Working For Jobs

by Lisa Hymas.

Brad Johnson noted
earlier this week that all but one of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate
“dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight
global warming pollution.” Now, that lone climate realist—Delaware Rep. Mike Castle—has been knocked out. So make that all GOP candidates for U.S. Senate deny the need for
climate action.

Tea Party upstart Christine O’Donnell, who took out Castle
to become the Republican nominee for Senate in Delaware, is right in line with
her GOP colleagues on the climate issue. She has attacked
climate legislation as a “cap and tax energy scheme which would kill
6,117 Delaware jobs.” Sarah Palin, who endorsed O’Donnell and deemed her a
“mama grizzly,” noted approvingly that the candidate is “against
Obama’s cap-and-tax scheme.”

O’Donnell is also against
masturbation, as she explains in a 1996
MTV special about a pro-abstinence campaign she was involved in. “The Bible says that lust in your
heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust,” she
said. “If he already knows
what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?”

Why is she in the picture, indeed? Many Delawareans may be asking themselves that very question
this campaign season. 

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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 Randy Rieland.

Let’s review. We just lived through the worst accidental oil leak in history. And we’re at the tail end of a summer of cataclysmic weather that top climate scientists tell us is a taste of the globally-warmed future. Yet the United States Senate failed to pass a climate bill so tepid that even a Republican (South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) called it “half-assed.”

How does this happen? The Center for Responsive Politics offers a whopper of a clue. It reports that during the first six months of this year alone, Big Oil spent $75 million lobbying Congress. The report also points out that last year, when green groups retaliated and spent a record $22.4 million on their own lobbying, they still were outspent 7 to 1 by fossil fuel lobbies. The Center’s Open Secrets Blog features all the dirty details as part of a weeklong series on how Big Oil fuels Washington.

It almost makes us feel sorry for them: For BP, the Gulf oil leak has been the gift that keeps on giving—and not in a good way. At yesterday’s hearing in Houston on the Deepwater Horizon explosion, federal investigators nailed the oil giant for not addressing hundreds of maintenance problems on the rig. BP’s erstwhile partners pointed one finger after another at their beleaguered colleague. Even Brad Pitt unloaded on BP, and in a rather dark way, saying:  

I was never for the death penalty before; I am willing to look at it again.

Dirty business: If you think clean coal is an oxymoron you’ve got plenty of company. Turns out a lot of utility companies don’t buy the concept either. According to AP reporter Matthew Brown, 30 old-fashioned dirty coal plants have been built since 2008, or are under construction:

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long way from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.

Waiting to inhale: And while we’re on the subject of the air we’d rather not breathe, the EPA is postponing the announcement of tougher smog regulations at least until late October. More likely the agency will stay mum on smog until after the November elections, because any announcement would provide ammo for Republicans who have been accusing the federal government of running amok. Even November would be way too soon for some on Capitol Hill. Why rush asked a group of seven senators in a written complaint to EPA chief Lisa Jackson earlier this month? New smog regulations can wait until 2013. 

We take it all back: Feels like you could use a little positive spin right about now, so how’s this? Bob Marshall, in the New Orleans Times Picayune, reports that some enviros think the BP gusher in the Gulf may actually save more Louisiana wetlands than it destroyed:

… three months of daily newscasts have dramatically increased national awareness of the state’s real coastal disaster, and the billions in fines BP is expected to pay could bankroll critical projects Congress had refused to fund.

Whine and punishment:  And here’s another little pick-you-up. During a visit to a remote research base in the Russian Arctic, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, suggested that too much has been made of man’s role in global warming, pointing out that climate change helped kill off woolly mammoths long before the age of human industrialization. German scientist Inken Preuss set him straight:

Climate change has never happened like now and man is making a huge impact.

Take that, Vlad.

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by Jonathan Hiskes.

Let’s talk home
economics: The average American household spends $2,340 to heat, cool, and
electrify its home for a year, according to the Department of Energy.

That’s more than
average annual spending on property taxes ($1,900) and homeowner’s insurance
($800). Over the course of a 30-year mortgage, energy costs amount to $70,000—a big chunk of change, especially when you consider that the median
home price in the U.S. is $177,000.

Actual costs will vary,
of course, depending on regional climate, the size and efficiency of the home,
and how many sweaters you’re willing to wear in the winter. Homeowners can save
as much as $400 a year if
their homes are built to the International Energy Conservation Code [PDF],
and more if they go beyond that standard.

