GOP energy policy sentence of the day

Sarah Palin went to a solar plant in Ohio to talk about oil today.

Via Keith Johnson.

We shouldn’t doubt the Governor in this department though. She gets her energy policy advice directly from God.

John Deutch on energy security

I attended a portion of today’s event at RFF on energy policy challenges.  MIT Professor John Deutch — who has an absurdly broad and interesting personal biography — spoke on energy policy and national security just after lunch.  He had three headline points:

1. Energy independence is not feasible for the U.S. (or its allies).  We can talk about improving energy security but basically people should stop using the term energy independence.
2. Our domestic political institutions are not set up in a way that acknowledges or deals with the links between domestic energy issues and foreign policy decisions.  As examples he pointed out the disconnect between the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the inconsistency of our long-standing (though recently expired) restrictions on domestic drilling and our persistent requests to overseas producers to ramp up production; and the necessity of U.S. domestic action on climate change as an essential pre-condition for a robust international agreement on climate change.
3. Increasing energy security will require incremental changes and a long-term perspective — you are not going to get an overnight overhaul of U.S. energy policy or practice.

Deutch proposed that there were four key areas where energy policy has significant intersection with foreign policy and national security:

• Oil and gas import dependence
• The vulnerability of energy infrastructure to disasters both natural and man-made (including terrorist attacks)
• Nuclear proliferation
• Climate change, including its growing role in the North-South diplomatic dialogue, its growing importance to U.S. standing abroad (and the diplomatic capital it will require in future), and its role in causing migration and conflict in some of the less stable parts of the world in the coming years

He made many other points along the way which I found interesting.  I’ve placed these below the fold in no particular order:

New ‘dro yo

Apparently we haven’t exhausted conventional hydro resources in this country. From Greenwire:

Hydropower makes a quiet comeback (10/28/2008)

Environmentalists have long criticized hydropower because dams can pose a threat to fish, but amid that criticism and the the rush to trendier forms of renewable energy like wind and solar, hydropower is quietly making a comeback.

Pennsylvania Power and Light is spending $350 million to build a new powerhouse at Holtwood Hydroelectric Dam on the Susquehanna River that has not changed much since it started operating in 1910. The project will be the first new hydroelectric plan in the East in 20 years. There, two sets of larger turbines and generators will produce 125 megawatts, enough to power 100,000 homes.

The Holtwood expansion will also aid migrating fish. Currently, shad swimming upstream on the Susquehanna River to spawn often cannot find the dam’s fish lift because of strong currents. But by siphoning some water to the new turbines and widening the river channel, the project will ease the flow, letting more fish pass, said Holtwood manager Chris Porse.

Other utilities are proposing more than 70 projects that would boost U.S. hydroelectric capacity by at least 11,000 megawatts during the next decade. Hydropower, the oldest and most widely used alternative energy, currently provides 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation.

As coal prices have doubled since last year, new hydropower additions are becoming more economically viable. Utilities are adding generators and hydroelectric plants to dams that have none (Paul Davidson, USA Today, Oct. 27). – KJH

11 GW of new hydro in the next decade would be ridick. Total existing hydro is only about 77 GW.

Tomorrow at RFF: That ’70s Show

Looks like we’ve already got a full house, which isn’t surprising given the impressive list of speakers. Sorry for the late invite. Fortunately you can stream the video here.

Energy Policy Challenges: Is the Past Prologue?
Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Registration and continental breakfast will begin at 8:30 a.m.

Resources for the Future
1616 P Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036
First Floor Conference Center

In the late 1970s, a series of studies was produced that surveyed America’s energy situation, including the landmark book Energy in America’s Future by scholars at Resources for the Future. Thirty years later, this symposium will provide a retrospective assessment of the 1970s experience in order to extract lessons for current policy. In what ways is the past a prologue? Which projections materialized and which policy concerns proved justified? Which did not? With what confidence or humility should this retrospective inform current visions of our energy future, given the emerging challenges of energy security and global climate change?

A distinguished group of academics and policymakers will draw on their extensive experience with U.S. energy policy to put the current energy landscape into historical perspective. Panelists include:

• Professor John Deutch (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Robert Fri (former President of RFF)
• Professor William Hogan (Harvard University)
• Milton Russell (Emeritus — University of Tennessee)
• Phil Sharp (President of RFF)

Download Agenda

How long am I going to have to leave my flat-screen TV in energy saving mode to make up for this?

Bad news of the day comes from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography:

Potent Greenhouse Gas More Prevalent in Atmosphere than Previously Assumed

A powerful greenhouse gas is at least four times more prevalent in the atmosphere than previously estimated, according to a team of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Using new analytical techniques, a team led by Scripps geochemistry professor Ray Weiss made the first atmospheric measurements of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), which is thousands of times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal mass of carbon dioxide.

The amount of the gas in the atmosphere, which could not be detected using previous techniques, had been estimated at less than 1,200 metric tons in 2006. The new research shows the actual amount was 4,200 metric tons. In 2008, about 5,400 metric tons of the gas was in the atmosphere, a quantity that is increasing at about 11 percent per year. …

Emissions of NF3 were thought to be so low that the gas was not considered to be a significant potential contributor to global warming. It was not covered by the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions signed by 182 countries. The gas is 17,000 times more potent as a global warming agent than a similar mass of carbon dioxide. It survives in the atmosphere about five times longer than carbon dioxide. Current NF3 emissions, however, contribute only about 0.04 percent of the total global warming effect contributed by current human-produced carbon dioxide emissions.

Nitrogen trifluoride is one of several gases used during the manufacture of liquid crystal flat-panel displays, thin-film photovoltaic cells and microcircuits. Many industries have used the gas in recent years as an alternative to perfluorocarbons, which are also potent greenhouse gases, because it was believed that no more than 2 percent of the NF3 used in these processes escaped into the atmosphere. …

The researchers found concentrations of the gas rose from about 0.02 parts per trillion in 1978 to 0.454 parts per trillion in 2008. The samples also showed significantly higher concentrations of NF3 in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, which the researchers said is consistent with its use predominantly in Northern Hemisphere countries. The current observed rate of increase of NF3 in the atmosphere corresponds to emissions of about 16 percent of the amount of the gas produced globally.

Guest post: Michael Livermore on cost-benefit analysis

We’ve got a special guest post today from Michael A. Livermore.  He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Inegrity (IPI), and the author, along with Richard L. Revesz, of Retaking Rationality:  How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health.

The Perfect Storm

Our next President will face triplet crises on the economy, environment, and energy.  A fiscal crisis teetering on recession, uncontrolled greenhouse gases, and oil-rich dictators profiting from sky-high prices at the pump.  With these three major storm fronts rolling in and threatening to collide, we’d better be prepared with a good plan.  And I don’t think evacuation is an option.

Navigating the course

These problems will not be solved by piecemeal policies. To steer us out of this mess, the next administration will need to use regulation and government oversight.    One interesting by-product of the wreckage on Wall St. is that many folks are taking a second look at regulation. But if we’re going to regulate, no one is going to be interested in a 1970’s redux.  We need smart, nimble, and well-balanced rules to tackle the problems of the 21st century.

In the new policy brief, from the Institute for Policy Integrity, we prescribe a way for McCain or Obama to accomplish this.  Task Number One:  the new administration will seriously need to upgrade the way they do cost-benefit analysis.

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, cost-benefit analysis has been required for all significant regulation.  But over the past three decades, industry and antiregulatory interests have had too much freedom to shape these studies.  Many significant biases now exist in how cost-benefit analysis is used and how it is performed, resulting in lax or a lack of regulation or government oversight.

Our policy brief prescribes specifics on how the next administration can balance the scales.  For example, oftentimes, “countervailing risks” of regulation are given significant attention, while “ancillary benefits” are given short shrift.  For example, the increased risk due to smaller cars is often counted as a cost of fuel efficiency rules, but the reduction in greenhouse gases is ignored or undervalued.  Last year, the Bush Administration lost a legal challenge over its light truck fuel-efficiency rules because it did not count the benefits of climate change reduction.  Failing to account for ancillary benefits results in deflated estimates of net benefits, which ultimately reduces regulatory stringency.

