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.

Supreme Court justices should be elected

UPDATE:  okay, turned out better than I expected.  Let's not elect them, but still give them term limits.


This is my pre-emptive post reacting to the near-future decision by the Supreme Court on Obamacare.  Maybe they'll preempt my preempting by doing the right thing instead, but I doubt it.  My best guess from reading Kennedy's and Roberts' questions is the same as the conventional wisdom, that they'll at least strike down a significant portion of the ACA on the fatuous activity/inactivity distinction.

I read Bush v. Gore the day it came out - five judges with little (Kennedy, O'Connor) to no (other three) history of ever caring about equal protection before that point suddenly joined two of the other four who also saw a problem in how the Florida Supreme Court was conducting the vote recount, but the five then refused to fix the problem but rather just stopped the recount.  The five used a contorted decision-making process to reach that result and then declared it had no effect on any subsequent decisions, to make sure their decision didn't accidentally provide equal protection to people who actually needed it.

Less well-known outside of environmental law is the SWANCC case, where the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling pretended the Clean Water Act didn't rely on the Commerce Clause for its constitutional authority, but only on constitutional authority to regulate navigable waters.  They made this up, because the majority wasn't ready to address the extent of the Commerce Clause.

Skip to 2012, where they'll soon adopt this activity/inactivity distinction.  Kevin Drum has a good take on it:

Of course it [ACA] was constitutional. Even Randy Barnett, the law professor who popularized the activity/inactivity distinction that opponents latched onto as their best bet against the mandate, initially didn't really think it was anything but a long shot. 

So how did that conventional wisdom change so dramatically in only two years? Ezra Klein writes about this in the New Yorker this week, but hell, Ezra's a liberal. He's probably sort of flummoxed too. Instead, let's hear what a nonliberal has to say about it:

Orin Kerr says that, in the two years since he gave the individual mandate only a one-percent chance of being overturned, three key things have happened. First, congressional Republicans made the argument against the mandate a Republican position. Then it became a standard conservative-media position. "That legitimized the argument in a way we haven't really seen before," Kerr said. "We haven't seen the media pick up a legal argument and make the argument mainstream by virtue of media coverage." Finally, he says, "there were two conservative district judges who agreed with the argument, largely echoing the Republican position and the media coverage. And, once you had all that, it really became a ballgame."

I've previously supported 18-year term limits for the Court, partly as a way to reduce the politicization of the nomination process by reducing the stakes involved, but that's not enough.  We're in the worst of possible worlds right now, with a Court making political decisions but without political accountability.  Let them face the voters if they've decided to be politicians as well.

It's not going to happen.  Term limits don't seem likely to happen either, although Democrats should at least lift a finger in support of it.  Elections shouldn't happen with lower judges who are bound somewhat by precedent, but term limits should.

Despite the terrible image we lawyers have, I like to think there's at some background level an integrity about the law that can overcome politics.  With this Supreme Court, though, maybe we should admit our weakness and bring democracy to limit the politicized "justice".

Doing their best to prove me wrong

I've argued at times that climate adaptation will be easier to push through denialist resistance than climate mitigation, because:

1. It's not asking denialists to give up the bad things they do.
2. It doesn't blame the denialists for bad things that are happening, except in an indirect way.  At least it doesn't focus primarily on whether their/our lifestyle is causing problems for other people.
3. It's saving their own bacon (or maybe their community's bacon) rather than helping/not harming other people far away.  Folks that would confidently deny climate change might be much less confident in arguing against preparing for climate change.

I've also argued that preparing for the possibility of climate change will encourage people to accept its reality, a kind of backwards way of reasoning but one that still gets to the best policy outcome.  Hopefully people will then realize that mitigation reduces the need for adaptation.  None of this works though unless climate adaptation is an easier sell than climate reality overall.

North Carolina and Virginia legislatures are testing my hope that adaptation is an easier sell.  People in both states have noticed that coastlines sure seem flooded a lot, and both states have lots of low-elevation land.  Legislatures want to plan how to respond to this but have come down with hives at the mention of, or express adaptation for, climate change.

Still, North Carolina has backed away somewhat from its widely-mocked effort to limit projecting sea level rise to no more than the historical record.  Now they say accelerated sea level rise could be considered if derived from good science, kind of.  It has problems but it doesn't stop planning for some level of climate adaptation.

Virginia also has problems, with the city of Norfolk spending $6m annually to keep roads and homes clear of coastal flooding.  Their bill dances around the issue of climate change, dropping the words entirely in favor of "recurrent flooding".

On one level this is equal parts laughable and sad.  It reminds me of the controversy over BBC America's Frozen Planet series and the initial effort to drop the discussion of climate change that was shown in the original British version (they did show it in the end).  No surprise that Americans are in climate denial when their leaders and media hide the truth from them.

