Matthew Lewis

Stories about energy, climate change, urban life, and bicycles.

[mateosfo]

Dear Fossil Fuel Lobbyists

It has come to our attention that your efforts to combat the spread of renewable energy and protections for human health are failing pretty miserably. 

In fact, with each passing year, clean energy grows ever-more popular with Americans of all political persuasions, in all regions of Our Great Homeland. This, despite your outlays of hundreds of millions of dollars each year begging, pleading, and misleading Americans into thinking that your products are synonymous with babies, pancakes, and breath itself. 

While your campaign war chests still hold sway over the American Congress, that’s really nothing to be proud of. Never have so many been bought by so few for so little. It doesn’t take any particular talent to buy a Congressperson. Hell, you don’t even have to have a pulse.

But your repeated and epic failures everywhere outside of Washington, DC, is enough to make a boy wonder: Are you really trying to block the inevitable march toward a clean energy economy? Or are your fossilized clients just a bunch of suckers, and you’re a cheap-suited army of minutes?

I’m beginning to think it’s the latter, in which case, I have a not-so-modest proposal. Hear me out on this. 

One may reasonably draw the conclusion that, against all logic and common sense, your repeated failures are really a clever disguise for ... success! You want a clean energy economy just as much as we do! But that whole paycheck thing, well, it makes things awkward, right? We totally get it. 

In which case ... why not join us, you know, on the DL? You can keep collecting your checks from ALEC and the Kochs and whoever the frack. We won’t tell them. Just let us finish taking Georgia and Florida and flipping the Southern Company to solar power and shutting down Keystone and wiping out investor confidence in fossil fuels and pounding the utilities into submission on demand response and renewables and forcing the auto industry to electrify, and then we’ll be more or less all good.

So, whaddya say? All these things are happening anyway, and your lobbying money seems increasingly powerless against the overwhelming belief Americans have in technology, markets, and freedom.

Tell ya what: You don’t have to answer right away. Just ... do nothing. That would be only moderately less effective than what you’re doing already; your clients, wrinkled old codgers that they are, will scarcely know the difference.

Love you, babe. 

[mateosfo]

The carbon tax conundrum

Comes now the oil industry in a shocking piece of news: 

Now that six of the world's largest oil companies have essentially come out in favor of a carbon tax, it's getting harder to dismiss the idea as some kind of outlandish lefty plot. And those companies can help their cause by engaging Congress directly, instead of outlining their case in a polite letter to the United Nations.

True, that would be helpful. A carbon tax, while not the be-all, end-all of climate policy, is an elegant solution to the problem of ensuring that entire economies cut their carbon emissions, rather than just particular sectors or nations. (But you still need to do sectoral policy like efficiency standards and electricity market reform.)

The Elegant Solution ...

The most economically elegant of all climate solutions, a carbon tax is beloved by newspaper opinion writers, environmentalists, economists, financiers, conservatives, liberals, and business leaders alike. It is probably one of the only climate policy choices that enjoys such broad acclaim. 

And for good reason: It’s so simple. If you put a price on carbon, people will emit less of it to save money. They’ll invest more in alternative technologies like renewable energy (and thereby drive down the cost). Industries will make more productive use of energy, and optimize existing processes for minimal carbon emissions. New materials will be invented that make it even easier to cut carbon. 

On the government side, a carbon tax doesn’t require a new layer of bureaucracy. You can refund the tax to low-income households to minimize its impact. You can distribute the revenues directly into activities that further reduce emissions. In theory, a carbon tax sets up a virtuous cycle that makes it easier, every year, to cut emissions. 

... With a Catch (Cynicism Recommended)

But there’s a catch, and it’s not technical in nature - it’s political. You see, a carbon tax only works to reduce carbon emissions if the price is high enough to actually change people’s behavior. For example, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that a carbon tax of $20 a ton would add 20 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline.

Now, if gasoline were still pushing its 2008 price of over $4 a gallon, a 20 cent increase might really get people to switch to electric vehicles, or clean transportation, or move to more pedestrian-oriented developments.

