Trump Seems To Be In A Race To Pollute As Much Of America As He Can Before Being Tossed Out On His Ass

On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order-- claiming a national emergency-- to bypass environmental laws fast-tracking of major construction projects in a bid to... perhaps boost the economy before November, perhaps enrich friends and GOP campaign donors-- probably a combination. What his order does is lift environmental review of major projects, exactly what Congress prohibited over the course of decades. In practical terms it will mean rushed approval of highways pipelines, oil and gas projects and other polluting industries that have historically and disproportionately had harmful effect on minority communities.

Mustafa Santiago Ali of the National Wildlife Federation, formerly a senior adviser for environmental justice at the EPA said "It shows again that they have no respect for the lives in these communities that are already overburdened. Trump’s actions put a spotlight on black lives don’t matter."

And just as that was going on, the Senate was working in a bipartisan fashion-- very rare-- to tackle the the Climate Crisis via agriculture, "direct the Agriculture Department to help farmers, ranchers and landowners use carbon dioxide-absorbing practices to generate carbon credits."

Mike Braun (R-IN), #LadyG (R-SC), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) are the principal sponsors of the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which would direct the U.S. Department of Agriculture "to create a program that would help the agriculture sector gain access to revenue from greenhouse gas offset credit markets... The bill would establish USDA-certified protocols for farmers, ranch and forest owners seeking to develop projects that can generate offset credits under existing programs. It would offer a new revenue stream for farmers, ranchers and land owners suffering from the economic impacts of global trade tensions and the coronavirus."

Landowners and farmers can generate credits and earn money for activities ranging from reforestation to sequestering carbon in soil to capturing methane from livestock.

“As a Main Street Entrepreneur and conservationist, I know firsthand that if we want to address our changing climate then we need to facilitate real solutions that our farmers, environmentalists and industry can all support,” said Braun.

Voluntary offset programs have been around since the early 2000s. In 2018, the average price of such credits was $3/tonne.

Demand for credits is expected to grow when airlines are required to purchase offsets to comply with the industry’s Carbon Offset Reduction Scheme (CORSIA), which will begin in 2021.

Republicans in Congress have largely rejected the kind of economy-wide climate measures proposed by Democrats. But some of them have recently floated legislation that promotes carbon removal through land-based measures like planting trees to investments in carbon capture and sequestration technology for power and industrial plants.

“Our nation’s farmlands, forests, and ranches hold untapped potential for removing harmful emissions from the air naturally,” said Sarah Greenberger, senior vice president at the National Audubon Society.

Kathy Ellis is running to represent a he rural district in southeast Missouri, bordering on Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and the red part of Illinois. And yeah-- it was Trump country in 2016. The PVI is a daunting R+24 and Hillary only took 21.0% of the vote. Two year later Kathy Ellis challenged Trump bootlicker Jason Smith, another right-wing homophobic closet case, and did 4 points better than Hillary did. This November she plans to do much better and, hopefully, replace Smith. She told me she absolutely supports "bipartisan measures to tackle climate change and supports our farmers. When I've travelled throughout the District and spoken with farmers, I've found that they often know the best tools to tackle climate change and want to implement these measures in their agricultural work-- but, they're often too expensive or inaccessible. Our small farmers are suffering, and implementing policies that protect them and our environment is a smart plan forward... Each year, Jason Smith conducts a 'farm tour' where he travels throughout the district, visiting farmers, in his pick of plaid shirts. As one farmer responded this year, 'I just want to be left alone.' It's clear that Smith doesn't prioritize the small farmers that make up our district, and his vote against bipartisan measures such as this makes that clear."

