Imagine that you and a group of people want to get from the South Rim to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. A few enterprising members of your group set forth building a ramp leading to the edge of the canyon, pointing north, and pull up in a bus, and tell you to get on. Anyone should be able to see that an effort to launch the bus will lead to a spectacular crash and burn. However, if Paul Krugman were the liberal conscience of the group he might say something like the following:

If we’re going to get real action on jumping the canyon any time soon, it will be via some version of this ramp and this bus. The bus now on the table isn’t the bus we’d ideally want, but it’s the bus we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bus at all.

Still, the bus represents major action to jump the canyon. As the Center for American Progress has pointed out, jumping the canyon would get us to the other side. And by all accounts, this bus has a real chance of being launched from our side in the near future.

So opponents of the plan to launch the bus off of the ramp have to ask themselves whether they’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. I think they are.

After all the years of denial, after all the years of inaction, we finally have a chance to do something major about jumping the canyon. Our bus is imperfect, it’s disappointing in some respects, but it’s action we can take now. And the canyon won’t wait.

Postscript:

This comment by Krugman is simply off base, and in fact opposite of reality:

Not to put too fine a point on it, think about how hard it would be to verify whether China was really implementing a promise to tax carbon emissions, as opposed to letting factory owners with the right connections off the hook. By contrast, it would be fairly easy to determine whether China was holding its total emissions below agreed-upon levels.

A carbon tax would not be applied to “factory owners” but to fossil fuel producers, with the tax applied as far upstream as possible. In both cases compliance requires counting carbon, and it is generally understood that compliance is easier with an upstream carbon tax than an economy-wide cap and trade system. There are plenty of reasons to oppose a carbon tax, but the relative complexity of compliance is not among them.

Duke Energy in North Carolina is experimenting with distributed power generation.  According to Scientific American’s 60 Second Science Blog, the company will spend around $50 million to install photovoltaic panels atop commercial buildings, residences and other property around North Carolina.  The intent of the project is to explore the feasibility of distributed generation of power along with gaining experience in using solar power in an electric grid.  Hopefully the results of the project will not be held proprietary, in order for other energy companies to consider similar efforts.  A bottom-up project like this (compared to the top-down regulation that can rub companies the wrong way) may be more successful in part due to less resistance.  Companies may be more likely to try and compete rather that submit to new regulations.

[UPDATE] Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) helpfully sets the stage for this post (emphasis added):

I’ve been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.

First we provide emission allowances under a cap and trade program to electric utilities for free,” Boucher said. “That provision will keep electricity rates affordable in regions where most of the electricity is coal fired, and Southwest Virginia is certainly such a region. Secondly, we provide two billion tons of offset each year during the life of the program. Those offsets would enable electric utilities like AEP (American Electric Power) to invest in forestry, agriculture and projects like tropical rain forest preservation in order to meet their CO2 reduction requirements under legislation. Therefore, they can comply with the law while continuing to burn coal.

[END UPDATE]

The Waxman Markey Bill is a massively complex, sprawling, and confusing piece of legislation (here in PDF). Reading through it I observed the large role of offsets in the legislation and decided to quantify that role.

Waxman-Markey (WM) focuses on a basket of greenhouse gases expressed in terms of greenhouse gas equivalencies. This makes it a bit difficult to compare apples to apples with EPA projections, so to simplify I am going to start by looking only at carbon dioxide in the analysis below. As I’ll show, introducing the other gases reenforces my conclusions.

Over the past 10 years carbon dioxide emissions represented about 83 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions (with the other 17 percent contribute from the otehr greenhouse gases) and this number has varied by less than a percent annually (source). So to calculate future allowed carbon dioxide emissions I multiplied the WM allowances by 0.83 (found on pp. 407-408 of the bill). This results in a total cumulative allowance for carbon dioxide emissions of 72.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) to 2030.

I then took the most recent analysis from EPA for its projection of carbon dioxide emissions under business as usual (source) and adjusted these under the stair-step increase in “covered entities” under W-M from 66.2% in 2012, to 75.7% in 2014, to 84.5% in 2016 and thereafter (this stair-stepping reflects the phase in of parts of the economy covered under the bill). I then added up the cumulative total emissions to 2030 (as far out as EIA projects) resulting in 92.6 GtCO2 by 2030.

So far this looks like a projected decrease in carbon dioxide emissions of 19.7 GtCO2 or 22% from the cumulative business as usual total (i.e., 92.6 minus 72.9). But then the fun and games begins.

WM appears to grant covered entities the ability to offset up to a total of 2 GtCO2e (the “e” is for equivalent, recognizing the other gases) each year. If these offsets are fully used, these would allow another 38 gtCO2e of emissions to 2030. In practice this would mean that the 19.7 GtCO2 in emissions reductions (representing the difference between business as usual and the allocations under WM) could be avoided by using about half the available offsets under the bill.

