Last week, the nation suffered from major sticker shock when we learned that our use of fossil fuels comes with a hidden price tag of $120 billion per year.  Thanks to the results of the National Research Council's report on energy and the environment, some of the extra costs of dirty energy were exposed.  (Full disclosure: Policy Integrity's faculty director, Richard L. Revesz, sat on the report's panel). 

But folks should prepare for a second round of surprise costs because, as the authors of the report mention, there are more stickers that weren't accounted for in this sum.  David Roberts notes that the $120 billion does not include major costs like tax-payer subsidies for coal, mercury pollution, and a few other by-products of "cheap" energy. 

Most notably, the report did not tally up the price of climate change or greenhouse gas emissions.  Using a very conservative estimate from recent proposed federal greenhouse gas regulations, each ton of CO2 causes $19 in social harm -- multiply that by the number of tons of CO2 emitted every year, and you get $117 billion per year. 

This low-ball number nearly doubles the report's estimate -- the combined health and climate costs of heat trapping emissions comes to $237 billion per year.  This amounts to a hidden tax of about $2,099 per household per year.

The NRC report underscored what many of us have known for some time-that the ostensibly "cheap" energy we get now from fossil fuels is actually extremely expensive.  We disassociate the price that we pay for things like heating or electricity from the big hidden costs dirty energy imposes on our nation.  In so doing, we obscure the real price tag of using fossil fuels. 

Some of these true costs have been deferred, but they will catch up to us soon enough.  Like a family living in a foreclosed house and just waiting for the sheriff to carry out the eviction order, we are living on borrowed time.

At $237 billion per year, the price of dirty energy is all the more reason to move forward with a cap on our greenhouse gas emissions. A recent Policy Integrity report found that, only looking at the greenhouse gas side of the equation, the Waxman-Markey would net $1.5 trillion, and possibly much more in savings and avoided costs.

Some policymakers worry that it will be too expensive for America to bring down our greenhouse gas emissions levels.  But the problem is, we are already paying dearly for the way we produce energy.  Over time, those costs will rise as the effects of climate change become increasingly felt.  The question is, when will we decide that the hidden fossil fuel tax isn't worth paying any more.

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This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

Last week, Dave Roberts blogged about a recent -- and very important -- study by the National Research Council on the enormous hidden costs of energy consumption.

I'm surprised that the study hasn't gotten more press coverage.  It's fact-rich, sober, and completely non-ideological -- and, at the same time, it's an incredibly damning indictment of the nation's energy system.  The report looks at a variety of "external" costs of energy -- that is, the costs that energy consumers themselves don't pay, but pass on to the public at large.  The costs they could pin down were largely related to air pollution, including the impacts on human health, crop and timber yields, and visibility. And the researchers find a big culprit:  coal-fired power.  From the NRC press release:

In 2005, the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion; these nonclimate damages average about 3.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour (kwh) of energy produced.  A relatively small number of plants -- 10 percent of the total number -- accounted for 43 percent of the damages.

Photo courtesy ittybittiesforyou via Flickr Based on my awesome powers of multiplication, and a quick trip to the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, these numbers suggest that the "hidden" costs of coal fired power in 2005 were roughly twice as high as the cost of the coal itself.  And those costs, according to the NRC, don't even include "damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security, which the report examines but does not monetize."

So any time someone tells you that coal is "cheap," just remember that in 2005 the real, comprehensive cost of coal was well over three times as high as the market price. 

The tally of damages that the NRC could calculate came to $156 million per coal-fired plant per year.  The biggest culprits seem to be in the Midwest.  According to this map in the NRC report, the Centralia and Boardman plants, in Washington and Oregon, respectively, don't rank particularly high for the kinds of costs the NRC was looking at.  But if you added in the costs for mercury emissions and climate risks, then the Northwest's coal plants might rank a bit higher.

Obviously, the National Research Council is no group of amateurs, nor is it driven by any sort of ideology.  It operates under the umbrella of the National Academies, a Congressionally-chartered non-profit that also houses the National Academies of Science and Engineering and the National Institute of Medicine.  In other words, it's a bunch of hard-core nerds:  people who care about, y'know, facts & stuff.  So tell your friends:  the experts have spoken, and despite what the market says, coal ain't cheap.

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In some hopeful news for sustainable energy advocates, the latest production numbers from the federal government are out -- and they show that the growth rate of renewable sources continues to outpace nuclear and fossil fuels.

The data come as Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are expected to introduce legislation today designed to curb man-made climate change, with hearings on their bill  -- a counterpart to the one that narrowly passed the House in June -- expected to begin early next month.

While the politics of the climate bill are likely to be even more contentious than health reform, some note with optimism that a shift toward renewables is already underway.

"As Congress debates energy funding priorities and climate legislation, it would do well to take note of the clear trends in the nation's changing energy mix," says Ken Bossong, executive director of the SUN DAY Campaign, a Maryland-based nonprofit research organization that promotes sustainable energy technologies. "Renewable energy has become a major player -- growing rapidly and nipping at the heels of nuclear power -- while fossil fuel use continues to drop."

According to the latest issue of the Monthly Energy Review published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewable energy sources -- biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar and wind -- provided 11.37% of domestic U.S. energy production in June 2009, the most recent month for which data is available. That represents a gain since the first half of 2007, when renewable sources accounted for 9.89% of domestic energy production, and from the same period last year, when they represented 10.2% of production.

At the same time, EIA's latest Electric Power Monthly reports that renewable energy sources provided 11.18% of net U.S. electrical generation for the first six months of 2009 -- a significant gain over renewables' 9.9% share for the first half of 2008.

Renewable energy sources grew by 4.62% during the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. Most of that growth came from wind and hydropower, which expanded by 24.54% and 7.14% respectively in the first half of 2009 compared to the first half of 2008.

In comparison, nuclear power increased by only 1.38%, while domestic fossil fuel production actually dropped by 0.7%. Meanwhile, overall consumption of fossil fuels -- including imports -- declined 7.67%.

The numbers for renewable energy are likely to grow even more in the coming months as planned projects get underway.

Those include a new North Carolina effort to develop offshore wind power. Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy and UNC-Chapel Hill are finalizing a contract that would have the company build one to three wind towers in Pamlico Sound while UNC researchers would study environmental impacts, maintenance and other related issues.

At the same time, though, Duke Energy is still investing heavily in new generation from polluting sources, constructing a new $2.4 billion coal-fired power plant at its Cliffside facility in western North Carolina. The Cliffside plant is expected to release to the air annually 6 million tons of carbon dioxide as well as large quantities of chemicals toxic to human health.

