More ECO:nomics
Two more tidbits from the ECO:nomics conference:
Recently I flagged a surprising comment from the Wall Street Journal: conventional wisdom in the press corps holds all three presidential candidates as equal on climate. I offered a few theories to explain this media blind spot, and upon reading David Roberts' summary of a panel discussion between the candidates' energy advisors, it's pretty clear the prize goes to theory #2:
Maybe conventional wisdom holds that the policy differences are so hopelessly wonky as to be irrelevant. Broadly speaking, all three candidates want cap-and-trade, and that's what counts. Airy details around allowance allocations are of concern only to environmentalists and congresscritters.
Even the candidates' pet wonks seem to view the policy particulars as a sort of a chummy disagreement among friends. It now seems that if this issue is going to get any traction in the general election, it will have to be because one of the candidates decides to make it an issue. Anyway, if you care about the details (which are actually quite interesting), see here and here on Grist.
In TerraPass-related news, TerraPass CEO Erik Blachford attended the conference to lead a roundtable on carbon offsets, and had this to report:
Ed Begley, Jr. did a session on the main stage, and when asked about his personal flying, he told the crowd he offsets with TerraPass. He explained how TerraPass supports clean energy projects, then moved on in his talk. However, when it came time for Q&A, Alan Murray, moderating the conversation, looked up into the crowd and asked whether I was in the room. Next thing I knew, I had a spotlight on me and microphone in my hand.Alan asked me how anyone would know that their offsets were actually making a difference, so I said what I'm guessing every Terrapass member knows I would say: third party verification! It's really the only way to know that you are buying genuine measurable, permanent reductions. (I probably don't have to repeat it for our readership but I will: 100% of Terrapass offsets are verified independently against leading 3rd party standards.)
That was our Terrapass highlight, but what I really enjoyed hearing later in the conference was this: Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked about whether he was living as green a life as Ed Begley. Arnold talked about how he'd converted his Hummer to bio-diesel and so on, but I was even more interested in the point he made about Ed. Apparently the two made a movie together in 1975, and even then Ed was as green as green can be. Now that is my kind of consistency. Go Ed!
Culture war: country music edition
I wasn't particularly planning to continue on the culture war beat, but then, I wasn't expecting Orion Magazine to publish exactly the type of article I'd like to see more of. In One Nation Under Elvis, author and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit uses music -- specifically country music -- as a jumping off point to examine the cultural and class markers that divide a movement from itself.
It's become a bit trite to say that climate change isn't (or shouldn't be) a left-right issue. But political coalitions in the U.S. really did once look very different than they do now. In the '30s, the progressive movement "saw farmers, loggers, fisheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers." According to Solnit, this constituency frayed in the postwar period, and blasted apart in the 1960s:
It was undermined by the culture clash that came out of the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, when I was old enough to start paying attention, the divide was pretty wide. And environmentalists were typically found on one side.
Read the whole article. These sorts of cultural considerations turn on nuances that won't come through in any summary I could cough up. But I will say a few more words on why I think this topic is important.
A possible political realignment is underway, spurred in large part by global warming. The rewards will be great for whoever is smart enough to grab them. But making the most of the opportunity requires seeing beyond some of the narrow frameworks that have shaped the debate to date. Please note that I'm not talking about "framing," the vastly overplayed notion that if we start using better words to refer to a given set of policies, opposition to those policies will magically melt away. I'm talking about actually reaching out to and considering the interests of constituencies outside the environmental mainstream. Solnit puts it best in the conclusion to her article:
It would mean giving up vindication for victory -- that is, giving up on triumphing over the wickedness of one's enemies and looking at them as unrecruited allies instead. It might mean giving up on the environmental movement as a separate sector and thinking more holistically about what we want to protect and why, including people, places, traditions, and processes outside the wilderness...This is the back road down which lie stronger coalitions, genuine justice, a healthier environment, and maybe even a music that everyone can dance to.
Photo by Larry Mills.
Interview with Fred Krupp
I had a chance to interview Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund and co-author with Miriam Horn of Earth: The Sequel (review here). EDF has a long and successful history of fighting to curb harmful pollutants. The new book looks at some of the emerging technologies that may make the whole idea of pollutants an outdated concept.
TerraPass: I wasn't expecting a book about global warming to be such a fun read. Was it fun to write?
Fred Krupp: Yes, it was fun to write because we were discovering all these fun stories about interesting characters. But it was also fun because in the process of writing this book, both Miriam and I had our spirits lifted that there are an abundance of alternatives to solve this problem.
TP:It's easy to flip between despair at how little progress we've made and excitement over the opportunities that lie ahead. What's your outlook these days? Are we really up to this task?
FK:The reason that the despair to date has been warranted is that the economics are all wrong. The conventional market system has a big flaw in that no one is forced to pay the cost of polluting the atmosphere. And the reason hopefulness is warranted now is that all three presidential candidates have come out in favor of a cap on global warming pollution.
Within 24 months, I predict, we will have that cap, which will create a cascade of private investment into these new technologies, will create a government requirement that we take this pollution out of the air. And we will see the entrepreneurial energy that America's always been famous for finally put to use to tackle global warming.
TP: Experts are hopeful that we'll have a cap within the next two years. But there are a lot of details yet to be worked out. In your view, what are the absolutely essential elements of a good climate bill?
FK: We need a hard cap on global warming pollution, not one with loopholes and escape valves. We need a strong bill that will get at least 20% of global warming pollution reduced by 2020 and 80% by 2050. We need a system enacted that isn't one that can be gamed by the lobbyists, who just put the fix in for their company and their technology, driving the cost up for all the rest of us.
We need a system that is performance-based, that creates a metric for how much people are going to reduce pollution. The technologies that will win are the ones that reduce pollution the most, not the ones that have hired the most clever lobbyist.
TP: The book is a broad survey of technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including some which have become controversial: clean coal, biofuels, etc. What would you say to critics who feel that some of these technologies are dead ends?
FK: The current generation of conventional biofuel made out of kernels of corn is problematic for a variety of reasons. It drives up the price of food, and its contribution to reducing global warming pollution is minimal at best. But in the book we write about a next generation of biofuels. Instead of conventional ethanol, we talk about cellulosic ethanol and the pioneers prospecting around the world for extremophiles that are able to digest fiber into sugar. We talk about companies like Amyris that have figured out ways to get yeast to turn sugar into, not ethanol, but into gasoline or even jet fuel.
The current conventional ethanol mandate was government's attempt to pick a winner. The reason a performance-based cap-and-trade system is better is that instead of having government pick the wrong winners, we have government play the role of scorekeeper, measuring the amount of carbon that is reduced, which will drive the system to the next generation of biofuels.
TP: Your book covers a lot of cutting-edge, emerging technology. What did you learn that surprised you the most while doing your research?
FK: The spirit of some of these pioneers is incredible -- guys like Bernie Karl who figured out how to make low-temperature geothermal work in the process of creating this ice hotel outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. He teamed up with United Technologies and ended up not only turning a profit by creating an attraction for tourists to flock to, but also enabled United Technologies to begin to sell these low-temperature geothermal units that generate electricity all around the world.
It was surprising how powerful American entrepreneurism can be when unleashed. And that's what gives me so much hope that when government fires the starting pistol for the most important and greatest race of our time and indeed of any time -- it's really a race against time -- it gives me hope that these [technologies] in the early stages [will bear fruit] once there's this infusion of money, thanks to the incentive finally being aligned with carbon reductions. That should make us all very hopeful.
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