The five stages of grief describes “a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss.” As Wikipedia puts it:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

A few years ago, I heard a very brilliant physicist, Saul Griffiths, use this piece of pop psychology to describe climate science activists (a.k.a. climate hawks), and I realized that he had it backwards. This is an updated post.

THE FIVE STAGES IN REVERSE

Climate hawks begin with accepting the science. What else can one do? Science is the reason so many of us survived childbirth and childhood, science has fed the world, science is the reason computers and the blogosphere exist at all. And yes, science gave us our fossil-fueled wealth. I’m a scientist by training, but I just don’t see how anyone can pick and choose what science you’re going to believe and what not. The scientific method may not be always be perfect in single studies — since it is used by imperfect humans — but it is the best thing we have for objectively determining what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It is testable and self-correcting, unlike all other approaches.

Once climate hawks accept the science, many quite naturally get depressed. See “Dealing with climate trauma and global warming burnout.”  The situation is beyond dire, and we aren’t doing bloody much about it, in large part because of the successful efforts of the deniers and delayers. Climate science offers a very grim prognosis if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

After depression comes a serious effort at bargaining. Climate hawks try to figure out what they can do to stop the catastrophe. Taking actions and making bargains at a personal level and a political level — depending on their level of activism.

Then comes anger. Once you’ve been at this for a while, you get very very frustrated by how little is happening — by the status quo media, the many anti-science politicians, and especially the deniers, the professional disinformers.

Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated).”

The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

It is impossible to believe. I myself can’t believe it.

The State Department released an environmental impact assessment on the Keystone XL pipeline Friday afternoon, concluding that the project is environmentally sound and “is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.” A 45-day comment period will now begin for the public to weigh in on the project. The State Department will respond to the comments, before finalizing the environmental impact statement, and “conduct a separate analysis of whether the project is in the national interest, a question on which eight other agencies will offer input over 90 days.” Obama is unlikely to make a final decision until “mid-summer at the earliest.”

From the report:

Based on information and analysis about the North American crude transport infrastructure (particularly the proven ability of rail to transport substantial quantities of crude oil profitably under current market conditions, and to add capacity relatively rapidly) and the global crude oil market, the draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area. [...] Spills associated with the proposed Project that enter the environment are expected to be rare and relatively small.

The study found that “The annual CO2e emissions from the proposed Project is equivalent to CO2e emissions from approximately 626,000 passenger vehicles operating for one year or 398,000 homes using electricity for one year.” It also suggests that “America can meet its energy needs over the next decade without” the project by relying on the “growth in rail transport of oil from western Canada and the Bakken Formation on the Great Plains and other pipelines.”

The proposed pipeline would transport tar sands oil — one of the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels — all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Industry officials have themselves admitted that without the pipeline, vast amounts of tar sands will stay in the ground. Were the project to go online, the pipeline would constitute a “carbon bomb,” further enabling the ongoing glut of carbon emissions into the atmosphere that threaten to drive global warming to catastrophic levels.
Read more

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that twin votes in Kansas State House and Senate on Thursday put the kibosh on legislative efforts to roll back and delay Kansas’ renewable energy standard (RES).

Passed in 2009, Kansas’ RES requires investor-owned utilities to generate 20 percent of peak demand electrical capacity from renewable sources by 2020. The American Wind Energy Association has actually highlighted the RES as a driving factor in the states burgeoning wind power sector — half of Kansas’ wind farms began operating between 2010 and 2012, after the RES went into effect.

Unfortunately, Kansas has also been targeted by conservative anti-renewable efforts. Republican Rep. Dennis Hedke, the chairman of Kansas’ House Energy and Environment Committee, recently acknowledged he had private talks with a lobbyist for Koch Companies Public Sector LLC concerning the House bill to dilute the RES. (HB 2241) Even anti-tax activist Graver Norquist got in on the action, telling the state’s legislature it ought to abandon the “costly renewable energy mandate so as to mitigate its negative impact on the economy.”

But to Kansas’ credit, it looks like neither effort bore fruit:

[T]he Senate responded by voting 17-23 to defeat Senate Bill 82 that would have postponed the deadline for complying with the Kansas renewable portfolio standard. Instead of Kansas utilities reaching 15 percent of power from wind, solar or other alternative source in 2016, the bill would have moved the date to 2018. The measure also pushed the 20 percent mandate to 2024 from 2020. […]

The House answered by voting 63-59 to send House Bill 2241 back to a committee for additional deliberation. This measure would amend the state’s portfolio standard to declare 15 percent must be met by 2018, but the 20 percent target would be dropped.