Meanwhile, the rate hike the company requested to help pay for the plant has met opposition at public hearings across the state this month, with one local newspaper describing the scene at this week's public hearing in Macon County, N.C. as "a seeming never-ending procession of citizens stating their considered opposition" to the increase, which is also opposed by a grassroots coalition of 25 environmental and public-health advocacy groups.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Let man tear asunder.On Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama formally announced that the world's 20 major developed and developing nations had agreed to gradually eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies. 

It was the only climate-specific policy directive to come out of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, and it fell far short in the view of climate activists, who were hoping for a firm proposal on "climate finance" -- G20 aid to poor nations for help in adapting to and mitigating climate change.

"Removing fossil-fuel subsidies could be an important step towards cutting CO2 emissions," said Oxfam climate advisor David Waskow in a statement. "But it should not be allowed to distract from the failure of rich countries to offer poor countries the help they need. Poor people should not be asked to pay the price of cutting emissions" that rich countries have created.

Greenpeace climate finance advisor Steve Herz agreed.  "We think it's an important step forward," said Herz, "but it's no substitute for the work we expected them to be doing here, which was putting together a fair and ambitious financing package to help the world's poorest nations."

Despite the disappointment of activists, the commitment on the part of G20 leaders to cut fossil-fuel subsidies is an important step, assuming they follow through on their pledge. Fossil-fuel subsidies add up to around $300 billion across the G20 major world economies. Developing nations tend to use these subsidies to artificially lower fuel prices for consumers, while developed nations like the United States use them in the form of economic and tax sweeteners for fossil-fuel producers.

According to estimates from the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, eliminating the subsidies would reduce global greenhouse-gas pollution 10 to 12 percent by 2050.

"We already know that the prices [for fossil fuels] are too low because they don't reflect the cost of climate change ... the true scarcity value and opportunity cost of using this resource," said Columbia University's Scott Barrett, who studies natural resource economics. "These subsidies are sending the wrong signal about value and scarcity of fossil fuels in the marketplace."

Fossil-fuel subsides are also a drag on the ecomony. "If you're selling kerosene at a lower price than the world price ... it will come out of the public purse in some other way," said Barrett, who co-authored a survey of economic policy strategies for combating climate change -- including the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies -- for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Second Assessment report, published in 1995 [PDF].

Removing artificial price supports will help cool demand for dirty fuels while simultaneously making cleaner energy more competitive. But it has to be done with care. if subsidies are cut off thoughtlessly, warned Barrett, a head of state could end up with riots in the streets.

This is one reason fossil-fuel subsidies have not played a bigger role in climate negotiations. Another, according to Barrett, is that many climate negotiators "were pushing for targets and timelines," to the exclusion of all other options.

"The biggest problem with targets and timetables is that they're not being met, they don't work," said Barrett.  "So why not supplement discussions about targets and timetables with discussions about actions that are actually going to be taken" -- like retiring fossil fuel subsidies, which looks like it may actually happen.

At the end of the Pittsburgh Summit, G20 heads of state directed their finance czars to begin developing a more detailed phaseout plan at a November meeting in Scotland. The G20 will revisit the issue at its next meeting, in Toronto in June 2010.

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Oil companies, electric utilities and the coal industry have poured more than $250,000 this year into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party's House fundraising arm that has played a lead role in attacking Democrats who supported climate legislation.

All told, political action committees for various fossil fuel industries have given at least $280,000 to NRCC through the end of June, according to quarterly finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission....

In the 2008 campaign cycle, the oil and gas industry and utilities combined to contribute more than $1.6 million to NRCC, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

So reports Greenwire (subs. req'd) today.  See also "Follow the money: Global warming polluters pay to undermine Waxman-Markey clean energy bill."

And don't get me started on how stupid the natural gas industry is for using their money to stop a climate bill that will be a boon to their industry (see Game changer 4: Tim Wirth delivers must-read "extreme words" to natural gas execs: "You don't have the right to sit back and do nothing" about climate change. "We are in very deep trouble, the edge of catastrophe, and you can help").  I'll blog on that shortly.

Here are more details on this dirty money, and how the GOP is spending it:

Last month alone - the same month that the House voted on a comprehensive energy bill - the industry contributed more than $54,000 to the NRCC war chest, mainly through a handful of large contributions from high-profile energy interests. Among them: $15,000 from Oklahoma-based Devon Energy Corp., $15,000 from Kansas-based Koch Industries Inc. and another $15,000 from Atlanta-based Southern Co.

Those sums reflect only donations given directly from the industry or its advocacy groups and do not include donations from industry officials.

Campaign finance records show that in June, NRCC received a handful of large contributions from individuals linked to the energy industry, including $15,000 from the chairman emeritus and director of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and $5,000 from the senior vice president of government relations at Peabody Energy Corp.

The energy industry traditionally has been a major contributor to the Republican Party, particularly to NRCC. But the recent contributions come as Congress debates climate and energy legislation that will have major ramifications for all corners of the energy sector....

Meanwhile, NRCC this cycle has launched a series of attacks focused on moderate Democrats' votes on energy legislation.

Just days after the House narrowly approved the Waxman-Markey climate bill, NRCC launched a series of radio ads, robo-calls and a television spot criticizing moderate Democrats for voting in favor of the legislation. House Republican leaders have also said that they view the energy vote as particularly damaging to the Democratic majority and anticipate that it will help them win back a number of seats in 2010.

Money can't buy you love.  But I guess it can buy you hate -- see House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate. "Why do conservatives hate your children?"

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How industry pressures and competing national agendas dim prospects for a climate treaty

It was about five years ago. I was talking with a radical friend about my then-recent personal decision to prioritize work on the climate crisis. I had done so after the European heat wave in the summer of 2003 that led to 30,000 or more deaths. This catastrophe jolted me into serious study about the issue of global warming, study which led me to conclude that the dangerous, earth-heating-up process was happening much more quickly than I had thought it was.

My friend didn’t disagree about the urgency of the climate crisis, but his view was that what we needed to do about it was to build a stronger movement to replace capitalism with a 21st century version of socialism. At the time, I didn’t agree. I felt that we didn’t have the many, many years that it would take to build the kind of powerful mass movement that would be necessary to accomplish that objective, especially given the weaknesses and disorientation of the Left. I felt that the immediate historical need was to do all we could to get off of fossil fuels and onto a renewable energy/energy conservation path. I was convinced that this clean energy movement, to be successful within the limited time period we have, would have to include a very broad range of people, people like Al Gore, for example, not exactly a revolutionary.

However, for the past few months, since liberal Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman made public a first draft of comprehensive climate legislation for the House of Representatives, I’ve been seriously re-thinking this question.

