Following the rocky path of climate legislation in the U.S. Congress these past years brought me back to the 1980s, and my time as a crime reporter in New York City. After a shooting in those days, a homicide detective named Marty Davin would go to the hospital and intercept the gunshot victim on a gurney outside the emergency room. If the victim was conscious, Davin would lean over and ask, "Who killed you?"
That usually got the victim's attention, along with an I'm-not-dead-yet protest. Davin would reply, "You are going to die. You might as well tell me who did it."
As I interviewed the sponsor of whichever emissions-reduction bill had just been gunned down, I often thought of Davin. The politicians and climate campaigners would assure me that they were still alive — passage of a carbon cap was inevitable, they'd say — and I'd remind myself that they had survived countless near-death experiences.
But what happened last week, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would not even try to bring a compromise climate bill to the Senate floor, was not just another setback. Sometimes dead really is dead — and for this Congress, barring a miracle, climate action is finished. With an ugly election looming in November, it may be years before we get another chance to debate a bill that prices carbon. And the consensus approach to federal climate action — the idea that cap-and-trade was the most politically viable policy — may well be dead, too.
This is a time to take stock. The first question is whether this was a failure of policy; a failure of politics, message, and messenger; or both? Second, is there a Plan B around which the climate campaign should now unify? And third, what needs to be done to allow a better outcome when the next opportunity finally does appear?
No one who follows climate politics could have been very surprised by Reid's move. The bigger shock was his decision to remove from the bill a mandate that utilities must generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. (Proponents hope to offer it as a floor amendment.) It was if the Senate was saying: Anything remotely effective, we're not going to do.
When Reid pulled the plug, I thought back to a snowy afternoon in Copenhagen last December. Sitting with Al Gore in an empty hotel café, I asked him to contemplate this very moment. "If the United States doesn't act," he replied, "if the Senate defeats the legislation or waters it down to a point where it is not even worth having a bill, that is an event horizon beyond which it is difficult to see."
He parsed the same issues then that climate campaigners are parsing now: "It may mean there is a fundamental flaw in the international political approach, but I'm not sure there is a good alternative. The reality is so dire that a new plan would have to emerge — but just now I can't imagine what it would be."
Gore had a point. When the goal is emissions reduction, there aren't many alternatives: You've got to reduce emissions. The Plan B options now being offered by various advocates should be vigorously debated, but all of them seem vulnerable to the same polluted politics that killed the cap. Advocates of the carbon tax are ready to take a run at their goal, and Godspeed — but it is hard to see how politicians who were terrified to support a cap (because opponents labeled it a tax) will suddenly become bold enough to support a carbon tax. Policy groups such as the Breakthrough Institute argue that instead of making dirty fuels more expensive, it's time for intensive energy research and development to make clean fuels cheaper. That sounds reasonable, but without the revenue stream that a cap or tax would provide — and in an era of budget cutbacks — it is hard to see government supplying the massive, long-term funding their plan requires.
Is the cap so fundamentally flawed that it should be abandoned forever? I don't think so. I believe it needs to be liberated from legislative bloat and rehabilitated as a modest first step: a tool for regulating power sector emissions, the job it performed so successfully in the 1990s, when America tamed acid rain. It's worth remembering that while climate politics were bogging down, climate policy mechanisms were being improved. Clever wonks found ways to cushion consumers and high-carbon industries from the price impact of the cap, while preserving a price signal for generators. Trading restrictions were added to keep speculators out of the carbon game. Though the term cap-and-trade has been demonized, the cap itself isn't broken.
Some will argue that this latest setback is proof that the U.S. will never cap carbon. I reject that view. All we can say for sure is that the U.S. will never cap or price carbon until the politics of the issue change — so the first order of business must be to begin improving the political atmosphere. During the three years I worked on The Climate War, a narrative of the campaign to pass a carbon cap, I came to realize I was writing a political thriller, a whodunit with multiple culprits. Let's look for lessons by considering some of the culprits, starting with the most obvious.
1. The Professional Deniers. Gore and environmental leaders made a tactical error several years ago when they declared the science "settled" and refused to engage the forces of denial and delay. The basic science was indeed settled, but the resulting message vacuum was the perfect medium for those who sow doubt and confusion about global climate change. It shouldn't be surprising that so many Americans remain skeptical about global warming. For 20 years, this loose network of PR pros, working for industry associations and anti-tax think tanks, has spread doubt about climate science and fear about climate economics, claiming that any attempt to cap CO2 would wreck the American economy. Their disinformation, amplified via the Internet, helped poison the debate. To counter the deniers' campaign, President Obama needs to speak out forcefully, and champions of the clean energy economy must point to the new jobs that are already being created by the renewable energy economy and show Americans precisely where they fit into it.
