Climate Change and Clean Energy Next? (Or Wait Until It Gets Really Hot?)

Now that a Historic, yet still inadequate Health Insurance Reform bill has passed Congress (incomplete because premium cost controls still need to be strengthened, as Senator Feinstein is trying to do, and as competition from a fairly-priced Public Plan would do), people are starting to talk about passing climate change and clean energy legislation.

David Roberts penned a good one here.

I personally think that the Senate should strategically wait until the weather gets a bit warmer, and the painful Memorial Day weekend gas price spike is felt across America, before taking up the legislation.  It's silly, but it's smart. People are more likely to support the legislation if they're sweating and gas prices are rising, which they will be in June and July.

I also like Joe Romm's new piece a lot, especially the parts about messaging -- on both health care and climate/energy.  Says Romm:

No serious messaging strategy can possibly be built around the phrase “healthcare reform.”  Why?  First, “reform” is a process, not an outcome.  No one serious about moving public opinion talks about process over and over again.  They talk about the benefits that reform brings, outcomes the public cares about.  Second, most of the public likes their healthcare, so the phrase “healthcare reform” is not intrinsically positive and, in fact, is probably negative for much of the public given the more effective conservative messaging.

If you spend half your scarce messaging time talking about “healthcare reform,” while your opponent spends all of their time messaging on negative outcomes that the public worries about, you are fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

Here's a quiz:
1)  What’s worse from a messaging perspective, “the public option” or “cap-and-trade”?  Hint:  Both are process.
2)  Tell me in one sentence what team Obama says is the benefit of passing a health care reform bill.
3)  Tell me in one sentence what team Obama says happens if we fail to pass the climate and clean energy bill.

On health care, no simple, repeated core message exists, so the whole effort is a muddle.

Like the 99% of people who aren’t expert on health care reform, only very recently — 12 months too late — have I begun to develop a clear idea of what this plan is or what it would actually do.  The problem is, many if not most people could probably care less about the uninsured — they just don’t want to join that group — and while people may say they want cost containment, in fact they don’t want their own costs “contained,” they only want their premiums lower.  They do want security about their healthcare.

Again, the single phrase that the Democrats repeat most often is “healthcare reform” whereas the single phrase that Republicans repeat most often is “government takeover.”  Is it any surprise the polling on this bill is so bad?

That's certainly a thought-provoking analysis.  Romm thinks Health Care Security would have been a much better frame for messaging, and I agree.  Here's what he proposes:

A vote for this bill is a vote for healthcare security.  You get to keep your healthcare coverage if you like what you have — and they can’t throw you off of it if you get some expensive disease or get fired.  And you get access to health care coverage if you don’t have it, and they can’t keep it away from you if you have a pre-existing condition.  And this bill keeps whatever healthcare you have or get affordable, so you don’t have to compromise your health to pay for other necessities.

Fortunately, we're doing better on climate change and clean energy, and there's far more bi-partisan support for passage of a strong bill, even if it tends to be for different reasons for Democrats (environmental, health reasons, green jobs) than for Republicans (economic, security reasons).

But we're going to have to leverage the types of lessons Romm emphasizes above to convey to Americans why our lives will be much better once Congress passes this legislation and President Obama signs it.

With Peak Oil also looming bigger and bigger (second link) right around the corner in 2014, you don't even need to think about climate change to realize that if we're to have a robust economic recovery that is also resilient, we've got to get our asses in gear on weaning America off of our dangerous dependence on oil.

It's a wonderful thing when environmental, economic, energy, security and health care solutions of this magnitude are all linked.  Now let's emphasize these linkages and pass bold climate change and clean energy legislation.  It will help unleash the Glacial Lake Missoula-level flood of pubic and private investment needed to transition America to a more secure, robust, and stable clean energy-powered economy.
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Banning Sales of Invasive Species -- A Money-Saving Win for Taxpayers

Last weekend, I made trips to a couple of stores to purchase crops and soil amendments for our spring/early summer garden.  I was dismayed to find that damaging invasive species are for sale in both OSH and Home Depot. 

