The big climate bill story of the last few weeks is the breakthrough Senate climate partnership between Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.). The result -- E&E News’s latest analysis shows, “At least 67 senators are in play” on climate bill.

This isn’t to say Senate passage will be easy, but I think it is now likely, and, it is certainly far more likely than it was two months ago. That’s what makes the lead story in today’s Washington Post so flawed.  It opens:

With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.

Uhh, yeah, well, it now looks like quite a few GOP lawmakers are willing to risk that backlash. Equally lame, the article’s subhead is “Democrats Deeply Split,” and the print edition continuation headline is

With Senate Democrats still divided, climate bill’s prospects cool

Now what’s particularly amazing about that headline -- other than it gets the direction of recent political movement exactly backwards -- is that the WashPost quotes precisely one Democrat dissing the bill’s prospects, Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).  Yet no serious vote counter had ever considered Nelson a serious prospect.  For E&E, Nelson was always a “probable no.”  For Nate Silver, Nelson is a whopping 10.29 percent “probability of yes” -- the lowest of any Democrat (see “Epic Battle 3: Who are the swing Senators?”

The real news, and it’s pretty big, is actually buried at the end:

Graham and Kerry are set to meet Wednesday with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, as well as with Obama’s top climate adviser, Carol M. Browner, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to discuss a possible compromise. They are also setting up meetings with colleagues on the issue.

Wow!  Graham and Kerry are now directly engaged with the White House.  That is what should have been the headline and lead.

“There is nowhere near 60 votes for a nuclear power bill on its own. There’s not 60 votes for a cap-and-trade bill as it’s currently constructed,” Graham said in an interview. He said combining the two measures is “the only way you’ll get to 60 votes.”

It is what Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope calls “the old formula for bipartisanship.”

“They would agree on a goal, they would not agree exactly on the means to a goal, and they’d come up with a legislative solution that takes elements from both sides,” he said.

Wow again!  Even the Sierra club is warm to the deal, even knowing it will include a strong title on nuclear energy and another on drilling for oil and gas.

And Graham, for his part, has become a lightning rod for controversy back home. On Oct. 22, the American Energy Alliance, an advocacy group funded in part by energy companies, launched a radio, TV and online advertising campaign in South Carolina that has cost “close to $300,000″ so far, according to the group’s spokesman, Patrick Creighton.

Featuring a Halloween theme, the TV commercial warns of “some scary stories coming out of Washington” and says, “The latest is Senator Lindsey Graham’s support for a national energy tax called cap-and-trade.”

Creighton said the group questions why Graham says a deal will help offshore drilling, which Congress has already allowed.

Groups backing the climate bill came to Graham’s defense last week. They aired radio and television ads that featured state Sen. John Courson, a conservative Republican who became concerned about global warming after witnessing the decline of polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba.

“Out-of-state interests are attacking our Senator Lindsey Graham,” Courson says in an ad underwritten by Republicans for Environmental Protection, “because he’s backing an energy plan that produces more power in America.”

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said he is optimistic that the parties can reach an accord because Americans are not divided along party lines on global warming. “Is there bipartisanship in the country? I think clearly there is,” he said.

So the real headline is that with the prospect for serious bipartisanship, climate bill’s prospects warm.

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

Last week in Congress, I met with three people who represent the three imperatives of our efforts against global warming. One represents the morality of the endeavor, another who received the Nobel Prize represents the science behind the economics, and the third is a well known gym rat who represents the way our democracy will answer the call. All three of them share one important trait -- they are all allies in the race to save the planet from the scourge of climate change.

That the Dalai Lama is an important voice in the climate change debate might strike some as surprising. After all, he has his hands full trying to protect the religious liberty of the Tibetan people. But in our meeting with him and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Capitol, he made it abundantly clear that he considers climate change a mortal threat to his people as well as to all of the one and a half billion people who depend upon the rivers flowing from the threatened glaciers of the Himalayas.

His depiction of the already dry Tibetan plateau made it clear why the increasing desertification and loss of glacier mass are without question a scientifically proven problem demanding an international response. The Dalai Lama is more than a spiritual leader, he is a man who esteems science, and he told us the science of this is clear to him. It was perhaps a coincidence that the week the Dalai Lama came to Washington, D.C. with his message about the science of climate change, several major American corporations quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of its refusal to recognize the scientific urgency of responding to this threat.

Why is it that a humble man wrapped in saffron robes living at the foot of the Himalayas gets it when so many allegedly technologically advanced corporate leaders do not? Fortunately, a large number of American business leaders are demanding action at an accelerating rate, and are willing to say goodbye to the retrograde forces of denial to make their point.

Just down the street from the Capitol, I met another leader who won the Nobel prize in physics. Dr. Steven Chu is leading a revamped and rejuvenated Department of Energy in its efforts to jump-start the U.S. economy with a burst of clean energy innovation. What he was doing theoretically to win the Nobel Prize, he is now doing practically by pumping out several billion dollars a month in loan guarantees and grants to help new business get on their feet in the biggest, boldest, most productive economic opportunity on our horizon -- the clean energy revolution.

Secretary Chu revealed that what made him willing to leave the comforts of academia to jump into the Capitol fray was the obvious need to save the planet from climate change. But now that he is in the post, he has taken to the task of building jobs and economic growth with a full recognition of another threat, that of the possibility that China will seize the initiative and come to dominate the world's market in providing clean energy technologies. Over lunch he emphasized his concern that China's investment of about $12 million a minute will allow it to gain an insurmountable lead over us in building new clean energy industries here.

Secretary Chu made a statement that might stun many Americans. He believes China has passed America in the field of high-tech manufacturing, not low-cost manufacturing. His statement revealed a new truth. We have historically feared the ability of China to beat us due to their low-wage rates. That fear now properly should be replaced by a concern about its ability to dominate high-tech manufacturing.

But Secretary Chu has an answer to that gloomy prospect: America can become a major provider to the world of clean energy products and services, if we play our cards right.

Now he is our ally in the great race to develop and deploy high-tech, clean energy technologies so that we can fulfill America's destiny to be the arsenal of clean energy to the world, just as we were the arsenal of democracy during World War II. It is a thrill to see the billions of dollars of investment that his department is now helping to promote, using the stimulus funds we provided in Congress, because this is the real-world application of the ideas we have promoted in our book Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy. What were developing ideas and dreams in Apollo's Fire are now becoming hard realities.

The next day, I had the good fortune to meet another leader, this one a noted gym rat, a devotee of the game of basketball, who asked a me and few other congressmen to come over and play a few games of basketball at the former tennis court he had made over into hoops court at the White House. He was to be named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize the next day, but that day President Barack Obama was most notable for his crossover dribble.

That move of his would surprise many for its effectiveness and his ability to get to the hoop and score. In this way his basketball game is just like his strategy on clean energy legislation -- his forthcoming score is going to surprise a lot of people. Until we passed our energy bill in the House, most said it couldn't be done. Now they are saying we cannot get a bill out of the Senate. Those folks are wrong, just like the folks were wrong who might have thought that Obama is too skinny to go to the hoop in traffic.

The dynamic is in our direction. All the relevant pressures are breaking our way. The resignations from the Chamber of Commerce, the increasingly clear science, the signs of bipartisanship emerging in the Senate, the increasingly clear picture that we need a new horizon for job creation to pull us out of the recession, the emergence of clean energy leadership in the business community from Detroit in electric autos, to the southwest in solar thermal technologies, to the Midwest in a host of new manufacturing opportunities, all point to a real chance for success this congress.

And don't you think that the belated realization that if Congress does not act with a scalpel, the EPA will act with a cudgel, has finally brought the sudden sense of revelation in many parts of the industrial community that they had better get in to the game instead of denying it exists?

This story about the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and a presidential gym rat may sound like the set up of a pedestrian joke, but it represents a troika of forces that are on the cusp of the greatest industrial revolution yet. The Dalai Lama represents the morality of the necessity of change, the physicist represents the economic and scientific necessity of change, and the presidential gym rat represents the political possibility of a clean energy revolution. Together those three men I met last week are the embodiment of hope.

Victory is within our reach and they will help us find a way to seize it.

Related Links:

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Wash. Times: “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”

Related Links:

Graham and Kerry are in talks with White House “to discuss a possible compromise.”

Three faces of hope for climate change

The Climate Post: Smalls steps and giant leaps

First Things First: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited India last weekend to inch forward collaboration on regional security, global business, nuclear power, and climate change. U.S. papers played up the real-time meltdown between Clinton and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.

The two appeared before cameras on a trip to a new, energy-efficient office building in New Delhi, a scene in which Ramesh excoriated Western pressure on India to reduce emissions: "If this pressure is not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours"--a reference to a trade provision in the climate bill narrowly voted out of the House of Representatives last month. The New York Times and the Washington Post note the eyebrows raised by U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern, who traveled with Clinton. The Times of India apparently headlined a story, "Climate man's visit shocks India." Indian leaders say they will not accept legally binding carbon cuts, unless the nation's per capita emissions reach that of the West, an argument analyzed in this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Spending to put India on a low-carbon trajectory might run $7 billion to $12 trillion in 35 years, according to a projection by The Energy and Resources Institute.

Mean temperatures in India have risen by 0.52 degrees Celsius over the last century, lower than the roughly 0.78 degree global average rise (The Earth is warming faster at the poles than at the equator).

"The single biggest investment opportunity of the 21st century": India's private sector increasingly sees value in "clean tech." Witness Reva Electric Car's plans to mass produce $12,000 electric vehicles for sale in the West. Ajit Nazre, the KPCB partner in charge of India investments, gave an overview of trends there to VC Circle, which follows the venture capital community in India. Nazre, who lauds clean tech in the quotation atop this paragraph, recounts the motivations for change there, which are far from unique: the worldwide discussion about mitigating against dangerous climate change; fossil fuel price volatility; clean tech entrepreneurship. Add to that mix, India is home to one-third of the world's poor, in desperate need of electricity.

Cities cover two percent of humans' land footprint--but are responsible for three-quarters of emissions. The Secretary of State isn't the only Clinton interested in India. The Clinton Global Initiative, run by the former President, has teamed up with Microsoft to provide Indian cities with a free, Web-based tool, called Project 2 Degrees, to monitor their greenhouse gas emissions.

Attention to "geo-engineering" has grown in legitimacy this year, and research investment ideas range from the simple and mundane to the beautifully illustrated. The American Meteorological Society gave its (meticulously worded) blessing for research into re-engineering the global climate. Ideas abound. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu elaborated on why the world should paint its roofs white, in a TV interview with what a poll of dubious trustworthiness calls "the most trusted newscaster in America." Scientists and engineers speculate on the effectiveness of shooting disks into strategic position between the Earth and Sun, to block light.

Many of the 21st century's big investments will be small steps, and unfortunately difficult for media to recklessly dramaticize. Climate change begins at home, according to a British report on energy inefficiency in the U.K. Such mundane "climate solutions" as installing replacement pipes and water-saving faucets could reduce the carbon emissions from water heating by 30 percent. Why aren't home-improvement experts in the forefront of lobbying in every national capital?

All Politics Is Vocal: International preparations for the Copenhagen talks step up, as U.S. senators prepare to step out for their August recess.

Some observers are more sanguine than others about the prospects of an international climate agreement this year. Hopeful is the chairman of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Michael Zammit. AFP files a brief interview with Zammit, who says he is emboldened by the new U.S. administration's shift in climate policy. Note the last line, which makes this report a textbook example of how to bury the lede. Also upbeat, sort of, is tiny Tuvalu, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2020.

The U.S. Senate will come back to a hyper-busy fall schedule, with Barbara Boxer expected to introduce the climate bill around Sept. 8 and the nation groping its way through the health care debate. Battle lines are growing firmer.  The NYT suggests in an editorial that the Senate close two loopholes in the House bill, one that grandfathers existing power plants out of the Clean Air Act, and another that, the paper says, weakens offsets. Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) suggested that climate legislation have an "off-ramp," should regulations become too onerous for the economy; the administration stepped up its arguments for how farmers will thrive under a climate program.

California farmers have a bright future, according to a new report by the Pacific Institute, which DotEarth takes to task for not taking political realities into account, particularly amid predicted droughts in the West.

Will-ing Won't Make It So: If a rank-and-file reporter--that large mammal species nearly as close to extinction as polar bears--showed the aloofness toward facts displayed by WP columnist George Will now four times this year, he would be asked to clean out his desk. The Post has already printed several corrective responses to Will: an op-ed piece by science journalist Chris Mooney; a letter by Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization; an editorial plausibly inspired by Will's errors; and a news article--in the Washington Post--that explicitly smacks down his errors on Arctic Sea ice melt. Today, Will's column pokes fun at the international climate negotiation process, which comes naturally if you believe that atmospheric monitoring is a religious activity. Will doesn't veer off into fact-checking slumber until the end of the piece, when he cites the scientific reasoning Mark Steyn, a National Review writer who determined that global warming halted in 1998. Science journalist Carl Zimmer, who has swept up after Will all year, turns in this fine response.

Still No Operating Manual: Futurist thinkers, such as R. Buckminster Fuller, laid down ideas for what eventually became the environmental movement, by applying thoughts about space flight to the Earth itself. If three people, say, can fit in a tin can flung at the Moon, as they did 40 years ago this week, how many people can the Earth hold? Writers of all stripes are returning to that basic question.

Politicians and advocates routinely call for an "Apollo program for climate change," often without evaluating the aptness of the comparison. With Apollo, the federal government was the entrepreneur, inventor, engineer, and customer. That's a small step compared with the suggested task at hand--slowly reconfiguring a global economy powered largely by fossil fuels, with millions of entrepreneurs and billions of customers. Now, that's a "mission." That'll keep everyone busy. That'd be--if we get there--a giant leap for mankind.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist.

Related Links:

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

India aims for 20 gigawatts solar by 2022

“Many , including us,  find deniers’ claims irresponsible.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart delivered a twofer last night with a bit of cap-and-trade commentary followed by an interview with "Dr. Nobel McGenius" --- aka Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Stewart falls asleep out of boredom while trying to explain cap and trade, pretty much nailing what much of the political media seems to think of covering climate policy.

Chu comes across rather charmingly in his interview, and Stewart clearly enjoys talking to the star physicist, one of the most intriguing members of Obama’s cabinet. It’s interesting that Stewart asked Chu to refute climate-change-denial talking points. Chu didn’t really excel in batting down the empty claims and didn’t get a chance to talk his about pet projects, like the “high risk, big payoff” research lab (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E) he hopes to start in the Energy Department. I know that doesn’t exactly scream hilarity, but wouldn’t talking about it have given more of a window into what makes Chu tick?

Looking for more to Chu on? (Sorry.) Rolling Stone published an excellent profile of Chu last month.

Watch Stewart's cap-and-trade schtick:

The Chu interview:

Related Links:

Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

What to make of the new climate poll

In the first half of his Sunday interview after the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Obama said he was confident the Senate will pass the climate and clean energy bill. He also asserted "My strong belief is that innovation and technology are going to accelerate our process beyond these targets, and that we're going to look back and say we can do even more."

Then Obama invited Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner to chime in (transcript here). Here is the rest of the interview:

Secretary Chu: Well, I just want to reiterate what the President said in terms of how do you prepare the United States for the future - with some reasonable certainty we're going to be looking towards higher oil and gas prices 10, 20 years from today. I think what the contractors are finding out about the climate, especially in the last five years, we will be looking at a carbon constrained economy, whether it's two years from now or 10 years from now.

So this is an opportunity for the United States to say that's where the puck is going to be - to quote Wayne Gretzky - 10 or 20 years from now this is where it's going to be, so why don't we meet in this new industrial revolution, meaning that we're going to get energy, abundant energy, the clean energy. So we have the ability to lead.

And if you send this long-term signal that there is a cap on carbon and it's going to ratchet down, then industry has shown remarkable innovation over the years on everything we've done, whether it's sulfur dioxide cleanup, whether it's getting appliances more efficient. As soon as you say this is where we've got to go, we've always gotten there a lot faster, a lot cheaper. And so this bill with the cap and with the slowly ratcheting down will send a signal to industry that says, you know, get your engineers thinking about it, get your scientists thinking about it.

And once you unleash that great American research and innovation machine, it's going to be - it'll take us into this new future.

So the future part of it - this really hangs that the future part is greater in the United States; that, you know, Ford is now deeply committed, and I think GM and Chrysler are coming along, deeply committed - their future is not to lobby to sell big, heavy inefficient cars. They're realizing now in a world 10 or 20 years from now their future will be in manufacturing light, energy efficient cars, because will have to want to buy those because the price of oil will be higher.

So this is really a bill that helps give industry a certainty that this is coming along, rather than depending whether you start now or five years from now - let's start it now. I've seen over the last decade more and more industries that the United States used to have a leadership in - from nuclear power to power engineering of transformers to cars - just one by one going away, being off-shored. And we've got to capture back this high-value engineering, which is the future.

So this bill signals the ship has turned. And, you know, people can say about allowances yes, but there's a transition away from allowances that - but the cap is still there and it's still ratcheting down. So it gives industry and it gives regions time to make adjustments. But the long-term signal is very clear. So this is the heart of why it's so important.

President Obama: And I just want to point out my Secretary of Energy used a very cool Wayne Gretzky metaphor. (Laughter.)

MEDIA: There still will be ice in the future is what you're saying? (Laughter.)

Secretary Chu: You know, here's this skinny kid who is arguably the greatest hockey player in the world. And they say how - and he says, I position myself on the ice. Well, how do you do it? I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been. And so for decades we've been trying to figure out how to - you know, this is where we wanted it - do we want it back to 1950? Well, it isn't going to be back to 1950. And so this bill begins to say to America this is where it's going to be and so why don't we take the industrial lead on this.

President Obama: Carol.

Ms. Browner: Three quick points. The President talked about the 1990 Clean Air Act. During that debate industry projected that the cost per ton of sulfur dioxide reductions would be over a thousand dollars. It turned out to be a fraction because American innovation and ingenuity rose to the occasion and we found solutions that allowed us to do it more cheaply once industry had that certainty. And that story can be told time and time again about environmental rules, that's probably the clearest - same thing for CFCs. The Senate decided to ban - the bill banned CFCs, there wasn't a replacement via the guaranteed market - the investments were made, the replacements came forward, it was cheaper, much more quickly than we thought.

Secretary Chu: Catalytic converters -

MS. BROWNER: You can tell it over again. The second point I would make following on the President and Steve is what we see are industries eager to be a part of a clean energy future. The fact that the President was able to announce proposed car tailpipe standards, the first-ever greenhouse gas standards and have 10 CEOS stand with him, governors, the environmental community, I think it's a testament to where industries are going. They see the future.

And finally, we had tremendous business support for the stimulus act, which was - your Department got the lion's share of it - but it was a tremendous opportunity for new, clean energy jobs and we're starting to see that happen as the money rolls out.

MEDIA. The House vote was obviously tough, 44 Democrats took a walk, voted against it. Are the Democrats that are voting for it going to pay a price at the polls, as the Republicans predicted?

President Obama: I don't think so. It was interesting, I hear that the Republicans were shouting "BTU" on the floor.

For background on the BTU tax, read this Time story.

MEDIA. They were.

President Obama: Which I think is fascinating, because that tells me those guys are 16 years behind the times. I mean, here they are having an argument about the 1990s and we're in 2009 - and they're making the same argument on health care. They're doing the same thing. They are fighting not even the last war, they're fighting three wars ago.

The American people have moved forward. They are way ahead. And for all the fear-mongering I think that, as I said, there's a recognition that the status quo is unsustainable. We have now an additional 15 to 20 years under our belts where we've seen energy prices continue with their volatility, the environmental consequences moved more rapidly than anybody had anticipated, our economy has not been strengthened - we've actually been - we've actually fallen behind other countries on this front. The same is true on health care, what we've seen is huge increases in health care costs, less satisfaction, decreases in quality.

And so we are not going to succeed by looking backwards. We're going to succeed by moving forward. That's what has always been true about America. Nobody ever looks back on American history and says - whether it was the transition from the agricultural era to the industrial era, whether it was the shift from the industrial era to the information era - nobody ever looks back on American history and says, boy, if folks had just kept things exactly the way they were, America would be wildly successful. Those arguments are always made. At every juncture in our history there has always been somebody who says: Be afraid of the future, this is a disaster, we can't change. At every juncture.

But that's not how we operate. What we do is we say, yes, the future is going to be tough, but we see opportunity there, along with challenge, and we're going to meet it.

And it was interesting, just - because you're talking about sort of I think a Republican congressional mind set that is looking backwards, because Republican governors and mayors have been largely supportive of all the steps we've taken on clean energy.

I had a lunch with a handful of corporate CEOs and they were talking about the '90s - actually the '80s and the '90s, and they said back in the '80s everybody was sure that Japan was going to take over - remember, they bought Rockefeller Center and we had these huge trade deficits, and everybody was certain that the American era was over. And what the best companies did was not shy away from this new challenge, but they embraced it and they said, how are we going to become more efficient, how are we going to cut our costs, how are we going to get more bang for the buck? In other words, how are we going to compete?

And what these CEOs all told me is that if we as a nation can make the same transition, take the same approach on the energy sector, on health care, on education - and frankly, on government, because government is not as efficient as it needs to be - but if we had that same mind set, then as a nation we're going to be able to compete effectively.

So are there going to be nay-sayers? Absolutely. Are there going to be short-term instances where you can get political gain by scaring the bejesus out of people and telling them that their electricity rates are going to go up a thousand percent and this is going to be a tax of $3,000 - even though the studies that they cite the authors of say that these guys are just lying about these costs? Yes. Those political talking points will, in some cases, have some short-term impact.

But long term, I look at America's history and that tells me that we don't shy away from the future.

Media: Were those 44 Democrats not coming along with the future?

Obama: No, I think those 44 Democrats are sensitive to the immediate political climate of uncertainty around this issue. They've got to run every two years, and I completely understand that. As I said, our job is to make sure that we're moving this thing forward and that as this thing gets implemented everybody starts realizing this is a jobs-producer, this is pointing industry towards the future, this is going to make our environment healthier for our kids, and that this is going to be one of those situations where people look back and say - they're not going to worry about what the specific vote was in the House, what they're going to be thinking about is how America decided to move forward.

MEDIA: The Clean Air Act got about 490 votes, because more people came to understand what that bill did.

Obama: At the end?

Media: Yes.

Obama: Yes. At the end, right. Well, like I said, once things work, everybody likes it. (Laughter.)

Media: Were you able to turn all the people you called yourself?

Obama: You know what, a lot of people I called, it wasn't a matter of turning as much as it was just a matter of talking through specific concerns that people had. But, look -

Media: Did they all vote for it, or did you miss a couple?

Obama: Well, I'll have to go back, I haven't checked the roll call yet.

But, look, I just think that what we've been doing over the last six months is getting people back into fighting trim. This is a town where there was just a belief that nothing could get done. Steve used the Gretzky metaphor - I'll use just the workout metaphor, and that is, you know, when you start training again and you're pushing your body a little bit harder, sometimes it hurts. But if you keep on at it, after a while your body adjusts. And I think that's what's happening to politics in Washington. Folks have been sitting on the couch for a while, and now they're starting to feel like, hey, you know what, I can run. And that's why we're getting stuff done.

That doesn't mean there aren't going to be times where it hurts a little bit. All right?

Related Links:

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

First Things First: The Washington-to-Beijing diplomatic shuttle shows no sign of slowing down. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visited China this week to prod collaboration on clean energy technology. Chu announced the U.S. would contribute $15 million to a partnership that will study how to capture carbon dioxide emissions and trap them underground. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blogger Keith Johnson sums up mutual perceptions nicely by citing headlines in his paper (“Chu Warns China on Emissions”) and the China Daily (”Steven Chu: U.S. Ready to Lead on Climate Change”).

The New York Times reports that China is taking the lead on clean energy. The Washington Post surveys business trends there and in other Asian nations, places that “could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill.” A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory official agrees that the U.S. is already left behind in some areas. And the number of U.S. “green jobs” is on the uptick–thanks to enterprising foreign firms.

The U.S. energy industry delivered a surprise this week. Exxon announced a plan to spend $600 million on research into fuel manufactured from algae. These simple plants, which include pond scum and seaweed, are a darling of many scientists and venture capital firms. Exxon’s investment further boosts the fortunes of maverick scientist Craig Venter, whose Synthetic Genomics is a partner in the project. Just a few years ago, Exxon’s previous CEO called ethanol “moonshine,” denigrating such projects, although it should be pointed out that moonshine is largely ethanol.

Count your carbs, count your carbon: Sweden assumed the presidency of the European Union earlier this month. The nation has had a carbon tax since the early 1990s, and continues to take the climate initiative, which now extends to food labeling.

With food or anything else, counting carbs is tricky business. Every facet of the climate story this week demonstrates why. In perhaps the most direct example, the Securities and Exchange Commission will take “a very serious look” at if or how to mandate that publicly traded companies disclose their climate risks.

Elsewhere, economic modeling spats continue. In California, small-business groups funded a study that suggests that, uh, small businesses will lose more than $180 billion in output –10 percent of the total–as a result of the state’s climate law. The California Air Resources Board says the study posits the climate law would bring no savings from increased efficiency or benefits from innovation and entrepreneurship, a supposition that “contradicts the track record of three decades” of state history.

Scientists are in the profession of keeping other scientists honest, theoretically. Computer simulations are such an easy activity to squawk at, scientists themselves do, in the most rarefied places, when they see less-than-rigorous studies published. As commentary on niche modeling, Nature publishes this paper that simulates the effects of climate change on Bigfoot habitats in North America.

The Washington Post runs another op-ed that pretends that climate change does not exist. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pens this op-ed. She writes, “Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas.” Climate Post usually thinks of mountains as solid, oil as liquid, and gas as gas. The latter two phases of matter seem harder to sit on.

Palin quotes Warren Buffett, the famed investor, describing predicted burdens the bill will have on low-income Americans. Buffett himself comes under scrutiny elsewhere. Bloomberg Columnist Eric Pooley untangles the assumptions in Buffett’s statements and those of David Sokol, chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

The next day, the WP ran an editorial supportive of the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last week, possibly to balance the decision to run Palin’s op-ed the day before.  Guardian columnist, and now backseat economist, George Monbiot takes a calculator to the aspirational agreements struck last week among G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and prevent more than two degrees C of warming. The developed world would meet their targets in part by offseting their emissions with credits generated by projects in the developing world. To generate enough offset credits, Monbiot calculates, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions by 125 percent.

Climate legislation allows regulated firms to meet their carbon caps by “offsetting” emissions–buying pollution credits generated by (mostly) forestry and agriculture projects. A comprehensive Greenwire article places offsets within the wider context of how markets can find efficient ways to protect ecosystem services–the many natural processes that clean water, or air, shuttle nutrients about, or cool the climate. Two Nicholas Institute colleagues are cited in the piece.

Summer Days: “Exceptional drought” sears central and southern Texas, draining crops and straining herds. Just one of 12 boat ramps at Lake Travis, near Austin, can reach water, which is down 40 feet. Plus side: Young children can wade safely in nearby river.

Officials, scientists, and at least one reporter in Macon, Georgia, have read the White House’s June report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which predicts a future of twice as many 90-degree days, with the hottest days 10 degrees hotter than usual. “When I read those numbers, I think about what that means to me and my family and my lifestyle, and that’s a very different picture of the South than what I grew up with,” a Georgia Tech scientist said.

The summer sun has desiccated San Joaquin Valley in California, and the U.S. need only look south to consider the effects of poorly managed water.

Dryness is crippling farming in India’s massive farming sector. Bhopal residents, all 1.8 million of them, are allowed 30 minutes of water every other day, in rationing undertaken in October. Downpours and flooding in Mumbai couldn’t help Mumbai, where officials cut water use by 30 percent given a drop in lake levels.

BBC reports from Char Atra, a beleaguered island in the Ganges, where “hardcore poor” residents cope as they can with natural hydrology. Villagers have rebuilt one woman’s home because last year, “there was so much water in her hut that she had to tie her children to their bed at night to stop them from rolling and drowning.”

Does he still count?: Love him or hate him, leading NASA climatologist James Hansen has become an embattled figure. ClimateWire turns in a thoughtful analysis of just how relevant the grandfather of global warming is or isn’t in his activist period, a skeptical complement to the lighter fare published by the New Yorker recently.

Hansen and Al Gore held a colloquium in Hell, which itself, apparently, has seen a 3.8 degree average temperature rise since 1955. “[O]ccupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons,” writes Ian Frazier, a satirist, the New Yorker’s tongue-in-cheek “Shouts and Murmurs column.”

Related Links:

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Wash. Times: “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”

India aims for 20 gigawatts solar by 2022

Prepared remarks submitted in advance to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Statement of Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Member Inhofe, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on moving America toward a clean energy economy.

We face many serious and immediate challenges. American families and businesses are struggling in a recession and an increasingly competitive global economy. We have become deeply dependent on a single energy source to power our cars, trucks and airplanes, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to import nearly 60 percent of the oil we use.

We face an unprecedented threat to our very way of life from climate change.

To solve these challenges, the Administration and Congress need to work together to spur a revolution in clean energy technologies. The President and I applauded the historic action by the House to pass a clean energy bill, and we look forward to working with the Senate to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

I want to focus today on the threat of climate change. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that carbon dioxide from human activity has increased the atmospheric level of CO2 by roughly 40 percent, a level one- third higher than any time in the last 800,000 years. There is also a consensus that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions have caused our planet to change. Already, we have seen the loss of about half of the summer arctic polar ice cap since the 1950s, a dramatically accelerating rise in sea level, and the loss of over two thousand cubic miles of glacial ice, not on geological time scales but over a mere hundred years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007 that, if we continued on this course, there was a 50 percent chance of global average air temperature increasing by more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit in this century. A 2009 MIT study found a fifty percent chance of a 9 degree rise in this century and a 17 percent chance of a nearly 11 degree increase. 11 degrees may not sound like much, but, during the last ice age, when Canada and much of the United States were covered all year in a glacier, the world was only about 11 degrees colder. A world 11 degrees warmer will be very different as well. Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Denial of the climate change problem will not change our destiny; a comprehensive energy and climate bill that caps and then reduces carbon emissions will.

America has the opportunity to lead a new industrial revolution of creating sustainable, clean energy. We can sit on the sidelines and deny the scientific facts, or we can get in the game and play to win.

Statement of Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Minority Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify about new legislation to get America running on clean energy. Let me begin by commending you for starting Senate hearings on this, the second legislative day after the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Immediately after that historic vote on June 26, President Obama called upon the Senate to demonstrate the same commitment we saw in the House to building a clean-energy foundation for a strong American economy. I am grateful that this Committee has wasted no time in answering that call.

The House bill reflects the principles the President believes are essential for our nation’s energy future: decreasing our dependency on foreign oil, creating millions of new jobs in emerging clean-energy technologies, and reducing the pollution that is a danger to our children. I know there are a variety of proposals pending in the Senate that have the same goals, and I am looking forward to working with all the Committee members as you move forward on this effort.

Clean energy is to this decade and the next what the Space Race was to the 1950s and ‘60s, and America is behind. Governments in Asia and Europe are ahead of the United States in making aggressive investments in clean-energy technology. American businesses need strong incentives and investments now in order for this nation to lead the 21st Century global economy. We are also coming late to the task of leading the world’s major greenhouse-gas emitters to reverse our collective emissions’ growth in time to avert catastrophic climactic changes that would severely harm America’s economy and national security within our children’s lifetimes. The necessary shared effort will not begin in earnest unless and until the United States leads the charge.

The advantage of the kind of legislation the President has called for is that it ramps up investment in developing new clean-energy technologies while giving companies an effective incentive to use those technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution. It does so without raising taxes or increasing the deficit.

I do not mean to say that we can get something for nothing. But according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the net cost to the average American household in 2020 would be less than 50 cents a day. For the wealthiest fifth of American households, the net cost would be less than 70 cents a day. The poorest fifth would actually see a net gain of more than ten cents a day. That is what your economists have reported to you.

People have pointed out that the per-household impact would not be uniform across the country – that the costs would be higher in a few states where people drive very long distances and rely almost exclusively on coal for electricity. Yet even if the cost borne by the average family in such a state were double the national average, it still would be just a dollar a day.

That figure does not account for the economic benefits of saving our children from living with increased drought, fire, pests, flooding, and disease. It does not account for the benefit of decreasing our dependency on foreign oil. Can anyone honestly say that the head of an American household would not spend a dollar a day to safeguard the wellbeing of his or her children, to reduce the amount of money that we send overseas for oil, to place American entrepreneurs back in the lead of the global marketplace, and to create new American jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced?

Labor unions support this kind of legislation because they know it will indeed create millions of high-paying American jobs that cannot be exported. Manufacturing companies support it because they know it will provide needed investment in research and development while creating markets for the American clean-energy technologies born from that investment.

Electric utilities support it because they know it will expand our use of reliable, domestic sources of energy like wind, solar, geothermal – and, yes, safer nuclear power – and, yes, cleaner coal.

Consumer advocates support it because they know it will strengthen the long-term economic foundation for all Americans without imposing short-term economic hardship on any Americans.

And environmental groups support it because they know it is our best chance of preventing catastrophic harm to public health and our natural environment.

Of course, there are still interest groups out there opposing this effort. But I think the tide is turning against the defenders of the status quo, who want more of the same policies that made us dependent on foreign oil and that caused America to forfeit the lead in the burgeoning global competition to sell clean-energy technology. I think Americans want reform that harnesses the country’s can-do spirit. I think they want to fuel long-term economic recovery with a wise investment that sparks a clean-energy transformation in our economy and that protects our children and grandchildren.

That is what the President wants. That is what I want. I believe many Senators want the same thing. Please consider the Environmental Protection Agency a partner in this effort to get America running on clean energy. And, please, keep up the momentum.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS VILSACK, SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE, BEFORE THE SENATE ENVIORNMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE, JULY 7, 2009

Madam Chairman and members of the Committee thank you for the opportunity to discuss the role of agriculture and forestry in addressing climate change and in building our Nation’s renewable energy capabilities. I am pleased to be joined today by Secretaries Chu and Salazar and Administrator Jackson. USDA, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency maintain a close partnership in our work on climate change and renewable energy.

Climate change is one of the great challenges facing the United States and the world. The science is clear that the planet is already warming. While climate change will affect us all, there are particular vulnerabilities and challenges for farmers, ranchers, and those who make a living off the land. I would like to commend the House for its extraordinary efforts in developing historic, comprehensive energy and climate legislation that creates the framework for U.S. leadership on climate change.

I, along with Secretary Chu, Administrator Jackson, and the Administration look forward to working with the Senate as you begin your deliberations. Our hope is that Congress enacts a bill that meets the President’s objectives of creating an efficient, cost-effective, and comprehensive approach that leverages the Nation’s capacity for innovation, creates jobs, reduces dependence on foreign oil, and protects our children from ills associated with pollution.

I believe it is crucial that we engage the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners. This issue is too important for agriculture and forestry to sit on the sidelines. A viable carbon offsets market – one that rewards farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners for stewardship activities – has the potential to play a very important role in helping America wean itself from foreign oil. It also represents a significant building block to revitalizing rural America. Landowners can also play an important role in providing low-carbon renewable energy.

The potential of our working lands to generate greenhouse gas reductions is significant. In fact today, our lands are a net sink of greenhouse gases. Based on the latest statistics from EPA’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, forest and agricultural lands in the U.S. take up more greenhouse gases in the form of carbon dioxide than is released from all of our agricultural operations1. The situation is different in developing countries, where agriculture and deforestation play a much greaterole in emissions. In aggregate, land uses are responsible for over one-third of ggreenhouse gas emissions. It is difficult to see how greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere can be stabilized without policies that target emissions and carbon sequestration on agricultural and forestlands. As a result, it is vital that America demonstrate how the inclusion of agriculture and forests in our domestic approach to climate change can produce real and lasting benefits to both landowners and the climate.

Under climate change legislation the farm sector will experience both costs and benefits. Energy price increases can impact row crop production and other agricultural activities. For example, fertilizer and fuel costs account for 50 to 60 percent of variable costs of production for corn. Because of higher personal transportation expenditures, rural households are more likely than urban households to feel the pinch of increased gas prices.

But, I believe that there are significant opportunities for rural landowners in a cap and trade program that recognizes the contribution that farms, ranches, and forests can make in addressing climate change. Rural landowners can benefit from incentives in climate and energy legislation that reward production of renewable energy such as wind and bioenergy. A number of renewable energy technologies such as anaerobic digesters, geothermal, and wind power can reduce farmers’ reliance on fossil fuels. In cooperation with the Department of Energy, USDA will contribute to promoting these technologies and our outreach and extension networks will need to help make them available to farmers, ranchers, and land managers.

These technologies and promotion of a clean energy economy will also stimulate the creation of new jobs. As farmers, ranchers, and land managers look to install an anaerobic digester or build a wind farm – people will be needed to build the machines and install the systems. And, because many of these technologies will be utilized in rural areas – many of these jobs could be created in rural America. These farmers, ranchers, and forest owners can also benefit from legislation that creates markets for greenhouse gas offset credits.

To be effective in addressing climate change, the offsets market will need to accomplish two goals. First, the market will need to recognize the scale of the changes needed and the infrastructure that will be required to deliver information, manage data and resources, and maintain records and registries. Second, ensuring the environmental integrity of agricultural and forest offsets is critical to addressing climate change and maintaining public confidence in the carbon offset program.

To produce meaningful emissions reductions, an offsets program will likely require the participation of thousands of landowners. I believe USDA, working with EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, and other relevant agencies can play a very important role in getting offsets to scale while ensuring the integrity of the offsets program. We look forward to partnering with our fellow agencies to work with the Senate in designing a credible offsets program.

Let me give you a few examples of the scale of activities that USDA provides nation-wide. Under the Conservation Reserve Program, USDA manages over 750,000 contracts with landowners who have taken environmentally sensitive land out of production for at least 10 years. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) manages a network of over 1,300 registered technical service providers nationwide.

It is important that agriculture and forestry offsets have high standards of environmental integrity. Quantification and reporting systems need to be rigorous, verifiable, and transparent – and review and auditing systems will need to be in place. Uncertainties must be accounted for and reduced. Greenhouse gas benefits accrued through carbon sequestration will need to be monitored over time to ensure that the benefits are maintained and that reversals are accounted for if they occur. If these principles are followed, the resulting offsets should be real, additional, verifiable, and lasting.

USDA can support this effort through its scientific expertise, and technical capabilities, specific to greenhouse gases, carbon sequestration, and offsets. For example, in 2006, USDA released guidance to farm and forest landowners to allow them to estimate their greenhouse gas footprints. We are developing user-friendly tools that can help farmers and landowners make these calculations.

I would like to close by again thanking the Committee for taking up this important issue for agriculture, rural lands, and the environment. I believe that agriculture and forestry can play a vital role in addressing climate change and that, if done properly, there are significant opportunities for landowners to profit from doing right by the environment. USDA is ready to help make this happen.

Statement of Kenneth L. Salazar, Secretary, Department of the Interior, Hearing on Energy and Climate Legislation, Committee on Environment and Public Works, U.S. Senate, July 7, 2009

Chairman Boxer, Ranking Senator Inhofe and members of the Committee, thank you for your work on this important challenge facing our Nation.

I am here today to urge this committee to join with the Administration in seeking strong and effective legislation that will steer our nation toward a new energy economy that brings new jobs to our nation and improves our energy security . As the President has said, there is a choice before us: we can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.

Interior is our nation’s largest landowner with jurisdiction over 20% of the land mass of the United States and 1.75 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). As America’s largest water provider and land and wildlife manager, Interior is already faced with the impacts of climate change on land, water and wildlife. Interior will thus play a key role in how the U.S. Government addresses and adapt to these climate change issues. Interior’s 6,000 scientists and 14,000 land managers are already documenting these impacts and developing systems to respond to them on and across public lands.

Interior’s land base includes some of the most productive renewable energy resources: solar in the Southwest; wind in the Atlantic, on the Great Plains and in the West; and geothermal in the West. We are working to develop these assets to help power President Obama’s vision for a new energy economy. Interior’s vast land ownership also gives it an important role in siting the new transmission lines needed to bring stranded renewable energy assets to load centers.

As the Secretary of the Interior, I can see the economic opportunity presented by the new energy economy. Since coming into office, we have prioritized the development of renewable energy on our public lands and our offshore waters. American business is responding. Companies are investing in wind farms off the Atlantic seacoast, solar facilities in the Southwest, and geothermal energy projects throughout the west. These new energy sources produce no greenhouse gases and, once installed, they harness abundant, renewable energy that nature itself provides.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently reported out legislation that will help to promote the development of this renewable energy opportunity. But we will not fully unleash the potential of the clean energy economy unless this committee, and the Senate, put an upper limit on the emissions of heat-trapping gases that are damaging our environment. Doing so will level the playing field and demonstrate that our nation is serious about building a new, clean energy economy. It will trigger even more massive investment in new clean energy projects throughout our nation.

In addition to seeing the potential economic opportunity presented by addressing climate change, the Interior Department is in a unique position to see the negative impacts that climate change is having on our land, water and wildlife resources. Our land managers are confronting longer and hotter fire seasons, new incursions of invasive species, and the early impacts of sea rise; our wildlife managers are dealing with climate change-induced impacts on wildlife mating and migration habits and species interactions; and our water managers are factoring new precipitation patterns into their planning decisions, as snow packs diminish and more extreme wet and dry periods challenge long-standing water management practices.

The Interior Department is participating actively in the interagency process on adaptation policy being led by the White House, and I look forward to working with your committee as well as you consider adaptation strategies that address the impact that climate change is having on our resources. We have been developing a unified approach to adaptation challenges through the Department of the Interior, and we look forward to providing the committee with the benefit of the expertise that our land, wildlife and water managers can provide on this subject. Our Department’s developing experience with adaptive management strategies for resource management can provide a template for future efforts. For example, snowpack declines in the Northwest and Mountain-West have been accompanied by earlier annual peaks in river run-off as documented in stream gage monitoring and analyses across the lower 48 States and throughout Alaska. Land managers facing this reality are analyzing potentially substantial changes in management requirements for fish and wildlife and water resources. Interior managers are also learning to be strategic in rebuilding facilities that are lost to such natural disasters as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Fish and Wildlife Service has repaired or replaced dozens of facilities at refuges along the coast damaged by these storms. In the process of rebuilding facilities for people across the region to enjoy, the Service decided not to replace some facilities judged to be too vulnerable and has relocated others to more secure locations.

In all of these activities, the Department of the Interior is putting a premium on integrating our dual science and land management roles. Scientists in our United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, for example, are working hand-in-glove with our land, wildlife and water managers who are responsible for the more than 500 million acres of public lands that we oversee. We are focused on ensuring that our USGS and other agency scientists are collecting and analyzing data that are providing relevant scientific information about natural resource conditions, issues, and problems to decision-makers in the Department, at all levels of government, and the general public. This is, and needs to be, an interactive process, as our land, wildlife and water managers work with our scientists and help focus the nature of their research and analysis on the reality of on-the-ground changes. This information – baseline scientific information, trends detection, modeling and forecasting, together with the effective dissemination of information and decision support tools – is key to understanding and addressing climate change and its effects.

Finally, I look forward to working with the committee as you address the opportunities for carbon reduction provided by the “biological sequestration” of carbon in our Federal lands. As you know, pursuant to section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-140), the USGS has the responsibility, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, to conduct national assessments of biologic carbon sequestration, ecosystem greenhouse gas fluxes, and potential effects of management practices and policies on ecosystem carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions. The USGS is well underway with this work. Combined with the work of other agencies, it will help to enhance the scientific underpinning needed for a domestic offsets program that focuses on carbon reductions from land use practices.

I also would like to point out that the Interior Department has been engaged in a variety of projects that will teach us a great deal about biological sequestration, ranging from wetlands restoration projects in the mid-Atlantic and southeast, to afforestation projects in the lower Mississippi Valley, and habitat restoration projects in the west. The methodologies that USGS is developing at the direction of Congress, and the experience of our land managers in pursuing these projects as part of our broader ecosystem responsibilities, should be useful to the committee as you develop an offsets program that credits verifiable carbon reductions that are associated additional and with environmentally sound land management practices.

Madame Chairman, a problem as complex as climate change takes the coordinated efforts between all the branches of the government and all the governments of the world. The Department of the Interior stands ready with our shoulder to the wheel to contribute to this effort.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

Opponents of this effort claim the nation cannot afford to act at this time. I disagree, and so do the Environmental Protection Agency and the Congressional Budget Office. These organizations estimate that meeting the greenhouse gas targets in the House bill can be achieved at an annual cost between 22 to 48 cents per day per household in 2020. That’s about the price of a postage stamp per day.

History suggests that the actual costs could be even lower. The costs to save our ozone layer, to reduce smog with catalytic converters, and to scrub the sulfur dioxide from power plants were all far less than estimated. For example, according to the EPA, the SO2 reductions will be achieved for one-quarter of the estimated cost. The right clean energy incentives will start the great American research and innovation machine, and I am confident that American ingenuity will lead to better and cheaper climate solutions.

We can make significant near-term carbon reductions through energy efficiency. We use 40 percent of our energy in buildings. I firmly believe that, with today’s technologies, we can build new homes and buildings that use 40 percent less energy than today’s new buildings and therefore save money on energy bills. By developing a system integration approach, I believe we could eventually build buildings that use 80 percent less energy with investments that pay for themselves in less than 15 years through reduced energy bills. Similarly, we could retrofit existing buildings to achieve 50 percent energy savings with investments that will pay for themselves.

A comprehensive energy and climate bill will drive American innovation in fuel efficient automobiles and the development of advanced batteries for electric vehicles. It will offer incentives to re-start our nuclear power industry and encourage utilities to invest in carbon capture and sequestration. It will drive investments in wind and solar power and next generation biofuels from grasses and agricultural waste.

