Is Solar Electricity an Energy sink?

                  Comments due by Feb 4, 2017

THAT solar panels do not emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide when they are generating electricity is without question. This is why they are beloved of many who worry about the climate-altering potential of such gases. Sceptics, though, observe that a lot of energy is needed to make a solar panel in the first place. In particular, melting and purifying the silicon that these panels employ to capture and transduce sunlight needs a lot of heat. Silicon’s melting point, 1,414°C, is only 124°C less than that of iron.

Silicon is melted in electric furnaces and, at the moment, most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels. That does emit carbon dioxide. So, when a new solar panel is put to work it starts with a “carbon debt” that, from a greenhouse-gas-saving point of view, has to be paid back before that panel becomes part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Observing this, some sceptics have gone so far as to suggest that if the motive for installing solar panels is environmental (which is often, though not always, the case), they are pretty-much useless.

Wilfried van Sark, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his colleagues have therefore tried to put some numbers into the argument. As they report in Nature Communications, they have calculated the energy required to make all of the solar panels installed around the world between 1975 and 2015, and the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with producing that energy. They also looked at the energy these panels have produced since their installation and the corresponding amount of carbon dioxide they have prevented from being spewed into the atmosphere. Others have done life-cycle assessments for solar power in the past. None, though, has accounted for the fact that the process of making the panels has become more efficient over the course of time. Dr Van Sark’s study factors this in.

Panel games

To estimate the number of solar panels installed around the world, Dr Van Sark and his team used data from the International Energy Agency, an autonomous intergovernmental body. They gleaned information on the amount of energy required to make panels from dozens of published studies. Exactly how much carbon dioxide was emitted during the manufacture of a panel will depend on where it was made, as well as when. How much emitted gas it has saved will depend on where it is installed. A panel made in China, for example, costs nearly double the greenhouse-gas emissions of one made in Europe. That is because China relies more on fossil fuels for generating power. Conversely, the environmental benefits of installing solar panels will be greater in China than in Europe, as the clean power they produce replaces electricity that would otherwise be generated largely by burning coal or gas.

Once the team accounted for all this, they found that solar panels made today are responsible, on average, for around 20 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of energy they produce over their lifetime (estimated as 30 years, regardless of when a panel was manufactured). That is down from 400-500 grams in 1975. Likewise, the amount of time needed for a solar panel to produce as much energy as was involved in its creation has fallen from about 20 years to two years or less. As more panels are made, the manufacturing process becomes more efficient. The team found that for every doubling of the world’s solar capacity, the energy required to make a panel fell by around 12% and associated carbon-dioxide emissions by 17-24%.

The consequence of all this number-crunching is not as clear-cut as environmentalists might hope. Depending on the numbers fed into the model, global break-even could have come as early as 1997, or might still not have arrived. But if it has not, then under even the most pessimistic assumptions possible it will do so in 2018. After that, solar energy’s environmental credentials really will be spotless.(Economist)

Economics and the IPCC

                 

                                       Comments due by April 29, 2016

Despite attacks from “climate skeptics” and other opponents of action on climate change, as well as its own missteps, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is broadly viewed as the world’s most legitimate scientific body that periodically assesses the economics of climate change for policy audiences. But growing inefficiencies and other limitations have made the IPCC an increasingly problematic forum for qualified scholars. This has been particularly true with regard to expertise from economics.

In an article that has appeared in the journal, Climate Change Economics, “Reforming the IPCC’s Assessment of Climate Change Economics,” my colleagues and I draw on our personal experiences writing the most recent IPCC report to identify some of the main problems faced by this institution and to propose some possible solutions. My co-authors are, in alphabetical order: Gabriel Chan(University of Minnesota), Carlo Carraro (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Ottmar Edenhofer (Technische Universität Berlin), and Charles Kolstad (Stanford University).

Background and Context

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to assess and synthesize scientific research on climate change, its impacts, and response options. The IPCC is governed by its Plenary (composed of representatives of member governments), Bureau, Executive Committee, and Secretariat, which have distinct roles to provide oversight, develop procedures, and facilitate operation.

Coverage of the scientific literature is divided into three Working Groups that respectively assess climate change science, impacts and adaptation, and mitigation. Authors are nominated by national governments, and selected by the IPCC Bureau. Authors serve as Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs), with responsibility for leading the writing of a chapter, or as Lead Authors (LAs), who serve on a chapter team and participate in the writing process. CLAs and LAs participate in numerous meetings held at diverse locations around the world. Other experts serve as Contributing Authors (CAs), but the process for nominating these contributors is less formal, and the CAs typically do not participate in meetings and deliberations.

The assessment cycle for each round of the IPCC begins with a scoping process, with government representatives, together with a large group of scholars and other interested parties, drafting outlines of each chapter of the IPCC. Following the scoping process, the IPCC Plenary approves the outlines, sometimes after some modification.

CLAs and LAs are then nominated and subsequently approved by the IPCC Bureau. CLAs and LAs serve as volunteer labor (although some have their travel expenses reimbursed). In the Fifth Assessment Report Working Group III process, Lead Author Meetings (LAMs) were convened four times from July 2011, to July 2013. These meetings took place in Changwon, Korea; Wellington, New Zealand;Vigo, Spain; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Over the course of the LAMs, CLAs led their chapter teams to review relevant literature and prepare chapter text, tables, and figures.

At three points during this process, external Expert Reviewers and government representatives submit detailed comments on subsequent draft. These comments, numbering in the many thousands in AR5, are made public following the assessment cycle, and, are checked by appointed Review Editors, who confirm that authors have replied adequately to comments. After four drafting rounds, the Working Group reports are preliminarily finalized.

Towards the end of the assessment cycles, authors of each Working Group, primarily CLAs, engage in writing two summary documents for each report, a Technical Summary (TS) and a Summary for Policymakers (SPM). The Summary for Policymakers is subject to line-by-line approval by the IPCC Plenary (that is, the governments). By the way, in case you’re interested, I have written about these government approval processes at length in previous essays at this blog: Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken? (April 25, 2014); Understanding the IPCC: An Important Follow-Up (May 3, 2014); and The Final Stage of IPCC AR5 — Last Week’s Outcome in Copenhagen (November 4, 2014).

Finally, concurrent with much of the chapter-drafting process, a subset of CLAs and LAs from all three Working Groups convene to draft a Synthesis Report (SYR) and its own Summary for Policymakers.

I’m exhausted, just having written that summary of the multi-year process in which we were engaged in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.

Categories of Key Reforms

I hope you’ll turn to our article in Climate Change Economics to read about the procedural and substantive reforms we propose. So, here I’ll provide just a list as a guide to what you can find in the article.

We propose four potential procedural reforms that could lower the cost for volunteering as an IPCC author:

• Improving interactions between governments and academics

• Making IPCC operations more efficient

• Clarifying and strengthening conflict of interest rules

• Expanding outreach

In addition, we propose three reforms to the IPCC’s substantive coverage to clarify the IPCC’s role and to make participation as an author more intellectually rewarding:

• Complementing the IPCC with other initiatives

• Improving the integration of economics with other disciplines

• Providing complete data for policymakers to make decisions

Looking Forward

My co-authors and I all found that working for the IPCC was at times enormously frustrating. As an IPCC author, particularly as a CLA, scholars can at times feel as if they are inside a political process, forced to respond to critical government comments based on political sensitivity, and even directly negotiating text with professional climate negotiators during the SPM Approval Sessions.

Despite such distractions and frustrations, however, the group of us believe that the IPCC remains a critical institution for the communication of scholarly knowledge about climate change. Engaging governments in often detailed deliberations over climate science, economics, and policy helps build a knowledge base that is broadly based. And the process of consensus-building around the SPM and the work of the underlying chapters play key motivating roles in driving international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Going forward, the greatest risk is that scholars with sound and balanced understanding of the relevant literature may be deterred from participating as IPCC authors, and thereby surrender the process to quasi-academics with political motivations. The potential harm to the policy process (and the reputation of academia) would be very great.

To prevent this from happening, the IPCC needs to reform its operational procedures and substantive scope so that qualified scholars perceive the time investment as authors to be worthwhile. At the same time, scholars of climate change economics should not dismiss the opportunity to provide a significant public service by volunteering for the IPCC in its future assessments. (Stavins Huffpost)

Carbon Tax of six states.

                                                Comments due by April 22 

As the political likelihood of passing comprehensive national climate policy has remained low, many states have taken up the mantle. This devolution of climate policy has been further reinforced by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) efforts to regulate carbon dioxide from existing power plants under the Clean Power Plan, which requires states to develop their own plans for compliance with emissions standards.

Certainly there is no shortage of policy ideas in the “laboratories of democracy” that indirectly aim at carbon emissions by promoting technology adoption or energy efficiency. Currently, two prominent examples of subnational policies aimed specifically at carbon emissions exist: California’s cap-and-trade system and the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which also employs a cap-and-trade approach. Recently, six states have each proposed legislation to introduce a comprehensive state-wide carbon tax: Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. (Vermont has a second legislative proposal that is more stringent but has less support in the legislature at this time.) And in California, where there is a robust cap-and-trade program, some legislators have suggested a transition to a tax.

It should not come as a surprise that these proposals have been introduced by Democratic members of state legislatures, and that these states have a history of ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation goals. Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island all have targets to reduce their GHG emissions by 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050, while Oregon and Vermont have goals of 75 percent reductions of 1990 levels by 2050, and Washington set a target of reducing 25 percent of 1990 levels by 2035. Furthermore, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont are all existing members of RGGI, already demonstrating political willingness to take policy action on climate change.

For RGGI states that also have carbon tax proposals, there is some degree of uncertainty about how the proposed policies would interact with existing policies. Only in Rhode Island have policymakers explicitly addressed this, providing that electricity generation sources covered by RGGI would forfeit only the difference between the auction clearing price and the tax level, so that their emissions would not be burdened twice.

Despite the similarities in political conditions across these six states, the designs of their proposed policies are heterogeneous—differing, for example, in terms of the pollutant covered by the policy. Historically, most policies have focused on targeting carbon dioxide emissions exclusively, as these are responsible for the majority of GHG impacts and are easiest to measure. Half of the states—Oregon, Washington, and Vermont—cover only carbon dioxide with their tax proposals. The others—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York—go a step further and also include methane emissions, which make up a smaller proportion of total atmospheric warming emissions but are more potent. New York also proposes to include other nitrous oxides and any combustion-related GHG emissions.

