Taxing Carbon Would Solve This Problem

There’s a problem when among a large cross-section of policy makers, activists and even industry honchos have all decided that reducing carbon emissions should be a priority, and yet still pursue inane schemes like carbon sequestration to do it. As the Times documents, the plan to burn coal and bury the carbon emissions is a huge failure. It’s too expensive, impractical and beset with technical challenges to become a real option anytime soon.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.

The thing is, if carbon were priced, it would be evident that just about any option that included burning coal was stupid. We’d see by the energy input into even creating a sequestration system that we were better off expanding wind or nuclear power. But if make the focus of our energy policy the investment of large-scale resources into projects, it’s hard to see how something like the coal sequestration boondoggle wouldn’t happen again. What’s hopeful in the article is that because the political climate is becoming more hostile to coal in general, companies are restraining themselves from even trying to build new coal fired power plants. But for us to make any real action on warming, this feeling will have to be institutionalized with some real incentives to produce clean energy and some real disincentives to produce dirty energy. If we got those in place first, the chips are likely to fall in the right place.

Bad Science Analogies - Krauthammer Edition

Charles Krauthammer gives us a doozy of a misleading scientific reference:

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

What Krauthammer is trying to say is that because science is an imperfect, speculative activity whose conclusions are always partially shrouded in doubt and subject to massive revision, we can’t put too much confidence in global warming models that predict catastrophe if we continue to emit carbon dioxide at our current rate. As evidence for his argument that models can be overturned (randomly! unpredictably!), he mentions that Newton’s account of physics was overturned by Einstein’s. And he’s right, we now know that a Newtonian model is not the best one to describe our physical reality. But it can still describe most of what’s important to us.

Just because Newton’s laws of motion can now be described in other ways doesn’t mean that when you drop an apple, it magically floats up. It just means that we have a different explanation for why the apple falls. What Krauthammer wants us to believe is that when Einstein came around, we viewed the world totally differently and had a radically different way of predicting the behavior of physical bodies and so it’s possible that something similar could happen for climate science. But relativity and quantum mechanics were more of an extremely nuanced correction to an account of physics that is overwhelmingly accurate, and more importantly, incredibly useful in nearly everything humans do. So it’s incredibly likely that our climate models are missing some rather meaningful nuances that will be discovered later, but the point is that there is a scientific consensus that when we put CO2 in the air, the climate is affected in very substantial ways. Surely this account can be updated and tweaked, but there is nothing that an obtuse reference to the history of science can do to make us place such extreme doubt in a rigorous scientific consensus.

Voluntary Doesn’t Work

Milton Friedman once said that “”there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” Whether this is true as a normative claim is up for debate, but it certainly is (and if you’re a stockholder, you better hope so) from a positive claim. In the long run, corporations will do (or least will try to do) what is best for its stockholders.

So what happens to companies that volunteer to reduce their carbon footprint? Some new research by Karin Thornburn of Dartmouth indicates that their stock prices go down:

Specifically, we studied the stock market’s reaction when companies joined Climate Leaders, a voluntary government-industry partnership in which firms commit to a long-term reduction of their greenhouse gas emissions. Importantly, when the firms announced to the public that they were joining Climate Leaders their stock prices dropped significantly. Controlling for general market movements, the average abnormal stock return was -0.9% over a three-day window and -1.5% over a five-day window around the announcements. For the 46 sample firms that joined Climate Leaders, the total loss in market value was $16 billion. The stock price decline was smaller for firms in carbon-intensive industries, where regulatory action is more likely (and thus partially anticipated in the stock price), and greater for high-growth firms, suggesting that the green investments crowd out growth-related capital expenditures.

Firms joining Climate Leaders conduct a careful inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions before they subsequently announce a reduction goal. The average firm in our sample set a goal to cut its total emissions of greenhouse gases by 17%. Interestingly, the stock price plummeted even further (on average -1.3%) when the greenhouse gas goal was announced, and the more aggressive the goal, the greater the price decline. The study also included 22 firms joining Ceres, a network addressing sustainability challenges whose principles are adopted by its members as an environmental mission statement. Stock returns were largely unaffected by the Ceres announcements, perhaps reflecting—in contrast with Climate Leaders—the lack of specific environmental investment commitments in Ceres. In addition, we looked at portfolios of industry competitors, but found little movement in stock prices when their rivals joined an environmental program.

Of course, we all knew that only coordinated, mandatory action could ever convince corporations to reduce their carbon footprint, but it’s nice to have some empirical data showing that voluntary action will never work.

