First, as an aside, my favorite quote on the new web in a long time: ‘This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”‘ From this review of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur. I suspect Roger will agree with that sentiment as applied to blogs (the review specifically singles out blogs as fitting that mold). I actually don’t. I think it takes some combing, but some blogs provide just as much insight and detailed intellectual analysis on our societal issues as the best full-time “professional” commentators.

Second, you’ve probably realized that Prometheus is now in the midst of its normal summerly slowdown. We are academics after all, and we like to take the summers off. I (and probably Roger, despite his telling y’all that he was done) will be throwing posts up here and there throughout the summer, but it’s going to be slow until late August or early September.

Finally, to the subject of this post. For now I’ll let Thomas Friedman say it for me about the “new” energy bill that the Senate passed last week:

The whole Senate energy effort only reinforced my feelings that we’re in a green bubble — a festival of hot air by the news media, corporate America and presidential candidates about green this and green that, but, when it comes to actually doing something hard to bring about a green revolution at scale — and if you don’t have scale on this you have nothing — we wimp out. Climate change is not a hoax. The hoax is that we are really doing something about it.

Then again, the debate on this energy bill was a lot less about climate than about energy independence. Watching how hard it was to get even this pidly little bill passed, that Congress will address energy independence and climate simultaneously now seems as remote as ever. It really makes you wonder who is talking to the editorial page writers of the major papers, some of whom ate the bait and ponied up that this was a significant new change in energy policy. The weakness of this bill tells me more than ever that we better start thinking a lot harder about adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, lest we follow the fate of Jared Diamond’s not-so-shining examples.

Congress is back at trying to reform the problematic National Flood Insurance Program. What’s curious is the claim that NFIP’s problems are recent and related to the 2005 hurricane season. This CQ article says:

The program, which provides virtually all water-damage insurance in the country, had to borrow that amount to pay out the unprecedented number of claims generated by Hurricane Katrina and the other 2005 storms that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast.

Lawmakers and experts say the 2005 storms revealed weaknesses in the program that must be addressed to put it back on sound financial footing.

The number of claims may have been unprecedented but the borrowing from the federal treasury to back up the insurance pool certainly was not unprecedented. And it is absurd to suggest that it took the 2005 storm year to “reveal weaknesses in the program.” The literature is deep on the NFIP’s problems and one of the biggest is that rate-setting isn’t protected from political tinkering, so NFIP can’t charge actuarially-sound premiums. So it’s nice to see that Congress is trying to address NFIP’s problems, but the question is will Congress protect NFIP from Congress?

Two things I noted today:

1- From the No S#%@! category, the Bush Administration seems eager to let everybody know that there will be no movement whatsoever on regulating carbon until January 2009 at the earliest. If you caught even a bit of the G8 news you already knew that (and somebody got me saying as much before G8). But apparently the Bush Administration wants to drive the point home, so last week they turned EPA Administrator Johnson loose at a House hearing:

U.S. President George W. Bush wouldn’t sign into law an anti-global warming bill that includes a so-called cap and trade program, the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator told U.S. lawmakers Friday.

During a congressional hearing, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash. asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson if the president would sign into law legislation that would create the nation’s first cap and trade program aimed at specifically limiting climate change-causing pollutants.

Johnson simply replied, “No.”

In response, Inslee, a cap and trade policy proponent, criticized Johnson, saying he hopes Johnson has his prediction wrong.

“I hope you’re premature. I hope you haven’t checked with the president,” he said, during a hearing held by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “I hope you’re not authorized to say that.”

Two things caught my attention here. As far as I can tell, Johnson’s appearance before this House Select Committee was entirely voluntary [that's the first item of note] since this is a select committee with no legislation-writing authority, no subpoena power, no budget authority, and no jurisdiction over any federal agency. So Johnson’s willingness to appear was either:

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It’s nothing new: rather than make better cars Detroit would lobby. So it’s no surprise that the big-3 chiefs are running to DC together to beg that they not be held to even the most milquetoast efficiency regulations. What is curious, though, is GM’s CEO’s choice of words:

“It looks like within the climate that’s being experienced now, it’s very likely there will be increases in CAFE,” Rick Wagoner, General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive, said Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. “I think our concern is, let’s make sure that we also fix the real problems while we’re doing that.”