2. Senate Republicans. Most climate campaigners understand the folly of trying to remake the American energy system without bipartisan support. But it's hard to forge centrist solutions when an entire party is denying there's a problem and vilifying the solutions. A scaled-back approach, one that can be sold as a modest, incremental step and not a new industrial revolution, might fare better.
There was a time — 2007 and 2008, to be precise — when some Republicans were moving away from deny-and-delay tactics. (In 2007, briefly, Newt Gingrich supported the carbon cap.) More recently, opposition to climate action has become a litmus test in the GOP. Arizona
It's hard to forge centrist solutions when an entire party is denying there's a problem.
Republican John McCain, who sponsored the Senate's first serious climate bills but now faces a primary challenge from the right, recently called a successor bill "a farce." His mantle of Republican climate courage passed to Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who took so much heat from his own party that he withdrew from the climate bill he helped write. Graham's position has been incoherent since then, but he has signaled support for a cap on the power sector. That could be something to build on.
3. Senate Democrats. After Reid pulled the plug, Democrats were quick to blame Republicans for obstruction. But what about the obstructionists within the Democratic ranks? Harry Reid didn't have the clout to force action on this issue because a dozen or more centrist Democrats — from states that either mine coal or produce much of their electricity from it — were dug in against it. It is impossible to tell if the senators were truly concerned about what the cap would do to their state economies — nonpartisan studies suggest its impact would be minimal — or just worried about what attack ads would do to them. Again, a more modest first step could change the dynamic. The crucial thing is to get started.
4. The Green Group. At a meeting in February 2007, the Green Group, an unofficial association of the leaders of the big U.S. environmental non-profits, told Harry Reid they supported a single legislative goal: An economy-wide cap. Their strategy was to assemble the broadest possible coalition to push the broadest possible bill. Given the magnitude of the crisis and the need to reduce emissions quickly, this made sense. Politically, though, it proved disastrous, because it led to bills of such cost, scope, and complexity that they scared the pants off timid legislators.
The Green Group held out for an economy-wide bill even after it became clear, in late 2009, that it was unachievable in the Senate. Only recently did
The Green Group wanted too much and ended up with nothing.
environmental leaders try to negotiate a compromise cap on electric power plants, which account for 40 percent of U.S. emissions. Passing a utility cap would have been a great first step, but the talks got started too late. The Green Group wanted too much and ended up with nothing.
5. The Power Barons. When the eleventh-hour search for a compromise began, the utilities got too greedy. If they had to go it alone, they argued, they deserved virtually all of the carbon allowances in the program for free. This left too few for other crucial purposes, such as cushioning manufacturers from higher electricity prices. Worse, in exchange for supporting a carbon cap, some utilities demanded relief from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations governing conventional pollutants such as mercury. Like the greens, they asked for too much and got nothing. (The greens, however, were overreaching on behalf of the planet, not their own coffers.) Some utility bosses were relieved to see the bill die. Those feelings may prove short-lived as the battle to reduce emissions moves to the EPA and the courts.
Some advocates, such as Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund, regard the decision to negotiate with the power barons as the height of folly. Washington, they argue, should simply dictate the terms of surrender to the polluters. Such a stance ignores an important fact: It isn't possible to remake the U.S. energy system without negotiating with the power barons. Punishing generators means punishing households that pay electricity bills. That doesn't mean, however, that the politicians should give the barons everything they want. But there was only one player with the clout to cut a fair deal with them, and he was missing in action.
6. The President. Barack Obama chose not to lead on this issue. His decision to address health care reform before energy and climate change doomed the latter. With advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod whispering that climate was a losing proposition (a self-fulfilling prophesy, to be sure), Obama never threw himself behind a particular climate bill. He left it to the Senate, the Green Group, and the power bosses — all of whom were sorely in need of adult supervision.
The real grownups in this tale were Rep. Henry Waxman and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last year surprised the Obama Administration by taking a comprehensive climate bill to the House floor. The White House had no choice but to help whip the vote, and it passed. Then Obama stopped trying, and the Senate refused to take up the legislation. It was a colossal failure of nerve, and a decision that likely destroyed any chance of achieving climate action in Obama's first term.
