by Auden Schendler, via The Atlantic
Two things have happened since the obscure holiday of St. Crispin’ day, October 25, this year. First, Hurricane Sandy emphatically reset the American conversation on climate change. A recent cover of Bloomberg Businessweek was “It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” Second, the presidential candidate who understands climate science and wants to take action has been elected. In his victory speech Obama said: “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”
In history, St. Crispin’s day happens to have marked two legendary battles where armies overcame overwhelming odds. The U.S. and Australia’s improbable victory, outgunned and outnumbered, at Leyte Gulf during World War II, was one. And in 1415 at Agincourt, Henry V and his men used longbows to defeat the numerically superior French forces. It’s worth noting that the catastrophic Charge of the Light Brigade also happened on St. Crispin’s day, reminding us that great boldness often carries great consequences.
Perhaps this year, St. Crispin’s day marked another improbable victory against all odds: The date when Americans finally started talking about realistic paths to climate solutions.
Where do we go from here? There are at least three viable options today, and here they are:
A Frontal Assault on Climate
It has become abundantly clear that adaptation, the climate solution recommended by Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, is a joke and a myth. “Adaptation” looks like lower Manhattan under four feet of water. The upside of that harsh truth is that government officials like Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Obama, and maybe even Chris Christie, are beginning to realize what conservative Yale economist William Nordhaus has been saying for years: It’s going to cost more not to deal with climate change than to fix it.
With that in mind, and knowing that Obama does see climate as a huge problem, it’s possible he could pursue actual legislation to reel in carbon emissions.
The right path wouldn’t be tepid support for a wildly complex fraud-incubating cap and trade program. Rather, it would be a creative, bipartisan policy fix supported by the left and by Grover Norquist Tea Partying Republicans.
The approach, proposed by a group called Citizen’s Climate Lobby and suggested in similar form by climatologist James Hansen, is a fee on carbon at the wellhead or mine, refunded back to the consumer. “Fee and dividend” looks like your heating, electric, and car fillup costs going up by, say, $50 each month (though the cost could rise), but a check for the same amount arriving at your mailbox every quarter. The idea: create a revenue-neutral market incentive for our economy to decarbonize, without adding a new tax. The right likes this approach because it’s not a tax and because it creates a market incentive to fix climate. The left likes it because a carbon fee is the sine qua non of fixing climate change. Will this alone slow the rise of the oceans? Of course not. But it’s the first step, it signals intent and creates policy certainty, and China will take notice. A simpler approach — a straight tax on carbon – is now gaining traction as part of a deal to fix the fiscal cliff.
Leyte Gulf: Fixing Climate through Tax Reform
Even though the above policy fix makes wonks drool, it would be pretty bold for Obama to go after climate directly, given the insane partisanship in the country, and the outsized bickering around this issue…. So perhaps he needs to tackle it obliquely, the same way Americans won the Battle of Leyte Gulf, forced into using smaller, nimble ships to fight more powerful opposition forces. A policy version of this tactic might be to attack climate from the sides, through tax reform, which both John Boehner and Obama see as necessary.
Most economists agree our tax system is broken. It’s a Rube Goldberg device that does nothing well and a lot of things badly. Annual compliance costs alone are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the economies of many nations.
Left, right, and center agree with William E. Simon, the former Treasury secretary, who said that “the nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.”
So let’s do something everyone agrees we need to do, and in the process, start taxing bads instead of goods: pollution instead of income. Again, a carbon tax won’t solve all our problems, but it’s the sine qua non of climate fixes, and a market signal and a message to China and India that the U.S. is now moving on climate, and they can follow or be left in the dust.
Agincourt: Campaign Finance Reform
Perhaps tax reform is just too big a lift. Why not go after El Jefe of all problems — one both right and left have aspired to fix — the problem of money in politics? As with Henry V at Agincourt, we’d need both luck and strategic brilliance to pull this off. But if we did, as Shakespeare’s King Henry said: “From this day to the ending of the world, we in it shall be remembered!”
Currently, politicians can’t simply make the right decision, they have to make the decision that will allow the dollars to keep flowing in. This is madness. It means soul crushing 24/7 fundraising, and limited time to actually govern. What if, after the dust settles from this election, both parties asked the question: “Were we happy spending a billion dollars each to achieve nothing?” We’ve certainly proved the Mutual Assured Destruction of unlimited campaign spending. Publicly financed elections create a better world, allowing our elected officials the time and freedom to actually govern, to make the right decision, not the one that protects fundraising, and allows citizens and businesses to spend their money on things they really care about, like schools and churches, food banks and medicine and children. If you fix money in politics, you start to fix climate, and health care, and energy subsidies, and key problems with our democracy. Money in politics is the great structural failure of our republic.
People on the inside of the sausage factory tell me this is crazy talk, and that campaign finance reform can never happen, because the people who benefit most from the money — the lobbyists — are in charge. Perhaps even tax reform and climate legislation are themselves similarly impossible propositions.
