Polling from 3 key states — and 5 key districts — finds strong support for the climate and clean energy bill.  Every major recent poll has come to the same conclusion (see Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1).  Perhaps that’s why E&E News found “At least 67 senators are in play” on climate bill.

In the new polls, likely 2010 voters were asked:

“Congress is considering an energy plan that has two key parts. One part would require factories and power companies to reduce their emissions of the carbon pollution that causes global warming by 17% (20% in MO) by the year 2020 and by 80% by the year 2050. The other part would require power companies to generate 15% of their power from clean energy sources like wind and solar by the year 2025. Would you favor/oppose this entire plan?”

The results:

And this matches every recent poll:

The same question was asked in five swing House district and the result was the same:

This new polling was done August through October by “by The Mellman Group, a leading Democratic firm, and Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican firm” for The Pew Environment Group

“Our surveys consistently find that voters across these three states and five congressional districts support efforts to address global warming and require the use of more clean energy sources,” said Mark Mellman, president of The Mellman Group. “These voters see global warming as a serious threat that is happening now and favor action to reduce carbon emissions.”

It is worth adding that “all respondents heard this argument summarizing the opposition’s strongest case”:

Opponents of the plan say this cap and trade plan is nothing more than a hidden $2,000 per year tax on average families.  This proposal puts a tax on companies which will be passed on to all Americans forcing them to pay more every time they drive, buy groceries, or flip on a light switch. This backdoor tax will make our struggling economic situation worse, costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs and making it harder for average families to survive the recession. And, people in the Midwest and South who rely more on coal will end up paying significantly more for energy. It makes no sense to hurt our own economy as long as China, India, and others continue to build polluting coal plants.

And “after hearing strongly worded messages from both sides,” voters still strongly supported the climate and clean energy bill.

You can find details on the 8 polls here.  The polling reveals the strongest arguments for the climate and clean energy bill and has some interesting implications for messaging, which I will cover in a later post.

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Midwesterners are operating under the misimpression that the allocation formula in the House bill is unfair to them.  It doesn’t, although a new, flawed EPA “analysis” (”here“) suggests otherwise.

Certainly the formula is a tad ambiguous and that will no doubt be fixed in the Senate.  The figure above shows the results of analysis by MJ Bradley (click to enlarge, methodology here).

I would note that the Bradley analysis does not appear to include the energy efficiency provisions in the bill, which are projected by independent analysts and EPA to deliver major savings (see “Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household and create 650,000 jobs by 2030“).  So even the small increase in bills that you see in 2012 would in reality be lower if the House bill became law.  But I digress.

The analysis is tricky for two reasons that the EPA appears to get wrong:

The EPA offers a long explanation for why the prohibition against excess distributions would be tricky to implement in practice — and then it seems like they just ignore the provision entirely.  So, as you can see, they claim California would get more allowances than it needs to cover its emissions.  But preventing that outcome is precisely why that provision was put in the House bill in the first place.

So I just think EPA got this is doubly wrong in a way that happens to fit the misperception of the Midwesterners.  I have also spoken to other independent utility modelers who say their results do not match EPA’s.

Bottom Line:  The allocation formula appears to be pretty fair, if a tad ambiguous.  EPA needs to spell out exactly how they did their analysis, and explain if they made one or both of these two major analytical errors.  The Senate needs to be clearer on how the prohibition-against-excess-distributions provision works.

For more background, here are some excerpts from Tuesday Climate Wire (subs. req’d) story:

A new U.S. EPA analysis requested by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) is spawning a lobbying frenzy among Midwestern utilities that claim the document shows they will be treated unfairly under federal climate legislation.

They say the assessment reveals that states like California will receive a financial windfall under a global warming bill, while states like Wisconsin will not get enough help and will have to spike electricity rates as a result.

“The EPA document just confirms the formula will disadvantage Midwest states for decades to come while the coastal states will hit a ‘federal jackpot’ every year over the life of the new program,” said Zachary Hill, senior manager of federal government affairs at Alliant Energy, a Wisconsin-based utility.

Some environmentalists are counterattacking that the three-page report is flawed because its author relied on questionable methodology and analyzed only one part of a bill that passed the House earlier this year. They also say a Senate version of climate legislation is still being drafted and could make EPA’s statements moot.

“I have not been particularly impressed of certain aspects of EPA modeling,” said Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It looks to me like they’ve done what is easy for them to do, but isn’t accurate.”

At issue is the document’s focus on a section of the House legislation prohibiting utilities from receiving more carbon allowances than what is “necessary to offset any increased electricity costs” to consumers. The text was added as part of a late compromise in the House to help bring more coal-state lawmakers from states like Missouri and Indiana on board.

Under a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases like the one called for by the House measure, businesses would have to hold a limited number of allowances matching their annual greenhouse gas output.

Yet the EPA analysis argues that enactment of the bill’s ban against overallocation of allowances could be difficult because of the complexities in estimating electricity costs, among other things.

“The prohibition provision would be very difficult to implement because it would require a great deal of speculation,” the EPA document states.

Many Midwestern utilities and their supporters jumped on the data and argued that companies in some states like California would get an unfair financial boost with climate legislation. Kirk Johnson, vice president of environmental policy at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), pointed to a chart created by EPA showing that coastal states fare far better than other ones in a mandatory climate regime.

A slew of utilities in the country’s interior have been protesting the House bill since its passage. Recently, the Edison Electric Institute, which represents large investor-owned utilities and helped draft parts of the House bill, called for more free allowances to flow to these small generators in states like Ohio to bring them on board.

But Romm and supporters of congressional action on climate are questioning whether the EPA data are valid in the first place.

Romm said it was not clear, for example, whether the calculations of emissions of a state like California included imported electricity from coal-fired power plants in Arizona. The EPA assessment simply states that estimates were based on 2006-2007 “retail sales” of electricity.

Dan Lashof, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, made the same argument and added that the analysis appeared to have been put together rapidly.

Others noted that a prior analysis from M.J. Bradley & Associates LLC, an environmental consulting firm, found costs to Midwestern consumers would be minuscule under the House bill sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

At the same time, Lashof said the document might be EPA’s way of saying “it’s nervous about the language” and needs clarity. He suggested the Senate could “go a long way” toward resolving confusion on the issue by adding specific wording that no utility can get more allowances than its emissions….

EPA did not respond to criticisms from environmentalists about the document’s methodology yesterday. But in an earlier statement, spokeswoman Adora Andy questioned the idea that the new document shows the House bill would take money from interior states and give it to coastal states. She pointed to a larger investigation of the House bill performed by the agency earlier this year.

“In fact, EPA’s comprehensive analysis of the House-passed bill — an analysis that has been public since June — indicates that the bill would not impose hardship on any state,” Andy said.

The lobbying push started after Feingold’s office released the document to utilities in Wisconsin, which then began a mass e-mail chain. Feingold’s office provided the original EPA analysis to E&E after variations of the text with attached commentary starting circulating among lobbyists last Friday.

“I have heard concerns from my constituents about how the climate change bill could unfairly impact Wisconsin. The data from the EPA was requested as part of my effort to learn as much as possible about the bill and ways to improve it. I look forward to working with the administration and my colleagues in the Senate to ensure we address the serious problem of climate change without unfairly hurting Wisconsin,” Feingold said in a statement.

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It's good to see a big Midwest "land grant" agricultural program that's concerned about the Gulf Dead Zone, and upper Midwest farms' large contribution to it. But this release about a study underway at Iowa State University aiming to reduce nitrogen entering the Mississippi River from farm fields falls flat when you realize it's just a technical fix for the status quo of over-fertilized conventional commodity crops.

