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.

Waxman: Focus on the Cap

The EPA today took a major step in declaring greenhouse gas pollution a danger to the public, increasing the urgency to regulate CO2.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is officially confirming today that greenhouse gas pollution endangers the health and welfare of the American public, finally obeying the mandate set down by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 2, 2007. Following a review from the White House and agencies across the administration, Jackson is announcing this morning that she has signed the Clean Air Act endangerment finding for six greenhouse gases. By the time the decision is finalized after two months of public comment, it will have been nearly two years since the EPA was blocked by the Bush White House from issuing such a finding.

The implications of this ruling loom large over proposed climate and energy legislation under consideration in the Congress. I agree with Barbara Boxer that this finding will provide a serious boost to those efforts, because now the EPA is obligated under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

The EPA's endangerment finding will open the door for the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Although the president would prefer not to tackle this issue through his administration's regulatory power, the threat of EPA regulation could be used as a hammer to persuade moderate senators of both parties to get behind cap-and-trade legislation.

"What it says to the senators on the fence is that it's not really a question of whether regulation is happening. It's a question of how it will happen," a senior aide to Boxer told ABC News.

Call it "blackmail," as the corporate lobbyists do in this piece, or call it what it is, a requirement under the law mandated by the Supreme Court. So the obstructionists can block legislation in Congress and watch the EPA enact strict mandates, or they can have a say in the regulation. Their choice.

Respective of Congressional legislation, I recently had a great opportunity to sit down as part of a lobbying delegation with Henry Waxman, my Congressman and the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to discuss the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation introduced on March 31. There are actually two bills, one in Energy & Commerce and one in the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, both following similar tracks and expected to be out of committee by Memorial Day. And it can be argued that this provides a wealth of options for Congress to consider in pricing carbon, and thus the multiplicity of bills makes sense. But clearly, by virtue of its expansiveness and impact on a host of energy/climate issues, not just carbon pricing and hard caps but energy efficiency and renewable energy standards, the Waxman-Markey bill will be the template for energy legislation in this Congress.

Waxman brings an interesting perspective to the debate. He believes that the best way to get energy legislation through the Congress is to just start moving it, with tight deadlines, and dare the Republicans to stop it. He frames the issue as one of national security, to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy; of environmental imperative, to mitigate the catastrophic impacts of climate change; and of economic necessity, to move the country into a renovated, clean energy economy.

There's a lot of talk about how the cap and trade portion of the bill will be handled. The bill is somewhat murky on these points. The potential exists in the bill for offsets that would give a substantial portion of the carbon permits away for free. And the bill has no mention of how the revenues gained from what permits are auctioned off would be used (Waxman said that he would like to see some money directed to ratepayers, and some money directed to R&D for innovation in the energy space, and he would like to see the money targeted rather than applied as a broad tax cut). But Waxman de-emphasizes these concerns in favor of looking at the cap part of cap and trade. If the cap is firm and based on what the scientists have set as a goal to mitigate the effects of climate change, he reasons, the rest will fall into place. He used the example of acid rain, which used a similar cap and trade system in the 1980s. Industry feared that they'd have to spend billions for compliance, but lawmakers focused on the cap, and the problem was resolved for 1/10th of the expected cost. The goal, then, must be the cap. Waxman believed that offsets would have to be verifiable, and in exchange for the offsets there would have to be more reductions (a 1-to-1 1/2 ratio rather than 1-to-1). But if that's the cost to make the bill more politically attractive, Waxman is content to focus on the cap. Waxman also responded to a question I had about Europe's cap and trade system, which was marred by offsets and giveaways, by saying that the committee worked with Europe's regulators in drawing up the legislation, and that they will not fall into the same traps.

Waxman also played up the economic possibilities of the legislation, that only the innovation unleashed by having to get under the cap will be sufficient to actually create valuable goods for America and "get us out of the recession." Dozens of new industries can be developed and tremendous potential realized through innovation and technological advancements.