Waxman’s draft of “The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” ACESA, was very problematic, but as it evolved through behind-closed-doors negotiations between Waxman and coal state, oil state and industrial agriculture Democrats, it got even worse. The target for greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions reductions over the next 10 years, an absolutely critical period of time if we are to have any hope of avoiding world-wide catastrophe, is way too weak, and it is questionable if even this weak target would be met. It contains a huge percentage of problematic “offsets” that will likely allow U.S. corporate polluters to avoid or minimize actual reductions of emissions from their dirty coal plants or oil refineries for 15-20 years or more. It gives away free 2/3 of the permits to emit ghg’s to corporate polluters; half are given directly to the fossil fuel industry. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate coal plants and other stationary sources of ghg’s. Its cap-and-trade framework allows Wall Street speculators to get into the huge new “carbon market” being created. It is nuclear power-friendly, and it projects giving the U.S. coal industry tens of billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration, an unsafe boondoggle that is, at best, a decade away from being commercially viable, if it ever is.

All of this from a liberal Democrat who, in the spring of 2008, one year before the release of the ACESA bill, introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on the building of any new coal plants unless they sequestered 85% of their greenhouse gas emissions. The ACESA bill will allow new coal plants to be built without having to sequester any carbon dioxide or other ghg’s until 2025.

It’s a similar thing with our “yes we can” President. All through his campaign for the Presidency one of his top issues was a call for a steadily-declining cap on ghg emissions and a 100% auction to polluters of ghg emissions permits. Most of that auction money would be returned to taxpayers and consumers to help them deal with higher prices, with some of it used for clean energy and green jobs investments. In March of this year Obama included this plan in his proposed 2010 budget authority legislation. But when he couldn’t get a filibuster-proof 60 U.S. Senators to support this, and after Waxman came out in late March with his ACESA bill draft, Obama went silent. Like Waxman, he allowed the powerful fossil fuel interests which continue to dominate Capitol Hill to wreak their carnage.

I wasn’t a big Obama fan. I wanted him to win and said so publicly, but I also said publicly that Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney was the candidate whose platform and personal history of courageous leadership were most consistent with my own beliefs. However, I did believe that an Obama Presidency would create openings for progressives and revolutionaries, and based upon Obama’s consistently-articulated, 100% auction position, I thought we had a good chance to get some decent climate legislation through the House of Representatives even if the odds were much longer in the Senate.

I was wrong.

What might have made a difference? Things might have been different if there had been a much stronger, more massive radical wing of the climate movement to visibly push back against the fossil fuel Democrats and the environmentalists who quietly went along with them. If there were demonstrations of thousands around the country, or a massive sit-in on Capitol Hill, this might have had an impact. Instead, most environmental and climate groups used their usual tactics, doing some lobbying to try to strengthen ACESA but engaging in virtually no “street heat.”

Where was the U.S. Left during this battle for strong federal climate legislation? It was around, here and there, individuals writing articles, some groups putting out statements, but by and large independent progressives who understand that corporate capitalism is our underlying problem were largely missing in action.

Why This Issue Is So Critical, Short- and Long-Term

There are a number of reasons why this issue needs to be one that every person in the world who considers themselves part of the Left should be studying about and taking action on.

The most important one is the reality of the climate science. There is no question that the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of forests and the general disregard for our ecosystem manifested by industrial capitalism, as well as 20th century efforts to build socialism in the Soviet Union and China, have led us close to the edge of a cascading series of ecological disasters that are a grave threat to the future of life on earth as we have known it for thousands of years. Stronger and more destructive hurricanes and typhoons, spreading desertification, more intensive and extensive heat waves, chronic and numerically increasing wildfires, rising sea levels, 100-year-floods happening every decade or less, the disruption of agriculture, growing water scarcity—all of this is happening now, and it’s going to get worse. The question is whether we as a human species, worldwide, are going to be able to gather the spiritual and political strength in enough time to make a rapid shift away from our past polluting practices. We must, we absolutely have to do this to prevent the acceleration of global warming which, sooner or later, will lead us past critical climate tipping points.

What are these tipping points? There are four: the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, the thawing of the methane-full permafrost in the northern latitudes, the release of methane frozen in ice on the bottom of the ocean as the ocean warms, and the decimation of the Amazon rainforest caused by drought or by humans cutting down too much of it. Any one of these tipping points alone would likely cause such catastrophic impacts or trigger such a major spike in greenhouse gas emissions that the extensive ecological disruption would be almost impossible to reverse for centuries if not millennia.

We aren’t at any of these tipping points yet, but each year that goes by without a dramatic worldwide effort to seriously reduce our ghg emissions brings us closer to one or more of them.

Any “revolutionary” or alleged revolutionary movement which doesn’t do all that it can to prevent this worldwide catastrophe is a complete and total contradiction in terms.

The climate crisis is also a fundamental justice issue. Who is it that is being hit first and hardest as the world begins to experience the negative impacts of a hotter world? It is the people who did the least to cause it, low-income people and people of color. It is Black people in the 9th Ward in New Orleans who lived in the neighborhoods least protected from a strong hurricane. It is Indigenous people in the Arctic where the ice and permafrost are melting, villages are collapsing into the ever-rising ocean waters and hunters are experiencing an unstable and weakening ice. It is residents of islands in the South Pacific where rising seas are threatening to displace entire nations from their historic homelands going back thousands of years.

Those with the least resources are those with the fewest options as climate impacts affect their livelihoods and living situations.

The politics of this dynamic is currently playing itself out as the nations of the world struggle to come up with a stronger international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, expiring in three years. For close to two years there’s been an effort underway to come up with a treaty by this December at a major United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. Yet as of right now there are significant differences between the Group of 77 and China, the formerly colonized countries of the global South, and most of the industrialized countries of the North, with some European exceptions. The global South is demanding significant cuts in ghg emissions by the industrialized North, at least 40% below the baseline year of 1990. They are demanding this since over 80% of the ghg emissions in the atmosphere affecting all the nations of the world are the result of the North’s economic development over the past 150 or so years. Yet the United States, responsible for over a quarter of those historic emissions, is proposing via the ACESA legislation to reduce U.S.-based emissions no more than 7-8% by 2020.

Revolutionaries who recognize the deep-seated inequality and injustice of the world economic order, growing out of centuries of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism by the coal- and oil-burning capitalist powers, have a responsibility to support the call for a truly just treaty. Only such a treaty can begin to restore the necessary trust internationally that would then make possible rapid leaps forward to renewable energy-based, sustainable and fair economic development throughout the world.

