Climate Politics

After delaying action against climate change, Big Coal is now scheming to cash in

For readers out there who understand the climate crisis well (I assume basically all of you), a lot of this will be recap, but today's hearing underscored how desperate the situation really is and how urgently it needs to be addressed. That urgency is a source, at least to me, of tremendous frustration.

To a great extent, we've reached this point precisely because energy industries and their political patrons spent years blocking action, rejecting science, and rhetorically casting "alarmists" as cartoonish hippie-fascists. So successful were their efforts that we now face a crisis of such magnitude that the very same actors are using the urgency they created to bully lawmakers into providing them significant handouts in order to fix the problem.

As my previous post points out (or was meant to point out), the bullying is proving effective. This post is a reminder that it's only effective because things look pretty dire.

Irony of the day

In the course of a Washington Post story on the fate of the House and Senate energy bills, we hear this about Bush’s feelings on climate change legislation: But Bush still opposes unilateral U.S. action. Sometimes, anyway.

The word from today’s hearing of Markey’s climate committee

As I suggested earlier, the crux of today's hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change was to suggest that carbon capture and storage is necessary quickly, via enormous government subsidies, or else we're screwed.

Remember, this is Ed Markey's committee. He's the guy who's supposed to advise Congress about upcoming climate-change legislation, and, for all intents and purposes, he's an ally to Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the environmentally minded members of the Democratic caucus.

This we expect from Markey:

There are over 150 new coal-fired power plants on the boards in the United States, and globally, it is predicted that something on the order of 3,000 such plants will be built by 2030. These new plants alone would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent and global emissions by 30 percent. That would spell disaster for the planet.

But this?

Fortunately, carbon capture and storage -- or 'CCS' -- offers a path forward for coal ... All indications are that CCS is a viable interim solution to the coal problem.

Markey taking this line means that if we're lucky enough to see major action out of Congress on climate change, CCS is going to be a huge part of it. But we already knew that, right?

Reporting from a coal hearing of the House Select Cmte. on Global Warming

If you dream of a near future in which coal mines are abandoned, coal workers are employed in emerging green energy fields, coal executives are feeding at the trough of welfare assistance (and not corporate welfare), and China and India are all too happy to buy our clean technologies at a healthy price ... well, then it's good you didn't attend this morning's hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change.

I'll be posting a few entries here detailing the most significant ground Markey's hearing covered. But the nickel version is that, though everybody from the governor of Wyoming to the wonks at the Center for American Progress think a cap-and-trade program is inevitable, they also think that many, many billions of dollars in subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration technology will be crucial to any greenhouse-gas reduction strategy.

Which is to say that I had a rollicking and hilarious morning!

Alaskan senator invents new theory of global warming

Ted Stevens, the Republican senator whose vacation home was recently raided by the FBI, and who made over $800,000 from a shady real estate deal last year, has come up with a brand-new theory of global warming. He told a NBC reporter in Alaska:

We're at the end of a long, long term of warming, 700 to 900 years of increased temperature, a very slow increase. We think we're close to the end of that. If we're close to the end of that, that means that we'll start getting cooler gradually, not very rapidly, but cooler once again and stability might come to this region for a period of another 900 years.

This was Stevens' way of telling the villagers of Shishmaref, which is being washed away by rising waters despite the Army Corps of Engineers' construction of massive sea walls, that they're on their own.

It'll be interesting to see if the denialists at Planet Gore, so quick to attack anyone who dares make an issue of global warming, will leap to the defense of Stevens' claim, which as far as scientists can tell, appears to be a personal fantasy.

My testimony to Congress on liquid coal

Here's the inside skinny on yesterday's liquid coal hearing before the House Science & Technology Committee. It was four on two (NRDC's David Hawkins and me vs. the other witnesses). You can read my testimony here and all the witness statements here -- not that I would recommend doing so unless you are a serious liquid-coal junkie like me.

