The United Kingdom will release this week plans for building new coal plants:

Mounting fears within government circles that Britain’s utilities are poised for a new dash for gas – increasing the country’s future power dependence on fuel imports from Russia – has persuaded Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, to back funding for a second clean coal demonstration power plant.

In an attempt to ensure that coal remains part of the UK energy mix, he will also set out licensing conditions for more coal power stations.

Mr Miliband’s renewed pitch for clean coal, which could be timed to coincide with the Budget on Wednesday, is to be pushed out quickly to counter scepticism in the power industry that the Government has a viable strategy to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Meantime, the UK government also plans ambitious emissions cuts over the next decade:

The Budget statement on 22 April will contain budgets for CO2 emission cuts alongside projections for tax and spending.

The carbon budgets will run for five-year periods up to 2022 when the UK should have cut emissions by between 34% and 42%.

On Friday the National Institutes of Health issued draft guidelines for funding research on stem cells.  This guidelines are in response to the March Executive Order issued by President Obama revising the previous funding constraints on stem cell research.  The guidelines are for extramural research, as internal NIH procedures cover all intramural research.

As is all too common with this issue, things get blurred pretty quickly.  This funding and associated guidelines are for research conducted on the stem cells, and cannot fund the derivation of human embryos.  The Dickey-Wicker Amendment bans such derivation.  The guidelines also restrict NIH funding to embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created for reproductive purposes that would otherwise be discarded.  Research on adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells can *continue* to be funded by NIH dollars.  As it stands, this is not a free-for-all.  From the announcement of the draft guidelines:

NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from other sources, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis, and/or IVF embryos created for research purposes, is not allowed under these Guidelines.

As I noted, these are draft guidelines, and comments can be submitted to NIH.  The comment period is 30 days from the publication of a notice of rulemaking in the Federal Register, which should happen this week.  Check back to the NIH link I provided above to find the final date for comments, which should be no later than May 24, along with more specifics about how and where to send your comments.

Today’s ClimateWire has a story about the debate over the costs of cap and trade:

From the halls of Congress to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, experts and politicians are hoisting conflicting numbers describing the cost of a cap on greenhouse gases, with amounts from $3,100 to $324 to zero being touted as the annual hit on households. As Congress returns this week, it will find a cloud of numerical discrepancies hovering over climate change legislation.

This is a great example of the consequences of how issues are framed in political debate. If the framing is “costs” of cap and trade legislation, the Republicans will win the political debate, regardless of whose numbers turn out to be right. Of course, the reality is that cap and trade can be designed in any way you’d like with high or low (or zero) costs. But remember that the theoretical basis of cap and trade is that energy prices will increase, so low or zero cost increases will have low or zero effect on emisisons.

The political point is that if the debate hinges on costs, Republicans have the upper hand because if Democrats respond with claims of low or zero costs, and if this turns out to be untrue, then such claims will become a political liability. But if the claims of low costs turn out to be true, they will gut the policy from the standpoint of emissions reductions, and thus become a political liability.

Bottom line: Democrats cannot win the cap and trade debate if the issue is framed as costs to American households.

Server was down the past few days. We appear to be back up. Stay tuned for a few posts.

As part of his weekly internet and radio address, President Obama announced the appointment of Aneesh Chopra as his Chief Technology Officer.  This position is brand new (but often promised on the campaign), although there is a bill in Congress to establish the position on a more permanent basis.

Mr. Chopra is currently the Secretary of Technology for the State of Virginia.  The new Chief Information Offcier for the federal government, Mr. Vivek Kundra, worked in the same department earlier in his career.  The CTO position, as described in the address, would focus on promoting technological innovation in the support of government priorities.  In conjunction with the CIO, and newly appointed Chief Performance Officer, the CTO would also assist in the administration’s open government efforts, increasing the transparency and availability of data.

Aside from this being a brand new position, an interesting part of the job could be the responsibilities in the promotion of technological innovation.  This is a bit more targeted responsibility than what the Office of Science and Technology Policy has typically had with respect to technology.  There is the potential for a turf war here over technology, given an issue that would prompt interest from both parts of the Executive Office of the President.

President Obama nominated Princeton physicist William Brinkman to head the Department’s Office of Science.  The Office of Science is the home for most of the non-weapons research conducted by the Department, and is one of the agencies targeted in the recent America COMPETES Act for a doubling of the research budget.  Dr. Brinkman is currently a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton, and has a long research career including research and managerial experience at Bell Labs and Sandia National Labs.  You can click here for a more complete biography.

This makes for a pretty complete team appointed at the Department of Energy.  Compare this to other parts of the federal science and technology portfolio, where we still wait for nominees for National Institutes of Health Director, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and three of the four associate directors for the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  With these leadership vaccuums, it would not surprise me to see the Department of Energy to be the de facto lead science and technology agency in the government.  In an effort to sweeten these sour grapes, it’s worth noting that science and technology appointments are still, on the whole, a lot further along at 3 months into a new presidency.