Since the president and his political advisers thought an economy-wide cap was too heavy a lift, Obama should have led a tactical retreat to what, in the past several months, became the last-ditch compromise position: the cap on the electric power sector. Had negotiations focused on this months ago instead of weeks ago, and had the president thrown his weight behind it then, we might today be celebrating a step forward instead of mourning another failure. Only Obama had the authority to call this audible early. The environmental NGOs and their allies were too invested in the economy-wide approach; they needed Obama to lead them.
He refused. To the bitter end, the White House pursued what his aides called a "stealth strategy" that deployed the president only sparingly. As a result, he failed to take advantage of the BP oil spill. When its terrible scope became apparent, in June, Obama began talking about the need to
Welcome to the 'glorious mess' — the tangle of regulation and litigation that follow when Congress fails to act.
cap carbon and accelerate the transition to clean energy. But it was a fleeting moment. Many climate campaigners knew the climate bill was dead on June 15, when Obama gave his long-awaited Oval Office address on the oil spill. Instead of making an explicit connection to the climate bill — and explaining that by capping carbon the U.S. could speed its transition to clean energy and help break its addiction to fossil fuels — Obama whiffed. He had a road map but didn't try to share it with the people. "We don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there," he said. Today, with that map in shreds, we surely don't.
As climate campaigners wait however long it takes to get another shot at legislation, there is important work to be done. Greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. have been dropping — and not just because of the recession. The task is to build on this trend during the economic recovery. Changes in our energy infrastructure are making this possible. In Texas, our highest-emitting state and a bastion of climate skepticism, carbon emissions have been declining since 2004 thanks in part to a renewable energy standard — signed into law by then-Gov. George W. Bush — that accelerated the installation of wind power and created thousands of jobs along the way.
The Department of Energy now has 7,000 clean energy projects across the country — projects that save money, create jobs, and reduce emissions. According to an analysis by the World Resources Institute, by leveraging existing authority over the next ten years the U.S. could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent to 12 percent below 2005 levels. This is far short of the 17 percent reduction Obama promised in Copenhagen and nothing close to what needs to be done. But if we continue cutting emissions before asking voters to embrace a cap, we prove that cuts are both technologically feasible and economically sustainable. And we'll be in a better position when the next legislative opportunity comes.
Until then, the climate war will be waged by cities, states, regional cap-and-trade programs, and, above all, the EPA, which early next year is set to begin regulating stationary sources of CO2 — power plants and large factories.
Welcome to the "glorious mess" — Michigan Rep. John Dingell's phrase for the tangle of regulation and litigation that will follow when Congress fails to act. We are about to experience precisely the sort of costly, protracted, plant-by-plant trench warfare the cap was intended to avoid. Since the utilities and the manufacturers weren't willing to cut a deal, this is what they get. The fragile period of compromise and cooperation between environmentalists and big business may now be coming to an end. Green groups that have invested time and money into the legislative process are now putting on their war paint and returning to the courts, with a renewed focus on stopping new coal-fired power plants and shutting down the oldest and dirtiest ones.
Tough new EPA rules for conventional pollutants will help, and so will new EPA carbon regulations. Perhaps these strict new regulations will refresh the power bosses' appetite for a cap. But they have plenty of lawyers, and the long, ugly battles over implementation of EPA regulations could extend the current period of uncertainty by many years. Republicans (and some Democrats) will try to strip EPA of its authority over carbon, or at least delay implementation of its new rules.
In effect, the Senate will be saying that Congress alone should have the power to act — so that it can then not exercise that power. Obama's aides say the president will be fully engaged in the battle to save EPA authority over carbon. It is a fight that he can't possibly duck, because it is our last line of defense. As Gore reminded me in Copenhagen, "The fact that this is extremely hard doesn't mean we should quit."
Comments in chronological order (Total 31 comments)
29 July 2010 3:22PM
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29 July 2010 3:35PM
A very simple awnser........ smaller cars!
29 July 2010 3:36PM
And more public transport..............
29 July 2010 3:53PM
Lead by example.
29 July 2010 4:13PM
What's next is a funeral, and this is the eulogy.
The American people killed the climate bill. The politicians were simply reacting to the countless independent polls of public opinion. When the American public were largely believers, even Republicans supported climate change legislation.
When Climategate hit, the amount of Americans who were willing to spend real money to mitigate climate change, dropped significantly. The politicians who switched sides with them. Even Obama knows a loser bill when he sees one.