TNR and BP

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding The New Republic’s new Environment and Energy blog, which is “powered by BP.” The basic argument for why it’s bad for TNR to have an entire “channel” devoted to environmental, and especially climate change and energy, issues that is sponsored by an oil company is twofold. The first, and most obvious concern, is that British Petroleum’s sponsorship will influence TNR’s coverage of climate change issues. After all, oil companies are some of the chief villains, and even if you don’t want to cast it in such stark terms, some of the most important players in the climate change debate, and so any honest journalism surrounding climate changehave to keep a keen eye on oil companies. I don’t think this will be much of a worry for TNR’s environment writers, especially because one of them is Brad Plumer, whose honesty and commitment to quality journalism is something that no one needs to worry about.

The second concern is both more subtle and more worrisome. The concern is that, in the words of Sam Boyd, “BP will have an easier time lobbying against climate change legislation if it is perceived as supporting environmental causes — a perception that will only be increased by sponsorships like this. Making a company with such a checkered history look good is in and of itself a bad thing.” So the question becomes, in the struggle to get a. accurate information and good analysis about environmental issues out in the general public and b. to actually effect public attitudes and even legislation about climate change, is BP’s very obvious sponsorship of TNR a net positive or a net negative?

On the first count, I think we can say that it’s a net positive. I have no reason to believe that TNR’s environmental coverage will be meaningfully affected by BP’s endorsement; after all, plenty of companies with an interest in their own media coverage sponsor and advertise all over the place and yet there’s still plenty of critical journalism about those very companies. There’s generally a pretty strong divide between the business and production side of magazines, and I don’t feel comfortable impugning the honesty of the TNR crew without good reason. Whether the blog, due to the BP sponsorship, can actually achieve the second goal is more debatable. Is the marginal effect on BP’s reputation by sponsoring TNR (and thus their ability to either lobby legislation their way or avoid negative scrutiny) overwhelm the marginal increase in good journalism that TNR will produce that could lead more people to, say, endorse alternative energy investments or a carbon tax? I think at least that more good journalism, and more coverage in general, of climate change issues can only help, but clearly BP wouldn’t so aggressively be greenwashing themselves if they didn’t think it was good for their bottom line.

In defense of TNR, it’s worth pointing out that any public pressure against fossil fuel producers would be directed against all of them, not just BP or any individual company, so it’s unclear what BP gains by trying to brand itself as the green oil company. A carbon tax would be applied to all of them.

When You Think Your Readers Are Idiots, Idiocy Ensues

Can people please, and I’m begging here, just stop with the “Look how much snow there is this one April, there must be no global warming!” bit. Sure, in the New York Sun’s case, the article about Northeastern ski resorts getting record snowfall isn’t all that malicious, but even implying that single weather events or single-season climate patterns have anything to do with a global process like climate change is basically just declaring “I’m a total dunce and proud of it”

Some People Believe Things That We Disagree With, Just Deal

Think Progress’s new blog, Wonk Room, is very, very good, but they seem to be making a mistake in trying to explain AEI envirohack Kenneth P. Green’s opposition to the standard environmentalist/liberal global warming policy agenda agenda as a function of AEI receiving money from Exxon-Mobil. Although these types of attacks may be good idea from a short-term, purely polemic standpoint, it does great injustice to those that actually believe that massive public investments, higher taxes and a bunch of new regulation are not the best ideas.

There are plenty of people that receive no money from Exxon-Mobil who believe these things. And their argument, on the surface, can be quite persuasive. After all, the impacts of global warming are highly uncertain and so it might make sense to focus on adaptation and coping technologies instead of preemptively decreasing the wealth of current generations with new taxes and regulation. After all, if we put off dealing with global warming and let future generations incur the cost, it’s better off for everyone because those future generations are sure to be much, much richer than us.

Now, I don’t buy this argument, but I also don’t think that Ken Green, Jim Manzi, Reihan Salam and Will Wilkinson are afflicted by false-consciousness either. Ultimately, there’s an intellectual debate about what to do about global warming, and ad-hominem smears of our opponents don’t exactly get us particularly far, especially because, as I’ve written before, the Manzi approach to global warming could be very politically popular, at least insomuch as it could damage the prospects for a more aggressive policy response. So I think we should take it a bit more seriously, instead of just saying “but, but Kenneth Raymond gave them a bunch of money and John Yoo has a fellowship there!!!”

