I am a big fan of the climate website, DeSmogBlog. So I was shocked when, the day after his unprecedented victory in Iowa, DeSmogBlog gave Barack Obama (!!) “the inaugural 2007 SmogMaker Award for blowing smoke on global warming.”

Gimme a break. How could anyone win that award any year — let alone in its inaugural year — when George W. Bush is still President? [Not to mention a year in which Lomborg and Inhofe continue their influential disinformation compaigns!]

After all, the “Prize honors those who sow confusion and delay on Climate Change.” Seriously. Bush is easily the confuser and delayer of the year … and the decade … and he surely will be on the short list for the entire century. Yet DeSmog says Obama is “looking like George Bush lite.” How can they make that claim? By misreading — or failing to read — Obama’s terrific climate plan. DeSmogBlog claims:

But he is campaigning on a greenhouse gas reduction ‘target’ that the U.S. won’t have to meet for 42 years….
While the world’s leading scientific bodies tell us we need to act immediately to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, Obama has set his own target date at 2050, long past any opportunity for voters to hold him accountable.

Uhh, no. In fact, his plan explicitly states:

Obama will start reducing emissions immediately in his administration by establishing strong annual reduction targets, and he’ll also implement a mandate of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Based on the links in their post, DeSmogBlog’s research on Obama’s climate apparently consists of reading a one-paragraph story on BusinessWire with Obama’s statement on Bali — which they link to not once but twice! They claim he is an unrepetent coal supporter, based on a June 2007 Washington Post article about his support for his state’s coal industry. And yet in his climate plan he bluntly commits:

Obama will use whatever policy tools are necessary, including standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology. Obama’s stringent cap on carbon will also make it uneconomic to site traditional coal facilities and discourage the use of existing inefficient coal facilities.

I defy DeSmogBlog to tell me which serious U.S. politician has a climate plan substantially tougher or more comprehensive than Obama’s. It is a courageous plan for any Presidential candidate to run on. Now let’s compare that to Bush’s record. As I’ve written:

Thanks to the misleadership of our President, the world took no action at Bali to reduce emissions, we had a sham international “climate summit,” the country continues to take no national action on greenhouse gas emissions, Congress was forced to drop almost all non-oil-related provisions to cut GHGs from the energy bill, the EPA blocked California and other major states from regulating tailpipe GHGs on their own, the Administration keeps muzzling climate scientists, and it keeps misallocating scarce clean tech dollars to hydrogen fuel cell vehicle research at the expense of real and timely solutions like energy efficiency and renewables — and that’s just the stuff we know about for sure!

… Our person of the year … President George W. Bush doesn’t just fiddle while the planet burns, he actively fans the flames and thwarts the fire-fighters.

DeSmogBlog owes Obama three apologies, for

1. Giving him this undeserved “award”
2. Failing to read his climate plan and then mischaracterizing it (twice)
3. Saying Obama is “looking like George Bush lite.”

For completeness’s sake, the second unacceptable misstatement about the Obama plan they make is:

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The global warming doubters/deniers (here and here) have jumped on a confused AP story about a confused Nature study (subs. req’d).

The normally first-rate AP reporter Seth Borenstein just wrote an article titled “Nature and Man Jointly Cook Arctic” that begins:

There’s more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone, a new study found. Nature is pushing the Arctic to the edge, too.

There’s a natural cause that may account for much of the Arctic warming, which has melted sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. New research points a finger at a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle….

The Nature study suggests there’s more behind it than global warming because the air a couple miles above the ground is warming more than calculated by the climate models.

Climate change theory concentrates on warming of surface temperatures and explains an Arctic that is warming faster than the rest of the world as mostly because reduced sea ice and ice sheets means less reflecting solar rays.

Sounds like a hammer blow against global warming being the main cause of Arctic warming. And it might be, except for the small problem that the AP article is mistaken because the Nature article is, to put it kindly, confused.

You can read the real story at RealClimate.

California and 15 other states returned fire in the brewing war with the White House over California’s Clean Car Act. On December 19th, Stephen L. Johnson, Bush’s man in charge of the EPA, explained that the EPA was denying California’s waiver request:

EPA has considered and granted previous waivers to California for standards covering pollutants that predominantly affect local and regional air quality. In contrast, the current waiver request for greenhouse gases is far different; it presents numerous issues that are distinguishable from all prior waiver requests. Unlike other air pollutants covered by previous waivers, greenhouse gases are fundamentally global in nature. Greenhouse gases contribute to the problem of global climate change, a problem that poses challenges for the entire nation and indeed the world. Unlike pollutants covered by the other waivers, greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment in California and elsewhere regardless of where the emissions occur. In other words, this challenge is not exclusive or unique to California and differs in a basic way from the previous local and regional air pollution problems addressed in prior waivers.

Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson, the Clean Air Act does not allow any reason to be used in denying California waiver requests, and he does not here appear to be citing anything relevant to the law. Moreover the logic of Mr. Johnson’s rejection is not supportable. California and the states that plan to adopt its vehicle standards represent approximately 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and total more than those of Germany, Japan, or India. Reducing emissions in these sixteen states will make a difference.

Mr. Johnson’s attempt at rationalization is unlikely to stand; as Janet Wilson reported in the LA Times, Mr. Johnson’s staff concluded the EPA would lose a legal challenge by California. It appears the purpose of Mr. Johnson’s action is simply to use the court system to delay enforcement of the Clean Car Act. On Wednesday, California responded in the U.S. Ninth Circuit court of Appeals. The question now is how long it will take the Ninth Circuit to rule, and whether the EPA appeals to the Supreme Court.

The House Commtttee On Oversight And Government Reform (headed by Representative Henry Waxman, D-CA) has opened an investigation into Mr. Johnson’s rejection and requested all relevant documents, including correspondance between the White House and the EPA.

The states joining California’s lawsuit are Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

– Earl K.

Andy Revkin at the NY Times has given a lot of ink to the Cap & Dividend plan (see here and here) by Peter Barnes a founder of Working Assets. Revkin says Barnes, “has long studied various bills and proposals for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide to limit global warming. He sees fatal flaws in every one.”

I don’t see any fatal flaws in either Obama’s plan or Mrs. Clinton’s — they are both terrific and comprehensive, unlike Barnes’. His goal is the same as theirs — to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. But his solution is fatally incomplete:

He proposes a “cap and dividend” system that charges a rising fee on sources of greenhouse-gas emissions (to propel a long-term shift away from such pollution) and returns the revenue to citizens, rich or poor, through a direct payment not unlike the checks that Alaska residents get every year from fees paid to the state by oil companies.

That’s pretty much it. What caught my attention in Revkin’s piece is Barnes’ answer to the last question posed:

What about laws such as better efficiency standards? (Nancy Anderson)
N.Y. Times columnist Tom Friedman has made a crucial distinction between incremental policies and transformative ones. Cap-and-dividend is transformative. It will get us to 80% emission reductions and create a clean energy infrastructure in the process. Raising efficiency standards for autos, appliances and buildings is a good thing to do, but it won’t transform our economy or cut emissions 80%.

That is, ironically, almost exactly backwards. Barnes apparently thinks plans like Obama’s and Clinton’s are loaded up with things like much tougher fuel economy standards and utility decoupling and federal clean-clean tech programs because the senators just love regulations and government spending (I know many of you conservatives out there think that). In fact, trying to stabilize at 450 ppm only using a price for carbon, as Barnes proposes, is wildly impractical and a political non-starter.

That’s because, at its most basic level, a price for carbon most directly encourages fuel-switching (especially from coal), but does not particularly encourage efficiency. That’s why most traditional economic models require a very high (read “unduly brutal” and “politically unacceptable”) price for carbon to get deep reductions.

Indeed, in the months and years to come, you are going to see an unending stream of such models, some funded by fossil fuel companies, and some from credible-seeming places like the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), all designed to scare the public into opposing serious action on climate. How bad will it be? In 1998, EIA concluded that merely meeting the Kyoto target, a 7% reduction below 1990 levels of GHGs by 2008-2012 would — if such a reduction were achieved strictly through domestic reductions in energy-related emissions through a price mechanism — require the price of carbon to reach $348 per metric ton, which, in their analysis, doubles the price for electricity! I kid you not.

The EIA analysis is dumb for many reasons, as I have testified [sadly I can't find the hearing, "Kyoto and the Internet: the Energy Implications of the Digital Economy" online -- I'll probably blog on this when EIA does their hit job on whatever comes out of the Senate]. But it contains one essential truth: Price alone is a lousy way to cut emissions. Probably the best way to see this is by looking at the (meager) impact of carbon prices on gasoline prices.
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