I'm a carbon neutral delayist - until 2020

At Monday's Water District meeting, we revised our greenhouse gas/climate change policies.  The prior policy was to reduce emissions "when feasible".  Staff's new proposal was to "strive for carbon neutrality".  The Board Chair (and the other enviro on our board) wanted more.  She said she wanted to achieve carbon neutrality and to give a date, even though it was one she didn't expect to meet.  The date she gave was 2015.

I didn't know she was going to do any of that, so it was a pleasant surprise.  I thought having a date, or figuring out a date soon, was good but we need it to be defensible.  We're already pretty good on emissions, getting most of our power from carbon neutral hydro, but we still use a lot of other power, have a lot of vehicles, and a lot of construction.  I argued for either 2020 or for setting up the process now for establishing a date.  By 2020 I said we should be well along in San Francisco Bay wetlands restoration, which should absorb a huge amount of carbon emissions and make carbon neutrality possible.  The Board settled on that date.

Video below, or go here, click on August 20, and start watching at about 3 hours in.



The reference to "purpa" is actually the Power and Water Resources Pooling Authority, a joint government agency that buys power directly from providers instead of going through utility companies, giving us a lot more control over our carbon emissions.  This is why we have a chance of achieving neutrality.


The truth is I'd be thrilled if we achieved carbon neutrality by 2020, but let's see how close we can get.  I need to start working on the planning for it.

That cat won't hunt, hopefully

A short non-climate post here.  I've followed the outdoor-cats-are-killers issue for some years now, and as a local conservationist I've seen places where people are supporting large populations of feral cats by feeding them, usually places with lots of vulnerable wildlife nearby.  The capture-spay-and-return argument fails to realize that the non-spayed population will quickly increase to reach the area's carrying capacity.

More recently a non-peer reviewed study (what have you wrought, Muller and Watts?) put video cameras on 60 cats for a week and found nearly 30% hunted successfully in that week, killing 2 animals each.  If those numbers hold up, the figure translates into billions of animals killed by cats annually in the US.  This suggests that owned cats are significant problem as well as feral cats, and that well-fed feral cats will still hunt.

One obvious solution is to stop feeding feral cats and ultimately to ticket people who won't stop.  Another is to stop letting cats outdoors, although that encounters somewhat more reasonable resistance. A third solution I hadn't heard of before today is cat bibs that impede their pouncing. Might be a good thing to use on feral cats too, and a lot cheaper than neutering them.

Then there's my idea - if a majority of pet cats don't hunt for a week, a significant percent probably don't hunt at all, or hunt very little.  It should be possible to create a breed of cats with this temperament a fixed aspect of their personality.  While I'd normally encourage people to get pets from a shelter instead of a shop, if the intent is to have an outdoor cat then maybe a breed that's known not to hunt is a good idea.  And then give it a bib.

Hi Mom

Hi Mom (and thanks for letting me post this reply),

Yes, I am familiar with the term "watermelon" as applied to environmentalists (green on the outside, red communist on the inside), and have even used it myself.  Sarcastically.  I'm also familiar with James Delingpole, conservative blogger at the Telegraph.  I'm not directly familiar with Delingpole's book, "Watermelons:  the Green Movement's True Colors",* but I think I know what I need to know at this point.

Their watermelon "analysis" just proves the intellectual bankruptcy on the anti-environment right.  They can't think of anything relevant to say, so they fight dead battles of the past.  Communism, really?  And in the Western world?  If the right hasn't realized as the rest of the political spectrum has that the foreseeable future is a market economy with varying levels of government intervention,  then they're showing they haven't had an original thought since the 1980s.  No wonder they haven't liked a Republican president in a quarter-century.

As for Delingpole himself, I thought I'd written about him but can only find a comment I wrote about his self-introduction on his blog, "James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything."  It reminded me of something:

Al Franken coined the term “kidding on the square” for statements that a speaker knows he actually believes more than is publicly acceptable, so the speaker makes the statement in a jocular fashion.

I’ve never been able to read Dellingpole’s blog because I can’t get past the introductory statement that he’s “right about everything.” Just by reflex, my fingers hit the browser’s back button. 

That statement and other stuff by Dellingpole I’ve seen quoted are classic kidding on the square, and give a good idea of the uselessness of the writer.

My coblogger Eli has been able to push his way through Delingpole's work, though, and has a few thoughts about this video:



Eli also provides links to other analyses of Mr. Right About Everything.

I wish I could point you to a honest and scientific conservative who disagrees with action on climate change, but they're thin on the ground.  Even my betting opponent thinks we should take reasonable actions to reduce CO2 emissions.

The best I can do is this Point of Inquiry podcast by science writer Chris Mooney with the politically conservative climatologist Kerry Emanuel.  He doesn't deny the need for action, but just disagrees on the best form of action.  Unfortunately, the conservatives who understand climate seem to be active scientifically but not so much politically.  The famous climatologist Jim Hansen is supposed to be a Republican, maybe that explains his preference for a revenue-neutral carbon tax over more complicated solutions that may have (or at least, used to have) better political prospects.

One last thought - the "watermelon" insult is vacuous and wrong, but it's only 99% wrong.  People will fit potential solutions into their own political framework.  I think some on the left may resist carbon sequestration, large scale solar power plants, and even last-ditch ocean iron fertilization, not only because of the not-unreasonable arguments against those solutions but also because they do not help the left's political "side".  I just wouldn't forget the converse is equally true about the corporate right, and I think that side has a heck of a lot more power.


*Interesting that a Brit would spell "colors" that way.  I guess he knows which country he's targeting.

We've got enough problems without shooting ourselves in the foot

A somewhat depressing article in the NY Times about wasted money being spent on the waste gas HFC-23, so much so that it's been produced in order to be destroyed.  It looks like the problem is finally being brought under control, with the UN tightening down what qualifies and the Europeans finally rejecting outright doing any more future payments for this.  Still, the problem has been obvious for years.  Offsets can work, but only if they're done right.

Getting Romney's culture quote just right

There may have been some confusion about what Romney actually said about culture and economic success, so I thought I would document it:

I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things....As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Massachussetts, which is about $53,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the state of Mississippi managed by Governor Haley Barbour, which is more like $31,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality....If you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it’s this: culture makes all the difference.... I recognize the hand of providence in selecting this place.

I think I got that right.  If not perfectly correct, then I'm certain it fits the spirit of what he was trying to say.

News report of quote is here, and economic info here.

Some real progress on California renewable energy

The California Public Utilities Commission announced recently that our three major private utilities had already hit the legally-required 20% renewable power standard, 18 months before the end of 2013 deadline.  Next up is 25% by end of 2016, and 33% in 2020.

Will it happen?  The original legislation in 2001 set the 20% standard in 2010, which was then reset in 2009 to give more time and more ambitious goals.  So if history's a guide, some slippage is possible, but this is doable.

In other news, California legislators are debating Senate Bill 843, which would allow renters and homeowners with property badly situated for solar (like me) to buy solar power from facilities off of their property.  In other words, a type of carbon offset, and a good one.


UPDATE:  more on the history of the California program.  Target dates have fluctuated over time:

In 2002, California established its Renewables Portfolio Standard Program, with the goal of increasing the percentage of renewable energy in the state's electricity mix to 20 percent by 2017. The Energy Commission's 2003 Integrated Energy Policy Report recommended accelerating that goal to 2010, and the 2004 Energy Report Update urged increasing the target to 33 percent by 2020. Governor Schwarzenegger, the Energy Commission, and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) endorsed this enhanced goal for the state as a whole. Achieving these renewable energy goals became even more important with the enactment of AB 32 (Núñez, Chapter 488), the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. This legislation sets aggressive greenhouse gas reduction goals for the state and its achievements will depend in part on the success of renewable energy programs.

Obama's tightrope on European airline emissions

Obama and the Senate Democrats are playing dangerous games, hopefully with care, with Europe's attempt to reduce carbon emissions from airlines.  The EU is applying cap-and-trade not just to internal flights but also flights to and from Europe.  For that, the US lines up with China and Russia saying the Europeans shouldn't care about emissions that start outside of their own borders.

This is important even if you don't like cap and trade and prefer a carbon tax.  How one area that's controlling its emissions interacts with other areas that aren't has to be resolved or the system will break down.  The key method is some kind of carbon emission tariff, and the EU system for airlines parallels that. A legitimate complaint could be made that the EU is keeping all the money for the carbon allocation emissions - it should instead divide up the money for carbon reductions with the outside countries.

I'm going to be optimistic that Obama hopes to use the crisis to push for a global framework on controlling airline emissions.  Using a crisis to achieve a resolution better than the status quo ante is a standard technique, but a risky one. A global airline emission framework has been in the works, for fourteen years.  The EU has every reason not to wait, but hopefully their push forward can move the rest of the world forward.