Of course he meant “political climate” not “Earth’s climate,” which makes his quote ironic. But what I’m really curious about is what he sees as “the real problems” that Congress should be addressing instead of getting America far more energy efficient than it is, both for climate and energy supply reasons. It never ceases to impress me that Detroit can scream and cry about how being forced to improve the efficiency of their product will lead to a loss of jobs, without being challenged in the slightest. As if fewer cars will be sold because the cars are made slightly more efficient? Somebody explain….

Hat tip (and bow and all praise thee) to Mr. Fleck who passed it along. NPR just sent out a press release previewing a Steve Inskeep interview airing on tomorrow’s Morning Edition with NASA Administration Michael Griffin. The title of the press release? How about

NASA ADMINISTRATOR MICHAEL GRIFFIN NOT SURE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A PROBLEM

Ok. The rest of the press release goes on to say [my bolds]

May 30, 2007; Washington, DC – NASA Administrator Michael Griffin tells NPR News that while he has no doubt “a trend of global warming exists, I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

In an interview with Steve Inskeep airing tomorrow on NPR News’ Morning Edition, Administrator Griffin says “I guess I would ask which human beings – where and when – are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Oh my. Here is the transcript that NPR released:

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Back on May 2nd I wrote about the looming coal vs. global warming fight in Congress. Today the NY Times put the issue up as its lead article (at least in the national edition). Edmund Andrews covers the issue well, bringing out various issues of price, competing priorities and constituent politics. (To recap my post: despite Senate ENR staffers trying to paint a rosy picture about a four-bill markup of some easy and no-brainer energy packages, coal state Senators still made a big stink about mandating coal synfuels.)

This is an issue setting itself up well (and early) to be one of the major boondoggles in crafting policy that effectively brings down GHG emissions. It essentially pits energy independence goals against GHG reduction goals when they should be addressed simultaneously in the same direction. Smart policy will reduce exposure to global warming risk and energy provenance issues together; bad policy will allow the two issues to battle each other.

The elephant in this room, only hinted at in Andrews’ article and only briefly mentioned in my post, is setting government targets for specific fuels. Coal state Members want to write into any energy/climate legislation either mandated volume purchase targets for liquefied coal fuels or heavy subsidies for the industry. But the coal-to-liquid conversion process releases a lot of carbon dioxide, and when confronted with this, coal supporters point out that carbon dioxide can be captured during the process and sequestered (known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS).

The key here is “can be” as in can be captured. It should be appended with “but won’t” unless any legislation mandating or heavily subsidizing liquefied coal also provides a mandate that any fuel derived from coal captures CO2, and also provides the subsidies to make that CCS possible. Will legislators go that far? Listening to Congress, especially the language coming out of Jeff Bingaman’s committee, I’ve heard a lot of discussion of subsidies to build synfuel plants and a lot of discussion about mandating fuel quotas or providing generous per-gallon tax credits, but nothing about also footing the bill for CCS. Keeping in mind that some lawmakers already want to give coal synfuels a $0.50/gal subsidy before even considering the carbon capture issues, requiring carbon CCS on the coal synfuel process means pricing coal synfuels well out of economic competitiveness.

The coal issue illustrates again the problems with government picking winners and losers instead of setting generalized targets to be met across a wide swath of economic players. Doing this with ethanol has already led to a international socioeconomic backlash, rightly or wrongly drawing in Mexican citizens decrying the rising price of the corn they depend upon for food. Anything close to a mandate for coal synfuels will mean a new avenue for climate change politicization. Have we learned yet from past lessons? Edmund Andrews hints that we probably haven’t:

But some energy experts, as well as some lawmakers, worry that the scale of the coal-to-liquid incentives could lead to a repeat of a disastrous effort 30 years ago to underwrite a synthetic fuels industry from scratch.

When oil prices plunged in the 1980s, the government-owned Synthetic Fuels Corporation became a giant government albatross that lost billions and remains a symbol of misguided industrial policy more than 25 years later.

From the LA Times today:

California homeowners are rejecting new rebates for solar power equipment, saying the state has made installing the rooftop panels far more costly than expected.

As a result, Public Utilities Commission reports show a decline of 78% in rebate requests in the first three months of this year, compared with last year, and the solar installation industry says it is threatened with collapse across much of California.

At issue is a requirement the state added Jan. 1 for getting a rebate under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Million Solar Roofs program. Applicants must first sign up for costly pricing plans offered by utilities that charge more for their electricity during hours of peak demand.

etc….

