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Lieberman Warner criticism, Part 3

This is the third in a five-part series exploring the details of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. See also part 1 and part 2.

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that tomorrow morning, you wake up, reach in your pocket, and find that you suddenly have billions of dollars of cash. Before you have a moment to celebrate, you also realize that you are lying in the middle of an interstate, and there is a big truck coming. What do you do?

(a) Issue an RFP for research, development, and deployment of technologies that will help you get off the highway;

(b) Issue an RFP for research, development, and deployment of crash-retardant pajamas;

(c) Invest in wildlife conservation measures to protect the flora and fauna on the side of the highway that are about to be covered in blood, guts, and twisted metal;

(d) Set aside money for truck driver grief counseling, or;

(e) All of the above.

If you chose (e), read no farther. You have identified yourself as a person who thinks that the Lieberman-Warner approach to greenhouse-gas reduction is perfection incarnate. If, on the other hand, you think that there was a fairly important idea not even listed amongst the options above (hint: it has to do with getting your butt off the highway and/or stopping the truck), then you understand the flaws innate to the Lieberman-Warner approach.

(And if you chose a, b, c, or d ... you're one odd duck. But at least you've signaled your self-interest in high-tech solutions to simple problems!)

Polar-bear listing decision must be made by May 15, says judge

The last time we checked in with the laggardly Interior Department, it was saying it needed until June 30 to decide whether to place polar bears on the endangered-species list. But the department had better find its Decider Pants soon, as a federal judge has sided with green groups to impose a new deadline of […]

Me on a podcast

I am on this week’s podcast from PolticalAffairs.net. I’ll confess when the PA guy called me I didn’t know it was a record of “Marxist thought online,” but hey, let a thousand flowers bloom. As it happens I was talking about a market-based carbon policy, kind of an odd subject for a Marxist podcast, but […]

Two simple, effective, and diametrically opposed climate policy proposals

This is the second in a series; see part one. I said in my previous post that of the three goals of climate policy — simplicity, political buy-in, and efficiency — it is possible to get only two at once. You can get simplicity and buy-in. You can get simplicity and efficiency. But when you […]

McCain, Clinton support summer gas-tax rollback

Hillary Clinton. Photo: Marc Nozell U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain have said they support temporarily suspending the federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel over the summer to ease the impacts of high fuel prices on consumers. McCain indicated he would shift revenue from other sources to cover the estimated $9 […]

By caring for God’s creatures, we avert a second flood

This is a speech I delivered on Earth Day, April 20, 2008, at the Unitarian-Universalist First Church in Jamaica Plain, Mass. A software glitch prevented its publication on that day, but I believe it's still worth sharing.

As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "I wish I could bring light ... but there is no light. Everything is going to become unimaginably worse. If I lied to you about that, you would sense that I'd lied to you, and that would be another cause for gloom, and we have enough causes already."

It is true that there are fewer bald-faced lies being told about the state of the earth -- even our president now admits that climate change is, well, shucks, kind of a problem -- but fewer lies does not mean that there is more truth.

Jim Hansen, the world's foremost climate scientist, is circulating a draft paper arguing that the climate "tipping point" must be reset at 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon, a point we passed two years ago.

If we do not immediately return below that level, Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves will collapse, with a catastrophic rise in sea levels. From the study of ancient ice cores and sea sediment, we now know that sea level change is episodic and quick ... measured in feet per decade, rather than inches per century.

Neither civilization nor global ecosystems can adapt to change this rapid.

Hansen sketches a solution of appropriate scale: immediate halt to burning coal; crash Marshall program to replace it with renewables; limit oil and gas use to known, economically viable reserves; full-scale reforestation and adoption of carbon-storing agricultural practices.

Nothing that we are doing, nor even seriously contemplating, comes anywhere near such massive a transformation, yet every actor on the political stage -- including major environmental organizations, "green" corporations, and presidential candidates of both major parties -- downplay the terrible realities and trumpet small-scale solutions wrapped in upbeat rhetoric.

We are racing toward the end of the world and have no plan of escape, but it is considered impolite to acknowledge that fact in public.

If biofuels are sustainable, we should be able to show it

A friend recently sent me a one-page press release from an ethanol lobby group that purported to debunk "myths" of biofuels. Our ensuing discussion helped me clarify why even people who once were excited and optimistic about biofuels (like me) are now so opposed to production subsidies (as opposed to R&D).

My friend asked (paraphrasing), "If not biofuels, then what?" and noted that what we're doing now -- "squeezing oil out of rocks" -- is not exactly good for the planet.

For me, the bottom line is simply this:

Ethanol is no more a renewable fuel than hydrogen is.

Rather, ethanol is a way for us to consume natural gas, diesel oil, and coal (not to mention a huge volume of water and vast acreage of cropland) to make motor fuels. All this is on top of serious problems raised by studies about land diversion for carbon emissions and food availability.

It's important to remember that fossil fuels are biofuels (fuels made from once-living matter), so using that term alone isn't helpful.

Notable quotable

“So I hope that this film will help others to connect the dots the way it helped Tipper and me to connect the dots on the relationship between mountaintop removal — which is a crime and ought to be treated as a crime — and the results of burning it without regard to the future, […]

Let’s raze more Amazon rainforest!

Blairo Maggi is a powerful man in Brazil. He owns a company called Grupo Andre Maggi that runs vast soybean plantations in the state of Matto Grasso, which straddles the Amazon rainforest and what the Nature Conservancy calls “the world’s most biologically rich savanna.” The New York Times has called Maggi “the largest soybean grower […]

Snippets from the news

• Washington, D.C., kickstarts bike-sharing program. • Tentative deal reached on farm bill. • Are hybrids unhealthy? • Gov. Schwarzenegger pushes for a power line through a state park. • Canada’s environment minister proposes limits on VOCs. • Russia says “nyet” to mandatory carbon caps.