Climate Change

KPMG is a global network of auditors and business consultants operating in 145 countries.  According to the new Climate Changes Your Business report from them, six industries in particular have to watch out because they are not sufficiently aware of and ready to manage the risks of global warming.  The winners (or potential losers) are:  aviation, healthcare, oil and gas, tourism, transport, and the financial services sectors.  See this article from “BusinessGreen.” 

Timothy Flynn, Chairman of KPMG International says that companies need to assess the direct implications of climate change to their businesses (extreme weather, etc.) and take corrective action, consider how indirect effects such as regulatory changes will effect them, and seek to benefit from opportunities such as the growing demand for energy-efficient technologies.  (I really do love that word:  opportunity.)  Their CSR chief, Lord Michael Hastings, says “I am convinced that companies that take the initiative to improve their carbon footprint will innovate for the better – for their own prosperity and the world as whole.”  Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, says “Smart companies take action.” 

On opportunity, I recently cited an “FT” article, Energy efficiency: Use less power to cut emissions, in which we learned the arresting news that “Dow Chemical claims to have reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. The group invested $1bn to meet this target but says the initiatives have resulted in $5bn of savings.” Get it?!

I have also mentioned two reports from Lehman Brothers on the Business of Climate Change which prefigure much in the KPMG report, namely the risks and the opportunities. 

MEM in Paris – The two-day Major Economies Meetings (MEM), talks among major carbon emitting nations, took place last week.  The economies of these 16 countries account for around four-fifths of global output of greenhouse gases.  The meetings aim to put these countries into some sort of unified trajectory as the world heads toward coming to an agreement, over the next year and a half, on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.  See this from the AFP (courtesy of Yahoo News).  One theme in this and other international meetings recently has been the need for assistance to the developing world on meeting the challenge of adaptation to climate change.  The article says “A South African assessment found that between 30 and 60 billion dollars was needed annually as of now to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change.”

Governors on Climate Change – There was another meeting last week, of 20 US governors, Democratic and Republican, who met at Yale to advance the cause of meeting the climate change crisis.  See Governors Call for Federal-State Climate Change Partnership from the Environment News Service.  They signed a declaration that is founded on three principles:  (1) a federal-state partnership is critical, (2) state-based climate action plans and programs have worked and should continue, and (3) rewarding and encouraging meaningful and mandatory federal and state climate action is key.  Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell said “… today my fellow governors and I memorialized our commitment to stop global warming while calling on our federal partners to join us in establishing a national policy on climate change.”  The governors were joined at the conference by two Canadian provincial premiers and by IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri.  For more on the conference see this from the host, Yale University, and the declaration itself.

Stern Warning – The lead author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change said in a speech in London last week “We badly underestimated the degree of damages and the risks of climate change.  All of the links in the chain are on average worse than we thought a couple of years ago.”  See this from “The Independent” and this from “The Guardian,” including this audio interview with the author of “The Guardian” article.

Vietnam – Finally, one of the burgeoning Asian economies, Vietnam, has announced its commitment to dealing with climate change.  In this story, we learn that Denmark and the UNDP are joining with Vietnam to create “pilot projects coping with climate change.”  UNDP has been doing a lot of work in the area of adaptation.

Have Some Fun – These five cartoons from NPR are informative and fun.  That’s a can’t miss combination where I come from.  

Earth Day is this coming Tuesday, April 22. There’s an awful lot going on all over the world. Dating myself, I can tell you that my buddy, Donald, and I went to the first Earth Day in 1970 when we were teenagers. He claims it was primarily to meet girls. My rejoinder is “That’s natural.” Back in 1990, I was working in public affairs for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation and we had a great honkin’ Earth Day in New York City for the twentieth anniversary, with hundreds of thousands of folks out, including for a big concert in Central Park. Earth Day didn’t have much cachet during many of the off years since its founding and today, but it’s beginning to pick up steam again. Check out the Earth Day website and see what’s happening in your community. You can also go to Earth Day TV to see some great videos.

The “NY Times Magazine” has its Green Issue this week. “Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, Build” are the sections of the magazine. This is a terrific compendium of articles on what we can do to make a difference, including a compelling piece from the excellent and thoughtful writer, Michael Pollan, who asks: Why Bother?

