Environment and Energy

About Those Evil Speculators...

Brad Plumer — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:31:00 GMT

So the Senate held a test vote yesterday on a bill to regulate "speculation" in the oil futures market, and it passed 95-0. Now, it seems unlikely this bill's going anywhere, seeing as how Republicans want to tack on a slew of drilling amendments that will no doubt bog the whole thing down—in fact, I'd give even odds that Congress doesn't pass any new energy bill before the August recess. Still, anti-speculator sentiment is quickly becoming as popular as the belief that the United States can drill its way out of high oil prices.

The irony is that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—the very same agency that would be empowered to restrict futures trading under the Senate bill—has concluded in an interim federal task force report, co-written with six other agencies, that investors aren't responsible for the recent spike in oil prices. The run-up, rather, has been "largely due" to boring old fundamentals: more people are burning oil and energy supplies are growing at a sluggish pace. One notable finding: Many speculative investors have been changing their position after prices move—not before—suggesting that they're "responding to new information—just as you'd expect in an efficiently operating market," rather than driving the price.

--Bradford Plumer

How Big A Deal Is Green Building?

Brad Plumer — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:49:00 GMT

Over at Grist, Dave Roberts draws up a bunch of probing questions for Al Gore about his new "100 percent renewable electricity by 2018" plan—most of them critical. I especially liked this question:

The bulk of electricity is used in the building sector. Why did your speech include no call to remake or retrofit America's buildings?

Now, I like superbugs as much as the next guy, but it's easy to forget that United States could still make massive—and cheap—reductions in its energy use in the short term just by doing small, boring stuff like tightening up building efficiency. The raw numbers are awfully compelling; here's a July report, for instance, from Environment America: "One quad of energy gained through building efficiency would cost $42.1 billion, 35 percent of the cost to gain the same amount of energy through new coal plants, and under 20 percent of the cost to gain the same amount of energy through new nuclear generation." (The United States uses about 35 quads of energy total.)

One major obstacle here, as Joel Makower (among others) has pointed out, is that many developers and builders aren't thrilled with paying higher upfront costs to make improvements that will benefit renters, homeowners, or building owners. Another problem is that buyers and renters usually don't have enough information to seek out more energy-efficient buildings in the first place. So there's are market barriers that state and local governments can help hurdle. California has been ratcheting up its building codes of late, but they're still way ahead of everyone else.

--Bradford Plumer

Superbugs! Or the New Velcro

Dayo Olopade — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:06:00 GMT

Here's an awesome lede, from a story that's part of Forbes' new online package about energy efficiency as the invisible "fifth fuel":

They don't need oxygen, they don't need sunlight. They can survive acid baths and doses of radiation 5,000 times more intense than the amount needed to kill a human. They can breathe metal, eat nuclear waste, drink boiling toxins and even heal their own wounds. Now scientists think these superbugs--known as extremophiles--may be the secret to a new energy economy.

Righto! What can't these critters do? Researchers worldwide are trying to find out:

In the past three years, the U.S. government has invested millions of dollars to figure out how extremophiles create, collect, store and expend energy in ways once reserved to the realm of comic book superheroes....
While a few of these bugs have attracted attention for their ability to break down biomass like switchgrass and wood chips into biofuels, bugs are being designed to solve the full spectrum of today's energy and environmental challenges.

For instance, Nate Lewis, a professor at California Institute of Technology, has identified bugs that replicate photosynthesis but achieve far greater energy yields. Rittman is working with micro-organisms that can convert solar energy into liquid fuels. Scientists at MIT are investigating bacteria that could lead to new fuel-cell technologies. Bugs are also being designed to clean water, eat carbon in coal plants, neutralize nuclear radiation and even enhance human mobility in outer space.

And so forth. And reportedly, the push for fresh thinking in Washington has expanded from ARPA-E at Energy to the departments of Commerce, Agriculture and Defense, and "energy-related legislation like the America COMPETES Act and the Advanced Energy Initiative has accelerated the pace and scale of research in the program."