There is a growing and interconnected, international grassroots climate movement that is planning for action in scores of countries all around the world this fall, beginning on October 24th (www.350.org) and continuing with other actions leading up to and during the Copenhagen climate conference in December. This movement has been steadily developing since 2005. It is a hopeful development and a concrete indicator of the potential for the climate issue to galvanize and advance an independent progressive movement that puts climate justice issues at its center. Another reason why the Left should be doing consistent work on this issue is because, as a once-great revolutionary leader once said, “the masses make history.”

Everyone is affected by this issue. Some are affected more by it and are suffering and will suffer earlier and more seriously, but this is an issue that ultimately affects us all. 75% of U.S. Americans understand that global warming is real and that we need to shift away from the use of fossil fuels. People are experiencing the changes in weather patterns in their daily life.

You can be sure that Barack Obama and John McCain would not have made this a major issue in their 2008 campaigns for the Presidency if it wasn’t one that their polls showed had resonance among the broad voting public.

We have a significant opportunity to build the kind of mass-based movement that, sooner or later, can force the kinds of changes needed in the way the U.S. creates its energy. As we are seeing right now with what is happening on Capitol Hill, there is a need for people who understand the way in which corporate power operates. We need people who can help the climate movement avoid the trap of blindly following Democrats who say one thing but, once in power, are then willing to settle for something very different. In this process progressive independents can build a stronger base of support and a more activist movement able to increasingly challenge corporate power and those subservient to it.

Helping people to understand the way in which power works, helping them to develop the tactics and the organizational strength to overcome it on particular issues—this is a key task for an independent progressive movement. In the process of doing this work and exposing the powers-that-be for who and what they are, we will be laying the basis for broadly-supported revolutionary changes in our energy policy, as well as in other areas of society.

On a very practical level, renewable energy technology can be used on local levels to provide “power to the people,” not just the power of the sun or the wind but power to build local economies that are more self-sufficient. Think about a local neighborhood which joins together to install rooftop solar panels and/or several windmills which, in combination, provide most or all of the electricity needed by that neighborhood. Organizing a neighborhood to do this is, first, a way to bring people together around a commonly-shared need—affordable and reliable electricity. The process of community organizing around a commonly shared need can develop confidence and hope within the community that will then likely manifest itself in other positive projects and initiatives. It will give people a sense of their power when they join together with others.

This kind of a process is the essence of what is needed to build a popular movement capable of eventually making revolutionary change.

Finally, but very importantly, the process of building a clean energy revolution will organically lead growing numbers of people toward a deeply-felt appreciation for and connection to our natural environment. This is something needed not just by the general population but by too many of those who call themselves radicals or revolutionaries. It is needed because the negative values of domination and greed which undergird capitalism and the destructive corporate practices which flow from them are responsible for tremendous environmental damage and pollution. The development of an ecological consciousness and a will to act on it on the part of ever-larger numbers of people is an absolute prerequisite if we are to have any hope for developing the kind of future new society which sees itself as one with nature, not its master.

On an individual level, appreciating, connecting to and learning from the natural world is an essential aspect of how new women and new men can emerge who are able to give leadership within a 21st century revolutionary process.

There are many things that make good revolutionaries: an ability to listen, a sensitivity to human suffering, an understanding of history and economics, basic organizing skills, a commitment to development of new leadership, self-motivated discipline, a willingness to sacrifice for others. Many of these qualities are enhanced by a personal connection to the many other life forms with whom we share this planet Earth.

In the words of an Ojibway prayer,

“Grandfather.
Look at our brokenness.

“We know that in all creation
Only the human family
Has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk the Sacred Way.
Grandfather,
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion
and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.”

Amen.

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Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities.

The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth Medical School, compromises a person's ability to mount an immune response to the H1N1 swine flu virus. 

Most disturbingly, the study -- published last month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives -- found that arsenic can weaken the immune response to swine flu even in the low-level exposure levels that  are commonly found in contaminated drinking water.

When normal people or mice are infected with the flu, they immediately develop an immune response where immune cells rush to the lungs and produce chemicals to battle the infection, the researchers explain. But in mice who over the course of five weeks had ingested 100 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic in their drinking water, the immune response to H1N1 infection was initially weak. When the response finally did kick in days later, it often overwhelmed the animal.

"There was a massive infiltration of immune cells to the lungs and a massive inflammatory response, which led to bleeding and damage in the lung," explains MBL senior scientist and report co-author Joshua Hamilton. The animals exposed to the arsenic were more likely to die from the infection than their counterparts who were not exposed.

The currently federal standard for arsenic in drinking water is 10 ppb, but levels in drinking water in some parts of the country routinely exceed that. A 2005 analysis of contaminants in drinking water by the Environmental Working Group found that the average arsenic levels in water supplied by at least 144 systems in Texas and 11 systems in Florida exceeded that standard -- in some cases at levels approaching those given to the experimental mice.

For example, average arsenic levels in water from the Bruni Rural Water Supply Commission in Webb County, Texas were 90.87 ppb. Levels of over 100 ppb were also documented in the drinking water in Jim Hogg County, Texas.  

When Hamilton and his colleagues heard about the recent H1N1 outbreak, they were struck by the fact that there are high arsenic levels in well water in many parts of Mexico. That includes Veracruz, where news reports placed the first case of H1N1 swine flu, though there are now questions about that time line since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta more recently reported that the virus likely started circulating among the Mexican people as early as the fall of 2008.

No link has been established between any specific case of swine flu and arsenic exposure, "but it's an intriguing notion that this may have contributed," Hamilton says.

The coal power-arsenic connection

Arsenic has been linked to cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver and prostate as well as fetal malformations. Earlier research by Hamilton and colleagues found that arsenic also disrupts the endocrine system that controls the release of hormones.

There are many parts of the United States where groundwater naturally contains high arsenic levels, including large swaths of Texas and Florida; click here for a map from the U.S. Geological Survey. If tests show that your water has high levels of arsenic, the Natural Resources Defense Council recommends purchasing filters certified by NSF International to remove it.

But arsenic is also released into the environment through industrial pollution. Across the United States, there are more than 700 toxic waste sites overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program where arsenic is a contaminant of concern. There are also scores of industrial facilities that routinely release arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air and water or dump it into surface impoundments like the one that collapsed last December at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston plant in Roane County, Tenn., according to the EPA's online Toxics Release Inventory. All of these create potential exposure pathways for people.

Of the top 25 industrial emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds via point-source air emissions (that is, releases through confined streams like smokestacks) in 2007, 22 were coal-fired electric power plants, according to the most recent TRI data available. The big arsenic air polluters are concentrated in the South, with 10 of the top 25 arsenic-emitting facilities located in the region.