I’ve been thinking more about meat and climate change, I have to tell you, these days, with the news about the pressures on grain and the soaring rise in food prices worldwide. The section on how we eat gets into this quite a bit. We learn, among other things, that in January “… Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: ‘Please eat less meat.’ He continued: ‘This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.’” I’ve written about this before, in an essay on how we treat animals – and ourselves. I’ll be writing more soon about animal agriculture and its implications for climate change.

You should also check out this terrific video on the Green Issue.

Echoing the “NYT” special section on the “Business of Green” that I wrote about on April 11 below, the “FT” (aka The Financial Times) had a special on Business and the Environment yesterday. This is pretty much about business in the UK, and it’s got some fascinating stuff, including an article on companies saving energy, Energy efficiency: Use less power to cut emissions, in which we learn the arresting news that “Dow Chemical claims to have reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. The group invested $1bn to meet this target but says the initiatives have resulted in $5bn of savings.” Get it?!

In another article on green building in France, Energy Plus: Paris building to set new standard, we are told that “…in France, buildings account for 45 per cent of French energy consumption and 16 per cent of water use, and generate 40 per cent of the country’s waste. Their carbon dioxide emissions amount to 25 per cent of the national total, second only to transport at 28 per cent.” I’ve written about Green Building a number of times here. It’s a fascinating and important subject. See this terrific slideshow too from the FT on green building.

A truly classic quote, as reported in the Year in Review, came from Fred Krupp, influential president of the Environmental Defense Fund, in referring to the White House talks on climate change in September:  “It was a lost opportunity.  America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.” 

Krupp and EDF have been a powerful force in getting the mainstream environmental movement more in tune with the realities of the private sector.  Instead of always confronting big business on issues of energy and the environment, they have very often worked with business to effect positive change.  That does not mean, in any sense, that organizations as powerful as EDF, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which bears many of the same attributes as EDF, don’t take their shots at irresponsible and dangerous actions by industry in the courts and in the offices and lobbies of government when industry’s actions merit it.  It does mean that EDF recognizes the value of getting business to act responsibly in whatever ways are effective.  Hell, even Greenpeace works with Coca-Cola and Unilever these days.  (See that story toward the end of this from July.)

Krupp and EDF made an enormous breakthrough in February of 2007 when they negotiated the shelving of eight coal-fired power plants in Texas.  Former EPA administrator William Reilly and Krupp were the architects of a deal that permanently altered the map of power production in this country.  You can see this segment from Frontline’s “Hot Politics” to get a bigger picture.

Now Krupp and the journalist Miriam Horn have come out with a book, Earth: The Sequel – The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming.  It looks at some amazing initiatives that are being aggressively pursued:   the use of “concentrators” to intensify the sunlight directed at solar thermal arrays or photovoltaics, colocating solar and wind farms to get the maximum generating potential of those two, bottling heat in giant thermos-type containers as a storage mechanism, using biotechnology to produce biofuels and nanotechnology to radically improve the properties of silicon for use in PV cells, power-generating buoys, geothermal units that can be deployed all over the world to take advantage of the crust of the earth’s tremendous heat and also the hot water that comes up with oil at wellheads, and underground coal gasification, among many others.

My favorite is the pilot in Arizona that is using carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant stacks to feed algae which, in turn, can then be converted to a potent biofuel.  The process is water-intensive but it can tolerate wastewater so that is another waste stream that is incorporated.  This scheme would also use nitrogen from the emissions as fertilizer.  Eventually, the coal in the plant could be replaced by the algae, leading to a carbon-negative situation.  (See also this recent piece from Matt Wald at the “NY Times.”)  I’ve been writing about Renewable Energy since the beginning of this blog and I continue to find these ideas and initiatives, as Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

One of the leitmotifs of the book is the entrepreneurial, even frontier spirit of the innovators bringing some of these solutions into being.  Venture capitalists get their due here.  But what drives capital?  The promise of a return on its investment.  What then is the single-most important driver in the quest to realize a good “return on capital”?  Krupp and Horn iterate (and reiterate) it’s setting a price on carbon.  Why?  To “level the playing field” with the fossil fuel and nuclear suppliers of energy.  What’s the best mechanism for doing this?  A cap-and-trade system.  This brings us back to Krupp’s quote above regarding the necessity to institute “mandatory legal limits.”  That’s the cap.  The trade part is what you do when you’ve gone below your capped emission limit and can then sell the difference between what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been mandated to achieve.  (I’ve written about this mechanism a number of times at Carbon Markets.)

EDF, led by economist Dan Dudek, was one of the pioneers of cap-and-trade back in the 1980’s in order to effect dramatic reductions in acid rain precursors.  (I had the privilege of working with one of their senior scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, back then on the acid rain problem when I was an activist with the Sierra Club.  Michael has been a critical figure in bringing the science of global warming to the fore.  He was right there with James Hansen at that epic hearing in Washington in the summer of 1988 that brought global warming fully into view for the American public.  See from about 2:45 in this segment from “Hot Politics.”)

Energy:  The Sequel also discusses other critical approaches to confronting global warming such as halting tropical rainforest destruction.  A post-Kyoto international regime that set a reasonable price on carbon ($30 a ton) would allow Brazil alone to realize $168 billion profit from protecting its rainforests while preventing emissions of six billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Woods Hole Research Center.  (Pop quiz:  After the US and China, which two countries are the biggest contributors to global warming?  Brazil and Indonesia - because of rainforest destruction.)

The book also notes the critical importance of energy efficiency.  (See my post Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit.)

The book is engaging, informative, and hopeful.  It gives us the perspective of those scientists, policy innovators, entrepreneurs and, in some cases, visionaries, who are going to make the earth a safer, more prosperous, smarter, and more equitable place for us all to live.  It’s a stimulating read, to say the least.

For more, go to the book’s website and also see the trailer.

I headed up to Columbia University this past week to check out the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet 08 conference.  As usual, I couldn’t devote as much time as I would’ve liked to the conference sessions, but I came away with a few good insights nonetheless.  Thursday, I attended a press briefing with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the institute and a real force for fostering sustainable development; plus the very worthy Jan Egeland, former UN chief of humanitarian affairs; Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, the cell phone makers; and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a senior correspondent for “The Economist” and an expert on energy and automotives.

One of Ericsson’s emphases is on bringing mobile telephony to the developing world.  This was characterized as the “singlemost transformative technology in the developing world.”  See Ericsson’s CSR pages for a ton of information on how engaged they are.

The discussion came to climate change, not surprisingly, and Sachs emphasized the importance of an integrated approach that would create an “incentive” system (cap-and-trade) along with technology policy.  Egeland said that mitigation is important, but that adaptation is critical at this point.  There are extremely vulnerable populations that need to be buffered from the increasingly intense effects of storms and other climate-induced disasters.  Drought, of course, is another looming specter.  Vaitheeswaran, a compellingly intelligent speaker, has written a new book, ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, and he said we’re looking at a billion cars on the planet soon, with two billion not so far in the future.  That’s the bad news for global warming.  The good news is that the renewable energy revolution could well be driven (pun intended) by a new generation of cars.  (Sadly, I missed Vaitheeswaran moderating a formal debate – “Proposition:  “The United States will solve the climate change problem.”  It was, by all reports, lively and smart.  You and I can see it here though.) 

Well, at the press briefing, I was going to ask about biofuels but before I was called on, Sachs read my mind.  (As you may recall, I’ve been writing about this a fair bit, including this post from last month:  Are Biofuels A Bummer?)  Responding to a question about energy, Sachs quickly segued into a blistering critique of present biofuels policy.  He called US and EU policy in this area “misguided.”  He said that biofuel production is driving up food prices worldwide.  In his talk to the conference on Friday, he outlined a ten-point plan for the next President on sustainability and eliminating biofuel subsidies was one of the points.  Sachs also has a new book:  Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. 

I am forced to say that a talk given on Friday left me a little breathless.  Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, an American it turns out, is the Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  She gave a talk on the virtues of Nukes.  She trotted out a number of the same canards I’ve been hearing, on and off, for over thirty years:  Three Mile Island and Chernobyl weren’t so bad.  People want nuclear power plants in their communities.  You can’t rely on renewables because the power is intermittent and we haven’t learned how to store it.  A new take on the theme of the acceptable risk of nuclear power was the somewhat blithe statement:  “Life is about risk.” 

Another assertion was that 90% of nuclear waste comes from weapons production, not power production.  Sorry, Lady Judge, but that dog don’t hunt.  Here’s just one quote from the US DOE website:  “As of December 2005, the United States accumulated about 53,440 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository.” 

