The Gulf Spill and a Climate Bill, part 2

After taking a few days off transitioning back to St. Louis, I'm ready to start up blogging again.  I've got a lot to cover, including my analysis of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's recent commencement address at Wash U.  But first things first: here is my follow up post on The Gulf Spill and a Climate Bill.

Even with repeated efforts to stem the BP oil spill, millions of gallons of oil are still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.  BP recently released live video feed of the gushing oil, which you can view here.  Things don't seem to be getting any better whatsoever; in a recent Op-Ed   in the New York Times, leading research scientists concluded that BP's worst case projection has likely been occuring all along:

"...our preliminary estimates indicate that the discharge is at least 40,000 barrels per day and could be as much as 100,000 barrels. Certainly, our assessments suggest that BP’s stated worst-case estimate of 60,000 barrels has been occurring all along. What matters most is that we take the steps to find out if it has."

Clearly, things are bad in the Gulf.  This unprecedented environmental disaster threatens endangered wetlands and the entire Gulf fishing economy.  Environmentalists have mobilized around the oil spill, with demonstrations and online actions calling for a complete ban for off shore oil drilling.  Yet, the Obama administration has been slow to react to the spill, and now appears to be scrambling to maintain the image that it is in control of the situation.  Obama just dispatched three top cabinet officials to the Gulf region, likely more for effect than for any actual ability to help solve the crisis.  

Due to federal law, BP's ownership of the Deepwater Horizon drilling site means that the government cannot take over efforts to shut off the leak.  But this may soon change, as Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said on Sunday “if we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way, appropriately.”  It remains to be seen how the U.S. government would gain control of the situation.

However, this blog post is not meant to criticize the Obama administration's handling of the oil spill clean up efforts.  While the administration may have been a bit late in its initial response, overall Obama has handled this disaster rather well.  He his dispatched his best officials to work to solve the crisis, and the federal government has provided advanced support from the EPA, NOAA, the Coast Guard, and other agencies.  If you follow the story deeply enough, there doesn't appear to be much more the Obama administration could be doing to help stop the spill.

While Obama has been decent in his clean up effort, his political response to the oil spill has been horrendous.  Weeks before this disaster began, Obama opened up the nation's coasts to offshore oil drilling for the first time in decades.  This move was likely political, and tied to the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham comprehensive energy legislation in the Senate.  So one would think that Obama would use this disaster as a political means to advocate for such legislation.  Yet Obama has barely endorsed the Kerry-Lieberman energy bill, and has not used the Gulf Spill oil disaster in any positive way whatsoever, with the small exception of announcing new fuel economy standards for trucks.

What the hell are Obama and the rest of the Democrats doing?  This is there one big chance to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate change legislation, once and for all.  Jonathan Hiske of Grist puts it best:

"It is a critical moment that Democrats are insane not to use... We've got a host of safer, cleaner options [than oil], such as offshore wind, which should be easier to develop now that Cape Wind is nearly ready to go. Let's run with them. This is a golden opportunity to completely change course and work toward ditching fossil fuels. America needs to hear that loud and clear, from its president."

Hiske wrote that on April 30, twenty four days ago.  Since then, I've heard barely a peep about comprehensive energy legislation from the President.  Instead, you get statements like this:

"Now, as I've said before, domestic oil drilling continues to be one part of an overall energy strategy that now includes more clean, renewable energy and energy efficiency than at any other time in our history.  But it's absolutely essential that going forward we put in place every necessary safeguard and protection so that a tragedy like this oil spill does not happen again."

Obama is no explanation as to WHY oil is still needed, but that seems to be a big assumption in all of his remarks.  It;s like Obama is saying, "renewables are nice, but they're not developed enough yet for us to really actually use them."  Hmm, maybe they aren't developed enough because the federal government gives them minuscule funding.  Maybe it's because we don't have a national renewable energy standard.  Maybe it's because we haven't invested in energy efficiency.  Maybe it's because we haven't passed a CLEAN ENERGY BILL.

Look, I understand that the Democrats are scared about the upcoming midterm elections.  Ever since the Tea Party crazies were let loose last August, Democrats have been slipping in the polls.  Understandably, the Democrats might not want to risk passing something the Republicans have painted as "cap and tax" that will "cost trillions of dollars" or "send jobs to China."  But that's the easy way out.  What Obama and the Democrats should do is counter these lies and use the Gulf Spill to finally do what they said they would do: pass a climate bill.

In the lead up to the Copenhagen Negotiations, President Obama let our country and the world down.  He devoted so much energy to healthcare that he didn't have time to support moving energy legislation through the Senate in time for the negotiations.  Now, if the American Power Act or another (hopefully better) energy bill fails to pass before November, Obama and crew may have blown their chances at passing ANYTHING climate related.  And that would be much more tragic than Copenhagen.

It's time for action. It's time for real, comprehensive energy legislation. It's time for a prolonged effort to innovate and develop new energy technologies, improve efficiency to conserve the energy we already use, and redesign the way society functions so that we no longer have to use oil. This is the path to sustainability.

Peak oil is coming soon. We've seen the tragic consequences of oil. We know that coal and other fossil fuels pose a huge threat to our climate and to our civilization. It's time for a change. And President Obama, we're counting on you to make it happen. Lead us to a clean energy revolution.

The Gulf Spill and a Climate Bill, part 1

Last Wednesday, Senators Kerry and Lieberman unleashed their long awaited version of clean energy legislation.  What was originally known as the KGL bill has become merely KL, as Lindsey Graham dropped his support due to partisan bickering over immigration.

