Working For Jobs

by Anna Fahey.

Cross-posted from Sightline Daily. This part three in the series “Talking Weather and Climate.” Read parts one and two.

In late July, officials put nearly half of the U.S. population under heat advisories, and an unusually prolonged streak of day and nighttime temperatures broke more than 220 records. At least 22 deaths were heat-related. In Canada, temperatures broke records in two dozen cities across Ontario and Quebec on one day, and Toronto saw its hottest ever July temperature: 100.2 degrees F.

Based on the available data, we can’t officially blame the 2011 heat wave, nor recent disastrous flooding and wildfires, directly or solely on climate change. But a large and growing body of scientific evidence tells us that human-made climate change makes for a hotter, wetter
atmosphere where droughts, floods, and heat waves are going to be more
frequent and more intense.

The climate science on that score is clear.

In fact, physical science is far clearer than political science, especially when it comes to measuring popular attitudes and beliefs!

For example, even in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus, the issue of human-made climate change is highly politicized in the United States. One recent poll shows that more than two-thirds of Democrats believe “the effects of
global warming have already begun to happen,” versus just one-third of
Republicans. This partisan divide is even more marked among elected
officials. As Joe Romm reports, Wonk Room research shows that well over half (56 percent) of the Republican caucus in the
current United States Congress denies the validity of climate science, and
35 of the 47 Republicans in the U.S. Senate publicly
question the scientific consensus. That’s an astonishing 74 percent of the party of Lincoln in the U.S. Senate questioning science. Of the 242 Republicans elected to the House of Representatives, 128 (53 percent) publicly question the science.

As one National Journal analysis put it, “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection
  of climate science that appears unmatched among major political
parties around the globe, even conservative ones.”

Public attitudes are quite different north of the border, where 80 percent of Canadians believe there is solid evidence of global warming. Still, as the CBC reported a while back, “climate change is becoming the most divisive issue in this country since the fight over energy pricing in the 1970s and ‘80s,” and polls suggest that the ruling Conservative Party is out of sync with the Canadian public on climate.
Despite clear popular support for strong action, some say that “the
Canadian government continues to justify its inaction on climate change
by asserting its need to be in lock-step with Washington [D.C.].” And
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a Conservative) has shifted back
and forth between science denial and supporting climate and energy policies.

Partisanship about scientific facts is one thing. There’s also a quirky opinion research phenomenon called “visceral fit,”
where people are more likely to say they believe in the science of
global warming if they happen to be “experiencing warm temperatures at
the moment the question is asked—even if they’re indoors.”

It makes you wonder what public opinion about climate change might
look like today in communities that have suffered extended streaks of
100-degree-plus weather, dust storms, or flood evacuations. Hopefully
pollsters are in the field taking stock of the effects extreme weather
events may have had on attitudes about climate change.

Meanwhile, at least one fairly recent poll examining views on
religion and natural disasters shows that a healthy majority of
Americans—nearly six in 10—say that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change. (On the flip side of that, the same poll found that 44 percent of
Americans believe the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence
of what the Bible calls the “end times.” Among Republicans, 52 percent
believe that natural disasters are evidence of what the Bible calls the “end times,” compared to 41 percent who see it as evidence of global
climate change.)

The most recent installment of the Yale
Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University
Center for Climate Change Communication’s “Six Americas” studies (in the field April 23 – May 12, before the Joplin tornado, before the current heat wave) found that roughly half of all Americans say that global warming is
already causing or making the following events worse in the United
States: coastline erosion and flooding (52 percent); droughts (50
percent); hurricanes (49 percent); rivers flooding (48 percent); and
wildfires (45 percent).

The partisan divide basically vanishes—at least among the general
public—when pollsters ask about solutions that would get families and
businesses, and our whole economy, off the dirty fuel roller coaster. For example, in an interview with Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Andrew Light of Center for American Progress points out that while the research shows that on the one hand, 64 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, with only 47 percent believing humans to be the main cause, research from the same month showed that “71 percent of Americans said addressing global warming should be a very high, high, or medium priority for Congress, and a whopping 91 percent of Americans—including 85 percent of Republicans—said developing clean energy should be a very high, high, or medium priority.”