In the Southern states, the biggest emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds to the air were the Southern Company's Bowen plant in Bartow County, Ga. and Progress Energy's Roxboro plant in Person County, N.C., each of which released 2,200 pounds of arsenic to the air in 2007 alone. Besides coal-fired power plants, the other big arsenic emitters were copper refineries in Texas and Utah and a glass plant in Kentucky. Click here for a chart showing the top 25 point-source air emitters, their location and the amounts released.

Industrial facilities -- and particularly coal-fired power plants -- are also dumping large quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters such as streams and rivers. Of the top 25 emitters of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007, 22 were coal-fired power plants. The facilities dumping arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters are again concentrated in the South, with 16 of the top 25 arsenic water polluters located in the region. Arsenic pollution of waterways is a particular concern since the pollutant concentrates up the food chain, which can render fish unsafe to eat.

In the South, the biggest dumper of arsenic and arsenic compounds into surface waters in 2007 was Dominion Power's Chesterfield power plant in Chesterfield County, Va. at 4,500 pounds. It was closely followed by the TVA's Johnsonville plant in Humphreys County, Tenn. at 4,200 pounds and TVA's Widows Creek plant in Jackson County, Ala. at 3,900 pounds. In fourth place was TVA's Kingston plant, which dumped 2,700 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds into nearby waterways in 2007. Click here for a chart showing the top 25 emitters of arsenic to surface waters.

The failure of the Kingston plant's coal ash impoundment also released significant quantities of arsenic into the environment. An analysis of water samples taken downstream of the spill and released earlier this year showed elevated levels exceeding standards set to protect humans from dangerous concentrations of pollution, with arsenic levels more than double acute toxicity levels. The tests, which were sponsored by the Environmental Integrity Project and United Mountain Defense, also found widely fluctuating arsenic levels in the nearby Emory and Clinch rivers, with some 37 times higher than safe drinking water standards.

Catastrophic failures like the one at the Kingston plant are not the only ways coal ash impoundments are contaminating the environment with arsenic. For example, high levels of the chemical were recently discovered in water and sediment samples collected downstream of Progress Energy's coal-fired power plant near Asheville, N.C., raising concerns that arsenic contamination from unlined coal ash impoundments is seeping into the environment. In addition, a 2007 assessment by the EPA documented coal ash waste dumping sites around the country associated with arsenic contamination.

Enormous quantities of arsenic are currently being dumped into these unlined and poorly regulated surface impoundments at coal-fired power plants across the country. An EPA analysis found people living near these coal ash dump sites have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated by arsenic, and evidence has surfaced since then suggesting the risk may be even higher.

Of the 25 surface impoundments where the greatest quantities of arsenic and arsenic compounds were dumped in 2007, 17 were at coal-fired plants; of those 17 plants, 12 are located in the South, as shown in the chart here. Note that TVA's Kingston plant doesn't even make the list of the top 25 facilities; the 44,000 pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds it dumped into its surface impoundment in 2007 put it at number 27 on the list.

The fight for tougher coal waste regulation

In the U.S. to date, the swine flu virus has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused at least 27 deaths, according to the CDC. This week the World Health Organization said it was getting close to declaring a pandemic as the virus has infected more than 26,500 people in 73 countries, while researchers warn that the current outbreak may be only a "dress rehearsal" for a wider pandemic to come.

Many questions still remain about the virus. For example, last month we reported that scientists working to understand the genetic makeup of the current H1N1 strain linked it to a virus behind a 1998 swine flu outbreak at an industrial hog farm in eastern North Carolina. But Dr. Barrett Slenning, an epidemiologist at N.C. State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, points out that subsequent laboratory research suggests the 1998 virus was not a direct predecessor to the current H1N1, with recent genetic analyses showing greater similarities to flu strains from Asia.

"It all points to the importance of human health, animal health, and environmental health workers needing to come together," says Slenning. "You cannot protect one without protecting the others."

And when it comes to protecting ourselves from the worst effects of swine flu, it might also help to exercise precaution by reducing our exposure to arsenic -- which ultimately means cleaning up dirty coal plants and carefully regulating their toxic waste.

But that won't be easy. While environmental advocates have been pressing hard for enforceable federal standards governing disposal of coal ash waste in the wake of last December's Kingston disaster, some in Washington are working to protect the dirty and dangerous status quo -- despite new research suggesting that regulations to require safer storage of coal ash waste will likely produce far more benefits than costs.

This week, for example, congressional allies of electric utilities have been circulating "Dear Colleague" letters that oppose regulating coal ash as hazardous waste, instead calling only for federal "guidelines" for coal ash disposal rather than enforceable standards. The letters are based on the notion disproved by the Kingston spill that the current patchwork of state regulations is adequate for protecting the environment and public health.

Leading the effort to gather signatories are Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa.). Among the lawmakers from the South who have signed the letter opposing tough federal standards so far are Reps. Marion Berry (D-Ark.), Travis Childers (D-Miss.), John Fleming (R-La.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Jerry Moran (D-Va.), Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), Mike Ross (D-Ark.) and Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.).

In response, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project -- which has taken a lead role in pressing for better regulation of coal ash -- is urging concerned citizens to call their representatives in Congress and ask them not to sign the letter. Instead, says EIP, lawmakers should support consistent and enforceable regulations of arsenic-contaminated coal ash waste to better protect their constituents' health.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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This piece was written for The Guardian by Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation in Britain.

Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The "chatter" of concern is getting louder. But at the same time, the political system in Britain has been wracked and absorbed more by its own inadequacies than by this fundamental threat to civilisation.

The fall of the Roman Empire was due to a large extent, writes the historian Adrian Goldsworthy, to a system of government that became inward-looking and weakened by internal dissent. Gone was the singular focus from the golden days of the Republic, when a small, trusted coterie of around 1,000 administrators ran the whole empire efficiently.

In its place was a bloated, inefficient and suspicious bureaucracy of 35,000, seeking power and personal advantage. Worst of all, gripped with self-obsession, they took their eyes off the Goths at the gates, and paid a devastating price. Any similarities to actual people alive today and current political circumstances are, of course, entirely unintended and circumstantial. Goldsworthy points out that every age can project its own experience onto the Romans, which just goes to show how much they did actually do for us.

In the last ten months, support for needing to take radical action over countdown period has been far and deep. Nobel prize winners from Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC to Wangari Maathai of the Kenyan Green Belt movement have leant support, thousands of individuals have too, along with groups whose memberships run into the many millions. Even "spiderman", in the form of French free climber Alain Robert, has risen, literally, to the cause.

Yet, in spite of the support that investing in the great transition could give to a weakened economy, the new and additional resources being made available are paltry compared to the support given to the financial sector. Around the world, as states become more acutely aware of the threats to food and energy security stemming from our ecological overreach, they are taking action. But they are just as likely to be eyeing the natural resources of other, weaker states to meet their rising consumption, as they are to be changing consumption patterns to live within their environmental means. Land grabs for food and biofuels seem to hit the news with growing frequency.