Airline emissions also aren't trivial and likely to increase substantially.  Anyone who's calculated their own carbon footprint can see that months of efforts to control emissions get ruined by a single cross-country flight.

Electricity from renewable energy can transform ground transport but can't do the same in the air.  Jet fuel from biofuels is barely getting started, so this is a serious problem.  Let's hope we don't stumble.

Good climate news, bad climate news

On the good news front, an excellent post from David Roberts on the amount of emissions the US has cut in recent years.  Go read.  Joe Romm has argued that we may have reached peak emissions in the US in 2007, this provides additional support.  New to me was that wind power is following the same downward price trend as solar, and may reach price parity with gas in this decade.

So enough with the good news.  Bad news is with global emissions generally, and China particularly:

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) -- the main cause of global warming -- increased by 3% last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tonnes in 2011. In China, the world's most populous country, average emissions of CO2 increased by 9% to 7.2 tonnes per capita. China is now within the range of 6 to 19 tonnes per capita emissions of the major industrialised countries. In the European Union, CO2 emissions dropped by 3% to 7.5 tonnes per capita. The United States remains one of the largest emitters of CO2, with 17.3 tones per capita, despite a decline due to the recession in 2008-2009, high oil prices and an increased share of natural gas.

I still wouldn't assign China the same level of blame as Europe - it's the total emissions per capita that matter, not the annual emissions.  China has also promised not to hit the US level of per capita emissions.  While China and India don't deserve the same level of blame as the developed democracies, they are on a very dangerous course for the entire world.

Syria speculations

1.  Me from Aug. 31, responding to William's request for my prescience on Syria:

I'm clearly not too prescient about civil insurrections, but I think the bad guys will win in Syria, at least for the short term. The military hasn't seemed divided there, which is the only way for the unarmed good guys to win.

So, wrong again, somewhat.  Maybe penalties assessed against me could be reduced by my "short term" qualifier.  The Libyan and Syrian civil uprisings started about the same time but the former started peeling off military units immediately while the latter only had random low-level deserters until recent months.

My guess based on other countries has been that people power uprisings have to win quickly, within weeks, or not at all.  I should modify that to say that successful people power uprisings win quickly or not at all, unless they become civil wars which follow a different kind of trajectory.  I still think Syria is unusual though in the length of time it lasted as civil demonstrations before either fading away or transitioning to what it's now become.

2.  Pretty obvious it's a civil war now, and despite the only-recent change in terminology by the Red Cross, it's been a civil war for months now.  Also obvious that Assad's finished, although I still disagree that it was obvious a year ago.  The US government seems to agree he's finished.

3.  As rebels are starting to take territory, although not necessarily hold it, the situation is becoming more like Libya, including a downside that rebels become more vulnerable to air power.  I stand by the argument I made in February that we should provide more direct military assistance to rebels, particularly in creating safe havens.  The tens of thousands of people that have fled to Turkey in just the last few days could still be in a Free Syria, starting to organize the transition.

4.  My argument in February relied on negotiations first, with military assistance as a backstop.  That's changed - unless there's a coup/assassination, negotiations are useless now.

5.  The key issue now is planning that prevents massacres of Alawite and Christian minorities.  Peeling off enough of them to assist the rebels would definitely help.

6.  Speaking of Syrian Christians, it's interesting that conservative American Christians are so aggressive over Syria when most of them were far more reticent to support change in Egypt.  The obvious difference is the attitude of the regimes toward Israel.  I'm guessing conservative American Christians aren't all that interested in the fate of Syrian Orthodox synods.

7.  The rebels in Syria seem even more like a black box than the ones in Libya.  OTOH, things seem to be going okay in Libya (no takers still on my Libya bet offer).

8.  Not sure of the value of my military predictions, but here's one:  Assad won't use chemical weapons.  I believe without evidence that Western nations have secretly communicated to him their guarantee that the gain to him from using them will be outweighed by the Western response.  He might still be tempted to use them in extremis but at that point, hopefully, anyone given the order will realize the personal best option is to disobey/take government succession planning into their own hands.

UPDATE:  forgot to reference the one-month rule that started working in Libya around May 2011 - from then on, setbacks to the rebels never lasted more than 30 days, and each month left them more powerful than the month before.  My guess is the same rule may have started applying in Syria a month or two ago, and a month or two more of the same will indicate the eventual result.