Notably, large majorities (including Democrats, Independents, and Republicans) say it is important for their own community to take steps to protect the following from global warming: public health (81 percent), the water supply (80 percent), agriculture (79
percent), wildlife (77 percent), and forests (76 percent).

Additionally, Americans indicate they want more renewable energy even if it costs more. The study shows that 68 percent of Americans (including 82 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Independents, and 58 percent of Republicans) support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year. And as of March 2011, a majority of Canadians indicated that they would support policy options like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade even if they cost individuals up to $50 per month in energy expenses.

The Yale/George Mason research also sheds light on which messengers
Americans are more likely to trust (or mistrust, as the case may be)
when it comes to information about climate. In a nutshell: “Much of the
broad information many Americans absorb about climate change is
disseminated by the two sources they trust the least—the mainstream news media and their own congressional representatives.”

Who do Americans trust? Perhaps surprisingly, government
agencies and scientists in general scored well. For instance,
three-quarters of Americans say they have high regard for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as scientists overall. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Park Service, and the Department of Energy got decent marks as well.

For his part, David Roberts doesn’t think that a single disaster (or even a few big “climate
disasters”) will likely be enough to change big, entrenched systems—like
our economy or our political structures—let alone people’s minds. At
least not very dramatically. He’s probably right (and we’ve certainly
seen that borne out when it comes to national policy efforts). After
all, we have seen Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill
come and go from the public mind, creating initial waves of concern
about fossil fuels and climate change that fairly quickly dissipated
into mere ripples and then all but disappeared. (Here’s an interesting New York Times analysis of this phenomenon among California voters.)

But one or two disasters (even enormous or devastating ones) here
and there seems quite different to me from the relentless chain of
weather events we’re seeing that are lacerating people and places—both
familiar and far off—over the past months and even years. One event is
too easy to shove aside as a fluke. But it’s the bigger picture—or tableau of weird weather—that is harder and harder for people to ignore.

Still, as I’ve written before, humans may be hardwired for foot-dragging—and
that is unlikely to change dramatically, even in the face of more and
more weather-related tragedies. Sadly, it looks like the majority of the
people running the show—the ones deciding everybody’s fate even as they
seal their own—are particularly prone to inaction and denial. That is,
white guys.

As David Roberts wrote recently, “there’s a study running soon in the journal Global Environmental Change called ‘Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.’ It analyzes poll and survey data from the last 10 years and finds that … are you sitting down? … conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people.”

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by David Roberts.

Last week, Todd Woody wrote a great piece in The New York Times about the growing crisis around the Endangered Species Act, as the Fish and Wildlife Service is overwhelmed with new applications for species in danger.

NYT’s Room for Debate asked me and some other folks to weigh in on the piece. You can read responses from:

Jonathan H. Adler, Case Western Reserve law school: Overdue for Reform
Holly Doremus, U.C. Berkeley law school: The Law’s Great Strength
Steven F. Hayward, American Enterprise Institute: Blame Partisan Environmentalists
Lisa Heinzerling, law professor, Georgetown University: The Law of Big Problems
J.B. Ruhl, environmental law professor: A Bridge to the Climate Future

First, let’s pause for a moment of silence. If Steve Hayward is accusing other people of being partisan, clearly irony is dead. … OK, here’s my entry in the discussion:

———

In the U.S., concern over human impacts on the natural world began with conservationism, an attachment to particular beloved places and creatures. Then, in 1960s and ‘70s, the ecological movement helped show that the human footprint extends beyond specific locales—it is systemic, threatening whole species and ecosystems. Conservation gave way to environmentalism, the consciousness that brought 20 million Americans, 10 percent of the population, into the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970.