Half of the nitrogen that makes it to the Gulf is from commercial fertilizer, and 15 percent is from livestock manure. The rest comes from wastewater treatment plants, industry, and rainfall, according to the U.S. Geological Society.

As much as 39 percent of the nitrogen buildup in the Gulf has been traced back to the Upper Mississippi River Basin, including Iowa.

So what is a bioreactor and how can it help? From the Iowa state page:

While the pilot bioreactors are only about 12 square feet in surface area, full-scale bioreactors require about 25 square feet per acre of farmland drained and a depth of about four feet depending on the location of the tile line. A 100-acre field would require about 2,500 square feet of bioreactor space covered by a grass buffer.

Sounds expensive! And, uh, like a lot of digging. Add in all the plastic "tile" tubing that's buried in the fields to drain the fertilizer (and all attendant pesticides one would assume) off quickly and into watercourses, now it's sounding pretty wasteful. And toxic.

Organic methods of reducing such runoff would necessitate a whole different system that would by default radically limit nitrogen and pesticide pollution of the rivers, and would institute weed management techniques like crop rotation and cultivation that could be the region’s only defense against herbicide resistant GMO superweeds which are well established in the South and marching northwards.

So how about putting more funds, effort, and multi-year studies toward getting conventional farmers off of chemicals altogether, instead of building enough trenches to hide an army?

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There's one interesting aspect of the Waxman-Markey vote worth highlighting in its own post. Ron Brownstein's analysis contains this intriguing information:

The sponsors also maintained substantial support for the legislation even in the Midwestern states expected to generate the most opposition because of their heavy reliance on coal for electricity. Overall 48 of the 60 Democrats from the Midwest and the Plains states supported the bill, including 10 of 12 in Illinois, 8 of 10 in Ohio, and all eight in Michigan. ...

Still, the most widespread Democratic defections came from Southern states, most of which backed McCain over Obama last November. Eighteen of the 44 Democratic "no" votes came from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy; 40 Southern Democrats supported the bill. That means nearly a third of Southern Democrats opposed the bill, a higher defection rate than in the Midwest and Plains (20 percent), much less the Northeast (8 percent) and the Pacific West (just under 7 percent).

What you see here is the beginning of a dynamic I expect to accelerate in coming years: the divergence of the South (specifically coal-mining Appalachia) and the Midwest on energy politics. For a long while they've been hand-in-glove, the coal producers and the manufacturers who use their cheap, dirty power. But those manufacturing areas have been bleeding jobs for a long time now. Cheap power isn't doing them much good. They need new jobs. And where are those jobs going to come from? What other plausible area of expansion is there for American manufacturing? Clean energy, of course.

That's why you see Midwest Dems edging forward on this stuff. They're getting the jobs pitch. Their desperate constituents are getting the jobs pitch. This is one of the very few reasons I'm not despairing yet about the Senate vote. Right now Midwestern Dems like Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) are making concerned noises. But we saw how skillful negotiation and persuasion from Waxman and Pelosi brought most of their House counterparts around. Once Midwest Senators start hearing the same arguments -- from Obama among other people -- I predict they'll soften. (This is assuming a minimal standard of competence from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, so caveat emptor.)

The South, still in the grips of regulated monopoly coal utilities and generally eco-hostile culture, is a tougher nut to crack. But on this issue, like so many others, it's beginning to isolate itself. The South has blocked progress in the country for a long, long time, on a stunning array of issues, but it can't do so entirely alone. It needs allies, at least allies of convenience. And on energy, it's beginning to lose them. Soon it will be alone on the sinking coal ship.

Does it need to be, though? Are the coal utilities right that "clean coal" is the only alternative for the region? Pretend for a moment that it isn't about the intricate historical web of personal and financial relationships among legislators, regulators, and regulated utilities in such states. Pretend that coal utilities hadn't long since abandoned innovation in favor of regulator management. Pretend this were a substantive determination: do Southern states have the resources they need to reduce emissions in the short term and maintain thriving economies?