You can see Lady Judge’s talk here.  I had the opportunity to talk with her a little later.  I ventured that her pooh-poohing of the role of renewables was not correct.  I mentioned the recent analysis from Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Associates that there was $7 trillion in business looming just over the horizon.  (See my post here.)  She said that she very much supported renewables but that you needed nuclear power as well.  I said that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as ‘twere, of the renewables industry.  I pointed out that not a watt of electricity would be generated from nuclear power in this country were it not for the Price-Anderson Act that, for all intents and purposes, insulates the industry from liability.  The private insurance industry wouldn’t touch nuclear power with a ten-foot control rod.  Lady Judge was poised and gracious and I thanked her for entertaining my point of view.

The idea that nuclear power is something of a silver bullet for climate change certainly seems to be gaining traction, at least in the UK and in France.  I think that the Earth Institute’s embrace is more-than-a-little off from their prevailing theme of sustainability.  Part of the problem lies in the continuing overemphasis, in my opinion, on the central power generating paradigm.  I think that the world will profit, in every way, from a shift not only to renewables but to the distributed generation model that renewables can empower.

I had time to catch a bit of the panel on “Identifying Energy Solutions for Sustainable Development.”  Paula DiPerna of the Chicago Climate Exchange gave a lucid and illuminating talk on carbon finance.  (I’ve written about that a number of times under Carbon Markets.  This, of course, is a critical part of solving the climate change problem.)

The Earth Institute and many of the participants at this conference are doing groundbreaking work in sustainable development.  It’s exciting to hear so many of these initiatives discussed.  Check out the conference videos to catch some of the excitement.

According to CoalSpeak, The Official CoalRegion Dictionary, the above term refers to “tuberculosis, or some virulent strain of TB. Consumption was a common word for tuberculosis many years ago (‘consuming’ the lung tissue). ‘Galloping’ refers to the speed at which the disease progresses.”  Ironic, perhaps, that I’m using this term to illustrate one of the thornier problems associated with global warming – ironic because of its association with coal, and coal’s association with runaway global warming. 

Jared Diamond, professor of Geography and author of the hugely popular Guns, Germs and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote a terrific op-ed for the “NY Times” early in January:  “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”  In it he noted that the developed world has consumption rates roughly 32 times that of the developing world.  “If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates),” Diamond wrote.  It would be difficult to suppose that world resources, strained as we are today with a world population of 6.5 billion, could support those levels of consumption.  Consider, while we’re at it, the output of GHG and the further destruction of ecosystems from industrial agriculture and fishing, overdevelopment, and conventional water and air pollution from such galloping consumption.  Are we thus doomed?  Diamond’s answer:  “No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels.”  But then we would have to reduce our access to labor-saving devices (driven by electricity, for the most part), and infant mortality would go up, gains in nutrition worldwide would evaporate, and literacy rates would plummet.  Right?  Wrong.  Diamond reminds us, if we had forgotten, that “…living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.” 

The seminal Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in October of 2006 by the UK government, warns, in its Executive Summary, (and available in 22 languages other than English), of catastrophic economic consequences if climate change is not confronted fully, vigorously, and now.  It also says:  “Tackling climate change is the pro-growth [my emphasis] strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries.”

Are you still with me?  Now today an op-ed from the “Wall St. Journal” came in over the transom to me from the esteemed editor of this and my sister Foreign Policy Association blogs, Robert Nolan.  (See the right margin for links to these many, diverse and interesting blogs.)  Sins of Emission, by Oxford professor of energy policy Dieter Helm, notes that “… the U.S. and the EU together account for nearly half of world GDP. And it is consumption, not production, that matters. This means that if global warming is to be limited, the U.S. and Europe will have to take much more drastic action to reduce those emissions embedded in their own consumption. Their appropriate emissions-reduction targets will have to be based on the consumption of goods that cause those emissions in the first place.”  I’ll buy that, as it were.  But Helm makes what Diamond, the Stern Review, and many, many others conclude is a false assumption:  “It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable.”

Economic growth, according to a growing number of analysts, will be stimulated by how we confront climate change.  I wrote, for instance, in February about a new analysis that said that our response to global warming can “… spur $7 Trillion in Clean Energy Investment by 2030.”  (See Trillions for Renewables! here.) 

Getting back to consumption:  How do you get at it?  One way was detailed by Yale professor Judith Chevalier in an another op-ed from the “NY Times” in December:  a tax on carbon consumption.  I wrote about this here and described it thus:  “So, if you can’t get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies.”  Professor Chevalier explains it more lucidly than that, but you get the idea.

Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.