Proponents of the EPA approach don't realize how flawed it is. Its perfectly legal to sue the EPA over any rules it tries to make. Those lawsuits only have to last till the next conservative president, who can just throw them all away on his first day in office.
EPA action will be nothing more than appeasement of greens, since the rules will never take effect.
29 July 2010 4:14PM
Where next for US climate bill?
Stop being so fucking two-faced about the BP oil spill and realise the USA have been polluting the world 100 times worse than what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico presently. Bhopal, wars, many years of oversized cars that spew tons of pollution into the atmosphere etc etc.
BP should take a leaf out of the American Armed Forces book and claim this spill as collateral damage, a little like when our British soldiers keep getting shot by friendly fire. This is just a friendly oil spill.
Where next for the US climate bill? Make it 380 million pages long, print it out on high grade white paper and shove each page up one American arse.
That's what to do with the US climate bill.
29 July 2010 4:33PM
Instead of constan nagging and preaching what all others should do, do it your selves. Lead by example.
29 July 2010 4:41PM
@Smokeypaul
Then the American congress would simply pass a bill seizing BP's assets in America, and bar the international arm of the company from selling petrol in the states. This would of course destroy the company, along with a great many of our pension funds.
But if you're that angry about it, maybe you should don a nice red coat, grab your musket and go show those pesky rebels who's in charge.
29 July 2010 4:44PM
@ecocampaigner - where EPA the ones that dropped the dome on Springfield?
@remusp - I am laughing out loud at your population comment, the reality is that population in Europe is in decline - and will be in the UK if the birth rates that have gone up recently go down again as is expected - and it is only immigration in Europe that is keeping population to a level were services are realistic.
If birth rates in a country fall below 2, after a 50 years or so population does not have enough breeding adults to continue breeding meaningfully so immigration is required.
You may want that for the UK, but the reality is that population is needed for basic services to work.
Europe will be facing a precipitous fall in population before the middle of the century at the birth rates.
Go here :http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1123982.ece
This is 7 years old, but like geology, populations do not crash over night, but over decades.
Other than that - the US, a fundamentally small government, couldn't care less about any where else, country - do you honestly expect them to stop guzzling oil? They will be the last do anything. As the crisis hits, they will vote in a hard line Republican government and try to invade other countries for resources, which is what they have always done.
29 July 2010 4:47PM
This is perhaps the most clear and comprehensive explanation of the complex climate change politics that i've ever seen in plain words; and isn't that precisely the point, it's very very complex?
It was if the Senate was saying: Anything remotely effective, we're not going to do
This is not what they were saying. What they were saying is "we're confused about the linkages, and consequently the ramifications, of trying to fix this problem with one sweeping mechanism and we're not going to risk it". The climate change 'problem' needs to be better defined (it is, after all, not a problem but many problems) in order to depoliticise an issue that can be tied to more or less any other issue for the purposes of advocacy.
This is not the end for 'climate legislation' in the US; it is only the end for this piece of climate legislation. There will be more and, who knows, if they are more focussed on a particular element of the problem, they may even be better.
29 July 2010 4:50PM
The Senate politicians who opposed this bill and others have, presumably, one of two motivations: belief or votes. They either believe sincerely that there is no need to do anything about climate change or they don't want to risk losing votes in the next election.
If there are still people with access to reliable information who can believe that climate change is not that big a deal, then it's a condemnation at once of their capacity to understand what is happening and of the ability of those with the information to present it adequately. As the article says, the climate change science was declared "settled" too early, giving the advantage to the organisations and companies which, in bad faith and for their own selfish reasons, kept knocking and disparaging said science with spurious and false arguments.
And if the motive is votes, then there could surely be no more damning definition of political expediency and irresponsibility: sod the planet and the future of the whole human race - including any and all descendants of each politician - in benefit of a few more years occupying a seat in the Senate.
29 July 2010 4:50PM
The reason so many Americans and Europeans for that matter are doubting that the science is settled is because it is not. The tragedy of this whole debacle is that there are real world problems - hunger, education/employment, development, war and of course energy. We DO need to go along a course of producing oil free ( as against carbon free) alternatives because we will eventually run out. As with all innovations they happen slowly and then accelerate to overtake the old technology ( you do not see many horse drawn carts in London - but their replacement took a genertion). Unfortunately, this logical process has been hijacked by a sentimental greenism which at its worst has invented a totally fictitious harmonious pre-carbon age and wants to send us to live in caves. Whatever the author writes, people such as Al Gore have exaggerated and given us a hyperbolic treatise on which he has grown rich and far more famous than as an erstwhile second rate politician. Eventually, the whole political establishment will wake up to the reality of governing and facing up to real problems not blaming everything on climate change.