Technological optimism is all around us. "You cannot predict the future and unimagined solutions come along; they always have done," we are reassured. Whenever there is a great problem, human ingenuity finds a techno-fix. Who could have predicted the chemical fertilisers for our food system, which thwarted Malthusian pessimists? The problem is, with the timeframe to act on climate change, those solutions that are meant to allow us to carry on as usual should have arrived years ago and be in place now. Now, with at best 90 months left on our clock, we have a challenge that will be a bit like the first time a child jumps from the top diving board into the swimming pool.

Both terrifying and thrilling, we need to brace ourselves for the fastest descent in the use of fossil fuels that a society like ours will ever have faced. It will need technology, behaviour change and regulations to ensure fair shares and equity on the way down. We don't know everything that will happen on the way down. But if we get it right, I suspect that we will rediscover several important things along the path that have been largely lost or forgotten: something about the importance of community, about our own ingenuity and ability to do things for ourselves, and something also about how deeply connected to, and ultimately dependent on nature, we really are.

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I've read humongous books in my time, most memorably Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks' magisterial cinderblock-sized novel of John Brown, the anti-slavery warrior whose "Bloody Kansas" campaign in the 1850s helped provoke the Civil War.

The similarly supersized Waxman-Markey bill couldn't be more different - not just in genre, but in attitude. Where Brown gave his life to abolish slavery, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" seems intent on postponing Americans' day of reckoning with climate-damaging fossil fuels.

In a bid to pick up support from coal state Democrats, Waxman and Markey this week pruned their cap-and-trade "20% by 2020" greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target to 17%. The actual reduction will almost certainly be even less, thanks to the bill's generous "offset" provisions and the economic collapse that has pushed emissions way below levels from the 2005 base year.

Worse, if a larger share of the GHG reductions comes from "other" greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, then reductions from fossil fuel burning will be disproportionately smaller. While that won't necessarily hurt the climate, it will mean that many of the ancillary but vital benefits from reducing carbon emissions, such as reduced oil dependence and diminished environmental destruction from coal mining, will be watered down.

To make my points, I'm going to go quantitative and speak of emissions in "CO2 equivalent terms," in which emissions of methane and other GHG's are scaled up to reflect their true heat-trapping capacities. All figures are in millions of metric tons ("Tg" or trillion grams). Ready?

Total U.S. GHG emissions in 2005 were 7,130 Tg, of which 6,074 Tg was carbon dioxide. A 17% reduction (Waxman-Markey's 2020 target) requires trimming that by 1,033 Tg to reach 5,042 Tg. But I estimate that due to contractions in driving, flying and use of electricity, CO2 emissions this year will be just 5,770 Tg, or roughly 300 Tg less than in the 2005 base year. Hence, the required reduction from 5,770 to 5,042, which is 728 Tg, is just 12.6% of current emissions. That's one-fourth less than Waxman-Markey's advertised 17%.

Worse, non-CO2 emissions, which accounted for 1,056 Tg in 2005, are probably fertile territory for quick and cost-effective fixes. If that component could be shrunk at twice the overall target rate, i.e., by 34%, it would contribute 359 Tg of the necessary 1,212 Tg total reduction. This would allow a mere 853 Tg of CO2 to be cut from the 2005 base year, or only 549 Tg to be cut from this year's estimated CO2 emissions of 5,770 Tg. The latter drop, a paltry 9.5%, could be gotten with annual reductions averaging just 0.9%. And of course the use of offsets will dilute those reductions even further.

Let's round that 0.9% annual CO2 reduction rate from 2009 to 2020, to 1%, and take it out to 2050. At that rate, in 2050 CO2 emissions would have fallen from today's levels by only one-third. Even if non-CO2 GHG emissions were completely eliminated, total U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 would still be down by less than half (46%) from those in the 2005 base year. There's a world of difference, alas, between that and the ostensible 80% reduction.

I ran a few of these numbers past a journalist I know who follows climate policy. He replied that "The political deal was to eviscerate short-term drivers [reductions and price rises] in order to get a long-term framework in place." Maybe so, but what's troubling is that the first GHG reductions are supposed to be easier to get than the last. Not to mention that U.S. environmentalists once had pretensions of making our country a model for the world, and weren't going to settle for anything less than science-driven reductions.

I know, I know, investments take time to bear fruit, and the bulk of the reductions to mid-century will come via economies of scale and tech breakthroughs and societal tipping points. But at this stage that's a matter of faith as much as of empirical evidence (as well as a subject for a separate post). And, last time I checked, Congress had not abolished the Law of Diminishing Returns and its corollary about low-hanging fruit.

Some say that Waxman-Markey, while imperfect, is at least a step on the road toward ridding society of fossil fuels. With the anemic numbers shown here, it smacks more of accommodation than abolition. Our atmosphere still awaits its John Brown.

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The oil, gas, and electricity sectors spent tens of millions more to lobby Congress in the first quarter of 2009 than their renewable-energy counterparts. Big whoop, right? You could have guessed that.

But the disparity between their spending -- at a time when Congress is seriously considering far-reaching climate and energy legislation -- is striking.

According to the latest lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the oil and gas industry spent nearly $44.6 million lobbying Congress in just the first three months of this year, and ranked second only to the health care and pharmaceutical industries in total spending. Electric utilities spent $34.4 million, and businesses in the energy and natural resources sector as a whole spent $102.7 million.

To find out how much clean-energy businesses spent, you have to search down into the "miscellaneous energy" category, which includes wind, solar, biofuels, hydro, and other industries -- and even then their combined spending only totaled $14.4 million. The American Wind Energy Association was the biggest renewable spender in that category, at $1.2 million. No other organization or company in the category topped $1 million.

Environmental groups have spent even less -- just $4.7 million so far in 2009. The biggest spender among green groups was the Environmental Defense Action Fund, which laid out $300,000.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a staunch opponent of climate action, tops the list of individual spenders on all issues, at $15.5 million. Also on that list: ExxonMobil at $9.3 million, Chevron at $6.8 million, ConocoPhillips at $6 million, and General Electric at $4.8 million.

Of course, it would be wrong to assume that all of these big-energy spenders are lobbying against a climate bill. ConocoPhillips and GE, for example, are both members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, and ConocoPhillips' senior vice president testified in support of the House climate and energy bill last month. But it does give you a sense of just how much renewable-energy groups and enviros are being outspent on the Hill.

Energy and environment both ranked among the 10 issues that have generated the most lobbying so far this year. And as the climate debate drags on this Congress, energy is likely to remain a top focus for big spenders.