I wrote about one of the several climate change six-hundred pound gorillas at King Coal in November.  There was a hard-hitting piece in yesterday’s “Progress Report” called Bad News For Big Coal.  (Fair warning:   “Progress Report” is a newsletter of the avowedly partisan Center for American Progress, which I’ve noted before, along with the fact that I find their work to be thorough and well-documented.)  The article talks about the fact that the federal government recently withdrew from the flagship CCS development, FutureGen. 

It also talks about the counterattack launched by Sunflower Electric in Kansas against that state’s huge decision in October to deny permits for two 700 MW coal plants.  Go here for my post on that, including Health and Environment Secretary Roderick Bremby’s extremely lucid video announcing the decision.  He said then “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.” 

Sunflower Electric and the nation’s biggest coal company, Peabody, have launched “Kansans for Affordable Energy,” an exceedingly thinly disguised public relations campaign in the guise of a citizen’s initiative.  This brings to mind a bald-faced ploy in the 1980’s against federal acid rain legislation:  “Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain” (CSCAR).  Peabody then was among the coal companies and utilities behind this “citizens’” group.  See this excellent item, among several, from the excellent “DeSmogBlog,” on the brawl in Kansas.

If you like, you can see this TV ad from Sunflower.  No mention of coal, but pictures of windmills; says it was recommended for approval, but, in fact, the permit was denied.  Warm and fuzzy, just like coal-fired power plants. 

Download link 

For a decidedly more vicious tack, check this out, from a series of their newspaper ads:

The Kansas legislature is being bribed and bludgeoned into attempting to reverse the state’s denial of the permits, but Sebelius has already said she’ll veto any such legislation.  For a good look at what the folks at Sunflower and Peabody would really like to say, see this video spoof from the “Wichita Eagle.”

Even more significantly, getting back to the big picture on coal, three of the world’s biggest investment banks, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi, have, by signing the Carbon Principles, admitted the riskiness of putting money into coal-fired plants.  For more, see Know Your Power.

“Half the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions needed to make the world safe can be achieved at a net profit to the global economy, a study has found.”  That’s how this article from today’s “Financial Times” leads.  (The threshold for “safe” is the 550 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the IPCC posits is the limit.  That’s about double the amount we had prior to the Industrial Revolution.)  Ceres, a coalition of institutional investors, commissioned the report by the McKinsey Global Institute.   Ceres’s president is quoted in the article:  “Efficiency is the fastest, cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gases and could bring large profits to the global economy.”  This graphic from the Swedish energy group, Vattenfall, underscores her contention.

You can access the full report online from the MGI - Curbing Global Energy Demand Growth: The Energy Productivity Opportunity.  You’ll find not only the report there, but a slideshow as well and a pretty good video from a recent event in which New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former US Secretary of Energy and recent presidential aspirant, is the keynote speaker and Diana Farrell, director of the MGI, presents the findings from their report.  There’s a good panel of experts discussing this after Farrell’s presentation.

The report asserts that “targeted policies can overcome the policy distortions and market imperfections that are currently acting as barriers to capturing higher levels of energy productivity.”  They go on to say “The obstacles that thwart improvements in energy productivity include information gaps, market-distorting subsidies, an inadequate financing infrastructure, and misaligned incentives. To overcome such barriers, policy makers must terminate distorted policies, make the price and use of energy more transparent, create new market-clearing and financing mechanisms, and selectively implement demand-side energy policies (such as new building codes and appliance standards) while also encouraging demand-side innovation by companies.”  In the category of “market-distorting subsidies” they might include the billions in dollars in tax breaks currently be enjoyed by the oil and gas industry and the eye-popping subsidies being given to ethanol production. 

This is hugely useful information and policy makers everywhere should embrace it.  The new energy law from Congress does incorporate a good number of important initiatives that the MGI report endorses.  Mile to go, though, miles to go ……

New Fund – Agence France-Presse reports G7 calls for investment to fight climate change.  “The United States, Japan and Britain have proposed setting up a multilateral fund involving the World Bank that would administer global aid and investment to help nations fight slash greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.”  This follows on the announcement in January that I reported on here in which Japanese PM Fukuda made a $10 billion commitment and said:  “A carbon-free society can no longer be a mere fantasy.”  His finance minister and those from the U.K. and the U.S. had an op-ed in the “Financial Times” last week in which they called for “a fund to ensure the widespread adoption of clean technologies in the developing world.”  An eminently practical view is guiding this initiative.  “If energy consumption continues along the current path in developing countries,” the ministers wrote, “future development will have a greater impact on our climate. We have no choice but to help developing countries reduce the carbon footprint of development and make their economies climate change resilient.” 