The video below is the very first one Audrey Denney made for her 2018 campaign. Ten seconds in, she said "I believe that climate change is the single largest facing humanity and life as we know it and I spent a huge part of my professional career working to solve this problem." Watch the whole thing. Today, Audrey told that she could talk about it for an entire semester of a college course-- which she has done. She did well last cycle and is now known throughout the large, rural-- and red-- northeastern California district and is running for the seat occupied by right-wing, do-nothing backbencher Doug LaMalfa, a Trump stooge. This morning she told me that she is "beyond thrilled to see bi-partisan support for the Growing Climate Solutions Act. I talk about carbon sequestration every day on the campaign trail-- not just because I’m a science nerd. Drawing carbon down out of the atmosphere and storing it in soil through plants-- is THE cheapest and most effective way to turn the dial back on climate change. Farmers and ranchers unlock this drawdown potential through the way that they manage their land and the practices that they implement. I believe that agriculture can and must have a net positive impact on our environment. The way we continue towards that goal is legislation like this-- that rewards farmers and ranchers for the good things they are already doing, provides support and training, and helps them increase their razor thin profit margins.





Like Audrey and Kathy, J.D. Scholten, a champion of family farms and rural communities, is running for Congress in Iowa's forth district, one of America's top agricultural districts. "One of the most underrated messages from the Iowa Caucus," he told me today, "was the consistent messages from the candidates about paying our farmers for their environmental services. We need to create 'on ramps' for farmers to enhance practices to combat climate change. We can't expect the average farmer who has struggled to make cost of production for over a half decade to go at it alone. At the heart of why I am running for Congress is my vision for Iowa's 4th Congressional District to be the epicenter for 21st century resilient agriculture."

Jennifer Christie didn't win her primary, but this is a bill she's been pushing for-- with a significant amendment: reforestation. She posted this on Twitter the other day:

Why Climate Activists Must Include Supply-Side Restrictions in Their Recommended Policy Mix

Daily average Arctic surface temperature since 1958. The red line is now — 2018 year-to-date (source: Bill McKibben).

by Gaius Publius

Climate policy recommendations, to date, cluster around a very small number of recommendations, all designed to discourage demand for fossil fuels and encourage demand for renewable energy sources. Few policy recommendations address the plentiful, cheap and growing supply of fossil fuels.

This is a major mistake. It may even prove fatal to the great task ahead. And only the climate activist and policy community can fix this error.

Consider the following six points.

The Argument for Restricting the Supply of Fossil Fuels

1. Note the graph above. If it's not already clear that global warming has not just reached truly dangerous proportions, but is accelerating, what's shown in graphs like that should dispel all doubt.

Here's another, from the same series of tweets by climate writer Bill McKibben:

Hmm, something seems a little different this year when it comes to ice in the Bering Sea pic.twitter.com/RwCayhinmt

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 25, 2018

The Chukchi Sea is the region of the Arctic north of the Bering Strait. As you can see, the extent of sea ice is declining precipitously. (See also here and here.) All those tiny lines are measurements from the most recent previous years.

(Both of these graphs come from the website of climate scientist and student Zachary Labe, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth System Science at UC Irvine. The site is rich in graphs like these. For more Arctic sea ice figures, see here and also the links at the bottom of the page.)

If this isn't an emergency, what is? The World War II analogy would be: Germany has been arming for war for years and has now massed troops on the Polish border. There's no time to waste in preparing the Polish people for the onslaught.

2. If there's no time to waste in addressing the climate crisis, it's necessary not just to restrict the demand for fossil fuels — for example, via carbon taxes and mandatory emissions standards — but also the supply.

This means, in turn, putting the squeeze on the economy to force a conversion to renewable energy supply, rather than simply put pressure on the economy via more gentle restrictions and encouragements that allow the economy to adjust, if it wishes, in a way that's "comfortable."

Examples of "comfortable" demand restrictions include carbon taxes and mandatory cap-and-trade systems. "Comfortable" demand encouragements include subsidies for renewable energy infrastructure.

Supply restrictions, in contrast, tend to be uncomfortable — for consumers because supply is restricted in advance of changes in buying behavior or availability of alternatives; for suppliers because the flow of profit is artificially constrained; and for segments of the economy as a whole because money is forced out of fully operating sectors (fossil fuel production, delivery and use) and into alternative, less-developed areas.