The other problematic element of the bill, for the progressive citizen lobbyists in the room with me, was the inclusion of clean coal technology in the bill, something that has been accepted by the White House and the Department of Energy as part of the solution. The typical response to this is that India and China will keep using coal even if the Western world stops, and we'd better come up with a way to capture and store the carbon produced or else our efforts will come up lacking. Waxman said that "we have to figure out if we can keep coal in our future." Obviously, the cap will eventually be too stringent for coal to remain a going concern in the United States without capture and storage technology advancing. And hopefully, the cap can force that, and develop new industries and new exports in the process. I don't know that I totally agree with that, but it's the party line on this, anyway. And besides, renewable energy has its own trade-offs.

Overall, I am far more optimistic about the prospects of climate and energy legislation coming through the Congress than I was before walking into that meeting. We still need to work hard to make the bill stronger, but the combination of the EPA ruling and the deliberate pace of the legislation moving through the House could provide the necessary momentum. We have to get this done, and hopefully we can create that sense of urgency. Also, we need to use the leverage of the EPA ruling to ensure this bill doesn't get weakened as it goes through the legislative sausage-making.

Car Market Competition

Nearly lost in everything else this busy week, the President has hinted at more aid for the auto industry, albeit with major conditions.

The aid package for the companies will be unveiled in the next several days, he said, and will be contingent upon the companies adopting business plans that reflect the fact that they have a smaller share of the auto market.

"We will provide them some help," Obama said during an online "town hall" event.

"I know that it is not popular to provide help to autoworkers -- or to auto companies -- but my job is to measure the costs of allowing these auto companies just to collapse," he said [...]

"If they're not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I'm not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money," Obama said. "And so a lot of it's going to depend on their willingness to make some pretty drastic changes. And some of those are still going to be painful, because I think you're not going to see a situation where the U.S. automakers are gaining the kind of share that they had back in the 1950s."

I think that's essentially right. The auto market has fractured and we can no longer expect the US industry to be sustained by the government at the same level. By the way, the creditors, specifically the bondholders, have to understand that as well. Everyone's going to have to take a haircut, and then we'll have some good old-fashioned competititon.

Just this week, India's Tata Motors released the world's cheapest car, but that will be confined to the local market unless it includes safety measures to allow it to be sold in the US. The electric market in this country is starting to heat up, from the 200 mpg Aptera, a futuristic three-wheeled vehicle which is trying to change its status as a "motorcycle" (which disqualifies it for certain tax breaks for consumers), to Tesla's just-released $50,000 sedan, the cheapest all-electric vehicle currently on the market. The prices will continue to drop through increased competition, spurring innovation. It feels a little like the 1920s, with a proliferation of smaller car companies competing for market share. That's probably better for consumers, and since the competition is playing out on fuel economy, better for the environment as well.

The EPA As Bad Cop

Some believe that the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is through a carbon tax on either production or consumption. Others favor a cap and trade approach that sets a ceiling on emissions and either gives away or sells credits to industry to emit. Then there's a third strain of thought that the EPA could simply declare carbon dioxide and methane poison and regulate the hell out of it.

The Environmental Protection Agency, about to declare heat-trapping gases to be dangerous pollutants, has embarked on one of the most ambitious regulatory challenges in history.

The move is likely to have a profound effect across the economic spectrum, affecting transportation, power plants, oil refineries, cement plants and other manufacturers.

It sets the agency on a collision course with carmakers, coal plants and other businesses that rely on fossil fuels, which fear that the finding will impose complex and costly rules.

But it may also help the Obama administration’s efforts to push through a federal law to curb carbon dioxide emissions by drawing industry support for legislation, which many companies see as less restrictive and more flexible than being monitored by a regulatory agency. And it will lay a basis for the United States in the negotiations leading up to a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen in December.

