Again, Supreme Court defers to EPA

On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously blocked the case of American Electric Power Co. et al. v. Connecticut et al., ruling that the group of states that brought the lawsuit (California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont) cannot ask the courts to force power companies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  That authority belongs to the EPA under the Clean Air Act, as determined by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts et al. vs EPA on April 2, 2007.  

The EPA is planning to release these regulations by May 2012, but is facing immense pressure not to do so from Democrats representing coal and oil states as well as from virtually every Republican.  State governments and environmental groups are pushing for regulation of greenhouse gases from every possible angle, and aren't having much success.  Having lost the push for Congressional action in 2009, and having already waited on EPA regulations for the four years since the 2007 Supreme Court ruling, they were appealing to the judicial branch to force immediate action.  Having this case thrown out means that those pushing for regulations will have to keep waiting, as the ruling on Monday further reinforces the 2007 decision that the court won't intervene when a federal law already exists that mandates regulation of greenhouse gases by the EPA. 

The maddening thing about this is the gridlock -- every year of inaction will push our world closer and closer to the tipping points of uncontrollable climate change.  The judicial branch is deferring to the EPA, the EPA was waiting on a climate bill from Congress, and Congress is being controlled by special interests in the oil industry who want to maintain the status quo and, therefore, their power.  The Obama administration is under attack because its EPA is attempting to exercise the very authority reinforced twice now by the Supreme Court.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich), the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (which oversees the Dept. of Energy), stated in a Washington Post op-ed that EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is an "unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs."  His co-author, Tim Phillips, is the president of Americans for Prosperity -- the front group for the infamous Koch brothers (Koch Industries is a major player in the business of refining and distributing petroleum and natural gas).  Does it bother anyone else that the Chairman of the ECC is presenting his opinions on the role of the EPA and the future of energy along with the president of a group that would benefit immensely from a lack of greenhouse gas regulations?  

This is no coincidence.  In 2010 alone, Upton received $20,000 in contributions from Koch employees.  Before becoming Chairman, Upton was known as a moderate Republican who in 2009 said "we need to reduce emissions."  This is in obvious opposition to his statement in the aforementioned op-ed that regulations are unnecessary because "this presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced."  Oh, really?  What happened in 18 months to change your mind?  Perhaps $20,000?  

Until we can get the special interest money out of government, we won't be able to unlock the gridlock.  Campaign finance reform:  our last best hope.

Battery breakthrough!

Our addiction to fossil fuels is the biggest contributor to global warming, so if we are to halt this destruction of our livable climate, we need to find a way to break away from that addiction.  Our world's need for energy is continually increasing due to overpopulation and the worldwide rise in standard of living, so we need to find a way of increasing energy production and availability while decreasing the proportion of that energy coming from fossil fuel sources.

A big barrier in moving from fossil fuels to clean energy has been finding cheap and effective ways to store the electricity produced from clean energy sources.  Battery technology has just leaped forward with MIT's announcement of a breakthrough in semi-solid flow cell batteries.

Lead researcher Yet-Ming Chiang describes the battery architecture as "using two proven technologies [solid state lithium-ion batteries and liquid-flow batteries] and putting them together."  The result is a black sludge-like material that may be the solution to long-standing battery challenges.

Called 'Cambridge crude' because of its similar appearance to oil, the battery has many advantages over previous technologies:

1)  It's cheaper to make than solid state lithium-ion batteries that are currently in electric cars.

2)  It has 10 times the energy storage capacity of liquid-flow batteries, so a small battery can pack in a lot of energy.  This lessens the weight and size of the battery, which makes it much lighter and smaller than solid state lithium-ion batteries.

3)  Because of its small size, low cost, and fluidity, it's easy to quickly pump it in and out of a car like gasoline. With current lithium-ion powered electric cars, you have to wait for a solid state battery to recharge by plugging it in or pay a high price for a fully-charged spare battery.

These features could mean that the semi-solid flow cell battery is the key to finally making electric cars competitive with gas-powered cars.

Besides personal transportation, this technology can be scaled to a large size for a low cost, so that wind and solar plants can use it to store intermittent energy sources for later use (i.e. when it's not sunny or not windy, the power plant can tap into the stored energy).

The research team's goal is by September 2013 to have a "fully-functioning, reduced-scale prototype system ready to be engineered for production as a replacement for existing electric-car batteries."  MIT has partnered with a new company, 24M, to make this happen.  They've already raised $16 million and have also won funding from the Department of Defense's ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy), the energy equivalent of the agency that funded the creation of the internet...so let's hope for another rousing success as big as the internet, eh?

How will climate change look from your front porch?