Shame on OSH for selling the invasive shrub, Scotch Broom, and shame on Home Depot for selling the invasive weed, Japanese Honeysuckle (I'm guessing there were others, but I didn't have time to check).  Both species are on the noxious weed lists of many states and conservation organizations across America.

What are OSH and Home Depot doing wrong here?  These species are or have been classified in many states as "Noxious weeds", which were defined by the 1974 Federal Noxious Weed Act as:

Noxious Weed means any living stage, such as seeds and reproductive parts, of any parasitic or other plant of a kind, which is of foreign origin, is new to or not widely prevalent in the United States, and can directly or indirectly injure crops, other useful plants, livestock, or poultry or other interests of agriculture, including irrigation, or navigation, or the fish or wildlife resources of the United States or the public health.

These plants are injurious and economically harmful!  So why on earth are they for sale, for people to buy and plant in their yards or otherwise on their property?  Is the ability to sell noxious weeds really that important to the horticultural industry and the sales of stores like Home Depot and OSH that such species can't be banned?  Really?

Is it too much to ask for the horticultural industry to show some level of moral responsibility to society and stop selling noxious weeds to typically unsuspecting customers who think they just look pretty?

The result of noxious weeds like this being commercially available to consumers who've probably never even heard of "noxious weeds" is undoubtedly that some plantings escape and become expensive, time-consuming, environmentally-damaging problems for state and federal agencies, environmental NGO's and private landowners.  Even worse, they probably often result in pest control officials using pesticides of questionable or even harmful levels of toxicity to eradicate the infestations.

Why should horticultural companies and stores like Home Depot and OSH get to profit off the sales of harmful invasive weeds at the expense of taxpayers?

This just can't be too hard of a problem to fix in today's day and age of uber-tight agency and NGO budgets.  It's time to ban commercial sales of species legally classified as invasive or noxious.  This is no-brainer conservation action that will save consumers, agencies and NGO's money, protect the public health from pesticide use that can be avoided, and benefit the health of ecosystems and biodiversity.
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Deforestation's Impacts in Africa: "The rains stopped, and banana groves and corn stalks died"

I'm a big fan of pictures and stories of the benefits that healthy ecosystems provide to humanity.  As I drove up toward Redwood Regional Park for my weekly meditative hike on Saturday, I was glad to find Living On Earth airing on NPR.

This quote got me -- a story about a reforestation project in Uganda, where the locals talk about what happened after the government cut down their forests:

HOFFMAN: Jerome Byesigwa chairs the group and explains how it started. In 2003, he says, the weather in the area suddenly changed when the government cut down much of the nearby Central Forest Reserve for timber. The rains stopped, and banana groves and corn stalks died.

[BYESIGWA SPEAKING] VOICEOVER: As soon as it had been harvested we realized there was a change in the weather. Just even ordinary people would tell you that the problems we were experiencing were because our forests there had been harvested.

The fact that these folks are getting carbon credits for planting highly invasive, water-hungry non-native tree species is just wrong.  It's great to see the World Bank funding reforestation projects like this, but it would be nice if they would help the local people by selecting native species, adapted to local environmental conditions (especially water needs) that help to replace the ecosystem services that have been lost to deforestation.

Clearly, we've got a ways to go to better integrate the science of sustainability into the planning of Uganda and the World Bank.

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Autism and Toxins - Living On Earth

This week's Living on Earth has a fascinating story about the role of environmental toxins in explaining the recent spike in cases of autism.  Here's an excerpt of LOE host Jeff Young's conversation with Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai School of Medicine:

YOUNG: The Centers for Disease Control estimate six out of every thousand U.S. children are diagnosed with some form of autism. The apparent increase in autism has alarmed parents and stymied scientists searching for a cause. Dr. Philip Landrigan argues in a medical journal that we should look to our environment for answers on autism. He's a professor of pediatrics and community and preventative medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Landrigan thinks a sustained focus on chemical exposures in the womb could tell us more than genetic studies have.

