so many hard-hit Oklahoma families? Whose interests are you defending?"

Heh.

Raising rates to afford cheap coal

"It allows us to continue to use coal, even though the cost of coal is going up."

-- Jeri Matheney, corporate communications manager for Appalachian Power, defending his utility's request for a substantial rate hike in West Virginia

Authors of economic collapse advise us to stick with coal

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, has announced it is holding a counter-protest to the Capitol Climate Action, the biggest civil disobedience on climate issues in U.S. history. They're calling it the "Celebrate Coal! and Keep Energy Affordable" rally.

A better name might be the "Celebrate 24,000 Dead Americans!" rally, because that's how many people toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants kills every year, costing Americans $167 billion in additional health care costs.

Other titles CEI could have chosen:

Celebrate Unemployment! Coal kills jobs. Investments in energy efficiency create more than twice the number of jobs as investments in coal, according to the latest numbers from Professor Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier at the University of Massachusetts. Every dollar sunk into a coal plant, even if it's spent making it marginally cleaner, is a job creation dollar almost half wasted. New coal plants are so expensive that they actually cost jobs.

Celebrate Economic Collapse! As the biggest U.S. source of global warming pollution, coal is a major contributor to the $271 billion annual drag on the economy global warming is projected to cause by 2025 (it's already causing a multi-billion drag). Unless we solve the climate crisis, it's going to be that much harder to overcome our economic woes.

Celebrate Weather Disasters! Expect more intense (and possibly more frequent) hurricanes like Katrina and Rita in a global warming world -- and many more climate refugees.

Celebrate Species Extinction! According to the journal Nature, "New analyses suggest that 15-37% of a sample of 1,103 land plants and animals would eventually become extinct as a result of climate changes expected by 2050."

Celebrate Mercury Poisoning! Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of man-made mercury pollution. Mercury from coal pollution can interfere with the development of babies' brains and neurological systems. One in six babies born in America (as well as Jeremy Piven) have elevated levels of mercury in their blood, putting them at risk of learning disabilities, developmental delays, and problems with fine motor coordination.

If it was up to CEI, we would still have lead in our gasoline, no seatbelts in our cars, and more pesticides in children's food. These are the guys who backed deregulation of Wall Street CEO's -- and are now opposing action on climate to get the economy back on track.

If Congress listens to CEI and Big Coal, we won't be able to solve global warming, switch to clean energy, and create the millions of green jobs we need to put people back to work and restore prosperity.

You can help make sure they don't by signing up for the Capitol Climate Action here.

The Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones

[The NYT's Andy Revkin has a very good debunking of Will with detailed comments from leading cryosphere experts, "Experts: Big Flaw in Will's Ice Assertions." Sadly, Andy continues his refusal to correct the harm he did to Gore by equating him with Will. In a day or two, I will attempt to untarnish Gore's reputation to make clear that he did nothing whatsoever wrong -- intentionally or unintentionally -- as opposed to Will who has done multiple things wrong intentionally.]

"When a reputable newspaper lies, it poisons the community; every newspaper story becomes suspect," declared a New York Times editorial. "Great publications magnify the voice of any single writer. Thus, when their editors or publishers want or need to know a source for what they print, they have to know it and be able to assure the community or the courts that they do. Where this is not now the rule, let this sad affair at least have the good effect of making it the rule." That editorial was published on April 17, 1981 about the transgressions of a Washington Post reporter named Janet Cooke [who fabricated a story, which the Post later submitted for a Pulitzer Prize "despite the growing signs of problems" with the story's veracity].

Incomprehensibly, the Washington Post -- after being roundly criticized for having senior editors and fact-checkers (and then their ombudsman!) sign off on (and then defend) George Will's error-riddled global warming column -- has allowed George Will to reassert in a new column (here) that every single one of his falsehoods was factual. [For a point-by-point debunking of the original February 15 piece, see CP and Wonk Room [PDF] and this joint letter to WP].

And in what seems to be Alice-in-Wonderland journalism, a senior editor at the Washington Post now asserts it is perfectly reasonable for a non-scientist Post writer to reinterpret a prestigious source's scientific data to support his or her conclusion -- after those sources have repeatedly stated that their data is consistent with the exact opposite conclusion and without telling readers of that disagreement. And not only did Will do that multiple times in his first piece -- the Post still let him do it again after he was called on it by multiple writers (see Washington Monthly and here).

Much as I would like to spend my time writing about the strategies needed to prevent business-as-usual warming of 5°C to 7°C, both of my parents were award-winning professional journalists, and I think this story is simply too important not to focus a maximum spotlight on.

