October 2009 Archives
10/28/09 4:47 PM
Obama's Energy Policy is Hardly Electric
Imagine, for a minute, that you're the president of the United States
and you have to deliver a barn burner of a speech about...electrical
meters. It certainly helps if you can mention the $3.4 billion dollars
in Stimulus Funding headed to the creation of a Smart Grid (and Whoo!
Thank goodness for a snazzy term like Smart Grid, without which the
president would be stuck with phrases like "real time electrical
pricing" and "demand response"). We're lucky President Obama is willing
to throw his oratory skills at a subject as pragmatically important and rhetorically
blah as the Smart Grid. But the twin energy speeches Obama has given
in the past week reveal the crushing lack of a "vision thing" in the
administration's energy and climate proposals. In last week's speech at MIT, Obama relieved many by finally coming out fighting on the topic of energy and climate change. His speech was one truism after another: The system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet." Sharing opportunities around the world means that we also share crisis.The world is in a peaceful competition for new sources of energy. For younger people, this is the challenge of a generation--a clash between innovative futurism and pessimism. Lisa Simpson, the cartoon goddess of wonky types, couldn't have written a better, smarter analysis of our energy issues herself.
Unfortunately, the speech was all analysis and no vision. Green jobs, new technology, "room for debate on how we do it," and, "no silver bullet," blah blah. The speech revealed the truism that the Stimulus is the bedrock of the administration's reform of energy policy--doling out $80 billion across the landscape is the most powerful tool they have--and the one that's least likely to be set upon by naysayers.
Later in the speech Obama took forceful aim at the people who will oppose changing energy and climate regulation. He said we're all "complicit" in "the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we're facing. And implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we've lost something important--that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something of the past."
All true. And yet. And yet. Where IS Obama's vision? In his Smart Grid speech, he compared the electrical grid to the U.S. highway system before Eisenhower. But the reform of energy and emissions is a bigger project than the Interstate Highway System, bigger than the TVA, and will create more domestic enemies than the Space Program. (Space was a famous last frontier--no one was there. In energy, lots of big players have been here for a century, paying off their infrastructure investments, like pipelines, refineries, power plants, many times over.) It's bigger than all of these combined with the Anti-Trust movement of the early 1900's. But we don't have a story for it yet.
The key to Americans meeting all of the challenges of the past has been our willingness to believe in a Great Narrative to justify risk and sacrifice. We all know that Obama can tell a heck of a narrative, but it will mean he has to take a stand, and risk making mistakes, which he hates to do. Starting today, he needs to stop talking about the comfortable stuff like Smart Grids, and start talking big...and risky.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Ian Muttoo
10/22/09 6:22 PM
Next on Oprah: Carbon Confessions and Zombie Troubles
Last week internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee apologized for the waste of
time and paper he caused by inserting the slashes in web urls back in
the early 90's. The CO2nfessional, Mea Carbona -- this particular form of
apology needs a name, because it's only a matter of cultural moments
before the GREAT QUANTIFICATION begins. And when it does, we'll all be
caught up in an actuarial frenzy to determine the carbon price tag of
every keystroke, plastic spoon, and ice cream cone of the minutiae we
call life... and apologize for them. Those who fight greenhouse gas regulation are right that this is far more than just legislation--it's a new set of values in both senses of the word. The economists who say carbon taxes or cap and trade are no more than a way to valuating externalities, a "rational" way to fight emissions, are probably not yet imagining how we irrational humans will run with all of this. Like that giant scap plastic vortex swirling in the North Pacific, the culture is quietly agglomerating a sense of the commons, and from that a consciousness of "bad ownership," will develop.
So Berners-Lee was wise to get out in front of the curve once again (the first time was that interweb thingy) and declare his apology. But he wasn't the only one making a CO2nfession last week: SAP chairman Leo Apotheker mentioned that the IT industry has the same carbon footprint as the airline industry. And the National Research Council, on a commission from Congress, announced that even the non-carbon pollution costs of fossil fuels are high: as much as 29 cents per gallon for gasoline and between 1/500th of a cent and 12 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity (depending which generator supplies your electricity and what fuel they use.)
What I'd like to see is a TV program (patterned on the Biggest Loser) where companies and individuals fess up to their carbon excesses and try to atone for them with the help of a chirpy Climate Coach. First up I'd nominate the makers of those electricity guzzling appliances that got "Energy Star" ratings undeservedly, and the people who were supposed to be verifying the Energy Star eligibility. What's the sense of taxpayers spending money promoting the Energy Star program if it doesn't stand for anything?
My second nomination would be for the movie Zombieland, which makes no claims to being a documentary, but does demonstrate a complete divorce from energy reality. The characters drive a 2003 H2 Hummer for hundreds of miles without ever filling up. (We all agree that zombies are real right?) Assuming they're going 60 mph and getting 10 mpg they should need to fill up every 5 hours and 20 minutes. (The tank holds 32 gallons.) Yet they go through the whole film without explaining how they get gasoline. It's a new age... someone needs to answer for this. I'm hoping Oprah! takes it on.
(Photo: Flickr/net efekt)
10/05/09 2:19 PM
Is the Climate Legislation Worm Starting to Turn?
If you look at crude oil prices, still bobbing around in the high $60's, you
might think that not much happened last week. But I think we may look back 10 years
from now and realize that last week the needle began to move
towards dramatic changes in U.S. energy and climate policy. First, on the foreign policy front, the U.S. was forced to recognize that it cannot enforce sanctions on Iran without China's support, and China is too wrapped up in its oily relationship with Iran to push hard. In front of our very eyes, the great constellations of power and energy have realigned. (And we're not EVEN getting into the lost Russian ship, the pirates/ecologists, and the supposed missiles that may or may not have been bound for Iran. Not that the "pirate's" story makes any sense either.) Dominating the oil market as the world's greatest consumer is no longer enough to get what we want; this means that a dramatic about-face towards creating low carbon trading blocs might be a cheaper way to consolidate power in a more multi-polar world.
On the home front, two climate sticks: the EPA is going to regulate CO2 emissions from large emitters, and Senators Kerry and Boxer released a less wimpy climate bill. Together, these two actions almost make Waxman Markey--with its big free carbon credit allocations for utilities-- look carrot-ish.
Which leads to the third plot point. Last week, utilities PG and E, Exelon, and PNM broke with the US Chamber of Commerce, which has gotten increasingly histrionic about CO2 emissions reductions to the point of calling for a "Scopes Monkey Trial" over the scientific proof of man-made global warming before dialing it back a few days later. (Here's the Chamber's own blog on the utilities who left, kicking off with a pugnacious quote from PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores.) And now, Politico reports, more than 150 business leaders from utilities, manufacturers and clean-energy companies plan to "swarm" Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday. They're swarming, or love-bombing Congress with the message that they want clear climate change regulation, sooner rather than later, simpler rather than complex, and they intend to profit from it. Among them are all of the companies that left the Chamber of Commerce last week.
The fourth plot points can be found in the graphs at the EIA's Short Term Energy Outlook, which show that U.S. carbon emissions shrank 6 percent over the past year. In the first half of the year, U.S. petroleum consumption fell by an almost unprecedented 6.3 percent, electricity use fell by 4.4 percent--largely the result of a shrinking economy--but a huge divergence from year on year rises in the past. Interestingly, coal fired electrical generation fell by 12 percent--more than twice as fast as the electricity demand drop. Huge! Nobody wants to shrink carbon emissions by shrinking the economy (precisely what all the fuss is about) but since we're already in the midst of a major reorganization of energy, capital, and labor, this is a logical time to lay the new ground rules, even much as the financial regulatory agencies are trying to figure out the new rules for banking.
Maybe.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Pfala