About 10 members of Congress were there at any given time -- about evenly split on how they view liquid coal. The ranking Republican on the full committee, Ralph Hall from the great state of Texas, interrogated me at length -- trying to get me to say that I was anti-fossil fuel, that I was pro-tax (or that a cap-and-trade system was the same as a tax), and that I never offered any solution to the global warming problem. I think I held my own.

A setback for Yucca Mountain nuke dump as judge denies water to project

A federal judge poured cold water on the U.S. government’s plans to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada this week — or, more accurately, he left the feds high and dry. The Department of Energy has been seeking 8 million gallons of state-controlled water to drill test holes at Yucca Mountain; […]

EPA sued over ship emissions, smacked over 9/11 cleanup

The Environmental “Protection” Agency faced two major slams yesterday, from east and west. In Washington, D.C., the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued a report scolding EPA for its post-9/11 cleanup efforts, saying the agency’s approach to toxic indoor contamination in buildings near the site is misdirected and ignores New Yorkers’ health concerns. The report “confirms […]

How the congressional energy bills stack up

We've got three big hurdles before we see a new Energy Bill enacted: substantive, procedural, and presidential.

First, the substantive hurdle: the House and Senate bills differ on key points, such as fuel economy standards, a national renewable electricity standard, and energy taxes (I have reprinted a side-by-side comparison below). Merging the bills won't be easy.

Second, the procedural hurdle: both chambers must "formally be considering the same legislation," as E&E Daily ($ub. req'd) explains:

The Senate in June passed its amendment to H.R. 6, which is the energy bill the House passed during the new Democratic majority's opening 100 hour legislative blitz in January. Then the House last month passed a much more sweeping bill than its January effort and a companion $15 billion energy tax package.

"Right now we are in this interesting situation where we have two bills out there," said David Marks, a spokesman for Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.). "There is this procedural hurdle to get over first."

Third, the presidential hurdle: Bush must sign whatever passes before it becomes law. And that is not a sure thing.

Side-by-Side Comparison

This chart from E&E Daily compares the House-passed energy bill, H.R. 3221 (on the left), with the Senate-passed energy bill, H.R. 6 (on the right):

Examining John Dingell’s about-face on climate change

New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt examines a question that David and I have enjoyed disagreeing about (or at least that I've enjoyed disagreeing with David about) for a couple of months now: Is John Dingell sincere about tackling climate change, or is he pulling old tricks?

Leonhardt recounts the tale of Dingell's efforts to block fuel-economy standards introduced by former Sen. Richard Bryan a couple of decades ago by introducing a bill that would have created a nuclear waste dump in Bryan's home state of Nevada. Are we seeing that type of tactic again, albeit in slightly different form?

I still go back and forth on this. On the one hand, Dingell talks a good game to the press. On the other, what's really important is for him to whip up support among his colleagues for his carbon-tax proposal. The congressional aides I've talked to about this take stances ranging from "we don't trust him" to "we never know what he's really thinking" to "we believe he's out to axe real progress" to "it's too early to say." Time, as the kids are fond of saying, will tell.

Leonhardt writes, "If nothing else, it's also enormously useful that Mr. Dingell is no longer suggesting, as he did just eight months ago, that the scientific consensus on global warming may be a 'great error.'" It would be fascinating to figure out how Dingell came around, if he in fact has. And he certainly would like us to believe he has:

After the town hall meeting [which Dingell had called to discuss climate change] was over -- and he had listened to a couple of hours of questions about timed traffic lights, nuclear power and the possibility of impeaching President Bush -- Mr. Dingell sat down in a dark area behind the stage. I asked him whether Mr. Gore, who has been both a Dingell nemesis and ally at various times, had been right for all those years he was pointing out what was happening to the earth's climate.

"I think a cold statement on that point would be yes," Mr. Dingell replied.

And would it have been easier to solve the problem if we had started earlier?

"What's the saying? The saddest words in the English language -- 'might have been.'"