The Vine has covered offbeat developments like snake wave-makers, green bras and "oilgae," that (contra Doug Holtz-Eakin) are direct byproducts of a fertile climate for investments that save America money and energy. Though the bug stuff is reportedly "in its freaking infancy," what strikes about this kind of research is how clearly it contradicts the views of those who, like Brendan O'Neill believe green thinking sees "individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters." Here, the "insectarian" approach is neither a familiar conservationist tack, nor a bloodless regulatory fix taken with fingers crossed. It's hard science--applied to a potentially devastating problem. And it's as good an argument for biodiversity as I've heard.

Happily, every day a story like Forbes' surfaces, the presumption of unhealthy groupthink among greens dissipates. What's more, the market for environmental action, like any other, is remarkably self-correcting. The comparatively rapid realization that biofuels may be an erroneous allocation of precious food resources is a good example. The push among greens for more kitchen table conversation is another.

Al Gore's call to action last week, demanding all of America's electricity to be sourced from renewables in ten years, has been likened to the moon shot proposed by John Kennedy in 1960. But despite the warm fuzzies such analogies induce, comparisons to the Apollo project are imprecise. That mission offered a single target (visible each night!) around which Americans could rally. The many-headed hydra of climate change hardly lends itself to bullet points--but the multiplicity of solutions are, I think, what makes energy action universally appealing. After all, Apollo took Velcro to scale; what awesome/ubiquitous new technology will our energy crisis bring?

--Dayo Olopade

(Photo: Scientists testify before a House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing entitled 'Pumping up Prices: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve and Record Gas Prices.' Courtesy Getty Images.)

More on the EPA's Blocked Endangerment Finding

tnr1.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:47:00 GMT

During a Senate Environment and Public Works hearing today, Jason Burnett, a former EPA official turned whistleblower testified on some of the White House's recent attempts to suppress various climate reports drawn up by the agency's staff—including a "public endangerment finding" that would have compelled the EPA to start regulating CO2 immediately. As was reported recently, after Burnett had e-mailed the endangerment finding to the Office of Management and Budget, officials at the OMB were told not to open it. But the White House wasn't merely being childish, Burnett explained today—the administration did this specifically to avoid triggering transparency rules that would've required any drafts read by the OMB to be made public.

Burnett also made clear that while the current administration has prevented the EPA from acting on CO2 emissions for now, this delay is only likely to last until the next president. There's at least one upside to the White House's recent meddling—while we undoubtedly need to act quickly to start reducing emissions, if the Bush administration had decided to apply the Clean Air Act to carbon, it would've been in a position to influence regulations for years to come. From an environmental standpoint, the country might be better off if those decisions are made by a President Obama—or even President McCain—than by the current bunch.

--Patrick Caldwell

Parched and Hungry in the Middle East

Suzy Khimm — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Middle Eastern countries are being forced to choose between food and water, The New York Times reports:

For decades nations in [the Middle East and North Africa] have drained aquifers, sucked the salt from seawater and diverted the mighty Nile to make the deserts bloom. But those projects were so costly and used so much water that it remained far more practical to import food than to produce it. Today, some countries import 90 percent or more of their staples. Now, the worldwide food crisis is making many countries in this politically volatile region rethink that math.

It's yet another perfect storm in global resource scarcity. But what stands out about this crisis is how it was borne out of these countries' desire for self-sufficiency. Their plans seem to be the stuff of quasi-utopian fantasies: turning arid desert into lush farmland, growing enough food for a desert nation to feed itself. On the surface, such plans sound a lot like the recent calls for countries to become more resource-independent: America needs to assert its energy independence! Africa should learn to grow its own food!

