Ezra Klein

I think this result, from the Pew Research Center, should actually concern supporters of cap and trade:

One of the quirks of the elite political debate is that it tends to occur in dense cities with extremely impressive transportation infrastructures. DC. New York. Places where cars are more of a luxury item. But that, as the graph shows, is not how most Americans think of them. Car stereos are a luxury. Cars are a necessity. They're ranked as more important than a phone, a computer, or an air conditioning system.

That's not to say that the attachment between suburbanites and their Camrys is forgotten in the political conversation, but it doesn't, in my experience, inform the conversation as viscerally as some might expect. I fear that an Orange County commuter is car-dependent in a way a New Yorker has trouble fathoming, and thus correcting for, when they're thinking about how to sell a bill. The theory right now is that some sort of rebate system could actually make cap and trade an economic boon to the working class, if not the commuter. But loss aversion being what it is, I find it hard to imagine that the promise of a tax rebate they've never gotten before will overwhelm fears that they'll pay more money at the gas station they visit every week. One just seems more tangible than the other.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

The video above pits Henry Waxman against Newt Gingrich is straight-up, no-holds-barred, citation warfare. (There are moments when I wish this blog had music, or at least exciting sound effects). The primary point of contention is a number you're hearing a lot these days: $3,128. That's the supposed yearly cost that cap and trade will impose on every American. The number's pedigree is pretty good, too. It's from MIT.

The problem is that it isn't true. The author of that study, MIT scientist John Reilly, has now sent multiple letters to John Boehner begging him to ask his troops to stop distorting Reilly's science. The $3,128 estimate, he says, is "nearly 10 times the correct estimate, which is approximately $340."

But as Brian Beutler neatly documents, Reilly isn't the only one seeing his estimates butchered. Studies from the Wharton School of Economics and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are also getting ground up and twisted out. As the old line goes, good arguments don't need a lot of lies told about them to succeed. The Republican argument on cap and trade is assumed to be pretty good -- it'll raise your energy prices! -- but doesn't seem to have left the Republican leadership particularly confident. After all, every dollar cap and trade raises is a dollar that can be rebated to consumers, making the system either neutral for individuals or genuinely progressive. And that's probably what will happen. But that's harder to oppose. So we're getting a lot of lies.

Sadly, the truth just isn't that exciting. An EPA study examining the House cap and trade proposal concluded that the legislation would cost U.S. households around $98 to $140 per year between now and 2050. It's sensible stuff. That may be why, a couple years ago, one observer commented, "I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very good. And frankly, it's something I would strongly support."

That observer? Newt Gingrich.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Was at the gym this morning and caught this advocacy ad from "Repower America," Al Gore's climate change advocacy coalition. The framing caught my eye:

"Close the carbon pollution loophole. The stuff from oil and coal that's destroying the planet? Cap it. And spur new investments in green jobs and clean energy."

There are two interesting implications to that sentence. The first is that carbon is just like any other type of pollution. Polluters should have to pay. Nothing to see here. And there's a case for that attitude: Cap-and-trade was used successfully beat back the sulfur dioxide emissions that were causing acid rain. The policy worked more quickly than expected at a lower cost than predicted. The Economist called the program "probably the greatest green success story of the past decade." Here's a sort of ugly graph from the Environmental Defense Fund making the point:

As for "loophole," the word generally refers to a "weakness or exception that allows a system, such as a law or security, to be circumvented or otherwise avoided." You could make an argument that externalities -- costs that aren't paid by the participants in a transaction -- act as a loophole in market systems and high-carbon industries are taking advantage of it. You could also call it cost-shifting.

In both cases, however, Repower America is trying to make the conversation around global warming more of a normal conversation around pollution and corporate misbehavior. Emissions are recast as pollution and an unpriced externality is explained as an unnoticed loophole that's enriching oil companies. Pollution and loopholes. We know how to handle that. It's an attempt to demystify cap-and-trade. Think it'll work?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

This was largely expected, but it's big news that the Environmental Protection Agency is readying to issue finally issue its finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health. Under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, this means that the EPA will be able to begin regulation carbon as a pollutant.

