Friday, August 28, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Yet another major poll finds "broad support" for clean energy and climate bill: "Support for the plan among independents has increased slightly."

Posted: 28 Aug 2009 08:20 AM PDT

My key takeaway from the new ABC-WashPost poll:  A lot of people understand energy prices are going up if we do nothing. In fact, 36% of 1001 voters polled believe "the proposed changes to U.S. energy policy" won't make much of a difference on energy costs and 16% it will decrease them.  And this in spite of relentless negative messaging to the contrary from the disinformers.

Washington Post-ABC News Poll

Many Americans understand the "do nothing" energy tax, since they saw that annual energy costs under President Bush jumped over $1000 (see here).  Americans understand that our rising dependence on oil and our inaction on climate change are untenable.  And they really, really believe in clean energy and understand that oil companies and Republicans have been blocking action for a long time.

The Post piece on the poll, "On Energy, Obama Finds Broad Support" has a great quote:

"Something definitely has to be done," said Marian Eldridge, a former legal secretary from East Windsor, N.J., who participated in the survey. "Anything's worth a try at this point." She said she tries to "ignore the politics; you get discouraged." But she said that higher energy costs were "inevitable" and that "we're too dependent on other countries."

The fact that American — especially likely voters — support climate and clean energy action should not be a surprise:

Here's more on what the new poll finds:

Most Americans approve of the way President Obama is handling energy issues and support efforts by him and Democrats in Congress to overhaul energy policy — including the controversial cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Even as public support has slipped for Obama's health-care proposals, support for ambitious changes in energy policy has been steady. Although the issue of health care arouses more intense feelings than energy policy does, those who do feel strongly about energy and climate policy tend to tilt toward the administration's position and a broad majority of people echo Democratic lawmakers' views on the benefits of proposed changes.

Nearly six in 10 of those polled support the proposed changes to U.S. energy policy being developed by Congress and the administration. Fifty-five percent of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the issue, compared with 30 percent who do not. A narrower majority, 52 to 43 percent, back a cap-and-trade system; that margin is unchanged since June. A cap-and-trade system would set a ceiling for the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, and it would allow firms to buy and sell emissions permits.

But what about all that disinformation from fossil fuel companies and conservatives about how the climate bill will ruin the economy?

GOP criticism of the House energy and climate bill appears to have primarily influenced Republicans themselves. Among Republicans, support for cap-and-trade legislation has dipped from 45 percent to 37 percent since a poll taken in June….

Support for the plan among independents has increased slightly, with a narrow majority now in favor. Overall, a slight majority of those polled say changes to energy policy would help address global warming, while a third say they will not. A slim 5 percent volunteered that global warming is not an issue.

And Americans do love policies that promote clean energy:

Obama's goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 strikes a chord. More than eight in 10 people say they support the development of electric car technology….

Solar and wind power enjoy near-universal support; nine in 10 people support further development. More than eight in 10 favor requirements for greater fuel efficiency. Broad majorities also favor requiring increased energy conservation from businesses and consumers.

Fifty-two percent favor building more nuclear power plants, but that support drops to 35 percent if the new plants were within 50 miles of the respondent's home. Support for building nuclear plants is up about six percentage points since 2001.

People love nukes in someone else's backyard.  Here's an interesting stat:

Some people see the government's Cash for Clunkers program as a symbol of energy policy, even though it is separate from the comprehensive House legislation. Nearly seven in 10 backed using cash rebates to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars .

It may be that the well-advertised success of this program hasincreased confidence in the government's ability to enact intelligent energy policy.  If so, that is an even bigger benefit than its economic and energy impacts (see "Cash for Clunkers is a double economic stimulus that pays for itself in oil savings so CO2 savings are free").

I'll discuss the messaging implications of this and other polls in September.

Climate Progress at three years: Why I blog

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 05:16 PM PDT

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

No, I'm not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with George Orwell's.  I know of no essayists today who come close to matching his skill in writing.  On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts.  I've written some two million words since launching this blog three years ago this week.  Perfection isn't an option.

