Gristmill

Kent Conrad is trying to kill reform at the USDA

As I surmised might happen in a comment to Tom Philpott's recent post on ag reform, "Sustainable Dozen" member Chuck Hassebrook, Tom Vilsack's choice for deputy secretary, is having trouble getting through the Senate Ag committee. North Dakota's Kent Conrad (D) is trying to kill Hassebrook's nomination before it's even officially announced. Nick Kristof has the details here (h/t Jill Richardson).

In the Senate, a single senator wields enormous power and can put a stop to any bill or nomination if he or she so chooses. With everyone's attention on the stimulus package, this is the perfect time for a little backroom backstabbing. Should you wish to, say, register your feelings about this, the current members (and states) of the Senate Ag committee appear after the jump.

Denny's serves up a plate of petroleum

The millions of Americans (Grist included!) glued to their TVs Sunday for Super Bowl XLIII got a personal invite from fast food chain Denny's to swing by any of its 2,500 U.S. locations this morning for a free "Grand Slam" breakfast -- two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, two pancakes (a whopping 800 calories).

Against the so-called 'need' for new long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines

The following is a guest post from Carol A. Overland, a utility regulatory attorney and electrical consultant based in Minnesota and Delaware, representing clients in energy dockets including transmission projects, wind, gas and coal gasification generation, and nuclear waste.

-----

Transition ... transmission ... transition ... transmission ...

That old Bowie hook is on my mind as I represent individuals, community organizations, and local governments opposing high-voltage transmission lines. Today we're at a crossroads in energy, a transition point where the decisions we make, like electricity itself, are binary. What we choose will determine how we use electricity in the future. The first step is to carefully define "need."

Transmission doesn't produce electricity. It is passive infrastructure that just sits there, conducting energy from one place to another. At its worst, though, it's an enabler of dysfunctional energy planning and profit-driven projects that are against the public interest. Claims that we "need" transmission are end-stage conclusions of a many-step planning process that we as a society have not yet consciously begun.

"Need" is a term of art, and the crucial task for energy planners is to define the need. We need energy when we flick the switch, and when we do, that's a utility's need for service of local electrical load. We also need renewable generation, and we have an equally compelling need to reduce the CO2 emissions, pollutants, and toxic waste of electrical generation (a need not readily recognized in energy planning). Energy planners plan for peak "flick of the switch" need, those few very hot summer days or very cold winter nights. How much "flick of the switch" energy do we need? It depends.

Prior to assessing local load-serving need and making demand projections -- before "need" is considered -- the first and unarguably least-cost step is conservation. We can easily make up for an annual projected increase in demand of 1.5 percent through conservation, and can probably cut today's "need" by 10 percent or more, though compound conservation gets more difficult as we cherry pick the easy stuff. The next step before analyzing need is to enact energy efficiency, demand-side management, and load-shifting to cut the peaks and level out the dips. This is also a comparatively least-cost means of meeting demand.

When that's done, and not before, it's time to assess our need for electricity -- the supply side. Utilities, which are in the business of selling electricity and building their infrastructure -- for which we pay, routinely promote sales and exaggerate growth in demand. Because of their overstatements of need in similarly recessionary times, we overbuilt in the 1970s, to the extent that many proposed plants were ultimately canceled. Still so much was built that we haven't needed much utility infrastructure since. We've been through this before, and should be mindful in making investments.

Children are externalities

"So many people are wondering why, when our lives are supposed to be getting better, there are more and more babies born with birth defects and couples who are infertile."

-- Chinese environmental activist Huo Daishan, on the alarming rise in birth defects in his country

Civil disobedience campaign launched at Massey Energy mountaintop-removal site

"Give me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will rally about it the brave men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust, and set her free."

-- George Washington, 1779

In Pettus, West Virginia this morning, five Coal River Mountain activists were arrested and charged with trespassing after locking themselves to a bulldozer and a backhoe at a Massey Energy mountaintop-removal mine site.

In the face of an impending 6,600 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, they planted a banner for the Coal River Wind Project, a nationally acclaimed proposal that would create 200 local construction jobs and 50 permanent jobs, enough energy for 150,000 homes, and allow for sustainable forestry and mountain tourism projects, as well as a limited amount of underground mining.

After the TVA coal ash disaster in December, when a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in six feet of sludge, the Coal River Mountain activists fear blasting for the proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain, which rests beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines, could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

"Massey could flood the towns of Pettus, Whitesville and Sylvester with toxic coal sludge," said Julia Bonds, of Rock Creek, W.Va. "Blasting at a multi-billion-gallon sludge lake over underground mines could cause the sludge to burst through and kill thousands of people."

"The governor and county legislators have failed to act, so we're acting for them," Coal River Wind advocate Rory McIlmoil said. "They shouldn't allow the wind potential on Coal River Mountain to be destroyed, and the nearby communities endangered, for only 17 years of coal. There is a better way to develop the mountain and strengthen the local economy that will create lasting jobs and tax revenues for this county, and that's with wind power."