Now you might saw, what about the other gases in the basket? These actually make the use of offsets to carbon dioxide even more appealing, because the “carbon dioxide equivalencies” are much greater per ton than for carbon dioxide. For instance the table on pp. 391 to 392 shows that other gases have weights of up to 22,800 times that of carbon dioxide. This means that reducing 1 ton of sulfur hexaflouride, for instance, would be equivalent to reducing the emissions of 22,800 tons of carbon dioxide. So there will be an added incentive to offset carbon dioxide emission using gases other than carbon dioxide as the basis for offsetting.

WM include a provision that the president can add (or subtract) from the total number of offsets available, so the 2 GtCO2e per year can easily be adjusted. (Can you imagine the implications in a future presidential election?) There is also a strange provision that allows for (what I’ve termed) “grandfathered offsets” created since 2001 to have standing under the program, meaning I suppose, that offsets already created can be used in future implementation of the program. There are many dozens or more other exceptions, rules, qualifications, and contingencies that I have not explored.

The bottom line is that under WM, it seems quite possible that business as usual carbon dioxide emissions can continue simply through reliance on about one half of the available offsets. To the extent that these can be conjured up, they will work to depress the price of the allowances issued under the program, keeping down the carbon price. More generally, WM sets up a massive accounting game that should be appealing to carbon traders and those providing offsetting services, as well as many others involved in the carbon industry. It is no wonder that many enviornmental groups are opposed to WM.

Writing last week on the similarities between scandal engulfing the UK Parliament and the failure of bank regulation, John Kay describes a general lesson that might equally be applied here:

The Australian economist, Joshua Gans, recently described a problem central to the current financial turmoil. How could he persuade his young son not to wet his pants?

Believing in the power of incentives, Mr Gans offered a reward if his son could keep his pants dry for seven nights. The boy simply removed his pants. The prohibition was on wetting pants, not on wetting the bed. Young Gans was learning a skill that would equip him well to be a British MP, or a senior executive in a global bank.

Many MPs need second homes to perform their duties. Such rules were not intended to allow less honourable members to build a property portfolio by charging the taxpayer to refurbish a succession of second homes. These members argued that what they did was consistent with the rules.

The Basel banking principles attached varying capital requirements to different types of assets. But it was easy to rearrange how assets were categorised, even as the underlying risks remained the same.

The Gans household elaborated the rules to close the loophole, only to discover that their child was able to construct yet more ingenious methods of circumvention. . .

Regulation by rules invites compliance with the rules rather than the objective of the rules, and the more extensive the rules the easier it is to lose sight of the objective. Many MPs plainly believed that since there were rules on what they could claim, any claim within these rules was legitimate. The Basel directives can be seen, in retrospect, probably to have done more harm than good. Banks took the view that capital sufficient to comply with the regulations was sufficient for their business needs. Surplus capital was for wimps.

Much of what the financial services industry today describes as compliance is no more than the system of internal control that any well-run institution would itself impose. But when control becomes compliance, business necessity becomes bureaucratic obligation. Everyone in the organisation can make common cause in minimising its practical effect.

Simpler rules may be less harmful than complex rules, but they can only work when the simplifications correctly exemplify underlying values.

It is bizarre, even farcical, that the U.S. Congress says that it is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but at the same time it is spending a huge effort and political capital creating a Byzantine system of rules that will allow, even encourage, exactly the opposite to happen.

And, again, there is no “war on science” . . . the headline is a joke, poking some fun at those who saw a war on science during the Bush Administration every time politicians played politics in subjects involving science, but who have gone deaf, blind, and mute when the same behavior now occurs.

In this instance, the continuation of politics as usual involves biofuels. Despite what I saw as very favorable terms for evaluating biofuels recommend by EPA, a bipartisan group of 42 members of Congress has decided to tell EPA what scientific methods it should use to evaluate the carbon dioxide footprint of biofuels, based on its judgments as to the scientific merit of those methods. From a press release issued Friday:

Today, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (MN) and Ranking Member Frank Lucas (OK) along with a bipartisan group of 42 Members of Congress introduced a bill to correct flawed provisions in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that are limiting the potential for clean, homegrown renewable biofuels to meet our nation’s energy needs. . . The bill eliminates the requirement that the Environmental Protection Agency consider indirect land use when calculating the greenhouse gas emissions associated with advanced biofuels. Currently, there is no reliable method to predict accurately how biofuel production will affect land use in the United States or internationally.

The answer is “biofuels”. Thus, the science needs to be produced in such a way as to support that answer. I suppose that the agencies will get this message soon enough.

The UN has a just released a major new report out on disaster risk. You can read about it in the NYT here and here. Here is a detail that I have not seen in the various media coverage. Chapter 4 of the report concludes:

If the underlying drivers of risk are addressed then climate change impacts could also be addressed.