House Republicans and Democrats supportive of the motion said previous House committee work on the bill was flawed, while other representatives questioned the goal of rewriting the state’s renewable energy standard because the amendment would remove “regulatory certainty” for business.

“I would suggest we exercise prudent restraint,” said Rep. Russell Jennings, R-Lakin. “In fairness to business, and in fairness to the people of Kansas, they need some certainty.”

Kansas is one of many states in which organizations like The Heartland Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council have been lobbying against renewable energy policy, and pushing “model legislation” to undo renewable standards — part of a broader shift by conservative organizations recently to attack clean energy efforts at the state level.

Nor is renewable energy the only policy area in which conservatives and climate change skeptics have tried to convince Kansas to set back its own advancement — often with the aforementioned Rep. Hedke, a contract geophysicist with a client list that includes 30 regional oil and gas companies, at the lead. Earlier this year, Hedke introduced a bill, HB 2366, that would prohibit 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.” Another Kansas House committee recently put forward a law — likely the product of ALEC’s “model legislation” — requiring the state’s educators to teach students “evidence which both supports and counters” the science of climate change.

In all these cases, Kansas would be wise to continue pushing back right-wing efforts while moving ahead with clean energy policy. Kansas is one of the Plains states that’s been wracked by record-breaking droughts over the last few years, likely driven by global warming, as well as other forms of economically damaging extreme weather.

By Adam James

Allocation of capital is one way society expresses its values. That’s why Chris Thile recieving a MacArthur Genius Award is one of humankind’s greatest redeeming acts, and why Kim Kardashian’s net worth is so damn frustrating. It goes without saying, then, that finding ways to finance clean energy and address climate change should be a high priority for civilization, if self-interest ranks among our top values.

Decarbonizing electricity markets is a core task in the effort to tackle climate change. However, clean energy faces strong headwinds from cheap fossil fuels in the marketplace. Fossil fuels have benefited from a long history of subsidization, government investment, continued externalization of their environmental impacts, and the ability to plug into a grid that’s literally built to accommodate them. Given these conditions, a strategy for increasing clean energy’s market share requires developing policies to bring down the costs of clean energy, in addition to accurately pricing carbon and correcting market failures like pollution.

One way to drive costs down is through increasing access to capital for early-stage clean technologies. There are certainly challenges in early-stage clean energy financing (pre-venture capital/seed stage), but there are also several innovative solutions.

The Demons: Challenges for Early-Stage Clean Energy Financing

Clean energy is a tough gig to be in. It is, after all, up against the most powerful industry in the history of the world. But lots of early stage technologies have to compete against massive, entrenched incumbents. Why should early-stage clean energy have a harder time than, for example, new computer software or an “even smarter” smartphone? I sat down with David Miller, an Angel investor with the Clean Energy Venture Group, to try and get some insight about the “demons” faced by early-stage clean energy startups:

Demon 1: Extended time cycles for development, sales, and deployment. Miller explained that time cycles at every stage of clean energy are simply longer or more complex than those in industries like pharmaceuticals or software. Initial development cycles for energy technologies tend to be as capital and time intensive as pharmaceuticals, and certainly more than software. But the sales cycles are also extended because communication with the relevant actors in the market (often, utilities) is notoriously difficult. The process for getting those technologies adopted by big companies can be years rather than months.

The deployment time cycle is where the difference gets even starker. Energy systems are frankly less welcoming of new products than telecommunications or internet systems (despite some similarities), and while the creation of a more transactive market will certainly alter this dynamic, we are not there yet. Turnover in the energy system occurs across large scale infrastructure and over long periods of time, overlaid by many levels of regulation. Innovation in this context is a tough beat since achieving scale requires integration into a complex network, and not just a good or better product.

Demon 2: Lack of policy support. Finally, the policy landscape for clean energy is a mess. The lack of stable policy signals for clean energy, combined with the policy support for fossil fuels at every stage of development, creates a very intimidating atmosphere for investors looking to place their bets on clean technologies. To illustrate, note the historical drop-off in wind investments with the stop-and-go PTC extension fight. Letting fossil fuels pollute for free creates a huge market distortion, and absent any carbon policy, this is likely to continue. Read more

Automatic across-the-board budget cuts will take hold on Friday, affecting job growth, state education programs, environmental agencies, and women’s health programs. The sequester actually shares an important anniversary — with Big Oil tax breaks. It is not as well-known a date, but one type of deduction, the percentage depletion allowance, celebrates its 100-year anniversary today.

