Bullet Dodged

Lisa Murkowski's effort to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants failed yesterday, which is a boon for the public. The EPA is complying with a Supreme Court ruling to regulate carbon, and if Republicans don't like it, they can write their own legislative guidance for how to do so. Even my Senator got this one right:

Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) smacks down Murkowski at great length, saying “we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand on climate change” and if you don’t want the EPA to take action, then the only alternative is cap-and-trade. “Global warming is real…. it’s happening all over the world.” Attacks the “Flat Earth Society” who opposes action.

Murkowski has vowed to bring this back up, but she could also work to pass a real climate bill. The EPA's jurisdiction on setting their own rules is the proverbial gun to the head to force something to get done, and Murkowski may not like it, but her only recourse is to take action.

I don't know what that action will be. Jeff Bingaman is talking about splitting cap and trade from the renewable energy standard. But hopefully we can get something, and failing that, the EPA will be able to carry out its mission.

The Schwarzenegger Plan For Indefinite Depression

Senate Democrats have sent a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger asking him to reconsider his veto of the renewable energy standard and subsequent executive order. The strongly worded letter has about as much currency as the eleventy billion-dollar bill, but it does explain why the Governor's hypocritical action is a bad deal for California.

Respectfully, an Executive Order does not have the force and effect of law. Additionally, such a proclamation will only cause confusion and uncertainty to California's energy markets, jeopardizing California's role as the world leader in renewable energy development and green jobs.

As you noted when you signed AB 32, the landmark "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006," administrative actions are no substitute for a statute that is permanent and enforceable.

Directing the California Air Resources Board to implement an RPS program is a fundamentally flawed approach. The CARB is not an energy agency; it is an air quality regulatory agency. There are numerous provisions of law which impair the CARB's ability to implement a renewable portfolio standard. Assigning this new responsibility to the CARB will not result in new renewable energy being built soon--it will only lead to litigation, regulatory confusion, and delay.

In our view, it is essential to green businesses and the renewable energy investment community which bring jobs and capital into California, that California's 33% RPS be statutorily established and not subject to the whims of changing administrations.

There's only one reason that Schwarzenegger gave the CARB the ability to implement a renewable energy standard - so he can go on talk shows and crow that he's instituted an environmental achievement. Except, as is explained here, it won't. It will get tied up in court challenges and confusion, without a clear mandate for the standard or penalties thereto.

Schwarzenegger has responded to this by calling the Legislature's bill "protectionist," and saying that if we get water from the Colorado River, we should be able to get renewable energy from other states as well. The difference is that a commodity is not the same as a job. The twin goals of a renewable energy standard are to spur the usage of renewables as a means to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and to build a green-collar economy that will create millions of new jobs. Schwarzenegger would rather give those jobs away. And given the perilous state of the economy here in California, we simply cannot afford that.

Job losses in the public sector will prolong the economic pain in California through 2010 even as a recovery gets under way nationwide, two forecasters predict.

Jeff Michael, a forecaster at the University of the Pacific, said Tuesday that California's recession will be over before the end of the year. But the cutbacks in state and local government, along with the continuing fallout from the mortgage meltdown, will make 2010 feel like another year of recession, Michael said in UOP's latest quarterly forecast.

Similarly, the newest UCLA Anderson Forecast predicts a sluggish recovery because of the weak public sector. UCLA senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg is more optimistic than Michael about the housing market, and says California will outperform the U.S. economy starting in 2011.

Yet both economists say Californians can expect continued high unemployment for a couple more years or so. The unemployment rate is currently 11.9 percent in California and 11.8 percent in greater Sacramento.

And yet here is Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoing the only major bill that would produce any semblance of an economic recovery for California.

Palace Sentries Dispatched To Guard The Drawbridge

The establishment in Sacramento has manned the barricades, battened down the hatches and gone on the offensive to prove their own worth. They sent their best man in the media, George Skelton, out to prove that no, despite your lying eyes, the California Legislature had a real banner year. After all, they managed to bring suffering to the lives of hundreds of thousands of state residents with consensus and bipartisan elan!

The current Legislature, regardless of Duvall and despite ideological polarization, has had a better year than it's getting credit for.

Its main accomplishment was keeping the state afloat amid a flood of red ink, created primarily by the toughest economic times since the Great Depression. OK, so it did use some bailing wire and chewing gum! The bills got paid, even if briefly with IOUs.

With great difficulty and pain -- at least for Democrats -- the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed programs by roughly $30 billion. They also struck a major blow against "auto-pilot" spending by permanently eliminating all automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, except for K-12 schools. And they summoned enough courage to temporarily increase taxes by $12.5 billion.

In the end, they found a way to restore health insurance for 660,000 low-income kids.

The tax increases hit the more vulnerable elements of society disproportionately, of course. They actually found that way to restore children's health insurance by lowering industry taxes and increasing the co-pay and deductible burden on the low-income families themselves, while reducing the covered care. And anyone who adds cutting $30 billion in programs and eliminating COLA as an accomplishment is a bit of a social deviant. But there are probably no lengths to which Skelton will go to defend the palace walls from the rabble who think, based on the evidence, that the system is horribly broken.

Steve Maviglio wisely steers clear of the more horrific achievements of this year's Legislature, and offers a slightly more defensible outlook of the '09 Legislative session. Still, there's a lot unsaid:

Looking back, getting the measures on the May ballot was a significant early success that required 2/3 votes. And toward the end of the session, in addition to the renewable energy bill, Speaker Bass pushed through measures on childrens health and domestic violence that won broad bipartisan support. (The Speaker also got a standing ovation, and she appears to have strengthened her support in Caucus. Compare that to the ouster of the two Republican leaders).

Okay, so the grand water deal didn't get done. Big deal. Nothing like that has been done for a generation. Perhaps Senate President pro Tem Steinberg set the bar too high when he said he'd get it done. In any case, all parties agree that they got close and can pick up the pieces and get it finished in short order.

So for all those crying for major reforms, put it all into perspective. Sure, improvements could be made, and things could have been better, but this is not reason for drastic action. Far from it.

Of course, the renewable bill is veto bait, as are many of the other major bills pending the Governor's signature. And the domestic violence bill didn't pass the Senate, so, um, that doesn't count. The prison bill offered decent parole reforms but stopped well short of a real solution. Everyone keeps saying the water bill will happen but the two sides remain far apart, and the fact that they'll have to go into overtime to reconcile it kind of proves the point, no?

But Maviglio tips his hand with the line "this is not reason for drastic action." Of course he would say that. He's profited well from the status quo. Anything that messes with it could hurt him professionally, and what's more, could stop the endless blaming of outside factors to account for stunning failure.

There is no shame in stating that this was a failed legislative session. Just about everyone in California would agree with you, particularly the ones who are suffering the most from the destruction of social insurance caused by the most heartless cuts. Simply put, the Great Recession dominated legislative activity, and the conservative veto from various 2/3 requirements restricts the Legislature from fulfilling the expressed will of the people through their votes (NOTE: This does not only come into play with the budget; late last Friday Republicans blocked over 20 bills that required 2/3 votes for one reason or another, probably because they knew they could get away with it). That's not something to explain away, it's actually something to fight, every single day until the problem is rectified.

Skelton and Maviglio may want to tell themselves all is well, but the public knows better, and they're going to demand major structural change. Those who think that the Legislature can still be a force for good in the state can get aboard and provide the best ideas to break the supermajority gridlock and get the state moving again. Or they can defend their narrow interests. Their defense will fail, and it would be a shame not to see them on the right side of history.

Bait And Switch: The Governor's Executive Order To Destroy California's Green Economy

As Jim Evans, Communications Director for Sen. Steinberg, notes, the Governor is poised to veto a bill he championed, which would mandate the highest renewable energy standard in the nation, requiring utilities to get 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. But it's far worse than just a veto. Schwarzenegger wants to then set the standard himself by executive order. You can see why this would please him - he would be able to say that he boldly moved the state forward in the renewable energy space, while vetoing the bill from the Legislature that would do the same thing. And he wold significantly weaken the standard in a variety of ways.

The order presumably would set no limit on how much of the green power could be imported from other states.

Environmentalists who have been told about the governor's still-evolving plans said Schwarzenegger also was considering directing the California Air Resources Board to look at broadening the state's definition of renewable energy sources to include large hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy plants.

Critics questioned whether Schwarzenegger's order would be binding once he leaves office at the end of 2010. The validity of the order would be subject to a variety of potential legal challenges, they predicted.

So Schwarzenegger would allow utilities to outsource all the green jobs that would be created if power needed to be created on California soil, ruining the one area of potential economic recovery in the bill. He would put the standard on shaky legal ground, open to litigation and an unclear mandate. And he would hand a gift to the nuclear power industry by twisting arms at the Air Resources Board to change their definition of renewable energy.

This isn't just short-sighted, it's downright criminal. A high renewable standard could spurn all kinds of economic activity, but without a limit on importation, that activity will just go elsewhere instead of California. This is an effort of questionable legality for Schwarzenegger to reward corporate cronies with lower purchasing prices for green energy at the expense of California jobs.

Astounding.

Legislature Passes Groundbreaking Renewable Energy Legislation; "Green" Governor Will Veto

SB14, which would set a first-in-the-nation standard that utilities must receive 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, passed the Legislature late last night.

“Increased development of renewable energy in California has tremendous potential as an economic development tool. These are clean, green jobs that belong in California. SB 14 sets a clear target with a real deadline, and then makes it as easy as possible to bring renewable energy on line.

In light of the state’s ambitious new carbon emission targets, SB 14 will give energy agencies the flexibility they need in order to meet those goals. Current law “caps” the amount of renewable energy that the Public Utilities Commission may order utilities to buy or build at 20 percent. This bill would remove this cap and require utilities to acquire 33 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020.”

This would make California's renewable energy standard one of the most aggressive in the world. The Governor, feted in magazines and national media as an environmental leader, has vocally backed the 33% standard in the past. But power plant generators have pressured Schwarzenegger to veto the bill. And according to the LA Times, he will.

The Senate did manage to pass the energy bill, which would raise to 33% the amount of energy the utilities must get from renewable sources. Final approval by the Assembly of some minor amendments was expected.

However, a high-ranking administration official said late Friday that the governor may not sign the bill, SB 14 by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), because of provisions limiting the amount of energy that could come from outside California. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the bills were not yet on the governor's desk.

That would really be the icing on the cake to the worst Governorship in California history. The one issue on which he staked his legacy, and he is likely to veto the bill most likely to drive the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly because it would keep too many jobs in the state. Adding a renewable energy standard and mandating a majority of that energy be generated in state, is probably the only bill passed this year that looks to expand the local economy. And because of that, Schwarzenegger will veto it.

And the same magazines will put him on the cover with the slogan "The Greenenator" and talk up his environmental credentials.

Scaled-Back Prison Bill Done, Water Bill Not

Notes from yet another long session in the Legislature:

The Senate could wait no longer for the Assembly to get their act together, so they passed a reduced prison package along the Assembly's lines, one that falls $200 million short of projections and does not have a sentencing commission. The Governor has announced he'll sign the bill. It's marginally worthwhile for the parole reforms, but really nowhere near what's needed. And so the federal judges will in all likelihood order a mass release, and because little is being done to address root causes, the cost of prisons and the population as a whole are both still likely to increase. The cowards in the Assembly who think they have designs on higher office after this travesty should know that this vote will have importance, but not in the way they think.

The bill to waive CEQA requirements (California Environmental Quality Act) to put a football stadium in Southern California - without an NFL team, mind you - did not get by Darrell Steinberg, despite lots of energy and effort from special interests. He's giving the various parties more time to negotiate a settlement. Sports stadiums are among the biggest corporate welfare projects we have in America.

The much-ballyhooed water deal has been scuttled, as Karen Bass announced she did not have the votes to move it. The Speaker may ask for a special session on water, and the Governor would probably move that as well. The middle-of-the-night rush obviously didn't work, so some transparency would be preferable.

Still waiting on the renewable energy standard bill, which would put California in the vanguard of the nation in terms of its portfolio (33% by 2020).

Aggressive Renewable Energy Standard About To Hit California

As state Senator Mark DeSaulnier said to me a few weeks ago, on a majority-vote basis, California remains in the vanguard of the country. The Legislature is poised to prove that by the end of the session, if they manage to get to the Governor's desk the most aggressive renewable energy standard in America, with a target of getting 33% of all energy from renewable sources by 2020. Most stakeholders appear to be on board with this standard, including the utilities, who won't reach the current RES goal of 20% by 2010 (Southern California Edison Co. is at 15.5%, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is at 11.9% and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. only at 6.1%, as of last year). They are confident that the transmission grid, helped along by federal stimulus money, will allow them to transfer renewable energy freely enough to reach the 33% standard. The question, posed today by the LA Times, concerns where that energy will come from.

The main argument is over how much of the new green power must be generated within California's borders. Another point of contention is which is more expensive: in-state renewable energy or wind and solar power from facilities elsewhere in the West [...]

Unlike the current 20% renewable energy law for 2010, the two proposed bills with goals for 2020 have enforcement provisions, including financial penalties for failing to meet renewable energy procurement levels.

They also broaden the requirements to include publicly owned utilities, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

A big sticking point in the debate is how much renewable power the state's utilities are allowed to buy or generate out of state. The current law has no limit.

The utilities favor that, but labor unions and their allies want a provision in pending legislation that at least 80% of the power be generated in California.

Unions and their supporters say that most of the new power plants should be built in state so that California workers could snag most of the new green jobs and other benefits involved. "If the people of Wyoming receive the jobs, the tax revenue and the infrastructure, what benefit are Californians going to get other than higher electric bills?" said Matt Freedman, an attorney with the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayers' group. "The question is, 'Who is going to benefit from the 33% standard?'"

First of all, I can't believe that the 2006 law has no enforcement provisions. At the very least, there has to be some incentive to get the utilities to meet the standard, otherwise, as we're seeing right now, they'll slow-walk it.

To answer the man from the Utility Reform Network who asked, "Who is going to benefit from the 33% standard," the answer is that we all will, both by lower emissions and by setting a marker for other states to follow. Renewable energy is extremely popular, and if California acts boldly to set a high standard, they will see a residual benefit. There's probably a sweet spot in between no limit to out-of-state production and 20%, that can benefit both the environment and job creation in California. Perhaps a small tariff for importing renewable energy could be created to level the playing field.

Regardless, we're very likely to see this precedent-setting standard this year.

The bill numbers are SB 14 (Simitian) and AB 64 (Krekorian).

Falling Behind

The value of a planned economy: no need for debates that can be hijacked by the forces of regress.

As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases [...]

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.

To be clear, I don't SUPPORT the kind of totalitarianism evident in China, easier though it may make the transition to renewable energy. I wish that Republicans in this country would figure out that our value to the global economy lies in innovation and entrepreneurship, which is far more flexible here than in China, and if they would only allow it to flourish, America could easily become a world leader on this front. As it is, China uses its buying power and the relative alacrity with which they can turn the ship of state to crush us.

The article contains good news for the planet, and that supersedes the depressing news it augurs for this country's role in the post-American world, but it's frustrating to watch.

...meanwhile, in exceptional America, it takes months of browbeating for the EPA to reveal all the sites where coal ash can get into drinking water, rivers and streams.

Innovating Our Way Into Benefits From Energy Policy

We hear a lot about how legislation to mitigate the worst effects of climate change will cost a bundle. And to be sure, it does SOUND like transferring to a new energy economy would require a period of adjustment, and the costs would get passed onto the customer. But the CBO study of the Waxman-Markey bill specifically showed those costs to be miniscule, the price of a postage stamp per day. And David Roberts says that, when you factor in all the savings of the bill, Americans will come out ahead:

Cost-effective low-carbon alternatives are plentiful. Many remain unexploited not because they can’t compete in a free market, but because there isn’t one. A variety of market barriers, market failures, and behavioral failures plague the energy sector: monopolies, oligarchs, myopic accounting, misaligned incentives, perverse regulation, information bottlenecks, immature business models, cultural inertia, plain old bad habits. Underutilization of cost-effective clean alternatives is especially true in efficiency. (See: McKinsey & ACEEE.) Hell, recycled waste heat alone could generate 742 terawatt hours of power a year in the U.S., according to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (PDF).

Market failures can be overcome through smart legislation, regulation, and investment designed to encourage not just alternative technologies but alternative systems. When we get our accounting right, we see they’re all over. The era of cheap energy in the U.S. has produced, among other things, a relatively sclerotic and unimaginative energy sector, particularly in electricity, which is dominated by monopolies. (The average power plant is no more efficient today than it was 50 years ago.)

But that languid pace of innovation is changing, and quickly. The past or even present pace of energy innovation is no adequate predictor of the explosion on its way.

In addition to the avoidance of costs that would be due to climate change, observers underestimate the value of innovation and efficiency, particularly the latter, a key obsession of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Yesterday the White House announced a series of energy efficiency efforts which, if successful, will save millions of tons of carbon dioxide and gigawatts of power over the future. These things tend to snowball, as efficient lighting can beget even more efficient lighting, and efficient windows can beget even more efficient windows, etc. If we start building with efficiency in mind today, the savings in the future are really exponential. And the market has already been created for green building.

So I would rather talk about the benefits of climate change legislation than the costs, because over the long run, the benefits will more clearly show themselves.

Looking Beyond Waxman-Markey, Because Looking At It Is Too Ugly

By now you probably know that the Waxman-Markey climate bill will hit the floor of the House tomorrow. This has become almost a stealth issue in America, which is astounding. The President stressed his support of the bill at his press conference Tuesday and nobody asked a question about it. Today he's whipping support publicly and calling lawmakers privately, accusing Republicans of spreading misinformation and casting the bill as a "jobs bill," always a good maneuver in an age of double-digit unemployment. Yet it's not a front-and-center issue in most people's minds. An ABC poll showed support of the bill if it raised electric rates by $10 a month, and opposition if it raised them $25 a month.

And yet this is a world-historical vote, which seeks to address one of the foundational issues of our time - the fact that a runaway climate has the potential to make large sections of the world uninhabitable, cause mass death, and require disruptive adaptation costing in the trillions of dollars. So $15 a month swings support one way or the other? And nobody, not even the President, can get it on the front page?

Keep in mind that the bill, as currently constructed, is not even sufficient to the task. The energy efficiency aspects of the bill are sound - so sound that this EPA analysis, stating that Waxman-Markey would result in less renewable energy than in a status quo ante environment, is mainly because the efficiency targets are so strong that they would significantly reduce the amount of electricity required. But the other part of that reflects the inadequacies of the bill:

The bill also won’t sufficiently drive up the price of dirty fossil fuels to encourage a big switch to renewables, the analysis says. (Here’s how that sounds in untranslated EPA-speak: “Allowances prices are not high enough to drive a significant amount of additional low or zero-carbon energy . . . in the shorter term.”)

Enviro groups, which have misplayed this debate dramatically, don't want to upset the precarious balance that has allowed the bill to progress this far by strengthening it with amendments. And so we're stuck with a bill that has an insufficient carbon emissions cap, gives away scads of allowances to polluters and farm interests, maintains the ethanol scam, does too little on the renewable energy standard, doesn't invest enough in clean sources of energy and fails to advance the ball to a significant degree. Ed Markey says that this is the political reality of getting a bill like this to pass. And at Grist, Dave Roberts tries to look on the bright side:

Anyway, on odd-numbered days, I think I’ve reached a fragile zen detente with the whole process. Mainly, I’ve been trying to focus on a different question: will there be an energy revolution? After all, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is not the only shot for Obama to make good on his campaign promises on energy. Nor is the legislation our last chance to tackle the climate crisis. No bill can carry that kind of weight, not at this moment, with this Congress. America is at the tail end of an era of cheap energy and heedless economic growth. Waxman-Markey is just the struggle to get an extremely hidebound, backward-looking set of political institutions to acknowledge that the old order is collapsing. Building a new order is something else entirely.

