The Senate Fiddles: The Waters Rise

I was happy to see Cap & Trade prominent on the legislative agenda this year. We need C&T--or a carbon tax (and we can argue about which one)--if we are to use market forces to blunt the impact of climate change; and I don’t see the problem being successfully addressed unless we can get the market to work with, rather than against, a sustainable future.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Republicans come out, full force, against Cap & Trade. I have been perhaps mildly surprised at the level of dishonesty, and also the ineptitude, they bring to the table.

Wanting to let House Republican Leader John Boehner speak for himself, I went directly to his website. Click “Issues,” then click “Environment,” and you get a half dozen blips, mostly on the farm bill, the newest one almost a year old. Reading his website, it would appear that climate change is not an environmental issue on Boehner's radar.

The Republicans have been trumpeting the idea that C&T will cost the average American some $3000 per year—Atlantic editor Jack Beatty, on the NPR program On Point, cited the real figure at closer to $31 per person.

The $3000 figure is extrapolated, erroneously, from the work of John Reilly, a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Reilly has been working to correct the record; Republicans have been diligently repeating the lie.

But wait, there’s more! Boehner is also on the record against frivolous expenditures like spending money to weatherize federal buildings. Hmmm. . . . Jobs during an economic downturn, lower energy costs for the government for the life of the building. Yes, I do see why that would be problematic.

Finally, it’s important to nod in the direction of our friends the Democrats.

On April Fools Day, a majority of Democrats in the Senate (26 of them) went on record AGAINST folding Cap & Trade into the budget reconciliation process—which would have made it filibuster proof. Lotta coal states on that last. Can’t say what the less cynical rationale might be.

Nice to be in the new era of bipartisanship: on both sides of the aisle, the senate fiddles while the waters rise.

Don’t Tell Mom: GM Has Been Drinking from the (Gas) Hose Again

I keep trying to figure out General Motors, and mostly this just makes my head hurt—possibly from gritting my teeth, possibly due to the head-spinning nausea that contemplating the utter collapse of American industry induces.

The new Chevy Camaro Z/28 is the cover story in the April issue of Motor Trend Magazine (the blessing of paltry air miles is abundant magazines you could never justify paying actual money for). And it’s one of those mixed message images: tough looking pony car on the cover—red, with a white stripe down the middle of its bulging hood—a couple of lines in explanation at the lower left, in smaller and smaller type: “The Z/28 Returns: The Ultimate Camaro is ready to go. There’s just one small problem. . .”

And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist (or even an automotive pr flack) to figure out what that might be.

This *is* a Good Looking Car—not my preference, but I understand the appeal. But. . . It Doesn’t Look Good for GM, tin cup waving tremulously in the direction of Congress, to be launching a project like this at a time like this.

Just a few more gallons and I swear I’ll stop. C’mon, man, look at those fat, low profile tires! It’s a thing of beauty—listen to the engine, *feel it!* Just a few more gallons. . .

It isn’t that “GM insiders” think this is the wrong way to go, as the president of the Maldives begins to make contingency plans for evacuating the entire population of his low lying island nation. It’s that “it doesn’t look good.”

We’ll just let the guy from Motor Trend in on this—who’s he gonna tell, anyway? When we get to DC, we’ll talk about the Volt the Volt the Volt the Chevy Volt the Volt. The Volt is coming! The Volt is coming! Well, a few anyway. . . eventually.

And in the middle of the mag: it’s the Cadillac Converj, a hot looking electric prototype (based on the Volt the Volt the fabulous Volt), which Motor Trend believes would be worth $60K-$70K in 2014.

I don’t expect to have $70K jingling around in my cup holder any time soon. I still don’t understand why the Volt needs a bigger engine to charge its batteries than my car uses to propel the whole machine. And—near as I can tell—the batteries that “will” make the Volt possible still only exist on Sugar Candy Mountain. Just a tiny bit of reality (or response to reality), that’s all I’m asking.

It’s as if cancer-ravaged GM keeps telling us they’re stepping out for their weekly chemo, and instead they sneak down to the tuxedo store at the mall, blow their HMO money, come back with a smart new wedding outfit and try to hide it in the front hall closet—like we’re not going to look there! Like we can’t see that they’re not getting better!