Smart homebuyers (and
renters) will factor energy costs into decisions about where to live. You’d
think mortgage lenders would consider energy costs too—they need to know
whether potential buyers can afford a particular home. But lenders largely
ignore energy expenses, since they’re not a part of standard mortgage underwriting
criteria.

That would change under
the SAVE (Sensible Accounting to
Value Energy) Act [PDF], a bill backed by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)
that would require lenders to consider energy costs before granting a borrower
a federally insured mortgage. Bennet is considering introducing the bill after
the August congressional recess, his office said, and it could end up as part
of a larger banking or energy bill.

Residential buildings
account for 21
percent of the nation’s energy use, so cleaning up the housing supply is a
major climate imperative.

“Energy-efficient
mortgages” have been available for years, running on the premise that borrowers
who spend less on utility bills have more money available for mortgage payments.
But they’ve been an underused niche product that few buyers or even lenders know
about. The SAVE Act would take the concept and apply it to all government-sponsored
mortgage enterprises, such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. Those three
entities currently guarantee more
than 90 percent of new loans, so the bill would have a profound effect on
ramping up home efficiency.

“The big news is that
this would become a part of every federally backed mortgage,” said Cliff
Majersic of the Institute for Market Transformation,
an efficiency advocacy group that helped draft the bill.

For lenders, the bill
removes a significant blind spot, according to Majersic. “By ignoring those
energy costs, they’re ignoring an important factor in affordability,” he said.
“By calculating energy costs, they’re doing better, more accurate underwriting.
They’ll do a better job of not lending people more money than they can afford,
and, conversely, they’ll do a better job of not rejecting people who are well-qualified
to borrow, in part because they have lower energy costs.”

Energy costs would be
measured in one of two ways—through a third-party report if available, or
through estimates, based on home size, from the Energy Department’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey.

The change would
encourage home buyers to demand more efficient homes, reforming a current system
that essentially penalizes efficiency. Under current standards, a buyer may
understand that a $6,000 up-front investment in high-efficiency windows,
lighting, and a furnace will more than pay for itself over time, but that
doesn’t mean a bank is willing to lend the buyer $6,000 more. And a home builder
might also be hesitant to add that $6,000 worth of improvements, since they
would only make it harder for buyers to qualify for financing. The SAVE Act
would remove that disincentive.

The bill has the
support of the Leading
Builders of America, a trade group that represents 16 of the largest
construction companies in the nation.

“The big barrier with
energy efficiency has always been how to pay for it,” said LBA Policy Director
Clayton Traylor. “Customers love it, but they either don’t want to pay for it
or can’t pay for it under existing mortgage guidelines.”

He said home energy
standards (such as Energy Star)
are an increasingly important part of marketing new homes, but that, without
lending reforms, efficiency must compete with other amenities—like hardwood
floors and stainless-steel appliances—for priority in a buyer’s budget.

The bill does not have
support from the National Association of Homebuilders, a much larger trade
group that has opposed energy-efficient mortgages in the past. It may face
resistance from real-estate groups as well, since some energy-sucking homes might
fare worse on the market when energy use is made visible.

The Obama
administration could enact many of the the SAVE Act’s elements on its own,
Majersic said, as it examines federal housing policy and considers plans to
offload Fannie and Freddie. But he and other key architects of the bill would
prefer comprehensive legislation.

Even if Bennet
introduces the SAVE Act this year, it many not go anywhere soon.  As with anything in the Senate, inaction is
always more likely than action—even though the bill is designed to have no
budget or deficit impact.

“We don’t have any
illusions that this is anything but an uphill climb in Congress,” said Traylor.
“We’re committing to pushing this next year.”

Read about another tool that could green housing policy: location-efficient mortgages.

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by Kate Sheppard.

Just got confirmation from several Senate offices about what is
actually going to be in the package Democrats put forward next week. In a
nutshell, this is going to be a very tiny package, with little in the
way of energy measures. I’m not even sure you can call it an energy
package at this point.

Here’s what we know is going to be in the package:

Oil spill response measures, including elimination of the
liability cap for damages and granting the power of subpoena to the
presidential oil spill commission.

Reforms to the Department of Interior division charged with
overseeing oil and gas development, likely similar to the package Sen.
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has proposed.

$5 billion to spur the development of a natural gas truck fleet.