A flurry of new analysis from WRI and other researchers answers in the affirmative:

Our regional assessment, drawing on recent government and regional studies, suggests sufficient renewable energy resources to meet as much as 30 percent of the Southeast’s electric power needs within the next 15 years. ... With prompt policy action, energy efficiency improvements could reduce electricity use more than 10 percent by 2015 and 20 percent by 2025.

In other words, the South doesn't have to be trapped in the past. Its leaders just seem to like it that way.

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In Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a sailor contemplates the paradox of thirst amid a literal sea of water. "Water, water everywhere," he famously laments, "nor any drop to drink."

Is the sun setting on Midwest farming, or can it be saved by the dawn of a new model?

Photo: iStockphoto

Rural Midwesterners can likely identify with that iconic seaman. Cornfields stretch to the horizon, but the harvest won't end up on anyone's plate -- at least not directly. To provide useful calories for people, that corn is used to fatten animals on feedlots, or milled and processed into sweeteners, starches, and flours.

Like other U.S. citizens, Farm Belt residents increasingly turn to the supermarket, and thus the vast and far-flung industrial networks that supply it, for their sustenance. The region's corn returns to its residents in the form of corn-syrup-sweetened Coca-Cola and corn-fed McDonald's burgers.

If this odd arrangement actually generated wealth in the region, it might make some sense. But farming is such an economically disastrous endeavor in the Midwest that it's a wonder anyone still does it.

Corn-based ethanol production has been hailed as a cure-all for the region's farm economy, but as I showed last week, it's certainly no panacea.

Another, potentially more sustainable, solution would be to rethink what a farm is for. Currently, a typical farm in the Midwest produces inputs for industrial production. What if, instead, farms focused on growing fresh food for their neighbors?

At first glance, the idea is absurd. The rural Midwest doesn't seem to have the population density to support a robust local-food economy. It's one thing for specialty farms in New York state's Hudson Valley, a short drive from the nation's largest city, to "go local"; but it would never work in Iowa, where so many small towns have been all but abandoned and farms average 350 acres.

That's the conventional thinking, anyway.

But independent Minnesota farm researcher Ken Meter challenges that wisdom. In the seminal 2001 paper "Finding Food in Farm Country" [PDF], written with John Rosales of the University of Minnesota, Meter argues persuasively that the dismal economics of farm-state agriculture could be improved by developing local markets.

Meter's work shows that commodity farming, rather than building wealth, extracts money from rural communities. In a seven-county region of southeastern Minnesota in 1997, farmers brought in an impressive $866 million selling their wares. However, amazingly, they incurred $947 million in costs to do so -- a loss of a cool $80 million. Federal subsidies covered just half of that loss; the rest had to be made up by non-farming activities.

Moreover, nearly half of the $947 million in incurred expenses left the area, as payments to distant suppliers of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides, or to banks in the form of interest.

Meanwhile, though, the seven-county region's 120,000 households were busily buying food and eating it. Meter reckons that southeastern Minnesotans were spending $500 million on food annually -- and only $2 million of it on fare grown within the region. Yet if they could manage to buy just 20 percent of their food from nearby growers, that would amount to $100 million in additional sales for the region's farms, more than wiping out their $80 million loss in 1997.

In case study after case study -- not only in the Midwest, but also in farming-intensive areas in California, Arizona, and the Southeast -- Meter teases out similar scenarios. Farming for distant commodity markets sucks resources out of communities, and residents of those communities spend heavily on food from outside. He doesn't suggest that such regions turn insular and stop supplying or buying from outside markets; just that they consume a much higher portion of their food output locally.

Meter points to grassroots initiatives, such as southeast Minnesota's cooperative grocery Root River Market, as examples of how to rebuild rural food networks.

