Sometimes a debunking piece is so good it saves me the trouble. Funny how often those pieces are written by Dave Roberts. I’ll add some thoughts of my own at the end — JR.

The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone

By Dave Roberts, via Grist

I know Andy Revkin of The New York Times writes posts like this in part to bait people like me. But like Popeye, I yam what I yam. So consider me baited. Self-proclaimed moderates want to lecture anti-Keystone XL activists that they are “distracting” and “counterproductive,” without spelling out what the hell that means, yet they seem bewildered when that makes the activists in question angry.

Let’s review. This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.

As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded “my way or the highway environmentalism,” y’all, but don’t worry, he’s got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.

This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.

So let’s not yell. Instead let’s take a calm look at the Reasonable Revkin take on Keystone activism, representative as it is of a certain VSP consensus. In his post, he says it could be “counterproductive” to focus an activist campaign on the pipeline. I want to dwell on that word for a second, because it’s crucial to his case.

If you want to argue that activists shouldn’t focus on Keystone, you can’t just establish that rallying around and/or blocking Keystone won’t reduce carbon emissions much. So what? Why not try it? Something’s better than nothing, after all. Even if it’s a total waste of time, that may be unproductive, but it’s not counterproductive.

No, you have to establish that the Keystone campaign is impeding or preventing something else better and more effective from happening. That’s what it means to say the Keystone campaign is counterproductive — that it’s detracting from other, superior climate efforts.

What are these other efforts, and how is a focus on Keystone impeding or preventing them? That’s the causal relationship folks like Revkin need to establish to make their case, but they are maddeningly vague about it.

Back before the election, Revkin acknowledged that “the pipeline, in isolation, is not in the national interest,” but “overall,” Obama “should not stand in the way of the pipeline.” Huh? It’s not in the national interest but he should greenlight it? Why? Because “it’s very much in the national interest for Obama to avoid saddling himself with an unnecessary issue that would be easy for his foes to distort into an Obama anti-jobs position.” So Obama should sacrifice the national interest in the name of political positioning. Got it. Time’s Bryan Walsh and Mike Grunwald echoed Revkin’s sentiment, warning that Keystone activists risked empowering Obama’s opposition and getting a Republican elected, which would be way worse for the climate than the pipeline.

A couple things have happened since then. One, Obama got reelected, pretty easily. Two, it’s become clear that literally anything Obama does will be distorted as anti-jobs by congressional Republicans, which is one reason they are so widely hated.

Obama’s reelection is no longer at risk. He’s got nothing to lose and no reason to trim his sails to please an unpleasable opposition. Has that changed Revkin’s calculus? (Or Walsh’s? Or Grunwald’s?) If so, I haven’t heard it.

Instead, we continue to hear vague references to things Obama could be doing if he weren’t stuck with these meddling Keystone kids. Revkin says Keystone is a “distraction.” (Distracting whom? What would they be doing if they weren’t distracted? He doesn’t say.) Professional wanker Matt Nisbet says it “distracts” and “limits” Obama’s ability to broker a deal. (A deal on what? With whom? He doesn’t say.) Michael Levi says it makes 60 Senate votes for a price on carbon less likely. (Less likely than impossible?) I could cite a dozen more examples, people casually accusing Keystone activism of impeding or draining energy from other solutions.

What is this good-faith bipartisan progress just waiting to happen if only activists weren’t being unreasonable about Keystone? What do the VSPs have to offer? I don’t see it. I see self-pleasuring dreams of bipartisan Grand Bargains with no awareness of changed political circumstances. I see visions of elite-driven incrementalism with no sense of the ticking clock. I see, above all, the elitist instinct that activists should pipe down, quit being so darn angry and unreasonable, and let the Serious People sit down and work it out together in a spirit of comity and mutual respect. There’s no reason to drag politics into politics, after all.

Revkin himself was asked directly about his alternative strategy. He waved his hands at a seven-part video and a homily.