But the call for national self-sufficiency only makes sense in the cases where a country has the resources and capacity to meet its demands sustainably; for everything else, a healthy regional trade network may be the best solution. According to this logic, the Mideast food/water crisis seems like the textbook example for the law of comparative advantage: Produce what you do best and look to your neighbors for the rest.

Some countries are already taking note. The Times story points out oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are now looking for farmland in Pakistan and Sudan, despite the political volatility in those regions. "These countries have the land and the water...We have the money," one official from Bahrain is quoted as saying.

If these kinds of linkages and investments are made, it might not only help alleviate the Middle East's food/water crisis; it also could provide an opportunity for countries like Sudan and Pakistan to become more politically stable. Of course, a warmer investment climate is hardly the harbinger of positive political developments (Zimbabwe, anyone?). But if the Middle East's food supply become strongly linked to these places, they'd have a vested interest in ensuring that these countries aren't about to blow up in their faces--and they'd have greater leverage to do something about it.

--Suzy Khimm

Save the Environment, Abolish the DH

Josh Patashnik — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:47:00 GMT

Keith Richburg reports in the Washington Post that the national pastime is becoming more eco-friendly:

Across the country, baseball parks now have recycling bins for plastic cups, and solar panels are providing at least some of the energy. Men's rooms are being fitted with no-flush urinals to save water. Grounds crews are switching to chemically benign cleaners, and vending machines are being made more energy-efficient. Teams are even taking the environmental impact into consideration when they decide how to travel for road games. ...
This year, at the start of the season, Major League Baseball entered a partnership with the NRDC to make the entire game more Earth-friendly. The Council conducted a team-by-team survey and has come up with an online software tool, called the Team Greening Program, to help every team adopt more ecological practices.

Well, here's a modest proposal: Abolish the designated hitter rule! The average American League game is between five and ten minutes longer than the average National League game, because of the DH. Over an entire season, that adds up to a lot of extra energy being used to power stadium lights, for no good reason whatsoever. So it's time for it to go. This could have the side benefit, at least in the short term, of resulting in more injuries to Yankee pitchers, which would help punish the team for its extravagant energy consumption: The average Yankee game is more than 20 minutes longer than the average NL game.

--Josh Patashnik

Deep in the Heart of Wind

Josh Patashnik — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:40:00 GMT

One of the biggest challenges renewable energy has to overcome has less to do with science than with politics: It can be difficult to get regulatory approval to build the new transmission infrastructure necessary to carry power from the rural areas where it's generated to the cities where it's consumed. So it's very encouraging to see that regulators in Texas have approved plans to build a new $4.9 billion transmission project, which is critical if Texas is to become the wind-energy mecca that T. Boone Pickens envisions.

Brad had the definitive story back in November looking at the promise turning Texas into a wind powerhouse. But there's one specific way, ironically, in which Texas's lack of a well-established environmental movement may help here. A major obstacle to renewable energy development in greener states like California is that environmentalists, who have more political power there than they do in Texas, are often opposed to the construction of new energy infrastructure and transmission lines, since it can interfere with efforts at land conservation and species protection. They've succeeded in delaying such projects, frustrating advocates of renewable energy like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has remarked, "If you can't put solar panels in the Mojave Desert, where the hell can you put them?" In Texas, it's easier for energy companies to get what they want--which can be quite useful once big business puts its political weight behind green energy. It also doesn't hurt that Texas has its own electricity grid, so FERC doesn't have to get involved when new transmission lines are proposed.

--Josh Patashnik

We Only Smoke Domestic

Dayo Olopade — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Via KAL, who draws cartoons for the Economist, this gem:

Now, I think it's fair to say that eagle is a ringer for John McCain. And, while this week, if any, is appropriate to close with speculative interpretation and baseless analogy based on caricature, I'm not sure how to read this one. McCain = bald eagle = victim = patriot = smoker = Obama? A tangled web, to say the least.

Oh, and India and China aren't quitting anytime soon.

--Dayo Olopade

China, Binge Polluter

tnr1.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:14:00 GMT

(Beijing smog, from space.)