The policy brief also recommends a new procedure that would allow groups that are affected by agency inaction to petition the central reviewer and use cost-benefit analysis to show that the agency should be acting.  In this way, cost-benefit analysis can serve not only as a check on regulation, but also a prod to move agencies forward that are stuck in a rut or overcome with inertia.

One of the most offensive inefficiencies of current usage of cost benefit analysis is that it is often not used in the context of deregulatory decisions.  When the Bush Administration proposed changing how power plants were treated under the Clean Air Act’s new source review program—changes that would have massive economic, public health, and environmental consequences—no cost-benefit analysis was done because the agency claimed the regulations were not “significant.”  Recently, new rules from the Department of Labor that could lead to more toxic workplaces were also not subjected to cost-benefit analysis, although they are likely to have significant consequences over the long term if they are adopted.

Finding safe harbors

With sound use of reformed, fair cost-benefit analysis, the next administration can successfully navigate this storm, leaving ideological decision-making and special interests politics in the dust bin of history.  Smart economic policy, smart energy policy, and smart environmental policy are mutually reinforcing.  And since we literally can’t afford to ignore any one of them, we will need to decide carefully how to address all three together.

Ghostwritten op-eds and other things about which I know very little

A few weeks ago I had a shocking revelation. I walked into a friend’s office at a fairly prestigious DC think tank, and she told me she’d finally finished writing the op-ed she’d been working on for the past few weeks. But when I looked at the draft open on her screen, her name was nowhere to be found, and three prominent Ivy League professors’ names were listed instead (Sorry this is so vague. Don’t want to get anyone in trouble). Now given that she’s only an RA, I can understand why her name wasn’t on it. But her boss has an Ivy League PhD himself, and as I mentioned, her think tank is pretty well known/ respected. She explained to me that this is common practice, and that in order to get an op-ed into a major newspaper, you need someone really famous to publish it for you.

Not sure about yall, but this completely blew me away. Sure I thought it was a little odd when some famous politician or academic would make a nuanced case for a very specific issue on the opinion page of the New York Times, but in my mind this just further confirmed their super-intellectual status. Of course now that I know this practice exists, I feel as though I can spot ghostwriting a mile away. Case in point is today’s health care / sabermetrics piece in the New York Times. Let’s just say that I highly doubt that John Kerry, Newt Gingrich and friggin Billy Beane got together and dreamed this up.

Actually I have two quick gripes with that piece. First, I’m sick of everyone talking about the fact that Tampa Bay has the second lowest payroll in baseball. Sure, their salary outlays for this season are only $44 million. But the opportunity cost fielding a team stacked literally top to bottom with top ten draft picks was a lot higher than that. It came at the expense of finishing at the bottom of the American League for the past decade, which meant a lot of foregone revenue. You couldn’t just go out there tomorrow and build the Rays for $44 million using Sabermetrics. (Can you tell I’m from Boston?)

As for the argument that health care providers need to better use statistics, I think the “authors” are confusing the effect with the cause. I’m no expert on health care, but if we observe that valuable information isn’t being used efficiently by market actors, it’s probably because they have no incentive to do so. HMOs are for-profit enterprises and I’m sure there’s boatloads of evidence based analysis going on there. They’re probably just maximizing something other than the expected well being of the patient.

WaPo endorses “cap and return”?

Which you may also know as “cap and dividend” and “cap and rebate”. Read the editorial here. Apparently the movement is still unsettled on which word for the disbursement is the most politically attractive. Any CT readers have an opinion/ preference?

For a comparison of the welfare implications of this and other carbon permit allocation schemes check out the discussion paper Dallas Burtraw, Margaret Walls and I have on the incidence of US climate policy.