But after this awful election, and after Sandy, many of us — citizens, parents and patriots — have had enough. We are mobilized for a fistfight, or worse. At Agincourt, a similar point of no return, King Henry V recognized the human willingness to shed blood in a battle worthy of the fighting. Climate is one such battle. If we tackle this problem in earnest, the rewards far exceed the pain. If we do this, as Shakespeare wrote:
… gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. This piece was originally published at The Atlantic and was reprinted with permission.
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Obama has very little credibility on climate, and he lost that with this announcement:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/16/1202071/november-16-news-we-would-never-propose-a-carbon-tax-says-white-house-spokesman/
The House of Reprsentatives is worse, and, with the Blue Dogs, the Senate is roughly a tie (assuming Reid changes the filibuster rules).
We appreciate your ambition, but our leaders need to act as if they are concerned about the people, instead of giving us platitudes and photo ops. Maybe, as you say, there is common ground for a carbon tax. We’ve seen these little peeps from the Republicans before, such as Graham, McCain, and Nordquist. They are quickly squelched, and soon have the body language of chastised adolescents.
We the people have to make them do it, and not by choosing Democrats over Republicans. Citizens United isn’t going anywhere for a while. A massive education and public protest movement is about all we’ve got, at least for now.
I think you misunderstood his wording. He neither said yes or no. But the later suggest his administration will build a momentum which creates the economy and results in climate action.
What i am not sure about is his stance on Natural Gas, clean coal and Keystone & Co.
NRDC has an interesting and accurate take on all this. They point out that the White House already has the ability to continue cutting carbon at aggressive levels by using the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions at power plants. Power plant carbon standards could achieve 25% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 35% below by 2025, similar to the targets in the Waxman-Markey bill. This seems like a good approach to me, but I think we can’t just do this in a stealth manner. we need to make a statement to markets and the international community, send a signal. And that’s another way some sort of legislation would be helpful. Here’s NRDC’s take: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dlashof/what_does_the_election_mean_fo.html
There has been a quiet but intense lobbying battle going on for a while over the EPA power plant emission rules. I would not be shocked if Obama ends up weakening them via compromise, as he has done on other issues such as tax cuts. Even if he stands firm with EPA, there are at least a dozen things he could do that he has not shown any sign of being interested in.
Sorry, but Obama needs to step up, publicly and with aggressive action. Muddling through, talking about how everything is secondary to economic growth, and renouncing a carbon tax are what we have seen lately. If this continues, we will treat him like we did Lyndon Johnson. Yeah, we got Nixon, but what’s the difference?
Auden, in order to have a realistic path to a climate solution, you have to have a scientifically based solution.
Close to 95% of the heat from warming has gone into the ocean with the result you have sea level rise and more intense storms.
The only way you can counteract this problem is by converting ocean heat to mechanical work and by dumping sea surface heat to the depths where the coefficient of expansion of water is lower and there is 300 times the capacity of the surface to absorb the heat.
OTEC accomplishes both.
Solutions like nuclear power and fusion would only compound the ocean heat problem and wind and solar do little to resolve it.
Please share more insights on scientific studies assessing your proposal.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) uses the temperature difference between cooler deep and warmer shallow waters to run a heat engine and produce electricity. It is emerging tech, still in R&D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
I welcome the debate. Innovation of course stems from novelty, which by definition originates from a singular base and thus has no constituency.
This blog abounds with stories of the suppression of clean energy alternatives.
For starters consider David Lochhbaum’s article http://allthingsnuclear.org/fission-stories-115-marine-invasions-of-nuclear-plants/
“A nuclear plant generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity discharges 2,000 megawatts of waste heat to the environment. That’s nearly seven billion British Thermal Units (BTUs) per hour.”
Like the man says nuclear power plants aren’t situated by lakes, rivers and the ocean on account of the scenery.
From the OpEd News link: “(OTEC) is by far the most balanced means to face the challenge of global warming. It is also the one that requires the greatest investment to meet its potential.”
The problem i have with this technology is that this is just a populistic claim, nothing more. And beside all this, the question is why build an island in the ocean, or in the tropics? There are so many engineering problems and low efficiency that i think this idea is bad. Solar, wind or wave power can generate everything we require, why bother?
Wikipedia has more
“The most commonly used heat cycle for OTEC is the Rankine cycle using a low-pressure turbine. Systems may be either closed-cycle or open-cycle. Closed-cycle engines use a working fluids that are typically thought of as refrigerants such as ammonia or R-134a (Recently, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane has been subject to use restrictions due to its contribution to climate change. In the EU, it will be banned as of 2011 in all new cars). Open-cycle engines use vapour from the seawater itself as the working fluid.”
Ocean thermal energy conversion – Technical difficulties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion#Technical_difficulties
Just read the section on technical difficulties.