Such efforts are important, and point to a way forward for revitalizing farm economies in the Midwest and in other farming regions. Yet they may not be enough to remedy 50 years of disinvestment in local-food infrastructure. In the Midwest, the built environment -- grain elevators, freight networks -- has been carefully rigged to accommodate mass production of a few inedible commodity crops.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan asked the renegade Iowa farmer George Naylor why he kept growing commodity crops despite the ruinous economics. His reply is worth noting: "We've got a long-term investment in growing corn and soybeans; the elevator is the only buyer in town, and the elevator only pays me for corn and soybeans. The market is telling me to grow corn and soybeans, period."

Rebuilding farm economies in the heartland might require public investment in new distribution and processing infrastructure. If that sounds like a crazy socialist experiment, consider that under the current Farm Bill, the federal government props up economically and environmentally suspect commodity agriculture to the tune of about $20 billion per year. And a recent study figures that the U.S. government doles out as much as $7.3 billion subsidizing production of biofuels, mainly corn-based ethanol -- despite, at best, dubious public benefits.

These infusions of federal cash have done little to stanch economic hemorrhaging in the rural Midwest. As Meter's work shows, providing incentives for farmers to produce food for their neighbors just might. And given the energy-intensive nature of industrial agriculture, such a policy might actually offset more fossil-fuel use than boosting corn ethanol production ever could.

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FAA shuts down work on proposed wind farms

The Federal Aviation Administration has shut down work on at least 15 Midwest wind farms pending ... wait for it ... more research. Last year, Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), a critic of the Cape Wind project planned for Nantucket Sound, added an amendment to a military spending bill directing the Defense Department to study wind turbines' effect on small-aircraft radar signals. Since then, despite the fact that dozens of wind projects currently operate within sight of radar systems and have caused no discernable problems, all proposed turbines within the scope of military radar have been blocked. The stalled projects include an Illinois wind farm that would have been the nation's largest. "Until the potential effects can be quantified and possible mitigation techniques developed, it is prudent to temporarily postpone wind-turbine construction in areas where the ability of these long-range radars that protect our country might be compromised," says a Pentagon spokesflack. That sounds not-at-all promising.

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You know that massive "dead zone" that shows up every year in the Gulf of Mexico? The oxygen-starved, life-free patch of water about the size of, oh, Connecticut? That's your tax dollars at work. The zone is caused largely by nitrogen-based fertilizers, which flow downriver from farms in a small set of counties in the Midwest -- farms the Department of Agriculture subsidized to the tune of some $30 billion between 1997 and 2002. In contrast, in that period conservation programs in those same counties received ... $75 million. Love those priorities. This info comes from a new study by the Environmental Working Group. "In the crudest sense, we're paying people to pollute," says an EWG ecologist. A multistate compact to shrink the dead zone to one-third its current size by 2015 has been ineffective so far, possibly because despite incentives, the program is voluntary. The hypoxic area is a major threat to Louisiana's fishing industry, one of the world's most productive.

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Midwest states announce effort to protect children from eco-hazards

Youngsters in six Midwestern states may soon be safer from environmental dangers ranging from pesticide use in schools to toxic fumes from school-bus tailpipes. Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin lawmakers in the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators have agreed to work together to create stricter laws to prevent ill health effects in children stemming from pollution and toxic chemicals. The legislators also want to instigate a study into the long-term effects of chemicals on kids. "It seemed logical that we should work across state lines to pursue these proposals," said Iowa state Rep. Lisa Heddens.

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Final Version of Energy Bill Is Bad News for the Environment

After many weeks of pork-barrel politics conducted behind closed doors, Republican negotiators yesterday released a final version of the first big energy bill to emerge from Congress in more than a decade -- and it's a doozy. The package, which contains loads of subsidies for industry and loads of bad news for the environment, now goes back to the House and Senate for a vote; if the two chambers okay it, President Bush will enthusiastically sign it into law. Among other things, the bill would: give $14.5 billion in tax breaks to the oil, gas, and coal industries; provide major subsidies for ethanol producers; earmark $1.8 billion for research into "clean coal" (which enviros say is an oxymoron); use tax benefits to encourage nuclear power and a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska to the Midwest; smooth the way for oil and gas companies to drill on sensitive public lands with fewer environmental reviews; and let the U.S. EPA extend deadlines for polluted cities to clean up their air. On the plus side, the legislation would direct about $1.5 billion in tax breaks for energy efficiency, and it would not open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, but that's small comfort to enviros.