The state of California is once again leading the way as an innovative, visionary force for developing solutions to complex societal issues.  Last week, the California Energy Commission launched a very exciting project called Cal-Adapt.  Its purpose is to "synthesize existing California climate change scenarios and climate impact research and to encourage its use in a way that is beneficial for local decision-makers."  More simply, it's a place for the public to see how climate change will affect their local area, which will help them plan for place-specific adaptation.

A collaboration between UC-Berkeley, Google, California Natural Resources Agency, and others, the website brings together the most current climate change research available so that a user can visualize how their local sea level, temperature, wildlife, precipitation, etc, will be affected by a changing climate.  The user is also able to compare data from the past thirty years with current and projected scenario measurements, making for powerful side-by-side analysis.  The projections are given in ranges for high-emissions and low-emissions futures, which could prove to be a powerful motivator for strong emissions reductions when people see how those two pathways lead to two very different outcomes for their hometowns.

Climate change has proven to be a difficult issue for which to elicit strong action from the public, in part because with a global problem, global averages are the main data presented to the public.  When given averages of possible temperature, precipitation, or sea level change on a global scale, it can be hard for the projections to resonate with people on a personal level.  This site has the potential to show people how their individual lives will be affected and why they need to care about climate change.  Hopefully, this will translate to faster and stronger actions toward fighting climate change.

Now we just need to get this started in the other 49 states and every other country...

Decisions are made by those who show up

I just finished reading the book Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, which lays out a convincing argument for why progressives should be embracing cost-benefit analysis instead of refusing to engage with the process on moral principle.  It serves as an action plan for environmentalists to push for the reform of the federal government's approval process for environmental and safety regulations.

Since Ronald Reagan's 1981 Executive Order 12,291 established the requirement for a cost-benefit analysis for all proposed regulation, the process has been defined and dominated by an anti-regulatory approach.  The assumption has been that all regulations are overreaching and overly stringent, so cost-benefit analysis should serve as a check to that power by making agencies prove that a proposed regulation will not place an undue economic burden on the affected group.  The assumption that regulators are power-hungry empire builders is a false narrative that industries and small government ideologues have developed to vilify those that are trying to protect the American people and our environment.  Environmental, health, and safety regulations are often times the only resource for the less powerful to be protected from those without our best interests in mind - the actual power-hungry empire builders:  corporations.

When corporations are told that they need to put the public good above their bottom line, they feel their freedom to make as much money as possible is being infringed upon.  So, since Reagan's presidency, industry has pushed for less and less regulation in the name of economic growth above all else.  They have rationalized this process through cost-benefit analysis by assigning costs to things that are not currently traded in our economy, i.e. the cost of a human life.  The cost to industry to implement a safety regulation is balanced against the benefits of the regulation, usually in terms of the monetary value of the number of lives saved.  If the costs are more than the benefits, the regulation is not implemented.

There are obvious moral problems with assigning an economic value to intangibles such as 'life' or 'the beauty of nature' - which is why progressives have historically dismissed the very practice of cost-benefit analysis.  However, for the past 30 years this is the way that decisions have been made about how our health and environment are being protected.  By removing ourselves from the debate on moral grounds, we have ceded the development of the methodology of cost-benefit analysis to the anti-regulatory crowd.  This has led to an imbalanced process where the costs of proposed regulations are vastly overstated and the benefits are grossly underestimated.  Those undervalued benefits need to be more accurately represented by changing the methodology used to calculate values, such as 'clean air to breathe.'  When the formulas and surveys used to establish these values have been developed by the people who don't want regulations to pass, it's no surprise that fewer stringent regulations will pass cost-benefit analysis tests.

By refusing to engage in the process, we lose the ability to argue rationally for protecting our health and environment.  Pro-regulatory groups can be written off as tree hugger activists or as big government zealots if they aren't speaking the same language of economics as anti-regulatory groups.  If the current system were reformed, we could get rationality back on our side by showing that the actual value of protecting our health and environment is much higher than has been previously represented in regulatory equations.  For example, it is common when calculating the costs of a regulation to include any unintended risks that may result from implementing the regulation.  However, unintended benefits are rarely included.  This is not rational, and this methodology must be reformed to adequately reflect the actual effects a regulation would have.  There are many, many institutionalized practices such as this that make no logical sense, yet are being used to make critical decisions about which regulations are implemented.  If pro-regulatory groups push for reform of these types of obviously irrational methods, a more balanced system can be developed.

While some may advocate for the all-out elimination of cost-benefit analysis, this seems unlikely and irresponsible.  It is unlikely because our society, for better or worse, is currently structured around economic valuation - if you can't put a price on it, it doesn't have value in our marketplace.  It's irresponsible because elimination of cost-benefit analysis has been the approach of environmental groups for 30 years, and the lack of involvement in its development has had tragic consequences for the implementation and stringency of regulations.

Cost-benefit analysis seems to be here to stay, so we should sit down at the negotiating table instead of ceding victory by default.