Many an environmentalist harbors a shameful crush on China's command-and-control state--or, at least, on its vaunted ability to shut down factories and vehicle travel at will to reduce air pollution.

But will Beijing's pre-Olympic plan to scrub its skies actually work? One climate expert tells Wired "no":

And yet, at least in terms of air quality, one veteran atmospheric chemist says that China's outsized efforts will have little to no impact on the air. Why? Because Beijing's worst air-quality days are often not the result of human activities, but meteorological phenomena--namely, the lack of cold fronts pushing across the city from Mongolia.
...
"They cannot depend on weather modification. Nature is bigger and stronger than the Chinese people and rockets," Rahn said. "The west has known this for 50 years but China is in the stage of development where they think science and technology can do everything."

In other words, curtailing industry (and cloud seeding) three weeks before the Games may be the public-policy equivalent of starving yourself before swimsuit season--doomed to fail, and not a healthy substitute for regular exercise.

--Barron YoungSmith

Can the Feds Lead Us Out of the 'Valley of Death'?

Suzy Khimm — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:43:00 GMT

The Wall Street Journal ruefully points out that it will take some $3 trillion to realize Al Gore’s plan to end our dependency on carbon-based electricity by 2018. How, exactly, are we going to scrape together that kind of money?

In his speech today, Gore described how “billions of dollars of new investment” have already been flowing into clean energy development, and his organization describes the growing enthusiasm of greentech venture capitalists. But at the heart of Gore’s proposal is how the government should put the foot on the (renewable) gas pedal. We should build a national energy grid, subsidize workers to transition from carbon-based industries--funded, most importantly, by a carbon tax. On the other extreme are the free-marketeers who hope the world will spawn enough prospectors who want to cash in on the clean energy revolution--and who will jump in before the government ever gets its act together. Viva Boone Pickens!

But there are other ways to scale up clean energy investment that we need so desperately. The government itself could stimulate private sector investment, generating investment that is neither bogged down in a political (and bureaucratic) morass nor tied to the whims of private investors. On Tuesday, I attended a Senate committee hearing that examined two bills recently brought to the floor by Senators Bingaman and Domenici--one that would create a securities market for clean energy loans, increasing access to debt-financing for private investors, and another that would create a clean energy investment bank. The main idea is to find ways that the government can help unfetter the massive amount of capital we need to realize any of these clean energy proposals.

According to Dan Reicher from Google.org, such federal credit-enhancement tools would help private investors secure loans for higher-risk clean energy initiatives, which banks are still reluctant to support. It would also help move pilot technologies to full commercial-scale operation--and that's the moment at which many when nascent technologies falter, Reicher said in his testimony at the hearing:

In the clean energy technology industry, we call it the "Valley of Death"...Failing to bridge it has cost us serious progress on many clean energy technologies from wind, solar, and geothermal, to biofuels and efficiency.

Given the gloomy outlook of the economy--not to mention the role of unfettered credit markets in the recent meltdown--a government-backed securities market will be a hard sell. Then again, Boone Pickens himself is asking the Feds to help implement his clean energy plan. Even wildcat investors can’t swing it alone--so the money’s gotta come from somewhere.

--Suzy Khimm

Of Pounds and Piggy Poop

Dayo Olopade — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:51:00 GMT

Via Grist, a shame on you to Governor Mike Easley of North Carolina. He got chuckles for giving Barack Obama a well-timed dap in the heady days after the senator clinched the Democratic nomination. But now he's in deep with enviros in his state. David Hamilton and Jordan Treakle report:

Few places in the world have been pooped on more than Eastern North Carolina in the past 20 years. As jobs in textiles and tobacco moved out over the past few decades, the hog industry moved in, bringing with it the source of the poop: 10 million hogs on 2,300 farms, producing about 19 million tons of waste per year. This waste is stored in huge, open pits called lagoons and then sprayed on surrounding fields, which causes the stench to waft for miles around.
Owing to the low water table of the coastal plain, the store and spray method is often affected by flooding, which contaminates the water supply. The lagoons are located disproportionately in low income, African-American communities, where few other jobs are available.