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Clearing one of the last major hurdles on the way to a final energy bill, negotiators from the House and Senate agreed yesterday on most parts of a plan to almost double the use of ethanol by 2012 and provide a new tax credit for diesel fuels that are blended with soybeans or other farm products. Under the plan, the U.S. gasoline industry must mix at least 5 billion gallons of ethanol into other fuels by 2012, compared to 2.7 billion gallons today. That's good news for farmers in the Midwest -- and indeed, it was senators from Midwestern states who pushed hard for the plan. The remaining roadblocks in the energy bill include conflicts over tax breaks for buyers of clean vehicles and credits for utilities that install clean technologies.

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Lakes and streams in New England have been slow to recover from the ill effects of acid rain, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. EPA. The regional reduction in acid rain lagged 10 percent behind the national rate of 40 percent in the 1990s; more worrisome, the number of "acidic systems" in New England fell by just 2 percent, whereas other areas of the country experienced dramatic improvements. (For example, the number of acidic lakes in the upper Midwest dropped by 68 percent, in the Adirondacks by 38 percent, and in the Northern Appalachians by 28 percent.) Scientists speculate that the soil in New England has lost its ability to neutralize acids and therefore the entire ecosystem will be slower to recuperate from the effects of years of acid rain. However, they hailed the report's findings of strong recoveries in other regions as evidence of the success of cutting back on the pollutants that cause acid rain.

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It ain't easy being a scientist in farm country: Researchers studying the health effects of agricultural pollution say they are being silenced by fearful superiors and harassed by individual farmers, farm groups, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds and controls much of the research done on farming. One example: JoAnn Burkholder, a well-known aquatic botanist at North Carolina State University, received death threats and demands for her resignation after warning parents not to let their children wade in polluted streams; she called such harassment "rampant." Another: James Zahn, a former federal swine researcher in Iowa, was told by his bosses that he couldn't publish his findings on health-threatening emissions from hog farms or speak to citizens groups about his study. Some Midwestern scientists blame the problem on the close relationship between the USDA and industry groups; for their part, the two parties admit to working together, but they deny any effort to muffle or skew scientific findings.

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Think of it as good news in bad packaging: The swarms of mayflies that are coating Midwestern towns this summer are a sign that the region's waterways -- most notably the Mississippi River -- are healthier than they've been in decades. The flies don't bite or sting; they just mate and die, all in the course of one day, and they do so in such large volumes that they have to be removed with power washers, shovels, and snowplows. Still, their presence is welcome: "They are an indication of the general health of the river," said John Lindell, district manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Marquette, Iowa. As efforts to clean Midwestern waterways of pollution from sewage and farm runoff have paid off, mayfly populations have boomed. This year's swarms are bigger than they've been in a half-century, with some even visible on weather-radar screens.

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Almost 6,000 people will die prematurely from respiratory illness due to emissions from power plants owned by eight utility companies that the Clinton administration sued for violating the Clean Air Act, according to a private report released yesterday. In addition to the deaths, the report predicted that the pollution would lead to 140,000 asthma attacks and 14,000 cases of acute bronchitis. Residents of the Midwest and the South will be hit hardest, and the nation's overall productivity will suffer as well, because Americans will miss an estimated 1.2 million days of work per year due to related health problems. The energy industry pooh-poohed the study, with one spokesperson calling it the "45 millionth" of its kind and questioning the science behind it. The report, which was prepared by Abt Associates and paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund, comes as the Bush administration is lobbying to change the Clean Air Act in ways that environmentalists say would weaken it.

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