Comments David Roberts has made

It's a blog, Avatar. All that background information has been covered in previous posts. I'm not going to re-cover it all every time I write a new post.

I miss non-crank commenters.

Robert, sounds like you should get outside the right-wing echo chamber more often.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/24/AR2009062403648.html

"Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with substantial majority support from Democrats, Republicans and independents."

See also:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_treatment/archive/2009/08/27/who-is-my-neighbor.aspx

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

If you have not seen this CNN clip, watch it now. Here is the transcript, which hardly does justice to the 2-minute clip of what was happening in that room.

Unidentified participant: "My husband has traumatic brain injury. His health insurance will not cover him to eat and drink. And what I need to know is: Are you going to help him?

We left the nursing home, and they told us we are on our own. He left with a feeding tube. I have been working with him, but I'm not a speech pathologist, a professional that takes six years for a masters', and I'm trying to get him to eat and drink again. [inaudible due to weeping]. 

Senator Coburn: "First of all, yeah. We'll help. The first thing we will do is to see what we can do, individually, to help you, through our office. But the other thing that is missing in this debate is us as neighbors, helping people that need our help. You know we tend to... [applause] The idea that the government is a solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement. [applause].

My wife and I watched this episode. She is a clinical nurse specialist who has cared for patients with delicate issues involving feeding tubes. We could not believe what we were watching.

We were not the only ones. I've heard from many physician-researchers and health policy experts who have seen the clip. They react with virtually uniform dismay to Senator Coburn's comments. Among physicians, this dismay was tinged with embarrassment, since Senator Coburn is one of their own.

Here, for example, is the reaction of Dr. Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Pizzo practices in areas of pediatric oncology and HIV that have brought him intimate exposure to the profound traumas families face when a loved one is stricken with a life-threatening, costly, and prolonged illness. (I should mention that we cross paths since we are both advisors to Doctors for America.) In a phone call and a follow-up email, he noted:

I thought this was a very sad display. Here is a member of the United States Senate, a physician, who is essentially brushing off the experiences of a woman bringing forth a very tragic situation involving her spouse.

Dr. Pizzo went on to discuss romanticized notions of neighborhood and community help for people in medical crisis outside the realm of government.

In my career in pediatric cancer and AIDS, I remember when parents needed to take up collections from the community for serious medical conditions that - including at one time, bone marrow transplants. This was an untenable situation. We all recognize that when there is an immediate illness, neighbors, friends, and family will respond. And while that is appreciated and helpful, it will rarely if ever be able to cover the cost of medical care - especially for the millions of individuals who are uninsured or underinsured That is not a sustainable response.. to a serious and chronic condition. Only serious health insurance and healthcare reform will address such crises and human tragedies.

I'm sure that Senator Coburn is a compassionate man who will, "individually," do his best to help. He and much of his audience miss the larger point. This Oklahoma couple deserves better than to be treated as the pitiable objects of charity. They are entitled to effective help and support as fellow Americans whose lives have taken a tragic turn.

They indeed need the love and support of their neighbors, friends, and family. They need more, too. They need skilled home health care to guard against infection. They need visiting nurses and home health workers to help him regain whatever function he is capable of regaining in eating, drinking, and speaking.

Government, while not the solution to all problems, is the instrument through which a nation of 300 million people ensures that everyone receives proper care, even when some insurer or nursing home leaves him wounded by the road without adequate help. We owe each other that, in recognition of our common citizenship and our common humanity.

Americans face a stark choice in health reform. On one side, we have the President and Democrats who produce the Senate HELP and House Dingell bills, which (among other things) would remove lifetime expenditure caps on coverage for people with traumatic brain injury and would provide specific benefits for disabled people and their caregivers through the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. We have the late Edward Kennedy, who declared last year that the cause of his life was to guarantee every American "decent, quality health care as a fundamental right."

Opposing them, we have almost the entire Republican Party, which continues its fight against universal coverage. Even within this group, Coburn's inflammatory statements stand out. His claim that "the stimulus is a step towards a Soviet America" exemplifies a spirit which animates many Tea Party protesters, such as the man I recently met carrying a blunt sign that read: "Drop dead, I'm not paying for your health care."

When you think of that desperate Oklahoma woman, which of these two sides is the more loving neighbor? That's a question that answers itself.

--Harold Pollack

Gimmeabreak. In the end we'll spend more on the Iraq War than would be required to completely zero out US GHG emissions, based on claims that underwent nothing even approaching the scrutiny climate science has received.

The science has gone through multiple layers of peer review. It has been as examined and re-examined as anything in the history of modern science. If you don't believe the results, then you simply don't accept our sociocultural standards of evidence and truth -- and if that's true, then you're "skeptical" about a hell of a lot more than climate science.

Eh. I dunno. Pieces like this always strike me as kind of mushy. I always wonder: if I take all this seriously, what would I do differently? There are no hard facts or numbers, no hard tactical advice, no prediction or even vision of how becoming more apocalyptic would bring about change. This makes the choir feel good -- a Vast Existential Struggle certainly sounds more exciting and viscerally satisfying than the painstaking, frustrating, incremental work of politics -- but what's supposed to come out of it?

I just never know what I'm supposed to take away from pieces like this.

I dunno. People always SAY that message will work. But as you note, it's been around for a while now -- was prominently displayed in the New York Times the other day -- and it doesn't seem to be moving the needle. I sometimes worry that progressives' testosterone envy gets the better of them ...

Who's saying "unlimited"? I haven't seen that. It's not even an energy source -- it's a storage device.

Relative to existing batteries, though, it would be a quantum leap forward.

This is a great post.

Sean, I cannot recommend this Matt Bai article highly enough:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07congress-t.html?pagewanted=all

This Congress-based strategy is central to Obama's presidency. He's avoiding -- possibly overcorrecting -- for Clinton's mistake, which was being high-handed and dictating the shape of legislation to Congress, which is quite jealous of its prerogatives. Obama's staff is packed with old legislative hands, and glad-handing legislators is a large part of what they do. On his top priorities, Obama lays out a few basic principles and lets Congress do the rest.

It's worked reasonably well so far, but a few big tests are coming up -- climate and health especially. Should be interesting to watch.

(On the question of why he doesn't carry the weight in the executive branch: no politician wants the entire responsibility sitting on their shoulders. They want to share blame. Doing all this through executive tools would make Obama an enormous target.)

MM, you're right about the drinking stat -- I misread that entirely. Corrected in post. As for social services, I'll do some more digging on that tomorrow, when it's not 100 o'clock.

I appreciate your insight on the state and I (and I'm sure others) would love to hear more from you about how you see the state's problems and possible solutions. There are some great grassroots things happening in the state, for sure:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/29/coal

(PS: I grew up next door in TN.)

I wish I had a nickel for a) every piece of highly contentious speculation that is "common knowledge to economists," and b) every time I've ben accused of either blindly following the Dem line or blindly following the enviro line or blindly following the Grist line or blah blah. I can't see how the insult adds anything to your point.

Anyway, I'm going to do a post on this, so I won't get too far into it, but the idea is that the price signal is preserved because the per-kwh cost goes up -- the lump sum rebate is unconnected to use and included in the fixed-price portion of the electrical bill. Maybe, as Gar alleges, that gets consumer psychology wrong and use will be unaffected. Maybe not. I expect anybody who claims to know for certain is full of it. Anyway, I tend to think consumer decisions aren't the prime mover here. I care more about utility-run energy efficiency programs and power plant investments. The "making consumers suffer until they change" model is neither good politics nore the end-all be-all of energy policy.

You don't cite any examples, so it's hard to tell who this argument is directed toward. From what I've seen, the big green groups are split between saying "this bill is too crappy to support" and saying "this bill is a good step but it needs improvement." (EDF and NRDC the possible exceptions, but even they call for strengthening.) Just the public dithering you say you want to see. So who are you talking to/about?

I think you're reading a value judgment where the authors don't intend one. It's not "bad" that some small population states have high manufacturing and thus high per-capita emissions. It just is, and it helps predict where that state's legislators will come down on carbon reduction legislation. The point of the paper is just to elucidate the political landscape, not to separate white hats and black hats.

By the way, all the paper from the study comes from Vulcan -- more on that later.

Ah, thanks Scatter.

Sean, I think you draw a parallel where none exists. Bayh and his crowd are not "beholden to their idiot fringe" (insofar as you see American liberals, who would be banal centrists in almost any other developed democracy, as idiots). In fact, they (and the media) seem to judge themselves credible and successful precisely insofar as they crap on the left of the party and thwart its agenda. It is -- and has been at least since the Bush I years -- an entirely disanalogous situation. The far right of the Republican Part owns the Party, its punditry and its politicians. The far left of the Democratic party is virtually invisible in governance and mainstream media -- it can be found almost exclusively on the internet.

What you have right now is a responsible, centrist (by any but American standards) social democratic party trying to govern and a small minority drifting off into violent revanchist reveries. It is a quirk of the American system of government that 18% of the U.S. population can marshal 40 Senators and block all progress.

Think, for instance, about Iceland. Their right-wing party screwed everything up and steered the country into an economic collapse quite similar to ours. And so Icelanders have voted in the left party in a sweeping victory. But unlike here, the left party does not need to make nice with the remnants of the right party, or cajole and beg it to allow a change in direction. It can simply govern. If the public doesn't like the results, it can vote them out. It's one thing to zig-zag your way forward with periodic course corrections. It's another entirely simply to be frozen in stasis, occupied with kabuki disputes little more consequential than reality shows.

Yes, I think that's all exactly right -- the habits that come with being in opposition and the unfamiliarity/inability with promoting and supporting good ideas/people. For progressives, for some reason, supporting anyone or anything that has any power is still selling out. You see this, of course, with cap and trade for carbon, which used to be a relatively radical idea -- now that it's supported by the Dem establishment, of course lefties need something new that's more radical and more pure (which bizarrely seems to be a carbon tax). Consequently it's basically impossible for Dems with power to garner grassroots support; when they get the power, they lose the support. The only person to have defied this dynamic (thus far anyway) is Obama. We'll see how long that lasts.

Max, I think you're underestimating just how unusual it is for a reporter to cite an op-ed writer by name like this at all.

Jon, as I keep on saying, again and again, to anyone that will listen, the bill the Democrats are sending to the floor as we speak has way more than a carbon cap in it. It's got energy stuff, efficiency stuff, grid stuff. The Dems on the Energy Cmte. know that a carbon price is not enough. They're not the ones focusing obsessively on it! They wish other people would stop focusing obsessively on it! Especially their purported allies!

But Grey, any carbon price provision is going to be broad and weak, especially in the early years. That's why the vast bulk of the Waxman/Markey bill is taken up with other provisions outside the carbon part -- the RES, the EERS, the grid investments, the standards, etc. All that stuff is what's supposed to drive short-term capital reallocation to R&E. The carbon provision is just a backstop.

Chris, it's perfectly possible to accurate and responsible without trying to pretend you are writing from a God's eye point of view. There is no "separating them," because there is no such thing as news free of any framing perspective. What readers would benefit from, seems to me, is if reporters and journalists were open and honest about their perspectives, their biases, their empirical limitations, etc. Then readers could incorporate that into the way they absorb information. As it is now, the pretense of "objectivity" just means that the perspectives and choices are buried, unspoken, unacknowledged, and readers have to be fairly sophisticated to suss them out. It makes it harder, not easier, to learn from what you read. Subjectivity and accuracy are not at odds. There is no accuracy except subjective accuracy. Responsibility, fealty to shared standards of evidence, a self-critical eye, openness to criticism and willingness to correct, etc., are all separable from the somewhat idiosyncratic 20th century American journalism pretense of perfect objectivity.

All of which is basically orthogonal to the fact that Grist did not used to separate news and opinion cleanly, and now it does!

http://www.grist.org/news

The news page contains only news. The rest of the site contains a mix.

And thanks for your support! I feel fairly confident the site will evolve in ways that address most people's concerns. Our backend makes changes a lot easier now. (Except the colors, of course. The colors are hard coded.)

Chris, that may have been your subjective experience of Gristmill, but that just goes to show the (ahem) fickle nature of subjectivity. In fact, we published plenty of "hard news" in Gristmill. Kate's reporting from D.C. was published there. We ran stories from AFP there. The distinction between Grist and Gristmill may have seemed to you a line between news and opinion, but that was not in fact the case.

If you want straight, uncut news, you can find it here:

http://www.grist.org/news

Everywhere else, it's a mix of this, that, and the other.

(And -- I can't resist! -- if you think the "hard news" at BBC and NYT isn't ridden with judgments, assumptions, and contestable perspectives from top to bottom, you haven't been reading your Jay Rosen.)

Also, try using "reply" when you're replying to someone! (I'm going to be the in-house nag for this feature. Nag nag!)

Note also that Firefox has a built-in spellchecker, which operates in all text fields, so you don't really need Word or this editor for that feature. You just need Firefox. (For so many reasons!)

Aldyen, my friend, may I suggest that you use lots and lots more paragraph breaks? It's very difficult to read such a long chunk of unbroken text, particularly on a computer screen.

Bill (and everyone): please do not paste directly from Microsoft Word into the comment box. It produces all kinds of gibberish formating (I edited your comment to remove it). If you must paste from Word, use the "paste from Word" button at the top there -- the one with the little W on it. That will remove most of the weirdness. (I think!)

As for your comment, it is such a left-field strawman I scarcely know how to respond.

Ken, I realize why it is to your advantage to characterize EDF's analysis as an advocacy document from an advocacy org, but as explained in the post, it is not. They merely chose six leading nonpartisan economic forecasts and averaged their predictions.

Also, if you agree that corporate lobby groups are wildly overstating the costs of emission reduction, I look forward to you saying so publicly via AEI!

Psyche!

No, but seriously, soon.

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Wes,

Clearly you are old and behind the times. Thoughtful analysis is for geezers!

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I just don't get ...

... this notion that cap-and-trade is the sine qua non of being a head-in-sand-sellout. It doesn't make any sense.

I mean, you could cap carbon at 50% below 1990 levels by 2015, and 0% by 2030. That would be wildly ambitious, right? Commensurate with the problem, right?

Yes, we're probably not going to do that, but it's not because any flaw in cap-and-trade, it's because we as a culture are not prepared to face up to the task at hand. It's not like advocating different policies is magically going to change that. If we get serious about what we need to do, there are any number of policies, including C&T, that could do it.

Your hostility to c&t -- and Hansen's -- just seems bizarre and misplaced. Policy weapons don't kill people. People kill people.

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And they will be helped!

By environmentalists! Probably in this very thread. Starting in 3 ... 2 ...

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This is great

One note: I think advocates of this kind of policy (like me!) need to find a way to distinguish the kind of incentives they have in mind from "subsidies."

After all, Ken isn't talking about Congress handing out money to favored industries. Just like feebates, this would be an automatic transfer of money, inside an economic sector, based on objective performance standards. No legislator would ever have his/her hands on this money. So the incentive would be better performance, not better lobbying.

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Adam, context

Well, of course rebating payroll taxes reduces the regressivity of an energy price hike a lot. A gazillion, even.

The "somewhat" was about the difference between doing a straight-up payroll tax rebate and a payroll tax rebate with a cap -- the latter prevents a situation in which, in the CBPP's words, "the top 20 percent of the population would get a tax cut that exceeded their increase in energy costs." That is, it prevents free money handouts to rich people.

In the context of the last eight years, or even the last year, the overall policy is pretty fantastic, except for the weak-ass targets, which I'm guessing will be strengthened in Congress. There are more equitable ways of rebating auction money than the one they chose, but the one they chose is a hell of a lot better than plenty of alternatives. This post was in the splitting-hairs genre. (Which I know if your favorite!)

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Too bad Google ...

... works better than our own damn RSS feeds. Argh. (All that's changing in a couple weeks though!)

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Ted,

I think another leader-figure, better versed in politics and activism, could achieve more than Hansen.

Who? How?

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Ted, I remain confused

If your question is specifically about how public investment can replace existing coal-fired power plants, I have no answer. I'm not sure how any policy currently on the table (including carbon pricing) will do that, or why investments should be graded by that particular metric.

