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Browner included on Obama economic team discussions

Last week John Broder wrote in The New York Times about contrasting views on climate policy among two top Obama administration officials: economic team leader Larry Summers, who favors "safety valves," slow phase-ins, and caution, and climate/energy czar empress Carol Browner, who favors strict carbon restrictions, quickly implemented.

(Broder's article was irksome, by the way. At no point did he see fit to mention that the reason Browner and "environmentalists" favor stiffer carbon restrictions is not that they don't care about costs but that they disagree about costs. The casual reader is left with the impression that economists and other Very Serious people have to do a "reality check" for la-la-land greens who don't care about money or working people. Have we learned nothing from our experience with previous environmental regs? Why is historically ungrounded pessimism the same as "realism"? Grr. Wait, where was I?)

Anyway, one wouldn't want to make too much of this, but it seems like a good sign that earlier today when Obama met with his economic team, Browner was in the room.

Perhaps this is a signal that environmental policy gets a seat at the big kid's table and doesn't get filed under do-gooderism. Maybe we can't persuade the economists to take efficiency or innovation seriously, but at least someone representing an optimistic assessment of costs will be around to temper all the pessimism. Let's hope Summers takes her seriously despite her gender.

Is Toyota developing a purely solar-powered car?

An AP report is generating headlines around the world:

Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy ...

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

Getting some electricity from rooftop PV panels isn't news, though it is a good idea, if only a "symbolic gesture" until panel costs drop sharply. (See also Treehugger's "Solar-Powered Toyota Prius Project.")

But there isn't enough rooftop area to run a car solely on rooftop solar cells. I don't see how it would work even for an ultra-lightweight short-range city car with a really big roof area -- an ungainly, unaerodynamic design. And don't forget, cars are often parked inside.

Rocker Neil Young says America can take lead in efficient autos

Dial up “Live Rust” on your MP3 player while you kick back to read Neil Young’s auto call to action over at Huffington Post. Young has gotten plenty of mileage lately off of his involvement with Team LincVolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental outfitted to run on electricity. But if you’ve missed out on Young’s non-musical […]

The dumbest headline of 2009

On the very first day of 2009, the L. A. Times ran a story that already seems a lock to win the year's dumbest headline award. And dumbest subhead: "Recent moves by lame-duck officials, though frustrating to environmentalists, offer the president-elect time and political cover to deliberately craft rules on emissions, energy lobbyists say."

Yes, the LAT thinks that accelerating new coal plant construction, greenhouse-gas emissions, and the wanton destruction of the planet's livability will give Obama "breathing room to fight global warming."

You might just as well argue that waterboarding gives its victims "breathing room" -- after all, right after you have been waterboarded, you breathe like you have never breathed before, desperately gasping for air.

With heat pumps, smart cooperation is as important as technology

Commenter Pangolin made a point about the cost of ground source heat pumps, an energy-saving technology, in his comment about Hansen's open letter: "If I cluster installation of my geo-exchange systems (4 homes) I can realize significant savings in the greatest cost of the system, the drilling for the ground loop. If I bundle systems into neighborhood or block thermal-service units unit costs go down again."

Just so. To take an extreme example, a neighbor of mine had a ground source heat pump installed for $15,000 in a single-family residence (her home was ideal for the technology in a number of ways). Normally such systems run $20,000-$40,000. However, that cost can drastically be altered when shared. In 1992, a HUD Oklahoma apartment complex, Park Chase Apartments [PDF], installed heat pumps for 348 units for a cost of around $6,800 per unit -- about $10,000 per unit in 2009 dollars.

Even on the four-unit basis Pangolin mentions, the price could be lowered not only by a shared ground loop, but by shared pumps, and by timing installation to coincide with road repair, and placing the loop under the street. I suspect that done on the block level or even along a single street the length of a block, this could lower costs to $15,000 per unit.

This is not a technological change in the usual sense. But it makes use of smart cooperation to use technology more effectively. And this is only one of many cases where we can use cooperation to drastically lower the cost of the investments we need to make to replace fossil fuels. You can look at it as a form of technology if you want to. Certainly it is innovation -- an innovation in social relations rather than machines.

Obama taps oceans advocate Leon Panetta to head CIA

Obama is poised to nominate Leon Panetta to head the CIA, according to news reports today. Panetta is a long-time advocate for ocean protection, though he's not likely to get much sway in this area as CIA chief.

