Climate Politics

Proposal to curb prices not likely to include ‘gas tax holiday’

Congressional Democrats are expected to announce their plan to counter the rising cost of gasoline as early as next Wednesday, and despite the pressure Sen. Hillary Clinton is putting on her congressional colleagues, it’s not likely to include a “gas tax holiday.” The plan being worked up by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Senate Majority Leader […]

Who’s looking into the circumstances of the Gade firing?

After yesterday’s news about the ouster of Mary Gade from the head of the EPA’s Midwest office, the next question is who, if anyone, is looking into whether her firing came at the behest of Dow Chemical and the White House. According to EPA spokesperson Jonathan Shradar, no internal investigation into the circumstances of Gade’s […]

Are low gas prices an inalienable right?

I'm listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talk to Thom Hartmann on Air America. Sanders is arguably the best senator in decades, and understands, as he just explained, that we need to transform our energy system toward renewables.

But he also said something to the effect that "we have to get gas prices back down." I can't blame him -- particularly in his state of Vermont, rural people are getting slammed by high gas prices, because they have to drive long distances.

His main explanation of high prices (with which Thom Hartmann, an important progressive radio talk show host, seems to agree) is based on 1) oil companies ripping us off, 2) speculators pushing up the price of oil, and 3) OPEC keeping a lid on production.

While all of those are certainly a problem, and a windfall profits tax that Sanders advocates is certainly in order, if the Senate's most progressive voice is not discussing the problem that the supply of oil is beginning to decline, then I don't see how carbon pricing is going to fare well. In the long run, people will get hysterical as their oil expenditures increase, as I argued in what I will now call Part 1 of what may become a series on oil hysteria. We need to push a mandate on turning the American car fleet into an all-electric fleet, and we need to construct a national high-speed rail and light rail network.

McCain touts gas-tax holiday as well as ‘long-term solutions’

McCain on the long-term solution to dependence on foreign oil: Nuclear! Despite what those “extremist environmental organizations” tell you. And despite the fact that only 2 percent of our electricity comes from oil.

Tar sands are hardly ‘environmentally responsible’

Alberta's tar sands got yet another huge black eye this week when as many as 500 ducks died after simply landing on a giant pond full of highly toxic oil sands tailings. Only five were said to have survived their toxic plunge. A member of a Canadian environmental watchdog group described the water found in the ponds as follows:

Drinking a glass of water from a tailings pond would be like drinking a diluted glass of oil or gasoline.

Whether the bitumen is cooked in situ while still underground or scraped off, carted away, and processed elsewhere -- either process requiring both huge amounts of energy and water -- millions of tons of global warming pollution are produced and nearly unfathomable amounts of toxic wastewater and tailings are left behind. Indeed, it is estimated that producing one barrel of oil from tar sands requires between 2 and 4.5 barrels of water. Last year alone, the Alberta tar sands industry was permitted water withdrawals totaling a staggering 119.5 billion gallons.

Bush supporter apparently fired for doing her job

An EPA controversy brewing in the Midwest calls to mind the U.S. attorneys scandal, as Brad Johnson noted yesterday. Top officials in the agency have forced Mary Gade, head of the EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago, to step down from her post or be fired by June 1. The ouster comes after Gade pressured […]

Veto override fails in Kansas; embattled coal plants remain dead

Two new coal-fired power plants will not be built in western Kansas due to a failed attempt to override the governor’s veto. The coal-plant saga began when a state environment official last year rejected Sunflower Energy’s permit to build the new plants — the first such rejection in the U.S. on the basis of carbon […]

A gas tax holiday would be cynical and indefensible

(I write this post with some sadness. I would not have expected a major progressive politician who obviously cares about global warming to propose a gas tax holiday, which has no public benefits whatsoever and at the same time undermines the entire rationale behind a national climate strategy that includes, as it must, a pricing mechanism for greenhouse gases. Kudos to Sen. Obama for opposing this absurd proposal -- double kudos because it might cost him a few votes.)

The gas tax holiday proposed by McCain and Clinton is indefensible. That, of course, is why just about every independent observer has criticized it. The Washington Post and, separately, Huffington Post have catalogued an impressive list of serious critiques, starting with the rather obvious point that in a demand-driven price shock, a gas tax holiday probably won't even save consumers a penny -- it will just enrich the poor, suffering oil companies:

Diverting war spending to green investments is both politically possible and neccesary

Is it possible to divert war spending into green investment? (David is skeptical.) The current military budget for fiscal year 2008 is around 650 billion dollars, not including supplemental requests, which so far have been made every year since the Iraq war started. That $700 billion-plus total compares to the around $400 billion of military spending in 2001. Given the current unpopularity of the Iraq war, would it really be politically impossible to gain public support for reducing our military budget back to pre-Operation Clusterf*ck levels? (I'd like to see much deeper cuts, but let's look a mere $300 billion reduction for the moment.)

Tory swelling

The Tories are kicking Labour’s ass in the U.K. elections. More about the Tories’ surprising degree of green here.