Money doesn’t grow on trees per se…

Full disclosure: I love the Christian Science Monitor. Not only was it founded by an ornery, possibly crazy old woman and is one of the only newspapers in the country that most of its own reporting instead of relying on wire reports, but it also has a fantastic editorial board. First, they advocated a carbon tax last fall before Congress had even begun seriously discussing cap-and-trade schemes. They dropped another rhetorical gem today, coming out in favor of assigning an monetary value for the world’s forests. Some of the best lines include:

Today, trees are worth more dead than alive. This despite the fact that they stash away billions of tons of carbon in their soil and themselves and constantly inhale more carbon from the atmosphere. They also help regulate the earth’s climate in other ways, influencing rainfall patterns far away, including in the US. And they contain unique plant and animal life, the economic value of which is only beginning to be understood…

If developing countries earned credits for preserving forests, the pace of deforestation might be cut by 75 percent by 2030, the report says. Saving forests, in turn, could reduce the cost of cutting the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions by half…

Talk of adding forest protection into carbon-market schemes does spotlight an important fact: Forests have a value that so far has not been fully reflected in the world economy. Until it is, trees will be cut in favor of other land use.

As you can see, they are talking about climate change and reducing emissions through deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects, but there is a less than veiled reference to ecosystem services in the first paragraph of the quote above. Now, the CSM is not exactly the most influential paper in the nation. I, however, think it’s pretty cool that reputable news organizations are discussing REDD and ecosystem services, even in the middle of electoral pandemonium. Speaking of which, if anyone’s looking for a new investment that won’t drop like John McCain’s Intrade value, I have a sandalwood grove in Indonesia to sell you…

And if you don’t know, now you know…

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how far renewable energy has come in this country. Fortunately Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown reminds us that these are indeed exciting times. See for yourself below el jump.

* H/T to Tmoney.

Shortest nonsense of the week

Sorry guys, I’m a little slow. Here’s a McCain nugget from Wednesday night:

…clean coal technology is key…

McCain has support on this one too, namely from Obama. Everyone loves clean coal these days. It was brought up in all three Presidential debates and the Vice Presidential debate as well. Joe Biden got himself in trouble for saying Obama was against it. Now’s he’s shoveling it with everyone else on the clean coal train, which presumably looks like this:

BUT, the smoke is clear, anti-bacterial, and has the slightest hint of lemon.

Sorry kids, but there is no such thing as clean coal. Three out of four candidates probably know this already, but they are going to keep advocating it because America has a ridiculous amount of coal and it plays well in the heartland. I normally don’t get riled up about this sort of pandering, but talking about coal in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is annoying and silly. John, Barack, stop being silly please.

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Bright Green Blog has a good take on defining what clean coal actually is here. It consistently has some interesting stuff, and thus has been added to the blogroll.

It is fall and I want to go apple picking

Some eight hundred kinds of apples once enriched the kitchens, taverns and inns of New England, but most of these have already disappeared from the region’s cuisines. … [A]t least seventy of the heirloom apples unique to New England that remain are so infrequently featured in nurseries, farmers markets and roadside stands that they can be considered threatened or endangered.

That is Gary Paul Nabhan writing at the Island Press Eco-Compass blog (now on the blogroll).  Here is Gary discussing potato diversity in Peru.  Here is Paul Ehrlich expressing skepticism about the returns to specialization.

Nonsense, shorter

We can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil…

I’d note that both campaigns have been peddling this rubbish pushing this rhetoric.  Windmills and biofuels are no more likely to accomplish this than nuclear reactors, at least not on any timescale that is relevant to this election.

nonsense

McCain last night:

We can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away. We can store and we can reprocess.

Sen. Obama will tell you, in the — as the extreme environmentalists do, it has to be safe.

Look, we’ve sailed Navy ships around the world for 60 years with nuclear power plants on them. We can store and reprocess spent nuclear fuel, Sen. Obama, no problem.

Proposition #1

People with anger management problems should not be licensed to pilot several thousand pounds of metal, glass, and rubber.