The stringency of the proposed policies also varies across the states. As highlighted above, the coverage of pollutants differs. All else equal, the policies of those states with fewer pollutants covered are relatively less stringent. In addition to the coverage, the price (tax rate) also determines a policy’s stringency. The initial price level varies from $10 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in Massachusetts to $50 per tCO2e in New York, with the other proposals falling in between. More important, however, is a policy’s price path, which determines how the tax rate evolves over time. The bills from Rhode Island and Washington both include automatic increases at the same rate as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), ensuring that the rate does not get outpaced by inflation. By 2026, in real terms (i.e., assuming no inflation), the price of the proposed policies varies from $15 per tCO2e in Rhode Island to $185 per tCO2e in New York (see figure).

The figure above has been updated slightly from the original post.

The design differences among the states’ carbon pricing proposals demonstrate the flexibility of a carbon tax, including the wide range of options for implementation, at any scale of government. EPA’s Clean Power Plan has room for states to use a carbon tax for compliance, although states that might choose this compliance pathway would have to overcome additional hurdles to satisfy EPA requirements.

Each state’s proposed carbon tax policy stands to raise considerable revenue. How this revenue is used will be vital in determining the outcomes. In a follow-up blog post, we will investigate how these policies propose to use the revenue as well as the implications for affected households.(RFF)

Is it poaaible to decouple growth from emissions?

                                                         Comments due by April 15, 2016

Throughout the 20th century, the global economy was fueled by burning coal to run factories and power plants, and burning oil to move planes, trains and automobiles. The more coal and oil countries burned — and the more planet warming carbon dioxide they emitted — the higher the economic growth. And so it seemed logical that any policy to reduce emissions would also push countries into economic decline. Now there are signs that G.D.P. growth and carbon emissions need not rise in tandem, and that the era of decoupling could be starting. Last year, for the first time in the 40 years since both metrics have been recorded, a study by the International Energy Agency found that in 2014, as global G.D.P. grew, global carbon emissions leveled off. Economists got excited, but they also acknowledged that it could have been an anomalous blip. But a study released by the International Energy Agency last month found that the trend continued in 2015. In another study published on Tuesday, Nathaniel Aden, a research fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank, found that since the start of the 21st century, 21 countries, including the United States, have already fully decoupled their economic growth from carbon emissions. In those countries, while G.D.P. went up over the past 15 years, carbon pollution went down. “It’s really exciting, and it suggests that countries can sever the historic link between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions,” Mr. Aden said. Of course, even if 21 countries have achieved decoupling, more than 170 countries have not. They continue to follow the traditional economic path of growth directly tied to carbon pollution. Among those are some of the world’s biggest polluters: China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. And decoupling by just 21 countries is not enough to save the planet as we know it. Over the 15 years that Mr. Aden studied, the decoupled countries lowered emissions about 1 billion tons — but overall global emissions grew about 10 billion tons. The question is whether what happened in the 21 countries can be a model for the rest of the world. Almost all of them are European, but not all are advanced Group of 20 economies. Bulgaria, Romania and Uzbekistan are among them. The Paris Agreement, the landmark climate change accord reached in December, commits nearly every country to actions to tackle climate change — and to continuously increase the intensity of those actions in the coming decades. But absent major breakthroughs in decoupling, governments are likely to be hesitant to take aggressive steps to curb emissions if they mean economic loss. In the United States, the decoupling of emissions and economic growth was driven chiefly by the boom in domestic natural gas, which when burned produces about half the carbon pollution of coal. The glut of cheap natural gas drove electric utilities away from coal, while still lighting and powering ever more homes and factories. The decoupling was also driven by improvements in energy­ efficiency technology. The decoupling trend held even in the United States industrial sector. Between 2000 and 2014, Mr. Aden found that energy ­related carbon dioxide emissions dropped 16 percent in the American industrial sector, while economic activity increased 9 percent. But decoupling can hurt. Even as the industrial sector grew over all in those years, a push by American factories to use more energy­ efficient technology contributed to a 21 percent loss of industrial jobs, Mr. Aden says. In smaller economies, decoupling hurts less. Sweden experienced economic growth of 31 percent as its emissions fell 8 percent, continuing a longstanding trend driven by its tax on carbon emissions, instituted in 1991. Today Sweden gets nearly half of its electricity from nuclear power, which produces no emissions, and 35 percent from renewable sources, particularly hydroelectric. But in large, industrial economies that are trying to decouple, the change raises thorny questions. For example, will the pollution just move elsewhere? In Britain, emissions fell 20 percent between 2000 and 2014, while G.D.P. grew 27 percent. That was largely the result of a push to de­industrialize in the country that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. As Britain’s financial and service sectors grew and its coal mines, mills and steel factories closed, some of those industries went to China, which became the world’s largest polluter. According to Mr. Aden’s study, China’s G.D.P. has increased 270 percent since 2000 and its carbon emissions 178 percent. But there are very tentative signs that even China may be decoupling. In a paper published last month by the journal Climate Policy, two British researchers made the case that China’s emissions may have peaked in 2014 and have now begun a modest decline. It’s hard to know for sure because China’s self­reported emissions data can be faulty. But if it is true, and China’s economy continues on even a modest growth path, it could have profound implications for the future of climate change. “The question with China is if they really have turned the corner and if it can stick,” Mr. Aden said. Decoupling presents another problem. “The countries that have achieved decoupling have de­industrialized — and that has increased income inequality,” Bill Cassidy, a United States senator from Louisiana, said in an interview. “One of the things that has not been analyzed is the job prospects for those families. There’s going to be unintended consequences of their livelihoods being curtailed.” Meanwhile, some left­wing economists still say that the dream of decoupling is just that — and that the only way to truly lower emissions will be to bite the bullet and accept a hit to the economy. “I’m not saying it’s impossible to decouple, but we have to be skeptical,” said Giorgos Kallis, an editor of the book “Degrowth” and an economist at the University of Barcelona. “I don’t believe that an economy powered by solar and renewables can sustain the same level of economic growth. If we are serious about reducing emissions, we cannot do the wishful thinking that the economy will double every 35 years. We have to ask, can we manage without growth?” But Mr. Aden remains optimistic, saying, “We may be on the verge of a transition where this relationship is finally unhinging.”  (NYT The Upshot)