In addition to deploying the technologies we have today and can see on the horizon, we must pursue truly transformative solutions. Climate experts, such as the IPCC, tell us we must reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent by mid-century to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that may avoid the worst consequences of climate change. To achieve our long-term goals in a more cost-effective way, we will need a sustained commitment to research and development. Only R&D can deliver a new generation of clean technologies.

Let me close with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King. His words seem so fitting for today’s climate crisis: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

Now is the time to take comprehensive and sustained action. With the leadership of the President, the actions of this Congress, and the support and participation of the American people, I am confident that we will succeed.

Thank you. I would be glad to answer your questions at this time.

Statement of Governor Haley Barbour, State of Mississippi, Before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, July 7, 2009

Madam Chairman, Senator Inhofe and committee members: Thank you for inviting me to testify before you on the critical issues of energy policy and America’s future.

America’s future is so tied to out energy policy that this hearing could be held before the Senate Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Finance, Energy or Budget Committee and be equally important and relevant to their work.

Energy policy significantly impacts every aspect of American foreign and domestic policy. Energy is the lifeblood of our economy; our national security depends on it. When we consider energy policy, it must be in the broadest context.

As we all know, our country is in the worst economic crisis in decades. It is being felt at the kitchen table of every family, as unemployment is at the highest rate since 1983. Our government is vastly increasing our national debt to get our economy “back on track.” Even though everyone knows the national debt is increasing at an unsustainable rate, we are taking the risk because robust economic growth is the only way to solve our economic problems.

Yet, as we strive to get our economy back growing and more Americans back on the job, our government is considering an energy policy, as set up in the Waxman-Markey bill and the President’s budget, that would make it much harder for the economy to grow; a policy that is, in fact, anti-growth because it will necessarily and purposefully raise the costs of energy for families and businesses, especially manufacturing…for our economy as a whole.

The cap and trade tax, the $81 billion of tax increases on the oil and gas industry contained in the President’s budget and the Waxman-Markey renewable energy standard would all drive up costs and drive down economic growth. Don’t take my word for it. President Obama, then a candidate, said to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, “Under my cap and trade plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

And before becoming Energy Secretary, Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal in September 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

President Obama’s OMB Director, Peter Orszag, in April 2008 said, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away. Indeed, the price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program because they would be the most important mechanism through which businesses and households would be encouraged to make investment and behavioral changes that reduced CO2 emissions.”

Just last month in an interview with Forbes magazine, the CEO of American Electric Power (AEP), Mike Morris, said the cap and trade tax would cause his electricity rates to go up 30% to 50%.

The gigantic effect of energy policy on American life means Congress should work particularly hard to ensure Americans know the facts about the policies Congress is considering: To the contrary, the House of Representatives added more than 300 pages of its 1200 page energy bill just a few hours before it was brought to the floor and passed. This is just the opposite of what is needed.

Last month the Southern Growth Policies Board, a forty-year old regional economic development group for thirteen states, held its annual conference. The more than four hundred attendees were most concerned about the costs associated with the cap and trade tax, the renewable energy mandate and the $81 billion in tax increases on the oil and gas industry. They were concerned about the costs to families as well as the costs to the economy.

At this conference there was a great deal of support for conservation and energy efficiency-both indispensable measures in our energy future-and a lot of hope and confidence was expressed for renewables like wind, biofuels, solar and even some more exotic sources in the future.

Nevertheless, it was agreed that for a long time there will be a need for traditional fuels like oil, gas, coal and nuclear, which generates no greenhouse gas emissions. Clean coal technologies and projects were presented and praised. But the biggest and most discussed issue at this conference was the cost of energy policy proposals like the cap and trade tax, the renewable electricity standard and the tax increases proposed for the oil and gas industry.

There was no question about who would bear these costs: the consumer. The one who turns on the light switch, starts the washing machine, fuels up the car with gas or drives the truck delivering goods across town for across the country; that is who will pay.

Moreover, these increased energy costs will hit small businesses hard and will particularly hurt energy-intensive industries like manufacturing or computer processing. Some manufacturers even predicted these energy policies would cause electricity rate increases that would make their U.S. manufacturing facilities uncompetitive compared to facilities in China, India, Brazil or Russia.

Dan DiMicco, the CEO of Nucor Steel, America’s largest steel manufacturer, said the cap and trade tax would mean his company would close U.S. plants, shifting production to China. Making a ton of steel in China results in five-times grater emissions of greenhouse gases than to produce that same ton of steel in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that at a time when growing our economy is our number one priority, Congress is considering a bill that would reduce economic growth. When families are suffering because of a serious recession, Congress is considering a bill to drive up the cost of electricity that cools those families’ homes and the gasoline that runs their cars. As U.S. manufacturing faces stiff foreign competition, Congress is considering a bill that would make our manufacturers less competitive.

The concerns I’ve cited are serious, even if the cap and trade tax works as planned. But many Americans worry it will be an Enron-style financial scheme where Wall Street manipulators make giant profits while ratepayers, motorists and Main Street businesses pay greatly increased costs.

Environmentalists rightly worry about the assumed large scale use of international offsets, saying they are not verifiable. Others say the foreign offsets are claimed by CBO to reduce the price of allowances by 70%, but that’s highly questionable.

A particularly scary feature of the cap and trade tax regime is that anyone can purchase emissions permits. There is nothing to stop a large government like China from investing heavily in CO2 emission permits instead of U.S. Treasuries. The effect, of course, would be that U.S.-located industries could not buy those permits or that they would have to pay much higher prices for the permits, thereby making our businesses even more uncompetitive with foreign (read: Chinese) manufacturers. Market manipulation by speculators is bad enough; driving up demand and prices by foreign competitors is anathema.

The right energy policy for our country is more American energy, using all sources of American energy…all of the above. We have abundant, affordable, reliable American energy. Let’s use it rather than having a policy that makes energy more expensive.

I’d be glad to discuss more American energy during questions or to try to answer any other questions.

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

Merkley wants Senate jobs bill to help finance building efficiency retrofits

International climate negotiations often seem like some sort of cosmic science fair project -- an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors. There's a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light.

Faith in the UN climate process has dimmed. Joe Romm calls it a "dead man walking." The Copenhagen talks in December are generally discussed with the same dissonant mixture of urgency ("You have to do it in Copenhagen," says UNFCCC chair Yvo de Boer) and fatalism ("There is no movement," says German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel) as the last dozen rounds of international talks.

The Obama administration knows the danger of sclerosis and is working on several fronts to regain a sense of momentum. A good bit of that work will happen during this busy week, which will take the president to Russia to meet with President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin; he'll deliver a major speech on U.S.-Russia relations today. On Wednesday, he heads to Italy for the latest meeting of the G8 countries (US, France, UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada). On Thursday, on the sidelines of the G8, Obama will convene a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (the G8 plus Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa). On Friday he'll head to Ghana and on Saturday he'll deliver a major speech on development and democracy.

At all these events the issue of climate change will play a role. All will reveal something about the Obama administration's approach to international climate negotiations.

The Grand Plan

International climate negotiations have primarily been channeled through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but many in the international community are losing faith in that process, or at least in its monopoly on negotiations. Getting 192 countries to sign on to a meaningful treaty is nigh impossible; the lowest common denominator among 192 wildly diverse countries turns out to be pretty damn low.

Oddly, it was the Bush administration that first saw a way around the thicket. In May 2007 it announced a series of Major Economies Meetings on climate and energy security. The idea was that the largest greenhouse gas emitters could more easily find areas of agreement working directly with one another, and that what consensus they could find would help break the logjam in the UNFCCC process.

The sincerity of Bush's effort was widely doubted -- he (in)famously advocated for purely voluntary measures -- but the basic wisdom of the strategy is apparent to, among others, the Obama administration. In fact Obama seems to be taking it even farther, working not only with smaller groups like the Major Economies Forum (MEF) and the G8, but bilaterally with other large emitters. What shape these smaller deals take could vary, from shared targets to technology R&D agreements, but again, the idea is to show that big emitters are finally acting, taking real steps. This will, it is hoped, cut through the Gordian you-go-first knot sure to bedevil the Copenhagen climate talks.

The strategy began with Todd Stern's initial efforts in China, but "you can definitely say we are looking for other partners," an administration official said.

Russia

Most members of the international community had written Russia off when it comes to climate change. It grudgingly ratified Kyoto back in 2004, serving as the crucial final signatory needed to put the treaty into effect. But since then it's focused on nothing but often dirty and inefficient means of expanding its economy. Just last month, in what many interpreted as a thumb in the eye of the UN process, it announced a "climate plan" that would increase its greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020.

The reason Russia, a Kyoto signatory, can grow its emissions so heedlessly is that emission baselines for the UN process were set at 1990 levels. Of course in 1992 Russia's economy cratered, and with it the country's emissions. The damage was so great that the economy would need to grow substantially to meet a target of 10-15% below 1990 levels by 2020 -- and that's what it plans to do.

Most observers expected Obama to focus exclusively on arms control and the financial crisis when he goes to Russia, since progress on climate seems so hopeless. But as The Guardian reports, the administration fully intends to forge a deal on joint climate action. It's been pulling its ideas from a new report from the Center on American Progress.

The goal is to coax Russia into accepting strong sticks (mandatory targets at the Copenhagen talks) by offering it carrots. One is help entering carbon trading markets. The country is thought to be sitting on some 1.9 billion euros worth of carbon credits -- one of the main reasons it signed Kyoto -- but the government does not have the capacity or infrastructure to monitor emissions and approve projects. The U.S. could help with that, since it has considerable experience with such markets.

The other carrot is efficiency. Russia's energy intensity -- energy use per unit of GDP -- is twice America's, and the highest among the world's high energy consuming countries. Targeted exchange of efficiency technology and know-how could not only bend Russia's emissions curve but make its economy more productive. It's a win-win, but again, the government needs help. (Interestingly, Russia just announced that it will ban some incandescent lights by 2011.)

No big U.S.-Russia agreements on climate are expected this week, but Monday saw the introduction of a working group on energy, formed as part of a high-level bilateral commission created out of the summit. Steven Chu will chair the group on the US side.

G8 + MEF

The MEF is a smaller group of countries than the full UNFCCC, but it's still large and diverse, and there are enormous challenges in the way of getting a substantive agreement this week. Here are a few:

China + India

The overwhelming short-term priorities for developing countries are poverty reduction and economic development, driven in part by coal-based power. That's why China and India have both recently signaled that they will not commit to any binding GHG reduction targets. No, seriously, they won't. Says Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh, “India will not accept any emissions targets -- period. It is the bottom line; a non-negotiable stand. This is not something that India is going to budge on, under any circumstances." OK then!

Both countries (India; China) have also recently expressed ostentatious outrage about the possibility that the United States will impose "carbon tariffs" on imported goods. (A border adjustment provision was inserted in the Waxman-Markey bill before it passed the House.) Developing countries warn of an incipient trade war. Of course, as John Kemp points out, the provisions in the bill are not actually carbon tariffs but "carefully structured as import permits specifically to ensure they are consistent with World Trade Organisation rules." And sure enough, the WTO has signaled that the import permits are legal. China and India fear them.

Obama has spoken publicly against the border adjustments, but as Brad Plumer notes, it's helpful to have that stick in hand to make the carrots look better. (Todd Stern didn't have it when he went to China early last month.)

Of course China is hardly sitting on its hands. It's green stimulus package was both larger and greener than America's. Just this month it boosted its renewable energy targets to 15% by 2020. It looks set to swamp the U.S. in both wind and solar investment this year; between now and 2020, it's expected to spend more on renewables and nuclear than on oil and coal.

The central government has established the State Council's Expert Panel on Climate Change Policy to work on energy development plans that will involve trillions in investment. "Roughly, we need to spend an extra 1 trillion yuan every year to raise energy efficiency," said panel member Bai Quan. Just as importantly, maybe more so, it announced that regional government officials will be judged by reductions in carbon intensity instead of purely by economic growth. Getting career bureaucrats on board is essential to making sure the central planners' schemes become reality. The green shift is dispersing into rural areas as well.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will head to China later this month to talk turkey. Says Chu, "It's in our interest and China's to explore ways to cooperate for our mutual benefit--by promoting renewable energy, encouraging energy efficiency and cutting pollution." Chu's assistant secretary David Sandalow is hosting a high-level discussion on engaging China on CCS this Thursday in D.C.; a second, focused on finance and political barriers, will happen soon thereafter.

You can imagine Chu announcing a splashy post-combustion CCS development project, or an investment in solar thermal projects, in exchange for back-channel agreements on a timeline for the country to accept hard emission reductions targets (and back off on border adjustment fussing).

What's next

Japan and Brazil are among the other countries with which Obama may pursue bilateral deals, possibly before Copenhagen. The big sticking point with Brazil is avoided deforestation. They don't want it paid for via carbon credits, through the Reduced Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program -- they want it paid for with cold hard cash (so old-fashioned!). So far, no one except Norway is biting.

If all goes well -- an enormous if, of course -- the U.S. negotiating team arrive at Copenhagen with a web of bi- and multi-lateral side deals on clean energy technology sharing, adaptation research, development assistance, trade deals, and more. The world's biggest polluters will arrive with agreements in hand. Developing countries will see signs of real movement on the part of developed nations and soften their rigid opposition to targets.

And out of it all will come a stronger, more robust climate treaty, scaffolded by the self-interest of the many countries invested in side deals premised on continued international action.

That's the hope anyway. Needless to say: domestic achievements notwithstanding, if Obama can pull it off he'll be assured of a place in history.

Related Links:

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Soil carbon—a blind spot in the debate on carbon

Why buying cheap energy certificates worsens climate change

Last week the Department of Energy released part of the $25 billion in loans provided for through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, included in Section 136 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The delay in releasing these funds had been one of the longest running scandals in clean tech policy. Upon taking office, the Obama Administration vowed to expedite their release and Secretary Steven Chu had made finalizing rules needed to administer the program a key priority. In the first installment of the loans, Tesla, the VC-backed California maker of an all-electric sports car, founded by Ebay veterans, will receive $465 million to make its compact, all-electric Model S sedan. Ford will receive $5.9 billion to retool 11 factories across five states to improve the overall fuel efficiency of its fleet.  Finally, Nissan will receive $1.6 billion to retool a factory in Smyrna, Tennessee, to make an electric vehicle that is being developed and initially manufactured in Japan. The remainder of the money will be released next year.

DOE's announcement comes on the heels of the release of its formal $3.9 billion smart grid funding solicitation last week. The Funding Opportunity Announcement spells out the conditions and terms for those seeking funding for smart grid investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the offical title of the stimulus bill signed into law earlier this year. These two developments, coming one after the other, are evidence that the DOE is moving rapidly on the President's goal not only of getting money out into the economy to create jobs and drive demand, but also of making investments critical to a clean energy future.

In the case of the auto loans, they could not be more timely. Autos are a capital intensive business and with credit markets still impaired, it would have been very expensive or impossible for Tesla, for example, to borrow this money on its own. However, that does not mean that the loan is not good business for the government and Tesla. CEO Elon Musk indicated he thinks that Tesla may be able to repay the loan ahead of schedule. Tesla, despite some speed bumps in its early phase, is now profitable on a unit basis, meaning the approximately $120,000 price of its sleek sports car -- which has a long waiting list -- exceeds the cost of components.  Having also recently sold a stake to Daimler Benz, the company is now reasonably well capitalized. Recently, investor Steve Wesley indicated that Tesla's sales are on track to pass $100 million, a common bar for conducting an IPO. If Tesla continues on its current track, it may be the first home run of the clean transportation industry. In any case, the DOE funding puts it on track to move from the sports car niche to the mainstream where it hopes to leverage the glamour associated with the roadster. While Ford and Nissan have greater access to the capital markets, these loans -- provided for in the 2007 energy legislation in exchange for a commitment to higher fuel efficiency -- will help achieve that goal.

In the case of the smart grid, the major barrier to moving forward has been undeveloped standards.  Normally, standards evolve slowly as industry players forge alliances and choose standards that already enjoy market adoption. In this case, the desire to stimulate the economy has accelerated this process. Secretary Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke are overseeing an effort led by NIST to fast track standards for the grid to facilitate adoption. The disbursements made by DOE will indeed help establish standards insofar as the money spent will validate standards and increase adoption.

It is important that standards be as open and uniform as possible to create the broadest and fairest playing field for innovators to enter the smart grid technology market.  Because a smart grid is necessary to get clean energy online and also to drive the creation of new energy products and services, this is an area I believe is absolutely critical to determining whether clean technology can live up to its promise. 

While it remains to be seen how the smart grid will develop, these two announcements from DOE show that the Administration is on the case. These developments should be encouraging to anyone concerned about America's clean energy future.

Related Links:

India aims for 20 gigawatts solar by 2022

New Energy Finance: Solar power 50% cheaper by year end

Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

President Barack Obama doesn't think he can solve global warming by changing his f**king light bulbs, but he's going to do it anyway. More importantly, he's going to change the light-bulb industry.

Obama unveiled new energy-efficiency standards for lighting and appliances on Monday -- the latest in a string of energy-focused announcements and events for the president. On Friday, he praised the House for passing the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act. On Saturday, he focused his weekly address on the bill and the importance of clean energy -- a last-minute change, as the address had been intended to focus on health care. And on Sunday, he sat down with a group of reporters for a lengthy interview about the climate bill and energy in general, emphasizing that he thinks the clean-energy market is poised for explosive growth.

On Monday, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu at his side, Obama said the Department of Energy is at work on new standards for fluorescent and incandescent lighting. And in the meantime, he's changing the light bulbs in the White House.

"Now I know light bulbs may not seem sexy, but this simple action holds enormous promise because 7 percent of all the energy consumed in America is used to light our homes and our businesses," Obama said.

The president estimated that the new lighting standards would cut 594 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions between 2012 and 2042 and save American energy users $1 billion to $4 billion each year over that period -- conserving enough energy to eliminate the need for as many as 14 new coal-fired power plants.

Obama also announced that the Department of Energy has outlined tougher efficiency standards for household appliances, responding to a request from the White House in February to speed up the delivery of new rules, and he noted major federal investments in energy efficiency for buildings.

"One of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to make our economy stronger and cleaner is to make our economy more energy efficient," said Obama. "By bringing more energy-efficient technologies to American homes and businesses, we won't just significantly reduce our energy demand; we'll put more money back in the pockets of hardworking Americans."

Obama highlighted the gains that California has made in efficiency since the 1970s, which have put the state's energy usage 40 percent below the national average. In the process, he said, the state has created 1.5 million jobs in energy efficiency. Obama predicted that the new federal standards will have similar effects -- creating jobs, reducing emissions, and saving money.

The president also announced that $346 million from the economic stimulus bill will be invested in efficiency for commercial and residential buildings, which account for 40 percent of domestic energy use and 40 percent of domestic CO2 emissions. Of that money, $100 million will be invested in advanced building systems research, $70 million in residential buildings, $53.5 million for commercial buildings, and $72.5 million for buildings and appliance market transformation.

Obama took the opportunity to again praise the House's passage of the climate and energy bill on Friday, a move he said will help make "clean energy the profitable kind of energy." He praised legislators who voted for the bill for being "willing to place America's progress ahead of the usual Washington politics."

For more, read Obama's full remarks.

Here are President Obama's full remarks:

Related Links:

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Feeling ambivalent?Will the Waxman-Markey bill spark a full-scale energy revolution?

No. Not on its own, not in the next 10-15 years. The short-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases are too low, the renewable electricity standard is too weak, too many offsets are allowed, and there's too little investment in clean energy. To boot, there's every indication the bill will get worse before it passes ... in the unlikely event it passes.

The green world is grappling with these unpleasant facts right now, fluctuating between rage (kill it!), dread (we're screwed), and resignation (it's better than nothing). Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, on odd-numbered days, I think I've reached a fragile zen detente with the whole process. Mainly, I've been trying to focus on a different question: will there be an energy revolution? After all, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is not the only shot for Obama to make good on his campaign promises on energy. Nor is the legislation our last chance to tackle the climate crisis. No bill can carry that kind of weight, not at this moment, with this Congress. America is at the tail end of an era of cheap energy and heedless economic growth. Waxman-Markey is just the struggle to get an extremely hidebound, backward-looking set of political institutions to acknowledge that the old order is collapsing. Building a new order is something else entirely.

The question is, what's going to happen after the bill is passed? An energy revolution will require a combination of social, technological, business, legal, regulatory, and legislative changes. Federal legislation can't do all the lifting. Conversely, other changes can compensate somewhat for a weak (at least at the outset) federal framework. What will ultimately make the difference is not the specific mechanics of the bill but the, ahem, Sweep of History. (And who better to capture the Sweep of History than Some Blogger?)

I am reasonably optimistic, despite the flaws in Waxman-Markey, that history is on our side, and that the arguments happening today in Congress will soon be seen as peculiar and archaic. Here, briefly, is why:

Obama (Lo, is he not The Beginning of All Lists?)

There is no reason to think that this bill is going to be Obama's only legacy on energy. Already there's been the stimulus bill, which will probably do more for clean energy in the next five years than Waxman-Markey, the new mileage standards, and the big climate impacts report. And there is plenty more to come.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell has a fantastic piece on Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (For reasons only RS understands, it is not yet online. However, Charlie Petit at Knight has a bootleg PDF copy and some thoughts on the piece. Also read Brad Plumer. And while you're at it, read Brad's long and extremely excellent piece on the question of whether we need technological breakthroughs to beat climate change, which is centered on Chu.)

The RS piece contains this striking passage:

"The fact is, we're not going to level out at 450 ppm," [Chu] says. "We're going to go over 450 ppm. So what will we do? I'm not in favor of deploying geoengineering. But thinking about it is OK."

For a moment, the room goes quiet. In effect, the United States secretary of energy has just told an elite group of scientists and politicians that, no matter what happens with climate legislation this summer in Congress, no matter what China does or does not do, no matter what targets are set at climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, our future as a species is likely a grim one. Chu has uttered the politically unthinkable: that his own administration's efforts to halt global warming might not be enough to avert a catastrophe.

In other words, Chu gets it. He knows that this isn't just political football. It isn't just another "issue." It's imminent misery, not just for future generations but for people alive today.

And he's not the only one. White House science adviser John Holdren gets it. So do climate czar Carol Browner, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, and both Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern at State. So, if we're to believe those close to him, does Barack Obama (though many of his supporters are beginning to have their doubts, what with his ongoing low profile on the subject).

If Obama wins a second term, we will have eight years of an administration filled with people who believe that the fate of millions, possibly human civilization itself, rests on their ability to tackle this problem. They're not going to view the passage of a compromised cap-and-trade bill as the end of their responsibility. They'll use their eight years to make sure the long-term emission-reduction framework put in place by Waxman-Markey is part of our national DNA. They'll keep pushing China. They'll use executive branch tools (including, but not only, the EPA). They'll drive research and deployment.

In eight years, the quest for a clean energy revolution will not be a subject for partisan dispute but a simple fact, a shared national mission, and part of every business's long-term planning.

Some other reasons for hope:

• Oil prices threaten the economic recovery, as Ryan Avent keeps warning. Coal is getting more expensive, and several coal utilities are applying for rate increases. Gas prices are going to fluctuate (generally on the way up).

In short, fossil fuels are not going to become less of an economic pain in the ass. Their corrosive effects on the economy and public health seem likely to become steadily more apparent. Once consumers are familiar with alternative sources that offer stable, effectively free (after the initial capital investment) power, they're going to start demanding them.

• Cleantech is cool. This is from Joshua Green's excellent piece on clean energy in The Atlantic:

Shortly after the inauguration, a friend up for several jobs in the new administration confessed that he yearned to wind up at the Department of Energy. "It's like NASA in the '60s," he told me. "All the best and brightest want to be there." Obama's choice of Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate physicist, as secretary of energy only heightened the allure. In the early Obama era, romantic notions about making one's mark on history tend to take the form of helping recast America's economy, and by extension the world's, in a way that will head off global catastrophe.

And this:

"Think of the smartest guy you've ever met and then imagine 50,000 more just like him innovating all at once," Mike Danaher, a partner and cleantech specialist at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. "Just as they did with telecom in the '90s, they're attacking every component of every kind of alternative energy to improve it."

Cleantech's allure can partly be captured via numbers -- the amount of VC investment, the amount of stimulus money -- but it goes beyond that. It's about nerd chic. Figuring out energy is what all the hot-shit brainiacs coming out of Ivy League schools want to do these days. There's just an amazing amount of brainpower being devoted to these problems, more every day. I predict the pace of innovation is going to outstrip even the most optimistic projections. The clean-energy mammals will overwhelm the dirty-energy dinosaurs sooner than we think.

• The need for a real economy. One thing you frequently hear about the bubble-busts of the last 20 years is that there was too much capital chasing too few real investments. We need a new source of economic growth to absorb that capital. And there's a felt need today for Americans to start making stuff again -- inventing, manufacturing, and exporting things of real value.

What can we make? What's the new source of growth? Here's how economist James K. Galbraith put it:

Finally, there is the big problem: ... How to build the productive economy for the next generation? ...

Today the largest problems we face are energy security and climate change—massive issues because energy underpins everything we do, and because climate change threatens the survival of civilization. And here, obviously, we need a comprehensive national effort. Such a thing, if done right, combining planning and markets, could add 5 or even 10 percent of GDP to net investment. That’s not the scale of wartime mobilization. But it probably could return the country to full employment and keep it there, for years.

Moreover, the work does resemble wartime mobilization in important financial respects. Weatherization, conservation, mass transit, renewable power, and the smart grid are public investments. As with the armaments in World War II, work on them would generate incomes not matched by the new production of consumer goods. If handled carefully—say, with a new program of deferred claims to future purchasing power like war bonds—the incomes earned by dealing with oil security and climate change have the potential to become a foundation of restored financial wealth for the middle class.

This basic view, albeit toned down, is mirrored in Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force, which is pushing hard on clean energy as a source of restored middle class prosperity.

All of which is to say: the structural position of the U.S. economy more or less requires a push toward clean energy. You can't build an economy on moving fake money around forever. If you want large and expanding markets, there aren't that many places to go.

• States and cities won't stop. Waxman-Markey may set national standards at relatively weak levels, but plenty of states have tougher renewable electricity standards. A few are experimenting with feed-in tariffs (see here and here) and producing extraordinary results. You can't throw a rock without hitting a mayor who wants to revitalize his or her city by establishing a reputation as green (see Grist's list of 15 green mayors).

The federal debate is warped by the outsized influence of carbon-intensive states and industries (magnified both by corporate contributions and by the frakked-up structure of U.S. constitutional government). But at the subnational level, there is a swarm of political leaders without the same constraints. Eventually, their success -- not only environmental success but subsequent economic and political success -- will alter the political calculus even in the most recalcitrant states. Whether or not the trend is accelerated by Waxman-Markey, wealth is already transferring from middle states to the coasts, because the East and West coasts are where the action and innovation are.

• We are on the cusp of an extended progressive era. This is the one I'm least confident about, so I'm putting it last. But in my optimistic moments, I agree with the politics editor at The Nation, Chris Hayes:

Look at how far we've come in the last four years. We have a black president who ran on the most ambitiously progressive domestic agenda in a generation. Look at the political perspectives of the youngest voters, the most progressive cohort since the dawn of polling on almost every issue. White, male, Christians are the demographic roadblock. And the country is getting less white and less Christian. The macro forces are moving in our direction. What makes you lose hope is the hand-to-hand combat happening on Capitol Hill. Progressives have a unique lack of self-confidence where we feel like we are just going to get this one little chance, but I think the force of history is on our side. I believe that with every last fiber of my being.

I can't say I believe that with my every fiber. Maybe 60 to 70 percent of my fibers. But sometimes, when I squint just right, I see a future blooming with cultural and technological ferment, a tidal change on the way that will be helped by a strong federal climate bill but will not be stopped by a weak one.

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Using fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy has a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today….

So I wrote in a 2005 journal article, “The car and fuel of the future,” which was the “hottest article” in Energy Policy from July 2006 through March 2007 (and still #8 as recently as September 2008).

So after the Bush administration squandered some $2 billion on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, it was welcome news that our Nobel-prize-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu submitted a budget that sharply scaled back the hydrogen fuel cell program and shifted it away from a focus on transportation (see “Hydrogen car R.I.P. Secretary Chu agrees with Climate Progress and slashes hydrogen budget“).

Now some hydrogen advocates — and even some environmental groups! — are trying to restore the money, which is much more urgently needed helping to develop and deploy clean technologies that could save energy and reduce pollution in the near-and medium-term. I’ll blog on that effort later.

First, however, I wanted to once and for all lay out the case against hydrogen as a transport fuel, starting with an excerpt of almost my entire Energy Policy piece. I think it is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the challenges facing alternative fuels.

Abstract

This paper is based on a review of the technical literature on alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) and discussions with experts in vehicle technology and energy analysis. It is derived from analysis provided to the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy.

The urgent need to reverse the business-as-usual growth path in global warming pollution in the next two decades to avoid serious if not catastrophic climate change necessitates action to make our vehicles far less polluting.

In the near-term, by far the most cost-effective strategy for reducing emissions and fuel use is efficiency. The car of the near future is the hybrid gasoline–electric vehicle, because it can reduce gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions 30 to 50% with no change in vehicle class and hence no loss of jobs or compromise on safety or performance. It will likely become the dominant vehicle platform by the year 2020.

Ultimately, we will need to replace gasoline with a zero-carbon fuel. All AFV pathways require technology advances and strong government action to succeed. Hydrogen is the most challenging of all alternative fuels, particularly because of the enormous effort needed to change our existing gasoline infrastructure.

The most promising AFV pathway is a hybrid that can be connected to the electric grid. These so-called plug-in hybrids will likely travel three to four times as far on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity as fuel cell vehicles….

1. Introduction

Any energy and environmental policy effort must come to grips with transportation. Roughly 97% of all energy consumed by our cars, sport utility vehicles, vans, trucks, and airplanes is still petroleum-based.

In the 1990s, the transportation sector saw the fastest growth in carbon dioxide emissions of any major sector of the US economy. And the transportation sector is projected to generate nearly half of the 40% rise in US carbon dioxide emissions forecast for 2025 (EIA, 2005).

Internationally, the situation is equally problematic. As Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said in May 2004, ‘‘In the absence of strong government policies, we project that the worldwide use of oil in transport will nearly double between 2000 and 2030, leading to a similar increase in greenhouse gas emissions’’ (IEA, 2004).

Significantly, between 2003 and 2030, over 1400GW of new coal capacity will be built. These plants would commit the planet to total carbon dioxide emissions of some 500 billion metric tons over their lifetime, unless ‘‘they are backfit with carbon capture equipment at some time during their life,’’ as David Hawkins, Director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center told the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce in June 2003. Hawkins continued:

‘‘To put this number in context, it amounts to half the estimated total cumulative carbon emissions from all fossil fuel use globally over the past 250 years!’’ (Hawkins, 2003)

It is critical that whatever strategy the world adopts to reduce GHG emissions in the vehicle sector does not undermine our efforts to reduce GHG emissions in the electricity sector. With this caveat in mind, I explore some of the pathways most widely discussed for reducing or replacing oil while significantly reducing transportation greenhouse gas emissions: efficiency, electricity (particularly plug-in hybridgasoline
vehicles); ethanol from cellulosic biomass; and hydrogen.

2. Alternative fuels and alternative fuel vehicles.

Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) and their fuels face two central problems. First, they typically suffer from several marketplace disadvantages compared to conventional vehicles running on conventional fuels. Hence, they inevitably require government incentives or mandates to succeed. Second, they typically do not provide cost-effective solutions to major energy and environmental problems, which undermines the policy case for having the government intervene in the marketplace to support them.

On the second point, in September 2003, the US Department of Transportation Center for Climate Change and Environmental Forecasting released its analysis, Fuel Options for Reducing Greenhouse Gas
Emissions from Motor Vehicles. The report assesses the potential for gasoline substitutes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 25 years. It concludes that “the reduction in GHG emissions from most gasoline substitutes would be modest’’ and that ‘‘promoting alternative fuels would be a costly strategy for reducing emissions’’ (DOT, 2003).

The US government and others (such as of California and Canada) have tried to promote AFVs for a long time. The 1992 Energy Policy Act established the goal of having alternative fuels replace at least 10% of petroleum fuels in 2000, and at least 30% in 2010. Currently, alternate fuels consumed in AFVs substitute for under 1% of total consumption of gasoline.

A significant literature has emerged explaining this failure (GAO, 2000, Flynn, 2002). Besides the question of whether AFVs deliver cost-effective emissions reductions, there have historically been six major barriers to AFV success:

1. high first cost for vehicle
2. on-board fuel storage issues (i.e. limited range)
3. safety and liability concerns
4. high fueling cost (compared to gasoline)
5. limited fuel stations: chicken and egg problem
6. improvements in the competition (better, cleaner gasoline vehicles).

All AFVs that have so far been promoted with limited success—electric vehicles, natural gas vehicles, methanol vehicles, and ethanol vehicles—have each suffered from several of these barriers. Any one of these barriers can be a showstopper for an AFV or an alternative fuel, even where other clear benefits are delivered. MTBE, for instance, has had its biggest difficulty with the safety and liability issue, even though it has minimal problems in the other areas because it can be blended directly with gasoline. Electric vehicles deliver the clear benefit of zero tailpipe emissions, and can even have lower per mile costs than gasoline cars, but range, refueling, and firstcost issues have limited their success and caused most major auto companies to withdraw their electric vehicles from the marketplace.

The chicken and egg problem—who will build and buy the AFVs if a fueling infrastructure is not in place and who will build the fueling infrastructure before the AFVs are built—remains the most intractable barrier. Consider that there are millions of flexible fuel vehicles already on the road capable of running on E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline), 100% gasoline, or just about any blend, for about the same price as gasoline-powered vehicles, and yet the vast majority of them run on gasoline and there are have been very few E85 stations built.

In the case of natural gas light-duty vehicles, the environmental benefits were oversold, as were the early cost estimates for both the vehicles and the refueling stations: ‘‘Early promoters often believe that ‘prices just have to drop’ and cited what turned out to be unachievable price levels.’’ One study concluded, ‘‘Exaggerated claims have damaged the credibility of alternate transportation fuels, and have retarded acceptance, especially by large commercial purchasers’’ (Flynn, 2002).

All AFVs face the increasing ‘‘competition’’ from improved gasoline-power vehicles. Indeed, two decades ago when tailpipe emissions standards were being developed requiring 0.02 g/mile of NOx, few suspected that this could be achieved by internal combustion engine vehicles running on reformulated gasoline.

The new generation of hybrid PZEVs such as the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid have substantially raised the bar for future AFVs. These vehicles have no chicken and egg problem (since they can be fueled everywhere), no different safety concerns than other gasoline cars, a substantially lower annual fuel bill, greater range, a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and a 90% reduction in tailpipe emissions. The vehicles do cost a little more, but that is more than offset by the current government incentive and the large reduction in gasoline costs, even ignoring the performance benefits. Compare that to many AFVs, whose environmental benefits, if any, typically come at the expense not merely of a higher first cost for the vehicle, but a much higher annual fuel bill, a reduced range, and other undesirable attributes from the consumer’s perspective.

2.1. Hydrogen

Widespread use of stationary fuel cells running on natural gas seems likely post-2010, particularly if high temperature fuel cells achieve their cost and performance targets. The transition to a transportation system based on a hydrogen economy will, however, be much slower and more difficult than widely realized.

In particular, it is unlikely that hydrogen vehicles will achieve significant (45%) market penetration by 2030. A variety of major technology breakthroughs and government incentives will be required for them to achieve significant commercial success by the middle of this century. Continued R&D in hydrogen and transportation fuel cell technologies remains important because of their potential to provide a zero-carbon transportation fuel in the second half of the century. But neither government policy nor business investment should be based on the assumption that these technologies will have a significant impact in the near- or medium-term.

Bill Reinert, US manager of Toyota’s advanced technologies group said in January 2005, absent multiple technology breakthroughs, we won’t see high volume sales of fuel cell vehicles until 2030 or later (Truett, 2005). When Reinert was asked when fuel cells cars would replace gasoline-powered cars, he replied ‘‘If I told you ‘never,’ would you be upset?’’ (Butters et al., 2005).

Hydrogen cars face enormous challenges in overcoming each of the major historical barriers to AFV success.

The central challenge for any AFV seeking government support beyond R&D is that the deployment of the AFVs and the infrastructure to support them must cost effectively address some energy or environmental problems facing the nation. Yet in the spring issue of Issues and Science and Technology, two hydrogen experts, Dan Sperling and Joan Ogden of U.C. Davis, wrote, ‘‘Hydrogen is neither the easiest nor the cheapest way to gain large near- and medium-term air pollution, greenhouse gas, or oil reduction benefits’’(Sperling and Ogden, 2004). A 2004 analysis by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland concluded that even ‘‘in the advanced technology case with a carbon constraint, hydrogen doesn’t penetrate the transportation sector in a major way until after 2035’’(Geffen et al., 2004). A push to constrain carbon dioxide emissions actually delays the introduction of hydrogen cars because sources of zero-carbon hydrogen such as renewable power can achieve emissions reductions far more cost-effectively simply replacing planned or existing coal plants. As noted above, our efforts to reduce GHG emissions in the vehicle sector must not come at the expense of our efforts to reduce GHG emissions in the electric utility sector.

In fact, Well-to-Wheels Analysis of Future Automotive Fuels and Powertrains in the European Context, a January 2004 study by the European Commission Center for Joint Research, the European Council for
Automotive R&D, and an association of European oil companies, concluded that using hydrogen as a transport fuel might well increase Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduce them (JRC, 2004). That is because many pathways for making hydrogen, such as grid electrolysis, can be quite carbon-intensive and because hydrogen fuel cells are so expensive that hydrogen internal combustion engine vehicles may be deployed instead (which is already happening in California). Using fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy has a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today.

A number of major studies and articles have recently come out on the technological challenges facing hydrogen. Transportation fuel cells currently cost about $4000/kW, some 100 times greater than the cost of internal combustion engines (Wald, 2004).

[JR: Yes, a couple of numbers and quotes in this piece are a little out of date, which I will update in future posts. But even today, no company in the world sells a commercial transportation fuel cell warranteed for 100,000 miles for substantially below $4000/kw. The Honda FCX is “the world’s first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production.” Yet as the New York Times reported, “the cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce,” although Honda’s president Takeo Fukui “said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase" (see "The Last Car You Would Ever Buy — Literally"). So even after 15 years, and billions of dollars of investment by the government and private sector, transportation fuel cells are prohibitively expensive.]

A 2004 article for the Society of Automotive Engineers noted, “Even with the most optimistic assumptions, the fuel cell powered vehicle offers only a marginal efficiency improvement over the advanced [diesel]-hybrid and with no anticipation yet of future developments of IC engines. At $100/kW, the fuel cell does not offer a short-term advantage even in a European market” (Oppenheim and Schock, 2004).

A prestigious National Research Council panel concluded a major report in February 2004 with a variety of important technical conclusions (NRC, 2004). For instance, the panel said, ‘‘The DOE should halt efforts on high-pressure tanks and cryogenic liquid storage. They have little promise of long-term practicality for light-duty vehicles.’’ A March 2004 study by the American Physical Society concluded that “a new material must be discovered” to solve the storage problem (APS, 2004). An analysis in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American stated, ‘‘Fuel-cell cars, in contrast [to hybrids], are expected on about the same schedule as NASA’s manned trip to Mars and have about the same level of likelihood’’ (Wald, 2004).

There is a tendency in analyses of a future hydrogen economy to assume the end state—mass production of low-cost fuel cells, pipeline delivery, and so on. Yet while transportation fuel cells would undoubtedly be far cheaper if they could be produced at quantities of one million units per year, the unanswered question is who will provide the billions of dollars in subsidies during the many years when vehicle sales would be far lower and vehicle costs far higher. And while pipelines are the desired end game, and ‘‘the costs of a mature hydrogen pipeline system would be spread over many years,’’ as the National Research Counicl panel noted, ‘‘the transition is difficult to imagine in detail’’ (NRC, 2004). The AFV problem is very much a systems problem where the transition issues are as much of the
crux as the technological ones. We believe all AFV analysis should be conservative in nature, stating clearly what is technologically and commercially possible today, and, when discussing the future, be equally clear that projections are speculative and will require both technology breakthroughs and major government intervention in the marketplace. Analysis should treat the likely competition fairly: If major advances in cost reduction and performance are projected for hydrogen technologies, similar advances should be projected for hybrids, batteries, biofuels, and the like.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles face major challenges to overcome each and every one of the barriers discussed earlier. It is possible we may never see a durable, affordable fuel cell vehicle with an efficiency, range, and annual fuel bill that matches even the best current hybrid vehicle. Of all AFVs and alternative fuels, fuel cell vehicles running on hydrogen are probably the least likely to be a cost-effective solution to global warming, which is why the other pathways deserve at least equal policy attention and funding.

2.2. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs)

One AFV, however, has clear environmental benefits, including substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, a much lower annual fuel bill, a much longer range than current cars (with the added ability to fuel at home), and far fewer infrastructure issues than traditional AFVs. This AFV is the plug-in hybrid.

A straightforward improvement to the current generation of hybrids can allow them to be plugged into the electric grid and run in an all-electric mode for a limited range between recharging. Since most vehicle use is for relatively short trips, such as commuting, followed by an extended period of time during which the vehicle is not being driven and could be charged, even a relatively modest all-electric range of 20 or 40 miles could allow these vehicles to replace a substantial portion of gasoline consumption and tailpipe emissions. If the electricity were from CO2-free sources, then these vehicles would also have dramatically reduced net greenhouse gas emissions.

Because they have a gasoline engine, and are thus a dual-fuel vehicle, PHEVs avoid two of the biggest problems of pure electric vehicles. First they are not
limited in range by the total amount of battery charge. If the initial battery charge runs low, the car can run purely on gasoline and on whatever charging is possible from the regenerative braking. Second, electric vehicles take many hours to charge, so that if for some reason owners were unable to allow the car to charge—either because they lacked the time between trips to charge or there was no local charging capability—then the pure electric car could not be driven. Thus, PHEVs combine the best of both hybrids and pure electric vehicles.

Battery improvement will lead to increased functionality for PHEVs. Improvements in specific energy (Wh/kg) and specific power (W/kg) will reduce weight. Reductions in cost and increases in cycle life (durability) will make PHEVs more affordable. Adequate safety is a requirement. Operating temperature is important, but batteries with unusual operating temperatures may be considered if other benefits are demonstrated. Convenience of recharging is crucial, but the definition of ‘‘convenience’’ varies by users. A full recharge overnight from an ordinary home outlet is generally considered to be sufficient for a personal PHEV.

2.3. Barriers

PHEVs avoid many of the barriers to AFVs discussed earlier. They do not have a limited range. They do not have major safety and liability issues—although great care would have to be taken in the design of any home-based system that charged PHEVs or allowed them to feed back into the grid. They do not have a high fueling cost compared to gasoline. In fact, the per-mile fueling cost of running on electricity is about one-third the per-mile cost of running on gasoline.

The chicken and egg problem is minimized because electricity is widely available and charging is relatively straightforward.

The vehicle will almost certainly have a higher first cost, but this is likely to be more than compensated by the economic benefit of a lower fuel bill, as a 2003 study by the California Energy Commission and California Air Resources Board concluded (CEC and CARB, 2003). Also, that study did not consider a large potential revenue stream the vehicle owner may be able to extract from the utility by having what is essentially a portable electric generator.

A PHEV owner may be able to extract revenue for grid regulation services—generators that can provide fast response when grid voltage needs to be increased or decreased. Utilities would pay for this service if there was a guarantee that the car could deliver juice when needed, which suggests that this is more practical for vehicle fleets or for a corporate sponsor. The potential value of such services is significant: $700 to $3000 per year (Letendre and Kempton, 2002). This value is so large that it might allow the monthly cost of purchasing or leasing a PHEV to be lower than a conventional car, and perhaps even cover the replacement cost for batteries if they prove not to have a 100,000+mile lifetime typically expected of modern cars. It is critical that we fund some real-world demonstrations of PHEVs providing these services, to see if this value can be extracted. If it can, we might see major utilities helping to subsidize the cost and/or financing of PHEVs.

Environmentally, PHEVs offer two potentially significant benefits. First, since they are designed to run all-electric for short trips such as commuting, they offer the possibility of being zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in cities. The best early uses of PHEVs may well be to replace dirty diesel engine vehicles used regularly in cities, such as buses, maintenance vehicles, and delivery trucks. If we are unable to overcome the
multiple technical and practical hurdles to hydrogen fuel cell cars, then PHEVs may be the only viable option for urban zero emission vehicles.

The potential greenhouse gas benefits of PHEVs are even more significant, if a source of zero-carbon electricity can be utilized for recharging. PHEVs have an enormous advantage over hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in utilizing zero-carbon electricity. That is because of the inherent inefficiency of generating hydrogen from electricity, transporting hydrogen, storing it onboard the vehicle, and then running it through the fuel cell.

The total well-to-wheels efficiency with which a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle might utilize renewable electricity is roughly 20% (although that number could rise to 25% or a little higher with the kind of multiple technology breakthroughs required to enable a hydrogen economy). The well-to-wheels efficiency of charging an onboard battery and then discharging it to run an electric motor in a PHEV, however, is 80% (and could be higher in the future)—four times more efficient than current hydrogen fuel cell vehicle pathways.

As Dr. Alec Brooks, who led the development of the Impact electric vehicle has shown, ‘‘Fuel cell vehicles that operate on hydrogen made with electrolysis consume four times as much electricity per mile as similarly sized battery electric vehicles’’ (Brooks, 2004). Ulf Bossel, founder of the European Fuel Cell Forum, comes to a similar conclusion in a recent article, ‘‘The daily drive to work in a hydrogen fuel cell car will cost four times more than in an electric or hybrid vehicle’’ (Bossel, 2004).