But even if they're not using the "CC" words in Virginia and North Carolina, it's not that hard to read between the lines.  Someday people will ask why taxpayers should be paying for this out of income and sales taxes, instead of polluters paying for it along with the emissions that cause the problem.

UPDATE:  Anonymous has a great art project idea in the comments.  I'd put it at 7 meters above sea level though instead of 20 - we still have time to save the Antarctic ice sheets.

Improving existing coal plant efficiency is the political sweet spot

UPDATE;  Management strongly encourages readers to look at the bottom of the comments, a very interesting and informative discussion of electrical power distribution and generation has broken out.  Whoda thunk.

Nice post by Brad Plumer about unglamorous low-tech fixes for the climate:

Catherine Wolfram, an economist at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, says that we too often ignore simpler solutions, such as wringing more efficiency out of our existing fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. Many of those power plants, after all, are likely to stick around for decades to come.... 

Wolfram described what happened in the 1990s after some U.S. states began deregulating their electricity sectors. Utilities sold off their nuclear reactors to private operators. And, Wolfram found in a recent paper with Lucas Davis, electricity output at these newly privatized reactors increased 10 percent compared with those that stayed in the hands of tightly regulated utilities.

....Even today, Wolfram notes, many U.S. power plants still don’t have incentives to operate as efficiently as possible. There are many coal plants in the Southeast that are regulated under “cost-of-service” rules, in which power plants can pass their fuel costs onto consumers. That means there’s less reason to operate as efficiently as possible. And a carbon tax wouldn’t necessarily fix this — not if utilities could just pass costs onto consumers. 

Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA official, concurs. He notes that the efficiency of the U.S. coal fired fleet has remained flat since the 1970s. And a variety of research (pdf) suggests that small improvements in operations could boost the overall efficiency of the U.S. coal fleet by as much as 5 percent. (Wolfram, for instance, has found that a coal plant’s efficiency can vary as much as 3 percent depending on the skill of the guy sitting at the controls.) That may not sound like much, says Buchkeit, but spread across hundreds of coal plants, there are real carbon savings to be had here.

A mandate requiring the utilities to get off their lazy butts, improve coal plant efficiency to match the best-in-class levels, and pass the savings on to customers sounds like a political winner to me.  The Republicans will call it a slippery slope, but if you can't fight them on this then the game's over.  Seems like a nice initiative to move forward this fall.

It might be too expensive for the oldest plants to convert and shut them down instead, as if that's a sad story, but overall this should save people money.  I suppose the new investment might be used against an effort to shut the plants down in a few years, but for the vast majority of them, I think Brad is right that they're going to be around for more than a few years.  Anyway, it doesn't sound like it needs much of an investment, just some willingness to hire trained people.


UPDATE:  one possibility would be to exempt coal plants if the owners commit to shut them down or otherwise make them as efficient as natural gas within a certain period, say 5-10 years.  If the grandfathering that's found throughout the Clean Air Act came with time limits, we'd be much better off.

Many enviros have criticized Obama for not using the "bully pulpit" adequately to highlight the dangers of climate change.  Other activists make similar claims for their causes.  By contrast, most political analysts seem to think the bully pulpit doesn't actually work.

I think there's a measurement problem - short term changes could be noise or ephemeral reaction to the bully pulpit with no lasting implications.  Long term changes can't distinguish between bully pulpit causes and everything else in life.  My personal guess is that it plays a modest but not insignificant role in cultural attitudes, and plays a somewhat more important role in elite attitudes.

Obama's shift on same sex marriage provides the best hope that the bully pulpit can actually do something.  Public opinion has shifted dramatically on marriage equality in the last 20 years with some evidence of acceleration, so if there were ever a chance to accelerate it further, now seems like a great time.

Most polls I've seen following Obama's announcement have shown large shifts in African American public opinion (but not all polls) and little shift in non-black opinion.  Some analysts have complained that this shift just reflects people lining up with their side, as if that matters.  Anyway, it's short term. Long term, we all know that in a decade support for SSM will be the dominant position outside of the South but there would be no way to test whether the extent of the dominance was affected by Obama.

Let's look in the medium term, one or two years from Obama's announcement.  My guess, made before Obama evolved, was that his opinion could shift 5-7% of black opinion and 1-3% of non-black opinion.  I think I'll stick with that and look at polls in 2013.  The complicating factor is that support for SSM typically goes down in presidential election years as the Republican Party plays the anti-gay marriage card.  Might not happen this time, but who knows.

My prediction is that we'll see the biggest bump in African American support in 10 years, big enough to overcome any Republican push against marriage.

Moving past the medium term, I think the biggest effect of Obama's announcement is to line up the Democratic Party in all the same direction.  Democratic leaders in blue constituencies will find it very hard to resist supporting gay marriage.  Here in my area, the otherwise popular mayor of San Jose is finding that out, something that could really hurt his political future.  Democratic leaders in red constituencies and among African Americans now have much more room to support SSM.  This probably falls into the long-term category, though.

I'm not sure how this all plays into the debate over whether Obama should talk more about climate.  Overall I think that yes he can and yes he should, but his political actions are more important than the small effect he can have on public opinion in the medium term.


UPDATE:  found a prediction I made in 2005.

The actual timeline is that they'll benefit politically for another five years, it won't help or harm them much overall for ten years past that, and then for fifteen years it'll hurt them as they fight the fundamentalist dinosaurs in their party before they can finally get rid of the anti-gay marriage plank of the Republican Party platform.

I was too pessimistic overall.  Beginning in 2014, being anti-SSM will start hurting Republicans on the national level (this year it's neutral).  It won't take Republicans 30 years to drop opposition, more like 15-20 years.

Goodbye blue sky

The recent study showing that geoengineering via aerosols would make our planet's sky whitish, like what's seen in urban environments, is making the rounds.  It'll be interesting to see if we get some sky color denialism as a push back.  I also haven't seen whether urban skies would be even more altered as a result.

I expect this new study could have political repercussions.  The "don't worry about your SUV, we'll just partially blot out the sun and turn the sky a different color" crowd might find it a hard sell.  Especially when this change is from a human perspective, forever.  It will take centuries of pumping pollution in the atmosphere to balance the effect while the majority of extra CO2 is slowly eliminated.

Despite all this, I think we can't rule out the possibility that things will get so bad that we'll have to consider it.

UPDATE:  by comment request:

Allocate emissions to those who emit them (except electricity)

I got sidetracked as I often do, reading the Climate Progress thread that Eli referenced, into looking at a discussion about whether GHG emissions embodied in the production of imported products should go into the sinner's file of the importing nation.

The question is a truly exciting one of cost accounting.  In theory it doesn't really matter who you allocate the carbon cost to, as long as you allocate it to someone, you don't double count or undercount, and you keep the method consistent.  That's Coase Theorem for you - whoever's responsible for fixing the problem will be forced to put up the money to fix it.  So maybe you could choose to say the nation where the end user is gets the full freight.

Except it has some problems, especially when it concerns trade between sovereign nations.  For one thing, definition of end product could be hard.  A factory built to manufacture widgets for export - is the factory an end product or added to the emission of widgets?  An American reads a newspaper and then tosses it into a bin, where it gets shipped off to China for recycling.  Who's responsible for which or all emissions? It's easier to avoid these games and just count emissions where they become airborne.  More importantly, it could be a lot harder to track emissions in someone else's country and use legal force to ensure that country undertakes the conservation techniques/renewable energy/carbon sequestration that you're paying them to do.

The exporting country is getting paid for the product they export - if they internalize the externalized carbon cost of production that's an appropriate charge to bear.  Most countries prefer to be exporters rather than importers, so let the exporters pay for their pollution costs.

None of this denies the reality that China's emissions are (partly) why developed countries aren't even worse.  And Americans should fight coal exports to China just because it's a really bad idea, not because of carbon accounting.


UPDATE:  I forgot to add why electricity is different - it's such a close connection between buyer and seller that I think it's fair and practicable to allocate emissions to the buyer as much as the seller, and give the buyer incentive to buy from somewhere else.  Electricity doesn't have to be an exception, but it could be an exception.

Also see comments below, they're good.

A day late for Memorial Day

Remembering the sacrifices of those who served will hopefully make us less likely to rush into unnecessary wars.

Another way to share the sacrifice is to spread the risk around.  I'm somewhat sympathetic to calls for a renewed draft as a way to make sure every class and social group is represented, but the military doesn't need that many people.  Below I'm copying a 2007 post from my old blog, on how in the absence of prior national service - either military or volunteer work - virtually anyone of any working age could be subject to a lottery for draft military service.  I'm not expecting it to happen, but it would be a fairer way to go about things, and likely have more peaceful results.

Making mandatory national service a choice

My idea for national service is to give young people a choice:

Alternative #1. Before they turn 25, begin serving for a shorter period of time than Alternative 2 would require. I don't know how long; it would depend on the need and could be somewhere between 12 to 24 months.

or

Alternative #2. Do no mandatory service before 25, but if the national need arises at any age before their retirement, based on a proclaimed national emergency like Bush's War on Terror, those who did not serve earlier and are chosen by lottery will be required to serve twice as long a time period as Alternative 1. Almost no one who failed to serve earlier would be exempt from the lottery.

That's the basic idea, although improvements are possible - you can adjust the incentives so that right number of people sign up for military versus nonmilitary national service, or sign up right away versus taking a chance on the lottery. I recognize that you probably can't make a worthwhile modern soldier out of someone for a useful period out of a total period of 12 months, but special support roles that require less training could be developed.

The key issue is that almost no one who skips the initial service gets out of the lottery. No, a sedentary 55 year-old won't be fighting door to door under this system, but he could very well help with paperwork in Baghdad or Kabul and take his chances along with everyone else. And no exemptions at all based on the person being more valuable doing whatever she happens to be doing currently when her number's called. This is a new social compact we're talking about, and economic efficiency arguments get trumped.

The economic efficiency of not fighting Bush's Iraq War, or ending it much sooner than will otherwise happen, is pretty obvious and a likely benefit if the general and older population had a much closer connection to people being sent involuntarily to Iraq.

FEV2Gen to support V2G

To translate, corporate Fleet Electric Vehicles could add power To backup Generators and push Vehicle-To-Grid technologies along.

V2G involves drawing power from electric vehicle batteries to supplement the power grid, instead of connecting the EVs to the grid solely for the purpose of charging up the EV to drive around (great info at University of Delaware).  This could have a lot of economic value by timing when you charge and release power from the batteries, and go a long way to support renewable power by providing power storage.  A related idea would take old EV batteries when they're no longer reliable enough for vehicles, but still have significant storage capacity, and using them as power backup.

For decades, people in developing countries have used regular car batteries for power supply.  In recent years, hobbyists have modified hybrid cars to power homes, and EV carmakers are finally starting to make that option available to individual buyers.  V2G experiments are happening, but we've got miles to go.

The water district that I help direct is considering spending $700,000 to $1 million to buy/upgrade two generators (100kw and 650kw) for our buildings.  We have to have power 24/7, especially when the Big One hits or if a major storm takes out power at the same time that it causes a flood.  We have a significant vehicle fleet of our own, and 700 employees who mostly drive to work.

If much of our vehicle fleet were to be converted to EV and networked to add to the power we'd receive from our generators, then we could either use less-powerful generators or extend the time that we can operate without system power.  As an additional step, we would also have a financial incentive to work out deals with our employees, providing them with financial incentives if the EVs they drive to work could be used to supplement generator power while they're there.

This is a miniature version of the V2G solution for broader society, operating in a situation where having the power would be extremely important and otherwise hard to obtain.  Other government agencies could be in a similar situation - they own a substantial vehicle fleet and need generator power.  Other places like hospitals may not have much of a fleet but would have employees there 24/7.  I think using your own fleet may be simpler at first, but working with employees is the next logical step.

Another advantage this system might have would be for transitory blackouts.  Backup generators are inefficient and polluting, while most blackouts are short.  Maybe we could have enough EVs attached so that for an initial period of 30 minutes or so, they provide all the backup power, and only if the power is still off does the generator kick in to stop battery depletion from happening too fast.  With luck, the generators would never be used at all except for testing and maintenance, something that California's air quality regulators might appreciate.

Having these systems might be good practice for and help acceptance of larger scale V2G, as well as being an additional incentive to just get more EVs on the market.

Just an idea at this point though....

Latest update on our friends at Heartland

Guardian has a brief rundown.  I misunderstood previously what I think was John Mashey's point in the comments a while back, about the importance of a coal association showing up to support Heartland financially.  I thought that wasn't very surprising, but it seems that HI had been trying to maintain a facade of independence from that economic interest.  Not anymore, and maybe not even enough time to funnel the dollars through a masking fund.

Also interesting that Heritage Foundation, a right wing "think tank" hack job, would pitch in financial support for HI as a potential competitor.  Maybe the competition isn't all that fierce, or that Heritage prefers someone who's even more ridiculous than they are to provide a contrast.

Guardian also says HI lost board members, but no name.  Inquiring minds want to know.  UPDATE: ask and ye shall receive.

UPDATE 2:  As to Heritage being so generous, maybe they're not the ones making the call on that decision.  Page 93 of Crescendo to ClimateGate Cacophony shows lots of overlapping denialist donors.  Perhaps the donors decided the funding allocations were off due to a series of unfortunate events and prodded Heritage along.

California climate offsets and additionality

I spent two days last week at the Association of California Water Agencies' spring conference.  What is that?  Yes, I am an exciting person always seeking thrills and experiences.  Why do you ask?

The conference had an interesting-to-me panel on the financial aspects of California's cap-and-trade auctions.  Entities subject to the cap are allowed to get up to 8% of their carbon allowances through offsets.  The 8% max isn't for total allowances, it's for each emitter - one rich emitter can't satisfy all the obligation through offsets.

All offsets have to be certified through the California Climate Action Reserve - you have to do more than just say "I paid JimBob to add solar panels to his roof, so I'm done now."  The Reserve's protocols then has to be accepted by the California Air Resources Board, and only a few have so made it so far. The key idea is that offsets are going to be like wetland mitigation banks - people will be financing new actions that reduce emissions, certify them, and then sell the allowances that result from the decreased emissions.  This could assist in establishing a distance between buyer and sellers of offsets.

Additionality has some interesting twists - to the Reserve, satisfying additionality must go beyond legal requirements, must be initated in a timely manner (no backdating old projects to claim they deserve credit as offsets) and must exceed standard business practices.  Last one's the trickiest, of course.

I did a write-up for my water district about the conference:

 3.    AB32 and tidal wetland restoration
One panel focused on cap-and-trade.  Afterwards I talked to panelist Joel Levin of the California Climate Action Reserve, a state-created nonprofit that certifies third party carbon offsets that can be sold to entities that have to comply with greenhouse gas reductions.  I asked him if they have done any work with tidal wetland restoration as a carbon offset.  He said they had and believe the technique could be used as a carbon offset and therefore a financial benefit to those who are certified as creating the offset.  However, they presently do not have an accurate estimate of how much carbon is sequestered in order to certify an offset.  It is an ongoing area of scientific analysis. 

 There are two other barriers to Water District benefits from tidal wetland restoration as a carbon offset.  First, we don’t own the baylands that are being restored – the federal government does.  However, we are helping restore them, so we might be able to reach an agreement to share in any offsets created.  Second, the Reserve does not now accept offsets created on federal land, but it is working on eliminating that restriction. 

We have some big plans to do tidal wetland restoration of 16,000 acres in South San Francisco Bay.  This has potentially huge carbon offsets that could help tremendously with financing this project.  My understanding is that tidal wetlands have as much or more carbon sequestration benefit as freshwater wetlands, with none of the counterbalancing methane emissions.

OTOH, selling offsets eliminates the carbon benefit from restoration, at least to the extent you sell offsets.  Still there are countless other benefits from getting back wetlands, including other climate benefits.  Tidally-influenced areas can catch sediment that otherwise sweeps out to sea, making it at least somewhat more likely that the marsh areas can keep pace with sea level rise.


I'll just add a tangent from the memo about another topic that might interest people, putting solar panels on canals and reservoirs:

 1.    Solar power on canals and reservoirs
I talked to two solar power exhibitors, SunPower and SolarCity.  I asked both of them if anyone had used canals or reservoirs as areas to place solar panels.  Both brought up the potential advantage of reducing evaporation and the “free” space you wouldn’t have to rent or buy.  Both also mentioned an experiment by a winery that set up panels over a small reservoir/pond using a series of pontoons.  Neither company was the contractor in that case and the experiment has not been repeated.  They believe maintenance would be expensive.  SolarCity said something like it has been discussed for the State Water Project. 

 I mentioned to both of them that there might be advantages in many districts in reducing algae growth in reservoirs, and that our District in particular might benefit from reduced mercury methylation.  They hadn’t considered those potential benefits.  I told them this was just speculation on my part, and both said that if the District is interested, they’d be happy to talk to us.  My impression is that both thought this would be difficult. 

Not impossible, but not easy.

Dems reforming filibusters, Repubs abandoning no new tax pledges

Two undercovered items:

1.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has finally backed the reformers in his own party calling on limitations of the filibuster.  Critically, he agrees that the change in Senate rules at the beginning of the legislative session, per the US Constitution, are not themselves subject to a filibuster.  So this can only happen starting next year.

Reid finally got fed up with the Rs.  I sure wish this happened in 2009, then we could've had cap-and-trade in place for two years by now, as well as other critical legislation.  The problem with our democracy is that it's not a democracy.  California is a perfect example of that, with two-third's vote needed to raise taxes.

I'm guessing the Rs will say very little about this for now.  If they stay as the minority party in 2013, they'll fight "Democrat tyranny", but if they win control of the Senate, they'll adopt the cause themselves and say the Dems have no right to complain.

The constitutional option has been threatened in the past to get compromises, so that may be how it plays out next year.

2.  Matt Yglesias scores with the realization that Congressional Republican attempts to reduce deficit and increase military spending via reduced child tax credit puts tax-cutting promises in a new light:

It's interesting that the child tax credit is considered fair game in this context. Instead of a "no tax hikes" pledge it now seems to be "no tax hikes except on low-income working parents."

More info here on the cuts, although not a whole lot more.  I'd be interested in some details.

I'd describe what happened a little differently from Matt.  The Grover Norquist Americans for Tax Reform Pledge the Rs signed is pretty clear:

ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

(Emphasis added.)  What the Rs did is to violate and abandon the pledge.  Time to acknowledge who's doing some class warfare.

Galileo or Bozo, a binary choice

More from LATimes on Heartland's disarray.

John should use his blogauthor key, but this was too good to leave in the comments:

John said... 

As recently as the fall of 2009, the Heartland Institute's website featured a banner that flashed portraits of famous thinkers, including: 

Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
John Locke
James Madison
Thomas Paine
Joseph L. Bast 

Dear bunnies, which of these names doesn't belong in a list of famous thinkers? 

Sometime in fall 2009, Heartland removed Bast as a famous thinker. Joseph L. Bast founded the Heartland Institute, with the help of Big Tobacco money. Bast's most noteworthy publication is Please Don't Poop In My Salad, which is a collection of essays about freedom. Needless to say, one of the most precious freedoms (according to Bast) is the freedom to smoke, at a low tax rate per pack.
Source: The Inquisition of Climate Science, James Lawrence Powell (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Chance for Anthony Watts to show his worth

Anthony Watts now has two separate posts ringing with condemnation of Think Progress for a post last year that noted the terrorist Anders Breivik had accused climate science of actually being an eco-Marxist plot (that post disappeared temporarily but now it's back).

Watts to his credit condemned Heartland's revealing billboard campaign but AFAIK has stopped there.  I've already shown that HI has done this before, equating Al Gore with Ted Kaczysnki.  When I found that Heartland post, I also found another that I haven't written about until now:

Environmental Extremist Gunman Attacks Discovery Channel Headquarters 

James M. Taylor, J.D. – James M. Taylor – September 1, 2010 

An environmental extremist gunman has entered the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., and has taken a number of people hostage, according to Montgomery County Police. Police are trying to negotiate with the gunman, who may have armed himself with a bomb. Roughly 1,900 employees work at the building, which broadcasts a number of science-related programs. 

 The gunman has issued a manifesto and a list of demands, much of which reads like an environmental activist wish list....Much like the media largely ignored the environmental extremism that motivated the Unabomber, the mainstream media currently is largely ignoring the Discovery Channel gunman’s environmental motivation.

And another, also by James Taylor, J.D.:

Environmental extremist took an ugly turn Aug. 1 when activist James Lee, armed with two guns and several bombs stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., took employees hostage, and attempted to force the Discovery Channel to air environmental propaganda on global warming and other issues. The assault ended in the late afternoon when police shot and killed Lee as it appeared he was preparing to detonate a bomb and kill some or all of the hostages.... 

Gore Movie as ‘Awakening’

Lee was first arrested for engaging in disruptive environmental protesting outside Discovery Channel headquarters in 2008. At the time, he explained he had had an environmental “awakening” after seeing Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore bemoans the fact that peaceful, democratic means have not motivated people to enact his desired global warming restrictions. “I used to believe in democracy,” Gore says near the end of the film. 

History of Violent Rhetoric 

In 2006, Grist magazine staff writer David Roberts wrote, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.” The penalty imposed in Nuremberg for war crimes was death.... 

In 2008 NASA global warming activist James Hansen said CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." The penalty for high crimes against humanity is death....

According to Anthony Watts, noting these parallels is evil when Think Progress does it.  I've previously shown one other blog post where Heartland is substantially worse.  By Watts standard, that post and these two new ones also deserve condemnation.

For my part, I did not bring up these two posts when I found the first one equating Gore and Kaczynski.  I think the second of these posts is particularly stupid and inaccurate, but remember it's from James Taylor, and it's unsurprising that he doesn't understand the range of penalties available at Nuremberg and the International Criminal Court.  Still, I think these don't equate environmentalism as a whole with violent nutcases.  I don't see them as strong arguments, nor do I see the Breivik argument as that strong, but they're not innately wrong.

Watts disagrees with me on Breivik.  Presumably then he disagrees with Heartland on all three of the blog posts in addition to the billboards, and I hope he says so.

UPDATE Eli:  Anthony is going after Nick Stokes.  More hockey stick jumping.

UAH satellite temps being corrected by others. Knock me over with a feather

Here it is:

One popular climate record that shows a slower atmospheric warming trend than other studies contains a data calibration problem, and when the problem is corrected the results fall in line with other records and climate models, according to a new University of Washington study. 

The finding is important because it helps confirm that models that simulate global warming agree with observations, said Stephen Po-Chedley, a UW graduate student in atmospheric sciences who wrote the paper with Qiang Fu, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. They identified a problem with the satellite temperature record put together by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Researchers there were the first to release such a record, in 1989, and it has often been cited by climate change skeptics to cast doubt on models that show the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming.... 

"There's been a debate for many, many years about the different results but we didn't know which had a problem," Fu said. "This discovery reduces uncertainty, which is very important." 

When they applied their correction to the Alabama-Huntsville climate record for a UW-derived tropospheric temperature measurement, it effectively eliminated differences with the other studies.... 

Once Po-Chedley and Fu apply the correction, the Alabama-Huntsville record shows 0.21 F warming per decade in the tropics since 1979, instead of its previous finding of 0.13 F warming. Surface measurements show the temperature of Earth in the tropics has increased by about 0.21 F per decade..... 

Usual cautions apply - maybe this correction will turn out to be incorrect.  If not, this will be the second time the UAH series will turn out to have a mistake that bias it to underestimate warming.

Probably just a coincidence.

UPDATE:  post title revised per comments.

UPDATE 2:  per John Mashey, more than twice. See p.100, and especially see "Corrections made" table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_dataset showing there are 4 ups and 3 downs, not counting the latest up. Ups tend to be bigger than downs.

UPDATE 3:  thinking maybe I'm a bit too snarky here.  When's the last time I created a satellite temperature series?  Anyway, yet another case of observations falling in line with standard theory.

UPDATE: Eli:  Strictly speaking this paper is about the TMT product, the mid-trop, not the TLT, the lower trop, however since both use the same satellite, and TLT is a mix of detectors using some majic software that Roy and John have not shared, if the Fu fits, Roy can wear it.

Onward to apartheid in Greater Israel

The surprise agreement bringing Israel's leading opposition party into the governing coalition will have uncertain impacts.  Andrew Sullivan has the rundown - I tend to think it makes a disastrous attack on Iran somewhat less likely.

I'm less optimistic about the effect on apartheid in Greater Israel, where there's some bad news:

• Israel bringing back collective punishment, destroying the family homes of terrorists.

• American Congressman Joe Walsh supports soft ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with annexation, second-class citizenship for Palestinians and incentives to leave the country for Jordan.

That second proposal is only somewhat different from the present situation, where there's a longstanding, tacit agreement that a ruling majority will not rely on Arab parties to survive no confidence votes.  (Sorry I can't find a link referencing this, please leave one if you've got one in the comments.)

To The Point discusses Israel's decision to exclude visiting foreigners whose political viewpoints it dislikes (the US has also done this in the past, but I don't know of it happening recently for people not supporting violence).  The show discusses more extensively Peter Beinart's book, which seems to make a lot of sense about how Israel is betraying the democratic dream and what American Jews should do about it.

While I think partial democracies can last for a long time, they're not stable at a fixed level of partial democracy but instead change over time.  While it usually changes towards improvement, that's not always the case.  The pre-Civil War American South became more oppressive in some ways in the 1800s, criminalizing attempts to discuss abolition in the press.  Israel can become more democratic in some ways (gay rights) at the same time that it may double down on oppressing West Bank Arabs.  An oppressive policy creates its own tension - do you ease off on the policy, or double down to reinforce it?  We're seeing that in play in Israel.

And despite that fact, the room for political discussion on this is still wider in Israel than in the US.  A major Israeli politician can accurately call the situation apartheid, while a retired American president gets pilloried for doing the same. Whether either country will do anything to fix the problem is much less clear.

Stolen thought of the day, plus riffs

Stolen thought:  if fracking is such a boon to the economy by cratering the cost of power, why can't we use a fraction of that economic benefit to sequester the resulting carbon?

Riff 1:  yeah! You tell 'em!

Riff 2:  preventing methane leaks in production and transmission might be just as important as sequestering.

Riff 3:  many people view sequestering carbon from coal to be economically achievable, maybe adding 20-40% to the price.  Let's generously assume the cost figure is true.  If it was economically achievable with coal, then that should indicate even more that it's economically achievable with natural gas because of the lower baseline.

Riff 4:  when coal was the cheapest baseline power then the argument that sequestration for coal was economically viable had the strongest claim.  Now that natural gas is cheaper it actually gets harder to argue for coal carbon sequestration.  Still justified, but harder.  Requiring gas to sequester just like coal could attract support from coal interests.

Riff 5:  maybe offsets in lieu of sequestration could be done.  Carefully.


(Update:  edited a stupid typo in first sentence, from "can" to "can't".)

Billboards are just repeats of garbage on Heartland's website

They've done this before:

July 2006 column by Heartland President and CEO Joseph Bast:

The Inconvenient Truth About Al Gore 

....I have difficulty taking Gore seriously on environmental issues ever since it was reported that Ted Kaczynski, the murderous “Unabomber,” kept a heavily marked-up copy of Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, in his tar-paper shack and liberally borrowed from it when writing his anti-humanity treatise. There’s even a Web site (http://www.crm114.com/algore/quiz.html) that offers a quiz to see if you can tell Gore’s words from Kaczynski’s. I bet you can’t.

Was that a cheap shot? Maybe....

The Unabomber also was absolutely sincere in his belief that technological progress was an evil that had to be stopped, with violence if necessary. Fortunately, Kaczynski didn’t have access to the incredible powers of the Presidency of the United States. Unfortunately, Al Gore still aspires to that post.

I'm glad people are taking it seriously, but don't expect it not to happen again so long as this organization is given the time of day.  There's a lot at stake, so this repetition of history goes beyond a farce.

Time to set up the American Business Chamber

JBowers makes a good catch in a prior comment thread.  From one chamber to another:

Climate change dispute erupts with Aspen telling U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take a hike 

Aspen's chamber of commerce isn't the first to sever ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over political differences. The chamber in Homer, Alaska, made national headlines when it canceled its membership last year....  

At a retreat on Tuesday, the Aspen Chamber Resort Association's board voted 11 to 1 to withdraw its membership from the national organization. Tension between Aspen's chamber and the national one existed for years. The 680-member local chamber penned a letter to the national group in 2010 delineating its differences. But this year — which saw the driest winter in Aspen since the 1976-1977 season — politics are in overdrive thanks to the coming November general election. Several weeks ago, Aspen's chamber began feeling pressure from Schendler and his Aspen Skiing Co. bosses, the mayor, a pair of county commissioners and residents who had had enough of the local chamber's affiliation with the right-wing U.S. Chamber and its obstruction of solutions to climate change. .... 

The local chamber's recap continued: “Aspen’s economy is inextricably tied to the future of the global climate and all area entities have deeply embraced the idea of reducing our carbon footprint. With our resignation from the U.S. Chamber, the ACRA shows its solidarity with this position.” 

Two small cities are more than enough to christen this a trend sweeping the entire country.  Okay, maybe it's just a good sign, but I'll take it.  There are plenty of other small liberal resort towns and ski towns.  As the article notes, there are also a number of large businesses that have had enough of the US Chamber and its decision to favor conservative-leaning businesses over moderate and progressive businesses.

I think our local Silicon Valley chambers, and other places with strong green energy business interests, should be following the same steps to support their local business interest, along with the national and human interest.  I've gone back and forth in the past over whether businesses should fight to change the US Chamber from the inside or the outside, but I think the outside is looking more like the best alternative.

There already exists a Green Chamber of Commerce, pushing for business-friendly environmental solutions.  I think that's a great idea, but in addition to that maybe we need an umbrella American Business Chamber to be the Gandalf to the US Chamber's Saruman - to be what the US Chamber should have been.  The Green Chamber, local Chambers, and individual businesses rejecting Saruman could join a politically neutral, national level American Business Chamber rather than one that's decided to be a tool and player on one side of the political spectrum.  They should get back to ABC.

Keith Kloor highlights his own strawman; can't see it

I haven't decided yet what I think of Keith Kloor - maybe one of those people who resists acknowledging where reality is headed, but occasionally nods his head in its direction.  His latest stuff isn't very good though, with a Discover article labeling environmentalists as anti-technology and anti-city, while contrasting them with a few "green modernist" exceptions.

The anti-city claim is just vastly outdated and requires no further discussion.  Anti-technology is a little more interesting.  Kloor later clarified what he meant:

Environmentalism is anti-technology. By this I mean anti-nuclear power and anti-genetically engineered crops.

He says this in the context of explaining that he was being attacked as creating strawman arguments and responds with the above statement, and later adds, "Where’s the strawman here?" How about right where you highlighted it in those two sentences. His statement is not a strawman if you think that nuclear power and GMOs roughly encompass the majority of all human technologies. Actually, even that's not totally correct. By Kloor's reckoning, you can't, like me, be even mildly skeptical of nuclear power, or note that not all opposition to GMOs is unscientific, without being anti-technology. I do think some environmental opposition to nukes and GMOs is overblown, but that doesn't make them anti-technology.

This "above the fray" type of journalism gets old, and the strawmen are rickety.

One last note: writing this involves figuring out who I'm writing for, and the thought crossed my mind that Kloor might read it. I considered trying to persuade him rather than criticize him, and ended up with a mushy compromise style that doesn't try and cajole him but certainly pulls a few punches back. Oh well.

UPDATE:  Tim Burden has more, and there's a good discussion thread at Stoat.

Buying and closing coal mines to benefit climate

Interesting idea (paper here, summary article here) that some fossil fuels have sufficiently low profit margin that buying the mineral rights to them might be the cheapest way to keep them from being burnt.  For example, tar sands take a lot of energy to get out of the ground, reducing profit margins.  This might become even more important in the future if we start pricing carbon, making the value of the resource less while increasing the cost of getting the resource out (if we fully taxed carbon this wouldn't be necessary, so I guess our grandchildren can skip this step).  The author points out that it's not very different from the REDD process for rewarding countries that refrain from destroying tropical forests.  Saving forests does have huge ancillary benefits, but I suppose the same is true from reducing ancillary pollutants from fossil fuels.

This sounds like another version of an offset to me, which doesn't automatically make it bad in my opinion.  It does create the same issue though of making sure you achieve real savings, instead of throwing money at mineral rights for an economically-worthless coal seam that never would've been mined.

I think I like the above part of the analysis better than the major component, arguing that reducing fossil fuel demand through demand reductions just makes fuels cheaper to buy in countries that aren't serious about climate change.  I think this has some validity, but that long term energy plans, like Mexico's recent climate laws, involve fuzzier politics of where people think the world is headed.  Decarbonizing the developed world will put real incentives to do the same in the developing world, as will carbon tariffs.