The Obama economic recovery plan makes a bold investment in the modernization of our electricity infrastructure, in order to transform an often-overwhelmed patchwork of balkanized regional networks into a national “smart grid” based on Internet-like technology. Without a smart grid, the goal of independence from fossil fuels is impossible to reach. Repower America, Al Gore’s campaign to have America use 100% renewable electricity in ten years, explains that a national smart grid “will save money, increase reliability and protect consumers from outages, and make possible a clean electricity system.”

Building a smart grid requires both new technology and regulatory policy. In addition to a $20 billion investment in smart grid deployment, the recovery plan offers $2 billion in grants to promote a subtle but key shift in electric utility regulatory policy:

Policies that ensure that a utility’s recovery of prudent fixed costs of service is timely and independent of its retail sales, without in the process shifting prudent costs from variable to fixed charges.

Translating for normal people, electric utilities traditionally make higher profits when they sell more electricity to consumers. The key problem is that this discourages utilities from promoting conservation and efficiency — instead, the more wasteful their consumers are, the better. So demand goes up, utilities build new, expensive, and polluting power plants, and still costs rise. Utility shareholders’ interests are pitted against the rest of society.

Therefore, several states have implemented policies that decouple profitability (“recovery of prudent fixed costs of service”) from demand (“retail sales”), by using public funds and rate adjustments to guarantee an expected annual profit for the utility company and to subsidize investment in energy efficiency.

Obama’s economic recovery package contains $2 billion in state-level block grants that will be released “only if the governor of the recipient State notifies the Secretary of Energy that the governor will seek, to the extent of his or her authority, to ensure” that decoupling and energy efficiency incentive programs will occur.

Because our electrical infrastructure is a vital public resource, the profits of utility executives and shareholders must not be put above the public good. As Public Citizen warns, decoupling for unregulated utilities can lead to “windfall profits for the industry.” The California electricity debacle exposed the great failure of the experiment of utility deregulation, and the recovery package does not go far enough to bring utilities back under control.

As President Obama, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and legislators like Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) recognize, our entire nation needs to move to a low-carbon economy as rapidly as possible. That means modernizing our grid through both new technology and new regulatory policy. The economic recovery plan includes crucial language to allow that to happen.

Full decoupling language in the House-passed economic recovery package (HR 1): Read more

Given how many progressive political cartoons I publish, I thought it only fair to show one of the regressive ones, too. After all, just because people block the kind of fuel economy standards that would have forced Detroit to build more of the cars that people actually want, reduced our dependence on oil, and cut climate-destroying emissions, doesn’t mean they don’t have a sense of humor.

Yes, wanting to cut oil use, emissions, and consumer fuel bills is no different than wanting to have 50 steering wheels per car. Our President is so dumb!

I guess this is what people in Birmingham, Alabama think is funny. Yes, Birmingham. It is so sad it is funny, no?

A few more thoughts upon reflecting on this cartoon while taking my daughter to the park.

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[It may seem a tad late to be running Bill's 3-part critique of the stimulus (Part 1 here). But the proposals below that didn't make the stimulus are exactly the kind that should be included in the mother of all energy bills that will be developed and enacted later this year.]

The best part of the economic stimulus package moving through Congress is that it calls for a significant down payment on a new energy economy. One of its weaknesses is that it doesn’t give the American people a clear and exciting vision for what that new economy can do.

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The Catholic bishop whose diocese extends over the tar sands has posted a scathing pastoral letter, “The Integrity of Creation and the Athabasca Oil Sands.”

The letter by Bishop Luc Bouchard concludes, “even great financial gain does not justify serious harm to the environment,” and “the present pace and scale of development in the Athabasca oil sands cannot be morally justified.” Equally powerful is who the letter is addressed to:

The critical points made in this letter are not directed to the working people of Fort McMurray but to oil company executives in Calgary and Houston, to government leaders in Edmonton and Ottawa, and to the general public whose excessive consumerist lifestyle drives the demand for oil.

We have met the enemy and he is us!

Other than sticking with the euphemism “oil sands” (see “Canada tries to tar-sandbag Obama on climate” the remarkably detailed and heavily footnoted letter is a brilliant piece of work dissecting what has been called the “biggest global warming crime ever seen.”