The ultimate problem with making the EPA the bad cop is that the chief of police changes depending on the party in power. But in the short term, characterizing Lisa Jackson as a determined regulator who will restrict greenhouse gas emissions in transportation vehicles, power plants, factories and oil refineries would certainly get the business community's attention. And maybe a carbon pricing system, through cap and trade or a carbon tax, would be seen as a more fuzzy alternative. Ultimately, Congress needs to manufacture a solution, but the EPA finding could be a very large bargaining chip. In theory it will work, but if the corporate community owns the huevos of the Administration on this issue the way they do on the banking crisis, all the strategies in the world won't matter.

As far as what Congress may produce, Brian Beutler, apparently in his new gig at TPM, reports that the Administration seeks to put the clean energy R&D tax credit under budget reconciliation rules. I believe we can only innovate our way out of this climate crisis, and the R&D credit should be protected and extended as a national security priority in addition to an environmental one. The President discussed investments in clean energy just yesterday:

We can remain the world's leading importer of foreign oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of renewable energy. We can allow climate change to wreck unnatural havoc, or we can create jobs preventing its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can create those jobs right here in America.

We know the right choice. We have known the right choice for a generation. The time has come to make that choice, to act on what we know. And that's why my budget makes a historic investment: $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and energy efficiency, building on what we've achieved through the Recovery Plan.

And it includes a 10-year commitment to make the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent. This is a tax credit that Serious Materials has used to grow its business, and one I'm sure others here today have used, as well. This is a tax credit that returns $2 to the economy for every dollar we spend.

Yet over the years we've allowed this credit to lapse or we've extended it year to year -- even just a few months at a time. Under my budget, this tax credit will no longer fall prey to the whims of politics and partisanship. It will be far more effective when businesses like yours can count on it, when you've got some stability and reliability [...]

Progress is rarely easy, and I know people in this room understand that. Sometimes it takes months to learn that your ideas just won't work -– or years to learn that it will. Sometimes the funding dries up or the investors walk away. Sometimes you have to fail before you can succeed.

And often it takes not just the commitment of an innovator, but the commitment of a country to innovation. Often, what's required is the support of government, recognizing that our future is what we make of it. Our future is what we build it to be.

Sometimes progress comes not in waves, but in the small inching of water onto the shore. The R&D tax credit may be one of those puddles, but enough of them can add up to an ocean.

Obama's Way Forward On Energy and Climate Change

Another major piece of the Obama agenda expressed yesterday is on energy and climate change issues. The President called for a cap and trade system to shrink carbon emissions:

Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years. We have also made the largest investment in basic research funding in American history – an investment that will spur not only new discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine, science, and technology.

We will soon lay down thousands of miles of power lines that can carry new energy to cities and towns across this country. And we will put Americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions of dollars on our energy bills.

But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. And to support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.

First to what has already been passed. There are great incentives through tax breaks and public investment programs in the stimulus pacakge to get people to change their lifestyles to a more green and energy-efficient one. The build-out of a national clean-energy smart grid is one of the most exciting infrastructure projects of the past 30 years. Too much of our wind and solar energy systems would be best placed in areas that are not currently fed by high-voltage transmission lines back to any grid. Streamlining this would save billions in power already generated by reducing congestion and inefficiency, and open large spaces up to renewable energy.

But the biggest two parts of this, the legislation that Obama is calling for, are the RES (renewable energy standard) and a cap-and-trade system. The RES has the votes and will get done, and hopefully the Congress will shoot for a high percentage of electricity from renewables by 2020 (50%? Dare to dream?). As for cap and trade, here are some details:

On energy policy, Mr. Obama’s budget will show new revenues by 2012 from his proposal to require companies to buy permits from the government for greenhouse gas emissions above a certain cap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the permits would raise up to $300 billion a year by 2020.

Since companies would pass their costs on to customers, Mr. Obama would have the government use most of the revenues for relief to families to offset higher utility bills and related expenses. The remaining revenues would cover his proposals for $15 billion a year in spending and tax incentives to develop alternative energy.

This may be surprising to Congressional Dems, some of whom may expect to be using for a variety of energy and environmental purposes.