The purpose of supply restrictions, in fact, is to use that discomfort to force changes in behavior, to force the development of alternatives — and not to settle for waiting until the market or consumers decide to make these changes on their own.

The World War II analogy would be the transfer of money from the consumer part of the U.S. economy via rationing into the war-making part of the economy, in order to force the production of ships, tanks, guns and other materiel needed by the military. The constricting factor, the reason the U.S. couldn't support both parts of the economy at full capacity, is manufacturing capacity. No developed nation can double manufacturing capacity in a year, even with all the money in the world to do it. Capacity to make cars, for example, had to be converted to make tanks. In the same way, overall spending had to be diverted, since a nation's ability to expand government spending, while large, isn't infinite.

3. Restrictions on supply, when coupled with constrictions on demand, work very well in other areas where public policy intervention is needed to create a positive social change. Consider the attempt to limit tobacco use in Australia, from a recent academic study ("Cutting with both arms of the scissors: the economic and political case for restrictive supply-side climate policies" by Fergus Green & Richard Denniss) that looks at the utility of supply-side restriction in the battle to mitigate climate change (emphasis added):

Significantly, many countries rely on complicated and evolving combinations of these measures, wherein restrictive supply-side policies play an important role complementing demand-side policies.

Policies to control tobacco smoking in Australia provide an instructive example. The policy mix includes prohibitions on producing tobacco without a license, selling tobacco without a license, selling tobacco to children, tobacco advertising, tobacco sponsorship, and smoking cigarettes in confined public spaces. It also includes heavy taxation of tobacco consumption, hard-hitting public information campaigns, “plain packaging” laws, mandatory health warnings on cigarette packages, and the subsidisation of certain substitutes for cigarettes such as nicotine patches.

None of these anti-"free market" measures is considered out of bounds by the public in the war on tobacco use:

Far from being derided as an inefficient mire of “red tape”, Australia’s tobacco regulatory environment is lauded as a global model of effective public health policy, with the country seen as an early mover in innovative regulation in the sector (Chapman and Wakefield 2001). The combination of a wide range of policies, rather than an ‘optimal’ policy, is, moreover, endorsed in the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which states that “‘tobacco control’ means a range of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies that aim to improve the health of a population by eliminating or reducing their consumption of tobacco products and their exposure to tobacco smoke…” (article 1(d)).

As the authors also note, supply-side restrictions "have also played an important role in efforts to reduce negative environmental pollution externalities, including chlorofluorocarbons (Haas 1992), asbestos (Kameda et al. 2014), and lead in petroleum products (Needleman 2000)."

4. Restrictions on demand for fossil fuels alone aren't doing the job, certainly not fast enough. The march to a far less human-friendly climate — what I've been calling the Next New Stone Age — is relentless and accelerating. Again, we are now seeing zero degree Celsius days in February in the Arctic. In plain English, that means this: air, warm enough to melt ice, in the Arctic, in winter.

Restrictions on supply are therefore critically needed. Yet restrictions on supply create discomfort, both for producers and consumers. Can counter-arguments that point to "discomfort" as a reason not to address climate change via fossil fuel supply restrictions be overcome?

5. The surprising answer is yes, those arguments can be overcome. The paper cited above notes both economic and political benefits of restricting the supply of fossil fuels, and shows that, controlling for other factors, those arguments can be popular and effective. To my knowledge, it's the first paper to do so.

It points out that the economic benefits of supply-side restrictions include low administrative and transaction costs, higher certainty of abatement outcomes, positive price and efficiency effects, the avoidance of infrastructure "lock in," and others.

On the political side, the authors assert that "supply-side policies are generally likely to attract higher public support than demand-side policies, all else equal."