Americans used to build things. Real things. Things that worked.

I miss that. It’s not clear that we can survive without it. Certainly, General Motors can’t.

Are We Feeling (Green Energy) Stimulated Yet?

The stimulus package has lurched, slightly damaged but ambulatory, out of the Congressional conference committee and should be signed into law by (or on) President’s Day, as Obama hoped. I haven’t tried to pick through it to figure out how much is left that goes to what might be labeled green energy projects—and numbers in this context demonstrate an unseemly plasticity anyway.

During the (last) Great Depression, one of FDR’s alphabet soup agencies was the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the New York area, this “make work” program was responsible for building a lot of the roads, trails, and recreational buildings in the Palisades, on the western side of the Hudson River.

In the 1970’s, during Jimmy Carter’s Great Malaise, I served in the YCC, the Youth Conservation Corps, a summer “make work” program which did painting, trail maintenance and some, literal, bridge building (or throwing new planks across brooks, if precision is important here) in the Palisades.

What I would like to see—in the current stimulus bill or as a freestanding program—is something along the lines of an NCC, a National Caulking Corps.

We often bog down in arguments about what constitutes “real” and worthwhile investment in saving energy, which technologies are worthwhile and can be scaled up, which ones yield net energy gains, which gains are merely illusory. This can be odd, irritating, and (sometimes intentionally) diversionary, which is not to say that such calculations should not be made.

The consensus is pretty clear, however, about the “low hanging fruit” offered by energy conservation. Americans still use roughly twice the energy of people with a similar standard of living in places like Japan and Western Europe.

A Manhattan Project (street to street and building by building) aimed simply at “Bringing America Up to (Green) Code” would generate a large number of jobs and would save a huge amount of energy. You could do this in three layers which would also target several groups of people in need of work:

1. You don’t even need a high school diploma to caulk and weatherstrip.

2. Installation of insulation and replacement windows takes some training (and supervision of new hires) but that training too has a variety of positive multiplier effects.

3. Finally, there is abundant HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) work to be done, overhauling and retro-fitting existing systems, replacing outmoded equipment, designing and installing new heating, cooling, and hot water devices, and—perhaps most crucially—manufacturing these cutting edge devices.

You can’t outsource caulking and insulating. But we are in danger of trading dependence on foreign energy sources for dependence on foreign green technologies. In today’s New York Times, for example, Tom Friedman points to the American and Chinese embassies, across the street from each other in New Delhi. “The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof if loaded with . . . new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.”

This is an area in which I support the Nanny State: energy upgrades should be universal and mandatory. As to cost, one approach would be to tax utility bills such that they did not rise but also did not fall (to reflect energy savings) until the upgrades had been paid off.

If that amounts to a thirty year energy mortgage. . . well the government owns plenty of mortgages at this point anyway, and green mortgages would be both a lot less toxic and a lot more reliably profitable in every way.

Carbon Cap & Trade in (Parts of) the US

I didn’t give people greenhouse gas credits as holiday gifts, as in, “Happy Chanukah, I’ve offset your carbon footprint for this week!” or “Merry Christmas, I bought you some methane!” or “A fine Festivus to you and yours; I’m fighting global climate change in your name!”

In theory, this would be a reasonable extension of donating to charities as a non-materialistic holiday gift. In practice, I feel like it would end up sounding more like, “Could we celebrate this year by my ramming my beliefs down your throat?”

It’s a precarious balance.

If you shout at people, you alienate them and they ignore your message; if you whisper, most people can’t hear you.

“We’re doomed!” is excessive (Who knew?).

“Pssst, environmental apocalypse coming soon, pass it on,” seems a tad inadequate.

The Happy New Year news is that ReGGIe is now up and running.

Under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, but Reggie to its friends), as of January 1st, ten mid-Atlantic and northeastern states have implemented the first mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade program in the US.

Straight up the coast, from Maryland to Maine—with Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont in between and with Pennsylvania and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec currently enjoying “observer status,” power companies will have to either reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (for which they will earn salable credits) or pay a fee for every ton of CO2 they emit ($3.38 at the last auction).

The goal is to reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector by 10% by 2018. The money the states collect from the auctions is to be used for energy efficiency projects, renewable energy, and other clean energy technologies.

