Articles by David Roberts

Sweet nothings

Obama says the right things about transportation infrastructure:

We'll see what happens when the transportation bill comes up later this year.

Superb NYT story captures both coal's peril and the barriers to its elimination

"Is America Ready to Quit Coal?"

So asks a must-read story by Melanie Warner in the Sunday New York Times.

And so, slowly, fitfully, that possibility -- the possibility not just of cleaning up coal or using less coal but eliminating coal -- creeps its way into the American public consciousness.

The headline isn't the only thing worth celebrating. I would quibble with some details, but overall this piece comes closer than anything I've ever seen in the national media to getting the big story right.

It starts off by describing what too few people understand: coal is in a perilous position. Already building new coal plants is extremely expensive; any new regulations -- on CO2, MTR mining, coal ash, you name it -- could put new plants permanently off the table.

But the more interesting parts, to me, are those that describe the barriers in the way of quitting coal. Here are the big three, in order of importance:

The fear that that there's no alternative.

"[W]hether renewables can keep the lights on and our iPods charged remains an open question."

Loss aversion is, in your author's humble opinion, at the core of the coal fight. If the American people can be convinced an alternative is possible, they will not accept dirty, unhealthy energy, any more than they accept tainted water or cars without seat belts. But the fear of letting go of the devil they know, the fear of jumping into the unknown, is incredibly potent.

"Charging iPods" trivializes it; electricity provides basic sustenance, shelter, and comfort for families. For children. This is primal lizard-brain stuff. You do not mess with it lightly. Those looking to dethrone coal in the public imagination would do well to focus most of their firepower not on coal itself but on establishing the credibility and reliability of the renewables/efficiency alternative. It can't be cutting edge and whizbang forever. It's got to be safe for soccer moms in suburban Atlanta.

The fear of rising prices.

Markey on cap v. tax and ways to properly regulate carbon markets

In Houston last week for CERAWeek, Rep. Ed Markey -- chair of the Energy/Environment Subcommittee and the Global Warming & Energy Independence Select Committee -- gave an interview to the Houston Chronicle.

He had this to say on the tax vs. trade question:

Q: A cap-and-trade system is widely assumed to be the form the climate change bill will take, but economists and many others say a carbon tax would be a simpler, more efficient method to reach the same goals. Is the door completely closed on a carbon tax?

A: I think it's much more likely that a cap-and-trade system will be used. They've already reached a consensus in Europe, that 400-million-person continent, that that's the way to go, and it's the overwhelming way we're going with. I understand economists, and how they want to have a debate over what's more efficient, but in the end we can construct it as a cap-and-invest bill that is imposed in a fair, predictable way and will create incentives for innovation. What I use as an analogy is the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Up until then not one single home had broadband access. My goal in that act was to create the incentives for the deployment of broadband that could then lead—because of that huge additional capacity that was constructed—to the creation of thousands of other companies that could use that broadband capacity. I didn't know the names of the companies would be Google, eBay, Amazon, YouTube and thousands of others that created 3 to 5 million new jobs in America. But 10 years later people look back at the black rotary phone era as ancient history, but it's not that long ago. And I think we can do that same thing here. We have the opportunity to create 3 to 5 million new jobs in the energy sector if we unleash a technological revolution, because we have created through a cap-and-trade system a set of incentives that provides that opportunity. And I'm very confident that the same thing will happen. That's been my experience as chairman over telecommunications, chairman over regulation of the financial marketplace: the incentives have to be put in place in a predictable way that creates the incentives for the change that the country needs.

As to the fear of financial speculators, he had this to say:

Climate Central takes on Iowa corn

Climate Central bills itself as "a think tank with a production studio." This is what they do:

Using both staff experts and an extended blue ribbon network of scientists, Climate Central assesses and synthesizes the latest science, technology, and policy proposals. Our experienced communications team turns that information into creative, easily understood, and graphically rich pieces for print, television and the web.

They've got some serious names behind the project, including John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco before they were snapped up by the Obama administration. (Full disclosure: Grist board member Ben Strauss is a member of the CC team.)

CC just got up and running recently -- the full site doesn't debut until Spring -- but it's already turning out some great stuff. The latest is "Iowa: Corn and Climate," a video that recently aired on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Here it is (starts about a minute in):

The coolest thing, though, is that the video comes with an annotated transcript that takes virtually every sentence and substantiates it with a relevant bit of science, news report, or infographic. You get the public-friendly video and the wonk-friendly reference work, all in one package. Not bad.

CC aims to be an impeccably credible source of information on a highly contested set of subjects. It looks like they're off to a great start.