It’s Supercapitalism, Lubricated By Oil

The reason why I liked Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism more than any of the big liberal political economy books that have come out recently (namely Conscience of a Liberal or Squandering of America) is that it recognized what is the central liberal dilemma about the changes in the economy since the 60s.  Namely, that while corporate profits and power have soared, inequality has increased and the median wage has stagnated, our lives as consumers have gotten much, much better. Most people can now buy more and better stuff for less money than in any time in history.   Companies are more efficient than ever (though the recent shenanigans in the financial industry cast some doubt on that hypothesis) and workers have gotten more productive.

In Reich’s view, it doesn’t make sense to go after corporations are particularly nefarious in producing this state of things, they’re just doing their job.  The responsibility for creating a more just political economy instead comes from citizens  working in a public role to do things like increase income taxes on the wealthy, establish a national health care system, improve education and so on and so forth.  So we shouldn’t look for “corporate social responsibility” or for corporations to take on governmental responsibilities, like providing health care.  Corporations aren’t governments, they’re lean, mean money-making machines.  So where am I going with all this.  Because, once again, the fact that high prices for a commodity are leading to massive profits for those that extract and sell said commodity is causing some commotion in Congress:

 — Top executives of the five biggest U.S. oil companies were pressed Tuesday to explain the soaring fuel prices amid huge industry profits and why they weren’t investing more to develop renewable energy source such as wind and solar.

The executives, peppered with questions from skeptical lawmakers, said they understood that high energy costs are hurting consumers, but deflected blame, arguing that their profits — $123 billion last year — were in line with other industries.

“On April Fool’s Day, the biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil,” Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said as his committee began hearing from the oil company executives.

With motorists paying a national average of $3.29 a gallon at the pump and global oil prices remaining above $100 a barrel, the executives were hard pressed by lawmakers to defend their profits.

Seeing outright demagoguery like this is annoying on two levels.  The first level is that it’s just pointless.  Oil companies have one, and only one purpose, that is to increase the value for their shareholders.  And that’s what they do, and they do it very well. I would be more concerned if oil companies weren’t making money with oil prices at such a high level, because their shareholders would be getting totally screwed.  But it’s more important on a second level.

Markey and the congressmen needlessly grilling oil company CEOs are right about something - we need more investment in alternative energy.  But we shouldn’t expect oil companies to do so, we should expect the government, the polity, the collective to do so.  Because ultimately, it’s a political/societal decision how much oil we consume and how much CO2 we spew into the air. It’s also a societal decision whether or not we want to invest in alternative energy. Wouldn’t Ed Markey and Jane Harman be better off trying to build support in congress for a carbon tax or cap-and-trade instead that could actually raise revenue for alternative energy investment instead of demagoguery directed at oil companies?

A Good Book

I’ve written about Robert Bryce’ broadsides against “energy independence” before, and I was always juiced to see someone taking down an idea that seems so innocuous, but is just so breathtakingly dumb.  Well, he’s written an entire book, appropriately titled Gusher of Lies.  I probably won’t read it, but still, everyone else should.  While I probably disagree with his pessimism about alternative energy sources, he’s certainly write to say that there’s really nothing wrong with getting our oil from abroad, if we’re going to have an economy run on oil, that is.  The arguments against doing so are just absurd: we have no problem getting other commodities from abroad and it would be just about impossible to actualy withdraw from the global energy market.  The argument that oil = terrorism is just silly - AQ was at its operational high point in the 90s with record-low oil prices.

But while Bryce savages greens for thinking that alternative energy sources are going to save use, there’s some clear common ground that greens can take with him.  Namely that the preferred political alternatives to oil - liquefied coal and  ethanol - are even worse.  Ethanol drives up food prices, wastes our money, is too expensive and is a net positive on emissions.  Liquefied coal is also an expensive boondoggle that is awful for the environment.  Bryce also points out antoher reason ethanol is bad:

Detroit loves ethanol because it can use it to inflate fuel-efficiency ratings on their cars artificially. The mammoth Chevy Suburban, produced as a flex-fuel vehicle capable of burning both ethanol and gasoline, magically boosted its fuel efficiency to 29 miles per gallon from 15, since under federal rules only a vehicle’s gasoline consumption need be factored into the equation. Ethanol, in other words, has allowed American car manufacturers to produce more gas guzzlers and contribute to increased imports of foreign oil.

