Coal and climate news for June 29, 2009

Wow … there’s been a ton of news reporting and commentary over the last few days, and continuing today, about the passage by the House of Representatives on Friday of the American Clean Energy and Security Act.  It’s hard to know where to start reading to grasp what’s happened, what it means, and where this is all headed next.

But I’ll try to summarize a few things I found helpful, and pass on the links to the best of the coverage so far.

First, The Associated Press had a great little story that kind outlined what this bill is and what it does,  and the AP provided another story that analyzed the bill with some broad strokes about what it means for our nation’s energy future.

Of course, the bill still has to get through the Senate, and there’s much speculation about what’s going to happen there, and what the political implications are from the House vote on Friday. President Obama has already started to pressure the Senate to act on the legislation, and the president discussed his views in more length in an interview with a select group of energy and environment reporters …

I think this was an extraordinary first step. You know, if you had asked people six months ago — or six weeks ago, for that matter — whether we could get a energy bill with the scope of the one that we saw on Friday through the House, people would have told you, no way. You look at the constituent parts of this bill — not only a framework for cap and trade, but huge significant steps on energy efficiency, a renewable energy standard, huge incentives for research and development in new technologies, incentives for electric cars, incentives for nuclear energy, clean coal technology. This really is an unprecedented step and a comprehensive approach.

You can read the transcript of that interview here. By the way, the president is back to calling it “clean coal” after a brief foray into some new term, “cleaner coal” last week.

Over in Huntington, W.Va., a few dozen people felt strongly enough to turn out to protest the bill, and their efforts got favorable treatment in the local paper.

As reported last week, all three of West Virginia’s House members — Democrats Nick Rahall and Alan Mollohan and Republican Shelley Moore Capito — voted against the bill, at least partly because of concerns about its potential impacts on the coal industry. Those votes are confusing, given that the United Mine Workers union made it clear that the legislation ensures coal’s future by funneling tens of billions of dollars into “carbon capture and sequestration” projects and research.

In the New York Times, Nobel-prize-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman had some strong words for the folks who voted against the bill:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Krugman explains:

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

And there’s more:

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

Over at Grist, David Roberts has some thoughts on the costs of climate change legislation are over-estimated.

There’s a very interesting commentary in The New York Times by controversial author Gregg Easterbrook about CCS and FutureGen:

Yet coal use is a future certainty. Half of our power comes from coal, versus about 2 percent from solar and wind: in the next few decades, green power simply cannot grow quickly enough to eliminate the need for coal. We have two choices: do nothing and wait for FutureGen while coal-caused carbon emissions continue unabated; or start building improved coal-fired plants that reduce the problem. Which seems more forward-thinking?

I also wanted to mention that CBS had a story alleging that EPA had suppressed comments from a staffer who thought the agency’s proposals to regulate carbon dioxide were wrong-headed. There’s more on this over at Grist, where Jonathan Hiskes explains:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute released a draft of the “suppressed” report, which confirms the EPA’s explanation: The agency didn’t think much of the report because it’s authored by an economist claiming to be a climatologist.

Finally, Sunday’s Gazette-Mail featured a commentary by Charles McElwee, a corporate lawyer in Charleston, about coal and climate change.  Two papers mentioned by McElwee in that commentary are available here and here on his firm’s Web site.

I’m not going to comment on either paper, because I haven’t read them yet. But Coal Tattoo reader Tom Rodd wrote on the Gazette-Mail’s comments page:

Charles McElwee’s article and paper are an honest, even brave effort by a West Virginia elite leader to begin to face up to the realities of climate change. McElwee’s discussion is an important step in having intelligent, robust discussions about climate change and climate change policy in the Appalachian coalfields.

Given his audience, McElwee somewhat downplays the now-indisputable certainty of future grievous harm to human civilization if we do not rapidly switch to a planet-wide low-carbon-emissions economy. And McElwee’s argument that coal must be a dominating player in the US energy economy in the short- and medium-term may be somewhat undermined by the big new gas plays that are coming online. An arguably more compelling reason for supporting the massive CCS research and development that McElwee favors is the huge need to provide incentives and support for China and India to take that route.

Thanks to the Gazette for being a forum on these issues.