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According to the New York Times, a new deal between automakers Honda and Acura and solar developer SolarCity may give a big boost to the already-rapidly burgeoning solar leasing market.

Solar leases, or solar power purchase agreements, are one of the new innovative tools for encouraging solar deployment. Basically, instead of purchasing a solar array outright, the customer plays host to a developer’s solar system in exchange for an agreement to pay a pre-determined fee structure for the electricity over a set period of time. That allows the developer to acquire a new income stream, and most likely the benefits of renewable energy tax credits.

Meanwhile, the customer gets the electricity for a price that’s often slightly below the going market rate. Perhaps more importantly, they avoid many of the problems that have bedeviled solar installations, such as the up-front installment costs, the permitting process, and the performance risk. As a firm with assets, the developer is generally in a far better position to tackle those hurdles than individual solar customers.

As the Times reports, Honda and Acura will offer their customers home solar systems at little-to-no upfront cost via the partnership with SolarCity, the largest player currently in the solar leasing market. (Honda and Acura will also offer their dealers preferential terms to lease or buy SolarCity’s systems on a case-by-case basis.) So SolarCity gets new capital and a massive new customer base, Honda and Accura get a cut of the returns, and customers get an added promotional deal to lease their homes to SolarCity’s systems and purchase its electricity:

The deal, in which Honda will provide financing for $65 million worth of installations, will help the automaker promote its environmental aims and earn a modest return, executives said. It could also open the door for more corporate investment in solar leasing companies, which has largely been limited to a small cluster of banks to provide capital for their projects….

The program will give Honda and Acura customers an extra $400 discount on top of SolarCity’s normal promotions, which they can use to sweeten the terms of the solar contract, like eliminating the escalation of the monthly payment. Honda projects the fund can finance as many as 3,000 systems on homes and 20 for its dealers. If the program catches on, Honda plans to expand it.

The growth of solar leasing has been one of the biggest recent drivers of the United States’ solar market — even more so than increases in cell efficiency — putting new arrays on government buildings, public and private schools, and private businesses and homes.

A new report from GTM Research found that solar leases are now available in 14 states — comprising over 50 percent of the new residential solar capacity in California, Arizona, Colorado, and Massachusetts, and rapidly gaining market share in the ten others. GTM Research anticipates the solar leasing market will rise from $1.35 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016.

“I don’t think that by finding Honda buyers you’ve homed in on the perfect solar customer,” Shayle Kann, vice president at GTM, told the Times. But since car owners are more likely to have the income and credit history to qualify for solar leasing, “there’s enough overlapping between the demographics that you’re better off than the general population.” The initial program will be available in 14 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Apparently, Honda originally proposed the partnership with SolarCity in order to supply solar installations for its hybrid and electric vehicle customers. But when encouraging solar deployment seemed to promise more overall carbon emissions cuts than simply selling electric vehicles, they expanded the program to all customers — including those who’ve just clicked through its web sites as opposed to actually buying a car. Honda and Acura are hopeful the project eventually helps integrate solar power with electric vehicle recharging.

By Tom Kenworthy

Extensive oil and gas drilling in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah produces the great majority of the chemical air pollution that produces winter ozone in that rural region, a new interagency study has concluded.

“An emissions inventory developed for the study indicates that oil and gas operations were responsible for 98 to 99 percent of” volatile organic compounds “and 57 to 61 percent of” nitrogen oxides in the basin, the study concluded. Those substances combine in the presence of sunshine to produce ozone, which a recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency links to heart and lung diseases and mortality.

The Utah study, conducted by Utah state and federal agencies and three universities, collected data on pollutants last winter. The study said that ozone formation occurs in the region in about half of winter seasons, with severe ozone occurring about one year in four. It said that transport of ozone-producing chemicals from outside the Uinta Basin “is not likely to represent a major contribution to peak ozone events.”