Basically, if an American car company is supporting a type of alternative fuel, we should all be very wary of it, and ethanol is now exception.  Reading the Times review, it turns out that Bryce isn’t really as hostile to alternative energy sources as he puts on. He thinks that solar could “play a bigger role in meeting energy needs, especially with new technology that transforms infrared light into electricity. Algae look promising as a source of biodiesel”  He also is down with nuclear. And since those are my favorite types of alternative energy (nuclear, algae, solar in that order), it looks like me and Bryce agree on just about everything.

So, yeah, buy the book.

Environmental Justice

I like my movements nice and focused. I don’t think it’s good for gay groups to also be anti-war groups or that environmental groups should be particularly concerned with anything that isn’t the environment, fairly narrowly construed. By making a group’s area of concern too large, they become unfocused on their original goals and are likely to achieve little at all. Also, by taking extraneous stands on issues not related to their core concern, they can alienate potential supporters and unncessarily limit their appeal.

California environmental justice groups, I feel, are doing exactly that when they declare that they are opposed to cap-and-trade because they think it’s wrong for polluting companies to be able to purchase the “right” to pollute — oftentimes in areas that are mostly populated by poor, minority and indigenous populations. It’s not true, however, that all environmental justice concerns are misstated. One only needs to look at Cancer Row on the southern end of the Mississippi to see how concerns about pollution interact with problems of power and political agency. But in the case of being opposed to cap-and-trade, I feel like there isn’t much of an environmental justice case to be made against it. Most of the complaint is that a cap and trade system would basically concentrate pollution in the areas it is currently, which isn’t exactly where all the rich white people live. There are two problems with this.

One is that a cap-and-trade system, if implemented correctly, with the number of permits being adjusted and the permits being auctioned, then the effect of measures these groups support like a carbon tax, alternative energy investment or mandatory carbon reductions could all be achieved by a cap-and-trade system that auctions off the permits. In fact, that’s a unique advantage to cap-and-trade as opposed to mandatory carbon reduction. Also, for the time being, as Kate Sheppard noted, cap-and-trade is the most politically feasible mechanism to implement something approaching a long-term, noticeable emission reduction, or at least leveling off. And, when it comes to environmental justice, if it is to have any meaning, the quickest and most effective reduction of carbon emissions should be the overwhelming concern.

There are two simple reasons why just the speedy and effective reduction of emissions should override concerns about carbon pollution being concentrated in certain areas or businesses having “rights” to emit an amount of carbon they pay for. The first is a rather elementary one. Carbon pollution, as opposed to stuff like Sulfur Dioxide or Ozone, isn’t especially polluting in the local, hard to breathe sense (with the exception of coal plants, which are even getting better). But as far as automobile fuel and most carbon dioxide emissions go, the same environmental justice claims that work for dumping toxic sludge in a river upstream from a poor, urban community just don’t apply in the case of carbon emissions. But that’s not to say that environmental justice isn’t an important consideration for global warming. It’s just that global warming’s impact on environmental justice is similar to its impact on the environment, diffuse, global and concentrated on places far away from the United States. There are compelling arguments from a justice perspective that because global warming is likely to seriously screw over Bangladesh in a way it won’t affect, say, Chicago that would lend itself towards recommending that the countries that emit the most carbon should reduce those emissions…but it wouldn’t really matter how said emissions were brought down.

By pursuing this rather sketchy line of argumentation, these environmental justice folk are really driving an unncessary wedge between poor/marginalized people and environmentalists. What’s weird is that they support things like a carbon tax which would have not-the-best distributional impact on poor people, but that’s true with just about any politically feasible thing you can to decrease carbon emissions. What this appears to be, instead of any honest attempt to deal with the distributional problems of carbon emission reduction, is just groups who have cultural issues with the mainstream environmentalist movement and who want to stake their claim as contrary badasses by opposing some commonly respected policy.

Is Environmentalism a “Totalizing Ideology”? Does It Matter?

Peter Suderman makes a lot of good points in this post, in which he claims that in a wealthy, secular world in which external sources of meaning (religion, loyalty to the state etc) are dwindling, that people have turned to the environment as a source for meaning.  The implication for politics, so Suderman claims, is that, “environmentalism…becomes a form of antipolitics, one intended to supersede both the collective and individual choices that are part of modern politics.” He is mentioning global warming, and especially fear-driven, crisis based discussions of it, in which the threat is portrayed as so imminent and the magnitude so great, that political norms and processes(not to mention individual rights) must be ignored.   Suderman is very convincing, but also, I think, mistaken, so let’s deal with his claims in some detail.