Is the KSA shooting itself in the foot?

                                                            Comments due by April 6, 2016

FOR the past half ­century, the world economy has been held hostage by just one country: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Vast petroleum reserves and untapped production allowed the kingdom to play an outsize role as swing producer, filling or draining the global system at will. The 1973­74 oil embargo was the first demonstration that the House of Saud was willing to weaponize the oil markets. In October 1973, a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia abruptly halted oil shipments in retaliation for America’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The price of a barrel of oil quickly quadrupled; the resulting shock to the oil­dependent economies of the West led to a sharp rise in the cost of living, mass unemployment and growing social discontent. “If I was the president,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger fumed to his deputy Brent Scowcroft, “I would tell the Arabs to shove their oil.” But the president, Richard M. Nixon, was in no position to dictate to the Saudis.
 In the West, we have largely forgotten the lessons of 1974, partly because our economies have changed and are less vulnerable, but mainly because we are not the Saudis’ principal target. Predictions that global oil production would eventually peak, ensuring prices stayed permanently high, never materialized. Today’s oil crises are determined less by the floating price of crude than by crude regional politics. The oil wars of the 21st century are underway. In recent years, the Saudis have made clear that they regard the oil markets as a critical front line in the Sunni Muslim ­majority kingdom’s battle against its Shiite ­dominated rival, Iran. Their favored tactic of “flooding,” pumping surplus crude into a soft market, is tantamount to war by economic means: the oil trade’s equivalent of dropping the bomb on a rival. In 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security adviser, warned that Riyadh was prepared to force prices down to “strangle” Iran’s economy. Two years later, the Saudis did just that, with the aim of hampering Tehran’s ability to support Shiite militia groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. Then, in 2011, Prince Turki al ­Faisal, the former chief of Saudi intelligence, told NATO officials that Riyadh was prepared to flood the market to stir unrest inside Iran. Three years later, the Saudis struck again, turning on the spigot. But this time, they overplayed their hand. When Saudi officials made their move in the fall of 2014, taking advantage of an already glutted market, they no doubt hoped that lower prices would undercut the American shale industry, which was challenging the kingdom’s market dominance. But their main purpose was to make life difficult for Tehran: “Iran will come under unprecedented economic and financial pressure as it tries to sustain an economy already battered by international sanctions,” argued Mr. Obaid.
Oil­producing countries, especially ones like Russia, with relatively undiversified economies, base their budgets on oil prices not falling below a certain threshold. If prices plunge below that level, fiscal meltdown looms. The Saudis expected a sharp reduction in oil prices not just to hurt the American fracking industry, but also to hammer the economies of Iran and Russia. That in turn would weaken their ability to support allies and proxies, particularly in Iraq and Syria. The tactic had been brutally effective in the past. This was the grim scenario that confronted the shah in 1977 when the Saudis flooded the oil market to rein in Iran’s influence. The 1977 flood was not the sole cause of the Iranian revolution, but it certainly was a factor: The shah’s rule was destabilized just as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mounted his offensive to replace a pro­ Western monarchy with a theocratic state. In that sense, the oil markets fueled the rise of political Islam. The price of oil also helped end the Cold War. Then, like Russia today, the Communist superpower was a global energy producer heavily reliant on revenues from oil and gas. In 1985-­86, the Saudis’ decision to flood the market — which some believe was encouraged by the Reagan administration — led to a collapse in prices that sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin. “The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985,” wrote the Russian economist Yegor Gaidar. “On this date Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically.” Today, in Russia, fully half of government revenue comes from oil and gas. Even if oil returns to $40 a barrel — it twice fell below $30 earlier this year — that depressed price still creates “a dangerous scenario,” according to Mikhail Dmitriev, a former Russian deputy economic minister. Inflation in Russia hit double digits last year; its sovereign wealth fund, which bails out struggling Russian companies, is depleted; and factory closings are fueling labor unrest. Unhappily for President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s fiscal crisis has coincided with his military interventions in eastern Ukraine and Syria. If Russia’s economy worsens and Mr. Putin feels cornered, he may look for ways to distract the Russian people with more rally ­round­ the ­flag provocations, as well as induce panic in the oil markets about supplies and gin prices back up. Future shock has already arrived for oil producers like Venezuela, whose economy has been gutted by lost revenues from oil, which makes up 95 percent of its export earnings. With inflation predicted by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720 percent this year, Venezuela has become a financial zombie state — a harsh reminder of what can happen to countries that rely so heavily on a single unstable commodity price. President Nicolás Maduro is at the mercy of the markets that, every day, nudge his tottering regime nearer the abyss. Another oil producer, Nigeria, is running out of money, hobbling President Muhammadu Buhari’s campaign against the Islamist Boko Haram insurgents in the northeast. The plunge in oil prices has also shaken Central Asia, where Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have expressed interest in emergency bailouts from the I.M.F. and other lenders. In the Middle East, reduced oil revenues have restricted Iraq’s ability to wage war against the Islamic State. Persian Gulf oil producers like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates estimate collective losses of $360 billion in export earnings in the past year. Such a big budgetary hole poses problems with maintaining order at home while fighting wars in Syria and Yemen, and propping up cash ­strapped allies like Egypt. And then there is Saudi Arabia itself. All the evidence suggests that Saudi officials never expected oil prices to fall below $60 a barrel. But then they never expected to lose their sway as the swing producer within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Despite wishful statements from Saudi ministers, the kingdom’s efforts last month to make a deal with Russia, Venezuela and Qatar to restrict supply and push up prices collapsed. The I.M.F. has warned that if government spending is not reined in, the Saudis will be bankrupt by 2020. Suddenly, the world’s reserve bank of black gold is looking to borrow billions of dollars from foreign lenders. King Salman’s response has been to promise austerity, higher taxes and subsidy cuts to a people who have grown used to state largess and handouts. That raises questions about the kingdom’s internal cohesion — even as the king decided to shoulder the burden of regional security in the Middle East, fighting wars on two fronts. Has there ever been an oil state as overleveraged at home and overextended abroad? Meanwhile, by concluding the historic nuclear agreement, Iran is getting out from under the burden of economic sanctions. It will not be lost on Riyadh that this adds another oil producer to the world market that it can no longer control. The instability and economic misery for smaller oil­ producing states like Nigeria and Azerbaijan look set to continue. But that’s collateral damage. The real story is how the Saudis have been hurt by their own weapon.

