Midwesterners are operating under the misimpression that the allocation formula in the House bill is unfair to them.  It doesn’t, although a new, flawed EPA “analysis” (“here“) suggests otherwise.

Certainly the formula is a tad ambiguous and that will no doubt be fixed in the Senate.  The figure above shows the results of analysis by MJ Bradley (click to enlarge, methodology here).

I would note that the Bradley analysis does not appear to include the energy efficiency provisions in the bill, which are projected by independent analysts and EPA to deliver major savings (see “Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household and create 650,000 jobs by 2030“).  So even the small increase in bills that you see in 2012 would in reality be lower if the House bill became law.  But I digress.

The analysis is tricky for two reasons that the EPA appears to get wrong:

• First, the House bill forbids a utility from getting more allowances than are required to offset their increased costs, but doesn’t quite spell out how to account for that.  The obvious thing to do is what MJ Bradley does:  “Excess allowances are withheld from states that receive more allowances than their delivered electricity related emissions. These withheld allowances are redistributed to the remaining states on the basis of their emissions.”

The EPA offers a long explanation for why the prohibition against excess distributions would be tricky to implement in practice — and then it seems like they just ignore the provision entirely.  So, as you can see, they claim California would get more allowances than it needs to cover its emissions.  But preventing that outcome is precisely why that provision was put in the House bill in the first place.

• Second, states import power — sometimes power that is more carbon-intense than the importing state as a whole.  An analysis must take into account.  It does not seem that EPA’s calculations of emissions of a state like California included its imported coal-fired electricity.

So I just think EPA got this is doubly wrong in a way that happens to fit the misperception of the Midwesterners.  I have also spoken to other independent utility modelers who say their results do not match EPA’s.

Bottom Line:  The allocation formula appears to be pretty fair, if a tad ambiguous.  EPA needs to spell out exactly how they did their analysis, and explain if they made one or both of these two major analytical errors.  The Senate needs to be clearer on how the prohibition-against-excess-distributions provision works.

For more background, here are some excerpts from Tuesday Climate Wire (subs. req’d) story:

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When we last left the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they were going ape for the Scopes climate trial that the Chamber of Commerce had proposed for the EPA.  The deniers just stick their fingers and their ears and scream whenever they hear any science-based finding that GHGs harm human health.  What else can you expect from a group that which actually runs ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries?

Now CEI is trying to go after the UK temperature record because the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, used by the Hadley/Met Office, has abandoned some bad data.  Climate Science Watch (CSW) has the background, “CEI global warming denialists try another gambit seeking to derail EPA endangerment finding.“  Ironically, as Prof. Phil Jones, CRU’s Director explains below:

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here].  The original raw data are not “lost.”

A small amount of data, which could be easily reconstructed if one wanted to waste a lot of time, was abandoned for reasons such as the following:

Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

Yes, for years the deniers have been claiming that the temperature record is corrupted by the urban heat island effect or bad locations.  In fact, we know that it isn’t (see Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers: Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”)  But when CRU actually tries to abandon such data, the deniers cry foul.

CEI:  Can’t live with them, future generations could live with out them.

To compound the irony, the only meaningful hole in the Hadley data is the “hole in the Arctic,” as RealClimate puts it (see here).  The Hadley record simply excludes the part of the world “just where recent warming has been greatest.”  Because of that gap, the Hadley data almost certainly underestimates recent warming.

CSW asked three prominent scientists to comment on CEI’s bogus data-shredding charge and posted them here and here.  I’m reprinting them below, starting with Stanford’s Stephen Schneider, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate, coming out next month:

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Today is Blog Action Day, with thousands of blogs discussing global warming.

Doug Elmendorf, CBO

Yesterday, Doug Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Senate energy committee about the “comparatively modest” cost of a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon pollution. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal blared “Congressional Budget Chief Says Climate Bill Would Cost Jobs” and “Cap-and-Trade Would Slow Economy, CBO Chief Says.” Conservatives leapt on the reports to cheer the “end” of “cap-and-tax.”

Of course, Elmendorf’s testimony is nothing new. Elmendorf warned that jobs in the fossil fuel industry would be lost, and that overall GDP growth would be slowed by less than one percent by 2020. No one is arguing that there won’t be a shift from pollution-based industries to clean-energy industries. But doing so will create millions more jobs than are lost, as energy companies invest in American workers instead of foreign oil and mountaintop removal. The effect on GDP is within the margin of error of future estimates of growth. Even pessimistic studies by the National Association of Manufacturers find that U.S. GDP will increase by $9 trillion with limits on carbon pollution.