But gasoline isn’t expensive anymore, and it’s not clear when it will be again. Americans are rushing back into SUVs and trucks. A 20 cent jump in gas prices might cause a few headaches here and there, but it’s not realistic to think that Americans are going to dramatically shift their driving behaviors for so little money - after all, they didn’t really do it last time.

So, what’s the catch? Well, let’s venture inside Washington, DC’s Beltway for a second, and gird ourselves with some cynicism. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that a carbon tax of $40 or $50 per ton - the amount many experts think is necessary to slash emissions, corresponding to a jump in gasoline prices of about 50 cents - would actually get people into cleaner, more efficient cars or other forms of transit. Let’s say that such a carbon tax would also lead to dramatic shifts in other sectors, slashing carbon across the entire economy. 

But let’s say that, for now, the political consensus within DC is only comfortable passing a carbon tax of around $10.

Think of all those oil- and coal-industry lobbying firms on K street. They’re paid to ensure that their clients’ extremely harmful behavior goes unpunished. Sensing a growing political consensus around the need to tax carbon, they make a radical proposal to their clients:

The oil industry should lobby for a $10 per ton carbon tax. 

A Losing Proposition?

You’re thinking, “Huh? I thought you said a carbon tax was a good, agreeable, elegant solution?” Well, yeah - if it’s high enough to change behavior. But $10 is not high enough, and it’d be a mere, glancing blow for the oil and coal industries, which, under all reasonable climate scenarios, need to be winding down their core business over the next 25 years or so.

The risk is that, if and when Congress passes a (low) carbon tax, it will wash its hands of the climate issue. For how long, nobody knows - a decade? Two decades? Congress does not often pass major legislation effecting the entire economy; it never does so year after year after year. But this is what would be necessary if we all rally around a “passable” (read: “low”) price on carbon. We’re making assumptions about future Congressional actions that belie abundant experience in the past.

Think about it: A graduated carbon tax - which, logically, makes a ton of sense - requires Congress to raise taxes on the American people every year for a decade, or longer.

The fossil fuel industry knows perfectly well that Congress will not raise the carbon tax every year. If it sees an opportunity to pass a carbon tax that has little to no impact on its operations or profitability, it will support a carbon tax.

The Canadian oil industry went first last week - potentially sensing the shifting political winds as the Harper government loses public approval - and called for a carbon tax of undefined intensity. 

Now the new batch of oil majors have also called for a carbon tax, also of undefined intensity. Coincidence?

Watch this story very carefully. If they go all-in on a tax of $5 or $10 a ton, you’ll know which way the wind is blowing. And it’s not toward sensible climate policy.

It Gets Worse, Maybe

If Congress passes a low-price, low-impact carbon tax, I’ll bet you a $5 ginger beer that they’ll use that as an excuse to wipe out a bunch of other programs - programs that, to date, have been almost entirely responsible for slowing and, potentially, halting America’s carbon emissions. 

Incentives for solar power? Bye-bye, don’t need them! We passed a carbon tax. Wind power tax credits? Same deal, yo! Who needs subsidies when you’re taxing carbon? Fuel efficiency standards? Appliance standards? State renewable energy standards? EPA authority to cut carbon from power plants?

My fear is that we’ll all rally around a low carbon tax, with our brothers and sisters in the oil and coal industries by our sides, and blindly step off the plank.

Let’s hope this outcome never comes to pass.

[mateosfo]

Last night I finally got to see the documentary "Chasing Ice," the story of photographer James Balog's efforts to capture the death of our polar ice cap. There's no other way to describe it: This is a devastating film. In the lifetime of most of the people who currently use Facebook, we will probably lose the Arctic as we know it. It's comfortable to pretend like this won't somehow turn our lives upside down, like some miracle will come along and protect us from the laws of physics. But I hope you'll think about what you can do as you watch this Manhattan-sized-chuck of ice disintegrate and collapse into the sea; it's where we're all headed if we don't all make some serious changes in our lives. Each of us makes choices every day that determine whether humans make it as a species. This really is up to us.

[mateosfo]

Everything you need to know about DC’s periodic flirtation with a carbon tax, in one simple image.

