Articles by David Roberts

Your intrepid blogger heads to yet another green conference; promises to twitter some tweets

I'm at the airport, getting ready to head out to Santa Barbara for the second annual Wall Street Journal Eco:nomics conference. (Yes, flying on planes makes me a big fat hypocrite earthf*cker -- I eagerly await my NYT profile.)

The WSJ conference is interesting, mainly due to the contrasting influences of the top-notch WSJ news team and the WSJ editorial board, world headquarters for unrepentant far-right fruitcakes. So you get Al Gore and Amory Lovins, but then you also get Bjorn Lomborg and Vaclav Klaus. (Klaus gets the last word, with his session titled "Global Reality Check: From Europe to China to the U.S., how realistic is a big green push amid an imploding economy?" Anybody care to guess his answer in advance?)

In between you have an interesting mix of truly innovative and green-minded business leaders and ... business leaders primarily concerned with positioning themselves to profit from whatever happens next. Thus you get sessions like the hilariously titled, "Power Play: What will keep the lights on: nuclear energy or 'clean coal'?" Whee!

The really big news here -- and you'll want to notify all your friends and family about this ASAP -- is that I'll be twittering from the conference.

OMG! you say. OMFG! you add. Yes, it's true. I'll be delving into the brave new world of 2008, because clearly the main flaws of blogging are its excessive length, depth, and grammatical exactitude!

I don't even know enough about Twitter to tell you how to follow my twittering. But if you happen to know how, it's all going on under the name david_h_roberts.

Again: david_h_roberts. Feel the Future!

[Note from more tech-savvy editor: David's Twitter feed is here. And right below.]

What's the alternative?

Fossil fuel energy prices are down right now due to the recession suppressing demand, but the mid- and long-term trend is up. Coal, oil, natural gas -- all up. If we do nothing, energy will keep getting more expensive for Americans, and it will impact the poor disproportionately.

The progressive proposal is to price carbon, strengthen efficiency regulations, and invest in green energy and infrastructure. This will produce a short-term rise in energy prices followed by a mid- and long-term stabilization and reduction as renewables and efficiency scale up.

Conservatives react with outrage to the notion of policy that will produce an increase in energy prices, of any duration.

But ... what's their alternative? Energy prices are going up regardless. What's their solution to that problem?

I sincerely don't understand. Someone explain it to me.

There are two ways of improving the electrical grid, each with its own politics and challenges

Two years ago, nobody was talking about the nation's electricity grid; today it's so prominent in the national conversation that Barack Obama mentioned it in his inauguration speech. For energy wonk types, it's pretty amazing.

Lots of politicians and pundits are sort of waving their hands toward the grid as an energy solution, without being very specific about their goals or the policies needed to get there. To add some clarity, it's worth distinguishing two distinct grid issues, each with its own technological challenges, regulatory issues, and political implications.

To simplify matters, think of the grid like the nation's waterways. There are a few big, primary rivers -- the high-voltage, long-distance lines that compose the transmission system. Then there are thousands and thousands of smaller tributaries -- the lower voltage lines that carry electricity from the transmission system to individual homes and businesses, called the distribution system. (I guess the homes and businesses are ... lakes? Ponds? Frankly I haven't thought the metaphor through that far.)

With that distinction in mind, we can discern two grid-related subjects of interest to energy/enviro types:

The National Grid

This has to do with extending the transmission system to address two problems:

• First, there aren't many high-voltage lines that go to the places where renewable energy is most abundant (e.g., the Southwest for solar, the Midwest for wind).

• Second, right now there are (depending on how you count) anywhere from three to seven distinct regional grids that make up the national grid, and they aren't very well connected. While juice circulates relatively freely within these grids, it's difficult to get juice from one grid to another.

The wide grid refers to the effort to build a truly national transmission system: a new high-voltage backbone, with lines spanning the length and breadth of the country, able to carry electricity from anywhere it's generated to anywhere it's needed. Wide grid advocates argue that linking the entire nation together would mitigate the problem of intermittency -- the fact that sun and wind are variable (as opposed to baseload sources that can be turned on and off at will). The more intermittent energy sources are linked together, the more stable and reliable the whole system becomes.

WaPo confirms influence of Obama's top economic advisers; climate policy suffers

There was a time (er, last week) when I was mocked for lamenting the influence of Obama's top economic advisers on climate policy. I still think I'll have the last laugh. Or cry, as the case may be.

This is from a story by David Cho, just out in the Washington Post, about the extraordinary influence of Summers and Geithner in the administration:

The influence of their partnership was also evident during the battle over the budget, which began weeks before Obama was sworn into office.

Meeting in January on the eighth floor of the transition team's office in downtown Washington, Geithner pressed the incoming president to commit to cutting the deficit to 3 percent of the economy over the next five years, which would keep the nation's debt roughly in line with normal economic growth. Summers quickly backed him.

Some, including economist Jared Bernstein, resisted, saying that such a strict limit would make it more difficult to confront the many challenges ahead and that the size of the government's emergency response to the economy and financial markets would make the cap tough to maintain.

In February, the entire economic team convened in the windowless Roosevelt Room in the White House. Obama abruptly ended the debate. Geithner and Summers would have their way.

"The two of them being together ended up being pretty decisive for President Obama," an administration official said.

Rubinite deficit hawkery is back! Super. Atrios dryly notes:

Jared Bernstein's the crazy liberal who might want to spend a few bucks on social programs. Meanwhile Larry and Tim are shoveling cash into the Banksters' pockets as fast as they can. But, you know, they're the ones who are "serious" about the deficit.

Summers, you'll recall, was credited with reducing the amount of infrastructure spending in the stimulus bill. Here's what Bernstein had to say [PDF] before Congress last year, arguing for substantially higher infrastructure spending: