Climate Politics

Georgetown Law opens new climate center with support from governors

Georgetown Law celebrated the opening of its Climate Resource Center on Monday with an event featuring several green luminaries. Govs. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) and Chris Gregoire (D-Wash.), as well as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Council on Environmental Quality chief Nancy Sutley were on hand for the inauguration of the center, created to help connect […]

Louisiana governor talks energy in his response to Obama’s address

America needs a comprehensive new energy plan, and that plan should include more drilling for oil and gas. That’s the message Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. “To strengthen our economy, we need urgent action to keep energy prices down,” said Jindal, […]

Obama puts climate and energy atop his priorities list in his first address to Congress

President Barack Obama devoted a significant portion of his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night to energy and environmental concerns, talking up the need for energy investments and calling on legislators to send him a cap-and-trade bill this Congress. “To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet […]

Senate finally confirms green-jobs advocate Hilda Solis

From the about damn time files: Senate confirms Hilda Solis as labor secretary. Now, to get to that green jobs work you’ve promised …

Producing a true green 2010 budget

I perused the Green Budget 2010 released last week by a large group of U.S. environmental organizations, including EDF, LCV, NRDC, NWF and WWF. Unable to find a total cost figure for the wish list of federal programs it includes, I assumed this omission stemmed from hesitancy to draw attention to a hefty price tag. After toting up the numbers, this seems not to be the case.

The total cost of the Green 2010 budget is $74 billion, just $4 billion more than the FY 2008 Bush administration budget reference. This is a diddly amount, not even a small down payment on returning environmental programs to parity with pre-Bush administration levels, let alone commensurate with the scale of the terrible risk before us.

The Green 2010 budget deals almost entirely in environmental line items, parsing each federal program as if it were operating in isolation, never addressing the fundamental question of what is required of the federal government. Incremental policy being our raison d'être, this is not a surprise, but the failure to propose obvious budget solutions, such as shifting all fossil fuel subsidies to renewables (what ever happened to Green Scissors?) is perplexing. Nor do important political questions, such as the degree to which particular governmental agencies are beholden to given interests, seem to enter the equation.

I took a whack at constructing a "true green" 2010 budget (using a spreadsheet available here), coming up with a total of $273 billion, which still seems a little light, but in the right the ballpark.

Obama names additional appointments in environmental posts

The White House on Monday announced several additional appointments of interest to enviros, with the biggest being that Interior Department Inspector General Earl E. Devaney has been tapped to serve as the chairman of the new Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board, along with VP Joe Biden. Devaney played a crucial role in investigating the […]

What will Obama say about climate change in tonight’s big speech?

Buzz around D.C. is that President Obama will address climate change and energy policy in his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night — amid, you know, all those other things weighing on the new commander in chief. And folks are already parsing what it means if Obama includes revenues from the auction […]

Reid to introduce a new bill granting more authority to feds for electricity transmission

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today signaled that energy policy will be a major focus for Congress in the next months, announcing plans to introduce a bill later this week that would give the federal government greater authority in siting electrical transmission lines around the country. “What we’re talking about doing is making it […]

Some thoughts on economists and climate and so forth

The other day in a somewhat tossed-off post I expressed unease at the influence mainstream economists have on climate policy, particularly within the Obama administration. Elsewhere on the green beat you've got people like Chu, who comes out of the science and technology worlds, or Browner, who's been deeply involved in the mechanics of environmental policy implementation for decades -- they are unusual both for their expertise and their ambition around climate and energy. Contrast that to the economic team, which is populated with conventional Rubinites, veterans of the Clinton administration. Their avatar is Larry Summers, who spent Clinton's term pushing back against Browner on climate policy and who has popped up on green radars thus far mainly as the guy who had a hand in cutting back transit funding in the stimulus package. Geithner is basically cut from the same cloth.

It was with all that in mind that I found the notion of a Treasury Dept.-based climate policy team a less-than-thrilling prospect -- my presumption, absent other evidence (and I made it very clear I was just noodling), is that it will be a Summers-esque force for go-slow incrementalism. I probably shouldn't have used the term "mainstream economists," since that's rather imprecise, but anyone who's watched the Obama team take shape knows what I mean.

Anyway, this prompted some substance-free snark over on Common Tragedies, followed by more substance-free snark on Environmental Economics, followed by some substance-free mutual high-fiving in the comments. (This kind of cliquishness will surely help spread the proper respect for the social sciences.)

Still, Adam Stein -- a guy who knows how to mix substance and snark in proper proportion -- is concerned about what he sees as sporadic and inconsistent attacks on economists from environmental quarters. So this is as good an occasion as any to write a post on that subject I've been meaning to write forever. I want to try to get at a few things that bug me about economists the way (some!) economists and economics (often!) tend to manifest themselves in public debates over climate change.

USDA's People's Garden may not be all it's cracked up to be

US Department of Agriculture chief Tom Vilsack may not deserve that recently awarded Grist green thumbs-up after all. Obamafoodorama (blissfully abbreviated as ObFo) has an amusing and edifying (and lengthy) disquisition on Tom Vilsack's much ballyhooed "People's Garden." When Vilsack took a jackhammer to a slab of concrete in front of USDA headquarters in honor of Lincoln's Birthday (the USDA was founded under Lincoln and referred to by him as "the People's Department"), he thought he was demonstrating the USDA's commitment to sustainable landscaping. But he did it without, it appears, much forethought.

The planning process seems to have consisted of one step: "Dig a hole." There's no design for an actual garden to go in its place -- and it certainly was not intended, as many have presumed and now demanded, to be a food garden. The landscape plan that Vilsack brandished in a USDA photo was, according to USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service spokesman Terry Bish, a prop. When ObFo asked about it, Bish said "Oh, that's old. Those are the plans from when [former Ag] Secretary Schafer was planting a tree in the ornamental garden to honor a USDA employee who was killed in Iraq."

In fact, the whole thing was a photo op that got out of hand.

But the goal of the garden changed when it became apparent that there was a groundswell of public interest in a food garden at USDA headquarters.

"Suddenly there was all this interest from the public about vegetables," Mr. Bish said. "It was a sleeper. Sometimes we do these things, and they get really big." He repeated: "There's actually no timeline for the garden. It was all about the Bicentennial. But now we have to come up with ways of maintaining it and to see how we can use it ..."