This relative inefficiency has enormous implications for achieving a sustainable energy future. To replace half of US ground transport fuels (gasoline and diesel) in the year 2050 with hydrogen from wind power, for example, might require 1400GW of advanced wind turbines or more. To replace those fuels with electricity in PHEVs might require under 400GW of wind. That 1000GW difference may represent an insurmountable obstacle for hydrogen as a GHG mitigation strategy—especially since the US will need several hundreds of gigawatts of wind and other zero-carbon power sources in 2050 just to sharply reduce GHG emissions in the electricity sector.

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UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009

President Barack Obama's key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here's a rundown:

Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

Browner serves as a special adviser to the White House on climate and energy, a new role Obama created to work on an issue he has defined as one of his top concerns. Browner has been keeping a low profile in Washington, offering very few on-the-record interviews and not receiving as much of the limelight as other administration players, though it's clear her role in coordinating policy within the administration is major. She's at the table during economic discussions, and was the key negotiator hashing out a new deal on automobile emissions.

Browner served as Florida's secretary of the environment from 1991 to 1993, and was a top aide to Al Gore when he was in the Senate. She served as EPA administrator during the entire Clinton administration, and later served as a principal in The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm lead by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as Albright Capital Management.

Photo: epa.govLisa Jackson
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency | epa.gov

During her first months on the job, Lisa Jackson has made significant headway on several climate issues that the Bush administration EPA refused to take up. Within days of taking office, Jackson announced that the agency was beginning the process of reevaluating whether California and other states should be able to set their own higher standards for automobile emissions; the administration has now adopted those standards nationwide. She also moved the agency forward on regulating planet-warming emissions by declaring that they do, in fact, pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Jackson has been adamant that the EPA will move forward on regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act if Congress doesn't pass a climate bill this year, telling reporters, "The race is clearly on." But she has also maintained that the administration would prefer new legislation, and has encouraged Congress to deliver it.

Jackson came to the Obama administration from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she lead from February 2006 to November 2008. Enviros in the state gave her mixed reviews, though national green leaders cheered her appointment to the post.

Watch a video interview with Jackson by Grist's Amanda Little.

Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy | energy.gov

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist who came to the administration from a post at the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has made some ambitious moves in his first months in office. Greens swooned when he called coal his "worst nightmare," but he hasn't been quite as much of a rabble-rouser in office.

Among his biggest accomplishments so far have been streamlining the loan guarantee process at DOE and initiating new partnerships with other departments to improve energy efficiency. He also scored a win in securing funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Photo: BikePortland.orgRay LaHood
Secretary of Transportation | dot.gov

Ray LaHood was a Republican congressman from Illinois up until his retirement in 2008, making his pick a surprising one. He has not been a particularly visible member of the administration in its first months, though his department has made some major headway on key environmental issues.

The Department of Transportation scored $8 billion in funding for Amtrak in the stimulus package, as well as $15 billion in the budget to create a "world-class passenger rail system" across the country. Everyone's favorite climate curmudgeon, George Will, has basically written LaHood off as a communist for supporting mass transit.

DOT also played a central role in reaching a new deal on automobile emissions, one of the first major actions the administration has taken to curb global warming. And LaHood appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill in April.

Photo: Mike DisharoonKen Salazar
Secretary of Interior | interior.gov

The former Colorado senator got mixed reviews from enviros when he was nominated, and he's still getting them. He got cheers for withdrawing oil-shale leases on tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. He also got a gold star for scrapping the Bush administration's offshore leasing plan. But he has not written off offshore drilling entirely and is reportedly at work on a new offshore-drilling plan.

Salazar got a thumbs-down from enviros for upholding the Bush administration's policy on polar bears. The bears will continue to be considered a threatened species, since climate change is melting their Arctic habitat, but they won't get the protections from oil and gas exploration that a declaration as "endangered" would give them.

Photo: change.govNancy Sutley
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality | CEQ site

Nancy Sutley came to the Obama administration from the Los Angeles mayor's office. She has promised to be the "voice for the environment" within the White House, and said she "will play an important role in coordinating the efforts of the federal government" on environmental policy, but her work is largely behind the scenes.

She has pledged that Obama and his administration are willing to stake their political capital on passing a climate bill.

Watch a video interview with Sutley by Grist's Amanda Little.

Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture | usda.gov

Obama's decision to appoint the former Iowa governor to head the Agriculture Department was blasted by some in the green movement who believe Vilsack is beholden to the industrial agriculture interests that are deeply rooted in his home state. So far, however, the ag secretary has avoided significant controversy, though USDA is working to influence how climate legislation governs farmers and the ethanol industry.

Vilsack has said he believes farm and forestry operations should earn carbon credits under a national climate program (a view in synch with Big Ag), with his department providing the necessary oversight. Then there's the question of how EPA will measure biofuels' impact on offsetting carbon dioxide emissions -- a complicated issue that promises to leave either farmers or EPA scientists angry in the end.

Photo: dol.govHilda Solis
Secretary of Labor | dol.gov

Hilda Solis, Obama's green-jobs-loving labor secretary, has been a low-key figure thus far, though she has spoken publicly about the administration's desire to create millions of jobs in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors. Before joining the administration, she represented California's 32nd Distract in the House and was a key player in getting the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007.

The Labor Department recently announced that it is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend funds from the economic recovery act to train and employ residents of public housing in green jobs.

Get involved in the fight against climate change via Grist's Climate Citizens project.

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Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Advocates of regulatory environmentalism dominated the spin wars last month when the monumental American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) -- aka the carbon cap-and-trade bill assembled by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) -- passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Climate politics "realists" lauded “historic action” (in the words of Al Gore) on a bill that would at last "establish comprehensive national limits on the pollution that causes global warming" (in the words of Dan Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council). Meanwhile, cap-and-trade fans made of sterner stuff complained that the bill’s target for an initial 17-percent reduction from 2005 levels of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 was far too weak and decried Waxman and Markey’s massive giveaways of emissions permits to polluting industries.

In short, the initial mixed verdict on ACES was issued almost exclusively by the proponents of regulatory and carbon pricing solutions to America’s climate and energy-security challenge.

But there is another standpoint from which to assess ACES, one less prominent in Washington circles, and that is to ask what the bill does to promote clean energy innovation and game-changing technology breakthroughs.

Strangely secondary in the carbon discourse, the needs of the technologists, the inventors, the entrepreneurs, and the economic-development practitioners ought to emerge as at least an equal priority to regulatory responses in the nation’s struggle to decarbonize its economy.

As a recent report issued by my group at the Brookings Institution argues, America needs to catalyze and massively commercialize -- very soon -- truly transformative scientific and technological breakthroughs if it is going to have any chance of securing the 80-percent greenhouse-gas emissions cuts needed by mid-century to stave off really disruptive environmental breakdowns.

And that applies even if the nation can get a strong regulatory and pricing cap in place in the next few years. Over the next four decades, after all, global energy demand is expected to triple. But world emissions must be cut by half or more. All of which means that America and the world must change the game. America, in short, must move aggressively to develop and harness a portfolio of truly scalable clean energy sources -- which we do not now have -- and ensure that they are affordable enough to deploy throughout the world.

Consequently, it matters hugely whether or not the Waxman-Markey bill (or Congress through the standard appropriations channels) invests deeply enough in clean energy R&D and technology development and deployment to catalyze the needed inventions over the next 40 years.

So how are we doing? On the innovation front, Waxman-Markey must be deemed an important start, a move in the right direction, but not there yet.

Waxman and Markey deserve credit, given the circumstances, for setting aside some 16 percent of the hundreds of billions of dollars of cap-and-trade revenue that the bill would generate for such items as new auto technology, carbon-capture-and-storage work, and other clean energy technology development and deployment. Such public investments will be crucial to jump-starting the innovation process, creating clean energy jobs, and upgrading the nation’s energy infrastructure in the presence of numerous market failures. Given the pressure of competing interests, reserving even that much of the bill’s revenue for innovation activities represents an important start.

Also noteworthy is the bill’s dedication of 1 percent of the bill’s permit revenue to the establishment of eight "Clean Energy Innovation Centers" -- regional R&D hubs reminiscent of Brookings’ proposal for the nation to launch a network of energy discovery-innovation institutes (e-DIIs) designed to leverage the expertise of universities, national laboratories, industry, venture capital, and others in the transfer of powerful clean energy technologies into the marketplace.

Paralleling the Department of Energy’s FY 2010 proposal for the creation of eight “energy innovation hubs,” the Waxman-Markey centers represent an important affirmation of the importance of public investments in innovation, run through new commercialization-oriented paradigms. Of particular value in Waxman and Markey’s centers is their strong regional cast, and recognition that breakthroughs and their commercialization don’t automatically spring up and go nation-wide through university or federal laboratory work but instead require extensive synergistic interactions of scientists and technologists with local and global networks of firms, suppliers, investors, and preexisting industry "clusters."

And yet, the innovation investments in the ACES bill that passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee remain too small, largely because so many of the bill’s carbon-emission permits had to be given away free to ensure the bill’s passage. Assuming an average pollution allowance price of $15, ACES as currently written would generate just $9 billion annually for technology innovation activities, broadly defined, as notes an analysis by the Breakthrough Institute.

To be sure, $9 billion a year is hardly nothing, and would represent an important boost to the nation’s paltry current innovation flows. But the ACES innovation funding pales in view of that fact that my group at Brookings (and many other groups) has called for the nation to invest as much as $20 to $30 billion per year on energy R&D alone even as President Obama has called for investing $15 billion. And it’s doubly disappointing given that cap-and-trade revenues represent the nation’s best shot at finding the money to sufficiently fund innovation in the face of the punishingly tight budgets that will prevail for the foreseeable future.

The verdict, then, is mixed: Reps. Waxman and Markey merit praise for insisting upon crucial placeholders for innovation in their bill, but the accommodations extracted by the interest groups have left too little revenue behind for the most crucial use of cap-trade money -- investments to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy.

And so the way forward is clear: Notwithstanding the crush of competing interests, Congress must significantly enlarge the innovation component of whatever carbon program it cobbles together in the next year or two. So let’s say the cap-trade "to do" for the rest of the year in the House must be to defend the clean energy innovation outlays of ACES from marauding interest groups -- and then perhaps double them. Fail in this, and the nation could gain a complicated carbon pricing scheme but blow its best opportunity to finance the breakthroughs needed to make clean energy cheap and so stave off massive environmental destabilization.

But that’s a goal for the next several years -- or longer. In the meantime, the nation simply cannot afford to wait the two or three or six or seven years it will take to fix ACES and begin to direct cap-and-trade revenue into specific programs to boost energy innovation. And so Congress should engage now in the regular appropriations process. With engagement from the White House, the relevant committees should move now to embrace the Department of Energy’s 2010 budget request. Secretary Steven Chu’s first budget includes the outlines of a powerful energy innovation system for America that would broadly engage the pure-science community through the funding of Energy Frontier Research Centers, conduct "disruptive" research through ARPA-E, and start eight of its own “energy innovation hubs” for translational work to get new energy technologies out of the lab and into the market.

Congress should fund it all, this year. By doing that, the country could finally get started on putting in place the pieces of a serious, sophisticated push to make clean energy cheap and meaningfully slow climate change even as we wait for the crafting of the right carbon-pricing program.

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Here’s how to fix the climate: Take trips that are quite fancy.
In the mood for Chinese? Bag Beijing with John and Nancy.
Hit London, why don’t Chu, or give a crepe with Todd.
Just don’t think of your carbon trail, and make your peace with ... dog.

A wing and a player.beigeinside via flickr

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The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

-----

The word "Copenhagen" hangs over climate discussions everywhere from Washington to Wagga Wagga. That’s because in December the world travels to the Danish capital for the 15th Conference of Parties meeting, affectionately referred to as COP15. There, nations large and small hope to reach a new international agreement that would ratchet down global emissions beginning after 2012.

Expectations for a conclusive deal have diminished over the last several months. But negotiations of every stripe continue, and will accelerate through the summer and fall. This week saw nations, businesses, and advocacy groups ramp up activity.

Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, traveled to Paris, where he met with representatives from 15 other major economies and the European Union. Together these nations contribute more than 80 percent of industrial CO2 emissions. European officials pressed the U.S. for a stronger emissions reduction program than the one outlined in current climate legislation. Europe’s own goals are tied to the rest of the world. Leaders there have committed by 2020 to a 20 percent reduction in their emissions, below 1990 levels. If negotiators produce a new agreement in Copenhagen, the E.U. has vowed to raise that target to 30 percent.

Stern told his counterparts that pollution reductions below targets in the current House of Representatives climate bill are politically unfeasible: "We are jumping as high as the political system will tolerate."

Sino the Times: A more promising note rang from Beijing, where the government has issued draft car fuel economy standards tougher than those President Barack Obama announced last week, according to the New York Times. Chinese cars currently average about 35.8 miles per gallon and would be required to reach 42.2 mpg in 2015 (Obama’s new standard is 35.5 mpg by 2016). Chinese officials have yet to address a loophole large enough to drive a Hummer through: Standards apply only to cars produced in China — not imports.

In Beijing, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told Chinese leaders that the "climate crisis is game-changing for the U.S.-China relationship." Pelosi visited Beijing days after the Chinese government issued its formal negotiating stance for Copenhagen, which asks major emitters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2020. It’s hard to come up with a precise analogy for how difficult such a target would be. But certainly Americans could meet it easily by, uh, eliminating all household and commercial refrigeration.

Fortunately, striking a deal might ultimately cost much less than our entire national store of popsicles, ice cream, and frozen vegetables. Reuters interviews Gao Guangsheng, a top official in the National Coordination Committee for Climate Change, who acknowledges flexibility in the Chinese position. "I think Copenhagen may not be the final negotiation. It may set policy intentions so that we can keep negotiating," he said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who also went to China, put a finer point on current negotiations between the world’s two largest emitters: "Copenhagen will be defined by what the U.S. and China agree on in the next few weeks."

Other nations admit little or no such sunlight between their formal and informal negotiating positions. India has said it will look to the developed world for definitive leadership before considering a rigorous climate policy. ClimateWire explores the task facing climate advocates in India tilting at this particular windmill. "The Indian government’s agenda will not change until Indians want it to change," Malini Mehra, the founder of the Indian nonprofit Centre for Social Markets told U.N. Foundation audience in Washington, DC.

Climate glasnost?: Even intransigent national positions on climate change can change abruptly and dramatically, as they did after the 2008 U.S. election. They can also do so without warning.

Russia surprised the climate world by finally acknowledging the potentially catastrophic threats of manmade warming, Nature reports. The magnitude of this change might not be immediately apparent. Imagine that Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.) jettisoned his longstanding ridicule of basic science and climate policy, and adopted a position as rigorous as that of Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful House committee chairman and lead author of that chamber’s current climate bill. That’s what happened when the natural resources minister briefed the Russian Cabinet in April. Officials calculated that the economy already takes nearly a $2 billion hit every year, because of climate-related flooding, droughts, and storms.

This thaw in climate politics amounts to a major political shift in Russian attitudes. And its intended result is to prevent actual thaw that would amount to a climate shift in Russian latitudes. Edward Schuur of the University of Florida and colleagues write in Nature that warmer temperatures unleash soil carbon stored for many thousands of years in permafrost. Over the next few decades, carbon release from tundra could "overwhelm" the amount that plants use to grow, creating another accelerator for warming.