[mateosfo]

everything you need to know about the silly sequester debate, in one simple image:

[mateosfo]

"Renewable energy can't displace coal."

That analysis assumes that renewables can displace coal... they can't. They can only displace gas, which can be ramped up and down quickly (~20 min) when the sun and wind come and go. Coal plants take many hours to ramp up and down. So none of the analysis makes sense.

- Michael Shellenberger, founder of The Breakthrough Institute, commenting on a recent analysis that found that renewable energy is responsible for over 50 percent of recent reductions in U.S. carbon emissions.

[mateosfo]

It's NOT just a flesh wound

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra_cUTmQykc

I've been pondering whether to weigh in on all the noise resulting from two recent studies about the failure of cap and trade policy a few years back. David Roberts nicely sums up his thoughts on the matter here, and, as usual, I largely agree with him.

First, full disclosure: I was there. As director of communications at ClimateWorks during this period, I have a pretty good sense of what went down. But rather than offering my views on what's in these studies and joining in the mano-a-mano on he said/she said/who's wrong/who's right etc., I'd like to draw a sharp focus to what I think is the Real Big Issue that's NOT being discussed.

For some reason I was in an ornery mood that day, and I remember my ornery answer: Well, what if we don't live in a Jeffersonian democracy anymore? What if we've won the battle for public opinion, but the public has been the victim of a quiet, no-fault divorce from the policymaking process?

At the time, I was laughed at. Probably deserved it as it wasn't helpful to the conversation; but I meant it, and now I mean it even more.

The fact is, America is not a democracy. We do a great job of fooling ourselves into believing that our national institutions are democratic, but those are illusions. The DC pundit class - the "Very Serious People" - are masters of never actually allowing this to enter our national dialogue. And that's a problem.

It's a problem because our "democratic" institutions are deeply broken. The U.S. Senate is one of the most undemocratic institutions around, where a Senator representing 700,000 Wyomingites has as much power as a Senator representing 35 million Californians. That's a huge problem for climate policy - Wyoming is the coal capital of the U.S., while California has banned new coal power imports - but it's a bigger problem for democracy; we grant enormous political power to individuals who are not actually representative of the populace. It's a problem that extends across all issue areas.

It gets worse. Within this undemocratic institution of the Senate, we actually incentivize power-grabbing behavior through a hostage-taking technique known as the filibuster.

Then there's the House: Have you seen how district maps are drawn? Yeah, it's bad. We now have a majority of "Representatives" in the House who were not elected by a majority of the voters in the last election, from districts that were drawn expressly to enable a minority viewpoint to gain power. "Democracy"? I don't think so.

And finally, of course, is the issue of money in politics. The Supreme Court decisions calling money speech, and corporations people, were pretty predictable, given the rightward tilt of the court in recent times. But this insidious facet of politics is tossed in with the rest of the toxins listed above, and the cynics crack jokes and make fun of those of us who think, hey, wait, is this really what Tom Jefferson and Benny Franklin had in mind?

An acknowledgment of these hurdles faced by the climate community would have been appropriate; better would have been if the movement itself, its funders, and the media establishment had properly diagnosed these ills when they first started to metastasize during the Clinton years. Honestly, I think it would have been perfectly rational to predict the long-term failure of any climate legislation when the Senate unanimously refused to ratify Kyoto in 1997. But that's Monday morning quarterbacking.

But it's totally uncool to pretend that the rot at the core of our system is not the systemic cause of not just our failure on climate, but our failure in many policy arenas. We have a philanthropic and movement architecture that assumes functioning democracy and engaged voting populace. What if that assumption is only half right? What if we engage and inform a voting populace, and our elected officials don't give a hoot because they don't have to?

I write this now because 1) The issue has popped up again, and 2) I have become aware of a growing movement among certain circles of funders and NGOs to try to tackle these issues. And I want to be the loudest supporter for their cause. I believe that everything we care about as Americans depends upon fixing the broken parts of our civic life, and that everything we do until then amounts to fingers in the dyke.

[mateosfo]

Everything you need to know about DC's periodic flirtation with a carbon tax, in one simple image.

