Oh, This Is Going To Be Fun

Last week, Meg Whitman raised some eyebrows when she vowed to suspend implementation of AB 32, California's landmark global-warming law. This drew criticisms from the usual suspects, and also happens to be broadly unpopular in a state which supports action on climate change. It was also a thumb in the eye of the current Governor and practically the only policy on which he can claim a legacy. So Schwarzenegger came out today and said Whitman's making an idle threat that she doesn't mean.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today dismissed a vow by Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to suspend California's landmark greenhouse gas law if she's elected to succeed him next year as "just rhetoric that is going on among the candidates."

"You will hear all kinds of stories," Schwarzenegger told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "What will happen in reality and what they will do when they go into office is probably a whole different ballgame, and I think she will probably reconsider what she said.

"I'm sure she does not want to be counted as one of those Republicans that will want to move us back to the Stone Age or something like that," the Republican governor said. "So I would pay no attention to this kind of rhetoric."

Of course, relics from the Stone Age are the target demographic for a Republican primary, so Whitman has to say what she said. And she's not being accused of political pandering by, of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which should make for a fun weekend when the two appear together at the GOP convention in Indian Wells starting tomorrow.

Whitman's more pressing problem is that she has virtually no voting record as a private citizen, apparently having not even registered to vote prior to 2002. In an amusing moment of brazenness, Steve Poizner called on her to end her campaign as a result.

Poizner's camp issued a statement in response to the story this morning, attacking the Whitman campaign for "refusing to answer simple questions and deliberately lying to cover up the facts" and calling for the candidate to "step aside" and drop out of the race.

"It's understandable that Meg Whitman is ashamed of this record. But it's unacceptable that she continues to run from the record and deceive voters. Though there is no shred of evidence she ever registered as a Republican before 2007, she insists she did, yet she refuses to provide any evidence. Her arrogant answer: 'Go find it,' " Communications Director Jarrod Agen said in a statement. "In the history of America, no one has been elected governor of a state with Meg Whitman's 25 year history of no-show voting. She is unelectable and has tried to cover her lack of honesty with millions of dollars."

Hysterical. By the way, if you think eMeg's voting record is back, take a look at iCarly's. Quite a team they'll make on the GOP ticket next year...

We Need To Send One Strategic Thinker To Washington, Just One

I actually don't buy this for a second:

Environmentalists hope the push in Congress for climate change legislation is not overwhelmed by the debate dominating Capitol Hill over changing the U.S. healthcare system. But it might be.

Already two months behind schedule and unsure whether enough Democrats will play along, Senate leaders still aim to pass a bill by December when a United Nations summit convenes in Copenhagen to set worldwide goals for reducing carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

But as the debate over healthcare legislation rages and with President Barack Obama due to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to try to rescue the faltering plan, it was unclear whether rattled lawmakers will have the time -- or the inclination -- to take on climate change.

It's inclination, not time. The primacy of the health care debate is the best thing to ever happen to the climate change bill. It can slink around in the weeds, and Barbara Boxer can go to work on it and spring it on Congress before the teabaggers have time to react. It's already passed the House, so a quick strike in the Senate - even if it's a bad bill without a cap and trade plan - shouldn't be too difficult while everyone's head is turned. Because health care has taken center stage, the climate bill is popular at this point. The Democrats could markup on Wednesday and pass by Friday if they really wanted to do so. It would be the perfect way to bring the hammer down on Republicans for elongating the health care debate.

But I don't expect that to happen. Because too many Democrats want no part of a climate bill. The concessions made in the House should be enough to satisfy the Senate, but people like Ag Committee Chair Tom Harkin want to put their thumbprint on it as well. And there's no Progressive Block to get in the way of the endless concessions.

A strategic White House would have told Harry Reid today to schedule the climate bill for Thursday. It would have messed with everyone's head. But we have no strategic thinking on Capitol Hill, and these are the results.

Compromise of the Art

Paul Krugman writes today about the watered-down climate bill, but more specifically the difficulty among the progressive movement to figure out the tipping points in the face of all the compromising and atom-splitting:

In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives.

Now, however, a somewhat uneasy coalition of progressives and centrists rules Washington, and staking out a position has become much trickier. Policy tends to move things in a desirable direction, yet to fall short of what you’d hoped to see. And the question becomes how many compromises, how much watering down, one is willing to accept.

We can apply this to a lot of legislation coming out of Washington, but Krugman specifically looks at the climate bill. We all knew that the initial Waxman-Markey bill would represent the leftward bound of the policy. Predictably, coal-state Dems reacted unfavorably, and sought concessions, the most important being the softening of both the cap on carbom emissions and the renewable energy standard, as well as the inclusion of emissions allowances to polluters, instead of selling off all allowances 100% at auction. Not only will this giveaway to polluters push more of the costs of implementation onto the poor and give a windfall to groups like coal plant executives, but it won't stop electricity producers from raising their prices even though that's the entire point of the allowances. What's more, this doesn't seem to be enough for Senate Democrats:

Another senior aide said Waxman’s “pragmatic approach … will be appreciated in the Senate” but cautioned that the deal is unlikely to fully satisfy Senate moderates who are looking to temper the bill even more.

“Rick Boucher does not equal Evan Bayh does not equal Debbie Stabenow,” the senior Senate Democratic aide said of the Democratic Senators from Indiana and Michigan, respectively. Bayh and Stabenow have expressed reservations about cap-and-trade provisions, which would cap emissions and allow industries to trade for pollution permits.

“There are a substantial number of moderate Democrats who are uneasy at best,” the knowledgeable Senate Democratic aide noted.