Depletion allowances let oil companies treat the oil in the ground as capital equipment, and thus allows them to write off a certain percentage for each barrel that comes out. (See more here.)

The year 1913 marked the first time a Big Oil subsidy was written into the tax code. The Revenue Act of 1913 allowed oil companies to write off 5 percent of the costs from oil and gas wells beginning March 1 of that year. (For reference, see pages 172-174 of the Act.) A century later, oil companies can now deduct three times this rate, at 15 percent, although the very largest companies no longer qualify. The percentage depletion subsidy also increases when prices are high, at the same time that oil companies enjoy greater profit. It can even eliminate all federal taxes for independent producers.

A Center for American Progress report estimated that closing this tax break would save $11.2 billion over 10 years.

President Obama has called on Congress to eliminate the percentage depletion allowance, along with a series of other tax breaks totaling $4 billion annually. Even Ronald Reagan once asked for the same in a 1985 speech on tax reform:

“Under our new tax proposal the oil and gas industry will be asked to pick up a larger share of the national tax burden. The old oil depletion allowance will be dropped from the tax code except for wells producing less than 10 barrels a day. By eliminating this special preference, we’ll go a long way toward ensuring that those that earn their wealth in the oil industry will be subject to the same taxes as the rest of us.”

However, congressional Republicans taking the lion’s share of oil and gas industry contributions have refused to close century-old loopholes in order to raise revenue. A number of specialized Big Oil tax breaks allow the top oil companies to cut their tax bill dramatically, sometimes half (or less) of the top corporate rate. It is not as if Big Oil is struggling: Last year, the five largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil — earned $118 billion profit at a time when consumers paid record-high gas prices. This haul follows after a year the companies earned a record $137 billion profit.

The sequester, a broad spending cut of $1.2 trillion over the next decade, is scheduled to become law at midnight tonight. Part of 2011 Budget Control Act, it was meant to incentivize a now-failed effort to find more well-thought forms of deficit reduction. Here’s previous work from the Center for American Progress on how the sequester’s cuts threaten a host of climate and energy-related policies:

The Ides of March falls on the 15th of March every year, but this year that fateful date and the impending doom it foretells could arrive two weeks early — on March 1, when $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts are set to occur. The so-called sequester will slash 5.3 percent in funding from every federal program except Social Security and Medicaid. For public health and clean energy programs, the sequester means less protection from air pollution and the health problems associated with it, less assistance after severe extreme weather events, more oil imports, fewer permits for oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, and reduced accessibility to our national parks. In short, it’s clear that sequestration will harm middle- and lower-income Americans.

The Kansas Senate and House voted down two laws postponing the deadline for compliance with the state’s new renewable energy standard. Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist had been instrumental in pushing the bills. [Topeka Capital-Journal]

New research involving analysis of Antarctic ice suggests that the warming trend that ended the last ice age occurred in close conjunction with a spike in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Previous work had raised the possibility that the rise in temperatures and the rise in carbon dioxide had actually occurred roughly 800 years apart. [NYTimes]

A senior White House adviser said Wednesday that President Obama will announce in the next weeks and months decisive actions the executive branch is planning to take to tackle climate change. [Bloomberg]

Deutsche Bank analysts are predicting the global solar PV sector will become a sustainable market without subsidies within a year, citing the arrival of “grid parity,” unexpectedly strong demand and rebounding margins. [Renew Economy]

The Weather Channel has put together a guide to how climate change will effect the temperature and seasons in individual states. [Weather Channel]

Among the sequester’s other victims will be a program tracking U.S. green jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will be tabled when the automatic budget cuts take effect today, according to a person familiar with the decision. [Bloomberg]

The sequester also threatens the Department of the Interior’s ongoing efforts to promote renewable energy projects, including wind, solar, and smart grid technology. [Clean Technia]

A new study shows that decline in the populations of wild bees and other insects that serve as pollinators can have devastating effects on crop yields. [The Guardian]

A new economic survey in India is warming that country that adopting a carbon tax of $10 per metric ton would lead to a GDP loss of over $600 billion. [The Hindu]