[jayrosen]

Is there anyone with the same power and visibility who flat out makes stuff up like Roger Ailes?

I don’t think there is. (See this one, for example. Or this.) Here’s what he said the other day to TVNewser’s Chris Ariens:

When I saw the President say, ‘I know you all voted for me,’ and a thousand people stood up and cheered and applauded and then when the applause died down, he said, ‘Oh probably except you guys at the Fox table.’ I thought, ‘Am I the only guy in this room doing his job?’ They set up Freedom of the Press. The press is supposed to watch the powerful. And not throw in with them. And when I watched a thousand people stand and cheer and applaud I thought, ‘Uh oh. Somebody better do this job.’

As soon as I read that quote, I knew it was Roger’s fantasy. Because I had watched the speech. And if the Washington press corps had gotten to its feet at the mention of “all of you voted for me,” I would have remembered it. It would have been a big deal at the time. But it wasn’t. Because the standing ovation never happened.

See for yourself. Go to 1:35 in the above clip. Obama’s joke is, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me.” Lots of laughter. Lots of applause. Some cheering too. No one gets to their feet. No “a thousand people stand and cheer and applaud.” Ailes just made that up. 

[jayrosen]

Best-ever thing you can read on climate change and the American press.

A convenient excuse by Wen Stephenson in the Boston Phoenix is unlike anything I have read on the subject. Stephenson is a colleague of journalists at places like the Boston Globe, Atlantic magazine and Frontline on PBS. He used to work side-by-side with them. Then he quit to devote himself to understanding climate change, and doing something about it. Here he tells his former co-workers what he thinks of their response to the slow-moving crisis that is now upon us. A key quote:

You are failing. You are failing to treat the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced like the crisis that it is. Why?

Look, unlike most of your critics, I know you. You’re not just names on a page or a screen to me: you’re living, breathing human beings, with lives and families. I’ve shared the stresses and anxieties of journalism in this era. I know how hard you work, and how relatively little (most of) you are paid. I know how insecure your jobs are. And I know that your work — even your very best work — is most often thankless. Believe me. I know.

I also know that you take your responsibility as journalists, as public servants, seriously. Why is it, then, that you are so utterly failing on this all-important topic? I could be wrong, but I think I understand. I’m afraid it has to do with self-image and self-censorship.

Nothing is more important to me as a journalist than my independence. Yes, I’m still a journalist. And I’m as independent as I’ve ever been — maybe, if you can imagine this, even more so. Because leaving behind my mainstream journalism career has freed me to speak and write about climate and politics in ways that were virtually impossible inside the MSM bubble, where I had to worry about perceptions, and about keeping my job, and whether I’d be seen by my peers and superiors as an advocate. God forbid.

Read the rest. It is clear, direct, honest and very, very critical of our press.

But the problem it identifies is so huge that solving it requires an ideological war to be fought and won within the journalism profession, which is still populated by people convinced that they have no ideology. That makes me pessimistic. What makes me optimistic: the pressures that brought Stephenson to his conclusion, (“business-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and journalism-as-usual are failing us…”) are not going to change. And so others may be led to where he has gone.

[jayrosen]

There is no such thing as judgment with a capital J. 

Today a giant in American journalism passed:

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died on Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

The final lines of the obituary by Clyde Haberman of the Times are this compelling quote from Sulzberger: “You’re not buying news when you buy The New York Times. You’re buying judgment.”

And that is completely true.

However. There was a time when that was statement was almost enough. Editors could get away with the mystification of what is sometimes called “news judgment.” What I mean by mystification is pretending that the kind of judgments editors make originate not in who they are, or how they think, or where they come from, or the culture they share, or the priorities they have established, not from their vision of the world but simply from their superior knowledge of what news is— from professionalism or experience itself.

I do not think these attitudes suffice any longer. Increasingly, users want to know what goes into those judgments— that is, their basis. If judgment is what they are selling, then New York Times journalists need to know where that thing comes from.