There was a minor storm in the science community over the past couple of days as two Republican House members offered amendments (here’s one, here’s the other) to the NSF authorization bill (H.R. 1867) to strip funding for existing projects.

This kind of debate has been going on for decades, really since the beginning of post-WWII science policy, but it’s important to revisit the issue. Should Congress step in for peer-review panels of experts in determining project funding? Maybe. It’s an open values question that we are constantly rehashing, and for good reason. Elected politicians should constantly question how the taxpayer’s money is spent. That’s their job. But should individual Members perhaps read past the title and abstract of a project they object to when speaking on the House floor? Probably.

The latest iteration of this long-running fight is covered well by Jeffery Brainard in a Chronicle of Higher Ed story posted today.

In case you were one of those optimists thinking that the change in Congressional control meant a coming slew of passed legislation dealing with GHGs, or that January 2009 means welcome to the new era of GHG regulations or even clear sailing for logical no regrets policies that address oil dependence and carbon mitigation, you got a nice preview today of battles to come.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources, now chaired by Senator Bingaman of New Mexico, tried to hold an easy combined markup on four bills that deal with biofuels (S.987), energy efficiency (S.1115) and carbon CCS (S.962 and S.731). There was apparently a “divisive” roadblock in that the coal-state Senators wanted a new mandate on coal-derived transportation fuels (apparently they think we should be adding more CO2 to the atmosphere per VMT rather than less). There was a tentative deal to allay that issue until the bill package went to the floor, where it could be debated by the full Senate, but the deal broke down in a rather nasty way and forced a party-line vote, with some Dems voting against the coal fuels amendment that they otherwise supported. Ah, the era of bipartisan cooperation to solve our nation’s most pressing problems…. (CQ story here) (And if you think the politicking on this was constrained to the ENR hearing room, see the players deployed to lobby in this story.)

That this package could not pass easily, with the contentious issues worked out before markup, is certainly a sign that meaningful climate mitigation legislation is going to be bloody and a long time in coming. It also illustrates some of the messy compromises that will come with climate legislation, some of which may actually increase carbon emissions. Sure, CO2 could be captured at the coal-to-synfuel plant, thus preventing the extra CO2 that coal synfuel production emits from hitting the atmosphere and leaving a zero-sum between burning synfuel or gasoline. But with a liquefied coal mandate sitting alongside a biofuels mandate who actually thinks that in the end a requirement for capturing CO2 at the coal synfuels production site is going to happen? With all the people who want to make it and want to use it (i.e. the military), the economic pressures on not driving up the price by requiring carbon CCS are already clear.

Interesting exchange between Bill Maher and Sheryl Crow and Laurie David. Or not. I saw it on the NEI Nuclear Notes blog, so you can go there to get the exchange, or see it on youtube. Basically the upshot that NEI reports is yes yes yes we need to cut GHG emissions but no no no way do we need nuclear to do that.

What’s interesting to me is not the content but the tone of the conversation. Listen to Crow adamantly cut off Maher from bringing nuclear into the discussion. We want to talk about low-carb energy but we don’t want you to talk about nuclear. When Crow stalls out on giving good reasons to disavow nuclear David comes in with a little misdirection, laying fuel economy standards down as a step to be taken to avoid bringing nuclear into the picture.

I’ll give Crow/David the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t have the time or the prep to really get into the hidden subsidy issues that make nuclear a more expensive option than it appears. But for being so concerned about GHGs, a staunchly anti-nuclear stance — taking a major GHG reduction option off the table — is curious.

The non-idealist reality is that all options need to be on the table, and all options — including nuclear — need to be honestly accounted for. Hidden subsidies of nuclear, including insurance issues (the U.S. government insures nuclear plants because private companies won’t — Price-Anderson was just renewed through 2025), should be compared to the true cost of solutions like wind, which currently gets a generous PTC to keep it competitive.

Wind and solar are not viable options for baseload power, which is what coal provides. What we should be talking about is replacing the dirty, old baseload coal plants with nuclear plants while also bringing renewables online. And while David is right that [aggressive] efficiency and waste issues would make a big dent in demand, thinking that we’re going to solve our energy supply issues through efficiency gains shows a pretty deep misunderstanding of the way incentives and the market works here. You can wait and wait for efficiency gains to significantly reduce GHG emissions and you’re going to be waiting for a very long time.

Beyond the sound bites, fairly thorough studies on the competing economics (and other issues) of nuclear, coal and renewables are here and here.