The one weird trick missing from coverage of carbon emission rules for new power plants

Don't know how often I'll get away with a semi-bogus title like the one above, but I'll use it while I can.

Anyway, draft rules from last year for new plants have been revised without too much weakening. New gas plants with newest technology won't have trouble meeting limits, while the best coal plants, barring some breakthrough, will likely have to sequester about 40% of their emissions.

So the one weird trick that people forget is this is not a free market, it's a regulated utility market, so reactions between price and market have intermediaries. While the assumption is likely correct that virtually no coal plants would've been built anyway, to the extent that assumption changes for political reasons, this proposal means that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will be required. The issue of passing on sequestration costs in a regulated utility arose previously:

[One utility decided on a] recent deferral of a large-scale CCS retrofit demonstration project on one of its coal-fired power plants because the State’s utility regulators would not approve CCS without a regulatory requirement to reduce CO2.

This rule makes CCS slightly more possible, and there are four plants currently being constructed with CCS with special financial help, but this rule could assist these or similar plants.

With that weird trick out of the way, some other thoughts

- to litigate, the fossil fuel industry has to show it has standing to sue, and that could be an issue. Standing requires injury. If no coal plants were going to be built anyway, where's the injury? Once again, a conservative legal technique designed to cripple the law might have potential blowback against the conservatives.

- when the litigation happens, I have no idea of the maximum time it will take to finish, but it's pretty safe to say at least a year to happen, likely much longer than that. I believe these cases go direct to appellate courts, but from there they can request whether the Supreme Court would consider a further appeal.

- in a bit of irony for coal, their fight against cap-and-trade is coming back to bite them as far as new plants are concerned. New coal will have to reduce carbon by about 40%. I expect that if they have to sequester 40%, then sequestering 80% wouldn't have been hard, and if cap and trade had been in place, they could've sold the extra amount to existing plants.


UPDATE:  ironic timing - Norway is closing down its massive CCS project amid criticism and cost overruns. This keeps happening to CCS systems. Solar power has a mix of good news and bad news, but CCS seems to only have bad news. This will have to change if it's going to play an important role in the future.

Storms crashing on peoples' heads can fill some information deficits on climate

A study of Rutgers University students testing their automatic attitude preferences for environmental politicians versus anti-tax politicians found a significant shift to the environmental candidate after Hurricanes Irene and Sandy (full article behind paywall). Physical evidence literally hitting you in the face may satisfy the information deficit. Hopefully someone can check on Colorado in a little while.

I'm pretty certain that in 50 years, the number of climate deniers will be similar to the number of Flat Earthers no matter how well or poorly we communicate the issue. Objective reality has a role to play. The issue is how much sooner than 50 years  from now we can get people to take required action.

Following up on Eli's post on the Kahan paper, I have a thought experiment to follow up Kahan's study:  what if immediately after the subjects had completed the study, the researchers explained to them how the math actually works and then asked them if they wanted to revise their answers? It seems highly likely there would be a tremendous shift to the correct answer (and if the low numeracy people didn't shift, that tends to support Michael Tobis' view). This result would support the information deficit model. It's questionable how closely this resembles what happens in the real world, but the same could be said about Kahan's setup.

Obviously framing and psychological identity play a role in getting us to confront climate change soon, but so does the science, and so does the exposure of bad arguments used to deny the science.

Just a public service announcement for this climate divestment discussion. I'll do my best to make it, probably just for the 18th. If you're going, drop a comment.

Inside the Third Reich

I had planned to review two memoirs, Ulysses Grant and Albert Speer, but it's just been too long to say anything coherent about Grant's book other than it's well worth reading and escaped from copyright. Both books are well-written which is the key thing, much more so than honesty or historical value. It relates to my guess as to why I prefer Roy Spencer over RPJr. despite Roy being even more wrong:  Roy's a good writer.

To finish up with Grant, he's probably not worth reading though if you don't like military history. His account of the Mexican-American War, where he served with Robert E Lee, filled a substantial gap in my own knowledge. He never discusses his mostly-failed administration, which is unfortunate. He does put the war criminal/racist-for-his-time Nathan Forrest in his place. More than worth the price.

As is Speer's memoir about his life as one of Hitler's top officials and a potential heir, although the need to be cautious about viewpoint for any autobiography goes into overtime for the repentant Nazi. I have an amateur interest in World War II and in psychopaths, so a person who knew Hitler well could have an interesting story. My amateur guess after reading this and other accounts is that Hitler wasn't a psychopath, or at least not in all respects. Just a monster. His inability to form personal bonds seems psychopathic, but his deep emotional currents don't match the profile, nor his kindness to animals.

The missing element from Speer's account is what made Hitler so electrifying and dominant. Speer himself was clearly under Hitler's thumb for many years but doesn't make you really feel why that was so, and Hitler's many flaws weren't all that hidden, even early on. I didn't realize how boring the man was. The whole concept of charisma is mysterious to me, a poorly-defined, quasi-supernatural characteristic that makes me skeptical. Maybe it's a combination of hypnotic skills at a distance and pheromones up close. Anyway, Speer doesn't help clarify it.

It's pretty clear I'm not going to write the definitive review of WWII, Hitler, or even Speer, so I'll just recommend the book, and after the jump I'll just call out a few interesting points:

(click here for the full post)

Dear Bjorn: if you spend money to reduce a problem and the problem's reduced, that doesn't magically mean the problem reduced itself

One piece of Lomborg's alleged evidence that climate change hasn't produced extreme weather:  "Damage from flooding in the United States has declined from 0.2 percent of gross domestic product in 1940 to less than 0.05 percent today."

I vaguely remembered seeing this lame argument before, and after I clicked his source link I saw a familiar piece of liver. Should've guessed.

The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of money spent on flood control activities happened after 1940, and the damage-reduction effect of those flood control expenditures is incremental (flood control projects typically last 30-50 years, and rebuilding is cheaper than the original building). Extreme storm precipitation could get worse and the damage could still decrease, if you put in some effort at flood control. There's no accounting in the data set for the cost of that effort.

That's only one of many problems with Lomborg, but it's in my bailiwick so I had to call it out. And btw, the data doesn't include Sandy damages (the NOAA flood loss data set ended in September 2012), so that also might end up being a disturbance in the Force of the trend line.

California carbon caps will overcome challenges; California climate polling has good news

California in the next half-decade will face a similar challenge the European carbon market faced, but with a better outcome and better reason for it.

Future emissions are now projected to be lower than anticipated under the cap and trade program, and with many allocations given freely, the price of allocations to be auctioned could have been at risk. However, unlike the European system, California included a price floor. That floor increases over time, as does the percentage of allocations auctioned instead of those wasted on giveaways. These steps together with a gradual tightening of the overall cap will keep the market functioning. This is happening in large part just because the Europeans went first and we learned from them. The European system could be improved, as could California's, but having problems that others learn from doesn't make their system a failure.

One reason why emission projects are low is that cap-and-trade is only one part of California's system to reducing emissions. Per the link above, regulations affecting renewable power and carbon fuel standards are eating into overall emission levels. In effect, the system has a certain redundancy with cap-and-trade backing up other components - again, that's not a showing of weakness. I don't know if it's the policy-optimal design, but it beats nothing, regardless of Naomi Klein may have to say.

Maybe in a few years we'll have the political willpower to enact improvements. A recent poll showed 79% of Californians think global warming is happening. Of them, 71% are very sure or extremely sure it's happening (p. 20). I don't like how they did the follow-up question of what's causing the warming (p. 11), however. They asked all respondents to assume warming was happening and then asked whether humans or nature are the cause. They should've asked only the ones who accept it as happening, so we can see what percent believe there's a problem and humans are the cause, as they'd be likely supporters of actions to address climate. It's a shame that only 55% think there's a scientific consensus (p. 22) - seems like there's an information deficit among those who should be receptive to the concept that a strong consensus exists out there in support of their own beliefs.