Former Presidential Science Adviser John Marburger will give this year’s Bromley Lecture at George Washington University in Washington on April 29th.  The title is “Policy as Science” and this is the abstract:

Politics is a necessary ingredient of policy-making, but political acceptance does not assure policy success. Thinking of policy as science emphasizes features of policy-making and implementation needed for long term policy effectiveness. Identifying and strengthening these features in the processes of American science policy warrants a long term campaign that challenges the current advocacy-based approach. An emerging consensus on the need for a ’science of science policy’ suggests that such a campaign may be feasible.

This should be a good opportunity to see a more detailed description of what Dr. Marburger has in mind when he talks about science of science policy and how it matches up (or doesn’t match up) with what the National Science Foundation and the interagency working group have in mind.  For instance, it’s not immediately clear to me how the government hopes to take the research on innovation funded by the Science of Science Policy program at NSF and use it to improve “features of policy-making and implementation needed for long term policy effectiveness.”  In other words, while it’s nice to have a better understanding of how to measure innovative activity, it doesn’t necessarily connect to a better understanding of what policies would be effective in this area.

The Lecture will take place in the Linder Family Commons (1957 E Street NW, 6th Floor) on the George Washington University campus in Washington, D.C.  It will run from 5:30-7 pm

Recent Congressional testimony from Robert Greenstein, of the non-profit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in support of cap and trade illustrates how problematic the approach is, by accurately describing how it is supposed to work (here in PDF):

Fighting global warming requires policies that significantly restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The most cost-effective ways to do that are to tax emissions directly or to put in place a “cap-and-trade” system. Either one will significantly raise the price of fossil-fuel energy products — from home energy and gasoline to food and other goods and services with significant energy inputs. Those higher prices create incentives for energy efficiency and the development and increased use of clean energy sources. But they will also put a squeeze on consumers’ budgets, and low- and moderate income consumers will feel the squeeze most acutely.

Fortunately, climate change policies can be designed in a way that preserves the incentives from higher prices to change the way that we produce and consume energy, while also offsetting the effect on consumer budgets of those higher prices. Well-designed climate policies will generate substantial revenue that can be used to offset the impact of higher prices on the budgets of the most vulnerable households, to cushion the impact substantially for many other households, and to meet other legitimate needs such as expanded research on alternative energy sources.

Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) also sees increasing the costs of energy as the key motivation for cap and trade (h/t MS):

If we raise the price of energy, which will happen if we’re reducing the amount of carbon emissions, and industries have to figure out how to live in a carbon-constrained environment, they are going to have to figure it out because it’s in their profitable interest to figure it out.

Mr. Waxman might want to stick to the flawed economics:

We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point – they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap.

In yesterday’s Daily Camera, columnist Clay Evans wrote an editorial criticizing Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar for delisting wolves from the Endangered Species Act in Idaho and Montana. My critique of Evans’ position was printed in today’s Letter to the Editor:

Clay Evans’ editorial “Delist Wolves: Not So Fast” (Camera, April 15) does a good job of summarizing the most recent incident in a more than 100-year struggle over how wolves should be managed in greater Yellowstone and who gets to decide. However, the focus on Ken Salazar’s decision to delist wolves from the Endangered Species Act is a distraction from the real issue.

It is often asserted — as Evans does — that there are two types of people: those for wolves and those against. While this dichotomy is a convenient explanation for storytelling, a number of studies demonstrate that the public holds a wide range of attitudes towards wolves. Framing the political debate as “yes” or “no” is inaccurate and serves to perpetuate this 100-year conflict.

The most promising long-term solution for wolves is not protection under the Endangered Species Act. Rather, we must reduce the political intensity of wolf management and develop co-existence strategies. Wolves deserve a future no matter who is in political power. The best place to start is where human-wolf conflict actually occurs on the ground. Hint: The real issue occurs far from Washington D.C.

The National Science Board, the advisory board for the National Science Foundation, released a draft report titled Building a Sustainable Energy Future. It is open for public comment until May 1st, click the report link to find out how to submit comments.  The report provides guidance to the National Science Foundation on how to “increase its emphasis on innovation in sustainable energy technologies and education.”  It also recommends that the government “develop and lead a nationally coordinated research, development demonstration, deployment, and education (RD3E) strategy to advance a sustainable energy economy that is significantly less carbon-intensive.”  The press release announcing the report is somewhat vague on the recommendations, but the report provides many more details.  It’s a product of the NSB Task Force on Sustainable Energy, formed in October 2007.  It held three roundtable discussions in 2008 with various stakeholders.  The report’s specific recommendations (from the executive summary) for NSF after the jump.

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