Latest Articles
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Students keep up momentum with a pre-election Climate Summer
A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist’s board of directors. Thursday, 7 Jun 2007 LEBANON, New Hampshire If you’re worried […]
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Ruminations on food, class, and Carlo Petrini
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” Oscar Wilde once quipped. Fresh, yes, but is it affordable? Photo: Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market Such observations didn’t always endear him to Victorian-era Americans. Wilde’s 1881 lecture tour of the United States, while ultimately viewed as a triumph, occasionally drew […]
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Be there!
I’m bumping this back up to the top. Party’s next Wed.! Hey all you wonky Washington, D.C., nerdlings: We’re coming to your town! That’s right, it’s time to party with Grist — and your fellow Grist readers. After the way Grist rocked San Francisco, I sure hope D.C. brings its A-game. Or does the vaunted […]
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Progress … we think
I confess I haven’t had the intestinal fortitude to closely follow the negotiations at the G8, but it looks like they’ve come up with something being billed as a "breakthrough." This phrasing in the Washington Post story is curious: The goal is to agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, Merkel said, […]
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Gore wins!
Spain’s Prince of Asturias award for international cooperation, that is. Can the Nobel be far behind?
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Witness the verbal mangling at today’s press conference
The White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair showed off his legendary verbal skills at a G8 press briefing yesterday (PDF). Here are the two best bits.Yoda Connaughton was enumerating the President's "domestic agenda on climate" when he said:
The President has set out his support at the state level for renewable power mandates, and we now have the United States of America, 80% [sic] of our power under state renewable power requirements.
Packed in a lot of doubletalk in one sentence, he has. The president opposes a federal renewable power mandate (even though he signed one into law in Texas). Second, 80 percent is just plain wrong. The 20 states with renewable mandates (plus D.C.) account for 42 percent of electricity sales. Can anyone can explain what he meant?
The second example is even more garbled:
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Getting carbon cap and trade right for renewables
For the 110th Congress, this is not just a question for Saturday night.
One of the reasons why federal carbon cap and trade legislation is so slow in coming -- besides coal state mendacity -- is because it is damn complicated. Of the critical design choices, there is insufficient common understanding of implications, to say nothing of agreement.
We will only be successful in fighting global warming via a transition to renewable energy. Carbon capture and sequestration is not going to save us. In contrast to renewables, no one is doing it now and the technology is not game time. At best it's years out; at worst it's a trojan horse, locking us into a path of further dependence on coal.
The danger with carbon cap and trade is that the wrong design could seriously hurt -- hurt, not help -- renewable energy markets. Robert Harmon and Michelle Hirschhorn of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation have written an important paper (PDF) on the dangers of making the wrong choice. If carbon legislation is modeled on the current SO2 scheme, the markets for renewables will be severely undercut.
To their arguments I'd add that the best structure will allow people who make investments in renewables (distributed generation or wholesale) or energy efficiency to be able to monetize their carbon-free contribution. An output-based approach would not provide an obvious way for this to happen. Under a load-based cap and trade system, utilities would clearly be incentivized to encourage their customers to do both.
For the 110th Congress, it is more important to get it right than to get it right now.
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The Whine of the Motor
Big Auto pleads for smaller gains in fuel efficiency The heads of Ford, GM, and Chrysler returned to Washington, D.C., yesterday to try to convince Congress not to hike fuel economy standards. Next week, the Senate will consider a proposal to raise average fleet-wide mileage to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 from the current […]
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Clean Water Is Highly Overrated
Bush administration limits reach of Clean Water Act If you assumed the federal Clean Water Act should apply to all bodies of water in the U.S., well, you have made an ass out of u and me. The Bush administration unveiled guidelines this week that say only bodies of water large enough to float a […]