Other datapoints:  some 68% support more renewable power even if it costs the average family $100/year, and the public is evenly split on fracking (p. 37). I was really hoping for age breakdowns so I could chortle, but that wasn't provided.

I generally take specific poll numbers with a grain of salt, but trends over time seem more credible. Hopefully they'll repeat the poll over the next few years.

What Joe Romm said about Naomi Klein's 'you're with me or you're against the planet' argument

That is all.

So what happens after the second and third major uses of chemical weapons by Assad?

UPDATE:  I agree with Josh Marshall that turning over the chemical weapons for destruction is fine as an alternative, and IMO much better than a strike. If Assad only plays along for a while and then refuses, we could reassess whether to strike then or wait for him to use them again.


I'm glad that Obama is going to Congress, and he obviously shouldn't move ahead if Congress doesn't pass the resolution. The US moves too slowly on domestic matters. We have at times like World War II, Libya, and Syria itself, also moved too slowly on military involvement overseas. The more typical pattern though is for military involvement happening too quickly and on false pretenses. Getting Congress involved is a good idea in the long run, even if it results this time around in the mistake of tying Obama's hands. Waiting so that we can go from 97% sure of what happened to 99%+ sure is also a good idea.

Lots of stupid arguments being made on both sides. The antis say that anything short of overthrowing Assad is a failure as a deterrent and that a military strike will harm domestic programs at home. The pros say that failure to strike puts the US in immediate danger, and continue with the old chestnut of conflating chemical weapons with nuclear weapons as "weapons of mass destruction." The antis make sadly laughable claims that diplomacy is going to do anything about chemical weapons or about the problems in the Syrian opposition (Rep. Chris Smith says a military strike won't deter Assad but Smith's proposal to eventually set up a war crimes tribunal may help). I heard another Republican Congressman criticize Obama for not attacking when the previous, ambiguous chemical weapons uses occurred, and then say he'd vote against authorization.

The key issue is that the chemical weapons use and what to do about Syria overall are separate issues, despite the desire of extremists like McCain to tie them together. Obama seems to understand that. A reaction by the US and France to the chemical weapons use, either a military or non-military reaction, would succeed if it leaves Syrian decisionmakers thinking that doing it again would not be in their best interest (or if it really was just a mistake, then realize they had to get their system under control). I just can't think of a non-military reaction that has that effect.

I think it's not ridiculous to argue that the outside world should do nothing (sorry, do diplomacy only) after further chemical weapons attacks - we can't solve all the world's problems - but I think on balance it's a bad argument. I'm guessing that if the authorization goes down, Obama will just wait for further attacks, and then most likely strike without asking Congress (even though he should ask Congress).

Yes, the US is being hugely hypocritical in opposing Assad while doing nothing elsewhere, like Bahrain. That's not a reason to do nothing but instead a reason to fix our act in Bahrain.

For those who think the current bad news in Libya proves our involvement there was a mistake, my bet offer is still open, and updated.

More on plug-in v gas engine infrastructure

My post in August suggested that as plug-in hybrid and EV sales rise to several percentage points and more of market share, we'll start to see incremental degradation of the societal infrastructure supporting gas engines, mainly a loss of gas stations and car maintenance shops. I argued that range anxiety and "range irritation" will be an issue for gas engine vehicles in some urban areas within a decade or so.

Some pushback happened in comments over whether gas engine range anxiety will really be an issue and when it might occur. James Wimberley correctly points out that the current average age of vehicles is 11 years for a lifespan of 20 years, not 10 years as I said. Wiki says that's an increase from 9.4 year average in 2007 which suggests it may lower some as the economy improves. More importantly, wiki says "many Americans own three or more vehicles. The low marginal cost of registering and insuring additional older vehicles means many vehicles that are rarely used are still given full weight in the statistics." What we care about is more likely to be the median age of the vehicle that gets median usage. Still, I agree that it will take more than five years for that median vehicle to reflect current year market share.

On range anxiety, I did some unscientific (yes I know) checking around on Google Maps of two areas I know pretty well - South San Francisco Bay area and upstate New York. You have to get out to the more distant suburbs before gas station density really starts dropping and range anxiety seems more likely. In the exurbs, you usually travel on arterials where the gas stations are located, and people choosing to live in exurbs tend to accept lots of driving as part of the tradeoffs they're making.

Still, not every trip in exurbia is a long one that will pass by a convenient gas station. And while other people may be perfect, I certainly have let the gas tank get low enough to be more than a little anxious, even in the more urban-ish area where I live. Any decrease in gas station density could intensify that.

I had previously suggested a five mile trip just to get gas as problematic, but there's nothing magical about that number. While gas engine range irritation is probably more important, I still think range anxiety complaints will happen somewhere within a decade.

Range irritation, which I'd define as annoyance at the time spent filling up and maintaining gas engine vehicles, is the main issue. Driving even a quarter mile in heavy traffic can take time and that will get worse as station density decreases/population density increases. Drivers can plan their gas trips to avoid busy traffic, but that puts them in the same planning constraint situation that EV drivers face. When plug-ins can charge both at home and wherever they normally drive to, they're the more convenient vehicle.

In related news, plug-ins captured 6% of the August market share in Norway, presumably even more than that in Oslo. Significant financial incentives in Norway balance out the negative externalities from gas engines. Maybe Oslo will be the first place where the infrastructure favors plug-ins over gas.

In less cheerful news, Australian voters look likely to have scrapped their carbon tax on the most polluting businesses. Instead they'll have taxpayer tributes to the same businesses in return for reducing the harm they're causing to Australia and the world. While this was likely a secondary issue in the election, I think it does indicate the reason why it's helpful to make political compromises in order to get broader support for climate solutions.

Albert Speer's memoirs on Nazis rejecting gas warfare

Recently finished Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich. I'll have my own comments on the chemical weapons issue, but in case they're useless, I'll separate out a piece of history from late 1944 (at pp. 413-414 of the paperback):

Hitler, to be sure, had always rejected gas warfare; but now he hinted at a situation conference in headquarters that the use of gas might stop the advance of the Soviet troops. He went on with vague speculations that the West would accept gas warfare against the East because at this stage of the war the British and American governments had an interest in stopping the Russian advance. When no one at the situation conference spoke up in agreement, Hitler did not return to the subject. 

Undoubtedly the generals feared the unpredictable consequences.

Hitler, btw, had been temporarily blinded in World War I from a British gas attack.

Cultural cognition model versus "powerful groups are lying" model

Fair amount of Twitter discussion of a Dan Kahan paper setting up a lab battle between information deficit as explaining people's policy misunderstandings (Science Comprehension Thesis or "SCT") versus a psychological reaction to facts that conflict or confirm with personal and group ideology (Identity-protective Cognition Thesis or "ICT"). Kahan et al. found that people with better numerical ability applied that ability when the conclusions favored their ideology and sometimes didn't when the conclusions were problematic for them. This has the effect of increasing political polarization for people with higher numerical ability, which he says shows ICT as better explaining the effect than SCT. Chris Mooney has a decent writeup here.

With that throat-clearing done, the main issue is what Steve Bloom and Michael Mann said, in effect that the Powerful Groups Are Lying (PGAL) model better explains why the public has problems accepting climate science. Some organizations and people are lying and acting in bad faith, feeding into and creating the cultural identity that Kahan researches. My own suspicion that climate deniers are cozying up to evolution deniers is a conscious effort to snuff the Creation Care evangelical movement and preserve a conservative religious group identity, so this identity that Kahan talks about isn't a fixed thing - it's manipulated.

Secondary to all that, Mooney overplays it when he asks whether the Kahan paper will "slay the 'deficit model' once and for all." The study showed that highly numerate people were better than innumerate ones at understanding a problem, even when that understanding conflicted with their group identity. In the paper, Kahan says (p. 25):

ICT predicts that more numerate individuals will use that ability opportunistically in a manner geared to promoting their interest in forming and persisting in identity-protective beliefs.
The results in the experiment suggest that high-Numeracy partisans did exactly that in the gun-ban conditions. 