The End of Coal

Kate Sheppard’s inaugural post kicking off some sort of series for TAPPED about coal and environmental policy is very good.  There are a few bits of it, however, that I want to take issue with.  She says that since many investment banks think that some sort of cap on carbon emissions is inevitable, coal’s future is limited.  While she’s right the Energy Department pulled funding for liquefied coal, it’s not guarantee that a cap on emissions is coming soon.  For instance, if McCain wins (not a trivial possibility) and enacts some sort of weak cap-and-trade scheme in which many of the permits are just given away, will anyone be shocked if coal companies are able to fineagle a good number of them.

The problem with coal, and why I think it will stick around absent some agressive Democratic energy policy is that A) There’s a ton of it left in the ground and B) If “energy independence” takes over global warming as the central concern of our energy policy, a move to more coal, or at least arresting coal’s fall is basically inevitable.  If, for instance, there’s a terrorist attack, expect coal to stick around.

Add on the billions of dollars involved for coal companies, and it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll find some way to stick around if they can.  Contra Sheppard, absent some major policy changes that are basically contingent on getting a Democrat elected with a strong mandate to do something about climate change, expect coal to be a “cheap, abundant energy source for much longer.”  The “green economy” and the “death of coal” are hardly inevitable.

The Stupidity of Energy Indpendence

One of the most pernicious memes that has gotten a surprising amount of mainstream cred is “energy independence.”  Despite the obvious failures of autarky (see Korea, North), we’re apparently supposed to think that oil/natural gas are special goods that must be produced at home.  And while stupid, nationalistic ideas are all over the foreign policy sphere, what’s especially worrying about energy independence is that it’s supposed to be a bridge to the environmentalist community, because greens hate oil and hawks hate foreign oil, which means they can agree on something.  The problem is that conservative hawks really don’t care about global warming, and so they approach energy independence purely through the lens of hawkish defense policy, and the results are rather worrying.  A good example is Robert Zubrin’s piece in the NRO proposing a flex-fuel mandate.

 The piece is bad on all sorts of levels.  The first is the most basic claim - that high oil prices fund terrorism.  While it seems obvious that we don’t our economy at the mercy of regressive Saudi autocrats (but what about the Mexicans and Canadians from whom we buy our oil?), the case for high oil prices leading to more terrorism is very weak.  The most obvious counter example is that in the 1990s, when Al Qaeda was most active, oil prices were at historic lows.  More importantly, even if we could magically get oil to crash by switching to flex-fuels tomorrow, the Saudis are still the lowest cost provider of crude oil.  All we’d accomplish by trying to lower oil prices (besides exasperating global warming) would be to give the Saudis a bigger market share.  Also, it turns out that terrorists don’t get their funding from oil sales, but instead from “drugs, crime, human trafficking and the weapons trade.”  And, oh yeah, 9/11 only cost around $500,000.

 Zubrin’s second bad argument is that “The enemy’s unconstrained ability to loot us is also threatening our economy.”  Now, lets leave aside the question of whether Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (not to mention Nigeria, Norway, Venezuela and the aforementioned Canada and Mexico) are “the enemy” and focus on the question of the economy. Zurbin relies on some dubious math to show that high oil prices are an “economic de-stimulus tax package six times as large as anything Congress has put on the table.”  While Zubrin waxes poetic on what $200 a barrel oil would do to the economy, he ignores the more present reality — oil prices have been steadily rising, and the economy has not been hurt by it.   We’ve seen no consistent, long term effect of oil on growth, and there’s no reason that as the price gets marginally higher, that will change.  And if Zubrin really wants to break the OPEC cartel, he should probably do something about increasing demand from China and India, which would probably render any flex-fuel mandate moot.  But since he’s an Foundation for the Defense of Democracies fellow, I wouldn’t totally put out of the question invading those countries too, but let’s not get distracted here.

 His solution is that “Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold (not just made, but sold) in the U.S. be flex-fueled — that is, be able to run on any combination of gasoline or alcohol fuels.”  When he says “alcohol fuels” he means Ethanol.  You know, that government subsidized boondoggle that is causing a spike in food prices, deforestation and which emits even more GWGs than gasoline.  He wants to mandate that we use even more ethanol to pursue the phony goal of energy independence.  Zubrin’s wacko energy worldview gets worse when he starts using the “c” word: coal, and talking about “enriching America’s miners.”  He means liquefied coal, which is not only expensive to produce but also absolutely awful for the environment.