29 July 2010 5:51PM
Do not think it matters Homo Sapiens just another species in a long line of species we each have our time in the sun then we are gone.Perhaps the next dominant animal at top of tree will be kinder to the earth all you got to do is wait 3 or 4 million years and see what turns up.(personally i hope its felix domesticus)
29 July 2010 7:01PM
GELION
You need a little help
Try looking at migration watch for starters and recently published ONS report predicting 80 million by 2050 .
Europe birth rate falling but UK spiking with 1 in 4 new births to mother born outside UK .
So try and do a little bit of homework tonight so you can understand this better .
Also look up infrastructure in a dictionary so you understand what is lacking and why co2 is on the up as this does not come out of thin air as some think .
When we get back to 50 million we can welcome immigration again and then control our co2 etc
I am just off to Russia now so dont bother to reply as I have better things to do than explain things to you Oh I do not care a less about greenwash as population control is not on the governments agenda . .
29 July 2010 7:04PM
Surely, among the questions before this CIFer's "first" question are:
is this a success or failure?
for whom?
what should we make of this?
...
29 July 2010 8:06PM
If there is evil in this world, and if the devil has suborned a few along the way, then all that is manifest in the Republican party and those Democrats representing fossil fuel interests. If Obama doesn't lead with every tool at his disposal he will go down in history as one the biggest failures as President.
29 July 2010 9:36PM
@remsup - enjoy your Russian trip, but you are still wrong. European and Japanese populations are falling - if you take immigration out. There is not a lot of immigration in Japan where they have a serious problem.
The UK needs immigration. Take that out and the population will precipitously fall because the birth rate without immigrants involved is under 2.
Oh, and it's not only the UK ... :-D
Enjoy your Russian trip ...
29 July 2010 11:14PM
When you create artificial persons (corporations) that have the same rights as flesh & blood persons but who's only remit is to enhance shareholder's profits & when you have institutions sponsored by these very persons (government & political parties) there is only one depressing outcome. There are too many people in power who would lose out of tackling climate change.
"We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Louis D. Brandeis (Supreme Court Judge)
1% of the world population controls 40% of world wealth, the system itself is flawed almost beyond repair, unadulterated capitalism is not capable of solving a problem like climate change.
29 July 2010 11:22PM
I live in the USA and a Brit by birth. I am sick of this crap about all this crap. I hear about what I hear on climate change. Everything is based on the last 100 + years. No info. about the problems about the previous million + years. The facts are the planet and climate changes with time. Get real you liberal left wing people and wake up about what is going on with our planet
Ray
29 July 2010 11:54PM
remusp
Does Britain have any problems that aren't caused by immigration?
As I said on the another thread, debate on this subject is pointless. The Greenies won't talk sense, can't discus the validity of the science, because someone declared it settled. They have focused in on CO2 and completely forgotten about the methane produced by billions of cows we eat every year, just as an example. The push to reduce carbon emissions has not been without its negative effects either. Europe's wholesale shift into "greener" (read more economical) diesel cars has actually reduced the air quality in our cities. We have traded CO2 for soot and nitrous oxides. The increasing asthma, other respiratory illnesses and possibly even heart attack rates have increased as a result of this.
On the other side the climate change deniers us the holes that can easily be picked in some of the scientific evidence, combined with the Greenies loud and incessant shout that the science is settled to convince the populous that it is all a big conspiracy to tax the hell out them. The fact that the green movement has been neatly infiltrated by the anti-capitalist movement at its grass routes level helps with this propaganda no end.
Both side are like two children in the play ground contradicting and insulting each other. It is pathetic and prevents any real progress being made.
To effectively tackle climate change we first have to strip all of the processes that lead to the production of green house gases and place them in the wider context of pollution as a whole. Each individual industry needs to be examined and its operations revised to provide a sustainable future beyond oil. Companies that pollute without producing anything of real value should be severely curtailed, so that essentials can be maintained.
There is little point in cutting CO2 if we just end up creating other, possibly more harmful pollutants. The whole of the operation needs to be examined and the effects of any changes carefully considered before implementation, and reviewed over time to prevent any more unwanted side effect.