$5 billion to fund the Home Star program, which will encourage
construction of energy-efficient homes.

$5 billion for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

And that’s it. Obviously, there’s no
carbon cap, that much we already knew. But there’s also no other
major energy efficiency standards, and, perhaps most importantly, no
renewable electricity standard—not even the weak
one included in the energy bill last year.

A Senate Democratic aide tells me that leadership backed off
including a cap, which they thought would become the focus of Republican
opposition in the absence of the much-demonized carbon cap.

Senate aides hoping to put a positive spin on the package note that
it at least does not include any of the really bad measures that
progressive senators were worried about, including major incentives for
coal and nuclear power and the elimination of the Environmental
Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. It is also a
package that Democrats are expected to support uniformly.

But, one aid added, “I don’t think anyone around here is thrilled.”

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by Agence France-Presse.

WASHINGTON—Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
said Tuesday that he and other senior lawmakers had drawn up a “rough
draft” of climate and energy legislation to be introduced in two
weeks.

“I now have
a rough draft of what we’re going to do,” he told reporters. “I hope
to be able to have a bill introduced [the] week after next.”

President Obama has pushed Congress to pass a comprehensive bill to battle climate change
and foster alternative and renewable energy sources this year, despite partisan
tensions ahead of November midterm elections.

But his
Republican foes offered no sign they would water down their opposition to an
approach they have branded an “energy tax” on struggling consumers
mired in a sour economy.

Reid said he had
met with top Senate committee leaders and would consult with Energy Secretary
Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and the top White House official on
fighting climate change, Carol Browner.

Reid said he was
working with Senate Finance Committee Democrats to craft legislation that would
curb pollution from the utility sector in a way that helps consumers, but
declined to say whether it would cap the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause
global warming.

The Senate
leader also said the bill would include provisions to deal with cleanup and
recovery from the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill, promote clean energy
and job creation, and reduce consumption, “which is vital to anything we
do.”

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by David Roberts.

Today marks the release of the long-awaited EPA analysis of the American Power Act, Kerry and Lieberman’s climate bill. It could not come at a more consequential time: the decision about whether to include a carbon cap in the impending energy bill will be made in the next few days. Along with Obama’s speech tonight, the EPA’s analysis will play a big role in guiding that decision. It also comes on the heels of news from NOAA that global temperatures in May were the warmest on record. Tick-tock …

So what’s the verdict? Overall, EPA finds that the impacts of APA will be broadly similar to the impact of the House’s American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), i.e., affordable. Here are key takeaways:

The impact on U.S. consumers will be “modest.” Says the report: “Average household consumption is reduced, relative to the no-policy case, by 0.0-0.1% in 2015, by between 0.0-0.2% in 2020, by 0.2-0.5% in 2030, and by 0.9-1.1% in 2050.” Averaged over 2010-2050, households will pay an extra $79 to $146 a year. Not exactly a steep price to pay to avoid catastrophe. (Incidentally, overall household consumption will continue to rise, even with the mild constraints of the bill.)
EPA’s analysis only measures costs; it does not measure benefits. Specifically, it does not include the benefits of avoiding climate change. If you think that’s absurd, well, you’re right. As Michael Livermore wrote last week, the “all costs no benefits” method of analysis utterly distorts lawmakers’ perspectives. Obviously if the costs of unrestrained climate change were included, the bill would look like a screaming bargain.
Energy-intensive and trade-expose industries are held harmless. To quote: “the allowance allocations in H.R. 2454 [which are roughly the same as APA’s] can essentially eliminate any adverse effect that a cap-and-trade program would otherwise have on energy-intensive trade-exposed industries’
international competitiveness, and can thereby prevent emissions leakage that might otherwise arise if such a program were to reduce the competitiveness of U.S. industry.”
Offsets hold the cost of compliance down, but the limits on offset use are never reached. Overall, domestic offsets would account for about 18 percent of total reductions, and international offsets would account for another 18-29 percent, depending on how many are used.
Several key provisions are not included in the EPA model. These include, for example, “lighting standards, new
regulation for offshore oil and gas extraction, powering vehicles with natural gas provisions, and GHG tailpipe standards.” For these and many other reasons, “uncertainties remain that could
significantly affect the results” of the analysis. (What EPA won’t say: this kind of modeling is worth about as much as throwing darts at a dartboard.)