 It’s about time that environmentalists abandoned the notion of “energy independence.”  Not only is it infeasible in any reasonable timeframe, it also gives hawks space to participate in the energy/climate dialog using highly questionable prior assumptions about what our energy and climate policies should be based around and who usually end up concluding that energy independence always outweighs reduction in carbon emissions in importance.  

The Folly of “Energy Strategy”

Tyler Cowen links to a study showing that only are ethanol subsidies inefficient, but that reliance on biofuels like corn could increase CO2 emissions due to the deforestation encouraged by high corn prices. While everyone has known that corn-ethanol is one of the largest boondoggles in recent memory, it’s a good example of why energy investment strategies, absent some sort of increased pricing for carbon, are bound to fail. When you just invest in “clean” technologies, absent making CO2 emitting energy sources more expensive, you have the government picking winners. And you don’t have to be a hard-core public choicer to know that the decisions for who gets massive amounts of government money are often guided by less than enlightened motives.

This is why I’m confused by people like Jim Manzi, Bjorn Lomberg or Nordhaus and Schellenberger who emphasize investment so heavily while criticizing reducing emissions through pricing mechanisms. Especially because the two strategies are so complementary — we could fund our new energy investments with the revenue raised from a carbon tax or cap-and-trade! But absent some sort of external way to drive up the price of carbon, there’s no way to discipline these investments to make sure they’re something else than hand-outs to politically well connected industries.

Carbon Free Coal?

One of the most pernicious results of “energy independence” rhetoric is the second-chance it’s given American coal producers to remake themselves as modern and even green.  Thankfully, most can call out Big Coal’s BS when it tries to present themselves as the energy source of the future, and so they had to try to build a zero-emission power plant — too bad it didn’t work:

That bold step forward stumbled last week. With the budget of the so-called FutureGen project having nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion, and the government responsible for more than 70 percent of the eventual bill, the administration completely revamped the project.

The Energy Department said it would pay for the gas-capturing technology, but industry would have to build and pay for the commercial plants that use the technology. Plans for the experimental plant were scratched.

The plan was to take the carbon dioxide, and then sequester it deep in the ground, so that it would never get out into the atmosphere.  Many energy wonks and scientists think that coal sequestration could work, and if they could find a cost-effective way, it would be a boon for reducing or at least stabilizing carbon emissions.  But the question that seems most relevant is whether carbon sequestration is the best use of all the time and energy spent on it. That 1.8 billion dollars could have been used to build a nuclear power plant, implement green building standards, paint roofs white are all sorts of green measures that actually work.  It makes sense, I think, to actually be biased against sequestration because, ultimately, if we want to see any real movement on climate change and energy policy, we’re going to have to marginalize the influence of coal companies, not try to co-opt them.

What Does “Really Clean” Mean?

Debates about nuclear power can be endless and frustrating. On one hand, you have environmental contrarians that see nuclear power as some sort of panacea largely because it’s a fun, contrarian argument to take, while on the other hand, you have people with a hysterical fear of nuclear power that is simply inappropriate for these times. Yglesias doesn’t seem to fall in either court, but he’s more skeptical of nuclear power than he ought to be. While we both agree that nuclear power should be implicitly subsidized by raising the price of carbon emission, I don’t see a problem with explicit subsidies or at least regulatory fast-tracking of new plants.

With the amount of petty hostility the nuclear power industry has faced in the 30 years, some sort of governmental kick-start seems necessary if we’re serious about reducing reliance on carbon-emitting energy sources. As of now, besides hydro power, which is basically maxed out, nuclear is really all we have right now that can provide for a large portion of America’s electricity generation with no carbon emissions. For instance, France and Japan essentially get all their electricity from nuclear power, I don’t see why we can’t try to at least match their output in gross terms, if not in proportion.

Yglesias also waspishly suggests that nuclear advocates tell us all sorts of tall tales, like”We’ll be weaned off the dastardly power, perhaps, with nuclear powered cars?” The day of nuclear powered cars may be far off, but nuclear power could help reduce automobile emissions if more people drive plug-in hybrids which could be powered by nuclear energy.

The Edwards Nuclear Non Option

It was no surprise that all three candidates would come out for closing Yucca Mountain — the debate was held in Nevada after all, but only one of them, John Edwards, came out against building any new nuclear power plants.  When I first read references to this, I was baffled.  Though Edwards is a bit too populist for my taste, he’s struck me as a smart, serious man who addresses issues in an honest fashion.  He also acknowledges that global warming is a real problem, so I would expect him to want to pursue the only mass electricity source we currently have that is carbon free.  But no, John Edwards expects us to somehow transition to a carbon-reduced economy without any more nuclear power.