Solar powered car…sort of

I was driving through Maryland yesterday with some friends, and we were discussing what a new national PHEV recharging infrastructure might look like.  Although commercial PHEV’s are still at least a couple years away, Premier Power Renewable Energy, Inc. is integrating them into its projects, linking charging stations to large solar arrays mounted on a parking facility.  This story is also just one more reminder that even straight EV’s aren’t carbon-free unless the source of electricity is as well.  It’s encouraging that there are some firms out there that get that.  From MarketWatch:

Premier Power Renewable Energy, Inc., a leading solar integrator with operations in US and Europe, announced today that it has completed the first of two 201kW solar canopies which will total 402Kw, on the rooftops of two large six-story parking garages on each side of the new Trenton AMTRAK/NJ Transit center. Each project includes more than 600 solar panels. The solar systems are operated by Lawrenceville-based real estate developer, Nexus Properties, Inc. The scheduled ribbon cutting for the project is scheduled for Tuesday, October 14, 2008.

The dual-purpose “solar canopy” designed systems provide, on a combined basis, about 467,500kW hours per year — enough energy to heat and light 50 homes per year. The solar systems will eliminate approximately 141 tons of CO2 emissions annually.

In addition to producing clean energy for each of the parking structures, each solar array is being equipped with 110v charging stations for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) and Electric Vehicles (EVs). These charging stations allow PHEVs to move closer to carbon independence by utilizing solar energy to directly recharge car batteries, reducing their reliance on fossil fuel. The power generated by the solar systems at times, will be more than the structures need, and Nexus Properties will be able to sell excess power back to the grid.

From the inbox: DC recycling edition

I got an email this morning from my roommate informing me that DC is expanding its municipal single-stream recycling program to include, as another roommate put it, basically everything we were recently upset to learn couldn’t be recycled.  This means milk and juice cartons, plastic containers like yogurt cups, plastic bags (sweet), and aerosol cans.

Here’s a link to the Dept. of Public Works recycling page.  I’ve pasted the announcement below, which doesn’t yet seem to be on the DPW’s website:

Monday morning links

Wontcha just ease back into that work week, doggone it!

1. Tim Haab points out one good rider on the financial bailout: the renewable energy tax credit was (finally) re-upped.
2. Mankiw links to an NYTimes review of Goldin and Katz’s new book on education and technology.  Seems to give an overview of skill-biased economic growth, and addresses ways that our educational system has not kept pace with the demands of technological progress.  Looks like a good primer on some very important questions in labor economics.
3. The Oil Drum explores the links between energy and the financial crisis.  There are a couple links in there, a few open-ended discussion questions, and basically an open thread.

Which of your activities would you like to blame on changes in climate?

I now understand why Sarah Palin refuses to acknowledge the link between human actions and global climate change: she doesn’t even understand the direction of causation.

One of the many jaw-dropping Palin clips from the Katie Couric interview shows Palin saying that it doesn’t matter what caused global warming, what matters is that we do something about it now. Now that’s bad enough as is, but as Johnny Walker pointed out to me, she also says, “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” WTF? Here’s the video:

Now I was gonna let that one slide because people misspeak and Katie Couric clearly tricked the ex sportscaster. So I literally could not believe it when she did the exact same thing in last night’s debate (0:34):

Fortunately Biden called her out on the big gaffe, but wtf is she doing with this reverse attenuation? Johnny Walker interprets it as a populist position, in which the good people tell the elites, “Are you saying that you “blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate”? That may be true of your activities, but not mine, sir.”

This should solve the financial crisis

From Green Car Congress:

Senate Version of Bailout Bill has PHEV Credits

2 October 2008

The revised bailout legislation passed by the US Senate on Wednesday (H.R. 1424)—which has ballooned from an original 3-page plan from Treasury Secretary Paulson to the 451-paqe bill approved by the Senate—contains among its many other new provisions a tax-credit for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

<!––>The credit is a base $2,500 plus $417 for each kWh of battery pack capacity in excess of 4 kWh, to a maximum of $7,500 for light-duty vehicles; $10,000 for vehicles with gross vehicle weights of more than 10,000 but less than 14,000 pounds; $12,500 for vehicles with a GVW of more than 14,000 but less than 26,000 pounds; and $15,000 for any vehicle with a GVW of more than 26,000 pounds.

Phaseout of the credit is to begin after the total number of qualified PHEVs in the US sold after 31 December 2008 is at least 250,000.