I will go through Will's new and old falsehoods at length here because, as I noted above, the NYT editorialized on the Post's infamous Janet Cooke scandal, "When a reputable newspaper lies, it poisons the community; every newspaper story becomes suspect." Just as with the Janet Cooke scandal, this is about a major Washington Post writer fabricating and misusing sources.

Media Matters saw Will's column in advance and debunked it here, showing how Will doubled down on his previous global warming distortions and cited a document on sea ice trends as evidence against human-caused global warming when that "document actually states that the sea ice data are consistent with the outcomes projected by climate-change models." And Will cited the U.N. World Meteorological Organization [WMO] -- with no source citation -- saying "there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade," when, as Media Matters showed, as recently as January 7, Agence France-Presse quoted WMO secretary general Michel Jarraud as saying, "The major trend is unmistakably one of warming." I have similar quotes from WMO in my original post.

The abuse of sources in Will's columns -- signed off on and defended by the Post's editors (and ombudsman) should be a cautionary tale equal to the Janet Cooke story. One can only assume, sadly, that given the controversy, Will's new piece was as at least as fact-checked as the original, which, according to the Washington Post ombudsman was "checked by people he [Will] personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors" (see here).

And yet the fact-checkers let through a lie so egregious that it would seem to utterly vitiate the credibility of the Post all by itself. Will was allowed to publish the following statement:

No particular policy instrument is appropriate for all environmental problems

I introduced my previous post by noting that there are several prevalent myths regarding how economists think about the environment, and I addressed the "myth of the universal market" ­-- the notion that economists believe that the market solves all problems. In response, I noted that economists recognize that in the environmental domain, perfectly functioning markets are the exception, not the rule. Governments can try to correct such market failures, for example by restricting pollutant emissions. It is to these government interventions that I turn this time.

A second common myth is that economists always recommend simple market solutions for market problems. Indeed, in a variety of contexts, economists tend to search for instruments of public policy that can fix one market by introducing another. If pollution imposes large external costs, the government can establish a market for rights to emit a limited amount of that pollutant under a so-called cap-and-trade system. Such a market for tradable allowances can be expected to work well if there are many buyers and sellers, all are well informed, and the other conditions I discussed in my last posting are met.

The government's role is then to enforce the rights and responsibilities of permit ownership, so that each unit of emissions is matched by the ownership of one permit. Equivalently, producers can be required to pay a tax on their emissions. Either way, the result -- in theory -- will be cost-effective pollution abatement, that is, overall abatement achieved at minimum aggregate cost.

The cap-and-trade approach has much to recommend it, and can be just the right solution in some cases, but it is still a market.

Friday music blogging: Dark Was The Night

The Red Hot Organization is a nonprofit devoted to battling AIDS by mobilizing pop culture. Among other things, this has meant a long series of music compilations featuring popular artists.

Most pop music compilations tend to be less exciting than they sound at first blush, but Red Hot's have been unusually high quality, certainly well above the genre's average.

The latest is Dark Was the Night, a compilation of cover songs and unreleased tracks from a who's who of indie luminaries, from The National to Iron and Wine, The Decemberists, Feist, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, and on and on. It's excellent.

Tough to pick a track, but what the hell, here's The New Pornographers covering a song by Destroyer, a band led by Canadian artist Dan Bejar, also known as a prominent member of ... The New Pornographers.

Why not medium-speed rail?

The always-excellent Sam Smith, a keen observer of politics and society as a journalist for over 50 years, introduces an outstanding long piece on the high-speed rail money in the stimulus:

There's nothing wrong with high speed rail except that when your country is really hurting, when your rail system largely falls behind other countries' because of lack of tracks rather than lack of velocity, and when high speed rail appeals more to bankers than to folks scared of foreclosing homes, it's a strange transit program to feature in something called a stimulus bill.

One might even call it an $8 billion earmark.

There are four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress

Given that climate legislation will touch every sector of the economy -- and ultimately generate hundreds of billions of dollars from the sale of emissions allowances -- it is no surprise that everyone is bringing on hired guns.

But Washington, D.C. is turning into the Wild West, into Deadwood, as an important new Center for Public Integrity analysis (see here) of Senate lobbying disclosure forms makes clear:

More than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year, as the issue gathered momentum and came to a vote on Capitol Hill. That's an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress. It also means that 15 percent of all Washington lobbyists spent at least some of their time on global warming in 2008.

The Center for Public Integrity has a great chart that breaks down the lobbyists by sector (see here).

And many of these 2,340 lobbyists are quite senior and influential: