ICYMI*, Chait's optimist take on Obama and climate

Boiling it down to the essence:

After Obama’s original cap-and-trade plan failed, he started using the agency regulatory powers directly. (This is how Obama has been able to issue new regulations on cars, fuel, appliances, and future power plants.)

So far, there is one hole in his regulatory agenda: power plants that currently exist. This is, unfortunately, a very large hole, as these plants, mostly coal, emit 40 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions.... 

Then, a few weeks after last year’s election, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a plan for the EPA to regulate existing power plants in a way that was neither ineffectual nor draconian. The proposal would set state-by-state limits on emissions....Much like a cap-and-trade bill, it would allow market signals to indicate the most efficient ways for states to hit their targets—instead of shutting coal plants down, some utilities might pay consumers to weatherize their homes, while others might switch some of their generators over to cleaner fuels....Here is a way for Obama to use his powers—his own powers, unencumbered by the morass of a dysfunctional Congress—in such a way that is neither as ineffectual as a firecracker nor as devastating as a nuke: The NRDC calculates its plan would reduce our reliance on coal by about a quarter and national carbon emissions by 10 percent.... 

[NRDC's] Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015—and the international climate summit.

I've thought the most likely outcome is that Obama would do the wrong thing on Keystone and match it with a right thing on something else about climate. Not sure if the timing proposed above would make it the right thing to be matched with Keystone. This is far more important than Keystone, though, if it happens.

The remainder of Chait's article argued that Obama has used the regulatory structure as much as he could for small-bore climate actions, and if you set aside the bully pulpit issue then he's done a decent job. My impression, not backed by solid data, is that he passed up a lot of politically viable chances for small-bore actions on climate.

NRDC's proposal is here. Basically your state's average emission rate has to be somewhat better than a combined rate for coal and natural gas produced by current plants, with the combined rate determined by the mix of coal and gas you currently have. AFAICT if your state already has little coal and a lot of renewables, you don't have to do much, but if your state has a lot of coal power, the punched is eased somewhat. Many different trading devices allowed to reduce emissions rate, including purchasing efficiency efforts by consumers.

UPDATE:  clarified per the comment.


*ICYMI, ICYMI, means in case you missed it. I missed it when it came to that acronym for a while.

The better question is what should the global average temperature revert to after stabilizing

An argument I've seen more than once from climate inactivists sometimes comes in the form of a question, "what is the ideal average global temperature," as if the question has a deep implication. In mid-gallop from "there's no warming; the warming is all natural; humans have little contribution," this is the step, "the warming gets us to a better temperature anyway," before they move on to "the overall negative effect isn't that bad; it's too soon to take action; it's too late to take action."

The first naive thought would be that places like Alaska should welcome some warmth, and a lot of the world's land mass is polar. What they miss is how melting permafrost results in sinking roads and buildings, forests die because insect pests survive mild winters more easily, and coastlines disappear with the loss of sea-ice protection from waves. If you put Hawaii's climate in Alaska, then Alaska would suffer. Both the biological and human environments are adapted for the climates they have.

So here's my hypothetical alternative:  assume, very optimistically, that in the year 2050, gross CO2 and equivalent emissions have been reduced 95% from present through a variety of technological and behavioral changes, and that carbon-negative technologies like biochar and biomass-plus-sequestration balance out the remaining 5%. What do you do next year and the following years?

Simplest answer is do even better, if you can. The rule that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging, hasn't yet been satisfied. The oceans will be transferring back latent heat for decades after 2050, so even zeroing out emissions won't be enough to stop further warming. If you can get an increase in carbon-negative activities so that effect, plus annual ocean absorption of CO2, means the reduced atmospheric CO2 warming balances out the latent heat release from oceans, then at that point we'll have stopped digging deeper. And then, what next?

A further increase in carbon-negative actions will mean anthropogenic forcing is slightly net negative compared to the previous year. Continuing that year after year would start to raise the question, when do we stop? What average temperature are we aiming for? I don't think it's the 1850 average - neither we humans nor many ecosystems will function most naturally at that level.

I don't really have the answer; I just think it's an interesting question. Maybe more of a science fiction question, but our children will (hopefully) have to deal with it someday. As a policy question, the most recent, highest temperature will not be the one that people or ecologies are most adapted to, and neither will a temperature from a century or two earlier. People probably adapt faster than ecosystems, so if we choose a human-biased priority then the aimed-for cooling will be less pronounced than one prioritizing ecosystem recovery. Different societies and different ecosystems will have different ideal stabilizing temperatures, but unless they're really good with geo-engineering, then we only get one level of net forcing.

Maybe there won't still be millions of subsistence farmers on the edge of malnutrition 50 years from now, but I wouldn't count on that. Stabilizing their precipitation patterns probably should rank in the highest priority, but we'll have to see how much political pull they'll have to make that happen.


UPDATE:  Good comments, esp from Tom Curtis who says it's not correct to call the heat transfer back from oceans "latent heat". I'm not sure I agree though that the optimal temperature for humans or nature would be a pre-industrial temperature, either the 1850 temp I discuss above or Tom's reference to typical (warmer) Holocene temps. Natural ecosystems will have spent the previous 150 years moving in response to climate change - trying to get them to move again when 9 billion people are in the way could be a recipe for even further losses. Humans will be even more adapted to the existing climate.

A chosen temperature would eventually have to be low enough to stabilize the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, although I assume we've got many additional decades or longer to do that.

I think in the very long term we would want to return to something like Tom's preferred temperature level.

I now get why Europeans are disgusted with the European Parliament

The European Parliament last week rejected a fix to their cap-and-trade system that would have set a bottom floor to the price of carbon, a floor that likely helped keep California's system functioning through a tentative start to a better shape (so far).

Among other things that are annoying is that European fossil fuel-dependent industries say that a floor will put them at a competitive disadvantage to Americans, an ironic repetition of what the same American industries say about Indian and Chinese competitors. In Europe's case it also happens to be a lie as far as California's concerned, and dubious in the case of New England (has an existing-if-low price for carbon, and plans to restrict allocations further).

So you've got a system that can work if you make it work. Demanding that the sausage making of government work as well as one's ideal proposal (like a carbon tax that would supposedly emerge unscathed from a political process) is unrealistic, but then the failure to improve the solution is just stupid. The only good aspect is that it's not over - the Parliament left open the door to reconsider their action.

My carbon or yours?

So our water district staff presented how they thought we could reach carbon neutrality by 2020. Depending on how you do the numbers, we became carbon neutral without even trying.

A lot depends on this:

(Full presentation via scrolling to March 26 2013, Item 4.1)

That's how much energy's used to cradle-to-grave a water drop from the Sierras to the outflow of a wastewater treatment plant. My district is a water wholesaler - we handle the first three steps, and then a water retailer (either a private company or city government) buys the water from us, gets it to the end user, and picks it up from there to a sewage treatment plant. You can see the main energy use is the end user, mainly because they heat it. Our staff argues that end use is by the end user, not our responsibility, and I said I'd have to chew on it. Any thoughts? Possibly relevant is that the vast majority of water we sell them never gets heated, so that end use figure conflates some very high and much lower energy using water together.

This is important not only because it says we're not causing that lion's share of energy use, but because our water conservation programs are focused on end users, so reducing their usage could be counted as an offset. That gets us to carbon neutrality pretty easily if you accept numbers that no one's really going to accept, but still more easily than I expected even with more realistic assumptions.

In other news, the Army Corps of Engineers is drawing a reasonable amount of tax money from our county but not funding many flood control or San Francisco Bay restoration projects. You can hear what passes for a "concerned statement" on my part below:



If the link's bad, click here, go to March 26 2013, and the video segment is from 1:57:50 to  1:59:04.

Shameless self-promotion, Part Two

So the contest of Solutions for Planetary Stability continues, and both of the solutions I entered (former blog posts) have made it to the finalist stage. That sounds a little better than it is - they have a lot of company that also made it through as finalists.

The contest organizer, Sustainable Silicon Valley, encourages entrants to go out and drum up support for their solutions in a crowd-sourcing vote contest. If you like my solutions, please hop online and vote!

Solution #1:  Greening the Chambers - this solution works on increasing the green business/clean tech participation in San Francisco Bay Area Chambers of Commerce, with the dual goals of encouraging local environmental action and pressuring the US Chamber of Commerce to stop harming green business through its anti-climate activity. I'm very serious about this one, by the way - I'd consider it a career-topping life accomplishment to end the US Chamber's role in fighting action over climate.

Solution #2:  A first practical step towards a Vehicle-to-Grid system - using Electric Vehicle battery systems as backup power supplement during power outages for organizations that need 24/7 power. This would be a V2G system that would provide practical benefits if your organization owns several dozen EVs, instead of needing many thousands, and simplifies some of the technical and regulatory complexity of transitioning to a smart grid.

So if you like them or want to read up and vote for other solutions, first click here to register, then click here to read and vote for the Greening the Chambers entry, click here to vote for the Vehicle to Grid entry, or here to see all the solutions (all of them including non-finalists can receive votes). The crowdsource contest is officially independent of the expert judgment contest, but I'm sure that getting popular support is going to be helpful.

Are we at the "then they fight you" stage?

I think it's promising that climate denialists in Congress feel a need to actively fight against carbon taxes and a "fee and dividend" proposed legislation. Given that the legislation has zero shot of passing before 2017, I'm glad that the forces of status quo feel the need to fight it.

The article at the first link is good but flawed, with the incorrect and uncited statement, "Economists favor a carbon tax over cap-and-trade as more efficient and transparent". A tax gives greater certainty on costs but less on carbon emissions than cap-and-trade. It's a less efficient and less transparent way to achieve a proposed level of emissions, but more efficient and more transparent way to demonstrate the costs.

This part's good:

most new versions of the tax, including Boxer/Sanders, would include a border tariff on the carbon content of imports that is equivalent to the tax. That would create a big incentive for exporting countries like China to impose their own carbon tax so as to keep the revenue. 

Opponents clearly think the idea is gaining traction and want to stop it before it gets too far.

I'm looking forward to seeing something similar in Europe and Australia, providing the same incentive to us that we'd like to provide to China. I do think though that at least half of the revenue from an import tariff from a developing country should be sent back to exporter to help reduce their emissions.

Obama immigration plan is too tough and too lenient

This has a climate hook, by the way.

Obama's plan, summarized here, takes 13 years to give citizenship to people who have been here just short of forever.  It also legalizes and puts on the same track the people who arrive the day before the proposal would be introduced as legislation.  These are two different sets of people both as far as our ethical obligations and our self-interest are concerned.

The starting point should recognize three categories, and then argue who fits in those categories:

1. Immigrants who have been here a very long time - these people are Americans, basically, and have about as much right and reason to be citizens as the rest of us.  Once we've figured out that they qualify in this category, the wait time should be short to make them citizens.

What constitutes a "very long time" is a devilish detail that could get much debate, but that debate doesn't remove the fact that the category is legitimate.  The law by necessity draws a bright line somewhere in a gray area.  That's just life.

2. People who arrived recently - these are different people.  They aren't Americans, they are prospective immigrants who happen to be here already.  They aren't integrated into society and they haven't given significant investments of their lives into building the country.  The key here is that we owe them no more than we owe other prospective immigrants, so it's up to us to decide whether it's in our interest to give them a different status than other prospective immigrants who haven't come here illegally.

3. People in transition to becoming immigrants - just because you have to establish bright lines in gray zones doesn't mean you have to deny the existence of a gray zone.  So here they are, people who haven't just arrived but also haven't been here for so long that the only ethical and reasonable thing to do is to fast-track them to citizenship.  Some immediate legalization plus lengthy path to citizenship seems appropriate.  Obama's one-size-fits all approach is probably best just for this group.

The climate angle is this aspect (from the link above):  "The White House draft wouldn’t just affect undocumented immigrants currently in America. Spouses and children of newly legalized prospective immigrants could also apply for an LPI visa themselves from overseas if they pass a background check and pay the proper fees."

If you add triple the number of immigrants from the current 11 million, that extra 33 million people will mean a 5 to 7 percent increase our national greenhouse gas emissions.  Global GHG emissions aren't affected in exactly the same way, but it will increase as these people move from lower-carbon footprints to our own.  Even if the effect is reduced by having a total cap on emissions, the cap itself will be determined in part by how easy it is to live within the cap, and increasing the population by 5 percent will make it that much harder.  I don't think LPI visa holders or green card holders should have the right to bring in new immigrants - they should complete the citizenship process first.

Two other points - first, Obama's 13 year proposal is a classic worse-than-unethical-because-it's-a-blunder.  The significant majority of these people are going to be Democratic voters.  You don't make them wait forever to vote, and you don't start off with 13 years as your opening bid and then negotiate something worse than that with the Republicans.

Second, I think the issue underscores the need for future international greenhouse gas regulation to recognize and reward countries for accepting immigrants.  While Europe and Japan have admittedly done a far better job than the US on climate over the last 25 years, it would be an interesting exercise to estimate what their emissions would have been if they had accepted the same level of immigration.  Still far less than the US per person, but maybe not quite as stellar.

Contest for Planetary Solutions

Sustainable Silicon Valley has a contest for Solutions for Planetary Sustainability.  Yours truly has taken the subjects of two Rabbet Run posts (on greening the local and national Chambers of Commerce, and using electric vehicle battery power to supplement diesel generator power in blackouts) and made them into contest entries here and here.  Over 200 other solutions are also on tap.

Per modern convention, anyone who wants can register for free and then vote on solutions and give comments.  A critical soul has even tried to inspire better efforts by giving almost everyone zero out of five stars.  Feel free to support any entry you like, but the opportunity to vote ends on Friday.

Crowded crowd-funding for solar projects

On Monday, Mosaic announced it would do the first-ever crowd-funding of solar projects, with a $25 minimum investment.  Yesterday I tried to buy in myself but their four new projects are fully funded.  They look like they might be having the same problem that Kiva used to have - more money than projects (it also seems like a different model than Kiva, the money goes directly to the projects rather than paying for a general fund).

Crowd-funding seems like a good way to get micro-investors involved in startups that would otherwise be impossible, to open up a new source of money for investment, to fund smaller projects that are too small for traditional investors, and to fund entirely new and different ventures that venture capital funders find uninteresting.  My impression is that Mosaic serves all but that last interest.  Obviously no one knows if it's going to succeed but it's just as obviously worth a try.  Maybe eco-grandparents will start buying Junior shares in solar projects instead of a stock as a college investment.

The other advantage is for people who want to do something renewable but can't do it on their own property.  Our townhouse has a small roof facing east/west with shading on the east - not an ideal place for solar.  Mosaic might be a better use of money to offset our emissions, and as an offset that others can use.

Four out of five dentists say it's the scientific consensus, stupid

I'm late to the game of the Cox/Ince editorial on science and policy, but two points:

1. It's not "science" that matters most at the intersection of science and policy but scientific consensus that does.  If there's a well-established consensus with very few expert dissenters, then you've got factual conclusions as far as policymakers are concerned.  The consensus could be wrong of course, but that's not really relevant to policymakers - they don't have a choice of waiting for a perfect consensus because that won't happen.  What's missing from the commentary I've seen is that policymakers also don't have the choice of second-guessing the consensus by becoming their own Galileos.

Let's forget climate change for a while and take my constrained policymaking field instead.  Should I direct my water district to add fluoride to our water supply?  The vast majority of dentists say it helps teeth, but some disagree.  Does adding fluoride create non-dental health risks for the general population?  The vast majority of oncologists, endocrinologists, and neurologists reflected in the scientific consensus say somewhere between "no" and "not proven," but some disagree.  It's ridiculous to think I could get sufficient expertise in those three fields as well as dentistry to let me judge between experts.

And fluoride is just one issue.  What about water supply decontamination - should we use chlorine or chloramine?  What is the maximum horizontal acceleration that a worst-case earthquake will exert on each of our eleven dams?  Is the stream gauge appropriately sited to be provide accurate data on stream flow during storm events?  How much chromium 6 is tolerable in our stored groundwater?  Can migrating steelhead trout make it up the proposed fish ladder? I'm not second-guessing these things if they have an expert consensus behind it, regardless of a few dissenters.

Incidentally, I don't distinguish between scientific consensus and other expert consensus.  Seismologists tell us the maximum acceleration during an earthquake, and engineers tell us what dams can handle.  I don't see a difference.

The intersection with policy gets complicated if the consensus has an important dissenting faction or if there's no consensus at all, but that's not what we're facing on some issues, like global climate change.

2.  Contrary to what scientists often say, the science can all-but-decide policy because some policy questions are easy.  Scientific predictions of climate change in the next century under business as usual emission scenarios run from "bad" to "potentially disastrous".  That's pretty much all we need to know from a policy perspective to conclude that we have to deal with it.  The question of how we deal with it isn't easy or exclusively a science question, but whether to deal with it was answered by science.

Vietnam

Anecdata from the last few weeks in northern Vietnam.

1.  The government subsidizes fossil fuels via price caps and money-losing, government-owned energy sector companies, and Hanoi's air pollution is eye-stinging bad (I went jogging and wondered how much life expectancy that cost me).  Presumably Saigon and some other industrial areas are equivalent or worse.

No use ignoring the political support that subsidies of staple products create, especially from politically-important urban residents, but it seems like an alternative arrangement of withdrawing the subsidy and using the money in other ways that help urban air quality could create equivalent support.  Mexico is a decent model.

2.  Just as I've decided that other people's personal problems are far easier to solve than my own personal problems, other nation's political problems are far easier to solve than my nation's.  Why can't the US pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax?  Well, that's complicated....

3.  The government does a decent job of hiding political repression from the casual observer, while massive corruption is openly discussed.  Internet access was everywhere and I didn't find any English language websites blocked, although maybe that will change as English fluency and machine translation improve.  Soviet-style propaganda posters and public loudspeakers spouting messages were also everywhere though and more than a little creepy.  Uncle Ho's picture dominated many living rooms, probably a sincere gesture.

Of the two people who opened up to us in our travels, one was fairly supportive of the government and the other strongly dismissive.

4.  On the good side, we lost count after seeing three dozen or so electric bikes.  Hanoi has as many motorcycle scooters as people so the count isn't even a tenth of a percent, but they're there.  Just as electrifying cars and switching to renewable power is a major/the major part of the American climate solution, electrifying two-wheeled transport could be Vietnam's.  The government also seems to do a decent job of supporting infrastructure for two-wheeled transport, with cement paths and narrow bridges.  A huge tax on cars supports the two-wheel system, often doubling the car's costs.  Why can't we do that in the US, at least for luxury cars?  Well, that's complicated....

5.  I didn't spot a single solar PV system but did see plenty of solar water heaters, every one of them brand new.  Lots of hydro capacity and some construction, both of the all-good, small hydro and mixed result large hydro.  A side-note here:  funny how some enviros are reconsidering opposition to nuclear power but no one talks about large-scale hydro, which by contrast to nukes is economically cheap.  Maybe that's because the major dam projects are all finished in the industrialized world.

6.  Climate isn't quite warm enough for year-round rice production in north Vietnam, so many paddies are left fallow.  It seems like there is sometimes (not always) a choice available to farmers whether to flood or keep dry those fallow paddies, and that might affect methane production in the off season.  There might be a policy opportunity here, incentivizing farmers to keep the paddies dry in the off-season, and verification by satellite would be easy.

7.  I have a flood control idea for my water district, of using a smart grid composed of residential rainwater retention systems to shave the peak off of a flood.  I think it has a shot of being feasible in small, urbanized watersheds.  I wonder if the same couldn't be true for watersheds dominated by rice paddies, emptying them in anticipation of a major storm and then letting them take up some of the excess.

8.  Little-founded speculation, but where the hell are the birds?  I know it's winter and the Vietnamese trap and eat even the little birds, but still the forests and skies seem empty.  Maybe Rachel Carson's future has happened here.

Spectacular scenery but don't come for the wildlife, at least in the north.

9.  Touristing note:  Lonely Planet never led us wrong, other than a two bad addresses for hotels.  In particular, Handspan, Blue Swimmer, Asia Outdoors, and Sapa O'Chau all did a great job for us tourists, adjusting for the necessary flexibility and English fluency level of a developing country.

The long tail of climate change mitigation

Our Water District recently reviewed a draft energy audit on controlling our energy use.  The Board Chair and I had a lot of questions and comments on how we will relate the energy audit to our new goal of achieving carbon-neutrality by 2020.  Some of my general comments are below:


(Nov. 27, 2012 Board Meeting, Item 4.1)

Later on I suggested that we have a "Climate Impact" discussion included in every agenda item just like we currently have a "Financial Impact" discussion with every agenda item.

My point in mentioning this is that these types of actions fall somewhere in the long tail of actions to fight climate change - a program that can affect a lot of people while falling far short of the headline-generating action on a state or national level.  Just as individuals changing their behaviors can make a difference, though, so can these types of institutional changes.  I don't know of a good way to isolate and measure the effects of voluntary actions by local and regional institutions to address climate change, but they shouldn't be ignored.

A modest carbon tax has modest carbon reduction results

Been meaning to highlight Brad Plumer's post on a paper about the effect of a carbon tax on emissions (full paper here).  A tax of $20/ton, with an inflation-adjusted 4% annual increase, knocks emissions down 14% by 2020, and a larger number in 2050 if you believe economic projections that far in the future.

I include my caveat about 2050 because economics modeling is far harder than climate modeling.  In particular I can't tell what assumptions they make about the cost of renewables in the future, which seems like a game-changer to me.

Still this seems a reasonable argument that a carbon tax has only modest benefits.  By all means we should do it, but also use the funding for renewables, and pursue stricter regulation.  One aspect that surprised me is how much money this tax would raise, over a trillion dollars in the next decade.  That can really help with deficit reduction and maintaining social welfare programs as well as renewable energy funding.


UPDATE:  I really should've mentioned that an annual 4% real increase is not enough in their model to drive large decreases in emissions.  The implication is that if you choose a small initial tax then you need a higher annual increase.  The California cap's minimum price is even smaller than this study ($10/ton), and has a 5% annual increase.  Still it's just part of the pricing system, with emission allowances hopefully functioning as the real control on the amount, together with regulation.

Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

The California Cap passes its first test, barely

News coverage of the California cap-and-trade auction results diverged fairly sharply into whether it went well or had problems. Put me in the half-full category that it went well enough, but just barely.

The Air Board announced a sale price of $10.09 a ton, just barely above the reserve price of $10 and lower than the expected $11-15. Digging around a little doesn’t make the auction mechanics very clear – many bids were far higher than this. The reports imply that everyone paid $10.09, which would mean some type of Dutch auction setup.  (UPDATE:  confirmed it's a Dutch auction arrangement where everyone pays the same price.  Good explainer of the whole auction by Reed Smith is here.  The reserve price is a minimum that keeps the market from collapsing - if there's not enough demand for all the allowances to keep the price above that minimum, the effect of the reserve price is to reduce the supply of allowances being sold.)

I doubt it’s coincidental that the price is just above the reserve – that suggests the ‘market’ expectation is that it won’t be too hard to for California emitters to meet the cap, something that’s uncomfortably close to the problem of the European market that has too high a cap and a collapsed market. OTOH, emitters didn’t have to buy any allowances if they thought they could meet the cap on their own, so their expectation is that the Air Board will keep the California market from collapsing. I put the word ‘market’ in scare quotes because a sealed-bid auction barely qualifies – we’ll get a better idea of market price when trades start happening on a regular basis.

So it worked. A somewhat higher price would suggest a better-functioning market and more incentive for carbon reductions, although a much higher price would provide ammunition to critics’ ridiculous claim that the cap harms California’s economy.

Critics of the system include the state-level California Chamber of Commerce, treading a perilous line against California green energy businesses. The state Chamber filed a lawsuit against the auction on the day before it started. I expect they’ll take some flak for waiting so long to file, but I’ll have to save a look at their legal interests for another day.

The economic interest here is that free carbon allowances actually benefit emitters – the allowances have economic value that can be resold, and California is issuing 90% of the first emissions for free (that percent will decline over time). A 90% benefit isn’t good enough for the Chamber though – they want it all for free, forever. At least they claim they’re not trying to destroy the cap market – they just want free allowances – and that distinguishes them from the evil that is the US Chamber.  This isn't a trivial distinction from the US Chamber, by the way, and shows some-if-inadequate level of responsiveness to in-state business politics.

Even a 100% auction in my opinion would benefit California green businesses and help cement the leadership this state has on the green economy. The state Chamber is being short-sighted on a number of levels, especially if their effort to change the cap market ends up destroying it. This might be a good place for the state legislature to step in and backstop the Air Board’s decision, something that could be possible now that the Democrats have two-thirds majority in both houses, a requirement under the tax-revenue stupidity of California's Proposition 13.

An aside - there is a dividend component to the cap.  In a somewhat complicated procedure, utilities get all their allowances for free but are required to sell some and split the proceeds so 15% goes to reducing greenhouse emissions and the remainder as a credit applied to utility bills.  Seeing that credit will help counter the inevitable claim that the money is just going to solar power fat cats.

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.

Happy California Cap-And-Trade Eve

Nice radio program on California's cap-and-trade allocation auction that starts taking bids tomorrow, and on Monday we'll find out the price per ton, with a minimum price set by regulation at $10/ton.  Second biggest cap-and-trade market in the world after Europe.  Hopefully we've learned from other's mistakes (and I think we have).

One critique deserving a response is whether including a minimum and maximum price on allocations somehow proves a failure of the cap system.  The idea is if a cap's appeal over a carbon tax is that it determines the total amount of emissions, then the floor and ceiling prove the lack of commitment to determine the right amount of emissions.

Three responses:

1. Doesn't matter anyway unless the price hits the floor or ceiling.

2. It's a little simplistic to say a tax focuses on specific price for carbon while a cap focuses on specific quantity of carbon emissions.  The floor and ceiling for a cap just lets society choose a tradeoff between price and quantity.  You could do something similar with a tax by letting the tax price change if total emissions fall through a floor or above a ceiling.

3. If greenhouse gases were as easy to eliminate as ozone-destroying chemicals then we'd have a similar schedule for phaseout.  It's not that easy, so we're doing things less quickly under either a carbon tax in Australia, or cap in Europe and in parts of the US.  Putting a floor is an indication that we overestimated the difficulty in achieving a reduction and therefore will require a larger reduction.  It's actually good news, that we can achieve reductions more quickly than anticipated.

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.

Blackouts a reminder of the potential advantage of Vehicle-to-Grid power supply

NYU Langone Medical Center:

At times with only flashlights to illuminate the way, NYU Langone Medical Center began evacuating about 260 patients, carrying some of them down 15 flights of stairs to awaiting ambulances ready to take them to the safety of other hospitals.... 

But between 7 and 7:45 p.m. Monday, the hospital's basement, lower floors and elevator shafts filled with 10 to 12 feet of water, and the hospital lost its power, according to Dr. Andrew Brotman, senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.
"Things went downhill very, very rapidly and very unexpectedly," Brotman said. "The flooding was just unprecedented." 

Emergency generators did kick in, but two hours later, about 90% of that power went out, and the hospital decided to evacuate patients.

I wrote a while back about an idea I'm researching of using electric vehicles to supplement backup power during blackouts, a bridge to the truly big idea of Vehicle-to-Grid battery power storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, for release when needed.  This article suggests another reason for EVs as additional power backup - in case your emergency generators fail.