The Endangered Species Act is one of an extraordinary set of environmental laws passed in the wake of that event. It is designed with holism in mind, to protect not just species but “the ecosystems upon which they depend.” Similarly, the Clean Air Act was designed to address not just an enumerated list of pollutants but “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The green laws of the ‘70s were meant to be living, developing programs, weaving ecological care into all the government’s industrial and land use choices. In a journal commentary last year, political scientists Christopher Klyza and David Sousa argued that virtually all environmental progress in the U.S. since the 1970s has been a matter of “green drift,” the slow, contentious unfolding and extending of those foundational laws. As long as they are not repealed they will continue progressing; it is their nature.

In 1988, a new chapter in that story began, when the Congressional testimony of climate scientist James Hansen revealed to the broader public that human impacts now extend beyond species and ecosystems to the atmosphere itself. There could be no more thought of preserving untouched places; no place is untouched by earth’s climate. The human footprint now covers the biosphere itself and all it contains.

And so environmentalism gave way to … well, no one knows what to call it yet. Climate change is a problem unlike any human beings have ever faced. Its effects on any one place cannot be prevented without preventing its effects on all places. No one country can address it unless all countries do. More than 20 years after Hansen’s testimony, the full import is still sinking in.

Among other things, the green laws of the ‘70s have been rendered even more far-reaching than their authors intended. In order to prevent air pollution that can damage public health or protect the ecosystems on which America’s species depend, the U.S. must blunt the effects of climate change. There is no way to solve the domestic problems without solving the global problem. That’s why there is such a vicious political fight over the Clean Air Act’s extension to greenhouse gases, and why the Endangered Species Act is teetering on crisis, overwhelmed with the number of new species in danger.

How will the laws hold up under the legal and political pressure they face as their profound implications are pursued? Will the U.S. leaders grapple with the 21st century’s unique problems or sabotage the laws it has on the books and retreat into denial? In an ideal world, Americans would have an adult conversation about the best way to harmonize economic, energy, and environmental policy. But it seems adults can’t get a word in edgewise at this Tea Party, so for now the country will go where green drift takes it.

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by David Roberts.

Given the 2010 midterm elections, what’s next for U.S. climate and energy policy? Yeah, you’re right: probably nothing! Nonetheless, that’s not going to stop me from debating the issue with Steve Everley of American Solutions.

Everley and I have debated before, online at Salon.com and in person before a semi-drunk audience of Chicago hipsters. Despite my overwhelming victories on those prior debates (as judged by my friends and family), Everley is coming back for more. He just can’t say no to the beard!

It all goes down tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2010, at 11 a.m. Pacific (2 p.m. Eastern). You can watch it right here:

You can submit questions via the widget above or, if you like, tag them with #hpenergydebate on Twitter. Tune in!

(Thanks to Huffington Post for setting this up.)

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by Joseph Romm.

Poor Carly Fiorina. To make conservative ideologues happy, she has
to abandon science and her previous positions on the key issues of
global warming and clean energy.

But to win election statewide, she has to appeal to the majority of
California voters, who understand that clean energy is the key to the
state’s long-term economic and job growth—and that unrestricted
emissions of greenhouse gases will devastate
California more than most states.

And so in her first debate with climate and clean energy champion
Sen. Barbara Boxer, she simply couldn’t give a straightforward answer to the
simple question of whether she supported the Big Oil funded Prop 23
effort to gut California’s landmark climate and clean energy law, Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32).

Let’s go to the videotape (watch to the end):

Ouch.

You know that you have screwed up as a conservative politician when
the center-right Politico
says so:

Fiorina’s major stumble came on the issue of Proposition
23, which would suspend AB 32.  She said the focus should be on federal
climate legislation and that she had not yet taken a position on the
proposition.

“If you can’t take a stand on Prop 23, I don’t know what you will
take a stand on,” Boxer responded.