That seems to be either wrong or sloppy writing because the highly numerate people did better despite the group identity cost, presumably by using their better skills. The general argument in the paper is fine that polarization increases - both groups do better at high numeracy but one will do far better than the other when it reinforces their identity. If both improve then the deficit model isn't slain.

Mapping this directly to climate change, it suggests that both reasonably-educated conservatives and liberals will benefit from more science education on climate, although it will penetrate better with liberals. The real need, though, is for the PGAL effort to stop manipulating group identity and force-feeding disinformation.

Kahan's right though when he says "people, once predisposed, misinform themselves, summoning all their reason." That may be a common flaw, but it's still a moral flaw. The disinformers who feed this weakness are the crack dealers of politics.

I should also say not all the deniers know they're lying, and from my conversations with some of them I'm sure they believe what they're saying. Others though are a different story.

We did our divestment

The Water District board voted 7-0 last night to enact our climate divestment policy - no new investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies, get rid of what we currently have by 2016, and send letters to the state agency managing our pension funds, a state water agency association, and our local government counterparts encouraging them to do the same. Also yesterday, we cut our own compensation by just under 10%, reverting it back to what the board received in 2008.

There was some reasonable discussion of whether we should distinguish the best fossil fuel companies from the rest. We decided to go ahead with the simple divestment from all of them, and consider at a future time whether we should amend the policy in favor of the better companies.

Like I said earlier, this should make us the first water district and third government agency of any kind to complete this step. 350.org has a press release here. The San Jose Mercury News published an article, and to make it interesting I'll just copy below mostly just the critical parts:

In the 1980s, hundreds of American cities, states and universities sold their investments in South African companies as part of a protest against that country's former apartheid government.

Now, environmental groups are trying to duplicate that effort, but with global warming polluters in the role of villain. And, just as with South African divestment a generation ago, the Bay Area is at the head of the parade again, prompting cheers from environmentalists and jeers from skeptics who say the whole effort amounts to little more than empty symbolism.... 

"It is unfortunate some people seem to feel supplying consumers with reliable and affordable energy is somehow comparable to apartheid," said Tupper Hull, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, in Sacramento.

"Petroleum energy provides billions of people worldwide with mobility, comfort, security and economic prosperity, he said."

Hull said that many oil companies "understand the desire to develop new alternative energy sources and reduce our collective carbon footprint" and that many fossil fuel companies are working on renewable energy projects.

Jeremy Carl, an energy expert and research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who has been critical of the tactics of the environmental movement, said that climate change is occurring and is a problem. But rather than divestment, activists should work with companies and governments to promote issues like tax credits to encourage renewable energy research, or a carbon tax that would be offset by tax refunds to the public.

"We've seen people saying the fossil fuel companies are awful, and then driving home in their car and turning on their natural gas-powered electricity," he said. "I find it totally a distasteful and hypocritical way of looking at a serious situation. It trivializes an important issue."

I don't find that very persuasive, somehow. I have no interest in the flack from WSPA but I wonder if it's worth talking to Jeremy Carl, who's only a 15 minute drive away from me in my fossil-fueled car.

Per my previous post, I think the primary effect of these actions are cultural/political and not directly economic. OTOH, there's an economic cost to cultural disfavor - I bet tobacco companies have to pay a premium to hire and retain employees who might otherwise prefer to not kill people for a living. Could work the same way here as another form of cultural tax on carbon.

Video below of every fascinating moment of the discussion, assuming the video works (discussion begins about a minute into the video). It's Item 9.1 if you want to read it as well.

The EV v. gas infrastructure argument cuts both ways

The big challenge for electric vehicles is that we have the societal infrastructure to support gas engines but not electric. Despite that fact, in California the hybrid and EV plug-ins are now 1.8% of the market. Globally and nationally, estimates range from one to three percent of all vehicles in 2019-2020 will be the two types of plug-ins (see page 4).

The infrastructure challenge is real even if "range axiety" is overhyped. To the extent that challenge to plug-ins is met and overcome, though, then the shoe is on the other foot. Every sale of a plug-in vehicle decreases support for the infrastructure supporting gas vehicles. When plugins are taking only one percent of the market, the decrease is insignificant. When they take three percent, it's starting to be significant, and we can expect the effect to increase and to be concentrated in some areas. If nearly two percent of California car sales are electric now, then what will be the percent in a decade, and what will be the situation in the San Francisco and LA metropolitan areas?

There are going to be fewer gas stations and fewer gas engine car servicing businesses. They'll try to adapt but plugins and especially EVs won't need charging stations in the same places and they won't need as much maintenance.

I think we may be about a decade away from hearing the first complaints of range anxiety and range irritation coming from gas vehicle owners in some markets, where they'll have to drive five miles or more out of their way each time they want to gas up, while their plugins can charge whenever they're at home, work, or shopping. The process may accelerate as investors hesitate to put money in the gas vehicle infrastructure, knowing they'll need a number of years to make a profit while their market is shrinking.

I know I'm pretty good at counting my chickens before they hatch, and I recognize that cars have a 10-year lifespan so it takes a while for the existing car population to reflect changes in sales (UPDATE:  per the comments, more like 20 years, although older cars are driven much less). Still, I can see this happening in a decade in some markets, especially where I live.

Tamino uses math to describe how denialists handle data, but I prefer visuals

From Senorgif. Title:  Uh, Not a Good Fit.

Republicans writing the Fall 2014 campaign commercials for Democrats

Prelude here:  a Republican operative with a pre-existing condition and no insurance rethinks the Obamacare thing.

POTENTIAL SCRIPT EXAMPLE:

"We're the Jones Family, living right here with you in Houston, and we've been conservative Republicans for as long as we can remember. When Republican leaders told us not to sign up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, we believed them. After signup eligibility closed, Suzie here got hit by a car [PHOTO MONTAGE OF MEDICAL TREATMENT]. We're incredibly relieved that Suzie is recovering, but the bills have ruined us because our Republican leaders told us not to get insurance."

"We can't wait until the eligibility for Obamacare insurance signup starts again, and we'll be signing up."

"We're still conservatives, but something has gone deeply wrong with the Republican Party leadership. We're protecting our family this fall by voting for [DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE] who will help us get and keep affordable health care. You should do the same."

-----------------------

I don't think the effort to get people to not sign up will be very successful, but it should be successful enough to have plenty of Real People examples, like the hypothetical one above, in contested campaigns throughout the country.

While not all Republicans/conservatives have called for a boycott, a lot have and the rest have done everything they could to sabotage health care. I think this commercial would be a fair shot against your typical Tea Party Congressman unless he or she made an exception and told people to sign up on the exchanges.

Good chance we'll be the first water district in the country to divest from fossil fuels, starting August 27th

I'm guessing we're first on the planet too, but who knows. I previously wrote a memo suggesting we drop investments in fossil fuel companies (the big push by 350.org), and we directed staff to return to us with a proposal. It's now available (to RTFD, click here for the policy and scroll to Attachment 5 to get to the memo and discussion). It's pretty simple - no investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies, relying primarily but not exclusively on third-party documentation of what constitutes the top 200 companies. Our district doesn't control pension funds, so I'll ask that we also include a letter to the state CalPERS board urging them to take the same step that we're doing.

Along with being the first water district in the solar system to have a climate divestment policy after the August 27 meeting (assuming I'm not counting my chickens too early), I think we might also be the third government agency to do it. Reading through the 350.org list of twenty cities, Seattle and Santa Monica are the only cities with a controlling policy in place. A handful of others have passed advisory measures but don't mandate the change, some aren't currently invested in fossil fuel companies but don't have a policy, and the rest are still investigating the idea.

