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Required reading for novice climate economists

Whether it's Pacific Northwest flooding or the other "strange" weather phenomena we've been seeing in the U.S. and across the globe, the present-day risks of a changing climate are real and threatening -- to say nothing about the future risks.

But the current economic downturn often drowns out calls for major spending to lower emissions or otherwise address climate change. Still, the reality is that the two -- economic and environmental revitalization -- can and should go hand in hand.

A great introduction to why is available from Frank Ackerman in Dollars & Sense magazine. "Climate Economics in Four Easy Pieces" doesn't even need five full pages of English to make a strong case for action that stands up to climate change deniers.

Another rate increase in the name of cheap coal

Duke Energy just got approval to raise rates 18 percent to cover the continued rising price tag for its 630-MW planned coal plant in southwestern Indiana.

The new price tag? $2.35 billion, or $3,730/kW.

By my highly unscientific but quixotically regular analysis, that's a new record, just topping AEP's $3,700/kW proposed facility in Virginia. Way to go, Duke!

One note: This plant will not sequester its CO2, and $2.35 billion does not represent the full cost being borne by Indiana ratepayers:

On Wednesday, the commission also approved Duke Energy's $17 million plan to study the plant's potential to capture a portion of its carbon dioxide emissions as part of the company's proposal to possibly store the gas permanently deep underground.

So not only is it expensive, but it's also environmentally dangerous. But if we throw a few million ratepayer dollars at "studying" CO2 sequestration, maybe we can put a nice report together showing that someday in the future, it will only be expensive.

This apparently was insufficient to appease the environmental community:

Environmental and government watchdog groups oppose the plant and have sued to try to halt it, calling the project a huge waste of money that would be better spent on renewable energy such as wind farms. They also warn that its price tag could go even higher if Congress acts to impose caps on carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

Crazy hippies. When will they learn? We need to burn more coal and raise power prices because coal is cheap. Why is that so hard to understand?

ReadyMade: Depression posters for today

ReadyMade asked a group of graphic designers to "reimagine the populist poster art of the first Great Depression." The results are cool, and a couple of them are greenish, like this one from Nick Dewar:

So much for 'clean coal'

Originally posted at the Wonk Room.

Before Thursday's Senate hearing on the devastating Tennessee coal plant billion-gallon ash spill, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) demolished the "clean coal" myth. Alexander told Knoxville's WVLT-TV:

Coal is a dirty business.

Watch it:

China to increase coal production 30 percent by 2015

The Canberra Times/AFP has the alarming news:

China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs, the Government has announced, in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming.

(Note to Canberra Times: Some statements are so obvious you can skip the journalistic hedging.)

Land and Resources Ministry chief planner Hu Cunzhi said the Government planned to increase annual output to more than 3.3 billion tonnes by 2015.

That is up from the 2.54 billion tonnes produced in 2007, according to the ministry.

In short, from 2007 to 2015, China will increase its coal production by an amount equal to two-thirds of the entire coal consumption of the United States -- an amount that surpasses all of the coal consumed today in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America.

Such is the legacy of eight years of the Bush administration blocking all national and international action on climate change, and indeed actively working to undermine international negotiations by creating a parallel do-nothing track for countries like China. As Chinese officials have told me, we gave them the cover to accelerate emissions growth.

Some might claim a different president would never have been able to get China on a different path. But if Al Gore had been elected picked by the Supreme Court in 2000, I assert that China would not be planning for its 2015 coal production to be triple that of current U.S. coal production.

Changing China's rapacious coal plans will arguably be Obama's single greatest challenge in terms of preserving a livable climate and thus the health and well-being of future generations and thus any chance at a positive legacy for his presidency.

The story continues:

As mandates and government aid ramp up, the case for ethanol runs out of steam

As President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress mull a bailout for ethanol makers, the industry absorbed two body blows this past week.

1) The Environmental Working Group released a study revealing the profound opportunity costs associated with our government's generous support for ethanol.

The corn-based fuel grabs three-quarters of all federal renewable-energy tax credits, EWG reports. Ethanol gets more four times as much cheese as wind, solar, and geothermal combined. If you add in support for biodiesel, biofuels grab 80 percent -- four dollars in five -- of federal tax largesse to renewable fuels. In short, the dubious practice of turning corn and soy into liquid car fuel is crowding out other more energy-rich and sustainable energy sources.