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Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

Politico reports that interest groups and corporations have spent nearly $200 million on TV ads since President Obama’s inauguration to manipulate American energy policy reform. According to an analysis by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, $199.5 million was directed from January 20th to March 31st to television issue ads on energy, the environment, and climate. $54.5 million of the ads were about oil and gas alone:

Why is corporate America on track to spend $1 billion this year on a television barrage about energy policy?

President Obama’s clean energy agenda, like his proposals for health care and labor reform, threatens the corrupt business model of the corporate right. Closing the carbon loophole with a cap-and-trade system will create a strong, healthy foundation for our national recovery -- but pollution will no longer be free for ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and Peabody Coal. So they are trying to either block reform entirely, or -- for those corporations that recognize the necessity of action -- to ensure that their pollution is subsidized by the American taxpayer, through pollution permit giveaways or other handouts.

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There is a belief that with the Democratic shift in Congress, we finally have the votes to get a national renewable portfolio system (RPS). I don't buy it. As I pointed out here, a "pure" wind-and-solar-only RPS means a wealth transfer from Eastern to Western U.S., and no political party is inclined to vote against their state's economic interests. The basic electoral math of the Senate makes such an RPS impossible.

Many in the environmental community still don't get this, but in my experience, Congress does. Perhaps not universally, but as a collective body, it has created a situation where the headline RPS conversation is taking place in parallel with a whole host of sidebar conversations that would expand the eligibility to include other technologies with a broader electoral appeal.

Most notably, this has taken the form of the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS), led primarily (but not exclusively) by ACEEE and ASE. In its simplest version, an EERS is simply an RPS with a different suite of eligible technologies, using the tool of a clean energy credit to apply not only to traditional renewables but also to energy efficiency.

At the highest level, that's a good thing. A wind/solar dominated RPS won't pass, so by adding other comparably clean things to the mix, we get a bill that works. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible. The trouble's down in the weeds. And you don't have to stoop very far to get into them.

The ugly politics of RPS

The first problem the EERS faces is that there's a strong renewable contingent that really doesn't want to let efficiency into the tent. So there is no unified clean energy coalition approaching Congress with a politically viable bill.

This has manifested in a structure whereby the EERS is limited to 15-25% of the total RPS eligibility, with a different set of "tags" such that the supply of EERS cannot in any way affect the price for "pure" RPS credits. The argument for this approach is that if you let energy efficiency participate in these markets, their supply and lower cost will swamp out any incentive for higher cost solar and wind. But this idea itself is goofy, since excess supply of clean energy only creates a problem to the extent that it exceeds demand. And the demand is set by the regulation itself! If a renewable energy standard that includes energy efficiency is too small to encourage both to participate, embiggen it.

The efficiency community isn't blameless either. Crafting a regulation in which EE can participate necessarily requires that you define energy efficiency. And since that definition defines the parameters of participation, it is a highly politicized conversation. Do better lightbulbs count? If so, what's the definition of better? Does combined heat and power count? If so, at what threshold efficiency level? In all cases, do we provide differential incentives to more efficient devices or simply provide full participation for everyone who passes some flat threshold?

Answering these questions in a way that sends the right policy signals is easy -- but answering them in a way that keeps a political coalition in tow is hard. Take, for example, the question of scaling. If you sell a lightbulb that is twice as efficient as mine, should you earn more credits than I do? At a policy level, it's impossible to say that's a bad idea. But at a political level, if we make that decision I may be less inclined to support the legislation and the chance for passing the overall bill becomes (sadly) dependent on my political clout relative to yours.

Suffice to say, the efficiency community has been far from coherent in the way they have framed these issues to Congress. No slight to those leading the EE community in this effort -- indeed, there is a special place in heaven for those who volunteer to be cat-herders in the name of good energy policy -- but the result is that, as one Congressional staffer put it to me, "none of you guys are asking for the same thing." This is the type of thing that causes Congress to pass something with a patch for a policy problem here, a patch for a political problem there, and pretty soon it's patches all the way down. Notwithstanding the fact that this is, traditionally, how the U.S. makes energy policy, it is sure to lead to a lousy outcome.

Five whys

It seems to me that there is an easy solution, if we could just get organized. Bearing in mind that good policy rewards goals, not paths, it's worth asking the question: what is the goal of an RPS?

One of the great frustrations of RPS policies at the state and federal level is that it's maddeningly difficult to get a consistent answer to this question. Some will say it is to lower CO2. Others that it is to accelerate the transition to a renewable future. Others will say that it is to accelerate the commercialization of early stage technologies. Those are all noble goals, but the fact that you cannot get a consistent answer to that question is, at core, why there is so much inconsistency between definitions of renewable technology from one jurisdiction to the next -- and why the whole RPS/EERS discussion is so patch-ridden.

Back in the 90s, when Total Quality Management was all the rage, business schools spent a lot of time digging up the post-WWII era work of Deming and Taguchi, which led to the quality programs at Toyota and other Japanese companies. One of the principles that emerged from this work was the idea of "Five Whys." The concept is pretty simple: if you ask why five times, you'll probably get to the root cause of the problem -- but if you stop too soon, you're simply solving proximate problems without ever getting to the root.

Since our energy legislation is so rife with patches, it behooves us to ask five whys more often. Specific to the RPS, I'd posit that whatever you think is the motivation for renewable energy incentives, asking five whys ultimately gets down to a single, pure motivation: reduce fossil energy use.

This suggests that we would be vastly better off throwing out our RPS, throwing out our EERS, throwing out any definitions of eligible technologies, and simply providing a clear incentive paid to anyone who is taking demonstrable activities to lower the fossil intensivity of the U.S. power grid, paid pro rata with the fossil energy they reduce.

More on how to do that in my next post.

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Joe Romm has done a pretty thorough trashing of Matt Wald's recent New York Times piece. Herein, I pile on. This is a shoddy enough piece of journalism to deserve it. Like Joe, I've talked to Matt Wald before, and generally I find him to be a good writer on energy. He's capable of much better reporting than this.

That said, my larger beef is not with Wald nor the NYT per se, but rather with the analytical errors that are innate to his analysis, which are far too common in most journalism of this "what is the cost of competing power technology" type of piece.

The cost of electricity from any power generation technology is ultimately a function of five variables, some of which are innate to technologies and some of which are innate to specific uses of those technologies:

Virtually everyone who compares power generation costs screws up one or more item on this list. Wald may well have screwed up all five.

Most of the mistakes that arise from these analyses comes from a near universal failure: no one other than engineers gives a damn about the cost of power generation at the plant gate. It has nothing to do with the price of tea in China, and only a little bit more to do with the full societal cost of delivered energy. But it's ubiquitous in these analyses.