At the press conference announcing the study results, the deputy director of Utah’s Air Quality Administration said ozone levels this year have at times exceeded 130 parts per billion in the basin, far above the 75 parts per billion level considered a health hazard by EPA.

The Utah study follows a recent investigation into ozone in Colorado which found that more than half of the ozone producing chemicals came from oil and gas operations in a community in Weld County, a region that has nearly 20,000 operating oil and gas wells.

Ozone has been a frequent problem during summer months in urban areas of the United States. Wintertime ozone in heavily developed oil and gas regions of the West, including northeastern Utah and western Wyoming, is a relatively new phenomenon fueled in part by snow cover that reflects sunlight and temperature inversions.

The Utah study said that new rules from the EPA requiring so-called “green completions” of oil and gas wells will reduce emissions of VOC’s. A study sponsored by the oil and gas industry criticized that effort, contending it would sharply reduce production.

The Utah study also recommended additional studies to develop ways of reducing ozone in the Uinta Basin. But Brock LeBaron, the deputy head of the state air quality administration, said the state plans no new regulations on the oil and gas industry, favoring instead voluntary steps by energy developers.

“Right now we’re not passing any new rules or regulations,” LeBaron said, according to a report in E&E’s Energy Wire. “We’re not saying you have to control these VOCs from this piece of equipment.”

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At least fifty oil companies, business trade associations, labor unions, and political groups with combined lobbying budgets of more than $178 million lobbied Washington in support of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in 2012. And the dozen groups lobbying against the environmentally risky project had 2012 lobbying budgets of less than $5 million total, a ThinkProgress analysis reveals.

In 2011, many of the same companies and groups spent heavily to push the administration to approve construction of the proposed project. Forced by Congressional Republicans to rush a decision, President Obama rejected the application last January. The Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada Corporation vowed to reapply and the lobbying frenzy began anew.

TransCanada’s own $850,000 federal lobbying effort for 2012 was augmented by deep-pocketed allies including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($94,570,000 in total 2012 lobbying), the Business Roundtable ($13,989,000), the Exxon Mobil Corporation ($12,970,000).

Five labor unions (Laborers’ International Union of North America, the International Union of Operating Engineers, the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, and the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada) spent $1,559,925 in 2012 on overall lobbying, including advocacy for the project — which some labor groups believe would be a “game changer,” creating new jobs for their members.

More surprisingly, the American Jewish Committee (AJC)– which calls itself the “global advocate for the well-being of the Jewish people and for the advancement of democratic values for all” — spent part of its $100,000 lobbying budget in 2012 advocating for the pipeline. Calling energy security “a crucial element of our national security,” the group endorsed the pipeline as “part of short- and medium-term measures aimed at meeting U.S. oil demand.” AJC at least encouraged the U.S. and Canada to “take every measure to reduce the risk” of ”environmental hazard.”

Though outspent by more than a 35-to-1 ratio, groups in opposition included environmental groups, the League of Women Voters, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and the Quaker-affiliated Friends Committee on National Legislation.

The U.S. Department of State continues to review the revised application.

Here is the breakdown of who lobbied for and against Keystone in 2012:

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Yet another thing the matter with Kansas: A legislator on the committee that recently introduced legislation that would force teachers to misinform students about the science of climate change has introduced a bill to prohibit use of public funds to promote sustainable development.

Amazingly, he claims to be unable to see how his ties to the oil and gas industry could present a conflict of interest, as the Topeka Capitol Journal reports:

Rep. Dennis Hedke, a Republican, brought the bill to the House Energy and Environment Committee of which he is chairman. He said Tuesday he saw no conflict of interest in the fact that he is a contract geophysicist whose client list includes 30 regional oil and gas companies.

“I can’t see why,” Hedke said. “I didn’t think about that. It really never crossed my mind. I’d probably just say no.”

The bill, HB 2366, prohibits public funds from being used “either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development” which it defines as “a mode of human development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come, but not to include the idea, principle or practice of conservation or conservationism.”

