With climate legislation stalled and probably dead until the archaic and dysfunctional filibuster rule can be changed, the Obama Administration is moving forward with positive baby steps. Yesterday, the Commerce Department announced the creation of a Climate Service within the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration:
The proposed entity would provide “user-friendly” information to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change, creating a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation’s best sites for wind and solar power…
Just as NOAA’s National Weather Service provides information on short-range environmental conditions, the proposed climate service will provide long-term projections of how climate will change.
All well and good. Unless you are Sarah Palin, you believe that more information about critical scientific issues is important.
But the announcement raises one important question: what in the world is this thing doing in the Commerce Department? For that matter, what is NOAA doing in the Commerce Department?
You’ve got to give Commerce Secretary Gary Locke credit for trying:
“If you own a ski resort, you’re might be wondering, do you expand or not expand? What’s the impact of climate change on weather patterns at a certain elevation where your ski resort is?” he said. “Some people will take this information to the private sector and focus just on ski resorts.”
Well, all right: but the fact of the matter is that oceans and the atmosphere have now become critical environmental and scientific issues. That means that NOAA probably belongs in EPA, or maybe Interior.
As Holly pointed out a few days ago, NOAA doesn’t even have a statutory basis, and it won’t after this session because of the inevitable Republican filibuster of legislative attempts to give it one. So moving it is a snap.
This isn’t just about moving boxes around: it makes longer term policy sense. The best way to hamper government agencies is to split them up: as Terry Moe pointed out in a classic article two decades ago, business interests were able to hamstring the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) by forcing it to rely on health and morbidity estimates from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOS), which was placed at HEW. This effectively prevented the Labor secretary from advancing OSHA policy on her own — she had to rely on action from HEW, and the HEW Secretary might have her own agenda. This bred policy incoherence — which was exactly the point. As climate policy becomes more critical, we should try avoid past mistakes.
Moreover, Commerce is the smallest agency in the Federal Government: at an annual budget of 6-7 billion dollars, the whole agency would be a rounding error at the Pentagon. That means it has little political clout — a point that is obvious if you realize that Commerce Secretaries have had made virtually no policy impact during the century-long history of the Department.
Finally, Commerce Secretaries aren’t going to be very focused on the goings on at NOAA: they will care about business junkets and such. This happens every now and then to agencies: the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Treasury Department was given the gun portfolio in 1968, became the Bureau of Alcohol, tobacco, and Firearms, and sat there in the Treasury for more than three decades before moving to Homeland Security. (Even then, it should probably be at Justice, but FBI, whose officials hate it, would protest.).
So it’s a good thing that the administration is moving in this small but positive way — but let’s give the baby a good home.
Cul de Sacs are a familiar feature of suburbia. They are also coming under increasing attack, according to TNR:
So, for instance, one study of the city of Charlotte found that places where the streets weren’t very well connected (thanks, in part, to the heavy use of cul-de-sac) required a lot more fire stations to be built, costing the area more money. Another study found that areas with poor connectivity have much worse congestion—up to 80 percent worse—because the main roads and arteries are more likely to get clogged. So it’s not just that cul-de-sac layouts dissuade people from walking or biking; they also seem to be imposing costs on local governments. Though it’s unclear whether this backlash is a growing trend or just a few isolated incidents.
For a more detailed discussion, look here. And in the meantime, avoid those suburban dead ends!
No, not top 10 posts, silly. That’s boring. I mean that Top 10, except with a Legal Planet twist, to wit;
What are the Top 10 Environmental Pop Songs of all time?
My initial nominee is The Pretenders’ classic “My City Was Gone,” which is known more for its infectious bass guitar hook, but is actually an anthem about urban sprawl and smart growth. (Really: read the lyrics).
The biggest problem with this nomination is that Rush limbaugh uses it as his theme song music. Wikipedia says that Chrissie Hynde demanded that he stop, but then agreed to let him continue as long as he donated the usual royalties to PETA. Uh, Chrissie — you might want to reconsider that.