Roughly half of the capital cost of our electricity infrastructure comes from the transmission and distribution required to connect that power up to the load. It's also the source of about 10 percent of the total energy losses in our electric grid, and nearly 100 percent of all our blackouts. It is also the most consistently subsidized part of the electric system, which has played a key role in the construction of remote, inefficient power plants that explain why the power industry today is only half as fuel efficient as it was in 1910. And of course, all those other societal externalities -- from acid rain to global warming -- associated with certain power technologies are necessarily ignored from any analysis that presumes regulatory stasis.

Installed capital costs

I have no idea what Wald assumed, but his prices are laughable. If it's possible to build a modern coal plant with 7.8 cents/kWh costs as he suggests, I'd love to know where it's being done. As I and others have noted, this is more like 12-13 cents/kWh by any reasonable analysis, and it keeps increasing.

A part of the reason for the high cost of coal is the cost of delivery since coal plants -- for fairly obvious reasons -- tend not to be built anywhere near where the people are. Transmission and distribution to connect that power to the load costs $1,300/kW, on average in the U.S., tacking 3-4 cents/kWh onto the cost of any remotely-sited power plant. Since the fuel costs alone for a coal plant are in the 2-3 cent/kWh range, I'm fairly certain Wald's numbers simply ignored the T&D costs (and associated losses). They probably also ignored the fact that central power stations require a higher degree of redundancy than local ones, for the simple reason that more (small) generators make for a more reliable system than fewer (large) ones.

But hell, let's give the NYT the benefit of the doubt. And let's be conservative. Recent price increases notwithstanding, let's assume that a coal plant that is only compliant with current environmental rules (e.g., pre-CO2) can be built for $2,500/kW, and that the 7.8 cents includes 2 cents for T&D and 2 cents for fuel. Throw in another penny for non-fuel operating costs and that leaves us with 2.8 cents/kWh for capital recovery. I will again be really generous and assume that this plant operates 24/7/365, without a single outage for maintenance or unplanned outages, so that 2.8 cents/kWh will pay off $0.028 x 8,760 = $245/kW per year. That's a 10.2 year simple payback on the $2,500/kW investment, or a 7.5 percent annual rate of return (over 20 years of outage-free operation). Are you freakin' kidding me? No one is building a power plant for those kind of economics. And that's with hugely optimistic performance assumptions! Which brings us to the second assumption:

Cost of capital

Most power generation analyses look at the cost of capital (that is, how much do your investors and lenders expect you to pay back for every dollar they give you) based on current experience. People are building modern coal plants with an 11 percent cost of capital, so let's use that. People are building wind turbines with a 15 percent cost of capital, so let's use that.

But here's the problem with that analysis: lenders don't loan money based on fuel type. They loan it based on credit risk. And a regulated utility presents a massively lower credit risk than a small renewable developer. It is perhaps the most distortive subsidy in our electricity system, because it makes money flow to the most expensive, most inefficient power-generation technologies.

To be sure, just because this is "unfair" doesn't make it unreal. Small, financially unsophisticated guys don't have the kind of credibility with lenders that big utilities have, no matter how much we might want it to be otherwise. But when we are asking ourselves what the societal costs of various options are for the purposes of policy-making, Hippy Joe the Renewable Guy's credit rating isn't relevant -- what matters is a comparison across levelized capital structures. I would be very surprised if the EPRI analysis Wald cites makes such an equivalent comparison.

Capacity factor

Capacity factor is a measure of how many kWh a given kW of generation can produce in a year. It is a critical weakness of solar and wind, for all the usual reasons. (Rage, rage against the stillness of the night!)

It's usually got a healthy dose of BS in it for traditional technologies as well. The whole U.S. coal fleet today runs at something like a 75 percent annual capacity factor, generating 6,750 kWh/kW-year, rather than the 8,760 in my way-too-generous assumption above. This isn't because coal plants are particularly prone to outages. Rather, it's because for much of the country, there are substantial pieces of the year when the nuke + hydro + coal fleet is capable of generating more power than the system needs during substantial fractions of the year. As the highest marginal-cost generation of those three, the coal "dials back" accordingly, running at less than full load for much of the year.

This matters because -- as many a renewable developer knows -- a plant that isn't running is a plant that isn't making money. This is a problem that no storage technology in the world will solve, but is often ignored in analyses that assume that coal and nuke plants will run at 90+ percent capacity factors even while others run much less. EPRI and Black & Veatch may assure you otherwise -- but you can be quite certain that the equity investors who conspicuously chose not to invest in coal plants during the last two decades knew better.

Non-fuel operating costs

This is perhaps the least interesting of the numbers, for the simple reason that the data on O&M is pretty robust, and outside of equipment manufacturers, rarely overstated. It's the cost of humdrum items like labor, water chemicals, insurance, etc. Costs that all have to be paid, to be sure, but they don't swing wildly from one technology to the next. At the very low-end, you might see as little as 0.5 cents/kWh for natural gas-fired turbines or up to 2-3 cents/kWh for small-scale solid fuel plants (biomass, some coal). But it is worth noting that the cost of pollution clean up -- from sulfur to CO2 -- are borne predominantly by coal plants, and any sane investor is going to put a healthy cushion in their analysis to factor in coming CO2 regulation, either by demanding much higher returns or by assuming much larger non-fuel operating costs. Again, there's no possible way this was included in Wald's analysis.

This raises a final issue that all economic analyses struggle with: volatility.

Fuel costs

The story of the last 15 years -- from an energy, credit, or commodity perspective -- is not a story of rising costs per se, but rather one of massive volatility. From 1995 to today, crude oil has gone from $20/bbl to $9 to $140 and back to $40. Natural gas has ranged from $2/MMBtu to $15. Coal hasn't swung quite as strongly, but it's been far from consistent.

How do you factor this volatility into your analysis? That turns out to be a really hard question. In theory, volatility = risk, and so you capture it all in the cost of capital. That's what modern options-pricing is based on, and was used heavily by the folks at Long Term Capital Management to figure out how to make money in commodity markets. Say what you want about those guys, they were freakin' smart. And pricing volatility is really freakin' hard.

Moreover, the universal feature of all "alternative" energy sources, from solar to efficiency is that they reduce one's exposure to fuel volatility. That clearly has value -- and it clearly isn't captured in any model that sets a fuel price, assumes a conversion efficiency, and extends that number ad infinitum to the future with nothing more than a known inflation factor.

Taking that all into account, one can maybe give Wald a bit of the benefit of the doubt, if only because he is repeating mistakes made by so many others, so consistently. But the Times gets cited a lot more often than Black & Veatch reports, and it ought to be held to a higher standard. Wald's article simply isn't varsity material.

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