As for utility customers finding their bills skyrocketing, you seem to have missed the point of the post. Low-income, low-middle-income, and middle-income customers could all be made completely whole with 55 percent of auction revenues. That leaves 45 percent for investment. Unless you insist on rebating 100 percent, thus eschewing investment revenue for no policy rationale I can discern.

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ce,

There's no detail because there's no budget yet. Hold your fire, at least until Thursday.

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hapa,

What are you talking about? What does what I will accept have to do with anything? I would happily spend myself silly with deficit spending, but I am not the U.S. federal government.

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Well, by "wait" ...

... I mean pass a massive energy bill, issue CO2 regulations from the EPA, form a climate partnership with China, sign onto a Kyoto successor in Copenhagen, pass a transportation bill that shifts the bulk of funds to transit, and conduct a massive public education and activism campaign around climate legislation. And then pass a climate bill next year.

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Yes, that's the whole point

The traveling salesman might feel like he needs the big car (though small cars can be comfortable too, you know), so he'll be willing to pay. The retired school teacher won't buy the big car if there's a big fee attached. That would be the price signal, signaling.

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Steve,

The entire post is about Barbara Boxer, not Nancy Pelosi.

Also, please stop using the comment section to advertise your book. We let you get away with it a few times, but enough is enough. If you have points to make, make them here. It isn't the place for advertisements.

"3.Science does NOT say we need a cap."

What on earth can this possibly mean? Science doesn't "say" we need any policy, it just tells us what's happening and why. What's happening is too much CO2 is frying the planet. The leap from that to "hey, we should limit (that is, cap) and start reducing CO2 emissions" isn't science, it's common sense.

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Hilarious,

Yeah, archigeek, if you don't want to pay for nuclear boondoggles, just stop consuming electricity! After all, it's a free country.

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James,

Do you disagree with the need for public investment in clean energy and infrastructure?

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Yes,

Research and demonstration plants -- roughly what Gore supports.

Remember, 'clean coal' is a chimera, and will be for a decade at least. What matters is official policy toward non-CCS coal. That's where the real action is. If hand-waving, researching, demonstrating and whatever else these boondoggle CCS plants softens the blow of effectively shutting down construction of new non-CCS coal plants -- as I believe Obama intends -- I'm all for it.

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Ted,

What policy is Obama pursuing that's based on "clean coal"?

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stopgreenpath,

You need to relax. The ranting and "with me or against me" stuff is, as others have pointed out before, doing nothing for your cause. People instinctively mistrust zealots, justified or not.

I just solicited and ran a long article arguing against new transmission the other day. I'm all for decentralization and dispersion and community control over energy resources. I'm also, like most folks here, a pragmatist, and want whatever works. Instead of saying, with a bunch of exclamation points, that your model works, why don't you make some calmer arguments, maybe link to further resources or studies or people I could contact? I am keen to give this perspective more exposure.

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When EDF says you're giving away too much ...

... you know you've gone off the rails.

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Never pure enough, BioD

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The first one ...

... says we emit too much carbon "becuase we use too much oil." Far as I'm concerned that level of ignorance (deliberate distortion?) should be disqualifying.

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The U.S. tax code is transparent?

Tax gimmicks and loopholes are easy to stop?

Good grief.

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Charlie,

What proof do you have? And can you not conceive that on this matter Exxon's interest in a predictable carbon emissions price set by a reasonably non-gamed, non-speculation-driven system might have some overlap with the interest of climate champions like us?

It's a little difficult to believe I have to defend the proposition that Exxon is not participating in climate policy discussions in good faith. Should we also solicit Wal-Mart's thoughts on labor policy?

As to all the other stuff: I'm not telling you to sit down and shut up. I wouldn't presume and nobody listens to me anyway. I'm simply pointing out the reality: there's a climate policy on the table, its fate is fragile and uncertain, and now it is being attacked not only from the right but from the left. Perhaps the absurd caricatures of cap-and-trade flying around lefty circles will create enough bipartisan ill will to kill its chances. But I guarantee you -- and I will bet you any amount of money on this, name your price -- that the U.S. Congress isn't going to pass a carbon tax.

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I agree,

Clearly using sex to sell things is doomed to failure.

I think we should go with the whole "telling the audience they're morally repugnant" thing!

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'Long-term effects of climate change'

Nothing fires the American people up like "long-term effects."

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d'oh

Thanks JMG. Brain fart.

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Oh Jebus

so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he isn't saying this as a way to set up the bill for failure or at least for him to vote against the final bill, which will inevitably have some rip-offsets.

This is, to say the very least, a mistake on your part.

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As a gesture of support for this policy ...

... I have been living by it for over 30 years now.

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Jaysus

"In the long-run, this could lead to more affordable power and help revive the coal industry."

I get the latter half, but tell me what possible case can be made that implementing a more expensive form of coal burning, and then attaching an expensive sequestration facility, will "lead to more affordable power." Honestly. I don't even see the dishonest case for that. I just don't see any case at all. WTF?

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There are also ...

... social benefits of localized power that are difficult to quantify but with which I'm increasingly obsessed.

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JMG

You keep asserting that coal-mining companies have the resources to change ... something.

But what? The only thing a coal-mining company can do in the face of increased costs for coal mining is a) eat the cost, or b) pass it down the line. What else could they do? A coal mining company is either in business, mining coal, or out of business, because its business model has been rendered unviable. What I can't see is how it could "change" in a way that involves less coal.

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consumer

I should have been more clear -- I didn't mean "consumer" in the sense of Joe Sixpack at the tail end of the supply chain. I meant it in a much broader sense -- everyone who purchases carbon-containing products and services, including businesses in the supply chain.

Take coal. You tax coal where it's mined -- that is, you tax coal mines. Starting from there, you have "consumers" in the broad (and infelicitous) sense I meant: utility buys coal from mine company; business buys power from utility; consumer buys product from business.

Coal mine owners cannot change their behavior to reduce their carbon footprint without going into another business. So to get behavior change you need them to pass along the price signal to the next link in the chain. But what if, for any of a dozen reasons, they just eat the increase in opex? Make marginally less money for their shareholders? Cut costs elsewhere? There goes your signal. Similarly for every link down the chain.

Perhaps coal mines will become a slightly worse investment if the profits take a hit, but will that signal be decisive in a world where commodity and labor prices are fluctuating all over the place?

The notion that you drop a price signal in at the top of the economy and it cascades frictionlessly down to every part below is only plausible on an economist's white board. Is all I'm saying.

Again, for the gillionth time: I'm not opposed to a price on carbon by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think proponents of upstream taxes pretty consistently overstate their probable effects. (Remember: Inglis and Laffer want to stop here. This isn't one part of a broader effort for them.)

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I just mean ...

... stimulative in the "get cash in people's hands as quick as possible" sense (but there are other ways to do that -- not everything has to be stimulus policy). I agree in the long-term I'd much rather people have equity in clean energy than a little cash to pay for dirty energy and plastic gee-gaws from China.

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One weird thing about Wall-E

In one of the very first establishing shots, and the camera is zooming in on the landscape, amidst the enormous skyscrapers of trash are ... dozens of wind turbines.

That can hardly be an accident. Is the point that renewable energy won't save us if we don't change our lifestyles? That wind is futile? I dunno. I haven't seen it remarked on elsewhere though.

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Just open your mind, Tom

You'll see the larger cosmic forces at work here.

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OK

Here are your comments:

http://gristmill.grist.org/user/RDMiller/comments

If you want to round up the relevant information and links into a single place, I'll put it into a post on the main page. In the future, instead of putting it in again you can just link to that post. Just send it to me in an email. Sound good?

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RDMiller,

This board is full of people who are obviously willing to debate you -- enthusiastically. Nobody is suppressing you or telling you to shut up. Perhaps you're confusing "close-minded" with "refuses to quit disagreeing with me"?

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Randy,

I confess I don't understand the tendency to look down on bureaucratic competence. Sure there are lots of people out there who are more brilliant, who speak and write better, who are more inspiring or innovative in policy development.

But these people are being tapped to run large organizations, and all the brilliance in the world won't get you bupkis unless you know how to get sh*t done. This is what screwed up Clinton's transition -- he got a bunch of bright A students who proceeded to botch the workaday process of putting together and shepherding legislation. Obama is opting instead for experienced managers.

Competence is change we can believe in.

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Gar,

Is the "logical conclusion" of the principle of carbon pricing that we should follow people around charging them a nickel each time they exhale?

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Cool toilet!

Here's a picture of Bucky's bathroom:

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Vakibs,

You accidentally wrote that EDF is "the reason" we have coal plants and global warming. I know you wouldn't write anything that spectacularly silly on purpose. Was it a typo?

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Jon,

You say:

I actually never expected too much from Obama, because he was always clearly a centrist.  I don't know why progressives don't understand this.  If he gets a good green stimulus bill through, which seems to be happening, if he has most troops out of Iraq in a couple of years, if he passes comprehensive health legislation, and patches up international relations, and if he gets some kind of carbon pricing in a couple of years, I will be wildly delirious.

People say this a lot, which is peculiar, because it makes no sense. If Obama passes a massive green stimulus, prices carbon, gets comprehensive health legislation, and gets us out of Iraq, he will secure a legacy as one of the most accomplished and most progressive presidents in the post-war era. I don't understand why people are so easily taken in by his soothing post-partisan rhetoric and manner. His agenda is wildly ambitious and more progressive and anything American politics has seen in decades.

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Quarble,

Indeed! That will teach me to confine my research to a 30-second scan of Wikipedia!

http://www.parkthevan.com/drdog/

I'm going to see them live ASAP, trust me. Thanks for the correction.

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Jon,

why "instead of"?

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tommybasil,

I'm curious, what do you think Dingell's chairmanship has done for the rust belt? Whatever he's been doing, it doesn't seem to have worked very well.

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Sean,

Can you give me any good reason why it would be more economically desirable to tax upstream than at the point of CO2 release?

Well, I think the idea is that there are bazillions of points of CO2 release, and taxing them would be a wildly complex undertaking with enormous transaction costs. I'm swayed by your anti-upstream arguments, but do you have an answer to the anti-downstream arguments?

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But Sean,

what fun is that?

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I should clarify

I have no problem with an economy-wide carbon tax, which would apply to transportation. I'll push for that alongside everyone else. I just don't think it will have a large effect on the transpo sector.

A freestanding gas tax, or raising the existing gas tax substantially, is what I'm arguing against.

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Odo,

Do you disagree that a substantial tax would be politically difficult to pass? Or do you disagree about the substantive effects it would have? I'm confused.

And you assert in turn that a gas tax is the "most efficient" way to reduce emissions, without addressing, um, any of the stuff in the post.

Agreeing, as I assume we do, that the lack of a robust grid with clear interconnect standards limits the spread of PHVs; that the lack of hydrogen stations limits the spread of hydrogen vehicles; that the lack biofuel stations limits the spread of biofuel vehicles; that the lack of public transit limits the spread of not-driving ... then why should raising the price of gas be the "most efficient" way to reduce emissions, rather than removing the aforementioned barriers? You think if you make driving standard ICE cars economically painful enough for consumers, GM will eventually bite the bullet and start manufacturing PHVs while simultaneously building out the grids of their customers?

I'm not sure what argument you're making, if you're making one.

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It's easy ...

... to run your business in a short-sighted way when you know that you are "too big to fail" and any time you get in trouble the feds will bail you out. This is the kind of welfare dependency that drives conservatives crazy when it comes to poor black people. As for big corporations, hey, that's different!

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OMG, plants love carbon dioxide!

Does the IPCC know about this?! Somebody get on the horn with them!

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Also

Won't renewables and lower energy bills be a competitive advantage in the rental market? Couldn't you raise rent on a place with solar thermal water heating and solar electricity? Why wouldn't it be attractive to landlords?

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Charles,

Your ranting about cults and fanatics is self-discrediting, but nonetheless, to spare innocent passer-bys on these threads, I'd ask that you keep it civil and avoid further personal attacks.

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But you guys

These costs are all for actually existing nuke plants. It's not fair to talk about those! We're supposed to be talking about Future Pony Nuke Plants! They're practically free, and emit only pure drinking water and pony poots.

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Don't be so sure

I spend a lot of time around VC and business types, and they get it on corn ethanol -- investment in that sector is cratering and investment in second-gen stuff is ramping up hugely. And remember that Obama supports a low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) -- that will effectively rule out corn.

Behind the scenes, the worm is turning on ethanol. Reality bats last.

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EE,

I'm not sure the total number of electoral votes is the way to look at it. High emission states need enough representation to gum up the works (e.g. filibuster) and they need representation on the crucial Congressional committees, and they have both. I share your overall optimism though!

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Setb,

the point is, you could prevent everyone's costs from going up with far less than 100% of the revenue. You don't need that much to make it painless for the middle class -- and if reductions turn out to be as cheap as I expect, I'd bet you'll need very little.

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That's what I've been pushing, Jon

I'll have an op-ed out about it soon, if any of the MSM papers -- who are clearly trying to keep me down -- accept it.

If not I'll run it here.

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Yeah, Ken,

I think that's basically right. Thing is, the green policies on paper are extremely strong. Even the stated support for dirty energy doesn't amount to much if you pay close attention to the language. And he's surrounded by literally hundreds of green advisers who understand the issue, and who report, in private conversation, that he understands the issue.

So yeah, it's a leap of faith to assume he's playing them rather than playing greens, but it's not without evidence.

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Steve,

Thanks! None of us here at Grist realized that the transportation sector is mostly powered by oil. We'll definitely factor that into our coverage from now on.

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Backcut,

In the future, please try to make your comments relevant to the subject of the post. We all realize that you feel strongly about forestry management, but that's no reason to comment about it on unrelated posts.

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Oy

Yeah, I knew that. I interviewed the guy! This must be a sign of my oncoming dotage.

Anyway, fixed -- thanks.

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OK, mreinbold,

Bye-bye.

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Yeargh,

My bad, folks -- it's standard practice to link to the source from quotes like this. I just spaced it this time for some reason. I've added the link now (and thanks, Bart, for jumping in).

I did have a bit of a quandary picking out which part and how much to excerpt, but I think the quote gets to the nut of his point pretty well. The point itself is fairly trivially true -- for any commodity x, there will always be more of x available at some economic and environmental price -- but as GreenE says, he's willfully misinterpreting the concerns about peak oil.

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Chris,

Right now, as most people use them, yeah, RSS is a more involved process. I suspect that's going to change very, very quickly -- that email and RSS are effectively going to merge.

I'll see about adding an email option, but generating and sending emails is way more resource-intensive for us than RSS. (Perhaps that will change as well.)

One way or the other, it will be an improvement!

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Russ,

Yeah, that was a typo -- fixed, tx.

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PoorMan Institute on Palin interview:

"I get spam which makes more sense than this. I get spam which makes more sense as an answer to Couric's question than this."

http://thepoorman.net/2008/09/25/im-suspending-the-suspen ...

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Hm,

If The Bell Curve and Title IX is the best we can come up with ...

Remember, we're not talking about policy or value differences, but a case where progressives are denying relatively settled science because it does not jibe with their policy preferences.

The closest thing to a candidate would be Spence's "genetic differences" thing, except, from what I've read the science simply doesn't support the casual claims of Summers et al.

So I guess I still await a parallel case ...

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Spence,

I don't know if I would put it so cynically, but I think that's basically right -- I think it's basically right about how 99.9% of people approach scientific questions, of all political persuasions.

You think if the way to solve climate change was military build up and low taxes, all those right-wing skeptics wouldn't disappear overnight?

The more interesting question to me: would a big chunk of progressives be skeptics if the shoe were on the other foot? Can you (anyone) think of a parallel area where progressives have denied science because it leads to unwelcome policy?

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Nolanp,

"One of the leading founders of the Sierra Club"? Why don't you use his name?

Betterthannader,

"how 'devastating' the Bush Administration has been able to be has more to do with the complicity of the Dems than anything."

More than anything? The Republicans were in charge of both houses of Congress, the executive branch, and most of the federal judiciary from 2000-2006. So what exactly do you mean?

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Bob,

It doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's a contraction of "you all," and "ou" are the dropped letters, so that's where the ' goes. Y'all. Real redneck grammarians know this!

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Great video!

Nice work Joe.

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Jon,

It's a mistake to write Reihan off as a typical Republican. He's much more interesting than that.

Kira, repeating the lies doesn't make them true.

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Hey Winston!

Didn't realize that was you -- send me some pics!

And I think the newsletter will just pull stuff from the rest of the site. Probably mostly straight-news stuff, so you're unlikely to see much of my unhinged ranting. Wouldn't want to scare the students ...

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David,

what have we learned about feeding trolls?

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My wife ...

... watched the video and said, "you've got to look at the camera! Or if you have to look away, at least look up! Looking down makes you look shifty!"

Tough crowd.

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Yup

I'm riding my bike from Seattle, and Kate's pedaling over from D.C.

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George,

I think what I don't understand is how exactly scientists are supposed to determine the policy. Do you think Obama advisors are incapable of talking to scientists, or getting the best advice from them? Do you think the reason science-based policy hasn't won the day thus far is just that nobody making policy knew what science had to say?

My point is, it's not lack-of-science that's preventing good policy. Obama, I feel quite confident, is well aware that the politically acceptable solutions to climate change are not equal to what the science says is necessary. I feel quite sure that if he were a dictator, he'd do something much stronger than what he's proposed. It's not lack of knowledge that will prevent him from passing that policy -- it's politics. So I for one would be quite happy for him to surround himself with people who knew how to play that game. Scientists have already made themselves quite clear on this issue.

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Good grief

This thread is depressing as hell. Now we're going to stomp our feet and take our toys home unless we get to hand-pick Obama's energy team. And we're going to stock it with scientists, as though Science is some secret Truth Ray that can cut through politics.

Obama is doing politics, so perhaps he's well-advised to have some advisors that understand policy, the history of the issue in D.C., and the contours of the current political situation.

Being too pure for politics is not a virtue. It's an affectation, and one that ends up getting people like W elected, and thereby putting thousands of people at risk of suffering and death.

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CE,

Have you checked out Energize America?

http://www.ea2020.org/

Those guys not only sat around pulling their puds like we do on this site, they put together an actual legislative package, and have even found Congressional sponsors for a few pieces of it.

Problem is, the environmental movement, such as it is, is diffuse and uncoordinated and without much political muscle. The bills exist. What's missing is the social movement to drive legislators forward. If you have a clue how to get that going, let me know. I don't. And so I wonk.

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And more

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McCain's flack responds

This is absolutely hilarious.

McCain only has four houses, not ten! And did we mention he was a POW?

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I'm in the prime of my youth, Cowan.

Rambling and confusing, perhaps, but young!

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Thanks dwarmstr

Fixed.

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Not just Native Americans

It's every poor minority in the country. As Van Jones keeps saying, every constituency that isn't organized into the green movement will be organized against it.

They key here, as elsewhere, is showing this tribe what's in it for them if they go green. What's the better alternative?

I keep saying this, but viable alternatives are the linchpin everything turns on. "No, no, no" is never going to work.

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Bob,

Let's stay focused for a minute on the principle, not the particular subject matter. You say "science isn't about consensus" and that there's no particular reason we should trust one when one exists.

Is that generalizable? How about, say, evolution? The consensus there is pretty strong as well. But there are plenty of people running around say it's made up, it's a conspiracy, there are flaws in the theory science can't explain, etc. etc.

If a) I'm not a scientist so I can't evaluate the primary data, and b) I'm not supposed to trust the consensus, how am I to decide what to believe about evolution? Different people are saying different things. You say I can't take how many into account. So what then? What's my heuristic?

Get away from climate change for a minute and tell me how your principle applies in other areas of science.

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See also ...

Michael Klare.

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Folks,

cars are being enthusiastically embraced wherever they are offered, not just in the West. Perhaps that's not evidence of some deviant "addiction," but a consequence of every human being's obvious preference for being able to go where they want, when they want. If people are addicted to anything, it's personal mobility. I'm sure if people had access to the same degree of mobility without personal vehicles, they would be perfectly happy, but in the vast, vast, vast number of cases, automobiles are a huge step up from the other extant choices. They allow people a degree of freedom that affluent Westerners utterly take for granted. You have to be pretty damn rich and comfortable to turn around and view other people's desire for a personal vehicle as some sort of psychological or moral failing.

Let's pull our heads up out of the echo chamber and at least try to be realistic about what's going on.

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Dissent

Keep the grid public, open, and neutral -- net neutrality, just like the internet and for the same reasons.

But generation? That should be a competitive market, just like end use is.

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All sorts of ways

Investment. Legislation. Litigation. Price incentives. Tax policy. Social pressure. You name it.

I guarantee Americans' mindset didn't suddenly change midcentury in such a way that people woke up and said, hey, I want to cover the nation in pavement and live way out far from the city in an anonymous, cheap box from which I have to drive anywhere I go and where I never see anyone not exactly like me and from which I can nurse paranoid fantasies about Others who want to take away a form of life that largely consists in pursuing and purchasing consumer items from China with which to fill my anonymous box. They see that way of life as sacrosanct now, but not because they were persuaded, but because they were channeled there by the material imperatives of America's corporate class. They could be channeled elsewhere.

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Bart,

IMHO, the mindset changes after the rest of that stuff changes. Trying to change mindset directly (by what? persuasion?) is futile. Change the constraints, change the material circumstances, and the mindset will change to adapt to it. Start with the tangible, I say.

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All,

I warned Wolverine privately but want to do it publicly as well: calling other commenters Nazis, fascists, or the like will not be tolerated on Grist's boards. You get one warning and then you'll be gone for good.

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Josullivan

I should be clear: the Dems absolutely do not agree with Republicans on this. It is very much a strategy to get them through the next election, when they assume they'll have larger majorities and a Dem president.

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Hm?

http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/08/technology/Kleiner_bets_t ...

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Wow

"windpower, photovoltaics, and baseload solar thermal"

That's going to set the American people on fire!

For the record, actual polls and surveys show that people by and large prefer the term "clean energy":

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/12/91046/6008

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Jonas,

It's fine if you want to promulgate your anti-renewables views, but must you attribute them to "Europe"? It just sounds silly.

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Wolverine,

It's nice that you're here to speak for the traditional natives. It's weird that they sound so much like self-parodic white environmentalists from affluent developed countries!

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Whoa

Sean, I don't get where you're coming from here. Do you really support a safety valve, like Bingaman? Do you really support the (inevitably weak) federal system trumping stronger state level programs? You really support delaying cap-and-trade until "new technology" (read: CCS) is developed?

WTF?

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Wow

Build dirty coal to create a market for clean coal! Interesting.

How will we ever develop cancer treatments unless we give people cancer to create a demand for the treatments?

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Car sharing services

Carpooling

Vanpooling

Telecommuting

Shorter work weeks

Job sharing

Increased frequency of bus routes

All these are short term options that will take the edge off a lot faster than replacing our car fleet with whatever whizbang new vehicle comes along.

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Jon,

I think the difference is that conservatives think that if people wanted bikes, transit, and vegetables, they would have them. In a free market, people pay what they're willing to pay for what they want; the market finds the equilibrium. Ergo, if you want more bikes, etc., you ipso facto want people to accept your preferences over theirs.

That's an ahistorical vision of markets based more on 19th century physics than behavioral psychology, and one I don't share, but that's the thought anyway.

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Matt,

I'm under the gun for a Monday deadline, so please stop baiting me into argument, since I'm clearly helpless to resist. Damn you people!

First, while a whole massive infrastructure spending program cannot be cast as a short-term stimulus, there is plenty of short-term infrastructure spending queued up -- there are ongoing capital projects in states that are on hold as we speak, and passing some money to them would mean shot-term spending. See more here:

http://www.epi.org/subjectpages/stimulus.cfm

And second, long-term infrastructure spending is constantly shunted aside by the perceived need for insta-stimulus. It's an irksome dynamic. Every economist I know agrees that infrastructure spending is falling woefully short, and that spending on urban infrastructure and inter-city transit pays itself back richly in economic development benefits. See more here, particularly cites at the bottom:

http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/world_economy.cf ...

On fossil fuels, you missed the main point on oil, though it applies to coal and nat gas as well. For every dollar spent on fossil fuels, a substantial chunk is effectively scarcity rents, acquired by the owner of the resource because the resource is limited in supply. In other words: fuel cost. A dollar spent on renewables contains zero fuel costs, so all the money goes to jobs, training, energy infrastructure construction, operation, and maintenance. This is a productivity benefit.

And finally, when an economist demands "rigor" it usually means, "squeeze what you say into the model I'm using." The kinds of CGE models now being used to forecast doom on climate legislation -- from the EPA, EIA, NAM, and others -- have a record of almost total failure as predictive tools (which is never what they were designed to be). No one ever goes back and gathers models, analyzes then, determines why certain ones work and others don't. They are black boxes, wielded to defend the status quo. They assume full employment of resources; they don't know how to properly account for efficiency; the benchmarks they measure policy effects against are themselves fantasies based on looking into the rearview mirror, taking little account of climate change itself or the steep rise in energy costs; they are highly sensitive to variables like discount rates that are essentially matters of subjective value; etc etc. More to the point, evidence that spending on renewables and efficiency enhances productivity is, as Skip Laitner likes to say, everywhere but in the models. We see it paying off in the real world again and again. If you tell me not to believe my lying eyes because your model says it can't be happening, well, you're getting around to why people hate economists.

As it happens better modeling has been done and is being done, by Laitner at ACEEE, Bob Pollin for CAP, Jim Barrett at RP -- statistical models and disequilibrium models that better hew to the real world. Those tend to show modest positive macroeconomic effects and substantial positive microeconomic effects in terms of making cities more efficient, reducing negative externalities, and yes, keeping more money circulating in local communities, making them more resilient to exogenous variables, as you econo-pinheads put it.

And now I really gotta get to work.

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Meanwhile,

the other 99.9% of Americans who don't read sites like this are quite fond of the notion of patriotism, and quite patriotic to boot. They are, further, highly suspicious of rootless cosmopolitans with no attachment to place or country.

So reject patriotism as "propaganda" if you like, but understand that you are thereby going to alienate the vast bulk of the American populace and render yourself and your movement (even more) impotent. Is that worth it for the thrill of intellectual superiority?

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Yes!

Sam, shifting money from fruitless subsidies and tariffs to infrastructure investment is the best idea I've heard all day. And I bet you could get quite a political coalition behind it. Somebody come up with a slogan!

It's worth noting that smart infrastructure investment will have many of the benefits that tariffs fans and localizers are after -- that is to say, it will make local economies more efficient, productive, pleasant, and resilient.  

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Bill,

Can you explain how competition works in the U.S. electricity sector, which you site as an aspirational model?

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Wow

You're actually citing the regulated monopoly model in the U.S. electricity sector as a) an example of the free market, and b) a success story? I'm rarely speechless, but that is some serious sector nine from outer space material.

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Bury it!

Voi la: carbon sequestration.

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The key to carbon policy

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On transit ...

... I'd prefer the feds concentrate on balancing spending, shifting from the grotesque favoritism they now show highway spending. That's mostly a matter for the big transportation bill coming up next year. But beyond providing some do-re-mi, I'm not sure I want them doing a lot. Transit is best planned and operated at the regional level. A lot needs to be done to align the incentives properly, rationalize the management, and come up with innovative new funding sources, but the great bulk of that work will be done at the state level and below. Just as not everything has to be done by a cap-and-trade bill, not everything has to be done by the feds. They should offer some performance-based funding but otherwise use a very light touch.

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Yes

I'm at work on a long piece that's going to address some of these issues. Suffice to say, Wolverine's dorm-room radicalism is exactly wrong as usual -- the problem is not economics but bad economics. The models Republicans are waving around (mainly the ones from NAM and EPA) are general equilibrium models that no reputable economist will stand behind as a predictive tool. They have well known flaws that bias them against action. No one in the private sector -- where people actually care about accurate projections -- uses these models. They are a joke.

The problem is that the Dems have yet to marshal all the good economic work being done -- which shows the overwhelming benefits of action -- into an effective messaging strategy. They're getting their lunch eaten by ill-informed demagogues yet again.

Again: the economics are on the side of the angels here. Trying to make "economics don't matter" the core of our pitch is going to doom us to irrelevance. We need to address the issue head-on and quit pussy-footing around it. There's absolutely no reason to accept the opposition's economics-vs.-environment frame, and every reason not to.

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ce1907,

You're so insider and sophisticated it practically hurts to look at your comments. I have to look at them through a little hole I punch in a shoebox, like how I used to watch an eclipse as a kid.

There are plenty of (perceived) centrists who'd like to sell a crap policy. And there are a few (perceived) liberals like Boxer and Sanders that would like to sell a liberal policy. What we ended up with was a Frankenstein beast that no one could love. What would really be nice is to have a (perceived) centrist sell a liberal policy. On paper, that's what Obama looks like. I know Grumet comes from safety-valve world, and maybe you're right, maybe the entire thrust of Obama's public policy orientation is a ruse, just cover for Grumet to pull the strings behind the scenes and get one. Color me somewhat skeptical of that theory. There's going to be a ton of ferment in Congress this year, with a solidified majority and in all likelihood a new president coming into town with a new posse. He'll have some influence in empowering (or not) Congressional factions. Maybe the spineless Reid will be booted and replaced by Clinton, and maybe Clinton will ally with Boxer. Maybe Pelosi and Obama's crew will click and she'll outmaneuver Dingell. I don't claim to have any particular predictive powers on this score, and despite your self-consciously cryptic mutterings, I'm not convinced you do either. If you know something, say it. If not, relax the pose. I know it's a blog and everything, but it doesn't have to be a pissing contest.

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Wow

That's just awful. "Obama rejects McCain's silliest energy gimmicks!" Honestly, if the Obama campaign made that video I'd think it was effective.

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Look at the plan

There's a lot more in Obama's plan than expanded tax credits. Say what you will about individual parts of it, it's definitely ambitious as a whole.

His tongue is silverier than ours and his political judgment is better, and he's decided the best message to lead with is that there are real jobs being created, and not just on the coasts, and he's going to dump a whole lot of public money into the effort to boost the industries that are creating them.

Remember, by and large, people don't give a sh*t about policy. It's all about affect. He's positioning himself as someone who recognizes people's economic pain and has a concrete, well-funded plan to address it. Anything more detailed than that belongs in a white paper (of which his campaign has released plenty!).

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Yeah, well

Steve: I agree on a macro policy level, but on the targeted economic development stuff, coal just isn't going to be a big player, even if you buy into the clean coal nonsense. In terms of growing markets -- and growing supply chains that including manufacturers in these rust belt states -- it's renewables and efficiency that are creating the jobs.

Sean, I don't know whether Obama's people are hip to the regulatory stuff. I know he calls out decoupling relatively frequently, but as you've said, the devil's in the details there. Either way, I'm not sure it serves the purpose of giving a rousing speech. "Yes we can ... remove perverse incentives for capital deployment from the regulated monopolies in the utility sector!" [crickets]

As for economic development policy, there's deploying incentives and deploying incentives. If the Bush era has taught us anything, it's that the difference between competent gov't and ... not competent gov't is as or more important than fine policy distinctions.

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Millstone,

I'm not really qualified to arbitrate this dispute, but it's worth noting that smart folk like Doug Koplow dispute the EIA's numbers:

The EIA reports have been criticized in the past for providing subsidy estimates that are too low. Commenting on the previous EIA reports on energy subsidies, energy-subsidy specialist Doug Koplow said "the primary reason that EIA numbers are so much lower than other organizations seems to be a narrower research mandate in terms of what programs they were authorized to examine."

The same problem persists with the most recent report, says Mr. Koplow. "Based on my preliminary review, it looks like the newest report contains the same general deficits as the last two EIA reports on this topic: inconsistent baselines, fairly arbitrary definitions of what they include and how it is valued, and the use of a point estimate rather than a range that better reflects the uncertainty of what they are doing," said Mr. Koplow.

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Ask them ...

... why organic grapes cost so $%^*! much.

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ce1907

Which Dingell hearing?

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power-law distribution

Max, your comment reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell piece from a few years back about how some seemingly huge and intractable social problems are actually easier to solve than to manage, since they are caused by a small number of worst offenders. He focuses on homelessness but also takes on auto pollution:

A few miles northwest of the old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver, on the Speer Boulevard off-ramp from I-25, there is a big electronic sign by the side of the road, connected to a device that remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a car with properly functioning pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes "Good." When a car passes that is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes "Poor." If you stand at the Speer Boulevard exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you'll find that virtually every car scores "Good." An Audi A4 --"Good." A Buick Century--"Good." A Toyota Corolla--"Good." A Ford Taurus--"Good." A Saab 9-5--"Good," and on and on, until after twenty minutes or so, some beat-up old Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes "Poor." The picture of the smog problem you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the picture of the homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staff meetings at the Y.M.C.A. are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law distribution, and the air-pollution example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems centered on a few hard cases.

Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that's just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason--age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner--a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.

"Let's say a car is fifteen years old," Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. "Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It's the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions--the computer's not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst 's not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It's not just old cars. It's new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year."

In Stedman's view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year--take time from work, wait in line, pay fifteen or twenty-five dollars--for a test that more than ninety per cent of them don't need. "Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer," Stedman says. "Not everybody takes an AIDS test." On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts--with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars--have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site "hot"--having just come off hard driving on the freeway--which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn't, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city's regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality.

He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman's devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five million dollars that Denver's motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.

Why don't we all adopt the Stedman method? There's no moral impediment here. We're used to the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn't be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and--presto--the air gets better. But Stedman doesn't much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn't so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It's a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?

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Zach,

Believe me, we've all heard the shtick before, and it remains a strawman. All the bills you list involve tens of billions of dollars in annual investment.

And I get that you breakthroughlets have been let loose to carry your gurus' gospel around to the benighted masses, but do you really want to be selling it as "more effective"? It's been very effective at garnering press attention, but can you point to instances where it's been successful in doing something about climate change?

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Thanks Christopher

Fixed.

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Decoupling

Sean (and Max), is decoupling a sufficient regulatory reform to remove some of the barriers you guys are talking about? (I imagine the devil's in the details, of course.)

Because there does seem to be some nascent but growing political momentum behind decoupling. It finds a modest place in lots of the climate and energy bills flying around. Maybe it could be a wedge to open up a space for larger regulatory reform?

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I wonder who McCain will pick...

...as his Secretary of Special. I hope there's someone competent in charge of determining what parts of America are special enough to preserve.

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Sean,

Would including CHP be enough to get Southern senators on board?

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oh my

I think I have a balbo!

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Power

Seems to me this (excellent) discussion is missing something, as these discussions frequently do.

CBA will be shaped, as all tools of social decisionmaking are, by those who have power. The fact is, recent history is chock full of corporations getting away with things that would fail CBA even when applied in the most narrow, technocratic possible way. That's because they have the power to manipulate the levers of social action.

CBA is a vessel that can be filled with virtually anything. An honest CBA would, as Revesz and Spaceshaper say, favor environmental regulation. That it is not applied honestly has little to do with CBA itself and everything to do with the fact that applying it honestly would not benefit those with power.

The failure of enviros to be in the room when the Clinton admin. reformed CBA has nothing to do with its feelings about the CBA as such. It's a failure to grab what measures of power become available to them -- that's because enviros, like so many progressives, are high-minded and tend to view the brute struggle for power as beneath them.

So Russ is right that CBA is used for ill and Spaceshaper is right that it could be used for good, all of which just goes to show that CBA itself is beside the point. Get people who value sustainability in positions of power, and decisionmaking will reflect that. Tools once thought intrinsically evil will miraculously become agents of good.

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Uh

I'm a fan of C&D, but is there any evidence whatsoever that it's "looking good" politically in the wake of LW? Is it even on the political radar in any real way? A couple of amendments from conservative senators do not a "break the logjam" make.

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Uneconomic

I just don't get the argument that nuclear is hopelessly uneconomic, and always will be, when all evidence indicates that changes once you cap carbon.  Especially given the empirical evidence of the recent significant action by many companies on preparing new orders, just in anticipation of a coming carbon price.

The point is that nuclear's real competitors (micropower and efficiency) are already kicking its ass, and will be equally advantaged by a price on carbon, and thus will continue kicking its ass.

Also, there have been companies applying for licenses -- aka getting in line for subsidies -- but the thing to look at is whether any plants have been financed by private capital. Lovins says no, and I haven't seen anybody offering evidence to the contrary.

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Nick,

One thing is that I want to be careful about how we frame the challenge. We need to avoid talking as though the solution is to unplug coal and plug something else in its place, in a simple substitution. The goal is not simply to swap sources, but to remake the system in a holistic way -- how we use energy, and how much, how we regulate the energy industry, how we price externalities, and how we generate electricity. We need new energy policy and new energy habits, not just new energy generation.

So the first order of business is getting serious about efficiency, both upstream (in generating power) and downstream (in using it).

On renewables, intermittency is a red herring. First off, we're a long, long way from 40%, so it's academic. Second, we will have a diversified system -- on and offshore (and maybe high-altitude) wind, solar PV, solar thermal, geothermal, maybe some biomass -- so that when one source is idle another is producing. Add storage; add demand response; add intelligence to the grid. And remember, all power sources need backup, and indeed there's sh*tloads of backup for our current sources, already built and paid for. So intermittency, if it ever becomes a practical problem at all, won't do so for many years, and I'd bet dimes to dollars it never will.

The "we need everything" notion is plausible on the surface but doesn't survive close examination. Think of it this way: I have $1 to spend on carbon abatement. What's the maximum abatement I could get from that dollar? OK, that's where I spend it. Then I have another dollar. Same question. Same answer.

If, during the course of spending those dollars, the answer to the question is never "nuclear," then why should I spend any dollars on nuclear? The goal is not diversity, the goal is abatement. Diversity is almost certainly a means to abatement, but sticking an expensive, slow, subsidy-dependent source in the mix for diversity's sake makes no sense.

I am not, contra the cartoonish claims above in this thread, against nuclear on an ideological basis. If it ever becomes the answer to the question referenced above, then I'd be happy to go for it. But it hasn't. The real debate here is whether to dump many billions more of taxpayer money on it, which I would view as a horrendous waste that we can ill afford at this juncture.

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Bill,

What I really do not understand is why anybody would be opposed to a massive R & D project to develop the best technology possible, followed by a totally level playing field to select the best energy supply system.

Nobody could object to that anodyne phrasing, could they?

Thing is, nuclear is a mature industry, over 30 years old now. It's been receiving massive subsidies for 30 years and has a record of massive cost overruns, safety violations, unexpected downtime, etc. Why, after 30 years, should we keep spending billions in public money on it?

I'd love a completely level playing field, but it would help if nuke proponents started admitting subsidies are subsidies. On a genuinely level playing field, nuclear would vanish with nary a trace. Private capital won't finance it, so without gov't support, it's gone.

But yes: level playing field. Please!

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hapa,

I never understand this objection. Consider this highly simplified scenario:

Before cogeneration: coal producing 10 MW and 10 tons of CO2

After cogeneration: coal producing 10 MW and 5 tons of CO2

Is there some way in which the latter scenario is not preferable to the former, despite being coal being the base fuel?

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But Sean,

If we make policy based on the models, and models are systematically biased in favor of inaction, then our policy is systematically biased toward inaction. Doesn't seem like we should be fatalistic about that! Let's get mad as hell and not take it any more and so forth.

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Mr. Lovins,

Some of your critics accuse you of cherry-picking data and come to different conclusions than you. Explain that!

Also, I heard your degree from the mid-'60s is not actually in physics. Explain, sir!

That's good stuff.

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I agree completely with the broad point,

but we should take GreenMom's worry seriously. We can't discuss these things completely in the abstract, without taking account of the actual power dynamics in this country. When a policy attempts to enforce the public good at the expense of powerful private actors, flexibility in the policy will frequently be used to nefarious ends, absent an engaged and vigilant public (and we are, I trust we agree, absent that).

So I agree with the first principle, but IMHO first principles sometimes have to bend in the face of contingent realities.

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So Sean,

your position is that we should put America's crap in a bag, leave it on the atmosphere's front porch, light it on fire with the match of markets, ring the doorbell of democracy, and run away giggling with the giggles of justice? I'm afraid we must disagree. Good day sir!

Side note on the "center." Check out this post:

http://www.thenextright.com/josh-kahn/poll-is-our-message ...

In terms of ideas for governance, the Democrats are far more in line with the majority of the people. The actually existing center is very different from the center as typically defined by the American intelligentsia. It is far more in the direction of social democracy than elite opinion or policy reflects.

People conflate the two definitions of center, sometimes to invoke the moral authority of the former in order to advocate for the policies of the latter. It's called Broderism. (Sean, not accusing you of such, just to be clear.)

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OK,

I'm not willing to tear up some of America's best natural assets on a "guess" that in a decade or two it could bring the price of gasoline down a few cents. I'm fairly certain that's an argument my side will keep winning.

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cords

We bought a used, corded electric mower for a steal from a neighbor. I was sure the cord would be a pain in the ass, but it's actually not so bad. You can even get a new one for around $150.

The long-term strategy -- for us anyway -- is to get rid of as much lawn as possible and plant drought-resistant plants where it used to be. That's because I friggin' hate mowing we love the earth.

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oops!

Thanks pushmedia. Fixed.

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Ideas

Sean, I read Packer's piece, and it's great, but I've never really bought the "party of ideas" notion. Everyone should read Jon Chait's great take on it in TNR. Their archives are fubared, so here is the piece, dredged up from Lexis:

The New Republic

July 11, 2005 - July 18, 2005

The Case Against New Ideas

BYLINE: by jonathan chait

SECTION: Pg. 19

LENGTH: 4883 words

HIGHLIGHT: Policies aren't what matter in politics.

Ideas--the idea of ideas, anyway--have always held a lofty place in our political culture. But perhaps never before have they been imbued with such power as at this particular moment. Since last November, conservatives have been braying about their victory in the war of ideas, often with a whiff of Marxian assurance. "Conservatism is the ideology of the future," gloated Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. "Republicans are driving the course of history with new solutions." A GOP operative, even while conceding President Bush's recent difficulties, noted that things would be worse but for the fact that "the Democrats are really brain dead and have nothing positive to put on the table."

Oddly enough, it's not just conservatives who say this. Liberals, too, widely attribute their minority party status to a lack of new ideas. "Feeling outmatched in the war of ideas," The New York Times noted last month, "liberal groups have spent years studying conservative foundations the way Pepsi studies Coke, searching for trade secrets." Or, as Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris wrote last December, "[Y]es, there is plenty of blame to go around, from an admirable but not widely loved presidential candidate to his stunningly ineffective strategists. But at this point, it requires a willful act of self-deception not to see the deeper problem: conservatives have won the war of ideas." Since the 2004 elections, liberals have earnestly set about writing manifestos, establishing new think-tanks, and generally endeavoring to catch up with a conservative idea machine.

The notion that conservatives are winning politically because they are winning intellectually has a certain appeal, particularly for those in the political idea business. And the aspiration of liberals to sharpen their thinking is perfectly worthy. As analysis, though, it's all deeply misguided. The current ubiquity of such thinking owes itself to the fact that liberals and conservatives have a shared interest in promoting it. (Liberals in the spirit of exhortation and internal reform, conservatives in the spirit of self-congratulation.) But, more than that, it reflects a naivete about the power of new ideas, one that is deeply rooted in long-standing misconceptions of how our politics operate.

To begin with, the plain fact is that liberals have plenty of new ideas. Troll websites of the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, or the Century Foundation, and you will find them teeming with six- and twelve-point plans for any problem you can imagine: securing loose nuclear weapons, reforming public education, promoting international trade, bolstering the military, and so on. They get churned out by the shelfful providing more material than any presidential administration could hope to enact.

And these are not merely retreads of old wish lists. The best liberal ideas take account of new information. Noting academic findings that most workers base their savings decisions on simple inertia, Brookings scholar Peter Orszag and others have proposed automatic 401(k) enrollment. Yale's Jacob S. Hacker (writing in The New Republic and elsewhere) has shown that Americans face growing fluctuations in their income, and he is working on a total income security plan.

Indeed, devising earnest new ideas is the very thing liberals enjoy the most. Accusing them of having no new ideas is like accusing a member of the Kennedy family of excessive sobriety: If anything, the actual problem is just the opposite. Liberals have way too many new ideas and don't think seriously enough about prioritizing them. Liberal think tanks have plans for overhauling health care, slashing the deficit, creating progressive savings accounts, beefing up homeland security, and so on. The trouble is that it would be hard to do all these things at once.

Now, one might point out that liberal intellectuals have plenty of new ideas, but Democrats in elected office do not. That, however, isn't true either. In 2004, John Kerry and John Edwards ran on a program that was undeniably substantive. They proposed rolling back a large chunk of Bush's tax cuts and dividing the proceeds between deficitreduction and a number of spending programs, including a fairly innovative health care plan that involved reimbursing employers for catastrophic costs. Democrats in Congress do spend most of their time reacting to an agenda controlled by Republicans. But they have proposed a higher minimum wage, terrorism risk insurance for private businesses, legalizing the importation of prescription drugs, and reinstituting pay-as-you-go budget rules.

You probably don't remember many of these ideas, if you ever heard of them in the first place. But don't feel guilty. There's a perfectly good reason for ignoring these ideas: They have no chance of being enacted as long as Republicans control the White House and Congress. The truth is that liberal ideas aren't getting any circulation because Democrats are out of power, not vice versa. Not long ago, to take an example almost at random, Senate Democrats held a press conference with James Woolsey to unveil an energy-independence agenda. Not a single major newspaper or network covered it. This isn't because reporters harbor a bias against liberals. It's because they harbor a bias against ideas that stand no chance of being enacted. And so, the vast majority of the time, the press will simply ignore ideas put forth by the minority party. Or those ideas will simply be dismissed as impractical. Take this passage from a column last month by Newsweek's Robert Samuelson:

In floor debate, the Democrats never offered a realistic balanced budget. The closest they came was in the House, where they promised balance by 2012.

Samuelson is, in a certain sense, correct. Any plan that differs substantially from the Republican agenda is unrealistic, because the Republicans would never even consider it. But to mistake this lack of power for a lack of alternate ideas confuses cause and effect.

Indeed, during the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency, Democrats had all the positive ideas, and Republicans found themselves in a position of reflexive opposition: no health care reform, no deficit reduction, no crime bill. The Washington Post asked at the time, "Why are the Republicans, who generated so many new ideas a decade ago, suddenly reaching backward on economic issues?" Was this because Republicans had run out of ideas? No, it was because they opposed the particular ideas that the party in power had thrust into the national spotlight. Once Republicans won control of Congress on a wave of anti-Clinton anger, it became clear that they had plenty of specific ideas of their own. (At which point the public ran screaming back to Clinton.)

Today, Democrats generally oppose change because "change" means doing things Bush's way. This puts Democrats in the dilemma of either supporting new policies that are almost invariably bad--certainly from a liberal perspective--or appearing wedded to the status quo. Indeed, Bush has shrewdly exploited this dilemma. In 2001, Democrats conceded that the government needed to do something to stimulate economic growth and forestall a recession. What resulted was a Republican plan to shift the tax burden downward and hemorrhage red ink. In 2003, Democrats advocated added prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. Bush used the occasion to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars in giveaways to industry backers.

It's one thing for Democrats to sketch out the sort of alternatives they would prefer if they ran Washington. But, as long as Republicans do run Washington--and certainly as long as Bush sits in the Oval Office--doing nothing is often going to be the best available scenario for liberals. Emphasizing the downside of bad change rather than the upside of positive change reflects political necessity, not intellectual failure.

Some of those who excoriate Democrats and liberals for lacking ideas don't mean, when they say "ideas," specific plans of action. They mean something more abstract--a philosophical schema for governing, which often amounts to a slogan to describe one's ideology. It is certainly true that conservatives enjoy a long-standing edge here. Bush and his supporters have described their policies with simple aphorisms--smaller government, for example, or promoting democracy abroad--that have eluded Democrats. But Republicans often fail to abide by their own ideas. While Karl Rove recently asserted, "We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government," government has in fact grown significantly under Bush after shrinking under his Democratic predecessor. In this case, the conservative superiority in "ideas" simply reflects a greater capacity for hypocrisy.

Conservatives recognize the administration's failures to abide by its professed principles, especially on the growth of government, but this recognition seems not to temper their ideological triumphalism. They seem to spend half their time complaining about Bush's ideological infidelity and the other half celebrating their unambiguous victory in the war of ideas. An example of the latter can be found in a long, self-congratulatory essay in the May issue of Commentary, in which former Olin Foundation Director James Piereson asserts, "[N]ot only has conservatism risen to prominence in the electoral sphere, but conservative thought has seized the initiative in the world of ideas as well."

The conservatives' celebration of their intellectual triumph is further complicated by their oft-professed hostility toward intellectuals. They attempt to square this circle by portraying conservative intellectuals as merely channeling the authentic popular will. Irving Kristol famously said the role of conservatives was "to show the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong." One imagines Kristol, Piereson, and other conservative elites relaxing in working-class bars; listening to the denizens demand the privatization of Social Security or complain about the burdens of the estate tax; and then discovering, to their surprise and glee, that there were indeed corporations and wealthy individuals willing to fund the expression of such ideas.

While it has been fashionable to call Republicans the party of ideas for the last 25 years or so, it is all the more so now. The best case that can be made for this label is on foreign policy, where Bush has busily set out to expand democracy across the globe while Democrats carp. Yet, even here, there is far less than meets the eye.

The idea of spreading democracy may be a powerful one, but we shouldn't forget that it's an ad hoc rationale for the Iraq war--hastily put forward after Bush's primary justification, weapons of mass destruction, fell apart. If Bush believed in democracy-promotion as a central goal of the war, he didn't trust the public enough to make that argument (rather than the scary prospect of Saddam giving weapons to terrorists) anything more than a footnote to his prewar case. And, when it comes to those places that pose the greatest long-term danger, Iran and North Korea, even conservatives admit the administration is bereft of ideas.

Most important, the president (and his party) always dominate foreign policy thinking. The tools of statecraft lie in the hands of the executive branch. Nearly every modern president, however inept his foreign policy, manages to have a doctrine named after him. (Remember the Carter Doctrine?) Again, a comparison with the Clinton years is instructive. Democrats in the White House talked about a new era of humanitarian intervention, while Republicans grumbled sullenly. ("We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside of our national strategic interests," insisted George W. Bush.) That Bush is the one promoting powerful ideas, with Democrats largely on the sidelines, simply shows the degree to which control of the White House determines which party holds the initiative on foreign policy ideas.

What other examples exist to support the notion that conservatives have built an awesome ideas machine? The one most often invoked is privatizing Social Security. And, on the surface, it seems like a potent case. Conservative think tanks have spent years nurturing the idea of transforming Social Security, partially or entirely, into a system of individual accounts. Certainly, the history of privatization attests to the right's ability to take hold of an idea hopelessly out of the mainstream and inexorably drive it into the center of the national debate.

Yet privatization isn't a good idea. By this, I don't mean that I disagree with the concept of privatizing Social Security, although I do. What I mean is that the idea itself is half-baked. After Bush declared his intention to focus on privatization this year, it soon became clear that conservatives hadn't thought through a number of enormous obstacles to their idea's implementation. For instance, they seem not to have considered that their optimistic assumptions about the long-term return to stocks are nearly impossible to square with their pessimistic assumptions about the long-term finances of Social Security. Nor did they figure out how to offset the costs of new accounts, which caused the administration to propose clawbacks that could lead to such awkward scenarios as a worker dying and his dependents owing money to the federal government. (Don't ask.) And, as Brookings economist Martin Mayer has noted, mandatory annuities proposed by Bush would make retirees enormously sensitive to any changes the Federal Reserve makes to interest rates just before they retire. The list of similar problems is distressingly long. The more policy aficionados study Bush's idea, the more it looks like something cooked up by a throng of idealistic Ayn Rand-reading undergraduates fresh from Econ 101.

Privatization also points to another weakness in the conservative idea machine: its inability to address the problems of the day. The concept of privatization has slowly ground forward over 25 years or more, propelled by an endless stream of conferences, papers, and articles from conservative think tanks and magazines. And Bush has sold it as a response to a looming fiscal disaster. By any objective measure, though, Social Security is not a major fiscal problem compared with the deficit or health care. Health care, in fact, is rapidly bankrupting both the government and the private sector.

Here the comparison between right and left is instructive. Liberals are brimming with ideas about reforming health care and taming the deficit. Conservatives have little to say about either of these problems. On the deficit, they are theologically opposed to raising taxes, and they have learned from Newt Gingrich that massive spending cuts are political poison. On health care, controlling costs means controlling waste, yet much of that waste is income for interest groups closely aligned with the Republican Party, such as pharmaceuticals, HMOs, and insurance companies. The GOP, then, may be the party of ideas in the sense that its ideas have slowly and inexorably ground forward over a long period of time like glaciers over the Ice Age landscape. But, if this process leaves them unable to confront the actual problems facing the country, you have to wonder why this is something liberals ought to emulate.

The point here is not that conservatives want for new ideas. It's that the question of which ideas hold sway is a function of which party holds power and what priorities it has. It is certainly true that conservatives have devoted more energy to the question of fundamentally reshaping Social Security. But this difference has nothing to do with who has more or better ideas and everything to do with priorities. Liberals like Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs have devoted lots of energy to devising plans to end world poverty. Liberals have devoted enormous attention to the problem of global warming, while the Bush administration insists it will kill any action on the topic.

Is this because conservatives have no ideas, or are committed to (as Bush recently described Democrats) "the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock"? No, it's because conservatives philosophically disagree with those ends. These aren't contests of which side has more or better ideas. These are ideological battles over resource allocation. When Democrats regain power, their ideas will again control the agenda, and Republicans will again find themselves devoted primarily to the task of resisting change.

Given all this, why does everybody say the right has won the war of ideas? To answer the question, you must first understand that different people mean completely different things when they say that Democrats have no new ideas. And some of those who call for Democrats to come up with new ideas don't actually mean that at all.

One meaning has surfaced from Republicans with particular frequency during the Social Security debate. "[T]he only idea offered by Democrats is that [Bush] abandon his plans to reform Social Security altogether," lamented Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes last month. "George Bush has been willing to address a long-term, politically thorny problem," observed David Brooks in the Times. "But his Democratic counterparts are behaving like alienated junior professors. No productive ideas. No sense of leadership." In reality, Democrats have explicitly stated their willingness to address Social Security's future deficit as long as privatization is off the table. So, when conservatives decry Democrats' lack of ideas, they mean a refusal to adopt conservative ideas.

Liberal pundits also like to flay Democrats for lacking positive ideas, but they mean something else entirely. "If the Democrats had a brain, they'd. ..." is a familiar mainstay of the op-ed pages and the chat shows. For instance, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argued two months ago, "A sensible Democratic leadership would gather this very weekend to begin formulating a plan to address America's looming economic crises. These party leaders would develop specific proposals to reduce the trade and budget deficits that are spooking the financial markets.... They would reject Bush's half-baked plan for private accounts, but at the same time they would give the president political cover to do what's necessary to begin matching future benefits to future revenue."

Just last month, another Post columnist, Steven Pearlstein, chimed in, "Having railed against them in vain for the past five years, you'd think Democrats might try to reframe the issue on tax fairness." In a recent Times column, Thomas L. Friedman wrote, "Democrats [are] so clearly out of ideas." Friedman's ideas? Promoting alternative fuels, "a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization," stem-cell research, and action on global warming.

Of course, the above describes the Democratic position almost perfectly. It seems odd, but in fact this sort of thing is quite common: One constantly hears impassioned demands that the Democrats do exactly what they are already doing. Often, this confusion simply reflects the Democrats' inability to publicize their ideas--or frustration at their inability to win political victories in GOP-dominated Washington. (I can't tell you how many conversations I've had in which liberal friends ask why the Democratic leaders aren't simply saying that Bush's tax cuts are unaffordable and go to the rich, when in fact they are doing so with stultifying repetitiveness.) Sometimes it's merely a rhetorical device used by pundits to express their own liberal views while appearing nonpartisan.

But the constant invoking of the idea gap isn't entirely, or even mostly, disingenuous. Lots of politicians and analysts earnestly believe it. They believe it because they buy into a set of shared assumptions, usually unstated, about how U.S. politics works. The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas--rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances--and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future.

Because this interpretation is so widely shared, it is usually offered as a statement of faith, with little or no substantiation. Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby articulated this conviction in a column last year. "Candidates (and especially challengers) win elections by offering compelling visions, and those visions have to be based on real policies," he wrote. "Clinton won in 1992 not just because of Carville's slogan, catchy though it may have been; he won because he was prepared to grapple publicly with thorny issues, from the sources of American competitiveness to the pros and cons of nafta." In June of 2000, U.S. News columnist and longtime Washington eminence David Gergen wrote, "There is a good reason why Governor Bush is forging ahead in this race: He is becoming the candidate of fresh ideas."

This sort of interpretation is common among journalists. Up until the day of an election, the energies of the candidates and their observers revolve around which side has the stronger turnout operation, whose ads work more, which candidate hurts himself by putting the wrong kind of cheese on his cheesesteak sandwich, and other minutiae. Immediately after the voting, the locus of analysis switches completely, and the election is retroactively determined to be a referendum on the candidates' platforms.

Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildy optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. "The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven," explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. "They don't know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas."

Political scientists have shown how factors like economic performance and the rally-around-the-flag effect can exert enormous influence over voting behavior. A recent study in Science magazine was even more disturbing to those who believe in the power of ideas. Scientists showed the subjects pairs of photographs, which turned out to be matched candidates in Senate and House races. The subjects had to judge within one second which candidate looked more competent, on the basis of appearance alone. Their choice matched the candidate who won an astounding 71.6 percent of the time in Senate races. If you consider that a decent share of Senate races pit unknown, underfunded challengers against popular incumbents in highly partisan states, that is a remarkably high percentage. Faith in the discernment of the public is not based on proof, it's premised on, well, faith.

This idealistic belief in the power of the voters to judge superior policy ideas has deep roots. Alexis de Tocqueville noted how it is customary for Americans to speak flatteringly of the public in the unquestioning way that Europeans speak flatteringly of their monarchs. More to the point, it is often in both sides' interest to think this way. Bill Clinton's 1992 victory has been widely attributed to his bold New Democrat-populist platform, in contrast with George H.W. Bush's tired defense of the status quo.

Democrats accede to this interpretation for the obvious reasons. Republicans accede to it because they see Bush as an ideological apostate and are therefore eager to paint his defeat as a consequence of his infidelity to conservative dogma. But, while Clinton's innovative platform surely helped him seize the political center, other factors--a sluggish economy, a third-party candidate disproportionately hurting Bush, and Clinton's charisma--surely mattered more.

This idealism retreated somewhat after the 2000 elections. (Given that his opponent received more votes, it was awkward to paint Bush's triumph as a consequence of his ideas.) But it has returned in full force after the 2004 elections. There is plenty of evidence that the rise in Bush's stature after September 11, as well as John Kerry's ineptitude as a candidate, played a decisive role. But both sides have emphasized instead the role of ideas.

If elections themselves don't hinge on competing ideas, then at least ideas can shape the long-term ideological terrain, right? That's the story both right and left have been telling. In his Commentary essay, Piereson wrote that, in the immediate postwar years, American businessmen "did not understand the link between ideas and political movements, and therefore did not see the need to mount a sustained intellectual defense of their own interests." Piereson does not explain what persuaded them to abandon their lack of interest and aggressively fund conservative think tanks and foundations. Liberals--who have developed a fascination with corporations and the rise of conservative institutions--have an explanation of their own. They invest enormous importance in a memo written by Lewis Powell in 1971, making the case that corporate America must aggressively defend its interests.

My colleague John B. Judis, though, has a far more convincing explanation than a memo that changed the world. In February, he wrote in these pages that businesses adopted a more aggressive and self-interested stance because the U.S. economy changed. In the 25 years after World War II, U.S. business enjoyed a dominant and cushioned position. Therefore business leaders could afford to accommodate unions and reasonable regulations. But, as the rest of the world eventually caught up, profit margins shrank and businesses began fighting unions and looking to Washington to cut their taxes, eliminate regulations, and institute other changes geared toward their bottom line. The cultivation of conservative ideas certainly played a role. But the great shift in U.S. politics resulted not from the persuasive powers of conservative intellectuals but dramatic changes in underlying material conditions.

Arelated assumption is that new ideas are better than old ones. This meme has gained particular currency during the Social Security debate. For instance, conservative privatization advocate Peter Ferrara dismissed liberal foe Robert Ball as a "well-meaning gentleman who hasn't had a new idea in 40 years." The accusation resonates with many liberals. The Democrats' economic policy, as labor leader Andrew Stern told Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine, "is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas."

The elevation of new over old is one of those beliefs that can only survive as a background assumption, without any critical scrutiny. Nobody tries to explain why new is inherently better, because the notion is obviously ridiculous. Take Social Security, for instance. Whatever you think of the general virtues of privatization, the program has actually grown more, not less, suited to the character of the U.S. economy over the last several decades. Social Security is designed to safeguard individuals from various risks. As the economy has grown significantly riskier, the need for a program that offers people a risk-free financial bedrock has grown stronger, and the case for subjecting the program itself to more market risk has grown more dubious.

The final cause of the idea-centric view of U.S. politics is that ideas are sexy. Wealthy donors seem to be particularly prone to ideophilia. Bai recounts how Democratic operative Rob Stein showed a now semi-famous slide presentation detailing the $300-million-per-year conservative message machine to venture capitalist Andy Rappaport. "Man," Rappaport replied, "that's all it took to buy the country?" Both conservatives and liberals talk about the "battle of ideas" as though political success were simply a matter of having one thousand policy entrepreneurs chained to one thousand keyboards.

This conception of U.S. politics is especially compelling to intellectuals. It is a vision of a noble landscape in which philosopher kings hold sway. Each side has its visionaries, wonks, and pamphleteers, beavering away to see whose ideological manifestos, new syntheses, and ten-point plans will prove decisive in the next election. Writers and thinkers enjoy a heroic central role in shaping history: We--not grubby factors like attack ads or the state of the economy or the candidates' ease before the cameras--hold the future in our hands. Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe appeared before a gathering of conservatives in Washington and declared that Marxism's appeal lay in its "implicit secret promise ... of handing power over to the intellectuals." The promise is not confined to Marxism. It seems to have seduced everybody.

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dirty f*cking hippie

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Of course,

Waxman's hearings aren't about re-legislating the ozone standards. They are about political interference in EPA's decisionmaking. So handwaving distractions aside, DP, can you explain what Waxman's alleged sin here is?

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Kaela,

Beautifully put.

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It does say ...

... that the additional permits released upon the triggering of the "offramp" would be borrowed -- that they wouldn't change the total number or the trajectory of reductions.

But that provision was already built into the cost-containment of the original LW draft. So it's hard to see what's new here. Are they just trying to highlight this rhetorically? Or is there something more devious in the fine print?

Guess we'll find out tomorrow.

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More responses

I'll try to get to everything.

As for an "edit" button ... my only concern would be people who've made posts goin' back and editing them to make it seem like they were arguing for something they didn't, or to include info. that someone else pointed out later and then takin' credit for it, etc.

Very good point, and the solution I'm hoping to get is that everything changed or added in an edit would be marked as such -- maybe boldface or a different color -- and there would be a small tag at the bottom: "edited on [date]." Ideally, there would be no way to do a stealth edit.

(Don't quote me on any of this! If our tech team reads this they'll strangle me.)

... what I would like though is buttons that we could use when we want to bold, italicize, or quote

There will be a WYSIWYG.

Will contributors be able to see the article queue

The exact mechanics haven't been worked out yet, so don't take any of this as written in stone. Contributors will be able to see their own queue, and (probably/maybe) publish to their own blog on their own schedule. As to the timing of those posts being syndicated into other areas of Grist, that will be a matter for the editorial staff.

Can we please, please be able to block certain posters from the blog view?

Yes! All it takes is the click of a button, and you'll never have to read a comment by [person you hate] again! And you can turn it off, if you decide [person you hate] might kind of have a point after all. And then turn it on again when you remember that [person you hate] really is a jerk.

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OK

We can strive to improve CBA, to improve its assumptions, and use it as one factor among several in the decisionmaking process. And we can incorporate moral considerations, our legacy to future generations, wildcards that CBA is unable to deal with, and in general, a holistic approach that recognizes a more rounded version of human potential than CBA is capable of.

Sounds good to me!

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Thanks Lisa,

I guess it just sounds to me like the guy did a poor job of CBA. He used a discount rate that makes no sense. He could have used a more sensible discount rate and come to a more sensible decision. It's not inherent in CBA to have stupidly high discount rates, is it?

I guess when I envision alternatives, I see a mess. You value nature as such; someone else doesn't value nature as such; and you are at an impasse. Unless there's some common metric that you can translate your preferences into, how do you avoid a clash of unquantifiable values that will, in the end, come down to a brute test of who has more political power? It becomes a quasi-religious argument, does it?

Maybe it's just a failure of imagination, but I guess a lot of us are casting about for what those alternative ways of making decisions are, and how they'd look in practice. Maybe cause for a follow-up essay!

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The point is ...

A system that would avoid bogus offsets would be a bottleneck -- it would not be able to validate enough offsets, fast enough, to serve the cost-control function McCain is trying to make it serve. Any system that was fast enough would be so by lowering quality control. Offsets just can't do what McCain wants them to do here.

Tom, clean power plants are covered under the cap-and-trade system -- they won't be the ones generating offsets. The offsets, at least as McCain is envisioning them, will come primarily from the U.S. ag sector and from overseas (the CDM -- which is notoriously squirrelly itself).

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Ron,

I'm opting for fealty to the original source over your petty grammatical concerns. It's all about respecting history!

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clean coal!

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Undercover DFH here,

Lots of good discussion.

Bart, as usual, everything you say is sensible. I wish there were more like you. One note though: my review was not about how I see DFHs. I spent much of my young adult life surrounded by DFHs. I was a DFH, though of a rather callow variety (I was young). I have nothing against them. I consider folks like Jan who follow their convictions  far outside the mainstream quite courageous (hi Jan).

But if we really want people to take peak oil seriously, we have to defang it. People need a glide path from where they are to a more energy-sensible life. The bigger the jump they have to take, the fewer people will take it. What EFS offers them is a gargantuan leap -- from the average American life to this quasi-agrarian cult of true believers. The number of people willing to make that leap is going to be tiny, and thus the film is going to be ineffectual at creating real change. If anything it will reinforce all the worst stereotypes people bring to it.

What really bugs me is that I agree with Jon -- I don't think peak oil necessarily implies abandoning cities and retreating to rural collectives. That's a rather narrow and extreme school of peak oil thinking, and it's presented as the sum total. It seems almost consciously designed to marginalize the notion of peak oil.

I want change. This movie won't create any. That's the long and short of it.

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You go with wikipedia, BioD,

I'm sticking with Maiden.

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Bart,

Who are you arguing against? Nobody here disagrees with any of that.

But if you think there's not a substantial strain of contempt and disdain for ordinary Americans who live the standard American life afoot in the peak oil movement (and environmentalism too), you're not paying attention. And if you think ordinary Americans don't notice that contempt, again, look more closely.

Most people use emotional and tonal signals as a heuristic. They don't get into complicated arguments. If you approach them with an attitude of contempt, they'll tune you out and you'll never get to make your wonderfully rational arguments. It does not befit those who are serious about peak oil to ignore the issue just because it doesn't involve their beloved charts and graphs.

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Jonas,

Quit tossing around casual accusations of racism and genocidal tendencies unless you want to be banned.

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Fair enough, Steve.

Update posted.

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Steve,

Given that the Clinton camp has all but publicly acknowledged that this is a crass pander that will never actually become law, I suppose it's within their rights to fund it from pony sales if they like. They can say whatever they want. But in the real world, Bush is taking the gas tax holiday seriously. You think he's going to pass a new tax on oil companies? You think Congress will?

(Also, McCain hasn't said where the revenue will come from at all -- but then, that's true of all his gargantuan tax cuts.)

Josh, are you against infrastructure spending in the U.S.? Are you OK with hundreds of jobs being lost in the name of a political gimmick? If you're trying to reduce driving, reducing the cost of gas while allowing roads and bridges to crumble is an odd way to go about it.

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Thanks GreyFlcn,

Link fixed.

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Predictions

Kunstler has been monotonically predicting disaster on every front, every year, for decades now. Y2K is far from the only time the disaster hasn't panned out. Sooner or later something horrible will happen, he'll have predicted it, and a subset of people will hail him as a prophet.

History is filled with people like him, whose keen insight into socioeconomic dynamics is mixed with overweening moralism. At any given moment, there are a few of them out there, predicting that their corrupt, decadent culture is on the verge of dissolution. For any given bad development, at least one of them predicted it. None of them ever predicted any of the positive developments. They play their part in the larger discussion, but what they are not is a reliable guide to the future. I wouldn't bet a thin dime on a single one of Kunstler's predictions.

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I can't believe ...

... he's openly mocking the need for federal infrastructure revenue.

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Grist becomes sentient; replies

Ids, the relentless efficiency is toward the goal of reducing GHG emissions. It means getting the maximum amount of GHG reduction per dollar invested. Where you're conjuring up all that other stuff I have no idea, but I leave you to it.

Gar,

If you're allowed to sneak ponies into your plan, you're kind of stacking the deck. If I can just tap into the military budget at will, then hell, problem solved -- maybe I'll take $400 billion a year and end poverty too. One benefit of Sean's plan is that the incentives are tied tightly to revenue sources that are within the realm of the possible. Can you explain what makes you think the U.S. will consent to a huge cut in military spending in anything like the time frame we're talking about?

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Sean,

What the carbon tax/cap & dividend crowd seems to be suggesting is a preference for paths, and a belief that a small number of bureaucrats are smarter than a mass of creative actors.

That is a broad and entirely unjustified generalization. Nothing inherent in C&D expresses that belief. It just leaves the question of incentives off the table, to be addressed in other ways. There's no reason those other ways could not be goal-based rather than path-based.

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Also,

No matter what my next post is about, I'm going to call it "Kicking Danish Ass."

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All,

This is a fascinating and illuminating discussion. Despite the fact that feelings are obviously running high, everyone is doing a great job of remaining respectful and refraining from questioning the motives or sincerity of their interlocutors.

I vote we continue with that.

Anyway, the last post in this series will go up tomorrow, and believe me, it's kind of weak, so there will be plenty to bash and hash over!

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Yikes x 2

The enlightented, tolerant, thoughtful Liberals that over-populate our cities, will be competing with the homeless, impoverished, and racially  "diverse" individuals that are surviving on our streets everyday.  How ironic, that the people they have a bleeding heart for, will be better off in this situation, but ultimately just as doomed.

The black people are coming! The black people are coming!

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Green is the new black!

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Who?

Who finds them unconvincing because I am not an environmental ascetic? Can you cite a single person? This sounds like a construction that lives in your imagination.

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Russ,

In the case of air travel and high impact lifestyles, it is true that if you don't purge all voluntary hi-impacts from your lifestyle, you have no moral authority to call upon others to do so, or to advocate societal policies regarding them.

I'm sorry, that's just absurd on its face. I can't call for a social policy that discourages flying unless I voluntarily give up flying? The whole premise of my support for social policy is that I believe very few people will give up flying voluntarily. That's why you need public policy!

Also, the equally absurd attack on Gore's house -- which I won't get into yet again -- shows just how dangerous this business of passing judgment on other people's lives can be.

Also, Bart, I'm happy to call for public policies that will, in some incremental way, constrain my own activities -- flying, driving, whatever. Again, it is precisely my unwillingness to substantially curtail those activities on my own that leads me to believe that we need public policy.

Of course, I'm exaggerating somewhat. I do try to lighten my own footprint. I encourage others to do so, to the extent I can without feeling like a judgmental, self-righteous enviro type. I believe there are many benefits to doing so -- personal, social, economic, etc. (Pollan makes these points well in his current essay.)

But still -- there will never be enough people who voluntary do what we need. We need to advocate for public policy. And if we set the bar so high for even allowing people to advocate for public policy, we're only shooting ourselves in the foot.

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Gar,

I'm entirely open to the possibility that EDF says that, but can you point to an example?

I know that Boxer has bashed FOE in public, and yes, I found that quite distasteful. I've pushed back in the other direction too, e.g.:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/2/29/1582/30722

My point is just that there are more than enough genuine bad guys to go around. Fellow activists are rarely the real problem.

It's not just greens. Activists the world over tend to prey on one another, probably because when one activist attacks another he/she gets a response. When you attack a coal executive, he ignores you. It's more satisfying to be paid attention to. That's why so many revolutionary movements throughout history have cannibalized themselves via the vicious adjudication of finer and finer distinctions and tests of ideological purity.

(PS, Gar, Peter Barnes is at this conference I'm at -- I'll try to have a chat with him.)

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Bart,

I take your point, but I think you (and many other people) make far too much of it.

I advocate for public policy that encourages efficiency and conservation precisely because I know that the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities.

So while I think people ought to do what they can in their personal lives, there is actually no hypocrisy at all in failing to do so while still advocating for public policies that push things in that direction.

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Canis,

There should be a little player, with a "play" button. Do you not see the player? Or does nothing happen when you hit the "play" button?

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Pangolin,

Let me be crystal clear. The current path the human race is on amounts to mass suicide of about 5 billion people.

The fact that you believe this is crystal clear from the first ten million times you said it. You say it on every thread; it is your response to every subject, no matter the size or nature.

You might think that hectoring people for whom you radiate contempt (and frequently refer to as "sheeple") is a good way to avert the outcome you fear, but I assure you it is not. When people see that discussion here is dominated by strident cries that The End Is Nigh -- and, by implication, that anything else they have on their mind reveals them to be deluded and selfish -- they run the other direction. Adam and I have both had reports of people who wanted to discuss his article but were put off by the vitriol in the comments here.

I can't imagine that anyone who reads these boards doesn't know where you're coming from by now. If anyone's mind was going to be changed by it, it's changed. I think you should take the gentle advice offered more than once now and tone it down.

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Fixed

Sorry about that -- our zealous intern does not favor Joe's adventurous use of punctuation.

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Thanks sindark

Fixed the link.

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Whoa, whoa

I'm not arguing that Colbert shouldn't have invited Van Jones or that Jones shouldn't have accepted. Of course it's important to spread the word.

I only said that I don't enjoy the show, and particularly the show's interviews. They seem neither funny nor particularly enlightening. One or the other would be nice.

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Capster ...

... I believe Gar is opposed to the very notion of selling offsets ("permission to pollute") at all. So I don't think you guys are on the same page.

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John,

You accuse me of intellectual dishonesty because I point out that Roger is prominently featured in an article that is explicitly presented as making the argument you call a straw man. As far as I know he has not requested a correction. The story's now been reprinted in the Boston Globe without even the wee clarification at the bottom of the LAT piece. This is not the first time that Roger has been tragically misrepresented on this score.

I don't attack people who say adaptation is important. I call bullshit when people say it's more important than mitigation, or a substitute for mitigation. If Roger didn't keep, um, accidentally doing that, I'd probably quit calling BS on him.

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Yeah, Erik,

I don't disagree with anything you said, particularly about the funding disparity -- though I'd put responsibility for that more at the feet of the myopic and under-examined green philanthropy community than the big greens themselves. And I agree that we need both kinds of groups.

What unnerves me is that some enviros -- probably disproportionately represented on internet board like this, much more so than in actual small community grassroots groups -- seem steeped in contempt for ordinary people -- where they live, how they get around, what they buy, what they value, what they watch and read, etc. etc. But disdain that stuff enough and you end up distancing yourself from any point of contact or commonality. (And I direct this caution as much at myself as at others -- the elitism is strong within me, Anakin.)

JMG, from what I understand the story about chlorine is not nearly so clear as you make it out. Regardless, even if Clorox is a bad actor, this new product line is a step toward changing that. Perhaps if it's successful they will drop other product lines. It seems exceedingly strange to reject the company's attempt to change on the grounds that they haven't already changed. Kind of a catch 22 there. Within the bounds of their lawful obligation to make money for their shareholders, what would you have Clorox execs do?

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My point ...

... is that this looks to me like part of an effort by the Sierra Club to meet real people where they are -- i.e., in Wal-Mart, making quick choices, mainly based on price. They figure their imprimatur might sway some people to make the more sustainable choice. In return they get some money from Clorox to put toward their other initiatives.

Here and elsewhere, they've run into kneejerk anti-corporatism and accusations of "selling out."

But unless you think all corporations of a certain size are evil merely by virtue of existing -- and that even recommending their benign products and accepting their money is an unthinkable sin -- I'm having trouble seeing what the downside is here. I understand and share the concern about transparency, but the idea that grassroots green groups should stay more "pure" by remaining in their largely ineffectual niches, out of sight and out of mind for the vast bulk of the U.S. population, baffles me.

In short: what's the downside of the Sierra Club recommending clean Clorox products? Somebody explain it to me slowly.

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Well, also,

the issue of adaptation gets mixed in with sustainable development. I mean, there are relatively cheap things the world could do now to vastly reduce the harm of disease and severe weather, particularly in the third world. Climate change is going to make those things worse, but they're plenty bad now. In a sense what we'd be doing is "adapting" to our present world, to which we are far from optimized.

So adaptation quickly gets into issues of international aid, disease prevention, urban resiliency, etc. Those things are connected to climate change, and are part of the case for addressing climate change, but are issues in their own right, requiring expertise that I certainly do not have.

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Sean,

I'm not arguing against any investments. I'm just saying that there's no reason to accept the notion that that is the only legitimate use of funds. The point about putting the revenue in some sort of fund out of the reach of politicians -- a good one -- does not necessarily entail using that fund purely on the business community.

After all, broad social buy-in is also important for the health of long-term climate policy, and you won't get that if a large swath of the population is getting screwed.

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Beam me up, Glenn.

And speaking of space stuff: why is sci-fi so obsessed with encountering civilizations smarter and technologically superior to ours? What if we discovered one that was a little (or a lot) behind us?

That would certainly provide more of a moral test than mere resistance to alien overlords. Would we be alien overlords if we had the chance? History does not leave one optimistic.

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I'm not up on my space travel ...

... but isn't this a moot question pending the development of light-speed travel? It would take a lifetime just to get to Pluto, puttering along the way we do. Yes?

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L-W

I'm pretty sure L-W starts out with around 30% auctions, and ramps up to 100% auctions around 2036 or so. I'll look up the exact numbers -- but it's not zero.

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GE and Wal-Mart = "hipsters"?

Odd.

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Wait a minute ...

Are you telling me JHK think people are delusional for trying to preserve the automobile!?!?

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Odograph,

Cut to the chase, man. Jason wants us to be grateful that the people who have driven our country into recession -- possibly far worse -- with absurd risk mismanagement, financial chicanery, and self-dealing are now in charge to deal with the horrific effects.

No one -- not me at least -- is questioning the study of economics. We're not talking about a grad school bull session here, we're talking about people whose manifest incompetence is ruining thousands of their fellow citizens' lives. And now they're trying to engineer a way out of it that socializes costs while privatizing benefits and leaves them totally unaccountable. What I'm questioning is the absurd cult of expertise that seems to have give Jason a case of Stockholm Syndrome.

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Billhook,

Please try to make your points without insulting other commetners.

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Adam,

I was at the session and will try to get a post up on it over the weekend.

Suffice to say, they are not all three the same, and the session made the differences very clear. It was a fascinating panel. More later, gotta go get on a plane.

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American Power Idol

Perhaps we should update for the 21st century: Just have representatives from each energy source or technology come out on stage and put on a PR show. Then viewers could call or SMS their votes for their favorites.

"No tax breaks for you, dawg!"

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christophersj,

Trust me, friend, you're wasting your breath. LegumeSam has his beloved hammer and everything -- in particular, every post, and every comment, on this blog -- looks like a nail to him. You're not going to break through. If you're bored with the One-Trick Pony Show, just skip past it. Trust me, it's easy.

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infp

Can you explain in what way the American car, coal, and oil industries resemble free markets?