Scholars have identified various reasons, related to these factors [perceived benefits, distributional fairness, and so on], why people tend to prefer certain kinds of climate policy instruments over others (e.g. command and control regulation over market-based instruments) (Jenkins 2014; Karplus 2011; Rabe 2010) and, within a given class of policy instrument, certain design features (e.g. explicit earmarking of revenue from market-based instruments) (Drews and van den Bergh 2015, 863; Rabe and Borick 2012). What has not been analysed is the effect on public support resulting from whether the instrument targets the supply side or the demand side (controlling for instrument type and relevant design features such as, where applicable, revenue allocation). 

The point of the study is to support that point by "controlling for instrument type and relevant design features such as, where applicable, revenue allocation".

For example, on the "perceived benefits" of demand-side vs. supply-side climate policies, the authors state:

A common conclusion from climate-related public opinion research is that climate science is poorly understood and concern about the problem, though widespread, is shallow, i.e. it tends to be a low-salience, low-priority concern and individuals have a low “willingness to pay” for solutions (Ansolabehere and Konisky 2014; Guber 2003; Jenkins 2014, 470–72; van der Linden et al. 2015). This is unsurprising: the climate benefits of mitigation policies are diffused widely across time and space; they disproportionately accrue (and are perceived accrue) to future generations and people in other countries; and their magnitude is uncertain, meaning they are likely to be strongly discounted by voters (van der Linden et al. 2015).

Supply-side policies suffer none of these disadvantages:

By contrast, supply-side instruments typically target fossil fuels per se. Survey evidence suggests that people more readily link co-costs/co-benefits (environmental, health, security, social, economic) to specific energy sources than to the more abstract concepts of “carbon”/“climate” (e.g., Ansolabehere and Konisky 2014); and fossil fuels are well-understood commodities that many people more readily associate with a range of higher-priority, more localised and more immediate negative (non-climate) impacts, resulting in negative attitudes toward fossil fuels, especially coal (see Green 2018, section 3.1.1 and references there cited). These features give supply-side policies considerable advantages in attracting public support for climate policy. Relatively high public support for fossil fuel severance (resource extraction) taxes, even in climate-ambivalent, tax-averse north-American states and provinces (Rabe and Borick 2012, 377–79), provides circumstantial empirical support for these arguments.

The paper studied similar support for supply-side policies based on perceptions of distributional fairness and lower costs.

6. The bottom line is: This is the first study that controls for other factors in determining support for supply-side climate policies vs. demand-side policies by themselves, and finds much to be encouraged about.

The authors conclude:

In our experience, the climate policy community has for too long been excessively narrow in its preference for certain kinds of policy instruments (carbon taxes, cap-and trade), largely ignoring the characteristics of such instruments that affect their political feasibility and feedback effects. At the very least, then, we hope we have shown that supply-side policies should be in the toolkit, ready to be wielded when circumstances favour.

Better, we think, to cut with both arms of the scissors.

Cutting with "both arms of the scissors" means using both supply-side policies and demand-side policies in addressing the looming climate crisis. It's clearly ineffective to use just one.

Only the Climate Policy Community Can Lead in Making This Change

Note the addressee of the authors' conclusion — the "climate policy community." This recommendation is not addressed primarily to politicians, who in the West are natively "free market" apologists, which means, natively Big Money enablers.

And it's not addressed to the public at large, who fear — and are led to fear — the "discomfort" of supply restrictions. Recent American Petroleum Institute ads, for example, say this in effect to consumers: "Do you like that big-screen, smart-phone lifestyle of yours? Be sure to keep carbon in the energy mix, or you'll lose it." Yet the reality is, if Mr. and Ms. Consumer truly hope to keep their smart-phone lifestyle intact, they better start now to arrest the devolution to Stone Age life that constantly burning carbon will cause — just the opposite of what the API is telling them to do.

It makes sense then, does it not, that a message that clearly explain the benefits of reduction — and destruction — of fossil fuel supply can only be carried at first by leading climate activists and the broader policy community?

I see no one else to offer it. And considering both the existential nature of the coming emergency and its near-suffocational timeline, that leadership needs to start ... well, now.