Earlier today, I asked two Legal Planet colleagues who shall remain nameless (for now) about their nominees, and they could think of any. That’s right: none. I trust that our readers can do better.
Any ideas? Big Yellow Taxi is ruled out of order on the grounds of avoiding egregious cliches.
Ann cautions about downplaying the findings that the IPCC report erred in predicting the melting of Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and in the resistance of researchers to respond to FOIA requests from a climate skeptic site.
She’s right. We shouldn’t downplay the reports: instead, we should ridicule them.
So the glaciers won’t actually melt by 2035 — just suffer irreparable damage by then. Wow! How much should I flagellate myself? This obviously trumps the continual burying of science by climate skeptics, the rewriting of government reports by Bush administration officials, and the continual hyping of junk science of climate skeptics.
The way to respond to these “problems” is to go on offense and attack the skeptics. Pachauri’s actions were inexcusable, but they were also irrelevant to the broader picture.
I would suggest something like this as the default reaction:
Well, I’m certainly glad that climate skeptics finally believe that scientific validity should be a basis for public policy — a position they have previously rejected. Why don’t we agree to administer punishments to all those who have played fast and loose with the science — in proportion, of course, to the egregiousness of their errors. Maybe Pachauri — who has spent his life working in this area and has done a superb job leading IPCC until now, should get a couple of minutes in the stocks.
In comparison, Philip Cooney, who was lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, edited out science in official government reports during his tenure at CEQ, and is now working for ExxonMobil, should get, oh, 15 years in San Quentin.
Deal?
You can find Stephen Colbert’s biography of Cooney here.
The winner hands-down (possibly based on actual events in the City of Berkeley):
Runner-up after the jump:
While I was traveling last week, EPA issue new standards for biofuels. This rule makes changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard program as required by a 2007 statute. The statute sets new specific annual volume standards for cellulosic biofuel, biomass-based diesel, advanced biofuel, and total renewable fuel that must be used in transportation fuel. The statute also includes new definitions and criteria for both renewable fuels and the feedstocks used to produce them, including new greenhouse gas emission (GHG) thresholds determined by lifecycle analysis.
Under the statute, the lifecycle GHG emissions of a qualifying renewable fuel must be less than the lifecycle GHG emissions of the gasoline or diesel fuel that it replaces. Four different levels of reductions are required for the four different renewable fuel standards. For renewable fuels, the threshold is 20%, for example.
EPA concluded that:
* Ethanol produced from corn starch at a new natural gas-fired facility using advanced efficient technologies complies with the 20% GHG emission reduction threshold.
* Ethanol produced from sugarcane complies with the applicable 50% GHG reduction threshold for the advanced fuel category
* Cellulosic ethanol and cellulosic diesel comply with the 60% GHG reduction threshold applicable to cellulosic biofuels.
The most interesting finding is the ethanol figure. Ethanol barely made the 20% cut, and only after EPA rejiggered the numbers. EPA’s explanation sounds reasonable, but it’s hard not to be a bit suspicious of the politically convenient outcome. read more…
American pika (Photo from http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/02/27/government-will-consider-listing-american-pika-as-endangered/)
Cross-posted at CPRBlog.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has completed its review of the status of the cute little American pika. The verdict is good news for the pika, at least as far as it goes and if FWS is right about the science. FWS has decided that the pika is not endangered or threatened because, according to FWS biologists, the pika is not as vulnerable to the impacts of climate change as has been believed. Unfortunately, the explanation FWS offers is not very persuasive.
Global warming threatens the pika in two different ways. Pikas are prone to overheating; they can die if exposed to temperatures as mild as 77°F (25°C) for several hours. Hiding under and between the rocks in a talus field helps them keep cool, but if air temperatures get too hot, even those refuges won’t be cool enough in the summer. Ironically, global warming could also cause pika to freeze in the winter. The snowpack provides insulation for their talus homes. If that snowpack is lost, as it will be if winter precipitation comes mostly as rain in the future, pikas could die of exposure. Pikas cannot respond simply by moving to colder locations because they are poor dispersers, they have highly specialized habitat requirements, and they already typically live near the tops of mountains. As a result, the pika are often described as one of the most likely species to be adversely affected by global warming. As J.B. Ruhl put it in a recent law review article, “The pika is toast.” Many others, including prominent pika biologists, agree.
So how come the pika is not, according to FWS, threatened or endangered? A combination of optimism and a short time horizon account for that. read more…
Feb 05 Bad Few Months for Climate Science
The bad news for efforts to persuade the public and policy makers that climate change is happening and is human-caused continues. Since the revelation… [read more]
Feb 04 Time for a TREES Agreement?
The nexus between trade and the environment is huge: border tax adjustments, subsidies, eco-labelling, international technology standards, etc. etc. … [read more]
Feb 03 Extreme Events
I spent yesterday at a conference at RFF on managing “tail risks” – the low-probability but extreme events that are on the tail of the… [read more] read more…
The bad news for efforts to persuade the public and policy makers that climate change is happening and is human-caused continues. Since the revelation that hackers were circulating emails from climate scientists from the University of East Anglia, two new developments promise to stoke skepticism about climate science and scientists even further. The first is news that a claim about the shrinking of Himalyan glaciers contained in the IPCC 2007 assessment is false. The second is a finding by Britain’s Information Commission that the same scientists at the University of East Anglia whose emails were hacked broke the law in refusing to answer Freedom of Information Act requests from climate skeptics about climate data.
The IPCC report — the report for which the IPCC was named a co-winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Price — contains the following statement:
Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the pace continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high. read more…
The nexus between trade and the environment is huge: border tax adjustments, subsidies, eco-labelling, international technology standards, etc. etc. Little wonder, then, that many observers have called for a new international agreement to tie them together.
That’s complicated. But naming it is easy.
The WTO treaty on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is abbreviated as TRIPS. So it stands to reason that a similar agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Energy and the Environment should be called TREES.
No, I don’t know what exactly would be in it. But you gotta love the name.
That is all.
I spent yesterday at a conference at RFF on managing “tail risks” — the low-probability but extreme events that are on the tail of the probability distribution. Some probability distributions have what are called fat tails, meaning that the extreme events are more likely than you would expect from a normal distribution.
One way of identifying such a distribution is to see what happens when records are broken. With a normal distribution, after a short initial period, records should be broken infrequently — and when they are broken, it should only be by a small amount. If the tallest man in the world is currently about eight feet tall, we would expect the record to be broken by someone who is 8′2″ or something like that, not by someone who is sixteen feet tall. In contrast, Hurricane Katrina broke previous records of storm damage by an enormous margin. This is what we would expect from a fat tailed distribution, and it’s go insurance companies very worried.
Part of the day was spent hearing climate scientists talk about what they expect in terms of storms in the future; part on the mathematics of fat tailed distributions (there turn out to be several degrees of fatness), and part on policy implications. Fat tail risks can be difficult (and sometimes impossible) to diversify, making insurance problematic.
This may seem like an esoteric topic. But it has real and important implications for how we plan for possible catastrophic events.
The Copenhagen Accord has legs – so far 36 industrialized countries including the United States, members of the European Union, and Russia; and 23 developing countries, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa have signed on. A further 28 countries, mostly those considered least developed such as Mali and Palau, associated themselves with the Accord. That makes 87 nations willing to be listed on the agreement that was drafted in forty-five minutes by a small group of heads of state, including US President Obama, at the United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. What do these pledges add up to?
The actions pledged are legally binding only to the extent that countries enact domestic legislation. They do not add up to the reductions that climate scientists believe are necessary to maintain a “safe” climate. They are, however, an indication that no major contributor to climate change is willing to reject international cooperation.
Developed countries pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, economy-wide, by as little as 5% to as much as 40% by 2020. The United States offered an emissions cut “in the range of 17%” dependent on domestic legislation (for more on this, see Cara’s post and my ASIL Insight) In contrast, the European read more…
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama did not equivocate on the topic of nuclear power. He talked about the importance of green jobs, and then added, “But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” This was one applause line that sent hands a-clapping on both sides of the aisle. Of course, nuclear power is the poster child for the expression “easier said than done.” Find a safe and trusted new plant design. Build some demonstration projects. Isolate liabilities. Harness hundreds of billions of investment dollars. Solve the long-term, high-level nuclear waste storage problem.
Ah, that pesky storage problem. Senator Harry Reid’s Nevada is not soon to open its arms for completion of the Yucca Mountain facility. There is no other near-term or even mid-range alternative in sight. Over 100 domestic nuclear power plants are currently operating, and, by default, each has become a storage facility of indefinite duration.
While it is rational to gather the experts in an effort to address such challenges, commissions and panels are not much in favor these days. Nonetheless, President Obama has asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to create a Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. He said, in part:
“The Commission should conduct a comprehensive review of
policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle,
including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and
disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel and nuclear
waste. read more…
Maybe the City of Los Angeles. I complained a couple of weeks ago that during the (rare) times when the Southland gets a downpour, all the water get sent out to sea ASAP, even though cistern technology exists that could conserve water, reduce pollution, and reduce the costs of purchasing it from elsewhere.
Well, as it turns out, Paula Daniels at the Los Angeles Board of Public Works (a former environmental fellow at UCLA) has been working on the problem for a while, and has developed a partial solution:
A proposed law would require new homes, larger developments and some redevelopments in Los Angeles to capture and reuse runoff generated in rainstorms.
The ordinance approved in January by the Department of Public Works would require such projects to capture, reuse or infiltrate 100% of runoff generated in a 3/4 -inch rainstorm or to pay a storm water pollution mitigation fee that would help fund off-site, low-impact public developments.
With all the complaints that government gets from all quarters, it’s good to see that someone is trying to think through things proactively.
In typical fashion, the BIA is opposing some aspects of the regulation, and has gotten the city to lower the fees, but it is heartening to see that it has avoided its usual attitude, which can best be described as, well, antediluvian. It’s not accident that its more pragmatic position comes from the local chapter, as opposed to the state association, which often seems to be a chapter of the Tea Party set.
Let’s assume that the ordinance passes. The question then becomes how to retrofit existing buildings, a far more challenging and complex measure. And we will have lots of battles, perhaps through litigation, about what constitutes “new construction” requiring the technology, and what is simply maintenance — an issue that has repeatedly occurred in the “New Source Review” provisions of the Clean Air Act. When Dick Cheney was Vice President, he tried to redefine “maintenance” as basically the construction of new plants to allow them to avoid Clean Air Act requirements. Even conservative federal appellate courts didn’t allow this one.
Fresh from a State of the Union Address that focused heavily on domestic economic issues, President Obama and Vice President Biden journeyed to Tampa, Florida last week to announce federal support–and $8 billion in government funding–for high speed rail projects across the country. That’s a most welcome development.
American train buffs who’ve traveled in Europe and Japan marvel at the “bullet trains” that transport passengers between cities there at speeds of over 200 mph. Those high-speed rail facilities stand in sharp contrast to this country’s intercity passenger railroad system, which declined precipitously over the last half of the 20th century, as America’s interstate highway and passenger aviation systems became the preeminent way of moving travelers between American cities. In recent years, however, concerns over U.S. over-dependence on fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, security issues and the growing inconvenience of airline travel have converged to make high-speed rail an increasingly attractive alternative.
The federal government’s newly-announced $8 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant awards is designed to lay the groundwork for a national high-speed rail network, read more…
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