According to Kansas Sierra Club spokesman Zack Pistora, the bill appears to be an extension of an anti-U.N. resolution driven by Agenda 21 conspiracy theories proposed by Rep. Hedke last year that was linked to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity(AFP) — both of which reportedly have funding ties to Kansas the oil and gas billionaires, the Koch brothers.

The House Energy and Environment Committee of which Rep. Hedke is chairman will also be hearing a proposal to roll back Kansas’s renewable energy standards this week, despite their success at attracting new jobs and wind projects to the state. Both the proposal to roll back renewable energy standards and the bill that would force teachers to mislead students about the facts surrounding climate science also appear to have originated from ALEC.

By Bill Becker

It has not taken long for Barack Obama to face the first big test of his resolve on combatting global climate disruption.

That test is the Keystone Pipeline, which would carry one of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels from the tar sands of Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Obama ultimately is “the decider” on whether or not to let the pipeline proceed.

A great deal has been written about the pros and cons of Keystone, including competing claims about its impacts on jobs, the environment, gasoline prices and so on. There is strong evidence that the money would be better invested in clean energy and associated jobs.

However, too little has been written about the moral dimension of Obama’s decision. That dimension is succinctly described by K.C. Golden, the policy director at Climate Solutions. He calls it the “Keystone Principle”:

We cannot abide any major federal action that results in long-term capital investments that lock in emission trajectories that make catastrophic climate disruption inevitable. More simply, we have much patient work to do over many decades to make it better, but we must immediately stop making it worse. We are in the “era of consequences” now. Each month brings new pictures of the victims. Today and every day from here forward, we can pledge ourselves to this and demand it of the Obama Administration: We will not allow major new investments in making climate disruption worse.

Allowing the pipeline to proceed is simply incompatible with any serious effort to reduce the consequences of climate disruption. On the other hand, killing Keystone would be solid evidence that Obama 2.0, liberated from re-election, is the climate leader we have been waiting for.

Keystone — in essence a pipeline that would bring persistent new atmospheric poisons into the United States and make us complicit with Canada in exporting them to other countries — is only one of several climate-related decisions Obama must make in the near term, each one a test of his resolve.

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According to a senior official with China’s Ministry of Finance (MOF), the country is preparing to introduce a new set of new taxation policies designed to preserve the environment and conserve resources, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. [XinHua]

The government will collect the environmental protection tax instead of pollutant discharge fees, as well as levy a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, Jia Chen, head of the ministry’s tax policy division, wrote in an article published on the MOF’s website.…

The government is also looking into the possibility of taxing energy-intensive products such as batteries, as well as luxury goods such as aircraft that are not used for public transportation, according to Jia.

To conserve natural resources, the government will push forward resource tax reforms by taxing coal based on prices instead of sales volume, as well as raising coal taxes. A resource tax will also be levied on water.

The Koch brothers’ political network is doing some serious self-assessment in the wake of the 2012 election — but they’re not waiting for the final report for heads to roll. [Politico]

BP has won an agreement from the Justice Department that there will be no penalties on the barrels of crude oil the company was able to recapture during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill, cutting the company’s potential Clean Water Act fines by $900 million to $3.5 billion. [WaPo]

A bill introduced in the Kansas House would require the state’s schools to provide evidence in classrooms both for and against the existence of climate change. [SFGate]

A senior Environmental Protection Agency official overseeing states in the West and Great Plains resigned Friday, amid intense congressional scrutiny over how EPA appointees have used personal e-mail addresses to conduct official business. [NYTimes]

A major snowstorm is poised to deliver much-needed precipitation to areas from central and southern California to the Rockies and Plains states during the next several days. Parts of Kansas and Nebraska may pick up more than a foot of snow. [Climate Central]

The environmental committee of the European Parliament voted to reduce the number of carbon emitting permits to be auctioned over the next three years, in order to shore a crash in the price of carbon caused by a surplus of the allowances. [NYTimes]