As this flick makes clear, I hope, the transformation of lower income communities of color into such regional sacrifice zones is nothing new. In North Carolina, it's similarly political--a problem of unsustainable agribusiness specifically and land use in general. Such degraded air quality can lead to asthma and learning disabilities, not to mention a profound unpleasantness that, locally, has stopped some small children from having birthday parties.

Birthday parties! Wag of the finger, Easley. You promised to deal with this problem back in 1999. Before you pass the buck to a successor (who's reportedly larded up with contributions from the illustrious hog lobby), I suggest you wake up and smell the piggy poop.

--Dayo Olopade

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Dayo Olopade — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:16:00 GMT

One clean-economy adage has always made great sense from where I sit: If you think the sun is coming up tomorrow, you should be investing in solar. Here's more evidence as to why.

A “solar concentrator” developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can capture sunlight streaming through a window and focus it on solar cells around the frame, according to a study in Science, making it possible to put cells on windows and eliminating the need for large, expensive rooftop arrays. The new devices could increase the electric power obtained from each cell more than 40-fold, according to the MIT research team leader. When added to existing solar arrays, the new technology could increase efficiency by 50 percent, bringing down the price of solar power overall. Members of the research team have founded a company to develop the technology, which they say could be implemented within three years.

This, like all hyper-complex, opaque-to-the-untrained technological striding towards renewable energy is pretty great news. It also raises a few questions--some logistical, some aesthetic. I've been doing a little sleuthing about green architecture for another installment of this video gambit, and some of the design innovations in green building would seem to diminish the potential for window-loaded solar panels.

In fact, one award-winning building with which I'm quite familiar (I lived on the street abutting the non-award-winning construction site for my final year of college) takes an almost contradictory approach to efficiency:

Located on a former brownfield site, the project reclaims a formerly derelict parking lot for the community. Five bus lines stop within walking distance of the site, and the project features bicycle stalls and showers.
Waterless urinals, dual-flush toilets, and low-flow faucets reduce water use, and rainwater collected from the roof of the Sculpture Building and surrounding landscape is used to flush toilets, eliminating the use of potable water for sewage transfer.
The project team oriented the Sculpture Building to minimize eastern exposure and almost eliminate western exposure. South-facing windows were designed to provide daylighting without glare in the summer and to provide daylighting in addition to heat gain in the winter.

This is all great, and it shows--the Yale Sculpture Building and Gallery is a platinum-rated LEED site. That's as good a sanction as you can get from the US Green Building Council. But how, say, would the less concentrated sun on a similar building compute with the sweet new window technology? And what about aesthetics? I love indoor sun, especially in the morning--but will the trend toward smart temperature regulation trump my need to photosynthesize?

When it comes to a more energy-efficient built environment, we can see how the story might end (sorry, Wall-E). With real industry-wide information sharing, the only upper limit on efficiency may well be the rate of replacement of current, leaky buildings with less wasteful ones. But as we move (glacially) toward that possiblity, I think it would help to create a framework for assessing best practices in building green. Of course, there's LEED--a great kick-start for 14,000 ongoing certified projects. But it would help if organizations like the USGBC (creators of LEED) didn't have to make an end-run around federal and municipal governments for such ratings. There are lots of curveballs like this bouncing around the green construction industry, from tech to material reclamation to city planning. Seems about time for a "czar" of some sort...

