Maybe Reid screwed the pooch on climate legislation in 2017, too

Talking Points Memo refers, on Reid's barely-anything changes to the Senate filibuster and how nothing is now happening on Obama's appointments.  To be fair, some of the problem is self-inflicted by Obama putting the task of nominating candidates to all positions somewhere below watching ESPN and filling out his college basketball tournament predictions.

The climate legislation hook is that 60 vote filibuster blockage to pass climate reform in the Senate.  Nothing is going to pass soon anyway, but we do have a shot in 2017.  Chances of success depend in part on how much the filibuster can still trip it up.  Even the strongest filibuster "reform" that was presented this year was weak tea.  I figured we have four years of trying something, finding it's not enough, and then trying something stronger.  By starting us out with barely-anything, we will end up fewer steps down the road to quasi-democratic procedures when climate legislation has a chance.

Lessons or lack thereof from bipartisan movements

As Obama heads off to Burma, I think back to when I knew something about that country.  I spent two winters there doing volunteer work in the early 90s and then several years in the mid-90s in Oregon focusing on Burma human rights work, comparing the situation to South Africa.  I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, although the ethnic conflict is far from over and even democracy will be no guarantee of good treatment for ethnic minorities.

Relative to most other western nations, the US did pretty well in Burma, backing up Suu Kyi and others in the elected/overthrown leadership.  When we activists went Congress to ratchet up sanctions, the senators we counted on were Patrick Leahy, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms (Ted Kennedy was also good, I think).  Our little Oregon group got every member of the Oregon congressional delegation to support sanctions, with liberal Republican Mark Hatfield being the hardest one to convince.  Burma never became polarized in American politics, as far as I can tell.

In another field that has long been polarized, things are changing.  Washington Monthly has a good piece titled The Conservative War on Prison, with conservatives starting to hop onto the alternatives-to-prison bandwagon.  The article is good on the what and when aspects of conservative change, but less so on the why and why at this particular time aspects.  There was this, though:

At the start of the 2007 legislative session, legislative analysts predicted that Texas was on track to be short 17,700 prison beds by 2012 because of its growing inmate population. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s response was to ask legislators to build three new prisons, but Madden and Whitmire had other ideas. Not only did they bring back a revamped version of their probation proposal—they also took aim at the revolving-door problem by cranking up funding for programs such as in-prison addiction treatment and halfway houses. This time, Perry relented (persuaded at least in part, the duo contends, by a high-stakes meeting they held with him shortly before the opening of the legislative session). Since then, the prison population has not increased, and last year, the TDCJ closed a prison for the first time in decades.

Budget shortfalls do not explain this shift. In 2007 Texas was basking in a huge projected surplus, and the Great Recession was still a year away. Instead, Madden and Whitmire had different winds at their backs. For one thing, the policy context favored reform. One legacy of the state’s prison litigation trauma is that Texas has strict restrictions on overcrowding (unlike, say, California). Under Texas law, when the system approaches capacity, corrections staff must seek certification from the attorney general and the governor to incarcerate more prisoners. The approval process forces state leaders to confront the choice between more prisons and more diversion programming. The political environment had also changed since the GOP completed its takeover of state politics in 2003. As a longtime observer of the state’s criminal justice notes, “Now … all the tough guys are Republicans. They don’t want to be outdoing each other on this stuff.”

I'm not entirely happy with this explanation.  I have my own, which is that ideological movements get bored.  After saying the same thing for a long time, there's a desire to say something else.  I think conservative ideology takes longer to get restless than others, but it still happens.  It's also not always successful:

Of course, there are limits to how far ideological reinvention can go. As political scientist David Karol has argued, it is unlikely to work when it requires crossing a major, organized member of a party coalition. That’s something environmentalists learned when they tried to encourage evangelicals to break ranks on global warming through the idea of “creation care.” They got their heads handed to them by the main conservative evangelical leaders, who saw the split this would create with energy-producing businesses upon whom Republican depend for support.

That's a rather simplified description of what happened among evangelicals, including who started it, how far it got, and whether the movement's truly ended.  It also downplays the difficulty in crossing the ideological and economic barriers of the tough-on-crime mindset and the prison-industrial complex.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from all this for climate policy purposes.  Sometimes all you can do is wait for people to change - or push change through without their help.  I've also thought for a while that Al Gore has been careful to avoid some of the limelight.  Conservatives are showing some real ferment over immigration, modest change on gay marriage, and tiny little cracks in climate denial.  Maybe we'll get lucky.

The time window for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is 2017-2018, so get cracking

My theory that our time for serious climate legislation is the two years after the 2016 election relies on the following reasons why up to 2016 won’t work:

• Before 2014 is no good because the current House majority would never pass it (and the Senate minority would filibuster).
• 2014-2016 is no good because the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in the off year.

Then there’s 2016, the counterpart of the lucky fate of 2012 Senate elections. The Senate gets elected in three separate waves, with a few more Ds than Rs. Fate decreed an uneven distribution with a large minority of Ds up for election in 2012, 23 Ds versus 10 Rs, a big reason why this election was supposed to be bad in the Senate, until the Rs pulled out their unregistered pistols and shot up their own feet. Fate said 2014 would be somewhat closer in distribution between parties, so Math said that 2016 is the vulnerable year for Rs, with 24 Rs up for election compared to 10 Ds.

While far from certain, it’s possible that for two years after the 2016 election, and only for those two years, Ds will have somewhere in the vicinity of 60 votes in the Senate. That’s the chance. The 2018 election puts the Ds back on the defensive, 25 D seats versus 8 R seats.

I suggest two alternatives for explaining climate politics. One is Roger Pielke Jr.’s so-called Iron Law:

When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.

The other is the acronym BOSO, or Brian’s Obvious Statement of the Obvious:

Getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard.

Only one of these is likely to display true insight into climate politics. The Iron Law appears to be unfalsifiable because it’s not applied where it doesn’t work, so you can probably guess which way I lean. If you go with the Iron Law though, then you make a few bets on technology and just hope for the best (and please don’t annoy Godwin by pointing out that was Hitler’s end-game strategy too). If by contrast you’re just a BOSO, then look for the best strategy to get to 60.

I’m assuming the president will be a Democrat, or a Republican who favors action, and that the House will pass a bill like they were able to in 2010. Getting Republican and possibly squishy Democratic support is the reason, really the only reason, to do a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A revenue-generating tax could do positive things for climate mitigation and adaptation, or a cap-and-trade law could provide similar incentives. It’s the possibility of getting a few Republican votes and the difficulty of BOSO that makes me think we should explore a revenue neutral tax.

And I’m saying “possibility,” not probability for all the above. On the hopeful side, science will continue to beat over the heads of the ignorant, and not-hopeful tragedies like Sandy may do the same.   Renewables will continue to expand while costs decrease, and shale gas can cut into the stranglehold that coal has over electricity politics in swing states like Ohio.  Demographics also favor reality. On the other hand, two election cycles between now and 2017 aren’t that many to get reality into Republican politics, which is actually getting more ideologically rigid at the state and local level.

Still, it’s an opportunity that we should plan for as much as possible, and revenue-neutral carbon tax might be the best way to do it. Meantime, stick with Eli’s strategy of regulating our way through this via the Clean Air Act (and I expect eventually through the Clean Water Act for ocean acidification).

 If the Republicans don’t bend in 2017 and there aren’t enough votes to get around them, then their rigidity will eventually make them a national version of the California Republican Party, a group so unpopular and powerless that it will have less than one third of the seats in both houses of the state legislature. That, however, will take even more time before it happens.

Might as well disagree with Andrew Dessler too

From my previous post about the To the Point radio show on climate change, Andrew Dessler also showed up on the show to discuss why climate legislation failed. He said that Obama had one bullet and two targets, and for understandable reasons chose to take aim at the target of health care reform.

The way I'd rephrase that is Obama and the Congressional Democrats chose to take a year and a half to fire one bullet, and that killed the chance to push for a second target. There were legitimate reasons for the strategy, but the shared mistake was in failing to simply get the exact same health care reform done quickly in six months and pronounce it the victory that it was, not just the best compromise they could get through Congress. I agree with Andrew that health care was the key to climate action failing, but there's more to it than that.

I'm making this pronouncement having just bought Eric Pooley's book on this subject, The Climate War. I can proudly say the first three or so pages don't expressly disagree with my thesis. Maybe I'll have more to say when I've finished it.

Harm minimization, the space program, and carbon caps

Same Facts has a nice post tying drug addiction and political demagoguery - sometimes you can only aim for health improvements instead of fully quitting the drug, and it's similarly an issue in politics:

Thus, in some cases, the right policy is to give injection drug users access to sterile needles. In others, the right policy is to give grandstanding congressmen some way to pander to ignorant voters without crashing the economy. We all wish that heroin users would stop using. We all wish that Congressmen would not demagogue the debt ceiling. Neither wish will be granted soon.

I invite reflection among those who have low opinions of politicians and simultaneously advocate for perfect solutions at the expense of solutions that are politically feasible. Those two positions work well together if you're primarily interested in expressing contempt, but not if you're trying to make progress.

With the end of the disastrously expensive space shuttle program, the perfect solution is to let the private sector carry on manned "exploration" of areas that robots explored decades ago, and switch the federal government funding to something beneficial. I see little point in talking about that solution.

Harm minimization, or successful harm mitigation, means alternatives that keep most of the federal money in the same states that it's spent in now, even in some of the same institutions in the same states. Obama's plan for partial privatization of the manned space program might be the best feasible option. I've thought about replacing it with something entirely different, an advanced technology rescue service, but that might be a bridge too far. Maybe we can gradually reduce the scale of the program (an aside - Republicans are fighting for the big-government, socialist style old program instead - how typical).

So, carbon cap and trade. Any number of people have pointed out how a simple, universal carbon tax would avoid all the problems of the compromised cap and trade programs in various parts of the world. Australia's example suggests it is possible to get a modest carbon tax through - but one with many exceptions and that transitions into a cap-and-trade scheme.

Taking a harm minimization/benefit maximization approach, rather than a rigid rationality or nothing approach, will get a better result. I'm all for a carbon tax, but won't let that stop me support capntrade as well.

Nisbet/Romm/Mooney/Prop 23

So, Matt Nisbet, kind of contrarian/kind of gets a lot of people riled up at him as he tells people how to be persuasive, has some paper claiming that the climate hawks failed at passing a climate bill last year despite having a financial edge on rejectionists and a reasonably accurate media portrayal of the science.

Joe Romm, given advance warning by a third party, breaks the news embargo to blister the work. Joe broke the embargo partly because he thought someone else had, but more interestingly because he felt Nisbet was deceptive and wanted his critique available when people read Nisbet's stuff. I'm still mulling that one over, but I think it's okay (he shouldn't have posted Nisbet's full document though).

Joe says Nisbet's deceptive in that Nisbet compares total lobbying across all sectors between business allies of cap and trade and business opponents (and each side's nonprofit allies). Nominally pro-cap-and-trade businesses are unlikely to have spent much of their lobbying budget on this issue. Joe could've strengthened his point by noting that the same issue applies to business opponents of caps, but not as strongly since the fossil fuel corps are highly motivated to throw money at this issue. He also backs this up with a second post showing fossil fuel industry far outspent alternative energy industry in political donations.

Nisbet could've had a decent point that it's not as much as enviros versus monolithic corporate world as it was in the past, given the large portion of the business world that's willing to live with the climate hawk position. But we already knew that.

Joe's other major critique was that Nisbet omits television when he says the media is now accurate about climate change, when Fox News' internal messaging has been to dispute reality. Seems like another legitimate point.

Chris Mooney also jumped in with a pointed defense of his own work showing the Bush Republicans were at war with science and arguing that Nisbet displayed inappropriate false bias about the level of Bushian interference with science. Interesting in that Mooney used to work closely with Nisbet. Nisbet also appears in the comments for a little while, also kind of interesting.

The failed denialist attempt to use Prop 23 to kill California's work on climate also came up, because reality outspent denial on that issue. I think Nisbet might miss three points: 1. good guys won, so are they really as incompetent as he thinks? 2. the big money won, so who has the big money is also important, and 3. most ignored is that the bad guys knew they were going to lose more than a month before the election, and without having seen the campaign expenditures, I'll bet they cut their losses. The bad guys also had a decent backup strategy in the form of the simultaneous Prop 26, keeping polluters from having to pay for the environmental effect of their nonsense. Prop 26 won, and polluters outspent good guys by 3 to 1. We need to watch that strategy harder, and use it ourselves.

Bottom line is that the bad guys are fighting defense in the Senate, and they only need two fifths of the Senate to stop action. Nisbet apparently thinks we can't do a frontal assault at all, and falls back to the research-and-adaptation-only-nonsense. I don't think he's made his point.

Names of US Congressmembers who deny climate change, so their grandchildren can find them

Yesterday, 240 Congressmembers rejected a one-sentence statement that humans are causing climate change and that it poses significant risks. 184 accepted reality as it is. I leave analysis to Joe Romm, and just take this opportunity to highlight the names of 240. I hope they can imitate George Wallace and do something to reverse all the harm they're causing, but the clock is ticking.

From the vote information page (in case the link goes away, Waxman H.Amdt 245, to amend HR 910, vote Roll No. 236 taken 4/6/2011), here are the ones that their grandchildren can examine:

Adams Aderholt Akin Alexander Amash Austria Bachmann Bachus Barletta Bartlett Barton (TX) Bass (NH) Benishek Berg Biggert Bilbray Bilirakis Bishop (UT) Black Blackburn Bonner Bono Mack Boren Boustany Brady (TX) Brooks Broun (GA) Buchanan Bucshon Buerkle Burgess Burton (IN) Calvert Camp Campbell Canseco Cantor Capito Carter Cassidy Chabot Chaffetz Coble Coffman (CO) Cole Conaway Cravaack Crawford Crenshaw Culberson Davis (KY) Denham Dent DesJarlais Diaz-Balart Dold Dreier Duffy Duncan (SC) Duncan (TN) Ellmers Emerson Farenthold Fincher Fitzpatrick Flake Fleischmann Fleming Flores Forbes Fortenberry Foxx Franks (AZ) Gallegly Gardner Garrett Gerlach Gibbs Gibson Gingrey (GA)

Gohmert Goodlatte Gosar Gowdy Granger Graves (GA) Graves (MO) Griffin (AR) Griffith (VA) Grimm Guinta Guthrie Hall Hanna Harper Harris Hartzler Hastings (WA) Hayworth Heck Heller Hensarling Herger Herrera Beutler Huelskamp Huizenga (MI) Hultgren Hunter Hurt Issa Jenkins Johnson (IL) Johnson (OH) Johnson, Sam Jones Jordan Kelly King (IA) King (NY) Kingston Kinzinger (IL) Kline Labrador Lamborn Lance Landry Lankford LaTourette Latta Lewis (CA) LoBiondo Long Lucas Luetkemeyer Lummis Lungren, Daniel E. Mack Manzullo Marchant Marino McCarthy (CA) McCaul McClintock McCotter McHenry McKeon McKinley McMorris Rodgers Meehan Mica Miller (FL) Miller (MI) Miller, Gary Mulvaney Murphy (PA) Myrick Neugebauer Noem Nugent Nunes

Nunnelee Olson Palazzo Paul Paulsen Pearce Pence Peterson Petri Pitts Platts Poe (TX) Pompeo Posey Price (GA) Quayle Rahall Reed Rehberg Renacci Ribble Rigell Rivera Roby Roe (TN) Rogers (AL) Rogers (KY) Rogers (MI) Rohrabacher Rokita Rooney Ros-Lehtinen Roskam Ross (FL) Royce Runyan Ryan (WI) Scalise Schilling Schmidt Schock Schweikert Scott (SC) Scott, Austin Sensenbrenner Sessions Shimkus Shuster Simpson Smith (NE) Smith (NJ) Smith (TX) Southerland Stearns Stivers Stutzman Sullivan Terry Thompson (PA) Thornberry Tiberi Tipton Turner Upton Walberg Walden Walsh (IL) Webster West Westmoreland Whitfield Wilson (SC) Wittman Wolf Womack Woodall Yoder Young (AK) Young (FL) Young (IN)

It seems strange to call out as brave someone who just admits the obvious, but Dave Reichert is the lone Republican Congressman who accepts reality. And three Democrats deserve special attention for denying it, the Hons. Boren, Peterson, and Rahall.

All according their plan that we've ignored

I got tired last year of enviros saying that EPA regulation of climate change was unlikely to be overruled by Congressional legislation. People thought that amending the Clean Air Act to stop action on climate change would be defeated by a Senate filibuster and a presidential veto. I said it would be attempted through budget resolutions and budget reconciliation bills. So now the Republicans have passed budget legislation in the House that will cut "EPA funds for curbing greenhouse gas emissions". They're also trying to defund the IPCC, a wrinkle I hadn't thought of, and generally trying to destroy the environment.

So fighting on the budget is what we should have been focused on all along. It's obvious that this Republican wish list isn't going to get through the Senate and past the president, but that's also not the end of the story. I wrote in my link above from last November:

Complicating this is the Republican threat to de-fund health care reform. I could easily seeing the Republican controlled House passing a budget that both de-funds health care and prohibits spending money to enforce the Clean Air Act. They will then attempt horse-trading, and I fear the concession that they'll ask for.

And yes, the Republican House did de-fund health care in the continuing resolution from this last week. We'll see who blinks on a potential shutdown versus a compromise and what gets sacrificed in a compromise.

Volokh Corrections #28 and #29: Adler should study environmental groups, Lindgren should review abstracts more carefully

Several weeks ago I was listening to Environmental Defense Fund's Insider Podcast where they described how their advocacy of "catch-shares" for commercial fisheries (allocating a percentage of fish caught to individual fishermen, instead of a quota) has created an ownership interest among fishermen that supports sustainable fishing. It was also a short time after the election where the California electorate preserved our premier climate change law, ratifying the way for the second-largest cap-and-trade market in the world to begin functioning in 2012.

About the same time, Jonathan Adler is writing about the "decline of the environmental movement" as it supposedly veers off course. Personally, I'm not surprised that environmental concerns played a lesser role than economic ones in the worst economy since the 1930s. Even then, climate legislation got further at the national level than it previously had in 10 years, California and other states move forward, the EPA will take its own actions on climate, and environmental groups continue to innovate. Adler could benefit from undertaking some research on these issues.

