An insightful column in the UK Times yesterday presented a clear-eyed view of the energy and carbon policy challenges facing Europe and the UK. Read the whole thing, and here is its conclusion:

Meanwhile, the UK must make a huge decision. We have promised to shut down seven old coal plants by 2015 because they emit too much sulphur. These can supply 12 gigawatts, or a sixth of UK capacity. Ideally, we would fill the gap with nuclear power, but EDF has made it clear that the first new British nuke won’t be ready until 2017, supplying less than 2 gigawatts.

It is self-evident that we must carry on burning coal for the time being and politicians must stop telling lies about energy. They must begin to set plausible targets, explain their true cost and how they will be achieved. The impact of recession on industrial demand is one reason why the carbon price is weak. The other reason is credibility.

You can track the specifics (or should be able to) on both Recovery.gov and USASpending.gov, but for the big numbers right now, check out the following sources:

AAAS R&D Budget breakdown

American Institute of Physics analysis

Science Progress

The AIP report is the most thorough, including relevant language on the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Defense.

The National Institutes of Health comes out way on top in the stimulus package, receiving $10 billion, most of that targeted for research.  If reports are accurate, you can credit the massive increase (it was originally slated to receive $3.5 billion) to cancer survivor Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania).  Advocates for the physical sciences really need to rethink their strategy and tactics, because they continue to be outshone by their biomedical counterparts.  Perhaps their case is harder, because I can think of no easy equivalent to a disease in physical science research.

While I’ve said it before, the federal budget is sufficiently confusing that it bears repeating: this is not a budget, but a supplement to the budget.  The stimulus money is intended to be spent over the next two years (which suggests grants currently in the pipeline stand to gain most of the R&D money), and is in addition to the current budget and the one for the next fiscal year that Congress will once again fail to pass (or at least fail to pass on time).

OK, a diligent reader writes in with the explanation.

ORIGINAL POST BELOW

Yesterday’s FT had a largely forgettable op-ed by Al Gore and Ban Ki-Moon on green aspects of economic stimulus packages. However, it did have this interesting statement that caught my attention:

In the US, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry.

First, is this in fact true?

Second, if it is true, how can it be that wind can ever be cost competitive with coal? Consider that coal, according to the US EIA was responsible for generating 155,000 thousand megawatt-hours of energy production in November, 2008. Wind was responsible for 1,300 thousand megawatt hours. This means that the US saw about 120 times as much energy produced from coal as wind. If it takes more employees to generate 0.8% of the energy as coal produces, how can it ever be cost competitive?

Something does not add up. Someone please explain this.

President Obama made some very interesting comments yesterday supporting the exploitation of Canadian “oil sands” as well as U.S. coal reserves. These comments are sure to make many people a bit uncomfortable, including some of his own appointees on energy and climate. What I find particularly interesting is Obama’s full recognition that restraining GDP growth is simply not an option. It will be interesting to see how this argument develops as Congress considers cap-and-trade, which in its purest form necessarily results in a drag on GDP, leading to such fancy things like “safety valves” and other work arounds. And cap and trade without a cap is just a fancy derivatives market. If Obama recognizes that in a trade off between GDP and emissions which one will win, every time, how long will it be before every one else does as well?

Here is an excerpt from the ClimateWire story, with a passage highlighted:

President Obama said “clean energy mechanisms,” like carbon capture and storage, would allow the United States to continue consuming Canadian sand oil, an emission-heavy fuel that often requires strip-mining vast stretches of boreal forest in the province of Alberta.

The assertion yesterday came two days before Obama is scheduled to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa, and it promises to raise questions among environmental groups, which see the oil sands as a key contributor to climate change.

Canada’s accelerated development of the oil sands, a remote reserve of tar-like bitumen that offers more fossil fuel capacity than Saudi Arabia, is a flashpoint for Obama on his first international trip as president.

The president is weighing the benefits of having a neighborly source of oil against the negative result of its carbon emissions, which can be up to three times the emissions of conventional oil. It’s a calculation that comes as Obama tries to end the United States’ reliance on oil from the Middle East and Venezuela in 10 years.

As a backdrop, environmental groups are pressuring him to apply strict emission standards to the oil sands and their connected refineries. Some believe Harper is seeking special treatment for that sector, because of the benefits it provides to Canada’s economy and U.S. energy security.
Obama won’t say ‘dirty oil’

Obama declined to call the oil sands “dirty oil” in a White House interview yesterday with Peter Mansbridge of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., but acknowledged that the process “creates a big carbon footprint.”

“So the dilemma that Canada faces, the United States faces, and China and the entire world faces is: How do we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change?” he said.

“I think, to the extent that Canada and the United States can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they’re emitted into the atmosphere, that’s going to be good for everybody,” Obama added. “Because if we don’t, then we’re going to have a ceiling at some point in terms of our ability to expand our economies and maintain the standard of living that’s so important, particularly when you’ve got countries like China and India that are obviously interested in catching up.”