The Environment Under President Trump.

                                                      Comments due March 10, 2016

Let’s play a game.

It’s April 30, 2017: Day 100 of President Donald Trump’s first hundred days. The champagne floweth, the Wall is under construction, and now we’re more or less federally mandated to refer to 1600 Pennsylvania as the Gold House. The president’s bombastic governance is buoyed by a comfortable Republican congressional majority. After the Senate blockaded Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, it confirmed a jubilant Ted Cruz, who has only cemented far-right ideology in the justice system. The GOP has had a busy hundred days. This is patriot country.

How’s the environment doing?

Most people don’t really talk about the environment anymore. The last time a journalist tried to ask Press Secretary Sean Hannity a question about climate change, she was booted from the briefing room. We can talk about land, though. With a real estate developer for president, we spend a lot of time talking about land.

Under the fast-tracked Business Opportunities for Appalachia Act (BOFA), mountaintop removal mining has decimated something on the order of 25 percent of the peaks in Central Appalachia. During late January’s fire sale of the American West, the private sector scooped up all but a fraction of the land previously owned by the federal government. Upwards of 15 percent of the leases are reportedly held by the blind trust that currently controls the Trump Organization’s assets.

Miles of the Pacific Northwest coastline are unrecognizable — it turns out we needed a couple more good swathes of land to host burgeoning U.S. crude exports to Asia — but hey, the Gold House lawn looks great. And besides, Seattle’s got it easy compared to Oakland, which is now just one large coal export terminal.

How’d we end up here? Well, what you have to understand is that a lot happened at once. President Trump moves without hesitation.

If we’re going to start with something, though, it probably began with the Paris climate change agreement the world was so happy to adopt in 2015. One of the first things that occurred after inauguration day was the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. This didn’t bode well for international climate action writ large. Without the U.S. on board, China and India pulled out, citing uncertain economic times ahead, leaving the European Union to try and salvage a neutered deal. Sure, the U.S. was broadly condemned, but with OPEC’s mid-2016 restrictions on oil supply and an uptick in the price of Gulf crude, cheap American oil sounded pretty good to China, which was happy to help finance those shiny new Pacific Northwest oil export terminals. They went up pretty quick, and that was enough to keep the president happy.

It’s important to keep this president happy.

After the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement, Congress swiftly, predictably, rolled back the Clean Power Plan for curbing carbon pollution from power plants and the Obama administration’s updated methane rules for cutting leakage from landfills and the oil and gas sector. Trump, flanked by coal executives amid much fanfare, signed the legislation. (This was before the dismantling of the EPA, but we’ll get that later. We’ve only made it to early February.) Either way, with a new originalist on the bench, SCOTUS was bound to strike down the power plant regulations anyway.