The question is, what’s going to happen after the bill is passed? An energy revolution will require a combination of social, technological, business, legal, regulatory, and legislative changes. Federal legislation can’t do all the lifting. Conversely, other changes can compensate somewhat for a weak (at least at the outset) federal framework. What will ultimately make the difference is not the specific mechanics of the bill but the, ahem, Sweep of History. (And who better to capture the Sweep of History than Some Blogger?)

I am reasonably optimistic, despite the flaws in Waxman-Markey, that history is on our side, and that the arguments happening today in Congress will soon be seen as peculiar and archaic.

Read the whole thing.

That's a good way of denying the present, by painting a rosy, hopeful outlook for the future. And his analysis isn't far wrong. But it does nothing for the political realty today. And that reality shows that climate change is just not yet a "touch and feel" issue for enough Americans to make a dent in the political debate. And that we have a better chance finding disruptive technologies that blow the clean energy space wide open than waiting for some Congressman who has a coal mine in his district to come around to realize the scope of the problem. I hope Roberts is right about the future, because I'm not sure the politics will advance too much from the present.

...I agree that this is a good way of looking at it:

As we see a lot of big, landmark style bills coming to the floor in the coming months and stress out over whether they are "good" or "bad," failure or success, and instead look at legislating over the longer term as a process of constantly pushing toward better policy. Obviously, congress' institutional structure -- it's very hard to pass anything substantial or with any kind of speed -- creates an incentive geared towards achieving huge breakthroughs, since you may only get this chance -- and this majority -- once...But there's no law saying that Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats can't take another bite at the health care apple -- or energy, or financial regulations, or whatever -- after the mid-terms or, hell, as soon as the first bill passes.

One quibble, which I will explore in my next post.

Cash For Clunkers

Included in the supplemental war funding bill passed by the House yesterday was a measure providing $1 billion in funding to a program called "Cash for Clunkers," which essentially works like this: the government will offer vouchers of up to $4,500 for car owners to turn in their inefficient vehicles for a new model which improves on that fuel efficiency. Ultimately, the program would spend up to $4 billion to get 1 million "clunkers" off the road.

There's actually been a lot of criticism from environmental advocates over the program, but it seems to me that its primary goal is to induce $10-$15 billion dollars of economic activity. The government offers $4,500 or so to leverage $15,000 or more of spending per car, and that goes to dealers, suppliers and manufacturers. The environmental impact is a secondary characteristic of what amounts to a micro-stimulus. Now, there have been some very compelling articles about how this particular program doesn't go far enough - although I would add that getting vehicles that offer 18mpg or less off the road and putting those people into any kind of car that gets half-decent, even below-average mileage saves a LOT more gas than putting people from a Honda Civic into an electric car. That's just a mathematical fact. So while it seems like nothing switching from a car that gets 18mpg to 22mpg, as the program incentivizes, you save more gas that way than switching from 50mpg to 100mpg. You can see if your car qualifies for the program here.

But again, the primary goal of this program appears to be getting $15 billion dollars cycled through the economy. Hiding that money in holes and allowing people to dig the money up is similarly wasteful, inefficient and inequitable - but it would be precisely what John Maynard Keynes would proscribe. Auto spending is the largest purchase that non-wealthy consumers make outside of housing, and incentivizing that activity would have a stimulative effect. Plus, considering that we own a lot of GM and Chrysler, this would in effect allow the government to pay itself.

Again, the details of this particular cash for clunkers plan may not be ideal. But putting it into the stimulus tells me two things. One, the Administration knows that we need economic stimulus. The economy continues to fall apart, with double-digit unemployment just around the corner, and even a leaky stimulus measure makes a lot of sense right now. If it reduces emissions - and nobody questions that it does, just not enough - that's gravy. The White House probably sees the prospect of a big stimulus unlikely in the short term, and so sneaking this cash for clunkers measure into the war spending bill at least leverages a nice piece into the economy.

Two, I think this means Waxman-Markey, the climate and energy bill, is in a lot of trouble. Despite the fact that it would actually reduce the deficit, the concerns about cost have caught fire on the right, mainly through persistent lies. The bill had to be seriously gutted to get passage out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, leading many on the left to slam it, sometimes in misleading ways, as David Roberts notes (Waxman-Markey does NOT give away 85% of carbon allowances to polluters). But cash for clunkers initially made its way into Waxman-Markey. That the Administration took it out and sped it up does not speak well for their beliefs about its passage in the short term. Maybe they just want to kickstart the auto industry faster, but it seems to me there's a lot more talk about things like painting everybody's roof white than passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill. And that's a big worry.

...so I'm providing the concerns with this iteration of the bill, the trigger point for vouchers can be as lot as 1mpg; there is a sense that poor people who need a car wouldn't be able to get one with such a voucher and should be able to step up with used cars (in other words, buy a used vehicle with better mileage than their current vehicle, kind of a clunkers-for-super-clunkers); and Japanese automakers would have a better time of things with this bill than American ones.

What's 3% When The Planet Is Boiling Anyway?

Democratic leaders on the Energy and Commerce Committee and coal-state holdouts reached a deal on energy and climate legislation that lowered the threshold for the carbon cap to a level where I'm trying to determine its value.

House Democratic leaders are scaling back plans to curb global warming and make the transition to cleaner energy in the hopes that they can get a bill passed this year.

"We have resolved a good number of the issues," said (Henry) Waxman, who chairs the panel and has set a Memorial Day deadline for it to clear the committee. "I believe we will have the votes for passage of this bill next week." [...]

Initially, the bill called for electricity producers to generate 25% of their power from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2025. That target has been lowered to 15% by 2020, with as much as 5% coming from improvements in energy efficiency.

The deal also makes more modest cuts in greenhouse gases. The draft unveiled in March called for a 20% reduction by 2020 in the emissions blamed for global warming. The version that will be unveiled later this week will call for a 17% reduction from 2005 levels by 2020.

While that early pollution goal goes further than the president has called for, it still falls short of what other countries are calling on the United States to commit to by December, when a new international agreement to reduce global warming pollution will be negotiated in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Other details of the bill still need to be worked out, such as how the allowances to emit greenhouse gases will be distributed. Obama has called for a 100% auction and would use the billions in revenue to help fund renewable energy technologies and to offset higher energy prices for middle-class households.

Waxman said Tuesday that the Democrats on the committee had agreed to give 35% of the allowances away for free to local electricity distribution companies to help ease costs. Allowances will also be doled out to auto manufacturers to help them develop cleaner cars.