True agricultural policy reform may require climate reform first

I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that addressing climate change and reforming food production are pretty much the same thing. You can't do one without the other. And -- as Yogi Berra might say -- vice versa. The food and agriculture industries, aided and abetted by governments worldwide (not to mention by consumers), have succeeded in offloading just about all external costs involved with feeding us. Environmental issues, public health issues, natural resource utilization issues, even most economic issues related to food have all been socialized to the extent that the industry is almost totally isolated from the societal consequences of its actions.

Until now, few have complained, as this system has led to ever lower food prices in the developed world and thriving export markets in the developing world. But the costs, which for 60 years or so seemed to have been pushed back beyond the horizon, are beginning to loom.

Many of us have high hopes that the new administration can make serious progress on reform, but it's important to focus on how serious the challenge before us actually is. In this way, it's like the global warming debate back in the '90s. The science was pretty clear even then. There were visionaries like NASA's James Hansen and, yes, Al Gore, who understood that we needed to act. But for most Americans, hearing about climate change in the '90s was like being reminded to carry an umbrella on a sunny day. Where exactly were the portents of doom?

How to save the planet with heated clothing

I spend a lot of time in a secret underground laboratory (basement workshop/office). It's my version of a Man Cave. In place of a big screen TV, pool table, and bar, it has (along with every power tool known to modern man) an oscilloscope, a table saw, and a box of red wine sitting on top my computer tower.

It's also completely unfinished (exposed studs) and unheated, with no insulation in the walls whatsoever. The temperature at my desk is presently 52 degrees and thanks to the thermal mass of the concrete walls and floor, will remain at this approximate temperature for the four coldest winter months. It's 39 degrees outside as I write. The cave analogy isn't too far off.

Staying warm while sitting on one's ass in front of a computer for hours on end in a 52 degree room can be challenging.

Why a cap without the trade is the worst of all worlds

As cap-and-trade legislation gets debated in Oregon and Washington, a worrisome lightbulb seems be going off for a number of folks. (Congressman DeFazio from Oregon, for example.) It goes like this: Instead of "cap-and-trade" how about just "a cap without the trade?"

Under this idea, we'd meet the terms of the cap through command and control regulation. There wouldn't be permits or a trading system (and hence no auctioning). To be sure, this will reduce emissions, which is a very good thing.

But in terms of fairness and inexpensiveness, let me be completely clear: This is a horrible idea.

For consumers and businesses who are already struggling to pay their energy bills, cap without the trade is actually worse than the very worst form of cap-and-trade. Plus, it misses out on almost all of the upsides of cap-and-trade done right.

In the worst form of cap-and-trade -- a "grandfathered' system, in which the government gives out permits to polluters for free -- consumers wind up paying massive windfalls to the big energy companies that get free permits. [Click here to learn why]. That's why we favor auctioned cap-and-trade, since it makes polluters pay for their permits -- and the public keeps the money. Auctioned cap-and-trade is fair, effective, and efficient.

But if you can believe it, cap-and-no-trade would actually be worse for consumers and businesses than a grandfathered system. Families would pay even more for energy, while Exxon and other big energy companies would get even bigger windfalls!

Here's why.

Let's not pretend the government isn't encouraging suburbs

There are a great many ways in which the government shapes our land-use patterns. Sprawl apologists often argue that low-density, suburban-style development has dominated the American landscape over the past half century because it is clearly superior to alternatives. Now, there's no doubt that many Americans prefer suburban life.

At the same time, it's impossible to ignore the overwhelming way in which government policy has encouraged such development, intentionally, and unintentionally. The government didn't necessarily intend for a massive network of (largely) free-to-user highways to spur suburban growth and gut urban centers, but that's what happened. Similarly, the government's long-term commitment to increased rates of home-ownership wasn't necessarily about changing land-use patterns. But as economist Ed Glaeser notes at the New Republic, the relationship between the policy and the outcome is clear:

Roughly 87 percent of all single-family detached homes are owner-occupied. Roughly 87 percent of all homes in buildings with five or more units are rented. Multi-family dwellings have common spaces, such as lobbies, and common infrastructure; sharing joint control over these things can often be quite difficult. Landlord control over large buildings irons out the difficulties of dealing with the cacophony of collective control.

The connection between homeownership and structure type implies that when the federal government gets into the business of supporting homeownership, it also gets into the business of supporting single-family detached homes -- and this means supporting lower-density living. New Yorkers have converted plenty of rental units into co-ops, but still 77 percent of the households in Manhattan rent. The government's big post-war push into homeownership was inevitably also a push to suburbanize. You do not need to be an enemy of the suburbs to wonder why the government is implicitly urging Americans to drive longer distances and flee denser living.

Of course, this is just one of many reasons why we should be skeptical of policies that subsidize homeownership. Such subsidies are regressive. They encourage heavy, leveraged investments in undiversified assets that perform unexceptionally over time. They reduce mobility, which prevents households from responding to changing economic conditions. And should there be a massive housing bubble and collapse, they put millions of households at risk of foreclosure and bankruptcy and contribute to global economic meltdown.

But for all this, the odds of a reversal of these policies, like the mortgage interest reduction, are basically zero. Which is yet another reason that we ought to focus on undoing other suburban subsidies wherever it's politically feasible. Congestion pricing, which could address crowded freeways while funding better urban transport, is a good place to start.