Latest Articles

A final entry on the cap-and-trade debate

The ongoing economic discussion concerning the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon taxes has attracted a number of eminent participants. Not only Mark Thoma, but Brad DeLong now (with an assist from Megan McArdle), offers some excellent commentary on the issues involved.

Q&A with Van Jones about the Climate Security Act and green jobs

Van Jones. What does the green jobs and justice community think about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act? To get one perspective, Grist caught up with Van Jones, the founder of Green For All, a group that promotes green-jobs policies and environmental justice. Jones, a civil-rights lawyer and the founder and former executive director of the […]

America’s 21st century can’t-do spirit

“It’s frankly not doable for us.” — chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson, on the G8’s proposal to reduce industrial countries’ emissions 25-40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020

Cause and effect

Here’s a sentence from a new story in the WSJ: The second-poorest state in the nation based on household income, West Virginia counts on coal to support its economy. May I suggest a rewrite? West Virginia counts on coal to support its economy; as a consequence, it is the second-poorest state in the nation based […]

An Inconvenient Truth opera to open by 2011, U.S. public transit overwhelmed, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: The Future’s Coming Fast Rough Ridership ‘How Now?’ Frowns Dow

Senate race takes shape in New Mexico

This got lost in the flap over the Climate Security Act yesterday, but via Politico, on Tuesday night Rep. Steve Pearce narrowly won the Republican Senate primary in New Mexico. He beat out Rep. Heather Wilson by a margin of 51 to 49 percent in the contest to see who will replace GOP Sen. Pete […]

U.N. food summit ends without agreement on solutions

A high-level three-day United Nations food summit ended Thursday without wide agreement on solutions to the world food crisis. At the meeting, delegates sparred over trade barriers, biofuels’ role in keeping food prices high, agricultural subsidies, how food aid should be spent, and how much aid to give. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened the conference […]

Are the CGE models useful for predicting the effects of climate policy?

My pal Peter Dorman is looking for answers: Does the class of economic forecasting tools known as "computable general equilibrium models" (aka CGE models) have any documented track record of success?

This may seem like an arcane point, but it's quite relevant to climate policy. Government agencies throughout North America are using CGE models to forecast the economic impacts of various cap-and-trade proposals. But many academic economists -- Dorman among them -- think that the CGE models are built on sand. Says Dorman:

A primer on organic wines, and a sweet way to bring them to the table

Psst! Organic wine doesn’t suck. About 15 years ago, a friend brought an organic wine to a dinner party I was giving. He explained to me that in addition to being made from grapes that are grown organically, organic wines don’t contain any added sulfites (some sulfites occur naturally as a result of the fermentation […]

Coal is no longer cheap — so what comes next?

This article first appeared in Spark, and is reprinted here with their permission. It's somewhat long, and it's got numbers and graphs. It helps if you imagine Scarlett Johansson reading it.

When it comes to power generation, coal isn't cheap. Both power plant and fuel costs are up by nearly 300%, and projected to rise farther¹. Even before factoring in the risks of future greenhouse gas legislation, this has conspired to make a bet on coal-fired central station power equivalent to a bet on massive retail power price increases. Increasingly, this is a bet that neither equity nor debt providers are willing to take.

And yet we continue to operate under the assumption that coal is cheap -- to the extent that we have largely framed our greenhouse gas policy conversation as a tradeoff between environmental stewardship and the cheap coal fantasy.

On balance, this is good news, because it means that the perceived conflict at the heart of our current climate change debate is false. We need not quibble about whether or not we can afford to address global warming; indeed, we can lower greenhouse gases and grow the economy. But first, we have to get beyond coal.

The Electric Sector's Role in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In the United States, coal is primarily a power plant fuel, and the electricity sector is our single biggest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, any discussion of greenhouse gas reduction must confront coal-based electricity. Figure 1 shows total US greenhouse gas emissions by sector, and Figure 2 shows how the electric sector has steadily increased its share thereof.

Figure 1: 2005 US Greenhouse Gas Emissions, By Source²