But operating under the dictum, "if you want to be a better writer, read better writers," I took on vacation Facing Unpleasant Facts, a collection of Orwell's brilliant narrative essays.  My life has been almost the exact opposite of Orwell's.  Indeed, if you think you had a rough childhood, trying reading, "Such, such were the joys."  Compared to Orwell, we've all been raised by Mary Poppins.

Orwell does have the soul of a blogger, as we'll see.  He is solipsistic almost to a fault, but with a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirist to shame.

Read about how his headmaster cured his bedwetting with a beating, a double caning with a riding crop in fact, after he foolishly announced that the first one "didn't hurt."  Or read "Shooting an Elephant," with its gut-punching first line, "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me."

Second, he has "a power of facing unpleasant facts," which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire for here.

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts — see "What if the MSM simply can't cover humanity's self-destruction?" and "The media's decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress" and dozens more examples here.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I didn't want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation 20,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay ten times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many, many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also "This could not possibly be more off topic").

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his master class of essay writing, argues in "Why I write":

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

Interestingly, I think there are more than four great motives to blog, at least for me.  But let's start with Orwell's:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one….  Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

No argument here.  On the bright side, I make no pretensions to be a serious writer.  I'm not certain that bloggers are journalists.  I think we are, however, journal-ists.  What is a log if not a journal?

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

Again, inarguable.  I'm an auditory person, for those who know NLP, and I dictate all of my blog posts.  If you want to be a better writer, I suggest you read aloud everything you write.  For me the sound of a good phrase, the pleasure of a headline that works, is immense.  I wouldn't blog just for that reason, and I'd rather have a widely-read substantive blog than a scarcely-read work of art, if such a thing even exists on the blogosphere.   Sometimes everything comes together, as in perhaps my best headline, the one Time magazine singled out in naming me a favorite environmental website:  "Debate over. Further delay fatal. Action not costly. This headline pretty much sums up Joe Romm's message. Romm is a one-man anti-disinformation clearinghouse."

I will take a clearinghouse over an arthouse any day.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Even more so with a blog.  In the increasingly likely event we don't avert catastrophic global warming, I do hope that the reporting and analysis in this blog, which evolves over time, will be of use to those trying to understand just how it is that, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it, "a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself."  It will be a great source of bafflement to future generations, and I suspect that as they suffer through the misery and grief caused by our myopia and greed, there will be a growing literature aimed at trying to understand what went wrong, how we did this to ourselves.  Perhaps this web log will help.  That's one more motivation for me to use as many links as possible to original sources.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

Pretty amazing that Orwell uses that last word.  The Wikipedia entry on "pamphleteer" asserts, "Today a pamphleteer might communicate his missives by way of weblog…."

Orwell explains the source of his evoluton:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

I couldn't dream of saying it better than that if I worked on this post for a month.

Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

I also blog for at least two other reasons.

Piece of mind:  I would be unimaginably frustrated and depressed if I didn't have a way of contributing to the task of saving a livable climate, a way of responding in real time to the general humbug and sentences without meaning and purple passages of those who wittingly or unwittingly spreading disinformation aimed at delaying action on climate change.  I hope the comments section on the blog serves in some small way as a similar outlet for readers.

Personal growth:  The act of trying to explain the science and the solutions and the politics to a broader audience forces me think hard about what I'm really saying, about what I really know and don't know.  It makes me much smarter, if no one else.  The rapid feedback and global nature of the blogosphere mean that I get to test my ideas against people who are exceedingly knowledgeable and equally articulate.  Through this blog I have interacted with people from every walk of life, with widely different worldviews, from many continents, whom I never would have otherwise known.  And all from the basement of my home, occasionally with my daughter by my side.

Like Orwell, I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know I wouldn't be blogging this much if you all weren't tuning in and writing your comments.  The readership of this blog has exploded — for those who follow my feedburner stats, they have gone through the roof since the website redesign, for reasons I don't fully understand.  And I am in discussions to further syndicate the content, so it will reach many more people than who read it here or on Grist or Worldchanging or elsewhere.

Most of all, it boggles the mind that I have a profession that did not exist even a decade ago, but that is, in many respects, precisely what my father did, precisely what I never expected to do.

After my brother lost his home in Katrina, and I started interviewing climate experts for what turned into my book, Hell and High Water, I made a decision I would not pull any punches and would get "political" as Orwell defined the term.