2) A professor from Iowa State University -- ground zero of ethanol fervor -- has broken ranks and issued a scathing, cogent critique [PDF] of of the ethanol program. Here's a juicy sample from the paper, by Dennis Keeney, emeritus professor, Department of Agronomy and Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering:

About 6.7% of the gasoline used in the U.S. will be displaced by ethanol in 2009, when corrected for the lower energy content of ethanol and assuming an annual gasoline consumption of 140 billion gallons. Assuming a net energy gain in the conversion of corn to ethanol of 1.25, there is a net energy displacement of approximately 2.8 billion gallons of gasoline, about a 2% net energy gain. If the energy in nonfuel byproducts (e.g. distillers grains, which are used for cattle feed) is removed from the equation, the net energy gain is close to nil. In other words, ethanol from corn will do nothing to boost net energy supplies.

Let's put these two assessments together: We're handing three-quarters of the resources we have for alternative fuels to one that delivers precisely ... nothing. At a time of rapid climate change and mounting budget deficits.

Below, a few choice nuggets from the two papers.

Green(ish) news from our nation's capitol

• Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wants to get funding for FutureGen -- the proposed "zero emissions" coal plant that the Bush administration axed due to ballooning costs -- into the stimulus package. Durbin said Thursday that he got a "positive response" when he discussed it with energy secretary nominee Steven Chu. His state-mate Barack Obama pushed to revive the plant back when he was just a senator.

• At a hearing on Thursday, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) announced the newest Democratic members of his committee (though their appointments aren't yet final): Evan Bayh (Ind.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), and two new senators, Mark Udall (Colorado) and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire).

• It's looking increasingly likely that Wall Street big-wig Steve Rattner, who works for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group, will be named as Obama's "car czar."

Digital TV delay could be win for environment

Anyone with a working TV set has likely seen the ubiquitous ads educating the public about the Feb. 17 switch to all-digital broadcasting. But millions of Americans still aren't prepared and could miss out on important news and emergency broadcasts -- a fact that has led President-elect Barack Obama to urge a delay in the transition.

Such a delay could be a perfect opportunity for manufacturers to improve their recycling programs, say activists from the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. The ETBC recently put together a report card ranking the major TV companies on their take-back policies. Highest-ranked Sony got a B- for leading the pack with the first national take-back program, but more than half of the 17 companies got failing grades for having no programs in place at all.

This week, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, ETBC has been calling attention to the lack of take-back programs -- and the electronic waste that will be created when a "tsunami" of analog TVs hit the landfill -- with a cadre of TV zombies (see video below). [Note to ETBC: Didn't you get the memo about vampires being the undead of the hour?]

Robert Stavins can't walk and chew gum at the same time

One of my New Year's resolutions is to blog more about the general lameness of the economics profession when it comes to energy and climate issues. (Note to self: How about losing a few pounds?)

I was in the midst of putting this resolution off for a few weeks when I saw a quote by Robert Stavins that seemed to sum up the value-subtracted that economists bring to the world.

In an otherwise excellent New Yorker article on Van Jones' efforts to push a green jobs agenda, which I will blog on separately, Elizabeth Kolbert feels compelled to "balance" Jones with some people who don't think it's a good idea to simultaneously address the climate problem and the poverty/jobs problem. Who else could a respectable journalist turn to than an economist, a profession that arguably has cost the country and the world more jobs than any other?

Indeed, I remember Bill Clinton opining at a Georgetown conference in 1997 on why he ignored the advice of Administration economists, like Larry Summers, who urged him not to adopt a serious greenhouse gas emissions target at Kyoto. Clinton said his economic team had assured him that his balanced budget plan would be a job killer, so he pretty much took everything they said from that point on it with a grain of salt. But I digress.

Kolbert manages to elicit this amazing response from one of our leading economists:

U.N. says ignore the cold, warming is still a problem

GENEVA — Icy conditions that have claimed dozens of lives across Europe since November are partly due to La Nina, an upsurge of cooler water to the Pacific Ocean surface, the UN’s weather agency said Friday. “The cold snap currently being experienced can be partly attributed to the La Nina phenomenon, which is a cooling […]