And more recently, Jim Lindgren complains about the pernicious effect of long-term unemployment benefits, quoting a study as finding "a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate because of extending benefits for up to a total of 99 weeks." What he missed in the study is its main conclusion, that:

Analysis of unemployment data suggests that extended unemployment insurance benefits have not been important factors in the increase in the duration of unemployment or in the elevated unemployment rate.

Yes, it also found a 0.4% increase in unemployment from extending benefits, but that is minor in comparison to the real factors driving long-term unemployment. This makes clear the level of hardship Lindgren and friends would impose on people who are jobless and are sincerely looking.

There's also a bias in the study that suggests the 0.4% figure doesn't represent slackers. The study authors can think of two reasons why extending benefit durations could increase unemployment:

First, the extension of UI benefits, which represents an increase in their value, may reduce the intensity with which UI-eligible unemployed individuals search for work. This could occur because the additional UI benefits reduce the net gains from finding a job and also serve as an income cushion that helps households maintain acceptable consumption levels in the face of unemployment shocks (Chetty 2008). Alternatively, the measured unemployment rate may be artificially inflated because some individuals who are not actively searching for work or who are unwilling to take available jobs are identifying themselves as active searchers in order to receive UI benefits.

A third possibility is the rate is artificially inflated because people who would've given up in the absence of UI benefits accept the condition placed on receiving benefits, that they seek actively seek work and would accept jobs. They're not liars, and no one is being harmed by extending their benefits.

So just like Adler, Lindgren might benefit from studying the subject he's writing about more closely.

Someone finally mentions the attack on the EPA will come through budget resolutions

I've babbled for months now that the Congressional Republican attack on environmental protection will be through the budget process, not through Clean Air Act revisionist legislation that would be subject to a Senate filibuster and an Obama veto.

Someone finally acknowledges that, in an Environmental Defense podcast (starting around minute 35). There they call it a potential "rider" or an add-on to an appropriations bill that would be very difficult for the Senate to kill or for Obama to veto. That's very close to what I'm concerned about, but an even more insidious and hard-to-kill action would be to zero out the budget for anything EPA could do to enforce application of the Clean Air Act to climate change issues. So I'm glad it's finally noticed, and the question is how to respond.

Complicating this is the Republican threat to de-fund health care reform. I could easily seeing the Republican controlled House passing a budget that both de-funds health care and prohibits spending money to enforce the Clean Air Act. They will then attempt horse-trading, and I fear the concession that they'll ask for.

I think it's to the Democrats' advantage to say these are established laws that aren't to be part of any games that Republicans will use instead of trying for revocation, and make sure the Republicans are set to take the blame if the Republicans cause a government shutdown over the budget.

Iron Law versus BOSO

Thought I'd just spell out the timeline I reference in the previous post.

• 2006 (a gubernatorial election year): Democrats in the California Assembly pass AB 32, mandating greenhouse gas reductions. The Democratic candidate for governor immediately supports the bill. After some equivocating, Republican incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the legislation instead of vetoing it.

• 2006-2010: Cap-and-trade consistently discussed as an important part of implementing AB 32.

• October 28, 2010: California Air Resources Board announces cap-and-trade will be part of implementing AB 32.

• November 2, 2010: Voters reject Proposition 23, which would have suspended AB 32, on a 60-40 vote.

• November 5, 2010: Roger Pielke Jr. announces on National Public Radio that "the iron law of climate policy simply says that while people are willing to bear some cost for environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits. And cap and trade ran up against those limits time and again, and it's not surprising that it failed."

I think RPJ's Iron Law has some hindcasting problems. He could say it's just a reference to national politics, but his Iron Law doesn't seem phrased that way.

In lieu of the RPJ Iron Law, I'd like to propose BOSO, or Brian's Obvious Statement of the Obvious, which is that getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard. While BOSO may not sound quite as profound, I think it has better explanatory power and does better with hindcasting.

UPDATE: A nice write-up on California's proposed cap-and-trade by Michael Wara is here.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias had a near-identical point here that I just stumbled upon. I like the term BOSO more than YOSO, though.

UPDATE 3: I was happy to find a RPJ post I agreed with on the value of testing carbon sequestration for a coal plant operation. Maybe it's not too surprising as a post, in that it gives him a chance to go hippie-punching against the Sierra Club, but in this case I think he's right and Sierra Club is wrong.

Climate regulation is all about next year's budget

With climate legislation shot this year and having no chance for the next two years when the Republicans pick up votes in the Senate, the only game in town on the national level is EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

The advantage that climate realists have over climate nihilists is that all we need to do is defense, and stop Republicans from passing legislation that amends the Clean Air Act. People look at the summer's 53-47 defeat of Sen. Murkowski's attempt to do just that as good news, saying Republicans need a majority in the House, 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and possibly override a presidential veto by two-thirds vote in both houses.