LANDRIGAN: I'll begin by pointing out that there has been some very elegant genetic research done over the past five or ten years that has very successfully identified a number of genes and gene mutations that are responsible for a certain number of cases of autism. All together these genetic causes are responsible for something like 20 or 25 percent of cases. Well, that's very important work and it's very important to know that there are genetic causes, but at the same time those findings leave the causation of something like 75 percent of cases of autism unexplained.

YOUNG: So, genetics alone can't explain this, what evidence do we have that environmental exposures might be a cause here?

LANDRIGAN: We know from other research on toxic chemicals that the developing human brain is very vulnerable to environmental toxins, we know about lead, we know about mercury, we know about PCBs, we know about certain pesticides, and for each of those chemicals we know that if the developing brain is exposed to the chemical early in development, especially in the early months of pregnancy, that the potential is very high for injury to the developing brain.
The second line of evidence I would call proof of principle. And this is the finding that there is a short list of chemicals that have been directly found to be linked to autism. The fact that early life exposure to these drugs can cause autism in certain children says to me that it's possible other drugs, other environmental chemicals might also be responsible for some cases of autism

I heard this story on the radio yesterday, and was excited to share it, as I've seen the impact that having an autistic child has had on the lives of friends. I find it infuriating that companies out there are profiting from business processes that put these kinds of toxins out into our environment.

I'm glad to see that high-level people, including experts at esteemed institutions like Mt Sinai School of Medicine, are taking notice.  Hopefully we soon see the kind of progress toward banning these chemicals that has resulted in victories from the the phase-out of lead from gasoline to the recent phase out of BPA from common household products.

Listen to the story>>
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The Evolution of Innovative Green Brands

Start off your week with a bit of food for thought from GreenBiz.com -- on how Wal-Mart has changed the game in the Green Products marketplace:

Walmart, being the sensible world-dominating company it is, saw a new twist on green that other brands (both the traditional and uber ethical) had missed. In short, green equalled efficient, and efficient equalled money saving.

From lowering energy consumption to "encouraging" suppliers to cut down their packaging, Walmart introduced innovations in products, services and business models that truly broke new ground.

More than any other entity, Walmart convinced shell-shocked traditional brands that they had to get with this green innovation thing.

Today, we are starting to see the results.

There's still plenty not to like about the mega-retailer's impact on the availability of well-paying jobs in the communities where they displace smaller/family-owned shops (among other things). But backed by Satchi and Satchi S, they seem to be leveraging their buying power to really make a difference up and down their supply chain.  I actually have it high on my priority list to dig deeper into what they're doing (and I'll report, from an ecological perspective, as soon as I have time)...

One thing I don't see them doing is offering many products that are old-school durable, helping us get a better bang for our buck, reducing our resource use and waste over time, and saving us time and money buying and replacing our stuff.  So many common consumer products today -- from computers to cell phones to coolers -- start malfunctioning or otherwise fall apart after a year or two, it's pathetic.  Then we have to recycle them -- if they can be recycled -- and most people then burn fossil fuels to go to the store (or to place an order that needs to be shipped from thousands of miles away) to get a new version of that thing from Wal-Mart that's fallen to pieces after just a couple of years.

What are you going to do about that, Wal-Mart?

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The Benefits of Biodiversity: Even Bacteria Do Wonders for Humanity

It's not just charismatic megafauna like bears, wolves, lions and monkeys that should come to mind when you think about the wonders of biological diversity.  And it's beyond the beauty and healing power of plants.

According to this article from Science Daily, humans should be thanking even some types of bacteria for making our lives better, in this case by providing a possible cure for Alzheimer's Disease:

Rapamycin, a drug that keeps the immune system from attacking transplanted organs, may have another exciting use: fighting Alzheimer's disease. The drug  -- a bacterial product first isolated in soil from Easter Island -- rescued learning and memory deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's, a team from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio reported on Feb. 23.