Unfortunately this does not fit in well with the political classes 5 year cycles, as it takes many decades to review and implement effective policy. Better for them to pander to short term public trends, and serve the interests of their paymasters in big business. As for the "free market solutions" well I think we can all see that the concerns of the environment does not fit in with the constant need to make more in the next quarter than they did in the last.
I don't see any change happening until it is far too late to save most of the worlds population, if that point has not already been passed. The human race was always going to struggle to survive serious climate change and even if that does not get us, we are in serious trouble when the oil runs out.
Yes and a quick trawl through (mostly website with a lamenting white supremacist bent) shows that there is a lot of evidence of a falling birth rate amongst white people in the UK. I think we are mostly too busy and too poor from paying off debts to breed aren't we?
30 July 2010 1:54AM
To all who have partaken of the Kool-Aid, there IS serious doubt about the true cause of current warming and the science behind it. The AGW debate is political, not of science. The believers in this religion are the first to call names and point fingers of blame, yet have no answers and only impracticle,
gee whiz" solutions that don't work now and never will. They target an ephemeral environmental "cause" that has more to do with economic envy and silly notions of rich and poor. The majority of posts to this article are by self-loathers and America haters. The politically induced idea that renewable energy can save the day is patently ridiculous and proven so again and again, day after day. Wind and solar are intermittent, are not friendly to power grids, unreliable, and heavily subsidized, raising the cost of energy for everyone. Not only that, the proponents of renewable energy mix and match energy sources and consumption willy nilly. Example: They say wind power will reduce oil consumption, when the vast majority of electricity is produced by coal, nuclear and hydro - not by oil. The result of these ignorant errors in judgement push our politicians to write stupid legislation and regulations subsidizing technology that will hamper our future, not improve it. In doing so, we are all made poorer while the earth remains indifferent, passing through yet another of hundreds of natural climate cycles. Wise up. Apply your passion to real environmental and human problems like water pollution, sanitation, and air pollution by known poisons. This does not include CO2, which nourishes all life on the planet. All of these real goals and more can be accomplished, but it takes innovation and hard work, something the social progressives find difficult to muster. They would rather crow and bitch than actually roll up their sleeves. Only a wealthy nation (and world) can tackle the real problems we face in the future. Poverty breeds a poor environment. Wealth bred by abundant supplies of inexpensive energy preserves it. Command and control is not the answer.
30 July 2010 10:30AM
@chriskiy - you are certainly right that both votes and beliefs are driving factors in the behaviour of Congressional representatives but that is to portray them (and indeed the issue) in an overly simplistic way. Under conditions of so-called 'Knightian' uncertainty - that is, where policymakers can't be sure what their interests actually are let alone be certain of the affects of their decisions - beliefs are fluid, and campaigning for votes is an imperfect science.
The problem is an information one; decisions were made on the basis of great uncertainty not just about causes and effects, but about beliefs and interests themselves.
30 July 2010 4:13PM
As usual, the article ignores the elephant in the room: Yucca Mountain. The first thing the Obama administration did after receiving the Nobel prize was to cancel Yucca Mountain. Apparently this was to save Harry Reid's Senate seat and the 60 vote Senate supermajority. This tatic failed when Kennedy's seat was lost to a Republician.
There are only 3 energy choices: do coal, do nukes, or do without.
"Renewable energy" is worse than coal. The entire purpose of "renewalbe energy" is to end up with a worldwide North Korean. Building 50 TWe "renewable energy," at greater than 1 kg-Fe/W uses 50 years of world iron production up front. Planet is immediately destroyed. CO2 will double in less than 50 years
By doing the greenie thing and taking atomic power off the table up front, the Obama administration is left with do coal or do without. A carbon tax or cap-and trade leaves do without by default. Carbon "tax" will have to be roughly 1000 USD/tonne-C to make coal more expensive than pipeline natural gas. Power cost will at least double. Not much wonder while the greenies support cap-and-trade, they alway only wanted do without. The Republicans are simply opposing "do without."
31 July 2010 2:22AM
Could you go into more detail or link an article?
31 July 2010 8:03AM
This is the second article in The Guardian this week that fails to mention the most pressing issue, while excoriating Obama for his failure to commit political suicide (the first article, by Jeffrey Sachs, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/jul/28/sachs-obama-climate-change" rel="nofollow">is here). How is it that peak oil is not mentioned or factored in to these arguments, even as the timescale for energy shortages and market panic are far more immediate than the effects of climate change?