The pros are using sports to explain climate science

I'm very glad to see this:


More info at the UCAR website.

I've been arguing for this type of analogy for years.  There are alot of people out there, especially high school age students but not just them, who haven't thought much about statistics and how they apply to weather and climate.  They do have an intuitive understanding of statistics when it comes to their favorite sport.  This is a way to reach them.  The climate/weather distinction works especially well when they consider short term event in their sport where random effects are important, versus long term outcomes where overriding factors become obvious.

In other climate news, iron fertilization of the ocean may have some, limited potential to eliminate between 1 and 10 percent of current emission levels from the atmosphere.  As with any other geoengineering approach, we should think carefully about it, but we should consider it.  If some day we used other means to get our net emissions to near zero, this may be one of several techniques like biochar and biomass power-plus-sequestration that could start reducing atmospheric CO2 levels to acceptable levels within a century from now, instead of the several centuries that the oceans will need to absorb most of the CO2 naturally.

"The decisions came in the context of accumulating scientific evidence"

Above is from George Will of all people, acknowledging that juvenile criminal defendants have different brains and different levels of culpability than adults:

This [Supreme Court] ruling extends two others, one holding that the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment for children under 18, the other that it bars life without parole for a juvenile convicted of a non-homicide offense. These decisions held that regarding culpability, and hence sentencing, children are constitutionally unlike adults. The decisions came in the context of accumulating scientific evidence about increased impulsivity and diminished responsibility because of adolescent brain development.

I vacillate between wanting to react with snarkiness versus simply welcoming sanity when I find it coming from an unexpected person.  I sure wish he'd replicate his interest in accumulation of scientific evidence to the far more conclusive area of climate change.  Or better yet, I'd like to know why a person like Will can think reasonably in some regards (this isn't the first time for him) and fall so short in others.

Anyway, thanks for the sanity, George.  Consider expanding it.

My six million dollar memo

I wish I always generated an economic return of $3 million per page.

The above is gross oversimplification and credit-hogging that should be shared.  The somewhat more accurate summary is that my Water District may go to the voters to request an extension of a property tax that will otherwise expire.  I've pushed on the contents of the tax in the past, like getting more money to deal with sea level rise along San Francisco Bay, and on Tuesday I tried to redirect and increase the funding for environmental programs.  I wrote a two-page memo to convince staff and especially the directors to make the changes.  I didn't get redirection, but I did get $6 million more for to help our streams, and that seems like a good outcome.

A longer version of this post, including the memo in all its glory is here at my Water District blog.  The main reason I'm writing here is just to comment on how useful it's been that I'm willing to make my arguments in writing.  Not many of my fellow directors seem to want to do that, but I think it's been essential in helping me change policies that I'm willing to put down on paper exactly what I think they should say.  I might not get that exact change, but I get something.

I taught an undergrad class some years back where I emphasized the importance of writing well, or at least writing adequately.  I'll stand by that claim.

The space alien's answer to the greenhouse gas/heatwave question

If you asked a scientifically advanced space alien whether current heat waves are worsened by our greenhouse gas emissions, it might take the complicated probabilistic approach humans have used to explain that our emissions have made the heat waves far more likely.  Or maybe it will do something easier.

Our space alien, Gort, sends out the Insta-Array of temperature sensors to get a reading, and then presses the "Ennaturalnate" button on the Climate Changeometer, instantly reverting all global greenhouse gas levels to their pre-industrial levels.  I'll leave the final answer to the non-lawyers here, but I think that all other things being equal, there would be a small but real drop in temperature within a few hours.  If one third of our warming to date is from direct effects of greenhouse gases, then Ennaturalnate should instantly drop temps in a heatwave between .25 and .5F.  Non-lawyers, is this right?  UPDATE:  per the initial comments, might take more like a week for a heat wave on land, and far longer over oceans or globally.

So that's the first and simplest answer for the news media that has so much trouble with this - if you could immediately remove all the human additions to the atmosphere, then temperatures would drop within hours, a small amount.  If the local television allows more than a five second soundbite, then you add that moreover there are feedback effects that make things significantly worse and add up over time.  And many of the climate denialists would have to agree about the near instantaneous effect, because many of the acknowledge climate forcing while making up nonsense about feedbacks being negative.  These denialists can add their caveats, but noone cares.

Just one lawyer's view of the issue.

The real process problem that Republican leaders have with Obama's immigration order

UPDATE:  per the comments, the change was a policy change and not a new Executive Order as it was originally reported.  Not sure that changes the analysis.)


Republican leaders have complained at great length about the alleged process problem with Obama's DREAM executive order, deferring for two years any action to remove illegal immigrants who were brought here as children.  They say it's not up to Obama to choose which laws to enforce, and the correct process is to change the law via Congress.

So this is silly- prosecutorial discretion is a standard executive function.  The Rs do have a process concern, just not the one they mentioned.  See the recently-passed transportation bill instead:

Thanks to the stubbornness of the Senate’s political odd couple — the liberal Barbara Boxer of California and the conservative James Inhofe of Oklahoma — Congress approved on Friday afternoon a serviceable transportation bill.... it does not include two anti-environmental riders pressed by the House — one approving the risky Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, the other preventing regulation of toxic coal ash waste from power plants....There are flaws, some serious. Financing for “transportation alternatives” — bike paths, pedestrian walkways and the like — suffered modest cuts. The bill also directs the transportation secretary to suspend environmental reviews of highway and transit projects costing less than $5 million, in violation of environmental law.

What's the relation?  Must-pass, popular legislation is a great place to push one's priorities onto one's opposition, especially unpopular things like stopping regulation of toxic coal ash.  The Rs didn't get all they wanted, but they did get some of it.

They wanted the same process for popular, must-pass legislation barely tolerating illegal immigrants brought here as children - they wanted to see what other, unrelated and toxic provisions they could get passed at the same time within Democratic legislation.  Now, it's no longer must-pass - the Ds can help their constituencies via Executive Order, so Rs have to actually offer something better than the EO to get them on board.

Expect the same thing, by the way, for whatever your favorite flavor of climate legislation.  It won't stay pure.  Sorry about that.  To whatever (limited) extent we can get similar climate results via EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act, that reduces Republican leverage, just as Obama did on the immigration issue.

My second tiny Godwin violation: Romney's Downfall

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo asks:

Can someone tell me when the Mitt/Bain Downfall video gets posted on Youtube? 

Well, okay then.

I did this once before, three years ago, and forgot everything. But it came back:



(UPDATE:  per the comments, you need to turn on the captions, using the box on the lower right in the Youtube video.)

For more info, see this TPM post.  I wrote a while back on the evidence in Romney's 2010 tax form suggesting that he paid even less or no taxes in prior years, so yet another reason to wonder what he's hiding. The disposal of fetuses comes from this Mother Jones article.

And just in case anyone's interested in my first Godwin violation regarding climate denialists, here's Singer's Downfall:

 

More info on that one at the old blog.

UPDATE 2: just thought I'd mention that I slammed the Romney's Downfall piece together pretty fast, so if anyone has suggestions for subtitle improvements, I could decide to upgrade the captions.  Or you can also use the link right above this update; it has tips for how to make a Downfall video yourself.

America != Europe. How's that for insight?

I'm planning to write a post on how a revenue neutral carbon tax might, just might, have a shot in the US in the medium term.  First though I have to disagree with William's argument that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the only way to go - or to be more fair, is the best political approach.

I'll just sycophantically second Eli's first comment to William's post that both taxing and regulating can work.  The other main point I'll make is that taxes are sticky in the US - they don't like to go up.  Saint Ronnie approved a rate increase in the US gas tax from 5 cents to 9 cents in 1983, and it's now 18.4 cents, a net decrease after inflation.  Regulations by contrast do get tougher - not only the CAFE standards that Eli talks about at length, but also the nickel-and-dime increases in regulations on coal plants that are helping natural gas in putting a squeeze on that industry.

It's a fact of life in the US that we accept regulation more readily than taxes and especially tax increases.  Seems like it might be a little different elsewhere.

I suppose regulation is somewhat less transparent, but you could also think of it as a solution to a coordination problem.  A tax approach makes the solution appear as painful as possible, and because we'll underachieve the solution regardless, we might consider a solution that doesn't highlight the pain and therefore gets more done.

Three other points.  It's helpful to clarify assumptions in any discussion, and in this case are we assuming the people are economically rational actors divorced from real world psychology and politics, or are we having a meaningful discussion?  Personally I prefer the latter, but it's helpful to identify your assumption if you want to talk about the former.

Second, at least in the US, a significant carbon tax that has any remote chance of passing political muster will have some balancing combination of exemptions and financial support for those interests and people/constituencies most affected by the tax.  The exemptions will distort the economics, and the financial support raises the question of where the money will come from if your carbon tax is revenue neutral.  These aren't easy political issues.

Finally, William points out that putting a floor on the price for carbon allowances in a cap and trade system contradicts the argument that allowances let you set right emission levels, something that's a lot harder to do with taxes.  He's right, but this gets back to initial assumptions - the cap-and-trade isn't a platonic ideal but an assessment of what's politically and economically achievable.  Putting a floor (or ceiling) on the price is a way to correct for misjudgments at the beginning as to what would be achievable in the future.

UPDATE:  William responds in the comments.

Presenting at Sustainable Silicon Valley on water and climate change

On May 24th, I had the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Santa Clara Valley Water District at the Sustainable Silicon Valley's annual WEST:  Water, Energy, Smart Technology Summit.  More info about my panel regarding regional resilience to climate change is here, and my presentation is below:



Supposedly, we followed a variant on the Pecha Kucha, 20 slides/7minutes presentation.  Some speakers completely ignored the rules; I didn't think quite that far out of the box.

My Powerpoint had a glitch - it was advancing automatically while I was talking.  Fortunately, they removed that from the video.  Unfortunately, fixing that appears to have lost two slides in the process.  At about 5:10 I start referring to a compromise between letting the bay advance due to sea level rise and protecting critical areas at a red line, and that missing slide is here:

My thanks to Water District staff for the crucial assistance in preparing the slides.  Responsibility for any opinions I expressed rests with me.

(Reposted from my Water District blog).

Obamacare part deux - credit where due

Brian Beutler on March 26:

In a little-noticed exchange Monday, conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts may have tipped his hand that he’s entertaining the possibility that the health care law’s individual mandate can be upheld on a constitutional basis that’s different from the one supporters and opponents have made central to their arguments....Roberts suggested he’s skeptical that the mandate and its penalties can be treated separately and may have opened the door to finding that Congress’ power to impose the mandate springs from its broad taxing power.

And Mark Kleiman on Wednesday:

....the ill-tempered and intemperate) outbursts from Alito about juvenile LWOP and (especially) Scalia about immigration make me wonder. If their side had won a huge victory – if they were about to overturn Obamacare – wouldn’t you expect them to be on their best behavior, and disinclined to reveal the full extent of their partisan hackery?
On the other hand, if Kennedy or maybe even Roberts decided that killing ACA was a bridge too far, it would be perfectly understandable if that put the extreme reactionaries in a pissy mood. 

I offer no prediction. But I’m not in total despair. I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

I've heard others say they had the same suspicion, but didn't hear them say it before the decision came out.

Another effect includes Vermont single payer plan getting a boost:

Vermont's push for universal, publicly funded, single-payer health care is going ahead no matter what, Gov. Peter Shumlinsaid Thursday, but he hailed the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the federal Affordable Care Act as a big boost for the state's efforts.
Shumlin called Thursday "a great day for Vermonters and a great day for Americans." But, he added, "I would say that of all the states of the Union, the least to be impacted by the Affordable Care Act is probably the state of Vermont."
That's because Vermont's health care overhaul, which legislation passed last year says will be implemented by 2017, goes well beyond the federal law, in the direction of a Canadian-style public system.
The biggest impact from the federal law will be money: an estimated $400 million a year in tax credits to help people with low and moderate incomes buy health insurance. That's expected to provide a partial answer to a big and still unanswered question: how Vermont will pay for its new health care system.

I'll add more on that Commerce Clause dicta thing:  if Obama's re-elected and gets to replace one of the five justices who made up the nonsense, it's far easier for a lower court to make up its own mind rather than glumly affirm a bad precedent and wait for the Supremes to overrule it.

Finally, Anthony Kennedy as a radical with some liberal social views, not a moderate.  I guess I can see it.

The weird politicized and legally conservative Obamacare ruling (plus dicta)

Well, that was unexpected.  Supreme Court - actually, John Roberts -  rules Obamacare is legal not based on the Commerce Clause but based on the government's power to tax.  Roberts actually ruled the law is not a valid exercise of the Commerce Clause.

The weird and politicized aspect is that there's relatively little evidence in favor and some evidence against the idea that Congress was using its power to tax as a basis for Obamacare.  I think Roberts wanted to reach the outcome that he got on the Commerce Clause without causing the most disruptive overturning of a Congressional law since the Great Depression.  He got what he wanted, a limitation on the Commerce Clause.  Compare that to the SWANCC case I mentioned earlier, where there was plenty of evidence that Congress relied on the Commerce Clause and the Court majority ignored that so they could get the result they wanted without dealing with commerce issues.

The ruling on Commerce Clause advances legal conservatives position, even though the tax outcome leaves Obamacare intact.  The Medicare ruling is even more legally conservative - the power of federal government to spend money as it wishes for the public welfare has been almost unconstrained outside of First Amendment issues, but now its ability to move states in the direction it wants, with its own money, is facing a limit.

Surfing around the legal blogs, they're starting to notice that the "holding" on the Commerce Clause is actually dicta - reasoning that wasn't necessary to reach the conclusion made by the Court majority, and therefore just a statement that is no binding precedent on lower courts.  These are statements that Court actually shouldn't even make but if they do, we can ignore them in theory.  In practice, it's pretty clear where a majority of the current Supreme Court would go on this issue, so a lower court would hesitate to ignore it.

Given this tiny amount of restraint though, I guess the justices shouldn't be elected.  They're playing court politics, not politics politics.

UPDATE:  Nice post at SCOTUSblog on the Medicare issue.  Because it was a plurality but not a majority opinion, that means the plurality opinion isn't binding on future cases.  And what's up with Kagan and Breyer joining Roberts in his nonsense that the feds can't decide when to stop spending money?  This is an incredible door to judicial activism - they imply that a smaller penalty would be okay, but we'll never know what's okay except by countless lawsuits that will have to be relitigated for any new law involving funding of the states by the feds.

On the good side, and per the comments discussion, the implication here is that if a law looks like a tax, even if it otherwise suggests that it isn't a tax, then for purposes of determining whether it's constitutionally permissible it is to be considered a tax.  That goes a half-step beyond what courts usually say when they say they will search for an interpretation of a law that allows it to be constitutionally valid.

Yes, carbon taxes can work in theory

I've argued a million times that some enviros shot and are shooting themselves in the foot by opposing cap-and-trade so they can get their-way-or-the-highway alternative of the carbon tax.  I'm not enjoying the highway very much.

To balance this criticism, I should say the liberal economics blog NoahOpinion is wrong to say "Carbon taxes won't work".   Had he said "carbon taxes are unlikely to be politically achievable in the short to moderate term at levels that are sufficient to change behavior, and other approaches deserve prioritization of political capital," then he'd have a worse title but better argument.  His problem though is that he mushes a political argument into what purports to be an economic analysis.

Noah briefly tries to unmush the politics but doesn't do it.  He mentions the political difficulty and then says that's not an argument that economists should use.  He says the solution is technology development, standard Breakthrough Institute stuff (thankfully minus their prioritization of nuclear uber alles).

So.  Even if you think we really can't get 90% GHG reductions with current technology, a debatable but unimportant argument given the decades that we're talking about, then anything that incentivizes a move away from carbon will assist new technological development.  Therefore a theoretical carbon tax, especially a substantial carbon tax, will provide some of that incentive that he wants.

As for his other points, coordination is difficult, but Europe is moving, Australia has a carbon tax, and other countries are making efforts.  Carbon tariffs on imports seem like an important solution to the coordination problem, although I'm not clear to what extent that raises World Trade Organization issues.  Noah says the pointy-headed intellectuals might not want tariffs, but that hardly matters politically.

His argument that carbon taxes can be revoked and therefore have little effect is another political argument.  If you assume the political strength exists to get them started, my guess is that worsening climate impacts over time will only reinforce that resolve.  Finally his argument that a small reduction does almost nothing is a misstatement of his previous argument about temporary reductions.  If he wants to make a scientific argument instead, go to it then.

It all comes down to politics.  I'm happy to support a carbon tax, but will also support cap-and-trade that seems to get a lot farther politically.  It passed the full House of Representatives in 2010 and versions have passed Senate committees.  If Noah's ideal technological support legislation had reached similar levels before being stopped, then I'm sure he'd call that substantial support, not something that "went nowhere fast".

Of course, cap-and-trade and carbon taxes will go nowhere on the national level barring a natural disaster for at least a few years.  Support for technology is fine, but it shouldn't be viewed as the only possibility on an indefinite basis.


UPDATE:  I should have mentioned that I generally like the other posts at Noah's blog, but of course I have to complain about the one where I don't like the free ice cream.