Virtually all of these difficulties are overcome by using a heat pipe 1 meter in diameter as opposed to a cold water pipe 14.5 meters in diameter. There is no movement of water to either release CO2 or harm marine life, whose greatest threat is from thermal stratification that is damaging to phytoplankton. Paul Curto’s piece also points out the advantages with respect to bio fouling.
I think the basic idea is great and would like to see 1 of those platforms, peer-reviewed studies, to better assess the environment impacts and cooling potential.
Paul Curto, is a former Chief Technologist with NASA, his assessment is posted here, http://www.opednews.com/articles/American-Energy-Policy-V–by-Paul-from-Potomac-101214-315.html
Fatally flawed, the philosophy behind OTEC is the same as that behind tail-pipe emissions: out of sight out of mind.
Jim – who will profit from OTEC patents he holds – falsely claims that we will solve the climate systems problem of warm ocean water. This is false because OTEC simply accelerates the transfer of surface heat to the deep ocean. We have essentially no knowledge how the sudden mixing of massive heat will change patterns of ocean circulation.
So when you hear technology X is the answer, we should really take a whole-ecology look at the claims. OTECs chief website even has a tab about problems that says the problems have been overcome. But they do not mention they are looking at the deep ocean part of the climate system as a place for disposal of waste products (BTUs) the same way the FF cos looks at the atmosphere as a place to dispose of CO2.
The first law of thermodynamics, the change in the internal energy of a closed system is equal to the amount of heat supplied to the system, minus the amount of work done by the system on its surroundings.
Some heat is moved to the depths in the process, which will return by convection. An equal amount is converted to mechanical energy.
If you don’t like this answer Mark, I am eager to learn of your solution to perhaps one of our greatest challenges.
And of course this mechanical energy produces replacements for FF.
The Guardian (UK) today has an item by Fiona Harvey pointing out that sadly the low cost of shale energy means it will be politically impossible to stop its extraction, with catastrophic consequences to the climate.
Shale gas is an effervescent boom, with financial companies taking gas& drillers for a ride, banking profits from the early rip-roaring production. Over anything other than a short-term perspective, it is far from low cost.
But agree, that short-term spike in planet-methane methane is crippling to both a planet high on GHG fever, and to prospects for a real clean energy transition.
The known array of climate forcings,i.e.,solar radiation,wind,ocean currents, ice melt, permafrost thaw, not to mention GHG emmisions,are now called “Feedback Loops” as scientists recognize their “Domino Effects”. In other words large amounts of Solar energy is absorbed at the tropics>moved northward by ocean currents>to melt sea ice>thawing arctic permafrost>releasing vast amounts of CO2 and methane>enhancing the greenhouse effect>warming the climate> ad infinitum. So recognizing that it isn’t just one event to worry about this self-starting mechanism is scaring hell out of the scientific community, as one scientist put it we are all becoming Cassandras. We can’t wait for science to catch-up; action is needed now! More detail may be found in “Scientific American, November 2012, “Global Warming: Faster Than Expected” by John Carey.
Consider focusing attention at the fulcrum of energy decisions; the CEOs (and board members) of fossil energy companies.
Rex Tillerson of Exxon, David and Charles Koch, and all the rest are humans, with reputations that become fixed legacies when they die. They are actively campaigning against clean energy. They support deniers and lobby against clean energy. They are stopping progress. They are creating their legacies of death and destruction.
It is in their financial interest to sell coal, oil, and gas. But it is in their moral — and permanent legacy — interest to allow clean the huge turn to clean energy to happen faster.
They can do both. Let’s do what we can to help them be moral. Let’s tell the world who is steering us all toward great harm. If they end their campaigns, we have a chance.
Also Boyce, from Peabody.
The men you listed are crazy. They will not change.
THe point is to focus national attention — and world attention — on them and on their bad behavior. Shame them. Guide them, push them, turn them — away from sabotage and toward the light.
Indeed. Put them on record.
Mark, there are as many solution as climate deniers. One is as lethal as the other.
China already has piloted various forms of carbon pricing in several large provinces and is planning to move to a national scheme – who is leading who here? ME
I am hopeful President Barack Obama will give priority to Climate Change issue.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
Sadly hope change. Obama already flunking this one..
Reviewing the basics of our situation:
-Newly reelected President and other leaders clearly sympathetic to climate and energy sustainability. Check.
-Political opposition to climate action in dire disarray (for the moment). Check.
-A one-time opening in tax and fiscal policy with possibilities for carbon taxation. Check.
-Dramatic climate-linked storms, droughts, fires, food shortages, etc. all in recent national memory. Check.
-A global economic and political leadership vacuum on the biggest issue ever to face humanity. Check.
How can we ever hope for a better moment to motivate national movement on climate and energy issues? If we climate hawks get a nothing-burger out of this opening we will be hungry for a long time!