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PJD

Safety valves are a bad idea, but the Lieberman-Warner bill has some pretty savvy cost containment provisions built in (banking and borrowing will accomplish some of what you're after -- provide flexibility). More on that here:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/25/01948/0376

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holymotheragod

You sure that's not an SNL skit?

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Almost as funny as ...

... "Mr. Clemens, do you recall bleeding through your pants in 2001?"

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Sam,

Someone who writes 2000+ word blog comments is in an odd position to call others "obsessives."

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Carville sex

Ew.

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Ugh

That reporter tried to get ahold of me. I didn't call him back, because all I could think to tell him was that it was a dumbass story and he was an idiot. And I didn't want to be thus quoted.

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In fairness to Khosla ...

... I can't recall him mounting any defense of corn-based ethanol.

How is Branson doing anything but the "cellulosic is better" shtick that has become ubiquitous?

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Sean,

I appreciate your efforts to engage in substantive dialogue with Ids, but at this point it's fairly clear that nothing you say will prevent his knee from jerking. Profit is bad. Private enterprise is bad. Messing with any environmental regulation, for any reason, is bad. Mouthing anything but the Party Approved Environmental Line is bad. It's not so much that all this stuff is wrong (though it is). It's just that it's boooring, just as boring as listening to the kneejerk claims of climate skeptics. Trolls come in all flavors. Feeding them is rarely worth the time.

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MT,

No, "workable" is not the benchmark. I'm sure the engineers you speak to are confident they can make it work, as are engineers put on almost any difficult problem.

The issue is not whether it's workable but whether it's cost-effective.

Go read some of Sean Casten's many postings on this blog. New coal -- not gasification, without CCS, just new coal that meets the pollution requirements of the Clean Air Act -- is already so expensive that private investors won't touch it. It's cheaper to go with natural gas, or efficiency, or cogen, etc. etc., and soon the rapidly falling costs of solar thermal, geothermal, and wind will hit the same mark.

Again -- that's new dirty coal. Coal gasification is substantially more expensive than that, and coal gasification + CCS is far, far more expensive than that. You might bring down the costs of clean coal, but do you really think the massive operation required to capture and sequester the carbon is going to reach parity with dirty coal? Or get cheaper? Please explain how.

And remember, even the DOE says that CCS is in its infancy and is years, possibly decades in the future. By that time, renewables will be cheaper, batteries and other storage will be farther along, efficiency and green building will be farther along, etc. etc.

Is there any reason to believe that 10-20 years from now, when CCS is finally scaled up and deployed, that it will represent cheaper or faster CO2 reductions than renewables and efficiency? It's just outlandish. It would require a miracle, and even if the Baby Jesus handed us that miracle, you'd still have all the other enormous externalities of coal mining, coal ash, coal transport, etc. to contend with.

So you have to wonder why our government is not only lavishing it with subsidies, but lavishing it with subsidies far in excess of what it's offering the alternatives. And you have to wonder why any green would support this insane course of action.

Yes. Opposition is pragmatic.On Department of Energy backs away from funding Future posted 1 year, 9 months ago 12 Responses

Yes,

And auctioning rather than giving away permits is precisely a way to raise some revenue with which to offer the working class some benefits alongside the costs. It's the only way to create a system that can garner broad political support. Without auctioning, what you've got is a massive regressive tax.

If Dems in Congress were pushing a massive regressive tax to fix the healthcare system, could any progressive in good conscience support the bill because they don't see votes for a better bill? Why view the political playing field as static like that? Conservatives don't.

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SteveC,

Seems to me what greens should do is advocate for the fastest, cheapest (or most profitable), most promising pathways to reducing CO2. We should be seeking to increase the political profile of those pathways.

Coal gasification plus sequestration just doesn't fit the bill. Its high profile is entirely due to the immense political power of the coal industry. So why should we go along to get along? Why not push back? Why not push for faster, cheaper CO2 reductions?

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The problem,

is that these are starting to drift away from the initial challenge -- communicating about global warming -- and toward extremely general environmental slogans.

It is communicating about climate change in particular that is so difficult.

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Well, OK,

perhaps the point is not that the coal industry is busy grubbing after subsidies and tax breaks -- as you say, the same is true of every energy industry and, honestly, most industries in the U.S.

Perhaps the more relevant point is that renewable energy is currently booming and attracting intense private investment, while government largesse is increasingly the only source of investment in new coal.

Doesn't quite trip off the tongue ...

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Sean et al

I hope everyone saw Van Jones' post today:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/1/24/145628/140

The way I think about it (and I'm not sure how common this is), green collar is a variant on blue collar -- that is to say, it's a job available to those with the right vocational skills; doesn't require a college degree; is (or should be) unionized and pays a living wage. As Van and others use it, there's a definite class connotation -- these are jobs opened up to a class of people that have been screwed by the globalized economy, shut out of decent jobs, stuck on a treadmill of debt and insecurity. They are skilled physical labor jobs, retrofiting infrastructure to be more green and energy efficient.

There's still plenty of vagueness within those confines, but the term is not completely fuzzy and values-based.

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It's cute

Andy's gotten a little coterie of flat earthers that follow him around now. Quite a compliment, I'd say!

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Fixed

PVC changed to PV.

Great post.

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Odo,

Just a consideration: I don't think any population has ever consistently pushed for empire. It is a project of ruling elites. Sometimes they can fool people into supporting this or that imperial venture, but by and large the proles rarely sit around thinking about what country they could assume control of next. Unless and until stoked by fear, they generally want bread and peace.

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Really?

Shit. I assumed that at my, er, advanced age I would finally be past mispronouncing words that I'd read a million times but never had occasion to say. I'm still smarting from saying "seh-gyoo" for "segue" in college. Yes, college.

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Jerry,

Since libertarianism has a fairly small constituency and very few electoral prospects, it seems that you folks are going to have to choose the lesser of two evils. Typically you've chosen Republicans, for the (rather wistful) reasons you cite, but as you say, what libertarian instincts there are left in the Republican party seem purely vestigial and not long for this world.

So what's the latest thinking among your colleagues as to which evil is less evil these days?

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Tom,

Wal-Mart is doing stuff. McConnell is just talking. You don't think there's a difference?

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Humor

Hunted to extinction.

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OMG

It's worse than we thought. FAR WORSE.

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Yeah, GreenE,

I think that's the idea. I wonder if some sort of biogas could eventually substitute?

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Kit,

Mid-century, the entire U.S. economy mobilized to prepare for WWII. There was, in a sense, plenty of sacrifice -- people had to ration, they had to drop the jobs they were doing to work in factories, development of domestic products and services was suspended in order to focus on weapon making, etc. etc.

But the result was a juggernaut, a wave of prosperity and innovation that carried this country for 50 years.

There's every reason to think that a comprehensive, full-scale retooling of the economy along sustainable lines would create the same wave of prosperity.

Knowing that, and knowing how difficult it will be to get it started, why would we begin by highlighting sacrifice? Won't there be enough of our enemies doing that? Why wouldn't we highlight the extraordinary benefits we'll be creating for our children? It's just politically, strategically daft to accept your enemy's way of framing the issue.

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People,

This is the last I'll say on it, as this exact same argument has been had four zillion times in every corner of the internet and will never, ever be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

1. The 2000 election was so close that, yes, obviously Gore lost for dozens of reasons, any one of which could have tipped the balance -- bad campaigning, bad consultants, the media, SCOTUS, etc. etc. Nader was one of those reasons. He made his choices, so he takes his lumps.

2. Why didn't Nader lobby for voting reform (the need for which I couldn't agree with more)? Why didn't he do the painstaking work of party building at the local level, where third party runs can actually succeed? Why did he run again in 2004, when it was painfully clear just how much difference there is between the parties? Why didn't he do anything between 2000 and 2004, or between 2004 and now, to build a grassroots movement? Why is he bashing Clinton and endorsing Edwards rather than stumping for this year's Green Party candidates? All the questions have the same answer: He's a narcissistic attention monger who cares more about demonstrating his superior virtue than he does about the less fortunate of this country, who are suffering under reactionary government. Maybe he wasn't always that way, but he's that way now, so as far as I'm concerned he can take his moral purity and you-know-what it.

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He's an ass.

Whatever achievements he may have had decades ago, in recent political history he has clearly demonstrated that he is a dunderheaded, narcissistic fuckwit. If you turn from an effective campaigner into a destructive egomaniac, you don't get a get out of jail free card because of your past.

Others are, of course, welcome to their own opinions of him, and are welcome to refrain from reading posts in which I call him an ass, of which I fully expect there will be more.

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Authority

Having thought about it a little, I wish I'd taken a different tack. It's not particularly fruitful to debate the credentials of the people Inhofe dug up.

The more important point is that science is not done by public statements or press releases. It's done in peer-reviewed journals, and none of the people Inhofe turned up have published peer-reviewed papers questioning the basic consensus.

Also, as or more important than the number of scientists who state one or another position (whose is bigger) is the trajectory of the science. For decades, the basics of anthropocentric warming have been getting stronger and stronger, more and more fleshed out. The science is proceeding in a very clear direction.

They want it to be about people and personalities. I should have stressed more that such things are utterly irrelevant to the practice of science.

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Stick to the thread topic, guys.

You both know this isn't going anywhere productive.

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Wes,

Can you offer an example of when the Green Party has pushed the Democrats in a positive direction? When they have kept the Democrats honest? When they have done anything concretely to protect the values they wield as evidence of their moral superiority?

Specifics, I mean.

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I read a piece ...

... about McCarthy in Rolling Stone this month (can't find the URL just now). He said that what he had in mind was a small meteor striking the earth.

He is in fact a deep pessimist -- he thinks the human race will do itself in long before slow-acting problems like global warming take us out.

Quite an interesting article. Worth tracking down.

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What soundbite did they let you get in?

I hope it was "coal is the enemy of the human race"!

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Great post

One quibble:

... the GOP is committed to defeating such legislation, and not because of Jim's arguments but because they doubt the science of global warming.

I don't think that's quite right. I think the science thing was always a convenient proxy. They are committed to defeating the legislation because, 1) they are loathe to let Dems secure any victories, and 2) their corporate contributors stand to take a hit. That pretty much explains their opposition to, well, everything.

Also, on externalities: what's striking is not just that carbon emission is a negative externality that's inevitably attended by numerous  other negative externalities, but that green energy is attended by so many external social benefits. Even if carbon was taken entirely out of the picture, shifting to renewable energy would still make sense for any number of reasons.

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Source also ...

here.

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Fair

Believe me, Eric, you'll get no argument from me about the messiness of the tangle and the injustice woven into the whole situation. It sucks.

I also agree that what China's engaged in right now, however authoritarian its execution, however horrific its environmental consequences, is, at its root, profoundly humanitarian: lifting millions and millions of people out of grinding poverty.

Still, abstracted away from all these confounding considerations, the fact remains: they are on a road that's heading toward a very bad place.

The obvious solution is for the wealthy West to give them a shitload of money to shift from dirty development to sustainable development. I'll advocate for that until I'm blue in the face.

But they can't wait on that -- they can't use its absence as an excuse. They need to act on their own, no matter what we do; we need to act on our own, no matter what they do; everyone has compelling internal reasons to act, independent of what the other players do. That's my point.

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Adam,

Do you think the solar ITC is worth billions more in subsidies to ethanol? A virtually meaningless CAFE boost that can be met by "flex-fuel" vehicles? Lack of support for renewable energy more broadly?

I get that solar is your thing, but in my mind it's a real question whether solar ITC -- which I acknowledge is much needed -- justifies the larger picture.

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All,

Look at what Gore said. He did not say, contra Eric's implication, that China and the U.S. are equally responsible. He said that both countries are using the other as an excuse not to act, which is true, and that they should quit it, which is also true.

On the question of moral and financial responsibility, clearly and obviously the U.S. bears the greater share, but that's no reason for any other country not to act.

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Huckabee quote

As some of you have pointed out, the quote from Huckabee about energy consumption was wrong in the first draft of the transcript, which I was working with yesterday. I've updated the post.

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Pangolin,

Off topic: I can not spell "privilege" and "privileged" correctly to save my damn life. Even after years of getting it wrong and correcting it, I still eff it up to this day, still rely on the spellchecker (which, PS, is built into Firefox). It's like some sort of weird mental block. Glad to see I'm not alone.

On your cynicism: it's too easy. There are people up on the hill that genuinely care about this stuff, and they're fighting hard against a lot of people who don't. Dismissing the entire process as one hopelessly corrupt wash only strengthens the hand of the bad actors. People who misuse government for private gain want nothing more than for people to be disgusted and tune out from the whole thing.

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See also ...

... Matthew Yglesias:

To me, this kind of pundit fuck-up -- declining to give credit to people who deserve it -- is probably the most damaging kind. For better or for worse, Friedman's become one of the leading voices on climate change and energy issues. And he's a very influential columnist. People probably read him hoping to see which politicians, if any, someone who finds his columns convincing should be supporting. In this case, they should be strongly favoring whoever wins the Democratic nomination. But Friedman won't say so. Instead, in order to reach a pox on both houses conclusion he finds himself ignoring the very strong similarity between auctioned permit plans and carbon tax plans. But if this is the treatment candidates stake out bold eco-friendly positions are going to get from prominent advocates, then who's going to bother. You can be sure the fossil fuel industry knows which politicians are their friends and which aren't. The ones who aren't need people to have their backs, not to just get slandered coming and going.

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GreenE,

No time, but this gets it basically right.

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Rgmerk,

I get the point in your parenthetical, but I don't think the choice of supply source is entirely independent of efficiency efforts, not if we conceive of efficiency holistically. Part of efficiency will, IMO, be siting sources close to loads to reduce transmission loss. That means small- and mid-size distributed power -- not ginormous, distant coal plants.

Also, it is more efficient to build a wind turbine and harvest power in perpetuity for nothing but maintenance costs than to build coal plants that forever require tearing up new land, transporting huge amounts of coal long distances, and creating massive healthcare costs. Basically, coal, natural gas, even nuclear all have thorny, ineradicable fuel issues -- finding it, transporting it, being dependent on it (security), etc. Wind, solar, and geothermal don't. That makes them, again IMO, part of the efficiency picture.

There's obviously plenty we and C&I can do on efficiency within the bounds of the current power portfolio, but it's not crazy to say that distributed renewables are an extension of efficiency efforts in a way coal plants aren't.

As for the alleged fallacy: yes, it doesn't logically follow. There are some background assumptions. But the only way it could turn out to be false is if renewables hit some sort of price floor, above the price of coal, that condemns them to being forever more expensive. That seems fantastical to me. Do you think it's a serious possibility? I don't. So the only question (for me) is when they get cheaper, not if. If you think it won't happen until, say, 100 years hence, then yeah, you've got a good argument for going with clean coal. But everything I know indicates that properly priced they already are close to parity, and technological developments and economies of scale will continue driving costs down as fast as they have been over the last few decades.

Anyway, I take it you disagree. I'd love to hear why.

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I'm makin' my way the only way I know how

I'm a TN expat, Sean, so I get to enjoy both the proletarian pleasures of bourbon and the bourgeois pleasures of small-batch snobbery. It's the best of both worlds.

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GreenE,

I believe Tom Philpott's going to post something on just that issue later today.

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Sci-fi

BioD, here you go.

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Why build extravagantly expensive coal plants?

Because coal is cheap!

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Daniel Bell,

To me, the least interesting thing about Hansen's allusion to the Holocaust is whether you, I, Revkin, Shellenberger, whoever, "approves" of it. Approval or disapproval in this case is just posturing, displaying your peacock feathers, defining your tribal affiliations. It's boring.

Unchecked global warming will be like the Holocaust in some ways; it will be unlike the Holocaust in other ways; by examining the question, we might be able to learn something about ourselves and how we react to various challenges, how our moral and affective responses do and do not overlap. That line of inquiry is, in my opinion, vastly more interesting than giving the allusion some kind of blanket thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

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Hm ...

I find this self-promotion insufficiently shameless.

The whole piece is about Tom's farm, y'all!

Kick ass. Congrats, Tom.

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You've got me, mauryh,

I secretly love the Iraq war and don't care about climate change. If I really cared, I would stamp my feet and insist that political reality mold itself to my views. The more I cared, the louder I'd stamp!

And cosmoss, who "endorsed" Clinton?

