Latest Articles

Canada's economic recovery plan includes green items

Stephen Harper, the recently reelected prime minister of Canada, is including plenty of environmental items in his government's $40 billion (about $33 billion U.S.) economic stimulus bill, including tax credits and grants to support homeowners fund energy efficiency improvements.

Here's the government's own rundown of the plan's green items:

Action to Build a Greener Canada -- Budget 2009 targets investments that improve Canada's environment. These include:

* $1 billion for green infrastructure projects.
* $1 billion over two years for renovation and energy retrofits to social housing.
* $300 million over two years to the ecoENERGY Retrofit program.
* $1 billion for clean energy research, development and demonstration projects.
* $87 million over two years for key Arctic research facilities.
* $245 million over two years for the cleanup of federal contaminated sites.
* $10 million to improve government environmental reporting. (Unless otherwise noted, all amounts are in Canadian dollars)

Harper's conservative government is also saying the right thing about climate change. According to the CBC, the "government said it's committed to reducing greenhouse gases by 20 per cent by 2020, pledging over the next five years to give $1 billion in support to projects that encourage sustainable energy."

But cutting those emissions seems to hinge on the successful development of carbon capture and storage technology. Harper's budget would "provide $15-million over five years towards research, and another $850-million over the same period for clean-energy demonstration projects, including large-scale carbon capture," according to the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Sierra Club leader discusses plans for his new role as chairman

Last Friday, long-time Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope announced that he is stepping down and moving to a new role as chairman of the group.

The move comes after 17 years at the helm, and just days after a more environment-minded president took office, prompting some to wonder what Pope has up his sleeve. In his new role, he'll be focusing primarily on climate change work, so we dropped him a line to get more details.

Grist: What prompted the change in position now, right after a new president was sworn in who seems likely to be much more sympathetic to green issues?

Carl Pope: The new administration and Congress offer so many opportunities to move our agenda that I wanted to focus more energy on the outside role, and less on management.

Grist: How will your role at the organization change? What will be the relationship between you and the new executive director?

Pope: After the transition, I'll be doing strategy, political, and fund-raising work -- and the new ED will be leading the organization and managing the staff. We'll both report to the board.

Grist: In the new role, you're going to be focusing primarily on climate policy. What are your plans in that area? What do you hope that the new focus will allow you to do?

Pope: We've launched an ambitious Climate Recovery Partnership, with three key goals: cut greenhouse pollution to the level scientists tell us the atmosphere can handle, leverage natural ecosystems to help protect landscapes and human communities during the coming period of unstable climate, and then eventually restore the climate by allowing enhanced forests, soils, grasslands, and oceans to gradually sequester the excess CO2 emitted over the last century. It's the most ambitious, broad-scale program I know of -- and I want to help make very bit of it hum.

Standards and public investment — primary means to lower greenhouse gas emissions

More and more climate science seems to imply we need to eliminate most greenhouse emissions over a time frame closer to 20 years than 50. This has a number of important implications:

It strengthens the case for standard-based regulation and public investment as the main drivers of change, with price as secondary reinforcement. As Tom Laskawy points out, price "will certainly help smooth the bumps in the road to a low-carbon economy. But it will be governments -- through mandates, efficiency requirements and infrastructure spending -- that will pave the way."

It implies a strong case for diverting carbon revenue into refunds rather than green investment. If we effectively lower emissions, then emissions will have to begin to drop faster than prices rise about halfway through the process. At that point revenue from auctions or taxes will peak and begin to drop. However, the transition will only be around half-over at that point. We don't want reductions to depend on a declining revenue source before emission drops are complete. At the point where dedicated revenues drop, the pressure is always to be "responsible" and reduce the program to match the declining funds, rather than finding additional sources.

It implies a strong case for deploying the technology we have rather than waiting for breakthroughs. If we have to massively reduce emissions over the next 20 years, a five-year delay loses a quarter of our transition time.

A nosy review of recycled facial tissue

As any sensitive nose knows, the quest for facial tissues that are gentle on you -- and the earth -- is nothing to sneeze at. Is it possible to find a strong, soft schnoz-swiper that doesn't strip the forest?

What if the U.N. held a climate summit and no one knew about it?

As the Financial Times reported (and Grist noted), U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon seems to want to convene a meeting of 30 to 40 heads of state in the next few months to address climate change.

But it's unclear exactly what's afoot. Ban's press office in New York said it has nothing to announce yet -- no date, location, or list of attendees for the summit. Nor would it say what the U.N. chief and his climate chief, Yvo de Boer, hope to accomplish by calling a summit months in advance of the big international climate conference scheduled to take place in Copenhagen this December.

"We just don't have anything to announce as of now," Alex Cerniglia, a spokesperson for the secretary-general, said today. "But he's definitely strongly engaged in the current negotiations and in reaching a deal in Copenhagen at the end of the year."

The U.S. State Department had nothing to say on the supposed meeting either, a spokesperson said.

De Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. climate convention, first mentioned the plans in London yesterday. He said Ban wanted to build on the momentum of Barack Obama's inauguration as U.S. president.

Perhaps De Boer and Ban hope to piggy-back onto the Group of 20 summit scheduled to take place in London in April. The summit is already expected to focus on spurring carbon-free energy sources.