In essence, this now gives the energy industry an easy way and a hard way to deal with carbon emissions. The easy way is the congressional process. There, they'll have local representatives and friendly senators willing to protect their interests. If that process breaks down, however, they'll face the hard way: Tight regulation by the capricious and unsympathetic bureaucrats who staff the EPA. Ed Markey put it bluntly: "Do you want the EPA to make the decision or would you like your congressman or senator to be in the room and drafting legislation? ... Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation."

It's the "do ya feel lucky, punk?" theory of congressional pressure. Or, to put it slightly differently, it's the executive branch's version of the reconciliation process. If this can't go through the normal congressional order, then they'll use a tool that's much blunter and whose impacts are much harder to predict, but that's essentially immune to obstruction.

MORE: Kate Sheppard has a good article outlining the likely next steps. Brad Plumer offers some analysis. For technical commentary, check out ClimateIntel's piece on the Implications Of Regulating CO2 as an NSR Pollutant.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

As a former fact-checker, I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of verifying opinion pieces. Someone can argue, for instance, that the uncertainty level in climate science is high enough that we shouldn't act, and though I don't think that's an appropriate read of the data, it's not falsifiable. Will's recent untruths, conversely, have been simply wrong. He said something was "X" when it was "Y." I did the same thing in an op-ed this morning. I wrote that our health care system "costs more than twice as much per person as that of any other country." I was wrong about that. I should have written that our system costs more than twice as much as the OECD average. So I sent the Los Angeles Times an e-mail and tomorrow they will run a correction. By contrast, Will has been doubling down on the original claim in subsequently published columns. That removed it from the realm of individual error and rendered it a threat to the institution's credibility. And the institution, it seems, is noticing.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 -- otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey climate change bill -- is not a cap and trade bill. Nor is it energy legislation. It's not about modernizing the grid or promoting efficiency or encouraging renewables. Instead, it's everything. Call it the Big Bill Strategy. And Waxman and Markey are perfectly explicit about this. (The word "titles," in this context, essentially means "parts.")

The legislation has four titles: (1) a “clean energy” title that promotes renewable sources of energy and carbon capture and sequestration technologies, low-carbon transportation fuels, clean electric vehicles, and the smart grid and electricity transmission; (2) an “energy efficiency” title that increases energy efficiency across all sectors of the economy, including buildings, appliances, transportation, and industry; (3) a “global warming” title that places limits on the emissions of heat-trapping pollutants; and (4) a “transitioning” title that protects U.S. consumers and industry and promotes green jobs during the transition to a clean energy economy.

The fact is, doing these pieces separately would mean three, four, possibly five bruising legislative battles, culminating in a battle over cap-and-trade that, in my estimation, simply can't be won on its own in this Senate. No one in D.C. has the appetite for that, not this year.

So they've decided, uncharacteristically for Democrats, to double down. They are piling all this stuff into one big-ticket, high-profile, must-pass bill. Just as there will be "a healthcare bill" -- and not four disparate, complicated healthcare bills only wonks can understand -- there will now be a green economy bill. For it or against it.

The downside to this strategy is similarly clear: If you lose, you lose everything. Senators who vote against cap and trade will also be dooming grid modernization and efficiency incentives. And crafting a bill this large ensures that there will be plenty to vote against. Roberts says that politicians will either be for or against "the green economy bill," but that's going to be a vague accomplishment as opposed to being for or against the worst provision of the green economy bill.

This sort of Big Bill strategy, however, is particularly well-suited to the climate change problem. More so than most policy problems, you either pass legislation strong enough to stop climate change -- defined, generally, as reducing the atmosphere's carbon load to 550 parts per million -- or you don't. Making it better isn't a particularly viable option: The trapped carbon will engage sufficient feedback loops that the problem will worsen on its own. That's different from a policy like health reform, where you could at least imagine improving coverage without, say, reforming the delivery system.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Alright, April Fool's Day over, as I can't figure out how to handle the House's 600-page cap and trade bill in sarcastic code. The full text is here. Human beings, given our puny brains and inability to recall previous subsections referred to be their numerical identifier, will probably prefer the summary document.

The bill -- which is the joint work of Henry Waxman and Ed Markey -- calls for a 20 percent cut in carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, a 42 percent reduction by 2030, and an 80 percent cut by 2050. The crucial question of how the allowances are apportioned and how the revenues are distributed has been left open for negotiation. The only concrete signal on this is that 15 percent of the permits will be given to energy intensive industries to help them manage the transition. That's a nod to political realities, but worrying insofar as it's the only concrete policy the authors have proposed.