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All right

Kucinich now has pride of place as the only presidential candidate on our homepage:

http://grist.org/

I hope we don't get in trouble with "the corporations"!

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Philip,

Once more: these were my personal observations, not "Grist's." I had nothing to do with choosing the homepage images, but I imagine Clinton and Edwards were chosen because they are among the frontrunners and are of greater interest to more people than Kucinich. Or maybe it was the funder conspiracy thing, who knows.

I did not "diss" Kucinich's policy proposals. I barely discussed them at all. I merely pointed out that he was light on specifics at the forum.

It matters not a whit what "Grist" wants, or what I want, or what you want. What matters is what can happen in reality. The reality is that Kucinich isn't going to be president. Pretending he is counts, yes, as moral onanism.

As for the protestor: Clinton was invited to speak about climate and energy. That's what everybody in the theater wanted to hear her speak about. I'm sure most of the people in the theater agree that the Iraq war is bad, but nobody wanted to hear some a**hole scream about it and waste their time. The badness of the war does not justify being a jerk. It doesn't give you a free ticket to disregard basic human respect, not only for Clinton but for everybody else at the event. Yes, he had the right to be there and the right to speak out. This is America: we all have the right to be inconsiderate pricks. Doesn't mean we should.

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All,

I didn't get into policy details with regard to the forum because I (and others at Grist) have covered the candidates' policy proposals in some detail elsewhere. Rather than restating that material here, I thought I'd share my personal impressions of the event and the candidates. Those impressions are indeed "biased," because they are mine. I'm sure other people had different impressions, and I invite them to share those impressions here.

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Michael,

Do you agree that you, Newt Gingrich, and Bjorn Lomborg occupy the center of this new debate?

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Flamingo,

I believe the rest have officially declined.

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Revkin replies

He's got a reply up on Dot Earth. We may continue this discussion soon.

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Michael,

A recent study from EPRI found that even with today's mix of electricity sources, a massive shift to PHEV's would substantially reduce both oil imports and CO2 emissions.

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The word "normal" was mine

I wrote the captions for the pictures. Probably sloppy -- I've changed it.

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This is so hilarious.

And sad. And hilarious.

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KenG,

Are you claiming that Michael Moore and/ or Al Sharpton:

1. are as influential in the Democratic party as Rush Limbaugh is in the Republican party?

2. are as extreme in their views as Rush Limbaugh is?

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Slow down

Everyone, I appreciate the anger, but I don't think it's productive at this point. The Dem leadership wants this stuff -- Pelosi in particular -- and they're doing their best to figure out how to get it in the face of enormous opposition. Anyway, right now this stuff about dropping RPS and PTC barely rises above the level of rumor.

It would be great to contact your Rep. and make it clear that you support the RPS and PTC, and that you won't forgive them if they abandon them. But right now, the leadership needs help and support, not this kneejerk pox-on-both-their houses stuff.

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Great idea, GreenNPR,

after all, what could go wrong?

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Daniel,

"determined" was a poor choice of words. The pretense of politicians now pushing cap-and-trade systems is that science, not politics, will determine the target. For now, at least among the Dem candidates and Sanders-Boxer, that's true: far as I know, scientists generally agree that to avoid atmospheric CO2 concentrations greater than 450ppm developed nations have to cut 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

Of course it's only pretense -- in practice, science alone doesn't determine a target. Couldn't. How much climate change we want to avoid vs. how much we want to just deal with is ultimately a question of values, i.e., a matter of politics.

I and many others think we will look back from the end of the 21st century and see that the transition to sustainability was a necessary, ennobling, and enormously beneficial undertaking. The idea that we should be timid about it, or slow it down, as though we're choking down a multivitamin, will appear quaint.

Yes, we are all engaging in a democratic debate and trying to build lasting, resilient institutions. No environmentalist can establish a target by fiat. But why not enter the debate boldly, seeking ambition and commitment? Why bargain away something you think is desirable on economic, environmental, and humanitarian grounds?

I don't think we're taking our medicine, I think we're Popeye getting ready to crack a can of spinach. If appeals to science get us started, then that's what it'll be for now.

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Kayser,

The cap is determined by the best recommendations of scientists. That's the whole point. Once the cap is set, the rest is automatic -- the market is supposed to figure out how to get there.

This is in contrast to a carbon tax, in which government must guess at what carbon price would yield the needed reductions, and how quickly to ramp up to that price. They will inevitably have to tweak the price repeatedly over the years, each one presenting a new opportunity for lobbying.

You might not agree, but it isn't "nonsense."

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Steve,

OK, I rescind my snark. I'm open to hearing any and all advice about how to:

1. offer tips to individuals about what they can do to get greener;
   
2. include in those tips that individuals should sell their cars, move to smaller houses in dense urban neighborhoods, take up a vegan diet, radically reduce their energy consumption, accept responsibility for a catastrophic global problem, and give up the desire for comfort and convenience; and
   
3. do so in such a way as to attract the attention of Today Show producers.

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Yeah,

politics. In a democracy. What a joke!

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She's going to talk in more detail about biofuels

tomorrow. Hopefully she'll pleasantly surprise us.

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Keith,

While I'm happy to join hands with you, sing folks songs, braid each others' hair, and wait for the day when money doesn't matter (to other people of course -- we already have our money), perhaps we should let Clinton make concrete, measurable progress in the meantime.

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indeed

When I listen to Agassi talk about developing software to manage the charging strategies of EV's flexible and mobile loads in a way that enhances integration of intermittent resources like solar and wind into the grid, I get a little weak in the knees.

A man after my own heart.

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Ralph

I can't speak for the environmentalist caricature you've painted, but for my part, I believe it is possible for us to radically reduce our use of fossil fuels and our GHG emissions with no net reduction in our quality of life (though not, of course, without huge changes). I believe that doing so is perfectly consistent with a healthy, growing economy. Above all, I believe we should get started and quit arguing about scientific conclusions that are as robust as any we could hope for, and dramatically more robust than the conclusions on which we base many of our other collective decisions (whether, for instance, to go to war).

If you really want to learn something about the people who are pushing for a clean energy economy, you're going to have to get past the comic book dirty hippie that hides under your bed. You're going to have to engage the real people here, who have a range of perspectives and a range of prescriptions. If you don't want to do that, then I can't imagine why you're hanging around here -- just to yell? You get satisfaction from that?

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Hm

It seems wrong to me, too, JMG. What about, e.g, Baltimore? But it's repeated here. Also see here, particularly the bottom part. Maybe something hinges on the definition of "major metropolitan area"? Or maybe the other cities are majority minority but not majority black?

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Zeus,

perhaps stipulating in advance that your side of the argument is rational -- those who disagree with you, by implication, irrational -- is not be the best way to enter a good faith debate.

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Siahtam

Seems like all the weight in your argument is on this:

Sure this bill isn't perfect, but it's likely the best we're going to pass in this country for quite some time ...

That said, I do think ED plays a unique and not entirely malign role in the environmental world -- something I should probably put in a separate post.

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Oops! Fixed.

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The reason ...

... they use "free market" as an ideological weapon is that the idea has immense power. Not only does it have a special place in the U.S. collective unconscious, but it is factually the case -- contra what Gar implied above -- that free markets are the financial analogue of political freedom, and open markets governed by laws (not men) have been one of the principal instruments pulling mankind out of various feudal arrangements and into the era of unbelievable plenty in which we find ourselves. In short, there are good reasons that free markets serve as a good marketing technique.

To me, then, the smart political strategy is not to accept the false marketing and inveigh against free market ideology -- thus placing yourself in the marginalized and ignored left -- but to point out that the policies in question are actually betrayals of the principles of open, free markets. We should be pushing for open, free markets, with externalities priced in and all players subject to the same laws, not accepting the fallacious marketing gimmicks of our opponents. We're letting them outplay us.

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The devil

That's not the devil who's using electricity -- that's one of the souls that's escaped from Hell. It's the hero's job to send them back.

Yes, we see the devil -- he's played by Ray Wise, of Twin Peaks fame, and his portrayal is delicious -- it's one of the things that elevates the show above mediocrity.

As for whether hybrids are seen as "chick cars," I imagine that depends heavily on what region of the country you're in and who you're asking.

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Risk

There's a lot of talking in circles going on here. What we have here is an unknowable future that contains non-trivial (yet unknowably large) chances of some very horrible things happening.

So what do we do in the face of those non-trivial but unquantifiable risks?

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Reading my mind

When I heard about this result, the first thing I thought about was "pressure-dependent chlorine nitrate photolysis".

You too?

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Bikes, possibly. Nudity, maybe.

But mustaches? Now that's utopianism too far!

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K&J,

Almost seems like you should make that into a post!

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apsmith,

You picked probably the most contentious part of my post -- the bit about costs. (I was wondering when someone would call it out.) Obviously I need to say more about that -- I plan to do a longer post in the next few days making the case in more detail.

One thing that trips us up, I think, is thinking about electricity purely in terms of generation, and the commodity costs of various generation methods. For reasons I'll get into more soon, that kind of thinking distorts as much as it clarifies. We should be thinking not about electricity as a commodity but about energy services (heat, comfort) and the systems that deliver them. That means whole systems, including generation, distribution, and load (appliances, etc.). A more holistic perspective reveals some of the hidden costs of our current hub-and-spoke centralized generation system. Anyway, more later.

(Oh, one more thing: government R&D cannot produce guaranteed new technologies in 10 years. The lifecycle for developing new technologies is very long. Commercializing and deploying existing technologies is faster, but that's just the kind of thing markets do well. Basically, we're going to have to get at least a substantial start with existing technologies.)

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Thanks BioD -- fixed the link.

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The amount of money involved in these prizes ...

... is trivial compared to virtually any government investment. They're a feel-good gesture, nothing more.

In a working market, the market itself would reward innovation. When prizes (or subsidies) are required to spur innovation, it's a sign that the market is broken.

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Hayden,

Tone it down or you're out of here.

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Yes!

Condos for families. Where are they? When we had two kids it just got ridiculously crowded, and there were no easily accessible outdoor facilities to let them burn off energy.

All you'd need to do is boost the size a bit, utilize the space you do build better (do I need a palatial master bedroom and bath?), and create a condo association that includes events and accommodations for kids as well as adults.

I'd love to live in or near a dense urban core, but it's hard out there for a family.

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The woman in that picture ...

... does not look like an "expectant mom" to me.

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I am talking to the Google guy, though.

I'll be sure to put in a biofuels question.

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Billhook,

Do me a favor and don't talk about murdering your ideological opponents, at least not here. Not even in jest.

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Hm?

Merkel's ability to pull off a green hat trick shows the importance of creating bipartisan support for environmental protection.

I've always found this a slightly odd way of putting it.

Imagine, if you will: an island with Sneetches on it, some with stars on their bellies, some without. The island is slowly sinking. The star-bellied Sneetches are in the life boats, itching to leave the island before it goes under. The non-star Sneetches are lingering on the beaches, quibbling about whether the island is really sinking, talking in ominous tones about the danger of ocean travel.

Finally, a non-star Sneetch trudges out and gets in a boat.

Would you say, "the non-Star Sneetch's willingness to finally get in the boat shows the importance of creating bipartisan support for leaving this island"? I suppose it's technically true, but it's somewhat more to the point to say that it shows the importance of non-star Sneetches getting in the f*cking boat.

Know what I mean?

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Gar,

I don't frame any criticism of offsets as attacks on offset buyers. I frame attacks on offset buyers as attacks on offset buyers. Grey's right: some offsets are good, some aren't, and I'd love to move the offset discussion along to at least that level of sophistication and away from the moralisms, wild generalizations, and bad analogies that have dominated it so far.

Wiscidea, your attempt at a gotcha point is silly -- there's no parallel where you're trying to draw one -- but regardless, you've made it four or five times now. That's enough. Next time I'll delete it.

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Kayser,

A moratorium just sounds like heavy-handed command-and-control to me. If we have a solid idea of the risk-adjusted future costs of climate change, let's internalize those costs into carbon-emitting activities. What, separately, does a moratorium accomplish?

Fair question. A reasonable price on carbon will, I think, effectively act as a moratorium. Coal plants won't make economic sense in carbon-constrained world. But it will take a while for the price on carbon to rise to sufficient levels, and for the carbon market to mature.

Meanwhile, the coal industry is racing to build a buch of plants before that happens. And once you build a coal plant, it's spewing emissions for 30, 40, 50 years. The coal industry is trying to create facts on the ground, as the Israelis say -- a set of new plants that will, just by their existence, provide enormous incentive to keep plying the coal industry with subsidies, chasing the elusive "clean" coal.

The fight over coal is right now.

GreenE,

In the short term, I'm not at all convinced that a total moratorium on coal plants (which is what a CSS requirement is, effectively, at this point) has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming policy.  A requirement for coal to be IGCC might, though.  

What better chance to shape the space of political possibility than a presidential primary? If coal moratorium becomes the consensus position of Democrats, and Democrats win Congress and the presidency, then it would certainly have a snowball's chance. It's up to us to push them toward optimal policy, not exclude the possibility right out of the gate.

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It means IGCC ...

... though to be honest, they didn't strike me as having a very good grasp on the subject. ("What is it, 'IPGG'?" "No, IGCC." "Yeah, that.")

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So ...

... while we're waiting for renewable energy to grow naturally, we should funnel billions in subsidies to the coal industry to stimulate the unnatural growth of CCS, because the coal industry is planning dozens of plants, and there's nothing we can do about that. Except give them tons of taxpayer money.

I realize that's conventional wisdom, but it's still deeply f*cked up.

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Ah, yes -- thanks

Fixed.

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Capitalism

Design a market in which every actor pays all their own costs -- including externalities -- and receives no special favors, and we're good.

In such a pure free market, good economic decisions are good ecological decisions. This is controversial, but to me it seems all but tautological.

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Great post

I suspect you're right that there's no institutional or technocratic silver bullet to managing commons well. There's no substitute for an active, engaged citizenry, holding its political institutions accountable.

That's why we're screwed.

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Fair enough

Mainly I wanted to note that I think Edwards' campaign is being a little slippery -- they mean mandating IGCC but they leave the distinct impression that they're mandating IGCC + CCS.

Or, translated to normal human being language, he's making it sound like he won't allow any more coal plants that cause global warming. But that's not what he's really saying at all.

grist.org

Michael,

My top value is getting Gaia out of the mess we have gotten her into. Everything else is secondary. Sneer at me for a pragmatist or even a weak-kneed lineral if you want. I don't care.

It's clear you really want this to be a dispute between clear-headed pragmatists and shrill ideologues. That would certainly put you in a flattering light relative to those who disagree with you. But it's just not true. To say that one path to reduced carbon emissions is cheaper and faster than another just is to say that it is more pragmatic.

If by pragmatic you mean willing to give in to the coal industry's extortion, well, on that we differ. I think that's a disastrous (read: non-pragmatic) strategy in the medium-to-long-term.

And yeah, like Gray said, the reason the Chinese are opting for coal is that it's cheap for them. Why's it cheap? Precisely because it's dirty.

Coal can be cheap and clean, but it can't be both at once.

grist.org

Michael,

You continue -- rather bizarrely in my view -- to ignore the central critique against CCS. It has nothing to do with environmentalists' or coal execs' "feelings" toward one another.

Here it is, one last time: by the time you add the costs of Clean Air Act compliance, gasification, and sequestration -- the minimal required to make coal "clean" -- you get electricity that is far more expensive than renewable sources like efficiency and wind. For any given kWh of demand, it will be cheaper to eliminate the demand or satisfy the demand with wind power than it will to satisfy it with clean coal.

So why devote billions in public subsidies to develop a form of energy that's more expensive than forms of energy we already have?

(This is leaving aside, of course, the damage wrought by coal mining and the substantial mercury and sulfur emissions generated even by CAA-compliant gasification plants.)

Nobody wants to return to a "preindustrial" economy. That's a straw man. We're seeking a post-industrial economy, where energy needs can be met without drawing down our fossil reserves.

I'd love to hear some, any, response to the critique actually being made rather than pop sociological speculation about environmentalists' feelings and biases.

grist.org

Wildleaf (et al),

By my calculations it should be impossible for a coal plant to offset all its carbon and still be cheaper than better power resources. How is this coal plant able to offset its carbon and sti