Renewable Energy Tax Credits – I wrote on February 7 below about the failure of the Senate to include a vital tax credit program in the economic stimulus bill.  Well it appears that this issue is far from dead on The Hill.  In this story from Reuters, I, for one, am delighted to learn that Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders want to revive the legislation that would extend the existing credits past the end of this year and, at the same time, rescind the billions of dollars that the oil industry is receiving now, in an era of unprecedented profits for them. The “NY Times” unequivocally endorsed the idea of renewing the credits in this editorial from this past Sunday.  See No Surprises (Unfortunately) – Part Deux from December for more on the tax issue.

Congressional Investigation – Meanwhile, in another part of the House, and further to the story of the investigation I mentioned here early in January, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman has issued subpoenas.  The “L.A. Times” reports here that Waxman “…wants the EPA to hand over documents related to its rejection of California’s request to impose stricter emission standards.”  Henry Waxman is a bulldog, make no mistake.  He’s also a hugely smart member of Congress and doesn’t go off half cocked.  Oh yeah, and he’s a passionate environmentalist. 

Economic Stimulus – In the U.S. Senate yesterday, they tried to get a vote on the economic stimulus package.  See this from the A.P.  The measure couldn’t get the votes necessary for cloture – the magic 60 necessary for a bill to be fully considered on the Senate floor.

What’s this got to do with climate change you ask?  Good question.  One of the missing components from the energy legislation signed into law in December was the extension of tax credits beyond 2008 for the renewable energy industries.  The Senate Finance Committee heeded the call and included a renewal in the economic stimulus package that was sent to the full Senate.  The American Wind Energy Association has been trumpeting the need for this and has voiced its concern for 75,000 U.S. jobs that would be at risk “…solely as a result of the decline in wind energy investment.”  They further calculate that tens of thousands of additional jobs will be threatened because of similar slowdowns in other renewable energy industries.  See their statement from January 30 lauding the action of the Finance Committee and their release from February 4 of a report calculating the potential for loss of  “116,000 U.S. jobs and nearly $19 billion in U.S. investment” in just one year if the tax credits are not renewed.  I’d say this fits in with the economic stimulus package, wouldn’t you?

But, surprise, surprise, the Senate Republican leadership pulled out all the stops and killed the package.  To be fair, the target was not the tax credit extension per se, but based on past experience such as keeping the Renewable Portfolio Standard out of the energy bill as well as keeping the rescission of tax breaks for the oil & gas industry and renewable tax credits out, I’d say the Republican leadership was perfectly happy to have the tax credits go down with the ship.  (For further background, see Senate Energy Update and any number of other posts from December on the legislation.) 

Green Energy Industry – The “NY Times” had a good story recently on how the industry’s doing in California.  The short answer:  very well, thank you.  The boom is  “…the product of billions of dollars in investment and mountains of enthusiasm.”  I’ve written about this boom any number of times here, including how venture capital is seeking projects all over the place.  One of the students in my climate change class was opining that there are no good environmental stories.  I told her and will continue to tell you that there are hundreds of good stories, with more every day. 

Trillions for Renewables! – Trillion has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?  An article in the “S.F. Chronicle” – Trillions likely to boost clean energy technology - Rising fuel costs, global warming spur investment – is about a new report from Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consultancy headed by Daniel Yergin, a longtime energy expert who has done some very solid work over the years.  Yergin, quoted in the article, says:  “We are seeing a major shift in public opinion.  This is providing a vital impetus that is moving clean technology across the great divide of cost, proven results, scale and maturity that has separated it from markets served by mainstream technologies.”  There is, according to CERA, a worldwide “bubbling” of clean energy activity.  CERA’s press release on the study, “Crossing the Divide: The Future of Clean Energy,” quotes Robert LaCount, head of CERA’s Climate Change and Clean Energy Group.  “The rapidly advancing new paradigms of climate change, energy security, and policy implementation and cooperation among the United States, the European Union, China and others will produce a broad range of opportunities, risks and pitfalls as the modern energy industry increasingly moves to adopt clean technologies that will be part of the alternative, low-carbon pathway to the energy future.” 

Pinch me.  Am I dreaming?

And one has to wonder how soon will the people so desperately trying in Congress and elsewhere to block this kind of progress be swept away by history?  Not soon enough for me.