For a balanced look at the costs and benefits of expanding, MIT’s study is basically definitive.  Though it is cautious about nuclear power and doesn’t see it as some sort of panacea for dealing with climate change, the lead author concludes that, “Taking nuclear power off the table as a viable alternative will prevent the global community from achieving long-term gains in the control of carbon dioxide emissions.” And while there are cost, safety and proliferation worries about expanding nuclear power, those are all solvable problems. Declaring that there shall be no new nuclear power plants is indicates an un-serious approach to climate change.  As I see it, this is a major demerit about Edwards.  If he’s so obtuse about nuclear power, then what other issues does he approach in such a fashion?

Good Point, Bad Economics

I am totally on board with the idea that “energy independence” is an impossible, pointless and even xenophobic policy to pursue.  First, no matter how low we could hypothetically force oil prices by becoming “energy independent” the evil Saudis are still the lowest cost provider of oil and would still bring in oodles of cash.  Second, “foreign oil” isn’t even the problem, it’s oil in general.  Burning hydrocarbons emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, whether they’re from Ghawar or Galveston.  So, I should be happy that Robert Bryce has written a Washington Post column titled “Five Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit.”  His first point, however, is both confused and misleading:

In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: “The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States.” Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America’s foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.

But the hype doesn’t match reality. Remember, the two largest suppliers of crude to the U.S. market are Canada and Mexico — neither exactly known as a belligerent terrorist haven.

While Bryce is correct when he says that, in reality, funding for terrorism doesn’t come from oil revenue, his point about how our oil purchases fund or don’t fund evil Middle Easterners is incorrect.  When Americans buy gasoline at the pump, the crude oil probably came from Canada and Mexico, but because oil is fungible, the aggregate effect of the demand of the American market is to raise the price of crude oil everywhere.  But because the public understanding of how markets work is so abhorrent, Bryce’s strategy of just saying “but your oil comes from Canada and Mexico” is probably a good one to help convince the uninformed public that making “energy independence” the focus of our energy policy is a bad idea.

Sacrifice and Global Warming

Kate Sheppard has a very good post in which she explains that contrary to a lot of liberal and environmentalist rhetoric about global warming, we shouldn’t be framing the issue as one where we need to sacrifice some growth and material well being to prevent irreversible damage to the planet. This type of rhetoric is appealing for Democrats because their best moments, rhetorically, have come when charismatic leaders talk about sacrifice. JFK’s inaugural is a great example of this rhetoric at its best (ask not what you can do for your country…), while Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, though certainly admirable, has not had a favorable reputation. Sheppard’s point is that because the costs of doing nothing to reverse, forestall or even slow down climate change are so large, we aren’t sacrificing by expending capital and possibly slightly slow down growth in the short term, we are instead averting long term catastrophe that would make us all worse off.

Sheppard concludes that framing  climate change policy, as Barack Obama does, in terms of sacrifice will ultimately be self defeating:

“Sacrifice” is the message those who’d like to keep dragging their feet on climate change want the public to believe. Having failed in trying to convince the public that the world is in fact not warming, they’ve turned to arguing that solving the problem will be just too darn pricey. Yes, putting a price on carbon will raise energy prices, at least for a little while, but nothing spells big, expensive catastrophe like rising shorelines, increased heat deaths, ever-more-powerful tropical storms, and wars over ever-shrinking reserves of fossil fuels.

Rather than talking about the “sacrifices” Americans might have to make, Dems should be talking about how much we all stand to gain by addressing this problem. It’s not a choice, and the alternative to acting will prove even more expensive.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger make the argument in their book Break Through that the environmentalist movement will fail politically and practically if it is pessimistic, sees human intervention as always negative and insists that the only way to pursue green goals is to inflict pain on people’s pocketbooks and diminish their lifestyles. Instead of using the old “pollution model” of austerity and regulation, the best response to global warming is massive public investment in alternative energy so that the price of non-polluting energy is low enough that we don’t have to trade-off between economic growth and the health of our planet.

What’s odd is that Kate Sheppard reviewed Break Through and was mostly negative about it.  There are differences, as far as I can tell, in Sheppard and N&S’s approach — Sheppard is much more friendly towards pricing carbon and mandating emissions reductions — but their approach is very similar.  One reason why I think Nordhaus and Schellenberger were so poorly received among many green types was not just because of the inflammatory nature of much of the book, but also because their critique and message was already being absorbed by environmental organizations and advocates, and even by their critics.