Talking to reporters after the debate, Fiorina sidestepped the issue,
  saying she would “probably” take a position on Prop 23 before
November, though it’s not her main priority. She insisted the real
referendum on energy legislation “is on the ballot—and her name is
Sen. Barbara Boxer.”

You’ll note that Fiorina immediately jumps to the old right-wing
talking point created by Frank Luntz for conservatives who want to sound
like they care about global warming and clean energy without actually
having to do anything: We need to fund energy R&D.

As for her claim that AB 32 is a job-killer, not only do 118
economists disagree, but so did Fiorina and rational Republicans just two years ago:

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by David Roberts.

I was part of a live debate in Chicago this past Thursday, facing off against Steve Everley of American Solutions at an event sponsored by Lexus and Patron and moderated by Mark McGrath, who you may remember as the frost-tipped lead singer of the band Sugar Ray, beloved to millions for their 1997 hit “Fly.” Yes, that’s all as weird as it sounds.

There’s been some hue and cry over these debates but in my experience it was harmless. McGrath turns out to be a genuinely nice, down-to-earth guy. His questions—at least the questions he was given—were fairly sharp and if anything biased a bit in my favor. Everley’s a nice guy too, and wasn’t interested in arguing over climate science. The focus was mostly on clean energy, though Snooki and pot legalization came up too. We each got 60 seconds per question to make ourselves heard over the hum of beautiful people buzzed on tequila, chatting each other up by the bar. Let’s just say that the informational content fell somewhat short of academic.

It was fun, though! I’ll put up video when it’s available.

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Me, on the Mike Malloy show

A Salon debate on cap-and-trade and energy politics: day four

A Salon debate on cap-and-trade and energy politics: day three

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by Robert Walker.

In response to my
post about the multitude of challenges posed by rapid population growth in
developing countries, Jason
Scorse replies, “there is plenty of food to feed everyone in the world
already, but many go hungry. There is probably five times the amount of food to
feed everyone in the U.S., but we have hungry people here.”
 
That’s like saying, “Severe poverty is not a problem.  There is plenty of
money in the world.  We just need to redistribute it.”  
 
For better or worse, we don’t live in a Marxian world where it’s “each
according to their need.” Those living on $1 or $2 in the shantytowns of Manila
or Mumbai are forced to skip meals when the prices of corn, flour, and rice
shoot up to unaffordable levels as they did during the food crisis of
2007-2008.  When grain reserves shrunk to near record lows in 2008 and
food riots broke out in more than two dozen countries, diners in America and
elsewhere didn’t save the scraps and ship them off to the impoverished corners
of the world.  And they won’t do it when the next food crisis arises.
 
Right now there is a serious drought in the African Sahel.  The World Food
Program is desperately trying to raise $100 million to feed 4.5 million people
in Niger and elsewhere in the region. Josette Sheeran, the executive director
of the World Food Program, warns that, as a consequence of widespread hunger,
Niger is in danger of “losing a generation” of young people due to stunting and
malnutrition. Should we be shipping in external aid to ease the existing food
crisis in the Sahel?  Of course we should. But that doesn’t mean that the
world will be able to feed Niger in 40 years; its population is on track to
jump from an estimated 15.3 million in 2009 to 58 million by 2050.  
 
It’s even more ludicrous to suggest, as Scorse does, that the availability of
drinking water, “while affected by population, is not determined by it.”
 Yes, there’s plenty of water in the world. Unfortunately, 97 percent of
is seawater.  As for the world’s freshwater, it is in increasingly short
supply.  About 75 percent of the freshwater we use is “wasted” on
agriculture.  Another 10 to 15 percent is “wasted” on industry.  And
while we can and must increase the efficiency with which we use water for those
purposes, there’s no guarantee that we will do so in time to avert the growing
water crisis. In the meantime, the populations of some of the most
water-stricken countries in the world, like Yemen, are on track to double or
more within the next 30 to 40 years.
 