What upset me, however, was the portion of Elmendorf’s testimony that was not reported. Although he recognized that his estimates do not take into account the economic impacts of climate change, he testified that the changes that scientists call “catastrophic” would be barely noticeable in the U.S. economy:

Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate. Moreover, researchers generally expect the growth in the U.S. economy over the coming century to be concentrated in sectors — such as information technology and medical care — that are relatively insulated from climate effects. Damages are therefore likely to be a smaller share of the future economy than they would be if they occurred today. As a consequence, a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7° Fahrenheit (F) by 2100. [Dale W. Jorgenson et al., 2004]

Elmendorf goes on to cite Nordhaus & Boyer (2000) to claim “the risk of catastrophic outcomes associated with about 11°F of warming by 2100″ gives a projected “loss equivalent to about 5 percent of U.S. output and, because of substantially larger losses in a number of other countries, a loss of about 10 percent of global output.” (By way of comparison, US GDP collapsed by nearly 50 percent during the Great Depression.)

This is frighteningly nonsensical. The CBO is arguing that the collapse of the national electricity grid, water supply, food system, and physical infrastructure from heat waves, desertification, disease outbreaks, wildfires, floods, and catastrophic storms would barely affect the national economy. In fact, seven to 11° F (4 to 6°C) warming would lead to unimaginable changes in our planet by 2100: Read more

The exodus of leading companies from the Chamber has been downsizing the denial-pushing industry group (which most certainly does not speak for the business community).  But Think Progress has the story (first posted here) of rapid weight loss that easily beats any of the winners of the reality show, “The Biggest Loser.”

As Mother Jones reported yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce consistently says that its membership is 3 million, even though it’s actually closer to 200,000. The reason for the artificial inflation is that the organization is counting the memberships of 2,800 state and local chambers around the country, even though many of these businesses have no relationship with the national organization. Some of these members are now protesting the Chamber’s numbers game:

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A new report from the New Rules Project finds that over 60% of all U.S. states have the renewable energy resources to be “energy self-reliant.” (“Energy self-reliance,” as defined in the report, is a measure of how self-sufficient in energy generation a state could be if it relied entirely on its own renewable resources). The New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, released its findings last week.

The report, “Energy Self-Reliant States: Second and Expanded Edition” describes how 31 states have the capacity to independently meet their states’ electricity demands by using wholly renewable energy sources, already at their disposal. Several states, the report notes, could use their renewable energy resources to produce electricity that meets over ten times their statewide demands. An additional ten states could generate enough electricity to meet well over half of their annual demands””again, solely from renewable sources.

The report’s analysis and projections only incorporates renewable energy resources that are currently commercially deployable:

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Arctic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years: scientist

Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said much of the melting will take place within a decade, although the winter ice will stay for hundreds of years.

The changes will mean the top of the Earth will appear blue rather than white when photographed from space and ships will have a new sea route north of Russia.

Scientists say evidence of melting Arctic ice is one of the clearest signs of global warming and it should send a warning to world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December for U.N. talks on a new climate treaty.

“The data supports the new consensus view — based on seasonal variation of ice extent and thickness, changes in temperatures, winds and especially ice composition — that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within about 20 years,” Wadhams said in a statement. “Much of the decrease will be happening within 10 years.”

Wadhams, one of the world’s leading experts on sea ice cover in the North Pole region, compared ice thickness measurements taken by a Royal Navy submarine in 2007 with evidence gathered by the British explorer Pen Hadow earlier this year.

Hadow and his team on the Catlin Arctic Survey drilled 1,500 holes to gather evidence during a 280-mile walk across the Arctic. They found the average thickness of ice-floes was 1.8 meters, a depth considered too thin to survive the summer’s ice melt.

Sometimes referred to as the Earth’s air-conditioner, the Arctic Sea plays a vital role in the world’s climate. As Arctic ice melts in summer, it exposes the darker-colored ocean water, which absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it, accelerating the effect of global warming.

Dr Martin Sommerkorn, from the environmental charity WWF’s Arctic program, which worked on the survey, said the predicted loss of ice could have wide-reaching effects around the world.

“The Arctic Sea ice holds a central position in our Earth’s climate system. Take it out of the equation and we are left with a dramatically warmer world,” he said.

“This could lead to flooding affecting one-quarter of the world’s population, substantial increases in greenhouse gas emissions …. and extreme global weather changes.”

Britain’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the research “sets out the stark realities of climate change.”

“This further strengthens the case for an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen,” he added.

For more on declining Arctic ice volume, go here.

US aims for bilateral climate change deals with China and India

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Last week I reported on the White House Clean Energy Economy Forum — see “Carol Browner says clean energy bill without carbon cap would be a ‘big mistake’; Nobelist Chu agrees, warning we otherwise face catastrophe, with St. Louis above 90°F for 1/3 the year.”  In this repost, Wonk Room has a video and transcript of some key remarks.

Last week, over a hundred CEOs of American companies broke with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby Congress to “pass comprehensive climate change and energy policy legislation this year.” The U.S. Senate is now considering the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, which would set a market-based limit on global warming pollution. Participants in a Clean Energy Economy Forum at the White House included J. Wayne Leonard, the Chairman and CEO of Entergy Corporation, the utility giant based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Speaking at the White House event, Leonard called for action on climate change and clean energy not just for economic reasons but starkly moral ones:

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