But I’ve been saying for a while that, as a matter of politics, the vast majority of the revenues from the auction will need to be returned to taxpayers — that is to say, the vast middle class. I think at least 60% to 80% needs to be refunded to start with, rising to 80% to 90% within 10 years. Otherwise conservative opponents will simply attack this entire effort as a tax. Yes, they’ll do so anyway, but if the bottom of three to four quintiles are made whole, the argument can be refuted.

What is cap and trade? Kevin Drum has a pretty thoughtful article about it at Mother Jones.

The theory is straightforward. Suppose you have two plants, and the first one is able to eliminate one ton of pollutants at a cost of $10,000. The second plant, perhaps because it uses a different fuel or newer boiler technology, can do the same for only $4,000. Under command and control, if you required them to remove one ton each, the cost would total $14,000.

But what if all you mandated was that two tons of pollutants be removed overall (the cap part) and allowed the plants to work out how to do it? Naturally, the first plant would just pay the second plant $4,000 to remove an extra ton of pollutants from its emissions (the trade part). At first this seems suspect: The first plant is being allowed to merrily pollute away. But you've still removed two tons of pollutants, and since it was done more cheaply—for $8,000 instead of $14,000—you can afford to ratchet down the cap. You can require that three tons of pollutants be eliminated overall, and since this still costs only $12,000, everyone comes out ahead. The public gets cleaner air, and the plants save money.

There are ways to make cap and trade essentially a carbon tax refunded to consumers, and that's by ensuring that the carbon credits are sold at auction. There are drawbacks to it, particularly if the rest of the world doesn't go along, but Europe is already on board, and while initially the results were mixed, they are effectively pricing carbon now, and we can learn from their early mistakes. It's not the end of the fight, but it's a good tool. Drum concludes:

"Cap and trade is just a tool," says the NRDC's Bryk. It might be the backbone of any effective long-term carbon reduction policy, but it's not the only tool we need. Or even necessarily the best. If you want to improve vehicle mileage, for example, raising federal fuel-efficiency standards is "much cheaper for consumers than raising the price of gas," she says. Michael O'Hare, a public-policy professor at UC-Berkeley, emphasizes the need for the government to take a more active role than just setting carbon prices. Sure, higher energy prices might motivate people to change their behavior. "But," he points out, "even if I want to take the tram, I can't do it if there's no tram."

In other words, command and control will remain absolutely necessary. As will taxes. Even with a well-designed cap-and-trade plan in place, we'll need tougher efficiency standards, higher fuel taxes, more sensible land-use policies, green research programs, and plenty more. But in the same way that cutting calories is the core of any weight loss no matter which fad diet you follow, raising the price of carbon is the core of any climate plan. With luck, this could be the year we finally figure that out.

Ultimately, I think technology is the killer app here. Raising the price for carbon output will spur the innovation to find clean energy solutions, and if industry is successful, we'll see a major paradigm shift. What's most important about this is that those solutions will eventually require millions of green jobs and a return to the American manufacturing base that held us in good stead from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the outsourcing craze. Major legislation on the climate wouldn't just be good policy - it's essential.

You can become a Climate Precinct Captain able to help with building a grassroots movement around these issues at 1sky.

Twitter Revolution FAIL

This is pretty hilarious. The Virginia State Senate is 21-19 Democratic, but a Republican Lt. Governor breaks all ties. So the Republicans in the Senate got some wayward Democrat to flip parties. Except the Chairman of the Party announced it prematurely on Twitter, leading the Senate to abruptly adjourn and scuttling the whole deal. Not Larry Sabato explains.

Before it was announced on the floor and finalized, RPV Chairman Jeff Frederick tweeted about it.

Majority Leader Dick Saslaw adjourned before it could happen.

The Democrats got into a room and pounded into Northam what would happen if he did this.

Northam backed down. (Now everyone hates him, idiot).

JEFF FREDERICK COSTS REPUBLICANS CONTROL OF THE SENATE!

This is the second damaging leak-via-Twitter in the last week, the other being Pete Hoekstra giving away classified information on a Congressional trip to Iraq. It's not just that Republicans appear to be deliberately sinking the economy in the hopes that the country will run to them in the event of a Depression. It's that they actually think their road to recovery lies in putting instant communication in the hands of inveterate gossips who will screw up all their plans in the name of "connecting with the kids." The ignorance is almost a little astonishing if you didn't know who you were dealing with.

...here's yet another example - Jim Tedisco, the candidate in the NY-20 seat vacated by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, is running all Tweets with the #ny-20 hashtag on his campaign site - including those attacking him.

Really, take the Twitter away from Republicans. It's hurting.

Decrepit

It's shameful that the technology for our nation's highest office is so pathetic. The White House needs to keep up with the times as surely as any other large company. It's appalling that they can't meet what I imagine to be the increased demand from the new Administration. Congress should remove whatever barriers are in place to a more robust technology in the White House (the Presidential Records Act ought to be rewritten) and properly budget for the changing times.

No More Commodore 64s In The West Wing

Stories like this, about the primitive nature of the White House's communication apparatus, make me mental. Maybe the incompetence of the past eight years is attributable to idiotic Bush appointees, but maybe just as much to the fact that they were charged with running the most powerful nation on Earth with WordPerfect and a TRS-80.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

The White House website has been very late to update. The PCs in the White House have 6 year-old software on them. Laptops are generally not allowed. I remember being amazed that the Bush Administration would "accidentally" leak documents to reporters, but with the garbage tools they have to work with, I get why.

There are two problems here - inertia and compliance with the Presidental Records Act. On the latter, Congress needs to get involved - our government should have the best and most state-of-the-art equipment to do their job. On the former, the Obama Administration is the best in history to push the executive office into the 21st century.

And America Loses The Innovation Race Again

The long-awaited very first mass market plug-in hybrid vehicle will come from... China.

BYD presented the vehicle, known as the F3DM, in a ceremony in the southern city of Shenzhen…. The vehicle can run up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) on its electric engine, and when it runs low on power shifts to a back up gasoline engine. Its battery can fully charge in nine hours from a regular electrical outlet, or much faster at BYD’s own charging stations, the company said in a statement.

The car will sell for 149,800 yuan ($22,000), about the same as many Chinese-made mid-sized cars, it said.

This is a company that Warren Buffett bought a 10% stake in recently. BYD (short for Build Your Dream) was a large battery maker that only moved into the auto market a few years ago. And now, they're on track to potentially beat the Chevy Volt to market - for half the price. I don't know if they'd sell stateside, but just selling them in China would have a dramatic effect on greenhouse gas emissions if they became popular, even if all of that electricity used plugging in the vehicles comes from coal.

Meanwhile, it's very clear why a Chinese company, or any company other than an American one, has the opportunity to do this - aside from the competitive marketplace for batteries, their industries aren't overburdened with legacy costs, a dynamic peculiar to our free-market for-profit health care system.

The Big Three are also not responsible for the broken U.S. health care system. If we paid the same amount for health care as Canada, G.M. would have accumulated an additional $22 billion in profits over the last decade.

That would be the savings if we assumed that General Motor's health care expenditures were reduced by roughly 48 percent to be in line with expenses in Canada. Of course, not all the savings in this counterfactual would have gone to profits. Some of it would have gone to workers in the form of higher wages or to consumers in the form of lower car prices.

On the other hand, G.M. is also picking up the tab for many spouses and dependent children. It would not have to pay these health care expenses in a Canadian type system. So the $22 billion figure is probably not a bad first approximation of the additional money that G.M. might have today if the United States had a more efficient health care system.

Even with these additional profits G.M. and the other domestic manufacturers would still face serious problems. They have made some bad choices in betting their future on SUVs and other low-mileage vehicles. They also have lagged foreign manufacturers in producing high quality, reliable cars.

But the real reason that Big Three are on their deathbeds right now is the economic crisis created by the Wall Street crew and their friends in Washington. It will be tragic if the people of the Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio are made to suffer through a depression because of the failed financial dealings of the Wall Street crew.

There is a failure of innovation, sure, but that's because of the constraints of doing business in an employer-based health care system. We have to do what we can right now to save the auto industry, but the biggest long-term goal would be to give them the breathing space to innovate.

Incidentally, there have been some excellent developments in this country with plug-in electric hybrid school buses.

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.

Presidency 2.0

While Barack Obama is likely to have to give up his Blackberry after being sworn in as President (owing mainly to a lack of email security, as well as record keeping under the Presidential Records Act), he will have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, a first. And he just finished up the first-ever Presidential YouTube address, which will become a regular feature.



It already has 630,000 views, probably 620,000 more than those weekly radio addresses which air at 4am. The even more interesting development is Valerie Jarrett's address at change.gov, a completely transparent update on who will be leading key agencies, which has NINETY-EIGHT THOUSAND VIEWS. This is a wonky and fairly dull address about ethics requirements and lobbyists, but because it's being made widely available and people are hungering for knowledge about the incoming Administration, it's getting widespread attention.

I find this to be very significant. Obama enters office with 3.1 million donors and an email list of 10 million. How these lists are put to use and allowed to engage with the Administration will signal how much the President-elect will live up to his expression that change begins from the bottom up. By using these Web tools, Obama can bypass traditional filters and deliver action items to his audience on issues can have relevance and immediacy.

"He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

The Internet outreach team includes some really great people, and I'm sure they will push the technology (White House Twitter feed, anyone?) in the years to come. As for this nonsense that Obama has to be careful reaching his supporters in a partisan way, I think that's a deep misreading of his Internet fan base. My personal view is that an overwhelmingly substantial portion of his Web supporters are not just Democrats, but more progressive than he is. And not only that, they are not passive creatures who have to be told what to think and what to support. They were TRAINED in the campaign to be self-starters. It's going to be a bit less about how Obama wants to use these supporters and more how these supporters want to use the technology, whether to support policy or push Obama from the left.

The other very good outcome of a President who gets technology and its promise is that it makes him more likely to sign a net neutrality bill into law. Keeping the Internet open and free helped Obama win the White House - now he can return the favor by ensuring that freedom well into the future. Sen. Byron Dorgan plans to introduce a net neutrality bill in January - I'm hoping the Congress acts swiftly on it.

Jetpacks!

I knew if we waited long enough, we'd get them. After all, we were promised.

The accompanying picture on that is a good argument for banning comic books and old "Jetsons" cartoons. That looks ridiculous. At some point we need to innovate on a track other than random devices from science fiction entertainment.

However, I will add, a steal at only $100,000!

Old Man McCain

Hey, I'm not the one making the slur (the RNC tells me that calling someone "old" is a slur, now), take your beef to the American electorate.

The top 10 answers people volunteered when asked to describe presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Monday. Included is the percentage of people who gave each answer. More than one response was allowed.

John McCain:
1, Old, 19 percent
2. Military service, 9 percent
3, Record, qualifications, 8 percent
4, Bush, 7 percent
5. Strength, 7 percent
6. Insider, politician, 7 percent
7. Iraq, terrorism, 6 percent
8. Honest, 5 percent
9. Republican, 5 percent
10. (tie) Moral/good and dishonest, 4 percent

When the guy admits that he can't use a computer, it tends to typecast him as from a different generation. But many people of advanced age, in fact the majority, happily use technology in their lives and have kept up with the times. I wouldn't call McCain old, I would call him retrograde. And such thinking is actually dangerous for the country.

And where is McCain on tech policy? Not so shockingly, the computer-free senator's campaign is not as plugged in as his rival's. In fact, his campaign website fails to address America's lagging performance on broadband access or affordability, the technological capabilities of the federal bureaucracy, or the Internet's ability to increase government transparency. "There are red flags," says Brian Reich, author of the book Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience and the former editor of Campaign Web Review, a blog that tracked the use of the Internet by candidates, campaigns, and activists.

Barack Obama has embraced the Internet, with his thunderous online fundraising and sophisticated MyBO website. (Plus, he's comfortable talking about what's on his iPod.) Unsurprisingly, high-tech leaders hail his comprehensive tech policies.

It's a major problem. America has fallen behind in broadband capacity, has failed to use the promise of technology in areas like health care and government transparency, is in danger of deleting the concept of network neutrality that would stunt innovation, and has generally seen its advantage on technology and the Internet wither. A tech policy is not just about tax breaks for the industry, it's about implementing and utilizing technology. And McCain opposes net neutrality on the advice of CEOs looking for another revenue stream:

I asked her about McCain's opposition to so-called network neutrality, proposed government rules that would prohibit Internet service providers from charging websites for faster delivery of their content. McCain is on the side of the cable and phone companies, which argue that the rules would squelch investment in new broadband networks. Obama has been a big supporter of net neutrality, a huge issue among online activists that adds to his Internet buzz factor, leading some (OK, it was us) to ask if Obama is a Mac and McCain a PC.

Fiorina said McCain understands the importance of the Internet and sees government-mandated net neutrality as a hindrance.

"There's no question that it is to our economy's benefit to have more Internet access, more broadband capability, to have this country more wired, so to speak, as we move forward.... I think John McCain understands the way to get that done effectively is by principally allowing business to get it done as opposed to a big government-mandated program. And business won't get it done unless they see sufficient return on their investment."

That's just a huge lie, which isn't surprising for Fiorina, a failed executive and professional liar who wants us to think that 23 million businesses make over $250,000 in sales when in actuality it's about 5% of that number. Net neutrality has brought untold wealth to this country and almost single-handedly created the tech boom of the mid-1990s. The incentive for telecoms to increase broadband capacity is opening up its customer base, which will make them plenty rich. Discriminating on content will make the Internet less popular, more stratified, and would funnel money to Fiorina and her pals.

McCain probably doesn't have a coherent answer on this at all. He's too busy finding the "ON" switch.

You're All On Pins And Needles Waiting To Hear About My New Ipod

So I left my iPod on a plane about a month ago, and I was about to replace it when I got wind that a new product line would be coming out today. As you may know, they released what amounts to an iPhone without the phone part, with a touchscreen, wi-fi, 16 gigs of storage for audio, video and photos, etc., for about $200 less than what they were selling the iPhone for. Thinking this is a great deal, I jumped on it, only to find out minutes later that they also cut the iPhone price by $200, which is just beyond bizarre. Apparently, people at the product launch thought so too:

The decision to cut the price of its most expensive iPhone to $399 from $599 - and phase out an entry-level iPhone that had sold for $499 - was clearly a shocker. Barron's tech writer Eric Savitz, who was in SF for Apple's product announcement, said "this was a move that no one in the room expected; people were truly stunned; and I mean jaw-dropping, mouths agape, stopped in their tracks stunned. The news almost erased all the good feeling in the room from the day’s various product announcements, and replaced it with a sense of shock. You’d think a dementor had flown into the room." Why all the fuss? Well, how would you feel if you had spent hours, even days, waiting in line for a $599 iPhone just two months ago - and now find that it's being priced at $399?

Apparently the stock dropped on this news too. If I had an iPhone I'd be pissed. From what I heard, the phone was the worst thing about the iPhone; the plan is locked in to AT&T, the service is scattershot at best, and the plans are costly. Getting all of the features I wanted without having to deal with the phone is like the best of all possible worlds, and I kicked in for the extra memory to get 16 gigs (I only used about 10-12 gigs of my old 20Gb iPod; seriously, does anyone even KNOW 40,000 songs for the 160Gb model they released today?).

Maybe if they opened up the device to competition from other cellular networks, it wouldn't be seen as too expensive considering it doesn't work well. Making the device open would allow more people to keep their service and transfer it over, and would make the phone more attractive to those who like their plans. But Apple was stubborn, fell in line with the typical way things are done in the cell phone industry when they had the juice to be bold, and now they're paying the price in a big way.

Technology is like information; it wants to be free.

UPDATE: This is not the publicity any company desires:

Steve Jobs' casual announcement today that Apple (AAPL) was cutting the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200 is not going over well among customers who paid $599 for theirs. In fact, it has sparked an outright rebellion in the Apple support forums, where discussion threads filled with hate mail are piling up faster than Apple can delete them.

"The more the day goes by, the more furious I become," writes VSiskos in "1 Million People Slapped In The Face Today," one of the forums still standing.

"I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS!" adds graphicalliber425. " Somewhere in my heart I'm hoping, Apple's going to offer all of us an extended return policy, or a brand new iPod nano right?"

Under's Apple's standard return policy, customers who bought a product within 14 days of a price reduction can ask to be reimbursed the difference, and some Apple stores have reportedly done the same for iPhones purchased earlier than that. But those random acts of flexibility seem only to have further inflamed the wounded feelings of those who weren't extended the same courtesy.

"They told me to shove it," wrote tulanejosjh. "14 days or nothing."

"Same here," added jmolina1313. "The guy treated me like I was on drugs!"

Apple had to know that people would be furious about this. They obviously calculated that they would rather take that hit (and the loss of perhaps fifty million dollars in revenue, if a just a quarter of iPhone purchasers turn theirs in) than try to sell a lame product. They must be cursing AT&T something fierce right now.

No I'm Not In This Line

The scarcity of my posting today has nothing to do with this line of people outside a Cingular store in the San Fernando Valley waiting for a certain "best technology product in the history of man." Actually, I won't get an iPhone on principle because they're not allowing it beyond one cell service carrier, which happens to be the worst carrier for connectivity. Screw that noise.

Actually, I've just been on deadline.

What little I have heard today is that British police stopped a car bomb from exploding in London today. Once again, local law enforcement proves itself to be the best defense against crime, and that most of these free-lance would-be assassins have no basic understanding of science necessary to carry off a bombing attack that would do any kind of damage.

You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

As for the use of closed-circuit television, ubiquitous in Britain, to try and find the failed bomber (who could be IRA or a right-wing nut, for all we know), let's go ahead and try such a nanny-state scenario in the US, I'm sure those libertarians on the right will love being snooped upon at every waking moment. Heck, the Glenn Reynoldses of the world can't even stand traffic cameras. So watch the hypocrisy dance if the government decides to install a Big Brother-type system in the name of fighting terra terra terra.

Anyway, car bombs don't kill people, people kill people, right?

The Myth of the Sci-Fi Solution

This week-old article in the Christian Science Monitor (actually a decent paper) has been nagging at me. I feel like this represents science trying to hit a 465-foot home run when all that is needed are some opposite-field singles. It seems to me like there's too much effort put into stopping global warming with "the big idea" rather than with a series of little ideas. In addition, this search for the big idea ignores the elephant in the room, that it's global dependence on fossil fuels that is the real problem, and no amount of giant space mirrors or atmospheric carbon vacuums or massive algae blooms is going to really change that.

I'd like to think that there's some technological "killer app" that can make global warming obsolete, but it just doesn't seem like the best way to address the issue. This is science as practiced in Hollywood movies ("We can push the asteroid BACK into space with a giant slingshot!") rather than one applicable to the present day. I agree with Bill McKibben, quoted in the article:

But others say the discussion over mitigation seems to have gotten ahead of itself. Why talk about fixing symptoms when we have the technology to address the root cause? "There's no getting around the fact that we're in a very desperate situation," says Bill McKibben, author of "The End of Nature" and more recently "Deep Economy." But "before geoengineering, let's do a little policy engineering first."

Indeedy.