This is a welcome step from the states, given that the Bush administration (Bye now, don’t forget to write!) has worked to pillage, rather than to preserve, the environment. Hopefully this will serve as a model for the incoming Obama administration, something that can be rolled out nationwide if it works well.

I’m not convinced that The Market Will Save Us! But it’s clear that sending the right economic signals, and setting up incentive systems that push both companies and people to Do the Right Thing is a crucial part of addressing our environmental problems.

And a Happy Festivus to all!

Is the Future Ahead of, or Behind, the US?

Two days after Christmas and the front page of the New York Times is the gift that just keeps giving.

In Germany, The Times reports, they are building houses that remain warm simply via passive solar, massive insulation (and heat exchangers, for fresh air) and retaining the heat generated by people and appliances. According to the article, these houses generate all the heat and hot water the occupants need, using about the same energy as a hair dryer. Cost of building isn’t much above standard construction, a premium of between five and seven percent. The European Union (those brazen communist bureaucrats!) is considering making new buildings meet the same passive energy savings standards by 2011.

In the US meanwhile, we get two front page pointers to stories further on which focus on rather more primitive power production issues: one is about a return to heating homes using coal. Cheaper, more plentiful, domestically produced at a more stable price than oil, coal for home heating was up 9% in 2007 and another 10% in the first eight months of 2008. What’s not to like?

In answer to that question—putting aside that pesky global climate change and the spewing of toxic chemicals and fine particulates into the air—there’s another story further on: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has reported the largest coal ash spill in US history. Coal ash sludge, containing thallium and lead, has burst out of a holding pond at a coal fired power plant on the Emory River, about forty miles west of Knoxville, contaminating the river and engulfing nearby roads and railroad lines. Initial reports had the amount in the neighborhood of 1.7 million cubic yards; the update better than triples this to 5.4 million—particularly interesting given that the TVA had previously reported the total contents of the waste pond to be less than half that amount.

Hard to read this little trifecta of articles and not come away thinking that some societies are moving forward, into the post-fossil fuel future. . . while others are sliding (or actively swimming) backward, into the toxic muck of 19th century technology.

Hard not to ask: WHY???

The Dark Side of the Street

We were awakened Thursday night by what sounded like gunfire, and turned out to be tree limbs, and entire trees, coming down in an ice storm. Friday morning we had no electricity, Massachusetts was under a state of emergency, and the governor had called out the National Guard to help clear the streets and give utility workers access to downed power lines.

Driving into Cambridge for meetings that day was like going from Kansas to Oz. It was overcast but fairly balmy; no ice in sight; and the general response was, “Emergency? What emergency?”

Three days later and the Sunday New York Times has nothing to say about Massachusetts, though the NYT Company also owns the Boston Globe (and execrable local paper, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette).

Across the street, the lights are on, as they have been the whole time. My side of the block, however, and the side of the adjacent street that abuts my backyard, remains dark. It’s like one of those Twilight Zone episodes in which the aliens perform psych experiments to see how fast community will break down.

No one on the light side of the street has been across to ask how we’re doing, or perhaps offer us some ice. Instead, I’ve been shoveling ice-encrusted twigs off our driveway, to try to stave off the warming and rotting of the food in our refrigerator.

The next door neighbors we talk to have left for a hotel, as, it seems, have a good number of our other power-starved brethren. We’re sticking it out because of a technological quirk that has kept us warm and supplied with hot water. We have an old steam boiler, retrofitted for natural gas: the only electricity our system needs to run is the DC circuit for the thermostat; there’s no pump or blower to circulate hot air or water, no compressor to inject fuel oil. As long as the gas stays on, we’re okay. Without it, we would have had to drain the pipes and leave.

We broke into one of the emergency supply boxes in the basement: the LED headlamps are goofy but functional; the hand crank radio doesn’t have much range; candles work. My daughter is in something of a panicked and cranky state of tech withdrawal, “I NEED to check my email!!”

So out we went to the local library on Saturday, foraging for wireless, adding a list of local WiFi hotspots to our emergency information list while we were at it.

On the way home I passed a convoy of Humvees, a couple of them jungle-camo green, the rest desert sand. Good to see and yet a little chilling as well.