Basically, plenty of Democrats would rather see absolutely nothing pass.

Given all of that, as long as the cap is hard and cannot be gamed, this will drive down emissions, coupled with the new fuel economy standard for cars, not to mention all of the initiatives on energy efficiency and renewable standards in the bill). And if anyone can shepherd through a bill of this magnitude and make sure it doesn't get totally de-fanged, it's Henry Waxman. His policy style is to keep working on an idea and taking small victories until the full flower of the policy is realized. Obviously it's an open question whether Waxman-Markey will amount to enough of a victory to support.

And that's really the fault line in this debate. If you accept that voters care about climate change, and want to see real action, a light-as-a-feather bill could alienate the young voters who care about it the most, and frustrate those who see no way for Congress to deal with such an abstract yet devastating issue, especially given all the special interests seeking the destruction of the legislation (This, by the way, is why Republicans are backing a carbon tax, because they know it's politically impossible and an attempt to stop the main bill cold). Where is the tipping point, where do progressives draw the line? And since we really do have a short window for dealing with mitigating climate change until we're powerless to stop it, if the subsequent bill would fail to reach its intended goals, wouldn't it be used as a symbol of Democratic failure?

There are strategic issues in addition to policy issues at work here. It's hard to figure what's right.

Perverting The Science, Boiling The World

Here's an incredibly unsurprising story: for decades, big business put their own profits ahead of reality and did whatever they could to poison the planet.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

This story is a smoking gun as much as the secret emails showing that cigarette makers knew their products caused disease and death. We have industry ignoring science for material gain. And the losers are you and me.

All they had to do was deny the science, and the broken media structure did the rest - posing the issue as a debate rather than exploring the facts, sowing confusion instead of certitude. For 15 years or more, we dithered, when we could have been moving forward on solving the problem. And we're still having to fight these groups.

The coalition disbanded in 2002, but some members, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, continue to lobby against any law or treaty that would sharply curb emissions. Others, like Exxon Mobil, now recognize a human contribution to global warming and have largely dropped financial support to groups challenging the science.

Documents drawn up by the coalition’s advisers were provided to lawyers by the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a coalition member, during the discovery process in a lawsuit that the auto industry filed in 2007 against the State of California’s efforts to limit vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions.

This time around, we do have a counterpart - progressive groups that have formed an alliance to finally get meaningful climate legislation passed. But we have lost so much valuable time, to the extent that we have not much left. And all because some executives decided they needed a new luxury yacht to go with the beach house.

Shameful.

Going Big, Not Going Home

Yesterday the Senate passed a resolution preventing climate change legislation from going through the budget reconciliation process, on an overwhelming vote of 67-31. The vote suggests that climate change alone can't get 50 votes in the House, anyway, so this doesn't seem to me like a major loss. In fact, this resolution only applies to this particular budget, and if a new budget resolution is written, the ban on reconciliation for cap and trade becomes moot.

However, I think the Administration has already foreclosed on that option, because the Markey-Waxman climate bill is more of an omnibus, which could actually make it easier to pass.

One of the striking features -- and perhaps the most consequential legislative decision Dems will make this year on energy/climate -- is that it lumps everything together in a single bill. I know some folks aren't big on this strategy, and I've been on the fence myself, but I've pretty much come to see it as both smart and inevitable.

Consider the context. There are several important steps that need to be taken on climate and energy, and the Dems have promised to get them done this year. If nothing else, the U.S. needs something to take to the Copenhagen climate talks, coming up in December. That puts serious time pressure on the whole undertaking [...]

It's important to note that the cap-and-trade part of the package is by far the least popular and easiest to demagogue. So conventional wisdom has been that Dems should lead with the more popular energy and grid stuff. But those aren't a cakewalk either -- there's plenty of regional opposition to renewable energy standards and a whole set of jurisdictional and local battles around the grid.

The fact is, doing these pieces separately would mean three, four, possibly five bruising legislative battles, culminating in a battle over cap-and-trade that, in my estimation, simply can't be won on its own in this Senate. No one in D.C. has the appetite for that, not this year.

So they've decided, uncharacteristically for Democrats, to double down. They are piling all this stuff into one big-ticket, high-profile, must-pass bill. Just as there will be "a healthcare bill" -- and not four disparate, complicated healthcare bills only wonks can understand -- there will now be a green economy bill. For it or against it.

I definitely agree that a single green economy bill is harder to demagogue, though Republicans will certainly give it a college try. And if everything is included, then legislators can pick and choose bits they don't like as a means to vote against the bill. But it is unusual to see Democrats go so big on such a big priority. While I think that the Waxman-Markey bill has room for improvement, unquestionably the bill would represent a major step forward.

I like it.

The Beavis And Butt-head Party Strikes Again

Today is the second annual Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to raise awareness on the issue of climate change. At 8:30pm local time, major businesses, local and national points of interest, and individual homes will dim their lights for one hour. Already today, sites ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Egyptian Pyramids have lowered their lights in recognition, and 4,000 cities in 88 countries will participate in the event. Sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour will provide, in the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, "a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message: They want action on climate change."

It will also provide a new way for conservatives to show what hardcore rebels they are.

Tomorrow is something called Earth Hour. Take the official RedState Pledge:

I do solemnly swear that I will honor Earth Hour by turning on every light in my residence at 8:30 p.m. on March 28, 2009, for one hour. God said, "Let there be light." Who are we to argue?

Yeah, they want you to turn your lights off, but everybody knows darkness leads to crime.