"If it isn’t boring, it isn’t green": Stern and Pelosi are not the U.S.’s only world travelers this week. Some 500 business leaders convened in the state of Denmark itself, calling on nations to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a target much lower than the 80 percent or so advocated by Obama and congressional allies.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a London audience that whitewashing the world’s roofs would reflect enough solar energy back into space to match emissions reductions from taking 11 million cars off the road. This is worth keeping in mind in coming weeks and months as Congress considers climate legislation (Legislators have the week off for Memorial Day). Little things, aggregated globally, mean a lot.

"Cap and trade" or no "cap and trade," the White House and Capitol are unlikely to ever change how they address global warming. That’s because both buildings reflect about 240 watts per square meter of solar energy right back up into the sky. (It’s the same principle behind parental encouragement to wear light shirts on sunny summer days. White and light colors reflect energy; black and dark colors absorb it.)

That’s just one approach. These buildings’ whiteness comes from heavy, hydrocarbon paints, which given the size of the buildings probably store several tons of carbon. The buildings themselves keep many tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. The Capitol Rotunda alone, made of Triassic and Cretaceous period sandstone, keeps carbon locked away in rock.

Climate Post is, of course, kidding in pointing out these relatively paltry stores of carbon. But maybe as elected officials and policymakers consider paths forward, they’ll take a moment to meditate on or marvel at the bigger picture — the much bigger picture — of the history they are making (either way), the common U.S. history that led them to this episode, its role in the community of nations, and the community of nations’ current, consequential role in the history of the Earth’s climate and life. How "cool" is that?

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California is planning to invest millions to support the rollout of new hydrogen fueling stations. Pictured here is a station near Los Angeles Int'l Airport that was built by a partnership that included BP, Praxair and LAX.Courtesy Hydrogen Assn.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu may want to slam the brakes on future hydrogen funding, but California will continue to pay its own way down the Hydrogen Highway, infuriating electric vehicle advocates in particular.

Obama's top energy official cut more than $100 million slated for hydrogen fuel-cell research from next year's federal budget, arguing that in tough times, tough choices had to be made. His department will allocate nearly $800 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for advanced biofuels research and commercial-scale biorefinery projects, part of his area of expertise at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before he joined the Obama administration.

In California, however, state lawmakers and regulators are handing out more money for hydrogen projects. Shell Oil, for example, will receive nearly $2 million in state funds to help build a hydrogen pump at a gas station near a swank Newport Beach country club and high end shopping mall. The pump will service a few dozen cars. State officials and hydrogen backers say it is a small but key step forward in solving the nation's energy and environmental woes. An additional $5 million in tax dollars will help build hydrogen fueling pumps near UCLA's campus, San Francisco Airport, and at the foot of wealthy southern California coastal communities.

Despite the state's massive budget woes, officials also approved another $120 million in alternative fuel expenditures, paid for with revenue generated from fees of about $10 recently tacked onto the costs of renewing a driver's registration. Hydrogen and electric plug-in technologies will both fare well, getting an estimated $40 million and $46 million respectively from the state.

But electric vehicle advocates said even those expenditures prove their point: According to the California Energy Commission, it will cost $40 million to build 11 hydrogen fueling stations, compared to just $12 million cost to build 6,500 EV charging stations.

Critics of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) much ballyhooed "Hydrogen Highway" program, unveiled in 2004, say the hydrogen funding is the latest outrage in a doomed and costly effort to convert drivers in the nation's most populous state to a still unproven replacement for gasoline. California is reeling from a potential $20 billion budget shortfall, but critics say oil companies and car manufacturers will continue to be prime beneficiaries of costly, state-funded hydrogen boondoggles.

By contrast, Chu's announcement left them dancing metaphorically on hydrogen's grave.

"California is pouring good money after bad down the hydrogen rat hole, at a time when we can least afford it. They're spending taxpayer dollars for a technology that doesn't work, and I object," said Paul Scott, vice president of Plug In America, an electric vehicle advocacy group. He was far happier with Chu's decision to cut off funding for hydrogen fuel research in next year's federal budget. "Listen closely ... that sound you hear is the banging of the final nail in the fuel cell coffin. Sweet music to our ears," he wrote in an e-mail.

Jay Friedland, also of Plug In America, said studies had shown it takes four times as much funding to build and fuel a hydrogen vehicle as an EV car. Chu appeared to echo that sentiment, joining fellow scientists, engineers and policymakers in questioning the commercial viability of creating clean hydrogen fuel on a broad scale any time soon.

But boosters retort that Chu erred, and they will look to Congress to rectify that error.

California air board staff and hydrogen advocates said the latest state spending was a critical long-term investment. Hydrogen is the least polluting vehicle fuel on earth, they say, and continued funding now will pay off by 2050 in sharply reduced greenhouse gases and other air pollution, as well as new jobs. Most important, it is vital to keep funding a mixture of possible fuel options until it becomes clear which is truly commercially viable.

They insist other studies have shown that hydrogen has as good a chance as battery powered cars.

"Steve is making a major mistake on several fronts," said Schwarzenegger's longtime environment adviser Terry Tamminen in an email. "First, many automakers that are heavily invested in hydrogen ... were not consulted on this decision, showing that our new Secretary could use some help with stakeholder outreach and diplomacy at the very least."

As for California's spending, he wrote, "I think taxpayer dollars earmarked for developing new/clean technologies are very appropriate… in bad times, we see even more clearly the cost of failure to invest in this important infrastructure. GM is dying at great cost to taxpayers; hundreds of billions of subsidies…to oil companies are essentially wasted. By contrast, when we supported development of high tech, we ended up with Silicon Valley and the trillions of dollars that has delivered to CA and the US in terms of jobs and taxes. You be the judge!"

California air board chair Mary Nichols, who has repeatedly sought to defuse competition between competing alternative fuel advocates, wrote to Chu on April 1 and copied the letter to Obama environmental adviser Carol Browner, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley, begging for continued hydrogen fuel cell funding as part of broad-range backing.

"Today it is not possible to know which technologies will be the market winners, but given that our global climate and future mobility are at stake, we must pursue all promising options. Fuel cell vehicles, with their potential to provide the range, high efficiency, rapid refueling, and performance consumers expect while achieving zero tailpipe emissions and dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions, are one of these options," she wrote.

Nichols noted hydrogen fuel cells were also "unique in their ability" to potentially power other current high polluters such as ships, locomotives and scooters. In a statement, she praised the state's latest expenditures.

"Hydrogen is one of the many fuels in California's future. But we need to cultivate the industry's early growth. This grant money will nurture a burgeoning technology that will provide jobs, invigorate our economy, and provide the state with clean power."

Anthony Eggert, Nichols' science and technology adviser, said late Tuesday that state officials were "puzzled' by Chu's decision, and that it would "obviously be a blow" to continued hydrogen technology development. He said the agency and a consortium of state fuel cell backers would push Congress to restore hydrogen funding in the energy department's final budget.

Asked for comment about Californians' pleas and criticisms, Chu's deputy press secretary, Tiffany Edwards, said in an email, "The President's 2010 Budget seeks to usher in a new era of responsibility -- an era in which we not only do what we must to save and create new jobs and lift our economy out of recession, but in which we also lay a new foundation for long-term growth and prosperity. The President and Secretary Chu are focused on investing in renewable sources of energy so that we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and become the world leader in the new clean energy economy. Change is never easy, but we must use our resources wisely in the short term if we are to transform the way we use and produce energy in the long term."

As for California's expenditures during tough times, Gerhard Achtelik, manager of the air board's Zero Emissions Vehicle program, noted that it took a century and lots of money to build gas stations, as well. Explaining the latest round of California funding, he said in many cases it was matching money.

Shell was the highest bidder in an open process, he said, and will spend more of its own money than any other applicant. Shell's project could also create hydrogen onsite, using a promising natural gas steam reformation system.

Achtelik said it was crucial to continue to fund a broad range of alternative fuel technologies, because while electric plug-ins and hybrid vehicles might be market-ready sooner, hydrogen-fueled vehicles would emit no pollutants, a giant step in helping the state meet its mandate to slash greenhouse gases and clear Los Angeles and the Central Valley's still polluted air in coming decades. Critics of EVs note that plug in vehicles, by contrast, have a long way to go as well, because much electric power still comes from highly polluting coal plants.

Electric vehicle advocates dispute that, saying their cars can be plugged in at night in homeowners' garages, to take advantage of burgeoning solar, wind and other renewable sources during off hours.

Part of the debate, like an old-fashioned schoolyard fight, reflects intensely personal differences about whose car is better. That schism has erupted repeatedly over the years between hydrogen and EV fans, with each side arguing their fuel is the one that will win out. Of late, EVs have been winning key laps. In addition to Chu's decision, President Obama toured an EV test site in Southern California this spring, and has pledged to get a million plug-in cars on the road. But others say the wheels are not off hydrogen yet.

Tamminen, who drives a hydrogen-fueled Honda Clarity, said in an email that contrary to press reports, hydrogen fueled cars are "real and here right now ... I refuel at the Shell station on Santa Monica Blvd…and have driven the car all over CA with no problem."

Noting that there are now 30 hydrogen stations in the state, he boasted, "I drive 250 miles and spend 5 minutes to refuel, while my friends with Teslas drive 120 miles and spend 4 hours recharging."

He added that EVs "suffer from lugging around half a ton of batteries," making the vehicles less efficient, and concluded, "May the best car win!"

But Scott, who drives one of the original Toyota electric vehicles featured in "Who Killed The Electric Car?" documentary, countered that he plugs his car into his solar powered Santa Monica home each night, and goes an effortless 150 miles or more on a single charge.

He said compressed hydrogen fuel, by contrast, is often trucked in by diesel spewing trucks to the few stations that do exist wiping out any clean air gains. He said that new, lighter batteries are being tested for EV cars, and that tens of thousands of electric vehicles could quickly be on the street. In fact, he noted, the filmmakers who shot the original documentary about how California's air board decimated the original EV fleets are hard at work on a sequel: "The Revenge of the Electric Car."

Next Page: Watch two videos about California's hydrogen dreams >>>

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Video 1: Terry Tamminen addresses the California Hydrogen Business Council discussing his experience with the Honda FCX and California's Hydrogen Highway.

Video 2: A tour of the California FuelCell Partnership testing facility and look at how hydrogen fuel cell cars are fueled.

<<< Back to first page of this article

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“We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said in a briefing today. He cited several barriers, including infrastructure, development of long-lasting portable fuel cells and other problems.

For years now, I have been urging the Department of Energy to slash the bloated hydrogen budget and redirect the funds toward clean energy technology development and deployment programs that could actually achieve significant benefits for the American public in the foreseeable future (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.” and “DOE flushes $15 million down the hydrogen toilet“).

Well, finally, we have somebody running the Department of Energy who gets how unproductive this whole effort has proven to be.  Nobelist Steven Chu has rolled out a FY2010 budget that cuts $100 million from the program.  Indeed, the budget (see page 4 here) zeroes out the “hydrogen” program and shifts all the money to “fuel cell technologies.”

I’ll blog on the rest of the remarkable FY2010 budget for clean energy shortly.  Here is how E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reports Chu’s remarks today on hydrogen and transportation in his budget:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu today said he sees little promise in hydrogen-powered cars in the coming decades as DOE released a proposed fiscal 2010 budget that slashes programs for developing the transportation technologies.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said in a briefing today. He cited several barriers, including infrastructure, development of long-lasting portable fuel cells and other problems.

The budget proposal would trim more than $100 million from the hydrogen program in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, cutting it to $68 million for fuel cell research and development and steering the program away from areas related to transportation.

But the budget increases funding for other vehicle technology programs, including electric vehicles, lightweight materials and biofuels. “We are shifting resources,” Chu said. “We are saying in the next 10 or 20 years, what is the most likely thing that will happen, what will actually get us on a lower-carbon emissions path.”

President George W. Bush called developing hydrogen-powered cars a priority, touting it heavily during his first-term as a way to curb pollution and reduce oil import reliance.

Another technology head-fake by Bush bites the dust (see Bush wanted to destroy the future of coal as much as the industry did, Futuregen was “nothing more than a public relations ploy,” House study finds).

Kudos to Chu for not just accepting the big increase in technology funding he was given — but for shifting resources and making the best use of all the taxpayer’s money.

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[Update: While some may think this decision was a win for corn ethanol, House Ag Committee Chair Collin Peterson clearly does not. In fact, he is seriously ticked off about it. According to CongressDaily, Peterson responded to the indirect land use ruling as follows: 

Ouch.]

The Obama administration came out big time today for biofuels. The White House is establishing a new Biofuels Interagency Working Group chaired by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and USDA chief Tom Vilsack and charged with a broad mandate to improve and commercialize advanced biofuels. In addition, the White House has released stimulus money to be administered by the Energy Department for research in advanced biofuels and, in a sop to a desperate industry, is directing Vilsack to "begin restructuring existing investments in renewable fuels as needed to preserve industry employment."

At the same time, the EPA announced its proposed rule for a new Renewable Fuel Standard. This is where things start to get hazy. First the bad news: by 2022, up to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol can be counted toward the RFS's 36 billion gallon biofuel production mandate. We're at 6 9 billion gallons of corn ethanol now and with all the havoc that has wreaked on agriculture worldwide, the concept of almost tripling that amount over the next 20-odd years is terrifying. What may yet save us is the fact that it will likely prove a simply impossible standard to meet.

And the fact that the administration's rationale for expanding the use of biofuels continues to be the, at this point, misplaced desire "to reduce our dependence on foreign oil" is just ludicrous. To wit: Stephen Chu said "Developing the next generation of biofuels is key to our effort to end our dependence on foriegn oil and address the climate crisis." That is, of course, precisely backwards. Addressing climate change WILL reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But simply reducing dependence on foreign oil won't save the planet -- only zeroing out our carbon emissions will do that. So energy policy in this country must be seen through that one, single lens.

There is some potential good news, however, as the EPA also announced that, as suspected, they will join California's Air Resources Board in taking indirect land use into account when calculating a renewable fuel's GHG emissions. And by the rule the EPA has proposed, both corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are unable to meet the new Renewable Fuels Standard. Like CARB, however, the EPA is hedging on its land use calculations and has offered other alternatives as well as opened up its proposal to public comment and "peer review" by experts. See Tom Philpott's post for a detailed exploration of the EPA's proposed land use calculations. It's entirely possible that the ethanol lobby will succeed in watering down the land use calculations such that corn- and soy-based biofuels will qualify for the RFS with no changes in production style or feedstock sourcing.

It's easy to throw up your hands and simply declare that the Obama administration has given in to the ethanol industry. Yet I was actually surprised at how little support for corn ethanol there was in the various announcements and press releases, not to mention the fact that Lisa Jackson herself explicitly observed that corn ethanol right now fails the proposed RFS. And while I'm deeply skeptical of even switchgrass as a feedstock, since anything that grows on marginal agricultural land would grow even better on prime agricultural land, I do think there are cellulosic biofuels that merit research (wood waste, garbage, etc.). Plus, let's not forget that algal biofuels still may prove commercially viable. It's also worth noting the very muted, though certainly positive, response from Tom Buis, CEO of ethanol lobby group Growth Energy. Buis likely noted as I did that the USDA's influence over ethanol policy is significantly diluted by putting Jackson and Chu atop the new biofuels working group along with Vilsack. A boondoggle is harder (though not impossible) to maintain when multiple agencies have to conspire to support it.

A good day for biofuels, yes. But even after today's announcement, corn ethanol's future is as cloudy as ever.

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