The study, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, offers the first evidence that the drug is able to reverse Alzheimer's-like deficits in an animal model, said the senior author, Salvatore Oddo, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Physiology of the UT Health Science Center San Antonio.

Could climate change and/or sea level rise threaten the existence of similar bacteria out there in remote locations?  Who knows.

This may be yet another instance of a highly isolated endemic species (one that occurs in only one place) that is discovered to be incredibly valuable to humanity.  How many such species -- that contain a compound found to cure a crippling diseases or otherwise provide a life-changing solution -- are on the verge of being lost forever due to rainforest destruction or other human environmental impacts?  The best way to not worry about that is for us to support and foster sustainability whenever we can -- both in the voting booth and when we vote with our wallets.

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Get Those Plug-In Hybrids Ready: New Study Predicts Peak Oil In 2014

For those of you interested in Peak Oil -- the other big reason in addition to climate change that we need to wean ourselves from our oil addiction ASAP -- here's a new scientific study on the matter.  It was conducted by Kuwaiti mathematical modelers, and they predict Peak Oil by 2014:

Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far as possible to make an intellectual judgment on the future supplies of crude oil. Over the years, accurate prediction of oil production was confronted by fluctuating ecological, economical, and political factors, which imposed many restrictions on its exploration, transportation, and supply and demand. The objective of this study is to develop a forecasting model to predict world crude oil supply with better accuracy than the existing models. Even though our approach originates from Hubbert model, it overcomes the limitations and restrictions associated with the original Hubbert model. As opposed to Hubbert single-cycle model, our model has more than one cycle depending on the historical oil production trend and known oil reserves. The presented method is a viable tool to predict the peak oil production rate and time. The model is simple, accurate, and totally data driven, which allows a continuous updating once new data are available. The analysis of 47 major oil producing countries estimates the world’s ultimate crude oil reserve by 2140 BSTB and the remaining recoverable oil by 1161 BSTB. The world production is estimated to peak in 2014 at a rate of 79 MMSTB/D.

I can't wait to get me a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle, and to be able to charge it off my home solar system.  But that's just my preparedness.  We're going to need lots and lots of them -- and lots and lots of rail to transport goods affordably -- ready as close to 2014 as possible if we're to avoid a highly undesirable energy crisis...  Let's get a move on, U.S. government!

Thanks to Chris Nelder for the Tweet...

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The Pyramid of Energy Conservation

A lot of people ask me where to get started in making their homes more energy efficient.  Thanks to Chris Nelder and Twitter for this interesting graphical set of "instructions:

It's late, so I've got to ponder this energy pyramid a little before I reflect on it.  Check back at this post for some comments, coming as soon as I have some time to give it a good thinkover...

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America's Costly Nitrogen Dilemma and What We Can Do About It

Did you know that overapplication of fertilizer is one of humanity's greatest environmental challenges?  Grist's Tom Philpott does a bang-up job explaining the problems it causes and exploring potential solutions.  He interviews experts including Stanford biogeochemistry guru, Peter Vitousek:

According to Peter Vitousek, a professor of biology at Stanford and a leading scholar on the nitrogen cycle, under optimum conditions and using best practices, plants take up only "50 or at best 60 percent" of the nitrogen laid on by farmers. So if so much of their fertilizer is going to waste, why do farmers apply so much? Vitousek explained that plants take up different amounts of nitrogen at different points in the growing cycle. To ensure that crops have sufficient N when they need it most, farmers essentially have to over-apply.

Globally, "about two-thirds of the nearly $100 billion of nitrogen fertilizer spread on fields each year is wasted," estimates The Economist. That's a lot of cash down the drain and a lot of nitrogen bleeding out of fields in various forms, wreaking all manner of havoc: Exhibit A, the 8,000-square-mile dead zone that blooms every year in the Gulf of Mexico, as Krysta Hozyash covered in this series.