Right now, it seems that opposition to climate change mitigation in the US has two basic drivers. The first is ideology, where environmentalism is conflated with socialism (or victimhood, as in the rather ripe conspiracy theories the anxious are prone to indulge in), The other driver is economic, where self-interest and short-termism dominate strategic thinking.
I don't know why it appears that the political right equate care for our planet with socialism or communism. Do conservatives not care about the air they breathe or the food they eat? This doesn't seem likely, just hard to understand. (Well, I don't understand it, but that may not be saying much).
I also find it hard to understand how the leaders of commercial concerns can be so cavalier in the name of today's profit. Don't they have children? Is the future really reduced to the next AGM, the next profit and loss account, the next dividend? It appears so, given the way some industries are trying so hard not just to ignore science, but each other.
Business lobby groups like the CBI support anthropogenic climate change (the CBI runs its own climate change site). Only last week, Lloyd's of London and Chatham House produced a wide-ranging and unequivocal report on sustainable business practices, energy supplies and climate change impacts on industry and commerce. Major US companies are leaving the US Chamber of Commerce due to what they regard as the chamber's 'obstructionist' attitude to environmental legislation. Institutional investors are unconvinced by ideological arguments that dispense with the inconvenient science, replacing it with a gambler's choice, a bet on very long odds.
Perhaps some people are simply so greedy that tomorrow's risk is always overpowered by today's profit. Perhaps some politicians, especially in the US, are so beholden to special interests and focus groups, that they cannot demonstrate leadership qualities, as I think this author asserts about Obama to some extent, although I see it more as pragmatism, and an inevitable "America First" influence when prioritising the legislative agenda - healthcare before climate change.
Whether you agree with the details of my analysis or not, the fact remains that the US is deadlocked, the public and government polarised like two frozen sumo wrestlers; eyes bulging and full of hate, forearms trembling with effort, blood pumping through distended veins as they stand stock still, achieving nothing and going nowhere. And they are locked in. The right and their attack dogs cannot be placated, for there is no return to the mythical stability of a US-dominated world, even as it slips away from them towards the vast and implacable east. The left cannot bring about the statist socialism that they admire without the constant economic expansion that capitalism demands, which drives them into the hinterland of consumer socialism, a compromise that dooms every well-meaning socialist endeavour.
What could possibly break the deadlock? What could bring industry and commerce to its senses, while shaking complacent ideologues out of their entrenchment? The answer is the missing link between the past and the future: peak oil. Nothing will bring business leaders to the table faster that a serious threat to their profits. What threat could do it? Oil at $200 a barrel - a chilling projection that might be only four years away according to the Lloyd's/Chatham House report in which it featured.
And this same shock to the global system will put paid to much demagoguery. Politicians of all stripes may indulge themselves when the public are insulated from the threats, but this cannot last long now because peak oil is almost on us. It is the price of heating our homes, of fuelling our cars, that will wake us all up. It will be the cost of food when petro-chemical fertilisers become so expensive many farmers will not be able to afford them and yields will drop.
In other words, we'll get serious about climate change when the lights go out, literally or metaphorically. We need something to shock us all, because adaptation is best done in advance of whatever it is you are adapting to. Peak oil is that shock, and it can't come too soon.
31 July 2010 4:25PM
In rough numbers, World energy will increase times 10, from 5 TWe equivalent to 50 TWe equivalent. Energy production infrastructure comes in at ~0.1 kg-Fe/W. That includes things like gas wells, pipelines, rail lines, power line towers.
While wind energy nameplate is ~0.1 kg-Fe/W, they only run ~1/4 of the time. Without storage windmills may actually be worse than no wind mills. Energy storage loses half the energy and windmills run ~1/4 of the time. That gets us to 0.8 kg-Fe/W. Los Angeles DWP is already planning on wind energy from UTAH. CA ISO windmill utilization is 20% and all the best sites are already used up. California aggragate wind energy was ~1.8 GWe in 2001 when the light went out. California in-state wind nameplate will probably never 7 GWe with a CA peak grid ~60 GWe.
Assumme Los Angeles 1 GWe wind energy has to come 2000 km from North Dakota using three 2 inch 500 kV power lines. Assuming with 10% line loss this requires 0.145 Mt aluminum. 0.32 GWy is required to smelt the aluminum. At 25% utilization and 70 GJ/tonne-Al, the windmills have to run more than a year just to smelt the aluminum.
