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Kansas legislature reviving last year’s coal fight

The Kansas legislature is once again attempting to pass a bill to get two new coal-fired power plants built in the southwestern part of the state, an attempt to override state environmental officials. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has gone head to head with Sunflower Electric Power and the legislature on this issue. The battle began in […]

President Obama should clear the way for state innovation on climate policy

The following is the second in a series of guest posts from the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank that works on constitutional and environmental issues. It is written by online communications director Hannah McCrea and president Doug Kendall, who also help maintain CAC's blog, Warming Law. (Part I)

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In a 1932 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote: "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens chose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

In the absence of federal action on climate change under the Bush administration, state and local governments have been taking advantage of this "happy incident" by passing measures that will reduce their contribution to global warming. Last September, ten northeastern states began auctioning allowances in the country's first mandatory regional cap-and-trade program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), while several western states began working with Canadian provinces to set up a similar program under the Western Climate Initiative.

Signaling that the nexus of leadership in U.S. climate policy lies currently at the state level, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hosted the Governors' Global Climate Summit in November, ostensibly to facilitate a high-level meeting between international and American leaders that bypassed the federal government. Unsurprisingly, California has led state efforts in advancing climate policy, and is currently in the process of adopting the largest and most comprehensive greenhouse gas reduction program in the country. These initiatives signal that Justice Brandeis's vision of states as "laboratories" of regulation is very much alive in the realm of climate policy.

Of course, state innovation has been most visible (and most contentious) when it comes to auto emissions standards, as seen with this week's blockbuster news that President Barack Obama is ordering the EPA to revisit the California waiver denial. As Grist readers may recall, in 2004 California formally adopted the "Pavley standards," an aggressive enhancement of auto emissions standards that would require a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles by 2016. Normally, states aren't allowed to depart from federal auto emissions standards in this way, but under Section 209 of the Clean Air Act, California has special permission to set better-than-federal fuel economy standards, provided it obtains a waiver of preemption from the EPA. Once California gets a waiver, other states are allowed to adjust their own standards to match California's, creating a mechanism in which states gradually bring about a nation-wide reduction in auto emissions.

Email of the day

This just hit my inbox, from Gary T. Strasburg, DAF Civ, Chief, Environmental Public Affairs, US Air Force:

After a thorough review of project requirements and information submitted by a team of functional experts, the Air Force has determined proposals received for a coal-to-liquid synthetic fuel plant on Malmstrom AFB, Mont., are not viable and will no longer pursue possible development of a plant at the installation.

Mail delivery cutbacks could trim vehicle emissions

Apparently, the U.S. Postal Service is considering cutting back on one day of mail delivery per week.

Personally, I suppose I'm fine with this, since I get very little time-sensitive mail. But I imagine that there are some folks who'd see this as a real hardship -- yet another little blow, at a time when there are plenty of big ones to absorb.

Regardless, someone just emailed me to ask how the service cutbacks might affect global warming.

Sadly, I've got no time for a real answer. But Google gives me just enough information for a ballpark answer: as an upper-bound estimate, I think that a one-day-per-week cutback in mail delivery could reduce vehicle CO2 emissions nationwide by as much as 700,000 tons per year.

Washington governor unveils green jobs legislation

Last night, NBC Nightly News aired a short segment on how hard the recession is hitting Seattle. It's quite depressing, especially amid the ever-gray skies ...

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) is not unaware of this fact and, as I've mentioned previously, is trying to boost the state's economy by putting monies toward major building projects and other job-creating ventures.

Yesterday, she announced a legislation package that focuses more concretely on the creation of "green jobs" -- as well as lowering the state's carbon footprint.

The legislation contains House Bill 1819 and its equivalent Senate Bill 5735. Both bills would implement a cap and trade system in partnership with six states and four Canadian provinces, which are part of a coalition called the Western Climate Initiative.

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In addition to the cap and trade bill, a proposed $455 million will be invested for projects that emphasize energy efficiency and clean-energy technology. These investments would help support 2,900 jobs for the next two years, according to the Office of Financial Management.

There will be public hearings on both bills next Tuesday, and if passed, the cap-and trade-program would go into effect in 2012.

Revealing skeptics as sock puppets in a few quick clicks

Want to play a fun Friday game? It's called Six Degrees of ExxonMobil. The object: To see how quickly you can get from a denier to ExxonMobil's coffers.

All you need to start is an opinion piece by a global warming denier. Let's take this column by Deroy Murdock for Scripps Howard News Service (he's also a contributing editor for the National Review Online).

OK, let's start. Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. The Hoover Institution has received at least $295,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Wow, wasn't that easy and fun? OK, so it's not quite "Bruce Campbell was in The Majestic with Susan Willis, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon," but the connection is just as reliable.

Transportation policy and the working married woman

Progressives in favor of congestion pricing on highways and in central cities tend to argue for those policies on progressive grounds (shock!) -- that such pricing systems reduce emissions, improve air quality, and fund transit improvements, which benefit lower- and middle-income households. Those are all nice benefits to congestion pricing programs, but we shouldn't neglect the congestion reduction function.

Congestion costs America some $80 billion per year, in the form of lost time and wasted fuel. And as it turns out, commutes extended by congestion have other effects, as well:

There is a strong empirical evidence demonstrating that labor force participation rates of married women are negatively correlated with commuting time. What is more, the analysis shows that metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting time between 1980 and 2000 also had slower growth of labor force participation of married women.

Long commutes are typically associated with dense cities like New York, but in recent decades, congestion has grown fastest in places with rapid exurban growth -- like Dallas, Riverside (California), San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

This might be my all-time favorite

Certainly in the top five:

From Chia to Chard

Chia leader The grass is always greener on the other side of the Atlantic. And speaking of decorative planters: It’s O-O-O-bama! She’s a poet and didn’t gnaw it Two buses diverged on a road, and I / I bit the driver of the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference. […]

Is there anything that isn't peaking?

Felix Salmon mused on the subject of Peakniks recently (and what a neologism that is!) after reading Ben McGrath's entertainingly morbid piece, "The Dystopians" in The New Yorker ($ub. req'd). While it's worth observing that "peaknik" has typically referred to Peak Oilers, I think it's safe to say that we're all peakniks now.

McGrath talks mostly about financial doomsayers, i.e. Peak Debt and Peak Dollars, but refers generally, if somewhat dismissively, to the "Peaknik Diaspora" and some of its adherents. These would be folks who "believe" in Peak Oil, Peak Carbon, Peak Dirt, Peak Fish. Personally, I think Peak Carbon is a not a terribly useful way to refer to climate change -- although "climate change" is itself a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change (something that Gar Lipow has taken it upon himself to fix). Peak Things, in my humble opinion (speaking of which, why did IMHO go out of favor? Is there no longer any humility on the Internet?), should only refer to resource maximums. Switching that around for carbon -- i.e. we're trying to stop producing carbon so we can declare/achieve Peak Carbon and continue reducing from there -- is just plain confusing. So let's dispense with Peak Carbon.