--Dayo Olopade

A (Partial) Defense of Kyoto

Brad Plumer — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:14:00 GMT

Strange to say, but it's fast becoming conventional wisdom these days to argue that the Kyoto Protocol has been a flop, and that European countries are all cheerfully blowing right past their carbon targets. (I've been sympathetic to that argument in the past, though I hardly think it means that any global agreement—or emissions-trading regime—is pointless.) But over at Global Dashboard, policy analyst David Steven has a long post compiling evidence that Kyoto might be working effectively, after all. There are a lot of nuances and caveats packed in there, but here are the main points:

It’s too early to say whether Kyoto has worked as advertised in Europe—but the evidence suggests that Europe as a whole will meet, or even exceed its targets.

Later reductions in emissions seem likely to be due to policy responses to Kyoto. Governments are reacting to the pressure that a binding target applies.

It’s likely that Europe would be emitting more if Kyoto had never been ratified—and it’s a real stretch to argue that the US is doing better than the EU on emissions.

There's also a smart rebuttal in comments by sometime-TNR contributor Ted Nordhaus, who co-wrote an essay in Democracy declaring Kyoto "dead." Nordhaus's main counterpoint is that most of the big emission cuts in the EU came about thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, as well as Margaret Thatcher's attack on the UK coal industry during the 1980s (which helped push Britain toward cleaner-burning natural gas)—and Kyoto can't claim credit for either of those things.

It's difficult to referee that particular argument, but Nordhaus is certainly right that we should be awfully suspicious of any EU country meeting its emissions targets by buying "offsets" through Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism, which has funded a number of dubious projects in the developing world, many of which may not reduce emissions at all. (John McCain's climate plan relies heavily on these types of offsets.) I'm still not convinced that Kyoto and its successors are doomed to failure, but it's certainly true that there are a lot of aspects that badly need to be repaired in the next round of talks.

--Bradford Plumer

President Bush, Please Follow Your Own Advice

Josh Patashnik — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:26:00 GMT

I have to say I mostly agree with this sentiment from President Bush's press conference yesterday, when he was asked whether he'd urge Americans to conserve more energy:

They're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less or not. I mean, you know, it's interesting what the price of gasoline has done, is it caused people to drive less. That's why they want smaller cars, they want to conserve. But the consumer is plenty bright, Mark. The marketplace works. ...
I think people ought to conserve and be wise about how they use gasoline and energy. Absolutely. And there's some easy steps people can take. You know, if they're not in their home, they don't keep their air-conditioning running. There's a lot of things people can do. But my point to you, Mark, is that, you know, it's a little presumptuous on my part to dictate to consumers how they live their lives. The American people are plenty capable and plenty smart people and they'll make adjustments to their own pocketbooks.

Aside from it not being government's job, high-profile public conversation crusades often don't work. But the problem, as Matt Yglesias notes, is that public policy often encourages and subsidizes highly consumptive lifestyles in a variety of ways (handouts to fossil-fuel companies and owners of McMansions, huge highway budgets, and so forth). As long as entrenched interests block a move to more a neutral governmental posture, you're left with stupid and pointless feel-good measures like public officials encouraging people to conserve, to no avail. So if President Bush really doesn't want to dictate to consumers how to live their lives, he should stop helping make certain options artificially cheap and attractive to them. It's ridiculous if policies aimed at conservation are deemed "presumptuous" and patronizing, while policies that have the effect of increasing energy consumption are all fine and dandy.

--Josh Patashnik

Camp Smolensk

tnr1.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:41:00 GMT

Maybe it's because I never went to summer camp as a kid, but I don't understand the allure of Russia's newest youth program, Atom Camp, to take place at the Smolensk Nuclear Power Plant (via Total Wonkerr):

"The camp will be an excellent opportunity for the children to spend interesting and useful holidays, to improve their health, to find new friends and, most importantly, to feel that they are part of the life of Smolensk NPP and its satellite city, Desnogorsk. This year the children will be involved in useful activities: particularly, they will take part in a clean-up of the dam of the cooling pond of Smolensk NPP."

A humble suggestion for the Camp T-Shirt: "Atom Camp: Staying Green While Turning Green!"

--Eric Zimmermann