The only method to store energy on the horizon is to separate ammonia and water by distillation. Distillation column uses solar heat or vapor-compression from the above windmills. Ammonia and water are recombined in an absorption column that drives a steam plant. 215 C solar collector and 50 C distillation column condenser system has 17.4% overall efficiency with storage. Assuming 1000 W/m^2 solar flux and 50% solar collection efficiency, overall system is ~90 W/m^2. Solar PV are about 20% efficient and half the energy is lost in batteries + DC to AC to DC batteries to AC line, getting 100 W/m^2. Sun goes down, so figure 200 days at 8 h/day. The 100 W/m^2 averages out ~20 W/m^2 over time.
Assuming average 20 W/m^2 and a 2 mm steel trough collector, 50 TWe require 2.5E+12 m^2, roughly 3 times the area of Texas. At 8000 kg/m^3 steel, 50 TWe 40E+12 kg steel, or 40 billion tonnes steel. World steel produciton is ~ 1 billion tonnes/y. I am too lazy to figure world ammonia requirement for ~500 TWe-days. Ammonia-Water storge is 3.2 grams-NH3/watt-hour. Making the ammonia and iron will trash the atmosphere.
31 July 2010 4:39PM
Oops! it is 9.48 grams-NH3/watt-hour energy storage.
31 July 2010 10:21PM
Sooner or later all those wind farms will kill a "bird" that has people on board. I can think of 4 airline disasters that everybody died: Concorde, Off Newfoundland, Florida, and a trijet? in the Arab states. In each case it was an onboard fire and the pilots stayed in the air longer than was absolutely necessary. In the case of the Arab state fire, the airliner actually stopped on the runway. Perhaps going down at sea or off airport would have not helped, nobody knows. It is a good bet that by now the airline pilots have by now gotten the lesson. Any future in-flight fire and the airliner will go to ground, or sea right here, right now. Invariably, a right here, right now will be in a wind farm. End of wind energy everywhere.
1 August 2010 1:44AM
In other words, we'll get serious about climate change when the lights go out, literally or metaphorically. We need something to shock us all, because adaptation is best done in advance of whatever it is you are adapting to. Peak oil is that shock, and it can't come too soon.
Nothing will ever happen that is eve going to be that shocking. Everything happens in little bits, few people see the big picture and are too set in their ways to change anyway.
Peakoil just means there is less oil, not no oil. Other fuels will keep us burning while the oils are used for the million otherways we seek to pollute the planet. We do not need to change a thing, just the mix of fuels used to achieve the same ends.
Humans do not do the planning ahead thing, we prefer the bull at a gate method.
1 August 2010 7:31AM
cause
Try the shock of economies collapsing - dramatic, hugely consequential, and very fast. We've had them every couple of decades now, so this is not some historical artifact we're talking about, but massive, world-wide system shocks like the dot-com collapse and the sub-prime implosion. People also change radically when their own self-interest is threatened, or that of their family e.g. when heating is too expensive to bear or food too expensive for those on a pension.
Retirement doesn't mean your vote is taken away, and in a developed world in which the demographic majority is shifting towards retired people, pension fund failures, national budget restrictions and financial incursions into healthcare to prop up ailing economies may occur relatively slowly, but the disaffections they breed simply fester. And when you say humans do not do the planning thing, you make trivial the entire process of building and maintaining a society. We fail in some respects, but there is continuity, and it is this continuity I would like to see maintained, instead of the seemingly inevitable collapse we appear to be heading towards.
Change does not necessarily mean hardship or failure, but we appear to be doing our damnedest to ensure it is as painful as possible.
1 August 2010 1:38PM
Eric Pooley
"With an ugly election looming in November" -- I think the upcoming November election prospects look very encouraging. Hopefully we are going to throw many of the liberal political hacks out into the "cold".
And your appeal to the EPA as a potential savior -- you know that anything the EPA attempts to do in January (note: delaying any action until January in an attempt to minimize November election losses) will be tied up in the courts until November 2012, and then the final house cleaning will occur: Obama and his Chicago thugs will be voted out, a new head of the EPA will be appointed, and Congress will repeal many of the unpopular tax and spend policies of the liberals. Maybe there even will be enough conservative support to open up America's oil resources and to pursue nuclear energy until the fusion energy programs become feasible.
In the meantime, here along the Gulf Coast, Obama's oil drilling moratorium is beginning to take its toll on the energy sector industry. "Obama, the jobs killer" will definitely become a campaign slogan come November 2010 and 2012.