I said it in my previous
response to Fred Pearce and I do so again here: In addressing issues
related to impending shortages of energy, food, and water, we have to reduce both consumption and projected population growth.
Reducing population growth, however, is a lot easier. If the U.S. and other
donor nations spent an additional $3 billion to $4 billion a year on voluntary
family-planning services and information, it would go a long way toward
reducing fertility rates and lessoning the chances that food and water
shortages will create a global humanitarian crisis.
 
With respect to climate change, the oceans, and the global commons, the
challenge is to prevent unwanted and unintended pregnancies in the U.S. and
other developed nations, where
the consumption rates are so much higher and the ecological footprints so much
larger. But that, too, could be accomplished with a comparatively small
investment.  
 
I fervently share Scorse’s hope
that people in the U.S. and other developed nations will trim their exorbitant
lifestyles, eliminate wasteful consumption, slash their carbon emissions, and
shrink their ecological footprints.  I just don’t see it happening any
time soon. Not soon enough to ward off more humanitarian disasters in the
developing world.  

In the meantime, can’t we
please give all women in the world the information and family-planning services
they need to prevent unwanted and unintended pregnancies?  Is that too
much to ask?  Or do we have to endlessly repeat the “population vs.
consumption” debate?

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by David Roberts.

Last week I took part in a debate at Salon.com on the merits of pricing carbon (and related matters). My debate opponent was Steve Everley, manager of policy research at American Solutions and a contributing author to “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine,” by Newt Gingrich. Salon has graciously agreed to let us republish the debate here. There will be four installments.

On day one, Everley led things off; I respond beneath.

Steve Everley: With the unemployment rate near 10 percent, creating jobs should be the first consideration of our elected leaders, but instead President Obama and his liberal allies in Congress are insisting on enacting a national energy tax that will kill jobs and drive American businesses overseas.

The vehicle for imposing this vast new energy tax system is cap-and-trade, a scheme where the government arbitrarily determines how much carbon each company can emit, chooses which companies get free permits to emit carbon and which companies have to pay for them, and then puts unelected bureaucrats in charge of regulating the whole system.

The result is higher energy costs, which virtually every economist will tell you are necessary for cap-and-trade to be effective – higher prices are necessary to prevent consumers from using what the left considers too much energy. President Obama even bragged that under his ideal cap-and-trade plan, electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket.”

President Obama has also listed Spain as the model for his energy policy, noting last year that the Spanish government’s investments in green energy “are paying off in good, high-wage jobs – jobs they won’t lose to other countries.”

But a study from economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Spain shows that his country’s push for “green jobs” has been a disaster for the economy: Calzada found that each green job created not only costs on average 2.2 jobs in the private sector, but also upward of $800,000 each in government subsidies. Two months ago, Spain’s unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

If Spain is the model that President Obama and the left wish to emulate, then America’s unemployment rate will also “necessarily skyrocket.”

Many other studies have shown, including those from the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office, that higher energy costs lead directly to fewer American jobs. The CBO adds that the shift toward so-called green technologies, President Obama’s biggest selling point for this new cap-and-trade energy tax, would actually reduce economic productivity as each worker in the energy industry would now spend the same amount of time producing less energy.

The European Union sold cap-and-trade to its member countries in 2005 on the basis that it would create jobs and boost their economies. The opposite happened. Since 2005, this policy has cost the EU economy over $7 billion, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office found last year that the EU system did not significantly advance investment in new technologies, which President Obama and his liberal allies in Congress keep pointing to as the source of new jobs that cap-and-trade energy taxes are supposed to deliver.

With that kind of record, what rational policymaker would seek to impose this new energy tax system on his or her own constituents as a way to create net new jobs and net new economic wealth, and not just a massive redistribution of wealth?

Last fall Sen. Kerry tried to sell his cap-and-trade energy tax plan by pointing out that America had effectively reduced its emissions in the past year “because of the downturn in the economy.” In order to get to where we need to be, Kerry concluded, we just need to go “another 14 percent.”