What’s even weirder about Obama’s sacrifice rhetoric is that it doesn’t really match up well with his actual global warming plan.  The center-point of it is a “$150 billion over the next ten years to develop and deploy climate friendly energy supplies, protect our existing manufacturing base and create millions of new jobs.”  And, surprise surprise, Nordhaus and Schellenberger support it whole heartedly.  I think this shows that focusing on the framing of the climate change debate is only marginally important; if Obama can use sacrifice rhetoric while at the same time supporting the policy mix of massive public investment accompanied by necessary carbon caps, regulation and revenue raising measures, then maybe this sacrifice rhetoric isn’t part of his environmental approach or frame, but rather another manifestation of his inclination to describe policies as embodying some common purpose, and in some cases, common sacrifice.

The Other Major Intervention

Jim Manzi’s post on hubris in dealing with global warming is =vintage-Manzi.  He comes off as humble, skeptical and is almost able to convince you that his approach is clearly correct.   The core of his argument is that when you have these massive plans to combat global warming, they are oftentimes hubristic and ignore the possibility that we really don’t know what’s going on or that there could be unintended consequences that we can’t predict from implementing these plans.  It’s a very basic small-c conservative argument against large government action of any type.  While I don’t want to delve into the debate over how bad AGW will be and how effective government action could be at reducing the magnitude of those negative effects, I’ll just point out that Manzi is ignoring another massive, hubristic experiment that can make us wonder:

Where is the humility about the complexity of society, the inherent difficulty in predicting the future of anything, and the limits to our capabilities? Put differently, where is the sense of how much harder it is to do a thing than to talk about doing it?

I am, of course, referring to the massive pumping of carbon into our atmosphere in the last 150 years.  While I’m a big fan of industrial civilization, economic growth and all that good stuff, it’s important to recognize just how unprecedented the industrialized era is.  We really are running a massive experiment on our planet, and Manzi is right, we should be humble about the complexity of nature, we should recognize the inherent difficulty of predicting exactly what will happen as we pollute the atmosphere with carbon, and we should recognize our limits to adapt to our radically altered biosphere.  In short, all those small-c conservative reasons why large-scale action to combat global warming could be ineffective or deleterious are also reasons why the status quo is unsustainable and dangerous.  Basically, for a small-c conservative, we’ve already screwed the pooch, so to speak, and we might as well try to clean up the mess and avert catastrophe.

Ramesh Ponnuru and I are Befuddled…

Ramesh proves why he’s the shit as far as conservative pundits goes, and explains to us why John McCain’s vision on climate change makes no sense:

 A few times over the weekend, he said that we should avoid a carbon tax because it would function as gas-tax increase. Instead we should go with his plan for “cap and trade”: The government would set a cap on emissions and create an artificial market in carbon-emission permits. There is a debate between proponents of each approach, but for the most part people who want the federal government to discourage emissions see them as interchangeable, and so do people who oppose any such federal intervention.

Even though among the Republican candidates, McCain views AGW as real, his plan to deal with it is incredibly flawed and confused.  I find it hard to believe, or perhaps this is wishful thinking, that McCain doesn’t realize that cap and trade, would also raise gas prices.  Or, at least, it should, or else it wouldn’t really be working at incentivizing people to use less gasoline. As Ponnuru points out, oil companies or refineries would have to buy the permits and pass along that cost to the consumer, thus functioning as a tax would.  McCain’s confusion continues:

  McCain says that gas prices will go down, because cap and trade will stimulate the development of new green energy sources. I don’t see how this works at all. If the prices go down, won’t consumption just go right back up, defeating the whole point of the exercise? And if this fanciful model worked, carbon taxes would have the exact same effect, right?

Ponnuru is right to point that any carbon strategy whose ultimate goal is for gas prices to go down is a flawed one.  Ponnuru’s anecdote here reminds us that in all likelihood, McCain probably isn’t a very intelligent guy, especially as presidential candidates go.  If he really doesn’t understand how cap-and-trade are the same, and that getting gas prices to go down is a bad idea to combat global warming, it shows that he’s either stuck in the “gas prices must be low” frame OR he really just doesn’t get it. I’m opting for the latter; in 2000 and now, McCain has never really struck me as nuanced, wonky or particularly smart.