I don't think defense is that easy. Republicans will focus on the budget process and attempt to amend the budget so that the EPA can spend no money to enforce or promulgate regulations related to climate change. As a budget item, it's not subject to a filibuster (UPDATE: should've said, as a budget reconciliation item, it wouldn't be subject to a filibuster, but that only makes it a slightly harder hurdle to overcome). Right now, the attempt would likely fail in the Senate by a 53-47 vote against, but if the Republicans pick up four or more Senate votes as predicted, then they've got the votes.

The Senate might then be in a game of chicken with the House, or maybe not if the House also switches enough votes to the Dark Side on climate budgeting. Obama could theoretically veto a budget with this provision, but in an election year budget with money for seniors and soldiers, that'll be hard to do. I could see an unfortunate compromise as a result.

Conclusion #1: we're in a hard battle yet.

Conclusion #2: this might have something to do with Obama's disappointing opposition to climate change lawsuits. He's saying that they should be dismissed, as long as regulations are in place and enforced. Having a stick of lawsuits waiting in the wings if the Republican zero out the budget might reduce some enthusiasm for that budgetary trick.

Anyway, the budget is what we have to watch.

Remembering Stephen Schneider, and voting No on Proposition 23

(This is a repost from the Brian for Water District campaign blog.)

Driving to a meeting of the Water District's Environmental Advisory Committee earlier [last] week, I heard the sad news about the unexpected death of the prominent Stanford climatologist, Stephen Schneider.

While a student at Stanford Law School, I participated in one seminar where he guest-lectured and heard him on other occasions during school and afterwards. I thought he gave the most convincing demonstration of who to trust in the climate debate by showing a survey of the mainstream climatologists and the small number of scientists that doubted climate change. Schneider showed that the mainstream scientists were reasonably confident of their predictions but also admitted a wide margin for error. The few skeptic climatologists admitted nothing, and were absolutely confident that they were right. He had given the best demonstration I could imagine of scientific honesty on one side and over-confident hubris on the other.

Schneider's death comes as California wrestles with Proposition 23's demand to suspend its premier climate change law, AB32, a theoretical suspension that would actually kill it if Proposition 23 passes. I know that Schneider actually had some criticisms of his own of AB32, but I can't imagine he would favor the misguided effort to kill the law and do nothing in return.

I'll be voting No on Proposition 23, an initiative that will harm efforts to fight climate change and efforts to protect our water and watersheds. We will have to learn from Schneider's legacy as the state and country move forward.

-Brian

For a eulogy about Steve Schneider, read RealClimate here.

Everything going well for climate denialists, except for climate

I've been meaning to link to this excellent, long post at Fivethirtyeight on the fall of Australia's Prime Minister, in large part due to the politically-successful decision by the opposition party to stop supporting legislation to fight climate change. Crucially, the PM "strung out" the issue to damage the opposing party rather than quickly passing a good bill, leading the opposing party to dump its rational leader and choosing the "Party of No" attitude instead.

Being destructive rather than collaborative is a good political strategy, as we're seeing in the US, where formerly realistic Republican senators are inventing excuses to oppose climate legislation. Many enviros did very little to support comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation because they prefer bills with no chance of passage, and the next Senate is guaranteed to be worse. Our best shot this year, and it won't get better again for at least two years, is a cap-and-trade bill on utilities only. It's far better than nothing,* but it's only a possibility at this point.

Those of us who think we should do something about climate change need to work harder. Unfortunately, the actual climate as opposed to the political climate is making that clear, as yet again, recent warmth makes the Jan-June period the warmest recorded, and fits yet again as one more unnecessary piece in the mountain of evidence for climate change.

*I should note that I have to see if this reduced-scope legislation still pre-empts some action by the EPA. I'd guess it would still be a good idea, but I'd also be less certain about that.

Cutting down protesters and forests in Madagascar

NY Times outlines how the situation in Madagascar has deteriorated:  a shaky government more interested in corrupt personal enrichment than in law enforcement is letting the country's forests be decimated and sent to China.  Meanwhile, my parents tell me that their church, which supports a tree planting-program in Madagascar, has learned that a Malagasy pastor associated with their program was killed when he attended a demonstration in the capital.


I don't have a well-defined opinion about the current government and president.  He unceremoniously deposed the prior president, but the prior president's democratic credentials were shaky at best, and many people joined the protests that drove him out.  So while that's unclear to me, it is clear that the government shouldn't be shooting protesters.  And obviously it should be preserving the last bits of Madagascar's irreplaceable nature instead of taking bribes to destroy it.  I can't forget the incredible lemurs we saw there, and how few Malagasy ever see them.  It would  be tragic to lose them. 