If I have learned anything from the blog, it is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and the next 50 generations, about the vast but still achieveable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action  — a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.   And that is possibly the most reassuring thing I have learned in the past three years.  Thank you all for that!

Cash for Clunkers is a double economic stimulus that pays for itself in oil savings so CO2 savings are free

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:34 PM PDT

Given the silly sniping at this small, wildly successful program, I feel obliged to update my last post.

BusinessWeek's Auto Beat whines, "They say the program was effective in selling cars, but the boost won't last long enough to really help the car industry for very long."  Ya think?  It's a friggin' stimulus, and a tiny one at that — $3 billion.

A person passes a car in a dumpster placed in front of an auto ...And then we have the academics — UC Davis's Christopher R. Knittel actually did a study on "The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide under the Cash for Clunkers Program," which got lots of media attention like "Cash for Clunkers Pays Ten Times Market Rate for Greenhouse Gas Reduction."  I could have saved them a lot of trouble had they bothered to read my May post, which noted "As a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this "cash for clunkers" deal is probably among the least cost-effective uses of federal dollars one could imagine."

Memo to media:  It ain't "Cash for carbon."

I was not a big fan of the final version of "Cash for Clunkers" because its mileage improvement requirements were so inadequate, as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) explained here.

But in the real world, the public has mostly turned in gas-guzzlers in exchange for fuel-efficient cars — which perhaps should not have been a total surprise since oil prices are rising, gas guzzlers remain a tough resell in the used car market, and most fuel-efficient cars are much cheaper than SUVs.  So as a stimulus that saves oil while cutting CO2 for free — it has turned out to be a slam dunk, far better than I had expected.

You can read the government's final report on Cash for Clunkers aka Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) here.  The economic bottom line, "According to a preliminary analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the CARS program" will:

  • Boost economic growth in the third quarter of 2009 by 0.3-0.4 percentage points at an annual rate thanks to increased auto sales in July and August.
  • Will sustain the increase in GDP in the fourth quarter because of increased auto production to replace depleted inventories.
  • Will create or save 42,000 jobs in the second half of 2009. Those jobs are expected to remain well after the program's close.

I should note that Detroit sold 39% of new vehicles in the program.  Further, as AP reported yesterday, "The Toyota Corolla was the most popular new vehicle purchased under the program. The Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Ford Focus held the next three top spots. All four are built in the United States."

I don't think the CEA factored in the economic benefit of lowering people's gasoline bill, which puts more money in their pocket to save or spend in their community.

Even Seth Borenstein, the AP science writer I admire greatly, who has a long piece explaining that CARS is a very cost-ineffective way to save CO2, noted that "America will be using nearly 72 million fewer gallons of gasoline a year because of the program, based on the first quarter-million vehicles replaced."

Well, the basic stats for the second phase, which brings the total cars sold to 700,000 are about the same:

84 percent of consumers traded in trucks and 59 percent purchased passenger cars. The average fuel economy of the vehicles traded in was 15.8 miles per gallon and the average fuel economy of vehicles purchased is 24.9 mpg. – a 58 percent improvement.

Yes, it costs energy to manufacture new cars, but most of that is in the steel and other metal in the car, so you get a lot of that energy back when you scrap it.

Yes, people drive newer cars further, but vehicle miles traveled declined 3.6% in 2008 compared to 2007, in large part because of gasoline prices, though Brookings believes more fundamental trends are at play.  I expect gasoline prices to rise relatively steadily over the next decade, to more than $5 a gallon, so exactly how VMT play out is far from clear.

Let's assume the new cars are driven nearly 20% more over the next 5 years, and that the average price of gasoline over the next five years is $3.50.  Then we're "only" saving 140 million gallons a year or roughly $500 million a year.  The $3 billion program "pays for itself" in oil savings in 6 years.  And most of that oil savings is money that would have left the country, so it is a (small) secondary stimulus.

Using a rough estimate of 25 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas (full lifecycle emissions), then we're saving over 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year — and all of the ancillary urban air pollutants from those clunkers — for free.

The bottom line is that the program seems to be a shot in the arm for the auto industry and economy, while achieving better energy and environmental gains than expected.  Let the sniping begin!