For reasons I’ve written about before—and discussed with energy wonk Trevor Houser—this kind of modeling tends to overestimate costs and underestimate the benefits of climate legislation. Even with those weaknesses, however, the analysis still shows costs that are, in the grand scheme of GDP growth between now and 2050, tiny.

Cost is simply not a credible reason to oppose a carbon cap.

I’ll update this post if Kerry and Lieberman say anything in their press conference introducing the EPA report.

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by David Roberts.

This morning Sen. Jeff Merkley will introduce “America Over a Barrel: Solving Our Oil Vulnerability,” a policy plan devoted to reducing oil use, at an event at the Center for American Progress. I think it could make a big difference in the debate. To understand why, let’s back up and have a look at where things stand now on climate/energy legislation.

Last week I wrote about the top five things to watch as d-day for legislation approaches. Now three of them have happened. The Murkowski resolution was voted down, but by a small enough margin that it didn’t determine things one way or the other. Reid met with the Senate committee chairs, but there were intractable disagreements and no decisions were made. Lugar introduced his bill, and Lindsey Graham jumped behind it, giving the “energy-only” forces a big push. Obama’s still making the right noises about “comprehensive” legislation, but behind the scenes he and Rahm are putting together a back-up energy-only package. And public anger over the spill doesn’t seem to be directing itself toward climate pollution.

Long story short, things are looking extremely grim for a cap on carbon. (The New York Times’ John Broder says: “probably not.”) It’s up to Reid to pull together a bill out of the many proposals now floating around. My guess is, he heard from Baucus and Bingaman last week that a cap-and-trade proposal can’t pass. He’s meeting with the full Dem caucus this week and he’s likely to hear the same thing, at least from the “centrists” whose votes will make the difference. Right now Obama and the Dems badly need to do something to address the oil spill, and they no doubt fear that a carbon cap would just bog the bill down in gridlock. There is, in other words, virtually no significant political force pushing to include a carbon cap. Just, you know, environmentalists. Oh, and the voices of America’s future generations as they cry out in judgment of our cowardice and myopia.

The question is: if Reid reverts to an energy-only bill as expected, where is he going to get his energy ideas?

Right now there are two main contenders: the bill passed through Bingaman’s Energy Committee, last year, ACELA, and Lugar’s new bill. I haven’t seen an apples-to-apples comparison of those bills yet to make a judgment on which is worse, but suffice to say, neither is particularly good. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, neither bill would yield any more renewable energy than business as usual. Their energy efficiency provisions are a pale shadow of what they could be. And they both go criminally easy on oil and coal. If Reid abandoned a cap and then ended up with a weak energy vehicle cobbled together from these two clunkers, it would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy.

That’s why it’s good that Merkley’s putting his ideas on the table. What’s needed right now are strong progressive energy proposals. If Reid’s going to do energy, he might as well do it right.

Merkley’s proposals are all focused on oil, and for now that’s probably the right strategic play. (If there’s anywhere Reid will be feeling bold, it’s on oil.) His plan would radically ramp up electric vehicle deployment, create ambitious 2030 fuel efficiency goals for vehicles and heavy trucks, ramp up production of advanced biofuels, and shift some heavy trucks to natural gas. Those are all, while ambitious, fairly familiar goals. Added on are some more interesting and overdue progressive initiatives: reform land use to serve people rather than cars, shift freight from trucks to rail and ship, and reduce the use of heating oil in homes through efficiency retrofits.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Merkley suggests the creation of a National Council on Energy Security, similar to the National Economic Council, located in the office of the president. The NCES would insure that energy goals don’t get lost from administration to administration. They would monitor progress, determine whether things could be moving faster, and make recommendations to the President and Congress. This, more than anything else, would count as elevating oil reduction to genuine national priority.

Here’s the reductions and where they would come from:

Of course there’s no guarantee Reid will use any of these ideas. But at least some bold ideas on oil are on the table now, something for progressives to rally around.

What I’d really like to see are a similar bill focused on saving electricity (with a tough EERS) and yet another focused on building out renewable energy (with a tough RES). Those are the two other crucial areas of energy policy, and they too are lacking in ambitious proposals. They’ve repeatedly been watered down in exchange for a cap!

It’s too bad Merkley is virtually alone in pushing genuinely progressive energy policy in the Senate. He can’t do all this stuff himself. Wouldn’t it be nice if a few of the body’s elder statesmen, perhaps with more seniority and committee power, backed him up? Wouldn’t it be nice to have more actual Democrats in the Senate? Sigh.