It's amusing to see Erick Erickson so terrified of possible boogeymen infiltrating his house from 8:30 to 9:30, as well as the wingnut tendency to go after all the most important targets, like symbolic light-dimming actions. But this has now become a cliche. My local wingnut radio hosts were making the same "jokes" last night: "I'll turn on every light in the house!... I'll keep my car running for an hour!" And of course, Glenn Beck devoted an entire show to running his car in the parking lot a couple months ago.

Conservatives are allowed to show their ignorance of sound science any way they want, but they ought to at least liven it up a bit. The "I'm going to turn on every light in the house" bit is getting about as hackneyed as jokes about airline food and Gilligan's Island ("all those clothes for a three-hour tour?"). Let me introduce you to a Republican with innovative and novel thinking about climate change. It's embarrassingly wrong, but at least it's new:

We've repeatedly documented Rep. John Shimkus' ridiculous positions on climate change. During a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing earlier this week, the downstate Republican was in rare form. Speaking to British global warming denier Lord Christopher Monckton, Shimkus made a novel argument that because plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, limiting our man-made carbon dioxide emissions would actually kill the world's plants. Watch the exchange here:

SHIMKUS: It's plant food ... So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? ... So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

I've always wanted to use this line on Steve's site, and now it's appropriate: Shimkus did not appear to be kidding.

Shimkus basically maps out a world where, prior to the Industrial Revolution, no plant life existed, because we hadn't yet set into motion mass production of their "food." In this scenario, plants actually sprung to life shortly after the invention of the Watt steam engine in the 18th century.

Now THAT'S a new one! Relentlessly stupid, sure, but new.

"Immediate Action Is Needed"

A report by California's Interagency Climate Action Team released this week shows that sea levels can be expected to rise 55 inches by the end of the century, impacting hundreds of thousands of residents along the coast, as well as billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure and construction. The worst areas would be San Mateo and Orange Counties, where over 100,000 people would be affected. The report isn't necessarily looking at how to combat climate change; it's looking at how to deal with its obvious reality.

The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.

"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach."

We're talking about flood zones in residential neighborhoods in Venice and Marina del Rey. We're talking about the SFO and Oakland airports being covered with water. Same for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It's truly terrifying. And with this being a global problem where the worst scenarios are increasingly being realized, California is little more than a bystander to this calamity, able to plan against the worst disasters and reduce development in the most affected areas, but unable to truly combat the problem without the rest of the world joining in. We will get the worst of this, to the point that livability becomes a question.

The full report, The Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on
the California Coast, can be viewed here. They've also prepared detailed maps showing the changes that would result from a 55-inch rise in sea levels.

Will Drags Down Journalism With Him

This week we have seen perhaps a tipping point in the decline of American newspapers. Hearst announced they may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle, a month after they said the same about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The two newspapers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, filed for bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register Company, which owns 20 papers in the Northeast. And the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran its last edition yesterday.

As much as we don't want to admit it, some of this is inevitable. The medium of delivered print newspapers in an environment where anyone can hop online and read virtually any article around the nation or the world is going to be threatened. That advertising revenue is falling because of the economic meltdown is just accelerating this decline. While newspaper websites generally do quite well, they haven't been able to monetize the content to a degree that's economically feasible. And the overall threat here is the death of news reporting, not the physical newspapers themselves. At least that's the view of Gary Kamiya.

If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. Online journalism is essentially parasitic. Like most TV news, it derives or follows up on stories that first appeared in print. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print. As a longtime editor of an online journal who has taken part in hundreds of editorial meetings in which story ideas are generated from pieces that appeared in print, that figure strikes me as low.

There's no reason to believe this is going to change. Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don't usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast.

But the story is more complicated than that. At the same time that newspapers are dying, blogging and "unofficial" types of journalism continue to expand, grow more sophisticated and take over some (but not all) of the reportorial functions once performed by newspapers. New technologies provide an infinitely more robust feed of raw data to the public, along with the accompanying range of filtering, interpreting and commenting mechanisms that the Internet excels in generating.

As these developments expand, our knowledge of the world will become much less broad. Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.

Paul Starr makes a similar argument in The New Republic, saying that the loss of newspapers will most impact local news coverage and lead to a rise in local corruption.

Now, I agree with this to an extent. The breadth of material presented in a newspaper is not entirely likely to be replicated online, at least not at any one place. More things would happen in the shadows in a post-newspaper world. And I hope for that not to happen. At the same time, there's a lot of redundancy in newspapers. Dozens if not hundreds of different writers across the country cover the exact same Obama address to Congress that I watched with my eyes as well, and can just as easily form an opinion on. There is an argument that local papers should focus on local reporting, and get their national news from national sources, which would probably still offer enough of a variety.

This breaks down when the papers that are able to weather the decline, the ones with the highest reputation and the broadest base of reporters, who could funnel news across the country and present themselves as an established brand, soil themselves with demonstrably mendacious columnists that call into question the editorial aptitude of the whole project.

Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

And since this was written, George Will responded to that falsely equivalent NYT article with a pissy rant standing by the substance of his global warming denialist column of the week prior. In doing so he defends the substance of a data point he included about sea ice levels in Antarctica, despite the climate research center where Will got the data has publicly disavowed it. And then, Will's editor Fred Hiatt defends his writer in some of the weirdest ways possible.

Hiatt insists Will's entitled to his opinion about the global warming facts because those facts are just too complicated--too unknowable--and who the hell are readers to claim otherwise? Hiatt told CJR:

"If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him."

That sound you hear is Hiatt digging the Post an even deeper and more embarrassing hole.

I have two favorite parts. The first was Hiatt's insistence that Will has every right to draw inference--to make claims of fact in his column--based on data that most scientists reject. Good Lord, what is Will not allowed to do in a Post column? And does the Op-Ed page maintain any guidelines?

And second, I chuckled when Hiatt insisted that if people disagree with Will's published falsehoods, they shouldn't try to pressure the paper to publish corrections, they should, y'know, "debate him." Right, because Will and Post editors have been so open and willing to address--to debate--the controversy.

Now, to his credit, the Post's ombusdman will write tomorrow that Will was wrong on the science, and that the paper should have addressed this more quickly. But clearly there is a problem with accountability at the Post when it comes to their star columnists.

(By the way, good for John Kerry for trying to get some measure of accountability by himself.)

But this is a serious concern. With the viability of the newspaper model looking less clear, we will necessarily shrink the amount of reporters covering both local and national issues. Online sources cannot fill the gap without substantial resources (endowments, anyone?). Therefore we vest more power in the fourth estate in the hands of a number of established brands. And yet those brands are gradually proving themselves unworthy of the power. It shouldn't look unfavorably on the entire profession, and the many fine reporters working under these brands, but it inevitably does.

It would be nice to say that, after being trashed and abused by major media for so long, that we don't need journalism. But we clearly do. And when they damage their reputations, it actually affects all of us.

Triumph Of The Will

George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it - Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it's amusing how they're wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.

But that's not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe's climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote "[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade," which is practically the opposite of the truth.

Will could have done the world a favor by reading his own paper's news coverage and maybe canceling his column for the day.

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it's a perspective.

Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.

Mum's the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will's most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper's editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post's editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions [...]

Will's assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he'd try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday's post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will's column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren't rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, "opinion." In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they've assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.

Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.

You Can't Parody These People Anymore

Stephen Colbert might as well give up.

Here's Dick Armey, decrying political discourse as "inane" and demanding that serious people go about their business and contribute seriously, and then minutes later saying to Joan Walsh "I am so damn glad that you can never be my wife".



And then, here's Glenn Beck, actually doing the idling the car outside the studio to "do his part for global warming" joke, months after Colbert did EXACTLY THIS JOKE on his show:



These are respected members of the conservative media elite.

Parody is dead.

Your Media Failed You

The news today on the climate is bleak. Even if we dropped everything and curbed greenhouse gas emissions in an aggressive fashion, we would still be faced with many of the consequences of a warming planet, according to climate researchers at NOAA.

Greenhouse gas levels currently expected by mid-century will produce devastating long-term droughts and a sea-level rise that will persist for 1,000 years regardless of how well the world curbs future emissions of carbon dioxide, an international team of scientists reported yesterday.

Top climate researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Switzerland and France said their analysis shows that carbon dioxide will remain near peak levels in the atmosphere far longer than other greenhouse gases, which dissipate relatively quickly.

"I think you have to think about this stuff as more like nuclear waste than acid rain: The more we add, the worse off we'll be," NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon told reporters in a conference call. "The more time that we take to make decisions about carbon dioxide, the more irreversible climate change we'll be locked into."

At the moment, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere stand at 385 parts per million. Many climate scientists and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have set a goal of stabilizing atmospheric carbon at 450 ppm, but current projections put the world on track to hit 550 ppm by 2035, rising after that point by 4.5 percent a year [...]

Even if the world managed to halt the carbon dioxide buildup at 450 ppm, the researchers concluded, the subtropics would experience a 10 percent decrease in precipitation, compared with the 15 percent decrease they would see at 600 ppm. That level is still akin to mega-droughts such as the Dust Bowl. The already parched U.S. Southwest would probably see a 5 percent drop in precipitation during its dry season.

This doesn't mean we despair and give up on stopping increased emissions, but it does mean that much of the damage has already been done. And how did this happen? Eric Pooley from Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy thinks he knows - the media has done a terrible job explaining the consequences of a warming planet.

Journalists and senior editors need to pay heed to Pooley’s three tough conclusions abut how “damaging” the recent media of the climate debate has been:

• The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus … that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones…. The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.

• The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action–i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices–and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.

• Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the “environment” pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, when it is clearly to society’s detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.

We get thousands of hours of "who is mad at who" and "which politician looked at the other politician funny" in the press, but scant coverage of the most potentially disruptive event in human history, which to this day has not been fully contextualized and left open to demagoguery from denialists on the right. The press has always found areas like science difficult, but in this case, science is keenly attached to public policy, and by failing to report honorably on one, it was impossible to summon the political will to affect the other. And this is true across public policy, for example in the recent stimulus debate, where cherry-picked bits from right-wing blast faxes are made to be "the story" despite them being only a tiny fraction of the overall spending package.

We're going to have lots of climate-related battles in the coming years. The Administration is taking it on as an energy issue, a national security issue, and a major foreign policy issue. But without a proper understanding of the incontrovertible facts of the debate, and a better rendering by those who shape the news, these efforts too will fall short, and Pooley's conclusion will be even more true.

The media’s collective decision to play the stenographer role actually helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.

Cross out the words "climate action" and add virtually any other major issue, and you have the story of the past 16 years.

Elections Have Consequences

This was expected, but President Obama is setting in motion a process that would finally allow California to set its own emissions standards.

President Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday.

The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.

Mr. Obama’s presidential memorandum will order the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the California application. While it stops short of flatly ordering the Bush decision reversed, the agency’s regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.

Just to pre-empt the whining from the right, the EPA had never before in its history denied California a waiver under the Clean Air Act. The courts have looked at this from the perspective of the automakers and have ruled repeatedly in favor of California and other states, agreeing that they are well within their rights to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Not only did the Bush Administration deny California the right to implement their tailpipe emissions law, they slow-walked the fuel efficiency standards passed by the Congress and signed by the then-President in 2007. President Obama will direct the Transportation Department to finalize those standards as well.