Senator Kerry has come out blazing for this bill.  He published an essay entitled "Transforming our Power" in the Huffington Post, as well as this piece in Grist.  In Kerry's own words, here are the big details of the bill:

"In the bill, we finally start to bring down carbon pollution by sending a clear price signal on that pollution. This market is tightly controlled, with only folks who need the permits able to buy the permits in the initial auction. No Wild West of speculation, no big banks coming in to buy up permits. Then the corporations who buy those permits can trade among themselves, so if a company makes great strides in bringing down their carbon pollution, they get the benefit of being able to sell off their permits, and if they don't, they need to buy more. It's simple, fair, and rewards those American companies who work hard to bring down their emissions of carbon pollution. And much of the proceeds of that carbon auction get sent straight to the American people, helping out consumers with their energy bills. Bottom line: it does what President Obama told the world we'd do -- it reduces greenhouse gas emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 2005 levels at 2050."

So hurrah!  Finally, we have climate legislation that everyone can get behind, right?  Well, not so much.  Turns out that many "Little Green" environmental groups vehemently oppose Kerry's bill because of its many giveaways to polluters like Big Oil and Dirty Coal.  They also feel that the bill's weak measures won't be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change (and based on James Hansen's predictions, they're right).

But we do have to start somewhere, don't we?  That is Kerry's main point.  He realizes that this bill is nowhere near perfect, but we need to start reducing American greenhouse gas reductions ASAP.  And this is the best he thinks we can do.

Most big environmental groups (like the Sierra Club, NRDC, etc) have yet to take any definite stance on the bill.  As Jonathan Hiske of Grist observes, they impressively managed to craft a statement without any opinion:

"It is time for America's leaders to get serious ... the Gulf Coast oil catastrophe is yet another reminder ... President Obama and leaders of both parties in Congress must provide the leadership necessary to develop a clean energy and climate solution," said the joint letter from 23 larger and more D.C.-centric groups, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Sierra Club, Audubon, and the League of Conservation Voters."

With opposition to the bill from the small green groups and non-committal approach from the large environmental groups, this bill is nobody's favorite.  This doesn't bode well for the bill's passage, especially given the tough political climate of the upcoming midterm elections.

Further complicating the picture is the Gulf Oil Spill, which ironically may hurt the chances of Kerry's bill passing.  You see, a couple months ago President Obama unveiled his plan to allow expanded offshore drilling.  This was supposed to be the compromise that would allow an "Energy Independence" Bill to finally pass.  And then the BP pipe broke.  The non-stop gushing oil has made Obama look pretty foolish, and has caused a lot of Senators to question the provisions in the Kerry Lieberman Bill that allow for continued drilling.

And that's the current situation regarding a US climate bill.  Altogether, not too encouraging.  Many say that we should give up on this Congress, and hope for the best after midterms.  Well, I don't think that's very wise.  America needs a clean energy bill, and it needs it now.  In my next post, I'll highlight some reasons why we should push the Senate to pass this bill, and how Obama has failed to utilize the opportunity of the Gulf Spill.  As a preview, check out Thomas Friedman's latest piece for the New York Times.

More to come on this soon.

Climate change: Four futures

Climate change: Four futures | Grist

Very interesting article from Grist. Sara Robinson argues that no matter what happens, there are only four possible futures available. Dr. Jim Dator, founder of the futures program at the University of Hawaii, first described the "four generic futures" in the 1970s by . Read about them below:

Future 1: Continuation
More business as usual. The people favoring this approach aren't just the deniers; they're also the people who intellectually understand and accept the reality of global heating, but are so locked into the status quo and its systems that they're either unable to imagine or impotent to instigate the kind of responses required to meet it.

(A rather sobering example: a friend told me earlier this week about a meeting with a Congressional staffer who proffered the opinion that 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon -- the absolute target set by the IPCC as necessary to avoid catastrophic warming -- wasn't possible, but a target of 450 ppm could probably be sold on the Hill. The guy honestly thought you could negotiate with physics the same way you negotiate state school lunch funding -- that Mother Nature is a bureaucrat who can be counted on to pad her budget request forms, expecting Congress to dock them. That's classic Continuation thinking.)

Under this assumption, American life will go on in this century more or less as it did in the last, perhaps with some adaptations here and there.

Future 2: Collapse
The end of the world as we know it. This is the Jared Diamond/James Howard Kunstler/Limits to Growth scenario, where civilization's immensely complex and brittle systems break down, and life winds down to something more simple and local. This isn't necessarily a "worst case" scenario -- a lot of us wouldn't mind returning to a less complex existence -- but it's radically different from the modern world we know now.

Future 3: Discipline
We acknowledge and accept the magnitude of the problem, make a serious plan to deal with it, and commit to following through. There will be sacrifice. There will be change. But because the transition is thought through and undertaken in an orderly way, much of what we value can be salvaged; and new (perhaps more authentically human) values can be brought to the fore as well. This is the path advocated by most environmentalists and climate activists -- not to mention a growing number of businesses who are seeking coherent guidance as they invest their capital in new green initiatives.

Future 4: Technology and Innovation
We put our confidence in our own ability to create technological solutions like geoengineering and carbon-free energy sources that will solve the problem. This is the future where science fiction meets future fact. Perhaps it's time for humans to consider moving to other planets, or creating artificial environments here that will sustain us when the natural environment turns hostile. Whatever the vision, it's taken for granted that humans are very smart monkeys who can invent our way out of anything if we simply decide to think big enough.

I'm personally hoping that we choose a mix of the "Discipline" and "Technology and Innovation" futures. As I mentioned in my previous post, to reach a truly sustainable society, we're going to have to change our way of life. But that doesn't mean that life needs to get worse. We can choose to innovate and create a beautiful new world, or we can choose to continue business as usual and hope that we miraculously avoid the "Collapse" scenario. Whatever happens, it's entirely up to us.

-Adam