Early March is around when things really started to get interesting.

Reinvigorated by a friendly business climate and overt federal support, Shell has begun preparations to head north. Very north. A global scramble for Arctic oil, currently in full tilt, is only avoiding escalation because of the president’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin (and the worldwide acknowledgement that the States’ indiscriminate bombing of Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi oil supply chains has actually left Arctic oil with one of the lowest risk profiles).

Speaking of Russia, Vice President Sarah Palin recently returned from her first state visit to Moscow, where she, Fred Singer (her chief of staff), and U.S. Trade Representative Carl Icahn (everyone thought he’d been pegged for Treasury!) punched out the first unofficial draft of a new public-private partnership incentive program aimed almost exclusively at international oil pipeline construction. Keystone XL, now back on track, was small potatoes compared to the Big and Tall versions on the horizon. Between the vice president’s program and President Trump’s invocation of eminent domain in more or less whatever direction his eyeballs are swiveled, pipelines are effectively the new highways. (Don’t worry about the highways, though. Secretary of Transportation Chris Christie has made sure to prioritize highway funding over bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly transport.)

Sure, there’s the whole climate change thing, and of course, academics and non-profit types remain today at near-nuclear war with the government on all things coal, oil, and gas; but the new U.S. moratorium on climate science research makes it difficult to put forth any new arguments.

Then there was mid-March’s spike in oil train explosions. You couldn’t really blame the GOP for that one, but environmentalists did anyway. The probability of an oil train explosion remained constant, but with more fracked oil came more trains. (As well as subsidies for private sector fire departments. It has become abundantly clear that we’ll need a lot more fire departments to deal with a rather unprecedented uptick in railway explosions.)

Of course, nobody, Republicans included, was really sure what would happen when Trump dismantled the Environmental Protection Agency. It kinda just happened in one of his fits of rage, and we’re frankly still sorting that one out. It turns out that the first thing that happens when you shutter an agency is that its 15,000 employees get angry. The next thing that happens is that the private sector steps in for the purpose of “economically efficient environmental protection.” EnviProtect Systems, which now holds a near monopoly on pipeline-spill cleanup and gas-leak plugging, was rumored just this month to be pondering a bottled-water business play. Fracking contamination has been a boon for private-sector water.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the elimination of the Department of Energy and the drastically curtailed purview of the Bureau of Land Management, but there’s probably not time to dive into the intricacies of Interior Secretary Rand Paul’s days. Suffice it to say that the man works long hours.

And the climate is still changing, but don’t tell Sean Hannity I said that.