He believes the worst climatic effects from the oil sands can be “solved by technology.” Canada’s emissions have risen 25 percent since 1990, more than half of which is attributed to its fossil fuel industries.

“I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal,” Obama added.

Last week I noted how Steven Chu, Energy Secretary, had apparently opened the door to discussing a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade. Apparently I wasn’t the only person to find these comments curious. Today’s ClimateWire reports on follow up questions put to Chu. In typically read-the-tea-leaves fashion observers wonder whether the clarification is really a clarification or a cover for a trial ballon. Only the insiders know for sure. Here is an excerpt for ClimateWire:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu yesterday clarified comments that seemingly opened the door to support of a carbon tax.

“Secretary Chu supports a cap-and-trade system as the best way to reduce our carbon emissions and confront the climate crisis,” said Department of Energy spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller in an e-mail statement.

Her remark came in response to a largely overlooked paragraph of a New York Times interview last week. The article stated, “[Chu] said that while President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders had endorsed a so-called cap-and-trade system to control global warming pollutants, there were alternatives that could emerge, including a tax on carbon emissions or a modified version of cap-and-trade.”

His words raised eyebrows with some, since Obama has been a consistent supporter of a cap-and-trade system, which would set an overall lid on greenhouse gases. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Chu supported Obama’s ideas but added that “the simpler the cap-and-trade system is, the happier I will be.”

An executive branch official said yesterday that Chu was simply acknowledging congressional proposals on a carbon tax during the newspaper interview.

According to Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, Chu backtracked a bit in his clarification, but in a way that was “well within the tradition” for Cabinet secretaries.

A ‘gaffe’ that may have political legs

“What he said originally meets the classic definition of a gaffe: a politically awkward truth widely acknowledged by experts but one not yet allowable in the political arena,” Mann said. “Cap and trade has the virtue of obscuring the costs of carbon reduction in a way that a carbon tax does not.”

Supporters of the carbon tax, including Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson and many environmental justice advocates, continue to press their case, though. On Capitol Hill, backers include Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who recently wrote a Times op-ed arguing that a carbon tax — the impact of which would be offset by other tax breaks — was a palatable option to many conservatives because of its revenue neutrality (E&E Daily, Jan. 14).

Yesterday, Inglis said in a phone interview that “he sensed openness” in the administration to the tax idea, even though Chu had to publicly back the president. A “Wall Street kind of trading scheme” would not go over well these days with lawmakers, he said.

The Obama Administration has belatedly posted the text of the stimulus package, with the President signed earlier today.  You have the opportunity to review the law and submit comments, though the timing is lousy.  As suggested by an earlier post here, the Obama Administration is likely to stumble through its efforts to make government more available and accessible to the public.  While some think this an unrealistic project, I think the effort is worthwhile and should be encouraged.

As part of the law, there is now a website, recovery.gov, intended to track the progress of the law.  It’s unclear whether the Congress will have a similar online presence for the stimulus package, but I wouldn’t rule it out just yet.  The idea behind recovery.gov reflects another website tracking government spending, USASpending.gov, established by legislation sponsored by then-Senator Obama and Senator Coburn, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.  The goal of USA Spending is to track the spending of federal agencies online.  For instance, you can look at the National Science Foundation’s grants from 2000 to the present.  Hopefully recovery.gov can grow into something at least as sophisticated as USA Spending.

A Guest Post by Michael E. Zimmerman
Director, Center for Humanities and the Arts
Professor of Philosophy
University of Colorado at Boulder

In his recent posting “The collapse of Climate Policy and the Sustainability of Climate Science” (February 7, 2009), Roger A. Pielke, Jr. argues that the political consensus about climate policy is collapsing, because policy makers are realizing that it is unrealistic to expect that CO2 can be stabilized at 450 ppm. That such expectations are already in the realm of “fiction and fantasy” does not prevent some environmentalists from calling for even more impossible attainments, while confusing the relationship between science and policy-making.

Consider Bill McKibben’s essay in Mother Jones (November 10, 2008), “The Most Important Number on Earth.” McKibben, author of The End of Nature, maintains during the past year climate scientists have demonstrated that we are facing “the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else to deal with…” Claiming that we may have already reached the “tipping point” in global warming that may lead to “the collapse of human society as we have known it,” McKibben cites a recent paper by James Hansen et al. which calls for reducing CO2 from its current 385ppm to 350 ppm. For McKibben, this is the most important number on Earth. Above 350ppm, he warns us, “we can’t rule out a sea level rise of 20 feet this century.” (I would add that in the overheated climate change rhetoric, almost nothing can be “ruled out.”)

It goes without saying that for the vast majority of human beings, 350 is far from the most important number; indeed, for most people global warming is not regarded as a serious issue at all, in comparison with what’s facing them here and now. For a mother whose children are dying of malaria in central Africa, or for someone whose child is starving to death, 350 is not important.