It was an illuminating admission from the Senate’s staunchest defender of the energy tax. Kerry articulated a direct relationship between economic stagnation and cap-and-trade, proof that an energy tax is a strategy that will kill more American jobs and make the recession permanent.

———

David Roberts: I confess to being uncertain how to respond to Mr. Everley’s opening salvo. Like his boss Mr. Gingrich, one of the original masters, he seems to be stringing together words and phrases poll-tested to inspire fear. The presence of the term “unelected bureaucrats” does not generally signal good faith and seriousness.

So let’s back up a bit. Why would we want a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions? Because we have a large and pressing problem to solve, namely climate change, a phenomenon that Everley astonishingly fails to even mention. The best science indicates that the developed world needs to reduce its emissions over 80 percent by 2050. That is a truly Herculean task, and I’d be quite curious to hear how Everley proposes to accomplish it without a mandatory cap on carbon pollution—or if he thinks it’s a real problem at all.

By emitting greenhouse gases, industries are imposing costs on the public, but they are not paying those costs. Carbon pollution is a classic economic “externality” that distorts the proper functioning of the market. One way or another, those costs need to be internalized, incorporated into the market price of fossil fuel-intensive goods and services. It’s important to note that such a move would not raise net costs—it would simply move those costs to their rightful owners. It would force the market to tell the truth.

So how to go about it? In the late 1980s, a group of market-inclined environmentalists, recognizing the limits of “command-and-control” air pollution regulations, developed a new model: rather than plant-by-plant mandates, set a declining upper limit on the total pollution emitted across the U.S. economy, issue tradable pollution permits, and allow private capital to flow to the best (read: cheapest) means of meeting the cap. Thus you harness environmental goals to market forces. This essentially conservative idea impressed the administration of George Bush Sr., who signed into law the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, which implemented such a system for acid rain pollutants. It was a resounding success, reducing pollution much more cheaply than expected, with massive social and health benefits. (For a compact history of cap-and-trade, I recommend this article in Smithsonian.)

Market-based pollution limits have been so effective that a bipartisan group of senators led by Sens. Carper. D-Del., and Alexander, R-Tenn., is now pushing a similar trading system for SO2, NOx, and mercury—so-called multipollutant legislation. Leading lights on the right used to feel the same way about using market-based systems to reduce greenhouse gases. For instance, a wise man once said:

“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”

That was Newt Gingrich in 2007, before he was angling for a presidential nomination from a party dominated by its Tea Party fringe. Similarly, in 2008 California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that a cap-and-trade system would “both create jobs and lower the cost of energy.” Now that she’s seeking votes from the Tea Party, she’s allying with the Senate’s premier flat-earther, James Inhofe, R-Okla.

In short, conservative politicians are turning away from—and grotesquely mischaracterizing—a market-based pollution control system for primarily self-interested electoral reasons. This has made clear dialogue on the subject extraordinarily difficult.

Anyway, I don’t want to bore people, but a couple more quick notes. First, the Spanish study Everley cites has been debunked up one side and down the other, most recently by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. No one but conservative ideologues takes it seriously anymore. Recent studies of cap-and-trade bills, like the one a couple weeks ago from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, show that they would be net job creators, if modest ones. Other studies, from, for example, the EPA and CBO, show that the bills would reduce the deficit, which you’d think would be attractive to conservatives.

On the costs of a cap-and-trade system, the economic consensus is that it would cost American households about a postage stamp a day—a far, far smaller price than would be imposed by the damages from climate change. For more on that consensus, see this discussion paper (PDF) from journalist Eric Pooley.

To conclude: virtually everyone agrees that the U.S. needs to invest in new clean energy industries and solutions. That’s the easy part. The politically more difficult part is how to pay for those investments. A cap-and-trade system offers a twofer: It discourages carbon pollution by raising its price, and it uses that revenue to fund clean energy solutions. Conservatives want to spend the money, but they don’t want to raise it. It’s fiscally and morally irresponsible.

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