Hospitals strike me as pretty power-hungry, so I'm not sure how long EVs could support them, but you could probably triage crucial uses and cut off the rest.  Any extra time would likely be appreciated.

Somewhat related - I attended a lecture by a Japanese consular official last summer on recovery from the tsunami.  He said that electric networks took only days to get back online, while gasoline supplies took weeks.  The implication is that a system relying more on EVs than gas engines will be more resilient.  Unfortunately we have another chance to see how that plays out here, albeit on a much smaller scale of tragedy.


UPDATE:  as of Saturday Nov. 3, it appears that power is coming back faster than fuel supplies.

Rogue geoengineering and scrivener's error

A shadowy businessman from my state named Russ George has apparently dumped boatloads of iron into the Pacific off the Canadian coastline in an alleged carbon sequestration project.  I first thought he had hooked up with the Haida, a Canadian First Nations indigenous group, in order to get some political backing, but the link shows it may have been more involved:

The dump took place from a fishing boat in an eddy 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, one of the world's most celebrated, diverse ecosystems, where George convinced the local council of an indigenous village to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation to channel more than $1m of its own funds into the project. 

The president of the Haida nation, Guujaaw, said the village was told the dump would environmentally benefit the ocean, which is crucial to their livelihood and culture.  

"The village people voted to support what they were told was a 'salmon enhancement project' and would not have agreed if they had been told of any potential negative effects or that it was in breach of an international convention," Guujaaw said.

One imagines they could have done better things with a million dollars than financing Mr. Ross.  He is of a certain infamy from his Planktos company's effort to do the same thing five years ago and sell carbon offsets certified AFAICT on the basis of their own say-so.

So now they seem to have legal trouble with international agreements that tried to regulate efforts such as those by George.  However, wherever you can find a dubious legal interpretation that could harm the environment, it seems one can find a connection to the recent Rabett favorite, David "Heartstrings" Schnare:

• The London Convention / London Protocol: You may fertilize if the intent is to grow fish but not if the intent is to dispose of carbon in the ocean. Hence, focus on “restoration”.

At the same link, Ken Caldeira writes:

It would be useful if any legal minds in the group would assess exactly the relevant language that Russ George has supposedly violated. 

I recall that in negotiations under the London Convention / London Protocol, there was concern not to impact fish farms which of course supply copious nutrients to surrounding waters. 

If my recollection was correct, somebody proposed an exception for mariculture. I piped up and said that all ocean fertilization could be considered mariculture and that the CO2 storage could be regarded as a co-benefit, achieved knowingly but not intentionally (just as when we drive a car we knowingly heat the planet although that is not our intent). 

My recollection was that in response to this comment, the word 'conventional' was added to the language, so that it now reads: 

"Ocean fertilization does not include conventional aquaculture, or mariculture, .. ". Resolution LC-LP.1(2008) - IMO 

Incidentally, it seems that they have a misplaced comma, as I believe the word 'conventional' was meant to apply to both 'aquaculture'' and 'mariculture', but with the placement of the comma, I read this as 'conventional aquaculture' or 'mariculture'. I am not enough of a lawyer to know whether the intended meaning or the literal meaning is the one likely to prevail under some sort of adjudication process.

The misplaced comma is what lawyers call scrivener's error, a great way to mess up legal documents and run up legal bills.  To broadly over-generalize, under US domestic law courts will correct scrivener's error when it leads to absurd results.  It strikes me as absurd to limit the regulatory exception to conventional aquaculture while expanding it to all mariculture.  The legal issue here isn't domestic law though, but international law as interpreted by domestic authorities, probably Canada in this case.  Hardly my field, but Article 79 of the UN Treaty on the Law of Treaties says if signatories agree there was a clerical error, you just go and fix it.  I think that's where we would stand now on the clerical error, but there are other reasons for thinking George is in legal trouble (comments of Jim Thomas) regardless of the misplaced comma.