Green Options

The US Congress and Senate have both approved a nuclear deal between the US and India. The deal ends a 30-year ban on sales to India of nuclear technology and fuel.

Yesterday the U.S. Senate voted to renew a one year extension for renewable energy tax credits worth $18 billion dollars. Absent from the package was a tax credit aimed at helping food giant Tyson and oil giant ConocoPhillips turn a profit by converting fats leftover from Tyson’s processing of beef to the so-called “renewable diesel” that ConocoPhillips blends with regular diesel (for a look at what renewable diesel is, check out Jason Burroughs comment below).

The legislation enacts a $1 per gallon credit for biodiesel production, but the “renewable diesel” made from waste fat, or tallow, would only be eligible for a 50 cent per gallon credit. According to Tyson and ConocoPhillips, without the $1 per gallon credit for making “renewable diesel” from tallow, their proposed project is a no go.

I’m a bit behind the curve in getting to Fred Krupp (the president of Environmental Defense Fund) and Miriam Horn’s new book Earth: The Sequel– my reading time ain’t what it used to be! While other green bloggers have beat me to the punch on this one, I still wanted to weigh in on this book, especially since the US Senate begins its debate of the Lieberman-Warner-Boxer Climate Stewardship Act today. While this timing was a matter of luck, as opposed to planning, Krupp and Horn’s book provides some valuable insight into the debate that will occur on the Senate floor this week… let’s hope a few of our esteemed representatives have read it.

At it’s core, Earth: The Sequel is an argument for cap-and-trade as a viable, market-based mechanism for addressing climate change. While long-time sustainablog readers are likely up on the concept of cap-and-trade, it’s worth a quick explanation. Krupp and Horn define the concept in the book’s first chapter:

The U.S. Congress must set a legal and steadily declining limit on global warming pollution. The allowances will be divvied up among emitters, or auctioned by the government to raise revenues — or some combination of the two. Polluters who emit more will need to pay for the extra pollution reduction achieved by others; those who can reduce global warming pollution further will profit by selling those reductions in an open market. We can, in short, use the power of the market system to climb out of the hole created by flawed markets.

One might worry that what follows such an introductory chapter might be a long, boring treatise on market-based economics and the environment; rather, the bulk of the book focuses on the companies (mostly start-ups) involved in innovative research and development of next-generation clean energy technologies. I’ll be discussing some of those stories in subsequent posts at CleanTechnica and Ecopreneurist. Today, I want to stay focused on this main argument: cap-and-trade is the mostly viable method of achieving significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.