What are you hearing, dear readers?

Combine a carbon standard with a renewable portfolio standard

J Wayne Leonard, CEO of the energy company Entergy, has an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for a carbon cap-and-trade program and against a renewable portfolio standard. What's his beef with an RPS? The problem, according to Leonard, is that an RPS would force his company to invest in renewable energy (!), while a cap-and-trade program would not. Clean coal uber alles!

This, I think, is why some people are suspicious of corporate climate kumbayas like USCAP. There's a sense that perhaps some of the companies are signing on not because they think cap-and-trade will force them to fundamentally change the way they do business, but because they are pretty sure it won't.

Fortunately, we don't have to put all our eggs in the clean-coal basket. We don't have to choose between a carbon standard and a RPS. Leonard's article is Exhibit A for why we need both.

Obama doesn't need to back away from investment to appease conservatives

Conservative pollster Frank Luntz takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to share the news that everyone loves infrastructure:

Last month, I conducted a national survey of 800 registered voters on their attitudes toward infrastructure investment ...

The survey's findings were unlike any other issue I have polled in more than a decade. Iraq, healthcare, taxes, education -- they all predictably divide and polarize Americans into political camps. Not infrastructure.

Consider this: A near unanimous 94% of Americans are concerned about our nation's infrastructure. And this concern cuts across all regions of the country and across urban, suburban and rural communities.

This demonstrates yet another reason why Obama's attempt to appease conservatives by bumping transit infrastructure investments to make room for tax cuts is pointless. The people want infrastructure, they want stimulus, and those two happen to be the same thing, so who gives a f*ck what Republicans want?

Nate Silver follows up with this excellent point:

I'm not sure why Obama isn't doing more to highlight the green portions of the stimulus bill. The public seems to tolerate the spending on bridges and highways -- but they also see it, perhaps not wholly improperly, as make-work. The long-run benefits of the alternative energy programs, on the other hand, are far more intuitively appealing. If the central critique of the stimulus is that the debt we're creating will be burdensome to future generations, that concern could be mitigated if the spending in question is portrayed as a down payment made on behalf of those future generations toward cleaning up the environment and mitigating dependence on fossil fuels. It also provides for some sense of purpose to the stimulus: we'll come out of this, Obama can say, with the greenest, most energy-independent major industrial economy in the world, etc. etc.

Exactly. I really don't see why Obama has to trim his sails one bit on this stuff. It's overwhelmingly popular and substantively correct policy, a combo that doesn't come along very often.

All the green policy news I don't have time to write about

• The House is debating the economic stimulus package today, and is likely to vote on it on Wednesday. President Obama was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday lobbying Republican lawmakers to support the bill, though GOP leaders say they are holding out for more tax cuts.

• Meanwhile, mass transit advocates are already miffed that spending for their projects got reduced in favor of more tax cuts. And on the Senate side, the prospects for transit look even bleaker.

• Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) announced on Tuesday that they have formed a Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition caucus in the House of Representatives. In his announcement, Inslee noted that the group recently met with Carol Browner, the new assistant to the president on energy and climate policy, and that the caucus members are working on improving green technology provisions stimulus package. "The melting of the Arctic ice cap is speeding up toward a point of no return and the economy is in turmoil," said Inslee. "We are in need of bold, aggressive action, and that’s exactly what the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition is about."

• Apparently, a pair of Swiss filmmakers is working on a documentary about what happened to Jimmy Carter's White House solar panels.

• The brilliant minds at the Reality Coalition have bought ad space on all misdirected web pages on washingtonpost.com.

• Ed Markey, chair of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming and author of the fuel-economy provision in the 2007 energy bill, sent a letter to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood on Monday asking him to strengthen the standards.

• The Heartland Institute has scheduled its annual climate change skepticism summit for March 8-10 in New York City, if you'd like to go give yourself an ulcer for a few days.

Seattle man invents rooftop wind turbine

Seattle inventor Chad Maglaque has a dream. A dream that he will one day be able to walk into a big-box store and purchase a rooftop wind turbine along with his giant jar of mayonnaise.

And surprisingly, his dream may not be so far off. Maglaque has actually put together just such a wind turbine, which he's named The Jellyfish, and he could soon be cashing a $10 million check to make many, many more. How? Maglaque submitted the design to Google's "Project 10 to the 100th" contest, which honors the company's 10th birthday by offering five innovators $10 million for simple ideas that could change the world. The categories for the contest range from energy and environment to health and education, and even a catch-all category for "everything else."

Of course, hundreds of thousands of other ideas have also been submitted, and Google folks are still narrowing down the top picks. But starting March 17, the public will be able to vote for their favorite idea out of the 20 semi-finalists. You can even ask Google to remind you to vote.

E.U. leaks details of its proposed Kyoto successor treaty

On Wednesday, the European Commission will release a communiqué outlining the E.U.'s vision for a successor agreement to Kyoto, to be hashed out this December in Copenhagen.

There have been some leaks related to the document, covered in The NYT and elsewhere, but now EurActiv has gotten a draft copy [PDF] to look over. It's got pencil marks on it, so obviously it's preliminary and could change by Wed., but it gives a good sense of the direction E.U. sees things going.