GP
   

Electricity from Plants — An Off-the-Grid Way of Lighting Your Room, a Street, a Park

Prometheus, bringer of fire, was punished for the crime of rendering less the sum of human wretchedness (Byron). Can we replace his gift with another? Or will we let the fire we burn, burn us?

by Gaius Publius

In the beginning, before we emerged into civilization, we were given fire as a source of energy — all we had to do was light it.

Now at the other end of our civilized life, we have all the fire we want — all we have to do is not light it.

People are generally pessimistic about the chance our species will escape unscathed the gift of fire that we now so greatly overuse. They think that the warming of the earth will doom most of us in a kind of Great Dying — taking our billions in number down to a fraction of that — and doom the rest who remain to lives more like the Old Stone Age than the NextGen Age of the iPhone 44.

Those that aren't pessimistic about climate solutions fall generally into one of two camps — the party of the "wizards," those who believe that the magic of science will save us without requiring much change in the way we currently live; and the party of the "prophets," those who think that humans must entirely rethink themselves, their lives, their culture, before any solution is possible.

As a small example, wizards see a "smarter grid" and "greener power plants" as a way of serving national energy needs, while prophets see local solutions — rooftop solar, independent village- and town-sized energy facilities — as the only way our species can stay nimble and survive.

Note that the problem being solved by wizards and prophets isn't just a science problem — how to produce our energy — but also a political problem as well. How can a village or town save itself if the national government makes all solutions impossible, as one political party is deliberately does; or promises national solutions that can't possibly work in time, as the other seems to do?

For a nice introduction to these two schools of thought, go here (h/t Naked Capitalism).

Lighting a Room with a Plant

This piece offers a kind of marriage of these two camps, a technologically innovative solution (something wizards will applaud) that nonetheless can be deployed entirely locally (solving the prophets' dilemma).

With this technology, one can light a room with a plant. No plug; just a plant. The technology exists (has existed, in fact, for more than a century) and efforts to scale it up, from a room to a house, a street, and a park, are underway.

The following short video explains it all.

From Deezen.com:

Dutch designer Ermi van Oers has created a lamp that uses a living plant to generate its own electricity – and plans to scale up the technology to power entire smart cities.

Presented at Dutch Design Week, the Living Light uses microorganisms to convert the chemical energy that a plant naturally produces during photosynthesis into an electric current.

Van Oers designed the lamp to be fully self-sufficient, so it can function off-grid, rather than needing to be plugged into an electrical socket.

She has already began to apply the technology – known as microbial energy – to public spaces, and is collaborating with the municipality of Rotterdam to light up one of its parks.

"The potential is huge," she told Dezeen. "Street lights could be connected to trees. Forests could become power plants. Rice fields in Indonesia could produce food and electricity for the local population."

Of course, these are early days for this technology, and the efficiency isn't great — efficiency defined as how much light you get from how much plant.

Van Oers acknowledges that "the technology is still new, and that the Living Light can only produce a small amount of energy in its current form. The plant photosynthesises around the clock. But the lamp takes a day to produce enough energy for half an hour's charge – although this can vary depending on the condition of the plant."

Nevertheless, the wizards among us will appreciate that photovoltaic cells weren't very efficient in their early days as well.

And the prophets among us, who understand that freeing ourselves from the death grip of the already rich is the only way solve this problem, will appreciate the simplicity and independence of this solution. Once the technology is mature and available, no politician-dominated utility commission, for example, can forbid you to use it.

Another Easter Island Solution

This is a form, by the way, of my proposed "Easter Island solution" to global warming:

You're a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried. At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, "Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now."

The chief, who's also CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.

Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?

There's always a choice ...

Cities, town, villages — and individual people — can simply act on their own and do it. In this case, ignoring the chief deposes the chief. It's a form of secession. And there is always a choice.

For more information, see here. For the underlying technology, the use of microbial fuel cells, see here.

GP