Panetta has been the chair and commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission since 2003. In 2005, Pew joined with the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy to create the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, which Panetta now co-chairs. He is also a board member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. While in Congress, Panetta was active on efforts to protect the California coast, and sponsored legislation to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. He continues to be active with the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

Panetta represented California's 16th district in the House from 1977 to 1993, and was Bill Clinton's chief of staff from 1994 to 1997. Since then, he and his wife have founded the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University at Monterey Bay. He is also the Distinguished Scholar to the Chancellor of the California State University system, and teaches political science at Santa Clara University.

Why large future warming is very likely

A friend of mine from college emailed me the other day and expressed some skepticism about the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It occurred to me that it would make a good topic for my next post.

So here is the reasoning that has led me to conclude that business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will lead to temperature increases over the next century of around 3 degrees C.

First, it has been known for over 150 years that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. In fact, the very small number of credible skeptics out there, such as Dick Lindzen and Pat Michaels, are on record agreeing that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will warm the planet. What they argue is that the warming will be very small. More on that later.

The conclusion that emitting greenhouse gases will result in warming does not rest on the output of climate models, but is a simple physical argument that predates the invention of the computer. And if you don't believe in physics, take a look at Venus. That planet features a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and consequently a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

So we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get?

How green will the economic stimulus package be?

Attention in Washington is focused on an economic stimulus plan, which will be the first major agenda item for the new Congress that convenes tomorrow, and for the new president when he's sworn in on Jan. 20. But how green will the stimulus package be?

In his radio/YouTube address on Saturday, Obama said his proposal -- dubbed the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" -- would create 3 million new jobs, 80 percent of them in the private sector, including jobs in the renewable-energy and efficiency industries. "To put people back to work today and reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow, we will double renewable-energy production and renovate public buildings to make them more energy efficient," he said.

While Obama mentioned that a portion of the stimulus funding would go to repairing roads and bridges, he did not mention funding for public transportation, which many environmental groups and transit advocates are hoping will receive a substantial investment.

On Sunday, Obama's advisers said his plan will include $300 billion in tax cuts for workers and businesses, a move to appease conservatives who are concerned about government spending. The tax cuts would account for approximately 40 percent of the total package, which is likely to total between $675 billion and $775 billion over two years.

On Monday, President-elect Barack Obama met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other leaders from both parties on the Hill about his plan. "The reason we are here today is because the people can't wait. We have an extraordinary economic challenge ahead of us," he said.

Two gray eminences of the food movement lay down the law on farm policy

There's an idea out there that reforming U.S. food policy simply can not be a priority for the Obama administration. We're enmeshed in two wars (three, if you count what our dear Israeli friends are up to in the Gaza Strip), the economy is crumbling, and climate change is accelerating.

Under these conditions, how can Obama possibly busy himself with something as trivial as food? The president-elect himself seems to buy into this line of reasoning. By nominating a corn-belt pol with a history of playing footsie with agribiz as his USDA chief, Obama signaled that status quo, not reform, will mark his food agenda, at least early in his presidency.

I think the food-reform-can-wait logic is wrong on several counts. As I'll argue later this week in Victual Reality, investing in a new food system could make for an excellent piece of a stimulus package. And on practical grounds, food-system reform is urgent. Anyone who doubts that should read the powerful, concise op-ed in today's New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson.

The sustainable food movement's most revered elders make the case with characteristic bluntness:

Conservative icons take to The NYT to tout the magic of a revenue-neutral carbon tax

In last weekend's New York Times, conservatives Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) and Arthur Laffer had an op-ed claiming that a revenue-neutral "tax shift" would make conservatives "the new administration's best allies on climate change."

Color me skeptical. Laffer, of course, is a conservative legend, an economist whose curve has given a great many mendacious right-wing legislators intellectual cover in the war on taxes. Inglis is best known for telling Mitt Romney that Mormons aren't Christians.

It's notable when prominent conservatives don't try to deny or downplay climate change. But that's a mighty low bar to clear these days.

There is a crucial bit of weasel wording here: "If the bill's authors had instead proposed a simple carbon tax coupled with an equal, offsetting reduction in income taxes or payroll taxes, a dynamic new energy security policy could have taken root."

It matters a great deal whether a carbon tax reduces "income taxes or payroll taxes." Energy taxes are generally regressive unless offset. Reducing payroll taxes would provide some progressivity; reducing income taxes would provide additional regressivity. (Many workers pay no income tax at all.) You can bet conservatives would love that. "The good news is that both Democrats and Republicans could support a carbon tax offset by a payroll or income tax cut," they say. Everything's in that "or."

As with many carbon tax fans these days, Inglis wildly overstates the effects of a modest price on carbon: