Politico.com is reporting that Obama plans to announce a national Fuel-Economy and Greenhouse Gas standard for automobiles that will finally get everyone on the same page.

This is something that Bush had promised to do, even going as far as citing a federal regulation as a reason that individual states couldn’t up their own auto emission standards… but he never seemed to get ’round to setting the numbers.   The announcement, set to go public tomorrow (according to the Politico.com source, and now NPR) will have the backing of many of the industries big movers and shakers.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is planning on attending the event, a big deal when one considers that California was leading the charge against Bush’s EPA to get the ability to set higher standards themselves.  Hopefully, this means that the 13 states and D.C. legislation can go by the wayside, and we can get down to the business of actually building better more efficient cars.

From NPR’s story:

Officials said Tuesday’s announcement moves toward the 30 percent goal by 2016, starting with model years 2011 and beyond.

Obama’s move also would effectively end litigation between states and automakers, who sought to block state-specific rules. The new federal rules would prompt automakers to drop their lawsuit. Two car companies that have been part of the litigation — General Motors and Chrysler — have received billions in government loans during a dramatic downturn in car sales and weakened economy.

Sounds like things have been happening behind the scenes (isn’t that always the sense you get from Obama?  “Look over there at the abortion issue while I get things done over here”):

In secret conversations, the Obama administration has lined up support from many state governments and a huge array of domestic and foreign automakers, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, BMW and many more.

Perhaps we are reaping the rewards of the Socialism of the Car Industry faster then we all thought possible!

Image from flickr user: Guilherme Kardel under Creative Commons License

Urban Spaces – once concrete jungles of pollution – are starting to realize the potential for green living, and the race is on for which city can push that envelope the furthest.

That was the thesis put forward during today’s Marketplace of Ideas panel, which featured Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was hosted by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI).  Mayor Daley spoke about the realized benefits of green roofs, a design that Chicago has embraced with more than 600 roofs either in construction or completed, totaling more than 7 million square feet green of space.  These roofs cool the city, absorb rain water and air pollution, provide jobs for their installation and maintenance, and even provide folks with quality of life improvements.

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Because it’s dramatic, and may presage the switch that I have been hoping for for a while: the divorce of the idea that a Conservative Environmentalist in politics is an oxymoron.

Let’s assume that Sarah Palin is continuing to ride the publicity train because she still has plans for a 2012 run for President.   Leaving aside my personal opinion — that such a a nomination would fracture the GOP irrevocably, to the point that we would end up with three parties here in America –  lets look at how her energy policy was in 2008 and… beyond.

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]]> http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/05/13/sarah-palin-on-energy-what-a-switch/feed/ http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/05/03/west-virginia-mountain-top-removal-coal-protests-heating-up/ http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/05/03/west-virginia-mountain-top-removal-coal-protests-heating-up/#comments Sun, 03 May 2009 19:26:45 +0000 Alan Smith http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/05/03/west-virginia-mountain-top-removal-coal-protests-heating-up/ Coal River Vally, WV, has become home to a civil disobedience campaign against Massy Energy company in an attempt to halt their destructive mountaintop renewal coal mining practices.

Kay Sexton, with her regular run down of environmental protests, has been examining the “imperatives and complexities” of protests that are unique to the environmentalist movement.  Here’s another data point to add into the discussion.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t always think that the environmental movement benefits from protests.  Channeling the Greenpeace mentality of chaining people to trees often seems to generate bad press more then it advances a cause.  But, there are times when even my cynical take on the efficacy of protest has to be subverted by out-and-out necessity.

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Global Warming is a health hazard.

One of the nicer Friday News Dumps, this decision comes as a welcome and long overdue shift in government activity on carbon and other global warming gasses.  The timing of the announcement, especially under the cover of Obama releasing torture memos from the Bush administration, is interesting — it’s already becoming a regular thing for this administration to give it’s opponents a few things to chew on in a very short period, and I would bet that many people are more fired up about the torture thing then this EPA ruling.

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The Waxman-Markey bill that recently was introduced into the House has already caused quit a stir, and that was before someone found a provision tucked in it’s 600 plus pages that would make it legal to sue the Government if you suffer from Global Warming.

The bill is big, robust, and in many cases even more aggressive in it’s battle against C02 then the Obama plan (maybe for a reason: to make the Obama plan seem palatable in comparison?).  This one little subsection, however, has the Washingtin Times all up in arms.  They are worried about the huge number of new lawsuits that this could cause tying up the legal system.  Wait a second… does that mean that they are admitting that these hypothetical lawsuits would be justified?  That the realize there would be a reason to be upset at the Feds for their inaction on Global Warming?   Nah…

Legal Options for Those “Harmed” by Global Warming.

According to the Times, the bill opens up a direct legal action option for individuals who feel they have been harmed in some way by Global Warming.  I located the passage they are talking about in the bill, and the Times seems to have it about right: here’s a line or two from the SEC. 336. ENFORCEMENT bit of the bill.

The persons authorized by subsection (a) to commence an action under this section shall include any person who has suffered, or reasonably expects to suffer, a harm attributable, in whole or in part, to a violation or failure to act referred to in subsection (a).

What is harm, you ask?  Well as near as I can tease out, it’s a wide open definition: “any effect of air pollution (including climate change), currently occurring or at risk of occurring.”  Well, I’m an asthmatic, and it’s been getting worse my whole life.  Does this mean I now have someone to blame!?

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A new way to treat wood has trees back in the limelight: a hardwood’s reliability that even a rain forest mahogany tree can love.

The above picture is of the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya® wood. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is “the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons”.  At this week’s Wall Street Green Trading Summit, a panel on forestation introduced a new way of thinking about how to deal with destruction of the rain forest.

>> More from the recent Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments and Solar Panels for All.

I think we can all agree that planting trees is a good way to go environmentally green (they capture carbon like crazy), but lets take a look at that other green for a moment: the green of cash.  Forestation can turn a profit quickly, given that it is one of the few industries in the United States that we know for sure will be cross marketable as a carbon offset industry. 

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Even for a group focused on Investing First and Green Second, this is getting a little silly.

The longer I am here at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the less this feels like anything to do with environmentalism.  At some point, when does off-setting stop being feasible, and when does carbon reduction become the name of the game?

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

This was driven home to me by a presentation on the investment opportunities presented by species banks.  Now, I didn’t even know what a species bank was until today, but apparently you can purchase an offset credit to get around the fact that your company is destroying the natural habitat of an endangered species.  And, there is an entire market based around this principle.

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We’re coming at you no-longer-quite-live at New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The summit is over for today, but I wanted to throw some concluding thoughts out after an afternoon spent discussing good business models for producing alternative energy and for overhauling our current electrical grid.

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments.

Two presentations stuck out to me from the afternoon, Tioga Energy and Acorn (no, not that ACORN) Energy.  Without turning this into too much of a publicity-fest for either company, here’s what they were about.

Solar Panels for All

Tioga has gotten pretty good at a business model that I’ve actually heard about in a few different places: effectively, they lease people’s roof space and put solar panels up on homes and businesses.  Then, they sell the energy to the people in the home at a fixed rate (below market value for the customer) that goes up slowly over a 20 year period.  There are options for the owner of the property to purchase the solar panels if they would like to down the line, but until they do Tioga maintains everything for them. This means that the company soaks the initial start-up costs for people: often that prohibitive thing reinventing a small business or a home-owner from taking a plunge.

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We’re coming at you live with more special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

It’s Lunchtime now at the WSGTS, and I just emerged from another dizzying bout of acronyms to find myself totally shocked by how little I know about big market investing. Fortunately, I stumbled on Open Carbon World, an open source project on carbon footprints that is here at the conference.  They have accumulated the following glossary of terms, acronyms and etc. to help novices like me navigate these crazy fast talking presentations.  If I drop one or two over the next few days, please forgive the frazzled brain, and give them a look up!  

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit:  The Species Bank?, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OCW is presenting tomorrow, so I’ll reserve final judgment ’til then, but expect a post on some sweet open source ideas having to do with footprints and offsets.

OK, so Carbon Trading, huh?

The murky mysteries of the market continue to elude me.  The second session today was all about the carbon offset market: where the money is, where the investment opportunities are and will be, and who is making the rules about what a carbon offset even means.

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We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The WSGTS claims to be the longest running and most comprehensive environmental market event in the industry (and we have no reason to doubt them!)

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In my recent quest to discover why people feel the need to fight so hard against the idea that humanity might be causing the globe to warm, I’ve started looking at everything I can find that illuminates skeptic science.  If you missed this profile of the physicist Freeman Dyson in the New York Times, check it out now.  Dyson, I would say, is the most highly respected scientist to publicly come out against global warming.

His point (in a tiny and simplified nutshell)?  There really isn’t a lot of proof of global warming beyond a series of simulations and models.  If you don’t buy their prognosticating power, you’re left considering the fact that we don’t know, for sure, the exact ratio between temperature and human interaction.

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For all President Obama’s rhetoric of science being back in the White House spotlight, it sounds like much of America hasn’t quite gotten that message.  A new poll from Gallup suggests that 41% of Americans think that the threat of Global Warming is exaggerated, the highest such number in a decade.  Well, at least people now mostly accept that it’s happening, even if it’s not a big deal…

Take that, Science!

Not surprisingly, the numbers on urgency seem to be based on political party: 66% of Republicans now think the Global Warming concerns are overblown, whereas people who identify as Democrats are holding at around 20%.  The political party that supports old energy doesn’t believe we need new energy… hmmmm…

It’s very easy for me, and for everyone else who clearly sees the logic behind the climate change science, to be frustrated by the war being waged on these facts by a coordinated series of commercial campaigns, and by the political factions who are allied with oil and coal interests.  But my background is coming from the news, so it’s not surprising that it’s the mainstream media that makes this poll really stick in my craw.

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That’s probably what the memo said on Joe Lucas’ desk this morning when he got to work.  Joe, the spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was on a CNN yesterday, saying he didn’t know if Coal was responsible for global warming.  By now, you’ve probably seen the following short clip:

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Transcript:
Still the industry refuses to say its plants contribute to global warming.
[Question:] Can you just answer that yes or no? If you believe that burning coal causes global warming?
[Joe Lucas:] I don’t know, I’m not a scientist.

Clearly, Joe knows.  He’s the spokesman for a Clean Coal advocacy group that admits as much, only they say that coal can clean up it’s act.  Now, there’s a lot of evidence that Coal can’t, that from cradle to grave it will always be very dirty.  Regardless, from a policy perspective, this sort of thing is just frustrating.

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When Does an Interest Start Being “Special”?

After years of railing against special interests, I find myself presented with a quandary.  Special interests are lining up behind the Smart Grid technology I love and, in doing so, risk saddling this cool program with the baggage intrinsic to special interests.

Even as lawmakers spent yesterday grilling everyone from members of the DOE to representatives from Google about Smart Grids, the groundwork for a Smart Grid might already have been assumed.  And, no, I’m not talking power lines and sub stations, I’m talking political donations.

The Current System is… Old.  Very Old

It’s a fact: our current system for transporting, producing and storing energy is ancient and inefficient.  Plus, as has been well recorded here on Red Green and Blue, Smart Grid technology theoretically does amazing things for how we use power as a nation and maybe even how we think about consumption.  By using less energy during peak hours, and even allowing personal rigs to feed back into the electricity grid with ease, the technology refocuses the country on conservation.

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“When you say that your town is open for Urban experimentation…  Are you taking part in these experiments?    because you look like you’ve received a large dose of Gamma Radiation”

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Where the Steel Goes…

The town of Braddock was once a thriving population of 20,000 people, all based around an active steel industry.  We know what happens to Allegheny towns when the Steel industry leaves: it’s not a pretty sight.  The town is now completely bankrupt, boasts a population of 2,500 people and a sign that says “Open for Good Ideas”.  It appears that anyone with a good Shovel Ready project idea can use Braddock as a blank canvas.  Fetterman is trying to use the Colbert Bump to bump his town back into relevance — on the back of green inventors and green ideas!

More video on Fetterman and the town of Braddock.

More on stimulus spending on Red Green and Blue

Carbon Footprint… Species Footprint?

A Carbon offset is a nebulous thing, but it does have measurements: tons of C02, years you can produce.  This raises some questions about how one can verify the veracity of a bank.  How long does the new place have to be “guaranteed safe” before the permanent destruction of a previous habitat is deemed acceptable?  What happens if a species that was on the endangered list makes a come back?  Does that mean your offset credit is now worthless?  Man, I hope Wall Street has some idea of how to defray the risks inherent in biology.

Unlike with carbon, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of voluntary market for these credits.  People who want to conserve manage to find some way to, well, conserve.  They find ways to make projects that don’t involve the destruction of habitats and species.   This means that this entire market is all based on government regulations and the things that the feds deem worthy of protection.  I guess that, in our capitalist driven society, placing a monetary value on something seems to be the only way to move from an adversarial debate between business and environmentalism.  After all, as Douglas Adams said: “You’ve got to build bypasses”.

Image: via Dou, flickr.com creative commons license

Can Green activists play the civil disobedience card… and still be taken seriously?

In the Green Options discussion forum, Tim Hurst recently posted a poll asking:

Is Civil Disobedience a Viable Green Strategy?

First, let me say that I’m a fan of civil disobedience in general.  I’ve studied my Gandhi and my King, and am usually staunchly pro anything that shakes up the status quo and causes people enough discomfort to look at themselves.

When it comes to the environmentalist movement, however, (and especially Power Shift ‘09) I think we’ve lost that weapon in our arsenal.  Further, I think that playing the civil disobedience card as part of our proverbial hand (metaphor becoming mixed here) is actively problematic.  Granted, Power Shift is not involved in the planned March 2nd. event, officially.  But that is a line often blurred by the news, especially as many folks might take their Power Shift training and use it while they are still in town.

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Follow the Money

As we watch the dollars going to alternative energy and exciting new transportation options in the stimulus package, it’s always fascinating to see who will actually be on the receiving end of these huge checks. The answer to that question isn’t out yet, but a good way to guess who gets what piece of the pie might be at hand.

The Center for Public Integrity has put out a study on the number of lobbyists on Capitol Hill who have spent some time on Global Warming, and the numbers are amazingly high.  Marianne Lavelle, writing for the center, lays it out:

“A Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms shows that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year, as the issue gathered momentum and came to a vote on Capitol Hill. That’s an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress. It also means that 15 percent of all Washington lobbyists spent at least some of their time on global warming in 2008, based on a tally of the total number of influence-peddlers on Capitol Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

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