Fortunately, this is yet another environmental problem where the solution will save money: greater efficiency of Nitrogen fertilizer use will cut farmers' costs while improving the health of our soils, waterways and even the air we breathe.

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A Green Jobs Revolution

Here's a fun read from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo:

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt explain why retooling our carbon-based energy sector for clean growth can spur the kind of investment and job growth that we saw in the telecom industry after the market opening of the early 1990s.

Congressman Markey and FCC Chairman Hundt compare the benefits we can achieve now from passing bold climate change and clean energy legislation to the benefits America reaped from passing 1990's legislation that lead to revolutions in telecom products and services:

In the ten years that followed the spectrum auctions that created competition in digital cellular and the regulatory framework that opened Internet access to competition and the telephone network to innovation - 1997 to 2007 - investors, according to McKinsey and Company, poured more than $850 billion in new capital into mobile, data, and expanded cable networks in the United States.

This investment drove job creation beyond any economist's prediction. Unemployment fell to 4 percent by the end of 1990s, and nearly 65 percent of the population was employed. That's a remarkable contrast to the numbers today: 9.7 percent of Americans are unemployed and only 58 percent of people are employed. The job growth led to national income growth and increased tax revenue, so that the federal budget, contrary to every estimate at the beginning of the 90s, was balanced by 1998.

We can get the same upside surprises if we pass a law that retools the carbon-based energy sector of the last century and encourages private investment in a 21st century energy economy built on alternatives such as wind, sun, biomass and geothermal. That's the purpose of the Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the House of Representatives last June.

Reform in communications stimulated creative destruction. For example, the old long distance industry charged ten cents a minute for a call when we passed the Telecommunications Act. Now people are not even aware that there used to be a long distance charge when they use their phones to call anywhere.

The replacement of the old networks with the new led to waves of innovation. Our reforms permitted everyone to unplug the phone line from the back of the telephone and stick it into the back of the computer. That connection was the first pathway to the World Wide Web - in large part because we did not permit the telephone company to charge extra money for all that extra and unpredicted use. The new demand for data connections drove telephone companies to buy routers and switches, to build data centers, and to upgrade lines. Cable companies were driven to respond by switching some of their capacity from one-way video programs to high speed two-way internet access, giving rise to broadband. In response, the phone companies are now installing fiber, taking broadband to new levels of speed and lower price per bit.

Similarly, in the energy sector we need to retool the existing generation and distribution networks with cleaner forms of generation, open markets to innovators who will build power lines that lose fewer electrons and connect new sources of clean power to users, and reward investors for installing more efficient ways of using electricity. Creating the right framework for our communications networks led investors to commit about $850 billion to rebuild those networks. With the right set of policies, it is reasonable expect a similar explosion of private sector investment in the energy sector. This will result in consumers paying less for heating, cooling and lighting, and America's energy sector will be firmly based on abundant, cheap and clean fuels. Nothing will pull innovation into the energy sector more than wind farms demanding better storage technology, solar farms demanding better ways of capturing and converting sunlight into electricity, and appliances and electric vehicles that can talk to the grid if it is smart enough.

There are other areas of the economy where Americans can and should find new jobs. In the energy sector we not only will need millions of employees, but we also know that those millions will help us achieve independence from foreign oil and an end to the pollution of the environment from carbon emissions. The trifecta of huge employment, national security, and protection of the environment is a winning ticket for America. We have found that winning formula before in hard times that proved to be the dawn of economic growth; we can turn the dark days of the present into sunny optimism about our future once again.

Superb piece -- they've clearly got their messaging down on the importance of passing bold climate change and clean energy legislation.  Note to the Senate: let's make it happen, already!

Kudos for TMP for bringing us this kind of high quality content, which is worthy of the op-ed pages of the world's finest newspapers.

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