Fracking In Florida

                                                   Comments due March 3 , 2016

 With geology akin to a wet sponge and fragile underground aquifers that supply almost all its drinking water, Florida has never been considered part of the agitated battle over fracking as a technology for extracting oil and gas. But that began to change two years ago when a Texas­ based oil and gas company was found to have been using hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and matrix acidizing, a fracking­ like method that dissolves rocks with acid instead of fracturing them with pressurized liquid. Neither residents nor local governments knew about it because well stimulation, the catch­all term for both techniques, does not require a separate permit and is not regulated. The result has been an unlikely battle over fracking in Florida that is picking up steam across the state. The discovery outraged local government officials and environmentalists, who said they were worried about the effects of toxic chemicals and acids on Florida’s soil and water. Nearly 80 counties and cities have passed ordinances to ban or oppose the methods, in part because of their dissatisfaction with the State Legislature’s proposals. Now, a bill to try to regulate fracking is dividing the Legislature. Environmentalists and some local officials have sharply criticized the measure, saying that it would fail to regulate matrix acidizing, the technology most likely to be used in Florida, and that it would stop local governments from banning fracking. The bill also would revoke any local bans. The House has passed the bill, and the Senate is considering it. “There is a certain amount of despair and disbelief” over the legislation, said Penny Taylor, a commissioner in Collier County, which is home to Naples on the gulf coast. “At this point, the concern is spreading statewide, and it does appear that counties where there may not even be oil are very concerned about fracking.” Local officials said they were angry about being overruled by state lawmakers in Tallahassee, an increasingly common move by the Republican dominated Legislature when it is displeased with local decisions. “I think the last couple of years we have had some of the biggest assaults on home rule that we’ve ever seen,” said Marni Sawicki, the mayor of Cape Coral. Such strong local opposition has led to bipartisan misgivings in the State Senate, where a few prominent Republicans have broken ranks and publicly criticized fracking. “Fracking isn’t the way,” State Senator Anitere Flores of Miami, a conservative Republican who sits on the Appropriations Committee, posted on Twitter. The committee is the bill’s final hurdle to the Senate floor. Even the powerful chairman of that committee has had qualms about the bill. He recently delayed a hearing on the legislation, saying he wanted to learn more about the fracking technologies directly from officials at the state’s environmental protection agency. The hearing is expected to take place this week. “We want credible, scientific responses to questions, not special­ interest  responses,” State Senator Tom Lee, the chairman, said. In the House, lawmakers in support of the bill said local governments and environmentalists were misconstruing facts and exaggerating the potential consequences of the measure, which would regulate fracking for the first time. They said the bans were illegal because counties and cities have little authority to regulate oil and gas drilling, other than as zoning and land­use issues. Still, to allay their concerns, the authors of the measure said they tweaked it to, among other things, require oil companies to notify local governments when they intend to use fracking. Most of the state’s oil and gas drilling, which is modest compared with major oil ­producing states, takes place in Florida’s panhandle and in the southwest, on the edge of the western Everglades. “The environmentalists claim that we are taking control from local government on this matter,” said State Representative Ray Rodrigues, the Fort Myers Republican who introduced the House bill. “You can’t take something away if you don’t have it in the first place.” Mr. Rodrigues said the bill took other precautions as well. It calls for a moratorium on “high pressure stimulation” — hydraulic or acid fracking, but not matrix acidizing, which does not create cracks but helps enhance the process — until state environmental regulators complete a peer­ reviewed study. The study would look at how the extraction methods could affect Florida’s geology and its underground water supply. Regulators would then complete the rules and forward them to lawmakers for their approval. Dave R. Mica, the executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, said acidization was not included in the bill because it was an offshoot of a common, well­ accepted technique used to clean wells and should not be subjected to more regulation. “It is regulated, and we have used it for decades and decades,” Mr. Mica said. Mr. Rodrigues agreed that a study was needed before moving forward because the state’s porous geology raises concerns that toxic chemicals could more easily penetrate groundwater. Studies from other states with different geology simply do not apply to Florida, experts said. Environmentalists are also concerned that the acids and chemicals used in matrix acidizing could further dissolve delicate limestone formations that protect the aquifers. “I think it would be foolish to ban a practice without any scientific evidence,” Mr. Rodrigues said. “For those who oppose the practice, they should support the study. And if the study proves their belief, then it’s acceptable to ban this practice.” But environmentalists and local officials said the legislation was seriously undermined by the fact that matrix acidizing was left out of the study and the regulations, leaving it to continue unabated. They want lawmakers to include acidizing in the bill but carve out an exception for the form used to clean wells. “We feel that we couldn’t have a bill that would address a technique we likely won’t use in our state and not address a technique we likely will use,” said Jennifer Hecker, a policy director for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, an environmental group. Anthony R. Ingraffea, an authority on fracking at Cornell University, said that because the bill did not include rules for all forms of well stimulation, it would do little to help Floridians. He said the legislation appeared to be a “smoke screen” to eliminate local control of fracking. Mr. Mica, of the petroleum council, said environmentalists were trying to put up barriers to any well­ stimulation technologies and would prefer to let local governments ban them. “Environmentalists should just say, ‘We don’t want oil and gas,’ ” he said. (NYT 2/24/2016)

Flint Michigan isn't alone.

                                                  Comments due by Feb 25, 2016

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.  As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”

President Obama would have good reason to worry if his kids lived in Flint. But the city’s children are hardly the only ones threatened by this public health crisis. There’s a lead crisis for children in Baltimore, Md.; Herculaneum, Miss.; Sebring, Ohio; and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.; and that’s just to begin a list. State reports suggest, for instance, that “18 cities in Pennsylvania and 11 in New Jersey may have an even higher share of children with dangerously elevated levels of lead than does Flint.” Today, scientists agree that there is no safe level of lead for children and at least half of American children have some of this neurotoxin in their blood. The CDC is especially concerned about the more than 500,000 American children who have substantial amounts of lead in their bodies. Over the past century, an untold number have had their IQs reduced, their school performances limited, their behaviors altered, and their neurological developmentundermined. From coast to coast, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, children have been and continue to be imperiled by a century of industrial production, commercial gluttony, and abandonment by the local, state, and federal governments that should have protected them. Unlike in Flint, the “crisis” seldom comes to public attention.

Two, three … many Flints

In Flint, the origins of the current crisis lay in the history of auto giant General Motors (GM) and its rise in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the status of the world’s largest corporation. GM’s Buick plant alone once occupied “an area almost a mile and a half long and half a mile wide,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and several Chevrolet and other GM plants literally covered the waterfront of “this automotive city.” Into the Flint River went the toxic wastes of factories large and small, which once supplied batteries, paints, solders, glass, fabrics, oils, lubricating fluids, and a multitude of other materials that made up the modern car. In these plants strung out along the banks of the Flint and Saginaw rivers and their detritus lay the origins of the present public health emergency.

The crisis that attracted President Obama’s attention is certainly horrifying, but the children of Flint have been poisoned in one way or another for at least 80 years. Three generations of those children living around Chevrolet Avenue in the old industrial heart of the city experienced an environment filled with heavy metal toxins that cause neurological conditions in them and cardiovascular problems in adults.

As Michael Moore documented in his film Roger and Me, GM abandoned Flint in a vain attempt to stave off financial disaster. Having sucked its people dry, the company ditched the city, leaving it to deal with a polluted hell without the means to do so. Like other industrial cities that have suffered this kind of abandonment, Flint’s population is majority African American and Latino, and has a disproportionate number of families living below the poverty line. Of its 100,000 residents, 65 percent are African American and Latino and 42 percent are mired in poverty.