The church members are asking people to contact the State Department and Congress and asking them to pressure the Madagascar government.  I think that's a good idea, and I'll suggest one other:  modify the Kerry-Lieberman bill so that countries facing tariffs for their failure to act on climate will face additional tariffs if they're buying illegal wood and aiding climate-harming deforestation.  Those monies could then be used to help fix the problem 

I'm supporting Kerry-Lieberman

The good parts seem good. The bad parts (nuking state regulations and EPA regulations) are unfortunate, particularly EPA, but the EPA regs would be subject to litigation and budgetary defunding by a simple majority vote of either house. Take the bird in the hand.

Joe Romm's summary is here. Seems good to me.

Eric de Place has a good summary of the price collar:

A price collar consists of two parts: a price floor (or reserve price) and a price ceiling. In this bill, the price floor will be set at $12 per ton of carbon dioxide in 2013. (The price floor rises at the rate of inflation plus 3 percent annually until 2050.) That means that authorities will not sell any permits for less than $12. This implies that not all of the permits available for sale under the cap will necessarily be used—good news for the climate and clean-energy jobs.

On the other hand, the price ceiling will be set at $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide in 2013. (The price ceiling rises at the rate of inflation plus 5 percent annually until 2050.) That means that authorities will sell as many permits for $25 as anyone wants to buy. This means that permits may be sold in excess of the cap’s limits, which is bad for the atmosphere. Fortunately, any permits sold in excess of the cap in any one auction are not actually in excess of the cap in aggregate. That’s because the bill provides for a “strategic reserve” of carbon permits. This stockpile of permits is assembled with a percentage of permits shaved off the annual cap in each year; and then replenished by unsold permits (in the event that the auction hits the price floor), by international offsets (at a discount of 5 offsets per 4 carbon permits added to the reserve), and then by domestic offsets, in that order.

I'm still getting a handle on offsets, but it appears from the above description that control and access to offsets are tightly restricted. More about offsets here. I'm increasingly accepting offsets as being viable. Enviros need to adjust. I'd also guess that something might go wrong with the offsets and need correcting legislation later. So much for perfection, but we weren't going to get perfection anyway.

As for actually adding something to the discussion, I have two original comments: first, there's no abrogation of EPA authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Water Act, as opposed to the Clean Air Act. Don't tell the bad guys about this, but there's AFAIK ongoing consideration of ocean acidification under the CWA.

Second, I have an idea that would "weaken" the legislation: include a provision that sets a floor for US emissions so they don't fall under Indian or Chinese emissions per capita. That should handle the complaints that we're letting those countries get away with murder. Yes, I'm serious.

Garlic ice cream and Sean Casten's anti-cap-and-dividend rant

I experienced both yesterday. They're both pretty confusing, but I'd have to give the preferential nod to the garlic ice cream - the cream really takes the edge off of the garlic. I'm not saying I'd get it again, but it wasn't that bad.

By contrast, here's Casten's post at Grist, and I have no idea how to make sense of it. He appears to believe that the dividend part of cap-and-dividend would somehow allow people to purchase their way above the cap, and that the price penalty given to high carbon sources wouldn't help renewable energy producers. And in the comments, he "clarifies" that the same arguments don't apply to cap-and-trade.

I don't get it. Even more confusingly, he's apparently worked in renewable energy, so he's not some random guy spouting nonsense.

Matt Yglesias critiques him here. As I wrote in the comments, the uncertainty over the extent of reductions applies to a carbon tax, but not to any cap proposal. David Roberts appears in several places to defend Casten, but never tries to explain what Casten is actually saying.

And in case it needs clarifying, I still think the 100% cap-and-dividend proposals are politically unrealistic, that the Waxman-Markey bill is very good, and that I'm waiting to see what's in Kerry-Lieberman.

It ain't easy being green (green climate legislation in the Senate, that is)

Mostly a link collection:

We're in trouble when the Dem front runner for a Senate seat advertises how he'll do nothing to stop climate change, but his opponent will take action:

Keep that in mind when you decide how pure your climate bill has to be in order to win your support.

---

Duncan Black:

Reading this post and some of the comments leaves me a bit bewildered. One way to get Republicans on board is to enable them to be divas, flatter them, let them bask in the media spotlight as they play Hamlet for 6 months, and keep offering compromise after compromise while getting nothing in return, on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, Lindsey or President Snowe or whoever will get on board. Another way to do things is to propose popular pieces of legislation and then make the Republicans eat shit every day they fail to pass it, go send out your charismatic leader to give speeches and hold rallies in their states, mobilize your massive community of supporters to take various actions in support of the legislation, etc. I could be wrong that the latter is the better strategy, both politically and in terms of actually getting s**t done, but it just isn't the case that the options are kissing up to Lindsey Graham or nothing.

