AB 32

Why do you want to be CA's govenor?

Since failing to vote gets more attention than wanting to suspend California’s climate and clean energy laws, a lot of people probably know this story: Meg Whitman, the fourth richest woman in California, thinks she should be governor, presumably because the three richer women are busy. She freely admits that this idea just popped into […]

At Governator’s climate party, EPA chief aims to calm small business worries

LOS ANGELES — EPA administrator Lisa Jackson unveiled a modest proposal on Wednesday: If a company wants to build a new power plant or refinery, or fix up a smoky old belcher, it will have to use the best available technology to control greenhouse gases. That’s it. Oh, and the Dunkin Donuts of the country […]

eSolar launches power tower concentrated solar thermal plant – live video cast today, 1 pm EDT

Watch eSolar’s launch live here at 10 am PDT.  CEO Bill Gross will be joined by David Meyers, Executive Director of The Wildlands Conservancy, and leading clean energy experts Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley and Google.org’s Dan Reicher (my boss from DOE days) . Below is a fascinating video from a recent episode of National […]

Obama’s ‘tougher fuel standards’

Re “U.S. to Issue Tougher Fuel Standards for Automobiles” (NY Times, 5/18/2009) “President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California’s tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard …” Four questions: (1) Which will it be: an emission standard […]

Are emission targets ever really ‘science-based’?

Are emission targets ever really ‘science-based’? Or are we playing a dangerous game of self-deception? Last month, Senator Barbara Boxer proposed six principles for climate legislation, the first of which was: 1. Reduce emissions to levels guided by science to avoid dangerous global warming. The National Call to Action on Global Warming, announced last week […]

Apollo Alliance chair talks to Grist about green jobs

Phil Angelides. Phil Angelides gained national prominence in 2006 as he went head-to-head with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over who could be the greenest of them all. His bid for the governorship may have failed, but he definitely made an environmental mark on the state as treasurer from 1999 to 2007. In that role, Angelides […]

Why the rush to defend this not-so-embattled style of legislation?

Recently the green blogosphere has been engaged in an oddly vigorous defense of command and control style legislation. I'm not sure whether this trendlet grows out of environmentalists' unfortunate habit of ranking and re-ranking and arguing over the ranking of various solutions to climate change; or out of pique that odious people like Charles Krauthammer are pretending to be proponents of carbon pricing; or, as I suspect, out of something else entirely, but I have some good news for supporters of mandates: Both the public and public officials love command and control style legislation.

To be sure, the term "command and control" is pejorative, but no congressperson ever introduced the 2008 Command and Control Environmental Protection Act. Nevertheless, virtually every single piece of environmental legislation ever enacted takes the form of a mandate. From renewable portfolio standards to CAFE to wilderness protection to the quality of our air and water to species protection to waste management to an endless stream of subsidies and tax credits (good, bad, and ugly) -- they don't call it environmental regulation for nothing.

Carbon price volatility is a real issue

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were at it this week, flogging stories about how falling carbon prices are threatening clean technology. I've written before about how easy it is to get distracted by carbon prices, which, under cap-and-trade, are more of a symptom of a broader issue, not a cause.

The Journal piece is fairly defensible. The Times piece is fairly hopeless:

Another blow to the sector is the tumbling price of permits for emitting carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. In countries where emitters must buy these permits, like those in the European Union, low prices mean emitters have fewer incentives to make their production process more efficient or move to less greenhouse gas intensive fuels.

Nancy Sutley, tapped to head CEQ, garners praise from fellow Californians

Nancy Sutley. Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley is expected to be appointed to head President-elect Barack Obama’s White House Council on Environmental Quality, a transition team spokesperson said Wednesday. Combined with the expected nomination of Steven Chu from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to be energy secretary, her appointment would give the Golden State two […]