Bishop Bouchard notes that “The environmental liabilities that result from the various steps in this process are significant and include”:

• Destruction of the boreal forest eco-system
• Potential damage to the Athabasca water shed
• The release of greenhouse gases
• Heavy consumption of natural gas
• The creation of toxic tailings ponds

He writes at length on all five, and concludes

Any one of the above destructive effects provokes moral concern, but it is when the damaging effects are all added together that the moral legitimacy of oil sands production is challenged.

Here is what he says specifically about greenhouse gases:

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Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the world is melting.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reports that in 2006 and 2007 that the world’s glaciers lost 2 meters (2000 mm) of thickness on average:

They note, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago.

This is consistent with other recent research (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” and AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003 and links below).

Bloomberg has an excellent story on report:

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On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to increase nuclear loan guarantees by $50 billion in the economic recovery package (S. 336). This staggering sum “would more than double the current loan guarantee cap of $38 billion” for “clean energy” technology:

TITLE 17—INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAM

The Committee also recommends an additional $50,000,000,000 to support the deployment of eligible technologies under the Section 1702(b)(2) of EPACT 2005 that will contribute to transforming the energy sector. This funding will add to the existing loan guarantee authority provided in other appropriations bills to support self-financed loan guarantees. The Committee is aware of the strong interest in the program and the large number of pending applications.

In contrast, the committee allocated only $9.5 billion exclusively for “standard renewable energy projects.” Although the loan guarantee program covers nuclear technology, carbon capture and sequestration for coal plants, as well as renewable energy, the vast bulk of requested loans — $122 billion — are for new nuclear power plants. This $50 billion nuclear throwaway nearly matches the total allocation for genuinely clean energy in the House version of the stimulus package: only $52 billion in total for smart grid, renewable energy, and energy efficiency investments.

Unlike renewable energy and energy efficiency technology, investments in the nuclear industry generate few jobs or economic growth. The nuclear industry has developed through massive federal subsidization from research to deployment over decades. Such a massive expenditure of nuclear pork has no place in the economic recovery bill. Brent Blackwelder of Friends of the Earth, who discovered the nuclear pork, called the appropriations “unconscionable“:

Now is not the time for another bailout boondoggle. Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy there is. It takes 10 years or more to build a reactor, so it is impossible to claim with a straight face that this preemptive bailout has anything to do with creating jobs. Senate appropriators’ decision to include such wasteful spending in the stimulus is an example of Washington at its worst.

New nuclear power is going to be very expensive — no matter where the plants are built. The most detailed and transparent recent cost study on the new generation of plants put the cost of power at 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).

Some have suggested that other countries will fare better — in spite of Finland’s nightmarish nuclear troubles (see “Satanic nukes? Finnish plant’s cost overruns to $6.66 billion” and below). They should read the story in today’s Today’s Zaman, Turkey’s largest English-language newspaper:

The only company bidding, the Russian-Turkish JSC Atomstroyexport-JSC Inter Rao Ues-Park Teknik joint venture, offered a price of 21.16 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Current electricity prices in the country vary between 4 cents and 14 cents per kWh.

[Wholesale prices in Turkey are 7.9 cents per kWh.]

That gives new meaning to the word “turkey.”

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The terrific climate cartoonist Marc Roberts directs us to a series of cartoons he did in 2007. They put the bathtub analogy that Revkin and I blogged on in context (see here):

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Today’s guest post on the green details of the Senate and House stimulus plans (with awesome bubble charts) is by Daniel J. Weiss and Alexandra Kougentakis. It was originally printed on the Center for American Progress website here.

On January 28, the House of Representatives passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, H.R. 1, by a vote of 244 to 188. The $819 billion recovery bill includes $72 billion for clean energy programs, and another $20 billion for clean energy tax incentives. This huge investment in weatherization, efficiency, transmission, transit, and clean vehicles programs will create at least 459,000 jobs by the end of 2010, as well as reduce oil consumption and global warming pollution.

Not to be outdone, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed the American Investment and Recovery Plan, S. 336, which includes $78 billion* in clean energy spending as part of its $365 billion recovery package. At the same time the Senate Finance Committee passed a $522 billion tax package that includes $31 billion in tax incentives for renewables and energy efficiency. The bills will likely be joined before Senate floor consideration.

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I know the climate junkies out there are reading RealClimate and DeSmogBlog and all The New Top 10 Climate Blogs.