Actually, in terms of "getting s**t done," as in getting climate legislation through the Senate, I think it's pretty clear that the choices really are kissing up to Lindsey Graham or nothing. I welcome the explanation as to how we're going to get 60 votes for a better climate bill without him, though. Or an explanation of how our charismatic leader is going to turn a likely loss of several Senate seats into a gain of several seats - otherwise the 60 vote hurdle gets even worse for at least 2 more years.

The only question in my mind is whether the cost of Republican support is worth it, in terms of restricting the ability of the EPA and the states to act independently. We won't know until we see the legislation.

----

As for seeing the legislation at all, John Kerry says it ain't over. It's worth mentioning than Graham had said before that health care legislation was killing the climate bill, and then returned to the negotiating table.

----

Larry Shapiro's smart view on why immigration is replacing climate as a legislative priority, and its effect:

Finally, with no movement capable of forcing a robust response to the climate crisis, the only way Sens. Graham, John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) could have gotten the Senate to pass a bill would have been to appease the special interests at the root of the problem.

Not sure I agree with his assessment that the legislation is dead, or that it's not worth the price paid to special interests, though. And personally I support a no-net-immigration policy, probably my most pseudo-rightwing political view (except that I'm also pro-amnesty, but whatever....).

----

Something unrelated - peak phosphorus? A new one to me, no idea whether it's a real concern.

Would Poizner, Whitman, and the other anti-AB 32 people want the rest of the world to act like them?

I'm pretty certain that governor candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman accept climate change even while they propose suspending California's premier law to address the issue, AB 32.

I would love to see someone corner them with this question: should the rest of the world act just as they would, and suspend action to address climate change for the same one or more years that they suggest? Do they really want China to keep building coal plants at the same rate? If they think that China shouldn't increase its emissions, when China's emission are one-third the per-capita emissions of the US? I'm pretty certain that even if AB 32 is implemented without delays, China's per-capita emission in 2020, the law's final year, will be less than California's.

I just can't see how they could give a satisfactory answer to this question. A child could see through a response that says we should "temporarily" quit trying but the rest of the world must keep trying, and saying everyone should quit trying for years is unacceptable. I expect they'd try to avoid answering it, but at this stage of the game, an extended interview could force them into uncomfortable positions.

Somewhat related: I was reading the nonsense put out by the Orwellian AB 32 Implementation Group, which included a claim that the law would cost $60/ton and cost "a winery" $2.6 million annually. First, $60 sounds pretty high for a law with modest aims, and the figures in the same document from the California government seem to show it as the high end of plausible figures. Also, dividing 60 into 2.6 million gives 43,000 tons of CO2, which also sounds like a lot. Is it? The Climate Registry claims to create public reporting of GHG emissions, and it has at least one winery (Sokol) as a member. The only thing I can't find on their incredibly extensive website is this public registry of emissions, not just for Sokol but for anyone. So much for this one effort to fact-check the forces of evil, and meanwhile I'm wondering what the heck is public about the Climate Registry.

I wonder if I could work out a bet with James Hansen over cap and trade

In the very small category of people who have done a lot to help on climate change but have also damaged the cause, number one on the list has to go to James Hansen.  The help far outweighs the harm in his case (in contrast to the number two person, James Lovelock), but he's really being problematic with his opposition to even the squeaky-clean, cap-and-dividend bill in Congress, the one that I think has little chance of passing.  Check the link for Joe Romm's critique, which I think is accurate.  Hansen supports alternative legislation, a revenue-neutral carbon tax where the money is redistributed back on a per-capita basis except with limits to families with too many children, which I think is just great and that maybe 5 percent of the country at most would also agree that it's great.  Thanks for that practical suggestion.

So I don't have a specific bet in mind, I'm just thinking that if Hansen believes Cantwell-Collins will have "only a small impact on emissions" then the European Union's cap-and-trade must have a near-zero effect.  I think the EU scheme should do most of what it intended.  Maybe that's sufficient daylight between positions to set up a bet.

There's the issue of offsets that would complicate the bet.  If I buy solar panels on my roof to reduce emissions, that's great.  If my roof doesn't work and instead I buy solar panels for your roof, that's an evil evil offset (yes, I'm exaggerating, but I'm not sure it's by much).  I think though that even if we disallow offsets for wrong reasons, there's still a net reduction in cap-and-trade, so maybe some more research could give room for a bet.

Much better news about Hansen is this piece of info I didn't know - that he called present-day warming as happening as early as 1981 (not just a prediction of future warming).  Impressive.