Articles by Tom Laskawy

NYT fails to acknowledge the job-creation opportunities from climate legislation

On the front page of Wednesday's NYT, we learned that Midwestern Democrats hate the climate. Or something. The ostensible point of the article was to highlight the geographical split between the climate change policymakers from the Obama administration and the House -- predominantly from the East and West coasts -- and the moderate Midwestern and Plains-state Democrats in the Senate who, according to the NYT, actually care about jobs.

For the record, the article, while admitting that President Barack Obama is, you know, Midwestern, ignored the fact that Ray LaHood and Tom Vilsack, Secretaries of Transportation and Agriculture, respectively, 1) are also from the Midwest, and 2) will have a significant role in devising an economy-wide solution to climate change.

And this is not to underplay the legitimate concerns that representatives from coal-dependent manufacturing states have. But this mostly just points to the greater weakness of the article -- the way it plays into the idea that addressing climate change will be some kind of job-killing catastrophe. This from the same newspaper that could write a feature on the tremendous job creation underway in Iowa related to wind-turbine manufacturing, a serious growth industry given that the nearby Plains states are considered the "so-called Saudi Arabia of wind." Keep in mind that enormous wind turbines will likely never be imported from abroad since one of these monstrous steel blades can barely fit on an oversize tractor-trailer much less be flown around the world on a 747. Indeed, the industry's potential for the Midwest led President Obama to visit a turbine factory in Ohio just the other week.

Obama's quick regulatory actions ring louder than markets

This post originally appeared on Ezra Klein's blog at The American Prospect, where I am guest-blogging this week with a promise "to keep the doom and gloom to a minimum."

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Speaking of doom and gloom, I was pleased to see the environmental policy-related dark cloud over Matt Yglesias lift somewhat over the weekend. The reason? First the EPA halted two new coal-fired power plants that were on the verge of construction -- plants that had been opposed for years by environmentalists -- and then President Barack Obama announced that California (along with 13 other states) could start regulating tailpipe emissions. In his glee, Matt observed:

Cap and trade or carbon tax legislation will, I'm convinced, be an integral element to any serious climate policy. But ... there's quite a lot that responsible regulatory policy can do.

No kidding. It's true that this question of the relative role of cap-and-trade vs. regulation has been bouncing around the enviro blogosphere for a while now. And believe it or not, as necessary as a robust, functioning cap-and-trade system is to addressing climate change, the opinion among many environmentalists is very much that government regulation, i.e. emissions cuts by decree, holds the key to a low-carbon future. The reason? The emissions cuts are going to have to be really, really, really big and markets, while very good at the trading part, don't do such a good job with the capping part.

Americans' climate change doubts aren't hard to understand

As if in response to David Roberts' point that "[t]here is nothing close to the public or political support necessary to pass the kind of sweeping policies necessary to eliminate America's emissions," Pew is out with a new poll saying just that.

Kevin Drum (via Andy Revkin) has the details:

Global warming, once again, ranks as the lowest priority from a list of 20, and the more general category of "protecting the environment" fell 15 percentage points from last year.

And as if that's not bad enough, Revkin also points to a new Rasmussen poll, which finds that 44% of U.S. voters don't believe humans are the cause of global warming, compared to only 41% who do. That's even worse than last year's results.

Somehow, those numbers don't surprise me. Leaving aside the fact that, thanks to the contingencies of history, the developed world has ended up occupying the parts of the planet likely to be affected least by climate change, the whole phenomenon is too vague and amorphous for most Americans to focus on. It just doesn't feel real to many people. After all, the weather is weird. Sometimes it's warm. Sometimes it's cold. Sometimes it rains.

In fact, I'm willing to bet the poll numbers for global warming will wax and wane in correlation with the temperature in any given year (just like a president's approval rating correlates pretty well with perceptions about the economy). Is it cold this year? Support will fall. A beastly hot summer? Up go the poll numbers.

Meanwhile, we as a society aren't particularly good with the whole science thing in general. Let's look at some numbers from a National Science Foundation poll back in 2004.

• Only 40% of Americans know that the universe began with the Big Bang.
• Fully half don't believe in evolution (with 1 in 5 entirely "unaware" of the concept at all).
• 58% of Americans think lasers focus sound waves rather than light. Lasers! Didn't these people see Star Wars?!
• And capping it all off: 29% of Americans don't know that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

What part of Americans' confusion regarding anthropogenic climate change is hard to understand? Even the concept of the scientific method is understood by only a fraction of our society. This all is why Joe Romm is running a pool on the nature of the near-term catastrophes required to turn Americans' climate change doubts into certainty.

And, tellingly, the partisan split is huge, with 59% of Democrats saying climate change is caused by humans, while only 21% of Republican agree. And why should they? Climate skepticism has been a cornerstone of Bush Republicanism for eight years -- and so far it looks like many in the GOP will continue to use it as a rallying cry.

If there's any hope in these recent climate poll numbers, it comes from a figure buried in Rasmussen's poll. They found that 64% of American voters believe climate change, whatever the cause, to be at least a "somewhat serious" problem (41% say it's "very serious"). So we may not rank the issue very high at the moment, and we may not be sure why it's happening, but a solid majority of us are ready to be persuaded.

And President Obama has left little doubt that we'll be hearing a lot about climate change in the months and years ahead. If anyone can move public opinion on the issue, it's going to be him, don't you think?

Picking the battles will be key to reforming food policy

Ah, the House Agriculture Committee. Never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Well, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but not by too much, I don't think. As Michael Pollan put it, "It's where decent ag legislation goes to die."

Does sustainable agriculture have any hope of support there? Well, we can be somewhat cheered by the fact that, with the Republican caucus as small as it has been in decades, the House Ag Committee has a mere 17 Republicans in contrast to its 29 Democrats. And the House being the House, you can be sure that those 17 Republicans will have plenty of time to work on their canasta skills (or whatever it is minority members do with all their spare time) because they certainly won't be writing legislation.

Unfortunately for us, the Democratic membership is mostly comprised of Blue Dogs (i.e. conservative Democrats) from farm states who have no real interest in or incentive for reform. And one thing is certain: Committee Chair and Blue Dog extraordinaire Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.) is no Henry Waxman, the hero of reform and oversight now leading the way on climate change and health-care reform.

In some ways, it's good news that the Farm Bill won't come up for re-authorization for several years. First, it means President Barack Obama doesn't have to dive right into this political-capital destroying mess of subsidy reform -- he has, after all, promised to eliminate subsidies for farmers who make more than $250,000 in farm income, two-thirds less than the current limit (and he put it in writing, no less). But more importantly, it gives us time to plot.

What should a foodie do between now and then? Now that we've got our shiny new President, it'd be nice to take him out for a spin, food policy-wise, even if we can't immediately head for the rocky terrain of the Farm Bill. Dave Murphy has written about what we might expect from the USDA, the good as well as the bad and the ugly. But what about some of the other areas that impact food and agriculture policy beyond the USDA and beyond what's contained in the Farm Bill? I thought I might do a series of posts on some of these areas since they'll deeply affect the development of sustainable agriculture. Let's start small. How's international trade policy grab you?