This will be announced in the East Room tomorrow. We now have a President who understands the need to act swiftly to combat the worst effects of climate change. California will finally be allowed to lead this effort.

News Of The Good: EPA Waiver For California Imminent

It's worthwhile every so often to look for the silver lining in the storm clouds over this state. After all, we do have a new President! That seems to be working out! And his pick for EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, was confirmed last night. Which means that it's probably only a matter of days before California gets its long-sought waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions.

With a new occupant in the White House, California could soon start enforcing its landmark 2002 law requiring a sharp reduction in vehicle emissions.

State leaders and environmentalists are pressing for quick approval of a waiver that would let California and at least 13 other states impose tougher air-quality standards than allowed under federal law. The Bush administration rejected the request a year ago, but that could be reversed by President Barack Obama and his environmental team.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he backed the California law. Last year, he co-sponsored a bill by Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California to approve the waiver.

"If I'm confirmed, I will immediately revisit the waiver," Lisa Jackson, Obama's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, told Boxer at her confirmation hearing last week.

This would set in motion a program to reduce emissions from vehicles by 30 percent over the next seven years. It would spur alternative transportation development like SUPERTRAINS out of necessity, and force the production of clean-energy vehicles. Industry was not going to innovate on their own; they had 30 years to recognize this problem but they sat on their hands. It's not a question of whether or not we can afford to implement this; given the natural disasters like wildfires that hit the state with increasing frequency, given the melting of the Sierra snowpack which decreases our access to water resources, given the public health effects of dirty air (a recent report showed that clean air increases lifespans by up to three years), given all the ancillary costs of climte change, we can't afford not to.

The Governor and state leaders have been lobbying for the waiver since President Obama's inauguration, and I'm confident that we'll see granting within the next week.

Old Tech, New Tech, Lower Emissions

We have such an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that we must explore all options. Some are very forward-thinking, like Democrat Chris Van Hollen and Republican Zach Wamp's proposal for green banks:

Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) wrote a letter to Obama this week urging his support for a national “green bank,” and a fund to help homeowners retrofit their homes for energy efficiency.

They say private sector support for the projects is flagging in the face of falling fuel prices and the evaporation of credit markets.

“The current financial crisis has not only thrown us into recession, it has significantly derailed or killed off virtually every alternative energy project in the pipeline,” the duo wrote in a letter to Obama this week, “making renewable energy yet another victim of the economic fallout.”

The “green bank” has a more formal name, the National Clean Energy Lending Authority. The $10 billion program would be a government organization intended to finance the transformation of the energy sector.

I agree, says the guy with SRI (socially responsible investing) funds that have lost 60% or more!

More seriously, thinking long-term on funding green investment and future innovation in the sector is a brilliant idea. But there are also more immediate solutions that aren't totally intuitive, but would reduce emissions in a big way. Phillip Longman writes about freight rail.

For now, Virginia lacks the resources to build its "steel wheel interstate," but that could change quickly. Thanks to the collapsing economy, a powerful new consensus has developed in Washington behind a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure. The incoming administration is talking of spending as much as $1 trillion to jump-start growth and make up for past neglect, an outlay that Obama himself characterizes as "the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." We’ll soon be moving earth again like it’s 1959.

By all rights, America’s dilapidated rail lines ought to be a prime candidate for some of that spending. All over the country there are opportunities like the I-81/Crescent Corridor deal, in which relatively modest amounts of capital could unclog massive traffic bottlenecks, revving up the economy while saving energy and lives. Many of these projects have already begun, like Virginia’s, or are sitting on planners’ shelves and could be up and running quickly. And if we’re willing to think bigger and more long term—and we should be—the potential of a twenty-first-century rail system is truly astonishing. In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 85 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emission by 38 percent and oil consumption by 22 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 13 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.

Yet despite this astounding potential, virtually no one in Washington is talking about investing any of that $1 trillion in freight rail capacity. Instead, almost all the talk out of the Obama camp and Congress has been about spending for roads and highway bridges, projects made necessary in large measure by America’s overreliance on pavement-smashing, traffic-snarling, fossil-fuel-guzzling trucks for the bulk of its domestic freight transport. This could be an epic mistake.

Again, I agree. The over-reliance on "shovel-ready" projects encourages unsustainable suburban sprawl. The current mania for infrastructure spending offers an opportunity to change that dynamic and use the latest in technology as well as old tech like freight rail.

Making Them Do It On Climate Change

Making Them Do It On Climate Change

by dday

Regarding Digby's musing about kabuki, even if this is a game for the cameras to give Obama space to his left, it doesn't mean that progressives shouldn't rally to Kerry and Conrad and make the argument. In fact, it seems to me that is the whole purpose - to "make Obama do it," as it were, and create a bottom-up movement for a real, liberal stimulus with a focus on job creation. Which progressives ought to do. Because there are certainly counter-vailing forces inside the Obama team (I wouldn't guess that Larry Summers is necessarily in on the game) who have the ear of the President-elect, and so even if this is kabuki it would work better with a grassroots response.

There's another area in which progressives need to speak up and not assume that our betters in Washington have everything covered, and that's on the issue of climate change. It looks as if the House has been reorganizing for the sole purpose to pass meaningful climate legislation, be that a cap and trade or a carbon tax. Henry Waxman deposed John Dingell as hed of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Dingell's coal-state partner in obstruction, Rick Boucher, was hustled out the door as well.

As Kate reported earlier today, new House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is reorganizing the committee, unifying oversight of climate, energy, air quality, and water issues under a single subcommittee: the Energy and Environment Subcommittee.

The Boston Globe just broke the news that Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will chair the new subcommittee.

Right now Markey chairs the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, and reportedly enjoys working on telecom policy. Due to his seniority, he had his choice of subcommittees this session -- which meant he could, if he wanted, take the reins of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee from coal lover and Dingell ally Rick Boucher (D-Va.). That alone would have been, as Joe noted the other day, "almost as big a deal as Waxman defeating Dingell for committee chair."

But now Waxman has consolidated environment and energy jurisdiction in one subcommittee. Gone is the Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee, chaired by Gene Green [D-Texas], another Dingell ally [...]

The Energy and Environment Subcommittee has something the Select Committee does not: legislative jurisdiction. It will be the key subcommittee pushing climate/energy legislation through the House.

(Boucher moves to that Telecom and Internet subcommittee, and he's been pretty good on that issue.)

This seems like a very grand setup for bold action to combat climate change, engineered by Waxman and Nancy Pelosi.

Then why is Pelosi telling Energy & Environment News that the House won't be getting around to climate legislation this year? (Sub. reqd. for E&E, so forgive the link to National Review's "Planet Gore" denial site. They think this is a sign that the planet's actually cooling and Democrats are quietly burying the issue. Someone forgot to tell the scientists!)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said today that she has enough votes to pass cap-and-trade legislation aimed at curbing the effects of global warming but would not commit to holding a vote in 2009.

Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Pelosi said she has sufficient backing in the Democratic-controlled House to move a cap-and-trade bill, but will not force the issue. "I'm not sure this year, because I don't know if we'll be ready," Pelosi said. "We won't go before we're ready."

Pelosi acknowledged the December deadline looming over U.N. negotiations toward a new international climate change agreement. "We're sensitive to Copenhagen and the rest of that," she said, referring to the Denmark capital that will host the next annual U.N. conference. "And it's a very high priority for me." [...]

Incoming House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) will take the lead in 2009 on a climate cap-and-trade bill. But to date, Waxman has not spelled out his plans for that legislation.

"To be determined," replied Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and Pelosi's point person on global warming issues, when asked today about prospects for global warming legislation. . . .

Asked about her expectations for the timing of cap-and-trade legislation, Pelosi replied, "I don't know what the timetable will be. A lot of that will relate to how quickly we get through the recovery, whatever else we're doing, and when the bill will be ready. I don't think it's ready."

I spoke to Frank O'Donnell from Clean Air Watch about this yesterday. He agreed that this seems incongruous, given all the work done to change around committees and put the best people on this issue in charge of it. "But why isn't this a top-line issue?" O'Donnell wondered. "Maybe Pelosi is just being cautious, but the stars seem to be aligned as well as they could be."

Certainly one would think that you don't want to try for major climate legislation in 2010, during the midterm elections. Although, given that green energy initiatives are very popular, and seeing all the Republicans greenwashing themselves during the most recent elections, that could be the calculation. But of course, that wastes another year at a time when more Arctic ice is melting and more greenhouse gases are being spewed into the atmosphere. Not to mention the fact that conference committees and reconciliation bills can extend this process for months.

I'm wondering whether this reluctance to act is due to the Obama team's uncertainty on which way to go, and the conflicts among his top advisers (there's that Larry Summers again).

In the fall of 1997, when the Clinton administration was forming its position for the Kyoto climate treaty talks, Lawrence H. Summers argued that the United States would risk damaging the domestic economy if it set overly ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions.

Lawrence H. Summers, left, and Peter R. Orszag, leaders of the Obama economic team, say a cap-and-trade system should include a “safety valve” against high prices of pollution permits.

Mr. Summers, then the deputy Treasury secretary, said at the time that there was a compelling scientific case for action on global warming but that a too-rapid move against emissions of greenhouse gases risked dire and unknowable economic consequences.

His view prevailed over those of officials arguing for tougher standards, among them Carol M. Browner, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and her mentor, Al Gore, then the vice president.

Today, as the climate-change debate once again heats up, Mr. Summers leads the economic team of the incoming administration, and Ms. Browner has been designated its White House coordinator of energy and climate policy. And Mr. Gore is hovering as an informal adviser to President-elect Barack Obama.

As Mr. Obama seeks to find the right balance between his environmental goals and his plans to revive the economy, he may have to resolve conflicting views among some of his top advisers.

To be sure, Obama has shown a desire to implement an expansive green jobs plan and fold energy issues into the overall recovery package. But there seems like reluctance on setting climate targets. O'Donnell said that he wouldn't doubt that Pelosi was deferring on this. "Barabara Boxer has been quoted saying that she's willing to do something simpler and more bare-bones and let Obama's team fill in the blanks."

Once again, I think this is a case where progressives need to be the squeaky wheel. It makes no sense to constitute an environmental dream team in the House and then slow-walk whatever legislation they can pass. The world cannot wait for American leadership on this, and any delay will just increase the needed targets and cause more pain. The House must act. We have to make them do it.

Blinding Me With Science

Politico has a piece today on Obama's cabinet being a middle-of-the-roader's dream. I guess that's true, and it's not entirely unexpected. Obama always told us who he was throughout the campaign, despite the hopes of those inclined to spin his cultural uniqueness into obvious progressivism.

But I would argue that this centrism is not uniform throughout the cabinet. In the green and labor spaces, the cabinet does live up to the promise of idealists for the most part. Hilda Solis is a fiery progressive at Labor, and all of the environmental picks are pretty solid. Most of all, we have a President who clearly values science and pays attention to scientific reason. That's a major change from the past eight years. The Presidential Science Advisor is going to be a Harvard physicist, and the head of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) will be a marine biologist and MacArthur genius grant recipient.

John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist best known as a strong proponent of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and a specialist on energy technology policy and nuclear nonproliferation, has been chosen to be Mr. Obama’s science adviser, according to two people close to Dr. Holdren and one person involved in the decision [...] Also, Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University and longtime contact of mine on marine conservation issues and climate, will be nominated by Mr. Obama to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dr. Holdren has long been pressing for prompt action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and advance research on non-polluting energy sources. He has told me in the past that he consciously eschewed getting involved with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to maintain an independent view of the science.

This is how Dr. Holdren described his stance to me in 2007: “I am one of those who believes that any reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date look at the evidence makes clear that civilization has already generated dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system…. What keeps me going is my belief that there is still a chance of avoiding catastrophe.”

You can add this to Dr. Stephen Chu, the new Energy Secretary, and you have a cadre of scientists who understand the very real dangers for planetary sustainability that come with continued burning of harmful greenhouse gases. We have to reduce the CO2 burden on the planet and come up with a new energy future that doesn't just reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but on fossil fuels entirely. A recent climate study by the American Geophysicist Union makes it clear that an American return to native fuels like coal would be disastrous for the world.

Some commentators have argued that falling reserves of oil and gas will automatically limit CO2's rise.
But at an American Geophysical Union meeting, researchers said reserves of coal dwarfed those of other fuels.

It was even possible oil's demise could trigger an acceleration in emissions through more coal use, they added.

"We can replace oil with liquid fuels derived from coal," said Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California.

"But these liquid fuels emit even more carbon dioxide than oil, so the end of oil can mean an increase in coal and even more carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, and even more rapid onset of dangerous climate change."

In the past, there would be nobody in the highest reaches of government to stop the headlong rush to boost parochial interests by burning coal as somehow a way to mitigate the effects of climate change and get us off oil. But now, we have an Energy Secretary who has called coal a nightmare.

Carbon capture and storage research is still in its early stages, said Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist announced by Obama this week as his nominee to run the U.S. Department of Energy. Real-world projects to pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide might also be rejected unless scientists show it can be done safely, Chu said during an April speech.

"Coal is my worst nightmare," said Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Stanford University professor.

Chu noted that coal is the current "default option" for meeting growing energy needs in the United States, China and India. But coal is also firing continued increases in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, even at a time when scientists say the need to dramatically reduce those emissions is critical.

"We have lots of fossil fuel," Chu said during a talk outlining his views on energy policy. "That's really both good and bad news. We won't run out of energy, but there's enough carbon in the ground to really cook us."

This is a return to SCIENCE driving policy, instead of policymakers driving a truck through science and doing whatever they want. Nothing about that is middle of the road.

...I just want to make it clear that I am not advocating living in a cave, in case you were wondering.

California Leads On Climate Change

Yesterday's adoption by the California Air Resources Board of a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is really worthy of praise. Ignoring the bleatings of neo-Hooverists and apologists for polluters who insist that concern for the environment is a "job-killer," the board, led by Mary Nichols, put forward 31 rules designed to cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. This will force innovation and provide a boost to the economy and the burgeoning industry of green technology, as the Governor noted in his remarks.

The Modesto Bee has a look at some of the plans.

INDUSTRY:
• Impose an emissions cap on utilities, refineries and other large industrial sources of greenhouse gases.
• Allow those large polluters to gradually lower emissions by participating in a cap-and-trade market.

TRANSPORTATION:
• Put into effect a 2002 California law requiring automakes to produce cleaner vehicles. The Bush administration has blocked the law, but state regulators expect President-elect Barack Obama's administration will back it.
• Require fuel companies to reformulate fuels so they are a combined 10 percent less carbon-intensive by 2020.
• Give local governments incentives to curb urban sprawl and reduce how far people drive to work or school.
• Require cargo and cruise ships to turn off their engines while docked.

ENERGY:
• Require utilities to generate one-third of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal by 2020.
• Strengthen energy-efficiency standards for appliances, as well as for existing and new buildings.

The fact that a renewable standard, cap and trade, green building, smart growth and development, energy efficiency and clean fuels are all combined into this large agreement is very hopeful. While the political sector is a mess, this is truly one area where California can become a model for the nation. And while there will be up-front costs, those can be mitigated by expected federal attention to renewable energy and green jobs, which could allow consumers to be eligible for federal tax incentives to implement these ideas. What's more, as Nichols argued, this is a big-picture savings over the long term.

But Air Resource Board chairwoman Mary Nichols said California's plan would save its residents and businesses money in the long run.

"We believe that California, again and again, has pushed for higher levels of efficiency in our electric sector, our buildings and appliances, and time after time it turns out efficiency measures have not only saved us money but leaped our economy ahead," Nichols said after the vote.

A board report found that the average household would save $400 a year by driving more fuel-efficient vehicles and living in more energy-efficient homes. And already, private investors have given more than $2.5 billion this year to new companies that have sprung up in California, in part to respond to the state's environmental goals, said Bob Epstein, co-founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs.

"Our president-elect has called for stimulating our economy," said Bill Mcgavern, director of California's Sierra Club. "I think he and the Congress will be looking to the state of California, and these measures can serve as a model for the rest of the country."

This is one area where we can be proud to be Californians. The SacBee has more.

United Front Against Climate Change

In what is some big news out of Poland, developing nations are agreeing to sharp emissions cuts in the next Kyoto-style agreement.

POZNAN, Poland -- Several major developing countries that had long resisted making specific commitments to combat global warming are laying out concrete plans to curb their greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations climate conference here, a shift that could mark the most positive development in the slow-moving negotiations.

Getting the emerging economies -- such as China, Brazil and South Africa -- to limit their escalating carbon footprint has been seen as crucial to the prospects for a future global climate pact. For years these nations have argued that the industrial world must first own up to its historic responsibility and commit to binding cuts, while the United States and other developed countries have countered that they cannot afford to limit emissions until their international economic competitors do the same.

The past two weeks, however, have seen an easing of that impasse. Brazil has pledged to cut its annual deforestation rate by 70 percent by 2017 -- which could reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 to 45 percent over the next decade -- and Mexico has vowed to bring its carbon emissions to 50 percent below their 2002 levels by 2050.

China, South Korea, South Africa, India and even Kazakhstan are also planning cuts (I like!).

Now, in some ways, the lower emissions are a fait accompli given the global economic slowdown. Global oil use was down this year for the first time since 1983, and will probably continue to fall in the near term. But it's important that the slowdown be used as a moment to increase competitiveness along green energy lines, and spur the kind of innovation needed to maintain a carbon lifestyle without carbon usage. This can be done through increased energy efficiency and hard emissions targets. Thankfully, we will have a President committed to those steps, and an Energy Secretary who understands the science and technology needed to make great advancements, and who knows the engineers can do it if the lobbyists get out of the way.

Add in a little environmental activism and you have the ingredients for a very real global focus toward mitigating the worst effects of climate change. In these bleak times, at least this is encouraging.

UPDATE: The EU put together a big climate change pact today as well.

Tofu For Planetary Survival

Remember when the Bush Adminstration boasted about how they reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 1% in 2006? Remember how this showed that they were on the right path to solving the climate crisis? Yeah, well, that's no longer operative.

According to a new release from the Energy Information Administration, “U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2007 were 1.4 percent above the 2006 total.” This increase erases the 1% drop in emissions in 2006, for which Bush claimed credit (even though the decrease was due to an unusually warm winter and high fuel prices).

So, if warm winters have the effect of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, then maybe global warming is the only way to stop global warming! Ever think of that, Al Gore?

Still, this kind of puzzles me. Gas prices were high in 2006, but they hit a record high in 2007, and were consistently higher than the previous year. It doesn't make a lot of sense, outside of just general increases in demand, to see emissions rise. Unless, you know, this is all about the cows rather than the cars.

When Rajendra Pachauri, who runs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made a suggestion that could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 18 percent, he was excoriated. Why was his proposal so unpalatable? Because he suggested eating less meat would be the easiest way people could reduce their carbon footprint, with one meat-free day per week as a first step [...] Boris Johnson, London's outspoken mayor, posted a long screed on his blog, declaring, "The whole proposition is so irritating that I am almost minded to eat more meat in response."

Johnson may not appreciate the environmental value of replacing his steak and kidney pie with a tofu scramble, but the benefits would be quite real. Animal agriculture is responsible for local pollution from animal waste and chemical use and for greenhouse gas emissions from the energy-intensive process of growing feed and raising livestock, plus the, ahem, byproducts of animal digestion. It would be much easier -- and cheaper -- to give up meat than to, say, convert an entire country's electrical grid to using solar, wind, or nuclear energy. A rural Montanan might have no choice but to drive to work, but he can certainly switch out his pork chop for pinto beans. While Pachauri was correct to note that one need not go vegan to help the environment -- simply eating less meat would help -- he could have also emphasized the more politically appealing point that one can be a carnivore and still reduce one's impact by choosing different meats. Even limiting one's meat consumption to chicken yields major environmental benefits -- not to mention health and financial benefits [...]

Now should be environmental vegetarianism's big moment. Global warming is the single biggest threat to the health of the planet, and meat consumption plays a bigger role in greenhouse gas emissions than even many environmentalists realize. The production and transportation of meat and dairy, particularly if you include the grains that are fed to livestock, is much more energy-intensive than it is for plants. Animals, especially cattle, also release gases like methane and nitrous oxide that, pound for pound, are up to 30 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Internationally there is an additional cost to animal agriculture: massive deforestation to make land available for grazing, which releases greenhouse gases as the trees are burned and removes valuable foliage that absorbs carbon dioxide. As a result, according to a 2006 United Nations report, internationally the livestock sector accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions -- more than the transportation sector.

While typing this, I recognized that I had a meat-free day yesterday: grapefruit for breakfast, meatless chicken nuggets (quite tasty!) for lunch, and my world-famous bean and cheese quesadillas for dinner. Getting the whole country on board with this might be even harder than making every car a Prius, but it'd be good to see at least some emphasis on the role of food consumption in energy and carbon policy.

There are so many systems that rely on burning carbon that it's going to be extremely difficult to get them all in order without a comprehensive strategy. And that includes meat-eating.

Chairman Waxman

I guess Henry Waxman, a key ally to Nancy Pelosi, wouldn't have made the move to unseat John Dingell if he didn't count the votes.

Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.) has ousted Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (Mich.), as Democratic lawmakers voted 137-122 Thursday morning to hand the gavel of the powerhouse panel to its second-ranking member.

This, more than anything, could be the biggest change in the federal government in 2009 and beyond. Waxman's Safe Climate Act sets the targets needed to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. It now becomes the working document in the House for anti-global warming legislation. And his constituency doesn't include a major polluting industry.

From a policy standpoint, it's a major progressive victory.

And the balance of power in the Congress moves once again to the Left Coast. In fact, right to my doorstep!