Anyway, if we’re going to abandon climate responsibility for an energy-only cop out—a disastrous decision that nonetheless looks more and more likely—then let’s get serious about energy. Surely we can manage that much.

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by Eric Roston.

First things first: U.S. senators rose one
after the next in support of or opposition to a measure that would
strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to declare
heat-trapping gases pollutants. The piece in question, a “disapproval
resolution,” was sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In her
floor speech,
she skewered the Obama administration’s move to regulate greenhouse
gases, saying that approach is too harsh in general, and particularly
at such a economically sensitive time. Republicans thrashed the EPA’s
endangerment finding, arguing mostly that added regulations would cause
economic hardship. Several suggested that the day’s vote was not about
the science, although it’s worth keeping in mind that EPA officials
evaluated the vast scientific literature on climate change as a part of
its decision-making process. Six Democrats voted with the 41 Republican senators against the resolution; it failed, 53-47.

The Murkowski resolution wasn’t necessarily expected to pass. But,
as expected, it feeds the conventional wisdom that the Senate won’t be
able to pass a bill this year. Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
told reporters he would vote against the leading Senate
energy-and-climate bill, which he helped write, because it doesn’t have
strong enough provisions for offshore oil drilling. He’s suggested that his colleagues “start
over and scale down your ambitions.” Earlier, he supported the idea to
begin lowering emissions in the utility sector.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) entered the fray with legislation that would aim to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions
by about half of the president’s target—17 percent below 2005 levels by
2020.

Climate Post Book Club, Part IV: Given the ever-increasing repercussions of the BP oil spill, Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman’s American Power Act, Lugar’s Practical Energy and Climate Plan, Murkowski bill, and on and on and on, this is
a great week for the world to lose itself in a political history book
about climate change. However, until this week, there wasn’t one. On
Tuesday, Hyperion published The Climate War by Eric Pooley. The author is deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, former managing editor of Fortune, and former national political correspondent at Time (where I first met him about a decade ago).

The Climate War profiles heavyweights in this
saga—including two members of the Nicholas Institute Board of Advisers,
EDF President Fred Krupp, and Duke Energy Chairman and CEO Jim Rogers,
among other leaders in the now years-long campaign to bring climate
policy to Washington.

The director of the Nicholas Institute, Tim Profeta, rose to
prominence during this period. As Sen. Joe Lieberman’s environmental
policy adviser 10 years ago, Profeta and his counterpart Floyd
Deschamps in Sen. John McCain’s office together spent the hot months of
2001 working on the Climate Stewardship Act, known informally as
McCain-Lieberman. Pooley:

Profeta and Deschamps stayed up late drafting the bill, pilfering
ideas and language from the acid rain cap-and-and trade program and ‘dreaming up big dreams for our little baby that lived in my computer,’ as Profeta recalled it. How were they going to create a new market and
put the industrial economy on a carbon diet? There were a million
vexing issues. They drew from academic papers written by economists at
EDF, Harvard, Resources for the Future, and other think tanks, and did
a good enough job that all of the major climate bills to follow would
draw from their work.

Profeta’s work and the Nicholas Institute belong to and serve this very large, very consequential story.

The climate story is many things—overwrought, overhyped,
misunderstood, ignored, underhyped, overblown, neglected, arcane,
overpoliticized, a no-brainer, and endlessly fascinating. When I ask
myself why I’m drawn to the topic (frequently), I always come up with
the same answer: Climate change is an everlasting gobstopper,
however long you chew it, there’s always more to chew over. But until
this week, no traditional political journalist with Pooley’s pedigree
has  chewed through the now 20-year (plus) history of U.S. climate
politics. The book is beginning to make its media rounds: Andy Revkin
at the New York Times‘ DotEarth blog; an excerpt about Rogers in Bloomberg Businessweek; a piece on Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; Marc Gunther at GreenBiz.com; and Al Gore’s blog.

Remind me who has the cards?: Battles over climate policy are being fought on several fronts.
Incoming U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres prefaced her tenure as lead
convener and negotiator with a memorable foray into “expectations
management.” She told reporters gathered for a briefing about talks in
Bonn, “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate
change, certainly not in my lifetime … If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement, then we
will have solved this problem. I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

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