If they continue to mystify the faculty of judgment that Sulzberger spoke of, they will be unable to improve it. If they cannot improve it, they cannot make it more valuable. If they cannot make it more valuable, they cannot prosper and secure their franchise for the next generation of Times journalists.

(Photo credit: B.K. Dewey.)

[gov]

THE POLL DANCE: Nate Silver on Predicting Elections

Nate Silver turned a love of baseball into a breakout career in forecasting player performance, inventing his own statistical system for gaming the game. Then he turned his methodical eye on politics, shocking the media-polling industrial complex by correctly calling 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. He’s now the house polling analyst for the New York Times, bringing a rigorous and gnomic level of intensity to his Five Thirty Eight blog. And his well-timed new book The Signal and the Noise comes out this week, attempting to unspool the science and art of trying and/or failing to predict the future of most anything. We talked with Silver about how the 2012 race looks so far, how it might all turn out, and how this could be the year when all the predictions (including his own) go very, very wrong.

Read More

[mateosfo]

Colorado's 14ers

(that's me topping out on 14,246-foot Mt. Wilson with Wilson Peak in the background, circa 1995; San Juan range, Colorado)

GOP Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan may or may not have claimed that he's climbed "close to 40" of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks; in a note to the Atlantic's James Fallows, the Romney campaign offers this clarification:

... he's not said 40 different peaks, its nearly 40 climbs - with a number of peaks climbed more than once.  He's been doing them for more than 20 years.

This is only mildly believable. There are many clusters of 14ers in Colorado, so it's possible to do two, three, or even four in a day if you're super fit and motivated. But only a handful of them are convenient to the Denver airport.

So what seems unlikely though is the number of trips - and days - it would take to re-summit the same set of 14ers almost 40 times. If you fly into Denver, you could realistically get up to Pikes Peak, Longs Peak, Grays and Torries, or Evans and Bierstadt, the closest peaks to the Denver airport. With a little more motivation and planning, you could head over to the Ten Mile Range and hit Lincoln, Democrat and Bross, or go even further to the Collegiates.

But each one of these excursions would take at least two days - assuming you land in the morning, drive straight to the base, camp, wake up early, hit the peaks, and back to your car by evening. If you drive like a maniac, you might make a late flight home to Wisconsin.

And that's where Ryan's credibility seems sketchy. Who would take 20 flights to Denver (assume 2 peaks per day average, one trip per year, over 20 years?) for a weekend of climbing the same peaks over and over ... and over ... again? There aren't really any other peaks you can get to in less than a day's drive, though I suppose you could add the Collegiates and possible the Sangre de Cristos. But those would be very, very long weekends, indeed.

Given his stretching on the marathon, I'm guessing Lyin' Ryan has been caught again.

[mateosfo]

Frack to the future (sorry)

George Mitchell on fracking, this week:

The rapid expansion of fracking has invited legitimate concerns about its impact on water, air and climate — concerns that industry has attempted to gloss over.

With so much at stake for the environment, jobs and energy security, it is critical that we make reasoned decisions about how to manage the use of hydraulic fracturing technology.

Me on fracking, six months ago:

So, to solve the problem of under-valued gas, the industry should demand that Congress re-regulate fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This would in fact kill two birds with one stone: It would slow the pace of drilling, allowing prices to rise to sustainable levels; and it would assuage a lot of critics of the gas industry, who are worried about non-disclosure of fracking fluids and concerns about water contamination.

Not quite the same thing, but you can't say we didn't see this coming from a mile and seven years away (SDWA exemptions for fracking passed in 2005).

[mateosfo]

Amen.

[mateosfo]

Unfair fight: Thermodynamics vs. economics. Popcorn-worthy reading.

[mateosfo]

I'm a bit of a contrarian with my friends who blame high oil prices on Wall Street speculators - fact is, oil is expensive because there just isn't enough of it to go around. We're living too far from work, and driving way too much, in gas-guzzling cars! Speculators really have little to do with our lifestyle and transportation choices. But it feels good to have a scapegoat.

[mateosfo]

Building on my "fire your utility!" post, here's some data that shows why utilities dislike clean competition: It eats their lunch. During the lunch hour, when they like eating. Almost literally.