I think there are a fair number of water districts like ours with significant climate awareness and political responsiveness, so I hope this will spread. As for its actual impact on those companies, even if it spreads widely, that's less clear. The pool of money available to be invested in those companies would have to shrink a lot before the companies are forced to pay a premium in dividends or interest rates in order to get investments. I suppose it could happen, but I think the primary effect is cultural, creating an awareness that they are basically little different from tobacco companies and the apartheid-era South African investments.

There is a difference from South Africa in that it wouldn't be good if we halted all fossil fuel use immediately, but somehow I'm not too worried about that outcome.

Hyperloop and autonomous driving versus betting the farm on high speed rail

We'll eventually find out whether Musk's Hyperloop concept will come to something. It's hard to imagine some of the claims, particularly about costs, will be anything other than underestimates. Just building tunnels to get through mountains north of Los Angeles and maybe other areas will rocket up the costs. I've also been following and peripherally-involved with California High Speed Rail for years, and I know that simply putting your structure up on pylons, which has also been proposed for HSR in places, isn't a guaranteed way to avoid land use conflicts.

Still, for the present, I view Hyperloop as similar to autonomous driving in its effect on our proposed HSR - both concepts have an known unknown chance of making HSR become a huge mistake. Autonomous driving might not be able to go 200 mph, but the cars could pod up together on a dedicated or separated highway lane and drive well over 100 mph. That improved drive time across California combined with the ability to use the time productively because you don't have to drive the vehicle could pull a lot of the market share away from HSR. Or not. Maybe they won't be all that fast or take longer to realize than I imagine.

But if you assigned some number to the risks, like a 15% chance that the Hyperloop will kill HSR before it pays off, 25% chance that driverless cars will do the same, and 30% chance that costs will be so much higher or income revenues lower than anticipated so that it doesn't make sense, that all results in a 55% chance that HSR will be a failure just based on those factors alone. Of course I pulled those risk numbers out of the air but they don't seem unreasonable.

I've been cautiously supportive of California HSR although I don't think it's popular in my area. We need to get people out of planes, soon. Almost everything I hear about it just makes me more hesitant though.

Betting a huge amount of money on a single piece of technology, no matter what it is, strikes me as un-hedged.

Unrestrained criticism of Hyperloop is here, YMMV.

The sofritas solution

I have a blogging theory in need of a good name, that all blogs eventually deteriorate into discussions of the authors' pets or meals. Eli and John have done a terrible job of validating my theory, which leaves the degeneration to me. I don't have pets, assuming you discount the salamanders that moved into our worm composting bin six years ago and are still there. I think I've verified them to be arboreal salamanders, a pretty cool type that doesn't bother with lungs or a tadpole stage and can climb buildings. Still, not a pet.

So that leaves the sofritas vegetarian meals I've been ordering at our local Chipotle Mexican restaurant. I've not talked too much about personal steps to limit climate change impacts, partly because it's not my main interest and partly because I'm hardly a world-leading example. Still, I'm not impressed with the contempt dripping from statements like "changing a light bulb won't fix global warming." It sure is part of the fix, and personal action should be one of the steps that climate activists take.

I'm not a vegetarian, love the taste of meat, and feel better on low-carb diets that are easier when they're non-vegetarian. Despite that, vegetarianism is generally (maybe not always) a better thing for the climate and should be encouraged, especially as the whole world gets richer. When it's easy to make a switch, just do it.

So if you have a Chipotle restaurant in your area and they've added sofritas to the menu, you should try it. Sofritas is an annoying made-up word for shredded tofu mixed with other ingredients, and it has a chewy texture that makes it competitive with meat (speaking as a meat-eater). If more non-meat options were this easy, I'd do a lot better on the personal level.

The American South should learn to embrace its heroic underdog history

Nice quote of one Perry DeAngelis highlighted in a recent Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast:

If you strip the horrors of history from history, the flip side of that is you strip the nobility of rising above such horrors

There's been some discussion lately about the libertarian split over embracing the Lost Cause of the Southern Confederacy and the general Southern attitude to their history. While I'm sure this has been said elsewhere, I think the whitewashing of the horrors of the antebellum South* denies the heroism of the people that resisted those horrors. Rather than downplaying those horrors, the libertarians and more importantly the popular histories of the South could discuss the true underdog Southerners - Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, the white Virginians who tried to abolish slavery in their state in 1851, many others who fought a Lost Cause as underdogs against horrible tyrants. Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and the others may have become underdogs during the Civil War, but the history of the South before the war didn't put them in that category. If modern Southern schools want to teach a heroic heritage, there's a nobility there that they should emphasize instead.


*And the North also had its own horrors, and its own heroes who fought them.

Late to the lawsuit party (even Eli got there first). Anyway, mind the footnote

Started writing out a little happy dance over Michael Mann's defamation suit winning a preliminary battle and then saw Eli's already covered it several hours ago, so go read. I'll just add four points:

1. It's especially good because one motion by the naughty parties was an anti-SLAPP motion, intended to shut down, quickly, those frivolous SLAPP cases that are brought to oppress free speech. Among other things, a successful anti-SLAPP motion usually changes the normal American rule and allows the defendant to recover attorney fees from the suing plaintiff.* Barring a successful appeal, Mann is now free of that monetary threat.

2. It's good news for Mann, but mind the footnote following the statement (p. 15) "The Court must, at this stage, find the evidence indicates that the CEI Defendants' statements are not pure opinion but statements based on provably false facts." The footnote reads in full, "The Court does view this as a very close case." IOW, it could go the other way at trial.

3. A difficult issue even if Mann wins may be proving damages to Mann's reputation, in that it's difficult for statements by disreputable liars to have much effect on the reputation of honest people. OTOH, Mann's claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress also gets to proceed, and that can get him damage awards, especially if the judge is angry with the defendant over the defamation and looking for a way to make the defendant provide compensation.

4. I think this case and the Supreme's actions on California Prop. 8 are good examples of why the law is like The Force, to be used for good or for evil. Anti-SLAPP motions were meant to be used for good, to help the little people who are sued by giant corporations for defamation when they tell city councils to vote down bad developments. Obviously, they can be twisted. Conversely, the modern version of legal standing that shut down Prop. 8 and brought gay marriage back to California was expanded by rightwingers to violate environmental laws by making it difficult for citizens to enforce the laws on their own. Standing then came around to catch the rightwingers on their own petards. This time.


*I don't actually know the law in Washington DC where this case was brought, but I'd be pretty surprised if it's different from anti-SLAPP done elsewhere, and it uses California law as a model which does allow fee recovery.

Climate divestment for the water district

Below's my memo that I sent to the Water District Board yesterday - we'll decide Monday or Wednesday whether to move it forward. Many many thanks to Jay Carmona at 350.org for their work and her research help.

(BTW, I'll be offline until Monday, can respond to questions then. "Unburnable carbon" deserves its own blog post....)
----------------------------------------------------
SUBJECT: Recommendation on developing a Climate Divestment Policy for the Water District

DATE: July 18, 2013

Our residents and the Water District itself are paying millions of dollars and incurring significant risks from climate change. We are losing water supplies in the Sierras, forced to use more water in reaction to rising temperatures, face increased risks from stream and tidal flooding, and manage environmental degradation from climate change. Why then should we finance the industry promoting the same problem that we work so hard to fix?

I urge the Board to direct staff to return at an appropriate time with a proposed Climate Divestment Policy using the model under consideration in a number of cities (see attachments) developed by the non-profit 350.org. The effect would be to exclude from investment the top 200 fossil fuel companies. Our reserve investments in corporate financial instruments are relatively small and limited to bonds, so I assume it will not be difficult to put a policy into place with few if any financial implications. Pension funds and OPEB funds are controlled by CalPERS, so I recommend in addition that we direct staff to return to the Board with a draft letter that the Board can send to CalPERS asking it to begin climate divestment.

In addition to climate divestment being in the best interest of our residents, not to mention the general public interest, it may also be in our direct financial interest. Recent studies have shown fossil fuel companies underperforming the broader market. More generally, the stock and collateral value of the industry is based in large part on the value of their fossil fuel reserves, but those reserves contain far more carbon that can be burnt safely. This “unburnable carbon” constitutes overvalued equity and underestimated risk.

We have made a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2020. I believe we can make use of the 350.org list and exempt any company that makes a similar commitment. While eliminating fossil fuels is impossible right now, I believe this proposal is a practical and feasible way to help get us to a global carbon neutrality as soon as is practicable, something we should do for our own sake and that of everyone else.

Attachments:

Memo from Councilmember Worthington, City of Berkeley, including draft letter to CalPERS

Staff Report, City of Santa Monica

350.org article on financial performance of fossil fuel industries, available at http://gofossilfree.org/analysts-fossil-fuel-free-portfolios-outperform-investments-that-include-carbon-polluters/

Simon's climatic battle over higher powers

Because I just now stumbled across this, I thought I'd write about a good article from 2011 by Simon Donner on how thousands of years of cultural beliefs that weather and climate are controlled by supernatural forces, not people, constitute a major barrier to action on climate. Key sentence:

It is unreasonable to expect a lay audience, not armed with the same analytical tools as scientists, to develop lasting acceptance during a 1-h public seminar of a scientific conclusion that runs counter to thousands of years of human belief.

Simon concedes the obvious that people have thought they could ask supernatural forces for help, but argues that still reserves the power to make changes to those forces themselves.

One thing I'd add to his points is the last two centuries of adding science to our understanding of weather have argued that we can't control the weather, even indirectly via prayer to the supernatural. So thousands of years of religious cultural beliefs saying the supernatural controls the weather is reinforced by two centuries of scientific cultural beliefs saying we humans have not even indirect influence via supplication. People have to overcome both biases to accept climate change. And there are plenty of people who can hold both biases - the randomness of weather lets them accept basic meteorological predictions and still find their prayers "rewarded" on an occasional basis.

So it's good, but I'm not quite ready yet to say I'm convinced. People don't seem to be that resistant to dropping supernatural explanations of weather (e.g. lightning) for scientific ones. Why does that willingness to end supernatural control stop when it involves human control? OTOH, the religious resistance is undeniable. The Creation Care movement seems to have been stymied so far, when it could have been a groundbreaker. My conspiracy theory I've floated before is that climate denialists sought out the marriage with evolution denialists more than the other way around, despite the fact that creationism has even more scientific disrepute, because that was the way to bleed the Creation Care momentum. I think influential people should consider what they can do to get Creation Care moving again, especially among Hispanics.

I'm sure Simon's right that we have to handle religious sensibilities with respect, although I'm not sure it's any more of a problem for climate than in any other area involving religious issues.

More generally, we had a huge blowup over "framing" several years ago. Ironically, the pro-framing bloggers did a bad job of communicating, and their antipathy to New Atheism was a mistake, but the framing concept of using language that appeals to the relevant audience is a no-brainer. They've won on that issue.

Climate snapshots

1.
European Parliament approves a partial fix of its cap-and-trade program, whose allowance price collapsed because industry found it too easy to meet the overall cap goal. The fix, needing approval by member states, "backloads" some of the unneeded allowances to a future time (and hopefully they'll just be eliminated at some point). I criticized the EP for its failure to do this earlier, so they deserve acknowledgment when they fix it.

I'll just note that it's not the worst thing in the world for the Europeans to find they set too-easy goals on carbon. It reminds me a little of a post by Roger Pielke Jr where he claimed the German feed-in tariff on solar was a failure because so many people had installed solar panels that the funding for the program was being overwhelmed. Consider the contrary possibilities:  allocation prices through the roof because reductions were too hard, or no financing problems for solar because it was still too expensive to install.

2.
I provoke a partial disagreement among Same Facts bloggers when two of them say that cap-and-trade has assessment problems that carbon tax doesn't, because a cap requires consideration of the social cost of carbon and mitigation, while a tax only considers the social cost of carbon. My response at the same post:

I’m not sure I’m buying this argument, although I can’t claim to be an expert. It does seem pretty clear that we need to be in the vicinity of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060 or so. Whether you get there in 2050, 2060, or 2070 might be a function of economic analyses, but that’s a marginal difference. So it might be easier to start with a cap allocation over time than it is to know you have to head in that direction and figure out a tax that takes you there.

The other and better argument IMHO is that allocating rights is how you grease the wheel. It’s not pure, but it gets things done.

A third blogger agreed it's not a technical issue, but argues a tax is still simpler.

More generally, I think scientists and some public policy academics may not accept political problems as being legitimately hard in the same way that scientific and engineering problems are legitimately hard. More about this at a later point, but for now I'll just say that if the politics are so easy to solve, then go make it happen.

3.
Provocative paper arguing for what I'd call a boomerang carbon policy:  we overshoot the 2C target in this century and then use carbon-negative biomass-plus-carbon-sequestration to get back to the target by  2150. (BTW, I realize the economic argument they make somewhat contradicts my point #2 above about cost/benefit analysis.)

I think something like this is the reasonable-best case outcome: we overshoot, and then the wealth and technology of future generations allows carbon-negative solutions that pull us back from disaster. Not exactly a low-risk approach.

4.
Noted with one comment:

The impact of adding such uncertainties would weigh for or against the conclusion that uncertainty should imply moderation.... And this is where I depart most sharply from Williams' conclusions. Uncertainty implies moderation only if the sources of uncertainty, on balance, add more to the risks of action than they do to the risks of inaction.

My comment is this wasn't written about climate change, but could have been pretty easily.


UPDATE:  I can't resist adding this from William:

This is just silly, you need to slap yourself about the face with a wet fish and reconsider.

I might have to try that the next time I get stuck on a problem.

Horse-beating, MSM edition

You all heard it earlier here, but I got in a few licks at the 150-word limit in the San Jose Mercury News:

Obama's climate policy is good for region

Charles Krauthammer's diatribe (Opinion, July 5) against President Obama for confronting climate change is a disingenuous insult to our region, where we face tremendous problems from warming.

Krauthammer misleads on the Pew survey, where 28 percent of respondents made climate change a top priority -- not bad for a problem whose worst effects are yet to come. His cherry-picked information leads to wrong or misleading conclusions.

China and India have both committed to never have the same per-capita emission levels as the United States -- Obama should be applauded for trying to accelerate their commitments on climate.

As a director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, I'm keenly aware of the millions that we are spending and will spend to adjust to new flooding, new water demand, and reduced water supplies in the Sierra snowpack. What Obama is doing is good for us locally, but I believe that what Krauthammer wrote is anything but good.

Brian A. Schmidt
Director, District 7 Santa Clara Valley Water District

UPDATE:  found this interesting - after the 2004 election, Bush pushed Social Security "reform" like nobody's business, despite the public disinterest and his failure to make it a priority. Krauthammer had no problem with that presidential decision, talking about it incessantly as example of leadership.

Other shoe dropping after the Egyptian coup

Bringing a group with a marginal commitment to democracy into democratic politics has its risks but also a benefit - the group starts accepting democratic norms at some level, and eventually learns the art of compromise.

So now we see what happens when the same groups feel taken for fools:

But at the same time, Sheik Abu Sidra said, Mr. Morsi’s overthrow had made it far more difficult for him to persuade Benghazi’s Islamist militias to put down their weapons and trust in democracy.

“Do you think I can sell that to the people anymore?” he asked. “I have been saying all along, ‘If you want to build Shariah law, come to elections.’ Now they will just say, ‘Look at Egypt,’ and you don’t need to say anything else.”

From Benghazi to Abu Dhabi, Islamists are drawing lessons from Mr. Morsi’s ouster that could shape political Islam for a generation. For some, it demonstrated the futility of democracy in a world dominated by Western powers and their client states. But others, acknowledging that the takeover accompanied a broad popular backlash, also faulted the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood for reaching too fast for so many levers of power.... 

“The message will resonate throughout the Muslim world loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims,” Essam el-Haddad, Mr. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, warned on his official Web site shortly before the military detained him and cut off all his communication. The overthrow of an elected Islamist government in Egypt, the symbolic heart of the Arab world, Mr. Haddad wrote, would fuel more violent terrorism than the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

And he took aim at Western critics of the Islamists. “The silence of all of those voices with an impending military coup is hypocritical,” Mr. Haddad wrote, “and that hypocrisy will not be lost on a large swath of Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims...." 

In the United Arab Emirates...Islamists said the crackdowns were driving a deeper wedge into their movement. 

“The practices that we see today will split the Islamists in half,” said Saeed Nasar Alteneji, a former head of the Emirates group, the Islah association. “There are those who always call for centrism and moderation and peaceful political participation,” he said. “The other group condemns democracy and sees today that the West and others will never accept the ballot box if it brings Islamists to power.”

“And they have lots of evidence of this,” he said, now citing Egypt as well as Algeria.

(Emphasis added.)

Of course there's always another hand, and just as Allende rashly governed as if he had won a broad victory instead of 36% of the vote in a not-very-democratic democracy, Morsi went and alienated potential partners in a divided country. In all the discussion I've seen, people acknowledge that democracy isn't just about elections but haven't expressly referred to the right to revolution, something that's been part of the traditional democratic theory for centuries. You could argue that's what happened, although a military coup in support of popular protests doesn't quite fit the archetype.

Regardless though of whether the protesters had the right to do what they and the military did, is whether Egypt and the Arab world is better off for it. I don't think Morsi was completely beyond compromising. A Muslim Brotherhood government maintained a peace treaty with Israel - I'd like to see the analyst, especially in the pro-Likud faction in the US, who predicted that. If the popular protests were truly popular, then barring real movement from Morsi, we would've seen the results in the next elections, but his opponents weren't willing to wait.

Morsi wasn't smart enough to offer snap elections. Had he been smart enough, maybe he also wouldn't have made the other mistakes that brought him to this point. One advantage a long-standing democracy has over a new one is that people like him have usually gone through a lower office election or two and make their career-ending mistakes earlier on. The trick is to get to a stable democracy though, and overthrowing a government every time its leader is stupid will not get you there. Hopefully they'll do better the next time.

As for what the US should do, I'm not sure. If Egypt gets elections soon, then we might as well just find a way to contort around the prohibition of military aid after a coup. Otherwise, start cutting the military off.

Picking up after Krauthammer's Fourth of July litter

Not sure if he merits it, but a point-bypoint reaction to his Fourth of July leftovers:

WASHINGTON -- The economy stagnates. Syria burns. Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him, even as a "29-year-old hacker" revealed his nation's spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change.

Krauthammer is unaware that the Administration is in the process of dealing with those other issues. Perhaps he should read a newspaper to find out what's happening with them. Also, a "WASHINGTON" dateline? Is he pretending to be a journalist writing news?

Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans' concerns (last of 21 -- Pew poll). Which means that Obama's declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost -- and it will be heavy -- is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide:

So Pew didn't give a long list and ask the public to rank in priority - instead people were asked which is their top priority, and 28% said climate change, which was smaller than the other priorities. Nothing in the polling suggests the public generally considers it unimportant. Is Krauthammer a liar or a poor reader? You decide.

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years -- a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

Sadly, no. Temperatures have gone up, not necessarily as fast as anticipated, but they've gone up.

Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn't mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president's presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings. 

On the contrary. It's flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It's flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave -- a freak event in one place at one time -- as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It's flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomenon such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

I'd agree that specific events aren't nearly as dispositive as long-term records, but the long-term record leaves no doubt. And record extremes as part of long term records are revealing in that we have far more record warm events than record cold events. The climate dice are rolling more 11s and 12s and an occasional 13. Obama's right to talk about climate weirding.

For the sake of argument, let's concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God's name is his massive new regulatory and spending program -- which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras -- going to do about it?

First, we don't know what the program will cost and can adjust if we collectively decide it costs too much. Krauthammer would rather not even figure out costs versus benefits. Regardless, given how many thousands of people are killed on annual basis from coal pollution, I'm not sure the cost will be net negative, even if you ignore climate change.

The U.S. has already radically cut CO2 emissions -- more than any country since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

There's a scene in the original book version of True Grit where Rooster Cogburn says that if he ever meets a Texan who doesn't claim to have drunk water from a horse track in the drying mud, he'll shake the man's hand and give him a cigar. I think I'll do the same thing for a climate denialist who doesn't cherrypick the time periods he looks at. Yes, we've recently improved upon our terrible emission record, but it still remains one of the worst in the world on a per-capita basis.

And yet, global emissions have gone up. That's because -- surprise! -- we don't control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

He says more than he intended. We're four percent of humankind producing about 16% of global emissions. The criticism that we can make of China and India is that they cannot allow themselves to develop in the same manner we developed, and that's a criticism we should only make with some humility. They need to do more, and they're doing more, but we have do more still.

At the heart of Obama's program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants

No, new coal plants can open if they can really be the clean coal they talk about, sequestering their carbon they produce to the extent it's more than comes from natural gas. If coal can't compete on that basis, then that's the free market for you. As for a systematic shut down, I don't know what he means because he doesn't either - we don't have a proposal yet. I think a realistic positive hope is that the initiative will accelerate somewhat an already-existing trend of coal plants shutting down, and that's a good thing.

"Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they're having a war on coal," explained one of Obama's climate advisers. "On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what's needed."

First, assuming the quote is accurate, Schrag was speaking for himself and not Obama. More generally, part of the confusion here might spring from the more recent concept of war. Prior to neoconservatives like Krauthammer getting in charge during the Bush Administration, people thought the idea of wars was to make them as short as possible, not the open-ended thing the neocons like to have other people fight. Even I, even Al Gore, don't want to shut down all coal use in the US in less than a decade, and realistically it's going to take longer than that. A "negotiated medium-term end to non-sequestered coal in the US and other developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow" is a much fairer description of the actual goal.

Also worth noting that coal plants can be repurposed to use biomass, so some of the jobs could still be there and many likely will be in the negotiated solution.

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and economic uncertainty.

More made up facts with nothing to back it.

But that's not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won't.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad. 

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We've been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we're telling them to stop dead in their tracks? 

Fat chance.

Covered this, we need to do a lot more and use that as leverage with developing countries. A carbon import tariff is a standard feature in the carbon control legislation that conservatives like Krauthammer keep trying to destroy. Similarly the complaint that international treaties haven't worked well is rich, coming from people who did their best to weaken and destroy the Kyoto Accord. China, by the way, is working on a cap-and-trade system, so they're way ahead of him.

I'm not against a global pact to reduce CO2 emissions. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one -- and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future -- there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.

Again, they're working on it, and worth noting that most of the other developed countries are also working on their own emissions while do-nothing types within their countries each whine about their own country not emitting enough to make a difference.

And America will not commit economic suicide on this issue, because Americans won't allow it to happen. Climate action will have to have a reasonable economic cost or it won't move forward.

For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

The certainty about climate change is the essence of science. As for what exactly will be done, it's Krauthammer who has faith that we shouldn't even work on a solution.

More environmental "just as" can win the climate fight

(I wonder if bad puns will be enough to get Eli to kick me off the blog.)

My well-ordered response to Obama's speech and plan keeps getting delayed, so some random thoughts instead:

The reference to regulating existing power plants is comprehensive, not just about coal plants. This might seem unimportant but I think it fits well with NRDC's proposal for state level emission regulations for existing coal and gas plants. I've referenced it before, and the more I read it, the better I think it does in providing a price for carbon without expressly crossing the line of providing a price for carbon. To summarize, it sets a different emission limit for power plants for each state, with the limit always stricter than what coal can do. The limit is less strict if a state has lots of coal and fewer gas plants, but in such a state there will be many more coal plants that have to take action. Coal plants can't physically meet the limit, but they can make trades like subsidizing energy conservation and renewables, and those trades will set up de facto prices for carbon. As always, RTFP.

The devilish detail is how strict your emission limits will be. Likely it will ratchet over time, so more reason to keep electing non-Republicans to the White House, at least until a Republican accepts science.

For those who think the lack of the detail makes the plan completely meaningless, investors in coal disagreed in the two week run-up to his speech (which I think is a good time frame, the rumors of what Obama was doing were out for several weeks).

EDF had a good podcast discussing Obama's plan, worth your time as always. They gave a nod to their friendly competition at NRDC, more evidence that NRDC's proposal has oomph. They also pass on a rumor that the Keystone decision will be further delayed, which is good. Delays are good when you're fighting defense, because your goal is to not lose.

Eli's already pointed to Ray's excellent Slate article. My one disagreement with Ray is about controlling non-CO2 gases. Ray says they're short-lived and so can be controlled at a future point, and action on them now distracts from the need to cut long-lived CO2. I think that cutting them now means we don't need to use political capital to cut them in the future. More importantly, I think that success builds on success. When we can say "just as we controlled ozone-depleting chemicals, just as we limited HFCs, just as we slashed methane, so we will do the same on CO2", then we're in much better position. This is especially true on international action, where denialists are depending on futility arguments. Ray says he's got a more definitive argument coming up though, so we'll see.

Worthwhile IEA initiative

Just read their first paragraph, it's actually kind of cheering:

The role of renewable sources in the global power mix continues to increase. On a percentage basis, renewables continue to be the fastest-growing power source. As global renewable electricity generation expands in absolute terms, it is expected to surpass that from natural gas and double that from nuclear power by 2016, becoming the second most important global electricity source, after coal. Globally, renewable generation is estimated to rise to 25% of gross power generation in 2018, up from 20% in 2011 and 19% in 2006. Driven by fast-growing generation from wind and solar photovoltaics (PV), the share of non-hydro renewable power is seen doubling, to 8% of gross generation in 2018, up from 4% in 2011 and 2% in 2006. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), non-hydro renewable power rises to 11% of OECD gross generation in 2018, up from 7% in 2012 and 3% in 2006.

Rest of the International Energy Agency summary is here. Non-hydro renewables used to be such a tiny component of energy that they could be ignored in the big picture, but not anymore. One trick that opponents will use to demean them is to rely on old data. Stuff from four years ago might not sound too old, but it is when you're talking about the status of the industry.

Guess I'll add one more tidbit:

Renewable electricity broadly on track in clean energy scenarios

As a portfolio of renewable technologies continues to become more competitive, renewable power is on track to meet global climate change objectives, i.e. the interim 2020 targets in the IEA Energy Technology Perspectives 2012 (ETP 2012) 2 °C Scenario (2DS), in absolute generation and investmentlevels. That scenario assumes over 7 400 TWh of renewable generation in 2020, versus total generation of 27 165 TWh. Biofuels for transport face a more challenging path. Production must more than double from current levels to meet the 2DS target of 240 million litres per year in 2020. Advanced biofuels production, in particular, needs to accelerate to meet 2DS objectives.

I didn't even know about this 2012 document, might be worth checking out.

Thanks, Ginsburg, and now please retire. Also, Anthony Kennedy's mixed legacy.

Glad that we got some good court rulings out today on gay rights. Definitely good in a policy sense; I haven't made a deep dive to decide if I completely agree on the law. So thanks to Ginsburg for all her good votes, and as I said after the election, now is the time for the 80-year old, two-time cancer survivor to step aside because it's the best chance in at least 4 years to get a decent nominee through the Senate.

End of Court term is a traditional time to announce resignation. If she waits until next year, it'll be campaign season with even fewer Republican senators willing to vote rationally. In Fall 2014, some 21 Democrats will be up for re-election as opposed to 14 Republicans in an off-year election that usually disfavors the president's party, so the Senate make-up is very likely to get worse. Hopefully the make-up will improve after November 2016 when the ratio for that election is reversed, but whether it will meet or beat what we've got today is unclear (not to mention we don't know who'll be President).

Regardless of whether even a healthy 80-year old has good odds of being to work another 4 years, I can guarantee that a 50-something replacement has better odds, as well as lasting through the contingency of four or more years of a Republican presidency. She should quit.

Hopefully I'll soon look like an idiot for my next statement:  she won't do it. Judges have truly impressive sense of their own importance, and I doubt the Supreme Court reduces that sense.

In my "also" about Kennedy, I think the last two days' ruling against voter rights and for gay rights are a decent example of the mixed legacy I've seen since 2005. While he's responsible for many awful decisions, he also supported human rights on some occasions that came at a personal cost during the Bush administration, losing the chance to be Chief Justice.

Still, if you assume he's acting with a legacy motivation (possibly a motivation for Obama on climate too), then I think he personally comes out better this way. He'll be remembered for making the right decision on social values at a minor personal cost, as opposed to being the Chief Justice who made terrible decisions. Think about that, John Roberts.


UPDATE:  yep, Ginsburg refuses to retire. More proof that the Supreme Court and possibly the appellate courts need term limits.

Weapons that don't work for long would be worth a lot

Put this in the category of blogging about a subject I don't know much about, but one of the worries about arming Syrian rebels is that the weapons will eventually fall into the wrong hands. My naive solution is to increase the odds that the donated weapons aren't durable enough to last much beyond the Syrian conflict or any other conflict when we're supporting one side.

For heavy weapons, having propellant and explosives that degrade fairly quickly over time doesn't sound all that difficult. For both heavy weapons and small arms, use metal parts that rust easily instead of being rust-proof, or maybe pre-stress and weaken components so that they fail after some amount of repeated use. I suppose this creates the risk that a machine gun might fail after two months of use instead of the intended year or so, but I bet they'd still be accepted by Syrian rebels.

Not a perfect solution, and the risk of blowback is still there, but it might help out in the right parts of the world without creating permanent additions to the global weapon supply. Especially given the weapons shipments are happening anyway.

On a related note, I think ammunition control may have better prospects of actually reducing violence in the US than gun control, and limiting the viability of ammunition could also help.


UPDATE:  I like the suggestions in the comments to work degradation into the software for advanced weaponry, although I think it's one more way to cause degradation and not the sole solution.

We'll be waiting for you on Tuesday

Obama will lay out his climate initiative Tuesday afternoon at my Hoya alma mater (the secret passage rumors there are true, btw, I found one myself in the main auditorium that he might use). Lots of speculation on what will be in it. You've got mine from February and May:  no shutdown of Keystone, but something else substantial, with fingers crossed it's the NRDC proposal to regulate existing coal power plants. The speculation suggests a bunch of other climate-related actions will also get thrown in, both on adaptation (which makes sense practically and politically) and carbon sequestration (which makes sense politically, I'm less sure practically except that it needs to be fully researched).

It would be interesting if the numbercrunchers with the chops to do it, go and figure out which is better for the climate - shut down Keystone, or do everything else he'll propose instead. Yes, better still would be doing both, but I'd like to know if the enviro emphasis on Keystone over coal-plant regulation is right. I'm sure it all depends on how generously one's assumptions favor the result one wants to reach (e.g., do you assume current tar sands production shuts down instantly, or that it continues in some form).

In other news, the new senator from Hawaii has adopted the Eli Rabett approach on climate communication with deniers, ridiculing the know-nothings. Will be interesting to see if he does it prominently.

How's this deal: everyone, including other fossil fuel interests, gangs up against coal

(Ahem.) Wereallyneedacarbontaxorcapandtradebutintheabsenceofsufficientpoliticalwillweshouldturntootherpollitically-viablealternativesfortheshortandmediumterm.

Okay, with that out of the way, here's the basic idea for the US:  natural gas eats coal's lunch but renewable power gets a guaranteed and growing share of the power market. More specifically, natural gas interests support a national Renewable Portfolio Standard guaranteeing an increasing market share to renewables, with some state-level flexibility to make it meaningful and feasible in most states. In return, enviros let better-regulated fracking expand. The deal might need two add-ons:  gas interests support legislation limiting coal exports, and in return, more areas get opened, carefully, to fracking (looking at you, California).

I'm not certain we need a deal on coal exports - enviros can try their luck fighting coal export terminals and rail lines on their own without the help of national legislation. Coal exports to Europe would also fall under Europe's cap, so I could see it being Europe's problem to decide how they'll meet their cap. I also think it's usually better to determine that emissions are caused by the country that emits them, not by countries upstream or downstream in the production chain. On the other hand, this deal is less useful if the coal still gets burnt but in another country. If enviros demand assistance in limiting coal exports though, then they have to offer something in return.

This would be a temporary alliance between natural gas and renewables. After a decade or so of growing renewables and decreasing coal, natural gas would have to start phasing in carbon sequestration and would likely have to be phased out itself. That's a fight in the future, though.

Enviros could turn down this deal, but I'm not sure the present status is better, with fracking sucking up the large scale funding that might otherwise be available for renewables.

I hope this won't be a useful information resource for very long

Via Wonkbook, a World Bank description of all the carbon pricing schemes in place or that have passed some level of approval at national or subnational levels. More than you'd think, and somewhat cheering when you remember that pricing is only one part of efforts to restrict emissions for many of the listed programs.

I need to really sit down with the part on the regional-level projects in China, but the first thing I wanted to check was Mexico. I had been excited to see a climate change law passed in the country, but according World Bank, not much has happened yet on the national level for a pricing scheme (see page 74). Other things are happening at regional levels in cooperation with California's program.

Hopefully the World Bank's descriptions will become incomplete soon.

Thought of the day: cage match between fluoride opponents and climate deniers

Rules are the fluoride opponents have to start out convinced that the climate deniers are wrong, and vice versa. I'd like to listen to their arguments on why the other group is wrong (not very interested in their arguments as to why their own group is right). So what happens in the end? Anyone gets convinced?

I'm being slightly unfair here to the fluoride people. Even though I've voted consistently at the Water District to fluoridate and might take some heat in my district for doing so, I think the consensus on water fluoridation being safe isn't at the same level of strength as that of the climate consensus. To clarify, the consensus that fluoridating water is better than not as a general matter for the public health seems pretty strong, but it gets more iffy on the issue of potential side effects.

Guess I'll repeat the obvious - this national security panopticon thing is a problem

Even though I trust Obama far more than Bush, I don't trust him or the hundreds of other people with access to total information about everything (slight exaggeration) to use it sparingly and only for good. And while I don't like to assume facts for which we have no evidence, the recent disclosures of government spying seem unlikely to be the only spying that's done on the general public. No abuses of the information have been disclosed, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened, and given enough time and enough people with access to the information, we can assume it will happen at some point.

What exactly to do about it seems far less clear to me. And as much as we environmentalists wished that the public knew more and cared more about our issues, we do a lot better than the civil liberties people do with the public.

One aspect of this issue is that the private corporate panopticon isn't much better than the government one. I've made a distinction in the past between the "reasonable" libertarianism that I sometimes identify with versus "simplistic" libertarianism that sees liberty in black and white terms. This is another case where simplistic libertarians, who see no threat from corporate information-gathering while acknowledging threats from government, just don't make sense. That corporate information is too ripe a target for government not to try to get.

We need some European-style privacy laws.

Motivated reasoning can be re-motivated

After previously snarking at Dan Kahan's snarking, I thought I'd poke around his website's blog a bit more to see what I can learn. Still thinking about it, but there are some useful points.

One that he makes in about every third blog post is that a person's benefit in sticking with the beliefs of one's tribe on communal issues like climate change often exceed the costs to that person of that person being wrong. It's a collective action problem where an individual pointing out that one's tribe is making a huge mistake just causes friction. The individual has a disincentive from even seriously considering whether her tribe is wrong.

The ironic part about this is that I think it makes sense on an intuitive level, but I don't recall Kahan citing evidence that proves it to be true (you can speculate that it explains studies of motivated reasoning, but that doesn't prove the theory). His emphasis on the science of science communication doesn't always follow in practice.

Wonkbook reports a related take on motivated reasoning, which found that partisans severely reduced their motivated reasoning when given a personal incentive to do so. Wonkbook refers to this proving that partisans are just "liars" but I think the psychology might be a little more subtle than that. Kahan's take might be that the cost analysis of thinking for one's self v. believing what the tribe believes is adjusted in the experiment.

Anyway, makes sense to me. I think it might also feed into my pet theory that climate adaptation might be the road to acceptance for climate science, because it's more directly about self-interest.

A (very) hypothetical conservative party not biased in favor of the rich over everyone else

I've wondered how the Republican Party or conservative parties elsewhere could avoid being the party that favors the rich over everyone else, especially the poor. As long as we have progressive taxation, or even a flat income tax that is not a poll tax, then the whole "smaller government versus larger government" dimension biases the conservative party towards the rich, whose economic interest at a simplistic level favors smaller government. So the libertarian angle that's being pushed now isn't one that's going to change the class favoritism.

Fighting and slowing social transformation, the other side of conservatism, doesn't map immediately to class issues. You might even expect the radically-increasing economic inequality today compared to past generations to disturb some social conservatives. I think the rare and usually-unsuccessful efforts by some conservatives to alter anti-tax positions at state levels might stem in part from social conservative viewpoints. On the other hand, social transformation has generally involved acceptance of outsider groups that experience economic discrimination among other harms, so fighting attempts to fix this often aligns with being biased in favor of the rich over others.

A dimension that doesn't divide parties right now in the US is opportunity versus compassion. One party could favor spending government money, whatever the total amount may be, on funding sufficient equality of opportunity for the vast majority of citizens to achieve what they want with their lives. The other party could favor spending government money, whatever the total amount may be, on compassionate assistance to people regardless of whether they share some of the responsibility for their problems. The first party seems to me to be logically right of center, and the second to be left of center. The Opportunity Party would also tend to be the party of the young and the Compassion Party that of the older demographics. This is the opposite of the actual situation in the US where younger people are more Democratic-leaning relative to older people.

So that's the first and biggest problem - Republicans aren't very willing or able to switch generational sides in a conflict over resources. The other issue is that Republicans aren't really competing for either the Opportunity or Compassion label. Instead they hug tightly to the Small Government label, leaving both of the other two to the Democrats. The recent noise from the right about achieving equality of opportunity through the destruction of the liberal welfare state is just that - noise. If they start putting more resources behind achieving equality of opportunity than Democrats are willing to do, only then will things start getting interesting. Unlikely.

Dear Slate: please fire whoever wrote the headlines below, immediately. Thank you.

Before you read on, decide for yourself what the two headlines mean. Knowing that Solyndra lost the government a lot of money, I took them to mean that the government lost even more money dealing with Tesla, at least a billion dollars. I assumed then it was an expose that showed Tesla paid back government loans via some surreptitious transfer of government funds.

The article itself is badly written and stupid, but it doesn't say what the headlines claim (and I assume Woolley didn't write the headers). The article admits that contrary to Solyndra, the US government made money from Tesla, but it could have made more money if it had structured the deal as an investment instead of a loan. It skates over what else might have changed, but mainly it fails to address the government was trying to promote technological change, not act as a VC company. I only assume Woolley has busted an artery for every government grant that ended up making money for recipients (maybe he should look into the lost patent opportunities in the fracking research grants). He should have many busted arteries.

I also welcome links where Woolley and Slate wrote in 2009 as opposed to long after the fact that the deal should have been structured to allow conversion of the loan to options.

The deal was a success, and slate-pitching a contrarian viewpoint shouldn't cross over into deception like they did here.