But I’d like to direct you to Greenfyre’s, which Alexa suggests folks aren’t reading (yet). I was first taken by the blog of biologist Mike Kaulbars when I saw the post “Global Warming is over! once every decade or so …” which had this great figure:

It’s always cooling, except, of course, when it’s not.

If you have your own hidden gem of a climate blog — an internet geode, as it were — I’d love to hear about it.

Congress is expected to give final approval to a massive economic stimulus package in the next couple of weeks. But before it does, there’s important work to be done on the color and content of the package. Lawmakers should address three questions:

• Is the package green enough?
• Is it visionary enough?
• Can the beneficiaries handle the money?

I’ll offer some thoughts on each of these questions in a three-part post, starting with the green issue.

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Harvard economist Martin Weitzman published an important analysis last year in which he explained why conventional economic analyses of climate change are “arbitrarily inaccurate.”

The first draft of the paper had said the vast majority of such analyses should carry the following label:

“WARNING: to be used ONLY for cost-benefit analysis of non-extreme climate change possibilities. NOT INTENDED to cover welfare evaluation of extreme tail possibilities, for which a complete accounting might produce ARBITRARILY DIFFERENT welfare outcomes.”

The final version, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” eliminated that disclaimer, but replaced it with a longer statement that is equally devastating (see below).

Weitzman’s bottom line: If you don’t factor in plausible extreme-impact scenarios — and the vast majority of economic analyses don’t (this means you, William Nordhaus, and you, too, Richard Tol) — your analysis is worse than useless. It is delusional. Pretty strong stuff for a Harvard economist!

The extreme or fat tail of the damage function (click on figure at right) represents what Weitzman calls “rare climate disasters,” although as we’ll see, they aren’t rare at all, they are near certain with business-as-usual emissions. For Weitzman, disaster is a temperature change of > 6°C (11°F) in a century, as he explains in an earlier paper on the Stern Review on the economics of climate change:

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A: I don’t know since I’m not a vegetarian. Anyone out there switch from carnivore to vegetarian or vice versa and can therefore offer an unscientific sample?

I am of course referring to PETA’s banned Superbowl ad, which, though rather over-the-top in its depiction of intimacy between human and produce, is hardly more explicit than what the networks routinely show in Victoria’s Secret ads (let alone Victoria’s Secret TV show) and is certainly not in worse taste than, say, half the network schedule. If our children can be subjected to a TV show in which the hero is a serial killer, or in which semi-naked models are dressed as angels or the torture-du-jour on 24, they can probably survive a model rubbing a pumpkin against her torso:

‘Veggie Love’: PETA’s Banned Super Bowl Ad

This may be the origin of the nursery rhyme:

PETA PETA pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well.

Or not.

The Washington Post TV columnist opines that the ad was intended to be banned, to get the free publicity. Why not?

[Now you know the real reason I wrote the earlier post -- Scientific American: Beef contributes 13 times the greenhouse gas impact of chicken, 57x potatoes: to provide some minimal justification for this post.]

The NYT reports on Obama’s 244-188 win:

Without a single Republican vote, President Obama won House approval on Thursday for an $819 billion economic recovery plan….

As a piece of legislation, the two-year package is among the biggest in history, reflecting a broad view in Congress that urgent fiscal help is needed for an economy in crisis, and at a time when the Federal Reserve has already cut interest rates almost to zero….

All but 11 Democrats voted for the plan and 177 Republicans voted against it.

If the House R’s won’t vote for the only stimulus on the table during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it’s hard to see how they are going to vote for a serious bill addressing the climate problem, whose existence they don’t even acknowledge and opposition to which they see as a political winner (see The conservative stagnation, Part 12: Cap & trade bill will return GOP to power “in 2010″³).

So be it (see “Q: Does a cap & trade bill have to be bipartisan?“).

The Wonk Room would like to congratulate Center for American Progress senior fellow Alice Madden, whom Colorado governor Bill Ritter today named as Colorado’s new climate-change coordinator. Alice served in the Colorado legislature since 2000 and was the House Majority Leader until she stepped down this month due to term limits.

Alice wrote engaging guest posts on the Wonk Room about Colorado’s unique energy and resource issues, from oil shale to water sharing.

We couldn’t agree more with Gov. Ritter’s sentiments:

Alice Madden has distinguished herself as one of Colorado’s most accomplished and talented public servants. Her thoughtfulness and problem-solving skills will be crucial as we strive to achieve the goals in Colorado’s Climate Action Plan and strengthen Colorado’s New Energy Economy. Expanding the use of wind, solar, geothermal and clean-burning natural gas will create jobs, clean the air and address climate change.