McKibben comes up with the analogy of someone who, having been told by his physician that he has entered the cholesterol “danger zone,” knows that he must “clean the cheese out of the refrigerator and go cold turkey.” Presumably, the people he has in mind are those in advanced industrial societies–-and those aspiring to be in such societies–-who use vast amounts of fossil fuels. For McKibben, the energy equivalent to going cold-turkey would include: no more new more new coal plants, a cap on the amount of carbon the USA can produce, and an international agreement that requires China, India, and everyone else to do the same thing. Oh, and a rapid switch to $10 per gallon gasoline.

McKibben freely admits that achieving these extraordinary goals in a very compressed time frame “requires a new kind of politics. It requires forging a consensus that this toughest of all changes must happen. The consensus must be broad, it must come quickly, and it must encompass the whole earth–they don’t call it global warming for nothing.” (My emphasis.) The Internet, we are blithely told, will enable us to arrive at this global consensus. McKibben adds, however, that we have only until the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Meeting to forge a global treaty that will “get it right.” As he notes, “Once the ocean really starts to rise, dike building is pretty much the only project.” In short, we are doomed.

There are good reasons why policy makers have begun to regard with jaundiced eyes such absurd counsels of despair.

Now for the good part: McKibben tells us that the global political consensus necessary to institute his draconian policies will not be reached by political debate, give and take, and messy democratic compromises, but instead because this is “what the physics and chemistry of the situation dictate.” As Pielke would say, here is a prime example of: 1) a using the post-WWII linear model of science to justify and advocate policy decisions, and 2) attempting to turn Abortion Politics into Tornado Politics. Instead of engaging in value-laden discourse regarding the best course of action in challenging circumstances, we are supposed to let nature do the talking and instructing: “Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain,” McKibben intones.

McKibben does not go so far as to describe the violence to which his technocratic regime would have to go in order to win “consensus” and to enforce on the entire human population the new rules of the game. Come to think of it, this new kind of politics doesn’t look so new after all.

The Washington Post website currently has short video clips from three of “America’s Best Leaders” according to U.S. News and World Report.  The series of short fluff pieces includes Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Maria Zuber of NASA, and Dr. David Baltimore of CalTech.  They aren’t the only scientists selected by the magazine, but they are the ones interviewed by the Post.

It’s hard to put anything particularly noteworthy in a four and one half minute video piece covering three people.  However, notice of scientific leadership in mainstream press is not a commonplace, so this caught my eye.  I found Fauci’s and Zuber’s comments the most valuable.  Dr. Fauci discusses the challenges of managing an lab and also handling the “30,000 foot” level decisions an insitute director faces. Dr. Zuber manages to argue for scientific funding for research without using the phrases “basic research” or “fundamental research.”  The linear model for scientific and technological research – pretty well criticised as incomplete at best and often inaccurate – is thoroughly embedded in policy discussions, and I’m glad to see it absent from this one.

A few years ago, on this blog and at Climate Audit, there was a healthy discussion of a paper by Greg Holland and Peter Webster that claimed definitive attribution of hurricane activity to greenhouse gas emissions (PDF). Now a paper by Sim Aberson is out in the current issue of BAMS (PDF) which uses the Holland/Webster paper as a good example of how not to do statistics.

The Aberson paper is summarized as:

A cautionary tale in which previously published results are shown to be invalid due to the lack of statistical analyses in the original work.

Eric Berger, of the Houston Chronicle, covers the paper on his blog, and here is an excerpt:

Aberson is basically saying that the statistics underlying Holland’s arguments in the 2007 paper are off. Way off.

So bad, in fact, that the way in which Holland draws his conclusions about the relationship between Atlantic sea surface temperatures and hurricane activity could also be used to conclude there’s a meaningful relationship between Atlantic sea surface temperatures and five-year running means of:

• The number of Republican Party members in the U.S. House
• The number of years since the crowning of a new pope
• The number of games the New York Yankees won in the current season
• A random number between zero and one

If that weren’t bad enough, Aberson concludes his paper with the following lecture:

The clear need for timely scientific results should not be a reason for shortcuts in the scientific process; correct statistical analyses must be performed to determined the likelihood that the hypothesis tested is valid.

Berger says that he doesn’t know who is right in the debate. I agree with Aberson, Holland/Webster is a good example of how not to do statistics.

I’ll be giving a talk at the Mesa Lab at NCAR this Wednesday at 4PM for the Advanced Study Program. Here are the details:

Advanced Study Program Seminar
Wednesday February 18th 2009, 4 p.m.
Mesa Laboratory, Main Seminar Room
Tea and coffee served before the seminar

Roger Pielke, Jr
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado at Boulder

Some Uncomfortable Knowledge About Climate Change

Abstract:

Roger Pielke, Jr will discuss some of his recent research on climate mitigation and adaptation policy, as well as the role of scientists in policy and politics. He’ll discuss a number of issues that raise uncomfortable questions about the state of climate science and policy for discussion with the ASP Fellows.