The president should be worried about Flint’s children and local, state, and federal authorities need to fix the pipes, sewers, and water supply of the city. Technically, this is a feasible, if expensive, proposition. It’s already clear, however, that thepolitical will is just not there even for this one community. Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, has refused to provide Flint’s residents with even a prospective timetable for replacing their pipes and making their water safe. There is, however, a far graver problem that is even less easy to fix: the mix of racism and corporate greed that have put lead and other pollutants into millions of homes in the United States. The scores of endangered kids in Flint are just the tip of a vast, toxic iceberg. Even Baltimore, which first identified its lead poisoning epidemic in the 1930s, still faces a crisis, especially in largely African American communities, when it comes to the lead paint in its older housing stock.

Just this month, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community, and development, Kenneth C. Holt, dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callouslysuggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

There is, in fact, a grim broader history of lead poisoning in America. It was probably the most widely dispersed environmental toxin that affected children in this country. In part, this was because, for decades during the middle of the twentieth century, it was marketed as an essential ingredient in industrial society, something without which none of us could get along comfortably. Those toxic pipes in Flint are hardly the only, or even the primary, source of danger to children left over from that era.

In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead was introduced as an additive for gasoline. It was lauded at the time as a “gift of God” by a representative of the Ethyl Corporation, a creation of GM, Standard Oil, and Dupont, the companies that invented, produced, and marketed the stuff. Despite warnings that this industrial toxin might pollute the planet, which it did, almost three-quarters of a century would pass before it was removed from gasoline in the United States. During that time, it spewed out of the tailpipes of hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, it tainted the soil that children played in and was tracked onto floors that toddlers touched. Banned from use in the 1980s, it still lurks in the environment today.

Meanwhile, homes across the country were tainted by lead in quite a different way. Lead carbonate, a white powder, was mixed with linseed oil to create the paint that was used in the nation’s homes, hospitals, schools, and other buildings until 1978. Though its power to harm and even kill children who sucked on lead-painted windowsills, toys, cribs, and woodwork had long been known, it was only in that year that the federal government banned its use in household paints.

Hundreds of tons of the lead in paint that covered the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States remains in place almost four decades later, especially in poorer neighborhoods where millions of African American and Latino children currently live. Right now, most middle class white families feel relatively immune from the dangers of lead, although the gentrification of old neighborhoods and the renovation of old homes can still expose their children to dangerous levels of lead dust from the old paint on thosewalls. However, economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today. As with the water flowing into homes from the pipes of Flint’s water system, so the walls of its apartment complexes, not to mention those in poor neighborhoods of Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and virtually every other older urban center in the country, continue to poison children exposed to lead-polluted dust, chips, soil, and air.

Over the course of the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead and millions more remain in danger of it today. Add to this the risks these same children face from industrial toxins like mercury, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs) and you have an ongoing recipe for a Flint-like disaster but on a national scale.

In truth, the United States has scores of “Flints” awaiting their moments. Think of them as ticking toxic time bombs — just an austerity scheme or some official’s poor decision away from a public health disaster. Given this, it’s remarkable, even in the wake of Flint, how little attention or publicity such threats receive. Not surprisingly, then, there seems to be virtually no political will to ensure that future generations of children will not suffer the same fate as those in Flint.

The future of America’s toxic past

A series of decisions by state and local officials turned Flint’s chronic post-industrial crisis into a total public health disaster. If clueless, corrupt, or heartless government officials get all the blame for this (and blame they do deserve), the larger point will unfortunately be missed — that there are many post-industrial Flints, many other hidden tragedies affecting America’s children that await their moments in the news. Treat Flint as an anomaly and you condemn families nationwide to bear the damage to their children alone, abandoned by a society unwilling to invest in cleaning up a century of industrial pollution, or even to acknowledge the injustice involved.

Flint may be years away from a solution to its current crisis, but in a few cities elsewhere in the country there is at least a modicum of hope when it comes to developing ways to begin to address this country’s poisonous past. In California, for example, 10 cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Oakland, have successfully sued and won an initial judgment against three lead pigment manufacturers for $1.15 billion. That money will be invested in removing lead paint from the walls of homes in these cities. If this judgment is upheld on appeal, it would be an unprecedented and pathbreaking victory, since it would force a polluting industry to clean up the mess it created and from which it profited.

There have been other partial victories, too. In Herculaneum, Miss., for instance, where half the children within a mile of the nation’s largest lead smelter suffered lead poisoning, jurors returned a $320 million verdict against Fluor Corporation, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. That verdict is also on appeal, while the company has moved its smelter to Peru where whole new populations are undoubtedly being poisoned.

President Obama hit the nail on the head with his recent comments on Flint, but he also missed the larger point. There he was just a few dozen miles from that city’s damaged water system when he spoke in Detroit, another symbol of corporate abandonment with its own grim toxic legacy. Thousands of homes in the Motor City, the former capital of the auto industry, are still lead paint disaster areas. Perhaps it’s time to widen the canvas when it comes to the poisoning of America’s children and face the terrible human toll caused by “the American century.” (TomDispatch)