What are the “underlying drivers of risk”? Chapter 6 provides the answer:

strengthening livelihood sustainability in rural areas, partnerships for urban and local governance, innovative financial mechanisms, environmental management, and community- and local-level disaster risk reduction

See also:

Bouwer, L.M., Crompton, R.P., Faust, E., Höppe, P., and Pielke, Jr.,
R. A., 2007. Confronting Disaster Losses, Science, Vol. 318, November
2, p. 753. (PDF)

Picking up on a post from last month, ScienceInsider and others have reported on a lawsuit that may test the validity of gene patents.  The Public Patent Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit against Myriad Genetics, which is the company owning the patents, and controlling the genetic tests, for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that show a predisposition to breast cancer.  Among the allegations is that the monopoly on these genes and the associated diagnostic tests prevents patients from obtaining a second opinion.  Apparently any examination of these genes requires permission from Myriad Genetics, which seems like an overreach of the traditional conception of the protection afforded patent holders.  The consequences to individuals include the inability to have other scientists assess the results of the tests and the influence of these genes on the potential for cancer.  General effects include a chill on research into these genes, and other consequences addressed by Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine Sir John Sulston.

It’s unfortunate that the validity of gene patents is going to be tested in this fashion, as I don’t expect this validity to be shaken.  Perhaps it’s a consequence of the deep pockets necessary to participate in a patent infringement case (on either side), but I think some kind of fair use or research exemption arrived at through an infringment action is a stronger legal claim than infringement of free speech.  Since the state of genetic understanding over the last several years has typically exposed more about what we don’t know that what we do know, to restrict access to genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 appears to cause more harm than good.

While the current administration has managed to fill a number of science and technology positions much faster than its predecessors, there are still some notable empty chairs.  NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) remain under the care of acting chiefs.  The NIST and NIH positions have been open since before the election, and unfortunately there’s been a history of long-serving acting heads of both agencies.

There has been some recent movement.  Shere Abbott has been confirmed as Associate Director for Environment at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  This week Thomas Frieden was appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control, and Zachary Lemnios was tapped to be Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Department of Defense.  Similar subcabinet appointments have been made in the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Health and Human Services.  While most of these nominees are recent, the nominee for FDA Commissioner has been waiting for six weeks, and the Federal Communications Commission nominee has waited since the beginning of March for their confirmation hearings.  A chart of many relevant federal positions in science and technology is available online.

Prior to the announcement of a permanent NASA Administrator, the Obama Administration has announced an independent review of human spaceflight activities.  The review will be lead by Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and apparently the go-to person for leading big-time reviews (he was the head of the study group that saddled us with Rising Above the Gathering Storm).  According to the initial announcement, the review must be completed quickly.

“The “Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans” is to examine ongoing and planned National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) development activities, as well as potential alternatives, and present options for advancing a safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable human space flight program in the years following Space Shuttle retirement.  The panel will work closely with NASA and will seek input from Congress, the White House, the public, industry, and international partners as it develops its options. It is to present its results in time to support an Administration decision on the way forward by August 2009.”

The lack of a NASA Administrator is one of the two biggest empty chairs in science and technology policy right now.  While I understand the interest of any new administration to review where things are, doing this without a permanent Administrator runs the risk of having someone at the helm who isn’t bought in to whatever the report concludes.  I’m also reminded of the last administration’s efforts to push NASA forward, and how badly they’ve unfolded.  That bold plan relied on cost savings for future expense of the program, yet failed to commit the attention to the program required to make those savings happen.

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A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced in the U.S. Congress a proposal for a revenue neutral carbon tax. To get an idea of what it is about see this description (in PDF).

It starts out by taking issues of science off the table:

The economic downturn calls for action to stimulate the economy, such as reducing the amount of taxes taken out of each paycheck.

Our ongoing dependence on foreign oil from hostile nations also calls for action to reduce that dependence and move to fuels of the future.

Even if you disagree with the science of climate change, everyone agrees that less carbon in the atmosphere would not hurt us.

Will such a proposal gain attention?

The President’s fiscal year 2010 request was released last Thursday.  This is distinct from the budget resolution that was approved earlier.  The resolution is meant to guide the budget process in Congress.  The request is available online.  There is no federal breakout by science discipline, so various advocacy groups pick up the slack.  The closest thing to an assessment of R&D funding on its own is at the Office of Science and Technology Policy website (more on those in a few days), which provides several different cuts.  While a scorecard is usually a good idea in any budget cycle, the added stimulus spending adds an additional wrinkle.

One way of observing the different perspectives of the various science advocacy groups is to review their budget analyses.  For instance, see which organizations complain about the lack of an NIH boost (even with a $10 billion stimulus shot).  Here are a few after the jump, but feel free to see how your disciplinary society considered the budget request.

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