Once again, the office of Sen. James Inhofe (Denier-OK) has put out a press release riddled with misstatements, this one attacking the nation’s top climate scientist James Hansen.

Their last release was notable for the outright lies and distortions by Inhofe and his top staffer, Marc Morano (see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Inhofe, CO2 — but not the sun — “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850 and Inhofe recycles long-debunked denier talking points — will the media be fooled (again)?)

Now they are making stuff up about Hansen, claiming the Bush Administration did not try to muzzle him, when they clearly did, as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee documented in a December 2007 report. Somehow I think that report, which is based on “over 27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Commerce Department,” two investigative hearings, and the depositions and interviews of key officials is a tad more credible than the words of some former NASA engineer.

It is absurd for Inhofe to have a blaring headline that “Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor” says Hansen “was never muzzled,” when this guy does not appear to have been Hansen’s supervisor (he “did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation,” an authority possessed by every supervisor I ever had in government — see also NASA’s Gavin Schmidt here) — and in any case, had a position above Hansen only from 1982-1994, a full decade before the muzzling occurred!

I don’t want to waste a lot of time debunking pathological make-stuff-uppers like Inhofe and Morano, but let me point out one representative lie. The Morano post blares:

NYT’s Revkin chides Hansen for promoting sea level claims that are not ‘even physically possible’

But let’s go the link and see what Revkin actually wrote.

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SciAm reports that

• Pound for pound, beef production generates greenhouse gases that contribute more than 13 times as much to global warming as do the gases emitted from producing chicken. For potatoes, the multiplier is 57.
• Beef consumption is rising rapidly, both as population increases and as people eat more meat.
• Producing the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas as a car driven more than 1,800 miles.

I primarily focus on technology-based solutions since they can be the basis of government policy and since many websites are devoted to personal behavior choices, like No Impact Man.

Behavior-based strategies really only work at large scale when societal values change (and/or prices jump) sharply, which is certainly inevitable in the coming years as more and more people come to grips with the increasingly painful reality of human-caused global warming (see “What are the near-term climate Pearl Harbors?“) and realize just how immoral it is to maintain current levels of GHG emissions per capita at the expense of the next 50 generations to walk the earth (NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

For a good article on how one meat-loving environmentalist has changed his behavior, see Mike Tidwell’s “The Low-Carbon Diet.”

I am a big fan of MIT’s John Sterman, one of the world’s leading experts on systems thinkers.

In a post on “The Greenhouse Effect and the Bathtub Effect,” Revkin notes that Sterman’s work trying to reduce the biggest source of climate confusion is related to the new NOAA-led paper that I discussed here: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.

The bathtub analogy is that while atmospheric concentrations (the total stock of CO2 already in the air) might be thought of as the water level in the bathtub, emissions (the yearly new flow into the air) are the rate of water flowing into a bathtub. We need to lower the level, not just the flow. A great video clarifying the issue is here. It is narrated by my friend Andrew Jones. If you want to play the simulation itself, go here.

Revkin got Sterman’s comments on the paper, which I am reposting below:

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In testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Vice President Al Gore will call for “decisive action” to combat the climate crisis, including passage of President Obama’s economic recovery package, a cap-and-trade system, and an international climate treaty:

If Congress acts right away to pass President Obama’s Recovery package and then takes decisive action this year to institute a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions – as many of our states and many other countries have already done – the United States will regain its credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to lead the world in shaping a fair and effective treaty. And this treaty must be negotiated this year.

Not next year. This year.

The hearing is being webcast live on C-SPAN.org. Below is the full text of former Vice President Al Gore’s testimony as prepared for delivery to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:

We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis.

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home – Earth – is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

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UPDATE: Gore testimony below.

Nobelist Al Gore is testifying today in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on “The Road to Copenhagen.” You can watch the live video stream here.

We are having a snow and ice storm in DC today, so of course that leading science blog the Drudge Report went nuts with a banner headline:

GORE HEARING ON WARMING MAY BE PUT ON ICE

Drudge quotes an unnamed “Republican lawmaker” as emailing him, “I can’t imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside.” Seriously, do GOP lawmakers have nothing better to do than email Matt Drudge about the local weather?

Salon’s response, “Breaking news: Despite global warming, snow still exists” put it well:

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