Climate Politics

Biofuels loophole in 2007 energy bill grandfathers in pollution

A recent report ($ub. req'd) by Greenwire's Ben Geman revealed a massive loophole in the 2007 energy bill that renders meaningless most of the climate safeguards for corn ethanol that Democrats have touted.

The loophole exempts any ethanol refineries that have already been built or were under construction at the time the bill passed from meeting the global warming requirements. Those facilities have a combined production capacity of 13.7 billion gallons, just shy of the 15 billion gallons of production mandated in the bill -- meaning that the Democrat-vaunted greenhouse-gas safeguards will apply to only 11 percent of corn ethanol production.

With recent studies in the journal Science and elsewhere revealing that corn ethanol takes 167 years to produce enough greenhouse-gas savings to make it as green as regular old oil, and with billions of people struggling with skyrocketing food prices, and millions more acres of forest and savanna being destroyed, that means disaster for the climate and the world's poor.

You can’t achieve the three goals of climate policy at once

I’ve been thinking about carbon policy lately (shocker, I know), prompted by recent interactions with Monica Prasad, Peter Barnes, and our own Sean Casten. The more I think about it, the more one of the central tensions becomes clear to me. Here are three goals for good climate legislation: Simplicity: The bill should not be […]

Energy prices that tell the truth: the real presidential litmus test

Calling all greens: Barack Obama, battling to remain the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary, this weekend took on the most sacred cow in American politics: cheap gas.

Campaigning in Indiana, Obama distanced himself from the gas tax "holiday" proposed by Sen. John McCain, saying it may not bring down prices and would require raising other taxes to pay for highway maintenance.

"The only way we're going to lower gas prices over the long term is if we start using less oil," Obama said in Anderson.

McCain pounced, saying through a campaign spokesman that "Americans need strong leadership that can deliver lower gas prices and a healthier economy, not Barack Obama's inexperience and indecision." Obama's Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, did likewise, unveiling a new ad calling for suspension of the gasoline tax -- a proposal first advanced by McCain on April 15.

As U.S. political campaigns go, the contrast between McCain-Clinton's playing the gas-tax card and Obama's brave clarity couldn't be clearer.

The thing you really never hear

This column from Newsweek editor Evan Thomas is largely a witless recitation of conventional wisdom, but it does raise one point I want to make. It seems to me that every mainstream media figure in the world is out there saying a) tackling global warming is going to be horrendously expensive, involving great sacrifice and […]

Lieberman-Warner criticism, Part 2

This is the second in a five-part series exploring the details of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. See part 1 here.

With atmospheric GHG concentrations rising at a frightening rate, we need a full court press to change directions, using every possible tool at our disposal. From an economic perspective, this means that we not only need to impose financial penalties on polluters, but also provide financial incentives for those who act to lower GHG emissions. We need a market mechanism in place so that the costs of GHG emission -- or the revenue associated with GHG reduction -- factors into individual investment decisions immediately. In short, we need big sticks and big carrots. The Climate Stabilization Act (CSA), as the Lieberman-Warner Bill is known, is a small stick with no carrot. This post explains why.

Governors rally against dirty Bush car plan

Nothing brings together diverse groups like a common threat. And governors in environmentally progressive states are getting used to banding together against the Bush administration.

Now they've done it again, to protest the "cynical" effort by the Bush Department of Transportation to take away the right of California to set tougher greenhouse gas standards for cars (and the right of other states to adopt the California standards).

The latest assault on states' rights came in the fine print of a proposal this week by the DOT to put into place tougher CAFE standards required by last year's energy act. On page 387 of that proposal, DOT slipped in the killer language: "any state regulation regulating tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles is expressly pre-empted."

Third try at coal-plant bill heads to Kansas governor

With firm belief in the power of try, trying again, Kansas legislators have sent another coal-plant proposal to the desk of veto-happy Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. The governor has twice shot down legislation to allow a new two-unit coal plant to be built in her state, but legislative leaders say the new plan is a compromise: […]

Thought of the day: American foreign policy

U.S. foreign policy is extremely opposed to big government. In fact, our rulers will spend huge amounts of taxpayer dollars trying to stir up military coups to impose dictatorships in any countries who try to institute more big government than we approve of.

Thoughts on the farm bill and the skyrocketing cost of food

The rising cost of food worldwide is more complex than portrayed in recent articles in The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Like a magician revealing his secrets, the once-invisible farm and food system is drawing scrutiny from the media, policymakers, and the public as we realize how intertwined our farm and food system is with the energy sector and global markets.

But how did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.

Renewable energy standard passed in Ohio

Ohio gets 87 percent of its electricity from coal (and the rest is mostly nukes), putting it in the upper echelon of coal-using states in the nation (No. 2 behind Texas, to be precise).

And that, friends, is about to change, because yesterday the Ohio Legislature passed a renewable energy standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5 percent of Ohio's electricity from clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2025. This bill has a solar-specific requirement that will result in about 594 MW of solar in the Buckeye State. Not too shabby! Kudos to Environment Ohio and the thousands of other activists that worked hard to make it happen.

Next, the bill lands on Gov. Strickland's desk. If you like, take a moment to email the governor to thank him for making clean energy a top priority and encourage him to take the final step of signing this bill into law.