As expected, the original Waxman-Markey bill represented the most leftward option, and that already was pre-compromised a bit. Now we have a smaller cap, a smaller renewable mandate, and a greater amount of carbon credits handed to polluters. And that's just to get it out of committee in the House. To clear the full House might take another dent or two, and then to clear the Senate will require a whole other set of compromises.

I think by the end, the bill will require Al Gore to fly less and that's about it.

I'm wondering where the vaunted Obama organization is in all of this. They have started to ramp up an effort to pass Obama's health care bill, but only based on his "principles" and not on any specific language or hard issue, like a public option. On energy, supposedly just as key a pillar in the Obama agenda, they have been silent. Bills get constructed now, not at the end of the process when it turns to an up or down vote on the floor. Surely the details matter, unless the goal here is simply to get anything done that can be called "reform" in a moderately credible way. I fully recognize the "art of the compromise" rhetoric about politics, and as long as these bills are seen as beginnings and not endings, we can live with them. But a little volume at the BEGINNING of the process rather than a rush at the end would help, Mr. President. Unless you see these bills at data points on your re-election resume instead of deadly serious legislation that affects all of our lives.

Climate/Energy Bill Deal?

It's a bit odd to have two important bills moving rapidly through the Congress, on parallel tracks, both of which would represent a key pillar of the President's agenda. I've focused a lot of health care, but there's also climate and energy legislation, which may have hit a breakthrough, according to CQ (subs. req.):

House Democrats may be nearing a resolution on energy and climate legislation ... Waxman will meet Tuesday afternoon with committee Democrats to follow up on staff discussions over the weekend. A markup is expected to begin as early as May 14, though a committee spokeswoman said no decision has been made...

...The biggest area of contention is the bill’s cap-and-trade plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama proposed to auction pollution allowances that industry would use in order to meet the cap. Yet to win votes, Waxman’s bill will almost certainly allow businesses to receive some of these allowances for free.

Lawmakers are not divulging any details of a compromise proposal. However, the bill is generally expected to provide about 35 percent of the allowances to local electric distribution companies, which would then be expected to pass the savings on to consumers. Additional allowances, most likely around 15 percent, could go to the manufacturing industry, and coal-fired utilities could receive some allowances to fund research into carbon capture and sequestration. Oil-state lawmakers want 5 percent of the allowances to go to refineries, but Gene Green, D-Texas, said negotiations are continuing. “We’re not there yet,” he said.

Several members also want to auction a substantial portion of the allowances to pay for research into clean-energy technologies and to assist low-income consumers. Some of the allowances would also go to the Treasury so the bill is deficit-neutral.

An even bigger decision for Waxman is whether to change the draft bill’s short-term target to reduce emissions 20 percent from current levels by 2020. Waxman has repeatedly said he does not want to change the target, but to reach a deal, he could move closer to Obama’s proposal to reduce emissions 14 percent by 2020.

I think it's a mistake to allow pollution credits to go to industry for free. But importantly, cap and trade makes up just part of the proposal, and the other elements of the bill would not only clean up some of the shortcomings of cap and trade, but actually strengthen the cap:

...unpriced carbon is not the only market failure. In fact, there are dozens, hundreds of such failures. If you sought to address them all with a carbon price—a fairly blunt tool—you’d need a very, very high price, and that’s not going to happen. A politically realistic price on carbon, likely to be low at least for the first decade or two, will not address or overcome most of those failures. The idea behind “complementary policies,” or policies outside the carbon price, is to address some of those failures and thereby make the road smoother (cheaper, more efficient) for the declining cap.

Roberts uses some examples: utilities, which are regulated monopolies acting outside the free market that may default to the most cost-effective but least climate-friendly options; the need for coal-fired plants to get phased out to meet the cap target despite the fact that they are grandfathered in under the Clean Air Act; and some more. Ultimately, complementary policies like a renewable energy standard drives the cap down to a level where it can actually mitigate the most disastrous effects of climate change. Ultimately, this may not be enough to prevent a rise of, say, three degrees in global temperature, and we need to move to an adaptation strategy as much as a mitigation one. But the fatalist notion of "there's no political will to tke meaningful steps," or "even if we lower carbon emissions, India and China won't" doesn't fly with me. In fact, since China has built power plants far more efficiently than we have, perhaps that phrase should get flipped around.

We don't really know what the changes in the legislation will be - hopefully, Peter Welch fattened up the Blue Dogs with enough lasagna so they didn't muck around with the bill too much. But while I still wonder whether we can get this done in this year, the most hopeful sign, for me, happened outside of Congress:

Bloomberg reports that Duke Energy Corp., which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, announced that it won’t be renewing its membership with NAM, in part because of NAM’s refusal to address global warming:

“We are not renewing our membership in the NAM because in tough times, we want to invest in associations that are pulling in the same direction we are,” Duke Chief Executive Officer Jim Rogers said last month in an interview. The association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republicans “ought to roll up their sleeves and get to work on a climate bill, but quite frankly, I don’t see them changing.”

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke is a founding member of the United States Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups that seeks to influence legislation on greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The National Association of Manufacturers has opposed mandatory controls, arguing they will harm the economy.

A Duke spokesman also said that the company would like to see cap-and-trade legislation “happen this year if possible.”

If energy companies like this want something done, something can actually get done.

The Death Of The Chamber Of Commerce? Please?

Look who's feeling some heat on climate change, our old friends at the Chamber of Commerce. The current Waxman-Markey climate bill is modeled fairly closely on a proposal by a coalition called USCAP, which includes a fair number of business interests. Businesses recognizes that the cost of failure now to address the warming climate will be extreme later, so they'd rather have a knowable price for carbon they can use to innovate and manage. The Chamber, of course, includes far-right interests that just want to ride the status quo into the center of the sun. That's causing some tension:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is taking heat from Johnson & Johnson, Nike and other corporate members over its opposition to global warming legislation pending in the House.

In a letter to the Chamber, Johnson & Johnson has asked the Chamber to refrain from making comments on climate change unless they “reflect the full range of views, especially those of Chamber members advocating for congressional action.”

Nike spokeswoman Anne Meyers said her company has also been “vocal” with the Chamber’s leaders “about wanting them to take a more progressive stance on the issue of climate change.”

While the Chamber’s opposition to cap-and-trade legislation introduced by House Democrats mirrors the views of some in industry, particularly energy producers, Meyer said Nike “didn’t feel that consumer companies had a particularly strong or vocal voice around the issue of climate change.”

Lobbyists at business coalitions that support federal climate change legislation say other companies are discussing the possibility of sending their own letters to the Chamber — or of threatening to withhold dues from the Chamber in protest.

Oh, to see a crackup inside the Chamber of Commerce. I can't think of a bigger threat to right-wing obstructionism or a bigger boost to progressive governance. Eventually this will come to a head on health care as well, with those businesses who want to remain globally competitive reason that the status quo with a broken system will surely bankrupt them.

On a related front, we may see both sides of the climate issue come together around a deal that includes nuclear power. Politics, art of compromise, all that. I guess my support on this would depend on the targets in the climate cap and the aggressiveness of the renewable energy standard.

Climate And Energy Bill Hanging By A Thread

I think that, at the end of the day, the Obama agenda on education and even on health care will make its way through the Senate. It may not look exactly like what he campaigned on, particularly on health care. But something's going to happen. Obama should be able to mass substantial bipartisan support on education reform, considering that he sides with reformers over teacher's unions, and the previous bipartisan deal on education is showing signs of success. And the budget reconciliation instructions on health care really offer a big stick to force a solution, even to conservative Democrats.

On climate and energy legislation, I'm really not so sure. People have a visceral relationship to health care and education - it's their bodies and their kids. Arguments about the climate and alternative energy, while just as important, exist in the abstract, and are ripe for conservative misinformation, particularly around costs (see the "national energy tax" fearmongering). Progressives can push back on this nonsense, and thanks to Paul Krugman for giving this a shot, particularly using conservative market principles:

To be sure, there are many who insist that the costs would be much higher. Strange to say, however, such assertions nearly always come from people who claim to believe that free-market economies are wonderfully flexible and innovative, that they can easily transcend any constraints imposed by the world’s limited resources of crude oil, arable land or fresh water.

So why don’t they think the economy can cope with limits on greenhouse gas emissions?

However, even though the Republicans are rank hypocrites on this issue, they can make an abstract debate more concrete with the constant efforts to label this a tax. Right now, Americans support regulating greenhouse gas emissions, even if it raises energy prices (and I can give this to you in more than one poll). However, just the mere action of conservative fearmongering is, I suspect, enough to waver those Blue Dog conservative Democrats who don't want to pass this bill anyway, as well as give an excuse for coal-state Democrats who resist change. Therefore, you're seeing this week Reps. Waxman and Markey hunting for votes on Capitol Hill.

House Democratic leaders appeared to still be short of the votes needed to pass climate-change legislation out of a key subcommittee, but a spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers leading the talks said negotiations were continuing.

Several moderate Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment said Thursday that fundamental issues such as how to soften the impact of the legislation on constituents and industries in their regions are still unresolved and that the panel might not be ready to vote on the measure by next week as Democratic leaders have called for.

The qualms expressed over legislation sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Waxman (D., Calif.), and Edward Markey (D., Mass.) along with possible Republican obstruction, point to the difficulty Democrats are having in finding consensus on climate and energy issues.

“I don’t think the votes are there in the subcommittee,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.) said in an interview. Mr. Butterfield said he was particularly concerned about the bill’s impact on low-income Americans, adding “What do I tell a single mom making eight dollars an hour?”

You can see the nonsense bubbling to the surface already. With a properly constructed cap and trade system that rebates significant money to lower-income Americans, they would actually be better off than with no system and continued pollution into their communities. But that doesn't matter. Butterfield and his fellow conservaDems are delaying, offering poison pill amendments, and emboldening Republicans to obstruct. These proposed amendments fly in the face of the science, loosening the carbon cap and generally seeking to keep polluters in business.

Some of the areas of the bill where Democrats are engaged in give and take are obvious.

A group led by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), wants to weaken the 2020 emission limits from the draft's 20 percent cut target, bringing it down to the 6 percent level spelled out last fall in legislation he produced with former Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) [...]

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said Boucher's group has endorsed the electric utility industry's call to set aside 40 percent of the proposed cap-and-trade program's allowances for free distribution to regulated local distribution companies within the electricity sector. The free credits would be phased out around 2025, which he said roughly lines up with projections of widespread deployment for carbon capture and storage at coal plants.

Doyle said the group also has recommended setting 15 percent of the credits aside for free allocation to U.S. industries considered most vulnerable to international competition, including steel, pulp, paper, cement and glass. Another 5 percent should also be walled off for petroleum refineries, he said.

Turning to the renewable electricity standard, Doyle said the moderate and conservative Democrats want Waxman to trim down his proposal from a 25 percent standard by 2025 to a less aggressive 15 percent requirement. Some states cannot meet the higher limits, he said, and they also want the definition of renewables expanded to include nuclear power.

And then you have refinery-state Dems wanting to protect their jobs. And coal-state Dems wanting to exempt coal. And nuclear-industry flaks wanting money for nuclear. There are just too many competing interests here. Now you know why Obama officials call ConservaDems the bad guys.

Unfortunately, the abstract nature of the debate obscures the urgency of legislation as soon as humanly possible. America cannot really make progress along with the world on mitigating the worst effects of climate change without a major effort like Waxman-Markey. We've already lost too much ground to stop a boiling planet, and if we let this slide, things will only get worse.

Can we really prevent global warming? Or should we be thinking more about adaptation? Building coastal fortifications may be cheaper than halting the release of CO2.

Right now, the climate scientists feel that if all humans shut off carbon emissions today, it will still glide up by about 1 degree centigrade. In the business-as-usual scenarios, Nicholas Stern says there's a 50 percent chance we may go to 5 degrees centigrade. We know what the Earth was like 5 or 6 degrees centigrade colder. That was called the Ice Ages. Imagine a world 5 degrees warmer. The desert lines would be dramatically changed. The West is projected to be in drought conditions. And certain tipping points might be triggered. We can adapt to 1 or 2 degrees. More than that, there is no adaptation strategy.

What do you mean by tipping points?

There's lots of carbon in vegetation that has grown and died in the northern tundras of Russia, Canada. Normally what happens when a tree falls and dies is the microbes come and gobble it up and they recycle in terms of carbon dioxide, methane. But in the frozen tundra, those microbes are asleep. So the big fear is that once the tundra thaws, those microbes wake up, they digest all that carbon. It goes up in the atmosphere. At that point, no matter what humans do, it's out of our control. This is the realization in the last decade that has caused many of us to get very, very concerned. Adaptation at 1 or 2 degrees will be painful, it will cause a lot of hurt and pain, but adaptation at 5 or 6 degrees—I'm terribly frightened that that's catastrophic.

Aren't we in pretty bad trouble no matter what we do? We're not going to be able to stop burning fossil fuels for quite a while.

We're in the great ship Titanic, the Earth is, and it's going to take a half century to really turn the ship. But that doesn't mean we can't start doing it today, and we must. It's possible that the United States can greatly reduce its use of energy in our buildings, which consume 40 percent of our energy, and our personal vehicles.

The scientists are warning that 2/3 of total coal reserves must be left unused if we want to stop the catastrophe that Dr. Chu is talking about here. We cannot afford to give anyone a break or hold off on a cap. This is bigger than any one district.

Two things in the corner of supporters of Waxman-Markey. One, the EPA has the authority to massively regulate emissions, including possibly implementing cap and trade if they so choose. So ConservaDems and coal-state pols can either come up with a solution or have it taken from their hands. The other trick we may have is the return of reconciliation.

This is a little bit deep in the weeds, but you may recall that back in early April when the Senate was debating the budget, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment meant to prevent the Senate from passing climate change legislation through the reconciliation process, and it passed by a wide margin.

Well, in conference, that amendment was stripped out completely. Mike Johanns is very unhappy. But that doesn't mean that a cap-and-trade program will absolutely be established during the reconciliation process. And it doesn't mean that Democrats will be hanging the threat over Republicans' heads the way they are with health reform. In fact, the conference report basically says this won't happen. But technically there won't be anything (other than Senate politics) stopping Democrats from doing so.

So many Democrats voted against reconciliation in the Senate that trying to pull that trigger would probably not work. But at least there's another option. Those of us who want meaningful climate and energy legislation need something to hang on. Because it's real tough out there.

The Battle Begins On Climate Legislation

Today is the 39th anniversary of Earth Day, which drew 20 million people to events in 1970. Without the Internet. Or Fox News promotion. And the House of Representatives used the anniversary to fire the starting gun for major climate change legislation:

Congress is launching the “mother of all climate weeks” on Tuesday, with a monster hearing designed to push forward global warming legislation.

Fifty-four witnesses will testify on climate change legislation in three full days before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, topped off with an appearance from Al Gore on Friday. The committee will also hear from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and high-profile representatives from business and the environmental movement.

As I noted last week, Chairman Henry Waxman seeks to get the bill out of committee by Memorial Day. The hearings are taking place right now. The efforts for legislation got a major boost with an EPA report suggesting that the consumer cost would be far less than the claims being made by Republicans.

With Republican critics of the bill zeroing in on the cost to consumers and industry, a pivotal issue will be how to mitigate the bill’s economic impact. Under a cap-and-trade plan, overall emissions would be limited and polluters would be issued emission allowances, which they then could buy and sell.

An EPA analysis released to the committee on Tuesday found that the price of emission allowances would be less than projected for a similar bill the Senate debated but did not pass last summer. Allowance prices would range from $13 to $17 per ton of emissions in 2015, and $74 to $96 per ton in 2050, the EPA reported. Last year, the agency projected that the Senate bill would cost $20 to $50 per ton in 2015 and $160 to $200 per ton in 2050.

The agency said forecasts have changed in part due to lower projected growth in gross domestic product, which means industrial output of greenhouse gases will be lower than expected.

“With lower forecast emissions, the allowance prices necessary to achieve the goals set in the discussion draft are also reduced,” the EPA said.

The EPA also said the bill’s average annual cost per household would be between $98 and $140, leading proponents to say the bill would have a relatively modest impact.

“When you combine this analysis with cost-saving measures from updated energy efficiency measures and weatherization, the savings will pile up for consumers,” Markey said in a statement.

In addition, the benefit to energy companies, having the certainty of a cap and carbon pricing, so they can manage their businesses and support the kind of innovation needed to get under the caps, would actually provide long-run savings as well, apart from mitigating the worst effects of climate change (which would cost lots of money).

Of course, Republicans will continue to smear and fear about consumer costs, even though revenues from cap and trade can roll back to ratepayers. In fact, the Republican opposition to this bill represents throwing a bunch of junk at the wall to see what sticks. They are vacillating between denying the science and focusing on costs, and the result is muddled.

The Senate clearly wants to follow the House's lead, and this will be a long process. But in the meantime, there are steps the Administration can take to improve our energy outlook, like allowing offshore wind turbines; and the looming EPA regulations under the Clean Air Act can work as a vice to force the Republicans to either allow a cap and trade system or get steamrolled by the executive branch.

It's exciting to see a very real transition to a new energy economy, and the hard work of the policymakers committed to moving forward. I urge you to watch these hearings.

...This is awesome from new Obama Administration advisor Van Jones.

It's Comical To Say John Boehner Knows What He's Talking About

Sadly, the Minority Leader of House Republicans is not the first to relate global warming to cow farts, although when Crazy Dana Rohrabacher did it I believe he used dinosaur flatulence as the example instead.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That's my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?

BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.

This is just comically wrong, and we can all laugh about it, but this is dangerous to our future and our economy. As Joe Romm notes, "Anti-science conservatives are now the cement shoes on the American people, pulling us down into the ocean hot, acidic dead zone." If you want to know why we haven't progressed on renewable energy or fuel-efficient cars or green technologies, look no further. Here are some real-world consequences.

China’s leaders are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy. Other countries are equally energetic in their embrace of alternative energy technologies; they are setting targets and investing billions of dollars to spur the development of entirely new markets in wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, energy efficiency, high-speed rail, and other clean and innovative solutions to global warming.

The United States, too, is poised to transform its economy to create millions of new jobs and help create a cleaner, safer planet by investing in a green, renewable-energy based economy. The Obama administration wants to unleash the ingenuity of our private sector to rein in pollution and put millions of Americans back to work. Yet China is spending twice as much as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spends to lay the foundations for a green energy economy, despite the U.S. economy being 1.5 times as large as China’s. And across Europe and Asia, other governments have diversified their energy portfolios and encouraged entrepreneurs to start and expand clean and renewable energy companies.

As venture capitalist John Doerr recently pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, “If you list today’s top 30 companies in solar, wind and advanced batteries, American companies hold only 6 spots. That fact should worry us all.”

Read that whole thing. We're simply falling behind the rest of the world in the industry that will lead the 21st century. And know-nothing, status-quo obstructionist conservatives are the reason why. Clinging to the dirty industries of the past only makes us a fossil. I think the Obama Administration and most Democrats know this and want to fix it, but time is running out and anti-science troglodytes like John Boehner aren't helping. He says that his party has a plan but that plan merely is to obstruct any progress.

...Just to show you the sense of urgency here, one company wants to bury emissions under the ocean. And people are listening to them.

CA-Gov: A Look At Mayor Villaraigosa

We've had less than glowing reviews of the public comments of potential gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, but there has been somewhat less talk about the other leading potential candidate, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. His re-election performance was uninspired and listless, but that's not a description of his policies.

I have said in the past that the enduring image of Villaraigosa's leadership is a crane in front of a half-finished building. Now we are seeing him tested in a time of crisis. Los Angeles has a close to $1 billion dollar deficit, and he is trying to balance cuts with continued support for labor, and the results have not been pretty. While Villaraigosa led the effort to add a penny to the sales tax for public transit, he has vowed not to raise local taxes to cover the deficit, and as a result, the mayor will cut salaries for city workers almost across the board by 10%, and LA Unified will lay off 5,000 teachers this year.

Los Angeles school district officials moved forward Tuesday with plans to lay off more than 5,000 teachers, counselors, custodians, clerks and other employees, but the battle over funding will rage on for weeks -- affecting who goes, who stays and what schools and classrooms will look like for students next year.

The Board of Education's 4-3 vote, after more than four hours of pleading and debate, closed most of a $596.1-million deficit for next year in the nation's second-largest school system.

"Anger is appropriate and outrage is appropriate," said school board President Monica Garcia, who voted with the majority. "Nobody wants to do these layoffs."

While the board, which Villaraigosa effectively bought after a series of election cycles, did spare 1,900 elementary school teachers, the layoffs will be deeply felt, particularly in those ten schools the Mayor personally controls.

In his State of the City speech last week, Villaraigosa denounced Sacramento lawmakers, yet he supports the same failed propositions that will not address the structural problems with state government, and he did nothing, of course, to move forward on any of those while Speaker of the Assembly. However, he did spend a lot of time in his speech talking about his innovative environmental policies in Los Angeles, which have had an impact.

Villaraigosa denounced the "politics of no" as he called for a green technology hub along the west side of the Los Angeles River to attract new jobs and start-up companies.

"We need to build a future in which clean technology is as synonymous with Los Angeles as motion pictures or aerospace," said the mayor, appearing at the Harbor City factory of Balqon Corp., which manufactures electric big-rigs for use at the city's ports [...]

As a centerpiece of his speech, Villaraigosa reintroduced his plan for a "green" industry corridor just east of downtown that would serve as a spawning ground for environmentally conscious businesses. The speech echoed Villaraigosa's message during his recent reelection campaign, when he promised to make Los Angeles "the greenest big city in America."

Over the last four years, Villaraigosa has pushed the Port of Los Angeles to replace up to 17,000 diesel trucks with cleaner-burning models. And at the Department of Water and Power, he has pressed officials to expand the utility's reliance on renewable sources of energy -- primarily wind, solar and geothermal power.

And that agenda could be scaled up to offer a new economic future for California. Villaraigosa selected longtime green activist David Freeman as his environmental deputy, and as a result you'll probably see some form of solar initiative along the lines of Measure B, which was defeated in March, come into law.

So there are glimmers here. But I will personally never forget Villaraigosa leaving town in 2006 for an 18-day Asian trip in the middle of the Schwarzenegger-Angelides race, and neglecting to even endorse Angelides until late in the campaign (and even then, not in Los Angeles). The Mayor has a few good ideas, has been less successful with the follow-through, and on the big structural issues has offered no vision of reform.

We still have no movement candidate in this race.

Going Electric

I'm tired of even thinking about the lunatic political leaders in this state, so I'm going to take a short break and focus on the innovators, those who have the ability to drag us out of recession and toward a new economic future.

For starters, Tesla Motors, which last year was thought to be in a fair bit of trouble, has come out of that and has begun to receive orders for their new $50,000 sedan model.

San Carlos, California-based Tesla Motors said it has received 711 reservations for its new Model S, an all-electric family sedan that carries up to seven people and can travel up to 300 miles per charge.

Tesla said reservations - which include a refundable $5,000 fee - started coming in after the car was formally unveiled on March 26. Mass production of the Model S is expected to begin in late 2011.

The company said the Model S will go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 5.6 seconds, with an electronically limited top speed of 130 mph. Three battery pack choices will offer a range of 160, 230 or 300 miles per charge. The company has not released pricing options on the higher-mileage battery packs.

The anticipated base price of the Model S is $49,900, after a federal tax credit of $7,500.

One high-profile buyer is Governor Schwarzenegger himself, who will turn in the Tesla roadster he had previously purchased in exchange for the sedan. The goal of Tesla is to bring a model into the $35,000 and under market, essentially on par with a Lexus, within the next couple years, and with the federal tax credits and complete lack of gas costs, that would be an attractive option for a pretty broad section of the upper and upper-middle class. Tesla reminds me of the Wild West early days of the auto industry, when lots of small manufacturers competed for business and the competition drove innovation.

Outside of the auto realm, the California high speed rail Authority hopes for up to $4 billion in federal dollars to jump-start production.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act approved by Congress in February contains $8 billion to be doled out to states for development of high-speed rail service and passenger rail service among cities.

California wants half.

"As of now, we have close to $4 billion worth of things we can show can be done within the time limit" of the act, said Mehdi Morshed, executive director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency charged with building a speedy rail line connecting Northern and Southern California through the Central Valley.

Morshed and other California boosters are trying to make the case with federal transportation officials that when it comes to high-speed rail in the United States, the Golden State is king.

"All factors considered, we are at the top," Morshed said. "We are the only ones with a real high-speed rail project. Everyone else is just improving their current (conventional) rail service."

While the $10 billion in bonds authorized by last November's Prop. 1A (the good one) have yet to be sold on the open market, federal stimulus dollars would really help get HSR off the ground. And such an investment would get some of the preliminary work out of the way and spur private investment, which would be looking toward a shorter lead time for their payoff. Our friends at the CA HSR blog, including some guy named Robert, have more. You can quibble with the strength of the SacBee article, but you cannot deny that the President has made high speed rail a priority and California's entity is clearly the furthest along, suggesting that we will be in line for a good portion of those stimulus dollars.

Despite political dysfunction, innovators will allow California to move to a new economy based on clean energy and efficiency. Hopefully the political leaders will follow, having failed to lead.

Electric, Not Ethanol

Via Matt Yglesias, here's a CBO report on ethanol showing that increased production of ethanol using corn has dramatically increased global food prices, and in both the short run and the long run could increase carbon emissions through more clear-cut forests coverted into cropland and the emissions use for producing corn. We pay tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for the pleasure of this, as well. All of this points to the need to create electric cars and transportation if we really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not alternative fuels that deplete additional resources. This especially makes sense if we robustly ramp up renewable energy production. Carbon capture and sequestration may be a priority for the Obama Administration, but spending decades looking for the magic bullet to keep coal production going seems less likely than just making solar and wind profitable. The Administration strategy is to sell CCS technology to China and India, and I get that, but renewables already work in this context and we don't have the time, frankly, to wait for the technology to mature when there's already a paradigm-shifting solution on the table.

Meanwhile, China's electric cars strategy includes payouts to consumers to buy the cars instead of production subsidies, which makes sense to me. We have large subsidies for electric car purchases in this country, as well.