Not much worth crabbing about global climate change here: it’s December in New England; there’s ice; let’s move on.

But the impact of the storm does point to a couple of matters of energy and economics that bear a little scrutiny.

Our power grids, both local and national are in terrible shape and getting worse.

Part of this is a matter of deregulation: when electricity was a regulated monopoly, the same company that produced your electricity also “transported” it. That company had a vested interest in maintaining the grid. Tighter regulation, moreover, meant that it was compelled to do so by more meaningful oversight. Not so, on either count, anymore.

The grid maintainers now do as little as they can get away with doing. It’s inefficient to keep an overly large supply of repair and maintenance crews on staff when they will “hardly ever” be put to work. That logic works fine right up until the point when rare weather events cause the “statistically insignificant” deaths of the frail and more isolated people whose utilities suddenly stop working for a few days—instead of a few hours—at a time.

The matter of corporate resilience and redundancy begs the question of more local and personal back up systems. I have not yet descended to the 1970s level of survivalist paranoia (a basement bomb shelter stocked with krugerrands, ammunition, and a year’s worth of military rations) but I’ve been trying to be prepared for the advent of less reliable utility systems.

A more decentralized power grid would do a lot in that regard. Never mind my fantasy of a zero energy home; if I had enough of my own electricity to just run my refrigerator, I’d be in much better shape.

To do that via small scale wind or solar, it would be useful to have some kind of storage system, a battery bank or perhaps a tank to store hydrogen. A backup system could also use natural gas to power a fuel cell; the dirty way to do this would be to just have a backup generator, burning gasoline, diesel, or natural gas.

Having alternative power for just a few hours a day would be tremendously useful in an emergency—you can run the fridge for just on hour or two a day and keep things cold; you can recharge batteries.

Building grid resilience and local backups like this might be a good way to jump start a small scale alternative energy infrastructure. Since most states now mandate net-metering, for the 99% of the time when there is no emergency, these small scale projects would be feeding energy back into the grid, reducing the need on the part of the utilities to build more generating facilities, paying consumers a monthly dividend that buffered us against higher energy costs.

Of course, it could be argued that we are heading into a period when energy and/or weather related emergencies will be far more prevalent. Which would make alternative sources of energy and better grid resilience that much more crucial. . .

The Auto Chiefs Do DC II

The last time the Auto Chiefs Went to DC they flew in separate private jets, couldn’t explain with any specificity what they were going to do with billions in bailout money (“just fork over the dough and keep quiet and nobody gets hurt”), and while two out of three agreed that taking a salary cut might be reasonable penance for presiding over the meltdown of one of America’s core industries, the third (Ford’s Alan Mulally) told Congress—politely of course—“no, I’m good where I am.” (Where he was being a $2 million annual “base salary,” although CNN reports that when you factor in a variety of bonuses, he was paid $28 million for his first four months at Ford.)

So. . . for “The Auto Chiefs Do DC II,” slated to premiere this week: Chrysler’s Nardelli is walking from Detroit to DC in a brown Franciscan robe with a hemp rope belt, barefoot, of course, with UAW members scattering broken windshield glass in his path; GM’s Rick Wagoner is coming to town having ridden the 500+ miles on a donkey, in farmers overalls with patches on the knees and Depression-era shoes (holes in the soles; no socks); Mulally has chosen to drive (or, rather, be driven) in a Ford Escape hybrid SUV (for which Ford pays technology licensing fees to Toyota, BTW).

I may have some of the details slightly wrong. . . (although not in Mulally’s case). But you get the point. They are REALLY SORRY they gave the impression that they were too big for their britches. And they are strongly committed to giving whatever impression their PR people tell them will get them money.

Oh, and the $25 billion GM needed a few days back? That’s now $34 billion.

And they have a plan too: they’re going to fire lots of people, close lots of factories, cut benefits both for retirees and for people who continue working in the industry, and maybe even build more efficient cars that people want to buy (or import them from their European subsidiaries, sorta like the way Lee Iacocca saved Chrysler from Japanese competition, by importing Mitsubishis and re-badging them as Dodges and Chryslers).

So glad sanity has returned to the American automobile industry.

We can all relax now.