Reports are that Waxman and Markey mean to begin hearings on the bill during the week of April 20, push it through subcommittee markup around April 27th, and bring it to the full committee on May 11th. The hope appears to be that the Senate and the House will reconcile their finished bills in the fall.

Instant reaction has been cautiously favorable. Joe Romm gives the bill a B+. Brad Plumer seems more skeptical, noting that if the proposed two billion in carbon offsets -- a policy most experts are skeptical about -- "were all used, the cap's emissions targets could be met for 20 years without anyone needing to reduce their fossil-fuel use." Dave Roberts comes out on the other end. "If this thing gets passed it will be an epochal change in U.S. policy," he says.

All these folks say that the bill is a good start. What concerns me is that it's not clear how it gets better. Waxman and Markey probably represent the leftmost edge of the possible. They're aggressively liberal, terrifically informed legislators who get the moral urgency of climate change and possess the intellectual firepower to grasp the necessary scale of the response. If this is as far as they felt able to go on an opening bid, it's hard to see the legislative pathway that strengthens, rather than weakens, the legislation.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

You might guess (correctly) that I was referring to the fact that contrarians are not the real problem – it is the vested interests who take advantage of the existence of contrarians.

There is nothing wrong with having contrarian views, even from those who have little relevant expertise – indeed, good science continually questions assumptions and conclusions. But the government needs to get its advice from the most authoritative sources, not from magazine articles. In the United States the most authoritative source of information would be the National Academy of Sciences.

There are two climate change discussions that occur basically simultaneously. The first asks how to get the information we want. The second asks what to do with the information we have. The first is a scientific discussion while the second is a policy discussion. Contrarians like Dyson have a more obvious role in the first discussion. The scientific consensus should probably dominate the second discussion. But, in practice, the two have gotten mixed up. The media gives a disproportionate amount of coverage to the intellectual dissenters in the policy process, and that has, in turn, spurred the climate change community to spent a lot of time emphasizing and defending the degree of consensus in the scientific process. It's bad for everyone.

The role the contrarians are playing in the policy process is not the role they play in the scientific process. As Hanson says, honest contrarians are being elevated out of convenience: Convenience for the media, who hungers for conflict, and convenience for vested interests, who encourage paralysis by promoting uncertainty. And so they end up being attacked, and their defenders cry that good science demands frequent dissent, and so we go. Scientists like Hanson, of course, recognize the role of independent thinkers in the scientific process. The argument is over the disproportionate, and generally cynical, attention they receive in the policy process.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

By now, readers of this blog are among the privileged elite know that there are many ways of structuring a cap and trade plan. You can auction the carbon permits to corporations and use the revenues to give people a tax break. Or you can use the revenues to give corporations a tax break. Or you can use the revenues to fund research into renewables. Or you can give the permits away.

Via Dave Roberts comes some CBO testimony examining these options. Their conclusion? "Auctioning permits and rebating the revenue, compared to freely allocating permits, produces the same macroeconomic effect, but auction-and-rebate is vastly more progressive, favoring low-income taxpayers, while freely allocating permits overwhelmingly favors the rich." There's even a graph:

The report does suggest that giving corporations tax cuts would be more economically efficient. It also leaves room for more progressive options, including a progressive rebate rather than an "equal lump-sum" rebate. Cap and trade doesn't have to hurt low income Americans. But it's one of the ironies of the debate that the folks most likely to raise concerns about higher energy costs on individual households are also most likely to insist that the bill is structured in ways that make low income households worse, rather than better, off.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Big procedural news -- and if this blog believes anything, it's that there's no news bigger than procedural news -- out of the Senate today where eight Democratic senators signed onto a letter (more letters!) opposing the use of the reconciliation process to pass a cap and trade bill. That means that cap and trade will be subject to the filibuster.

Brian Beutler comments that "Democrats are joining their Republican friends in a campaign to preserve the Republicans' right to filibuster," but that's not quite right. Look at the signatories: Robert Byrd (WV), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Pryor (AR), Bob Casey (PA), Carl Levin (MI), and Mary Landrieu (LA). These are all senators from states with large dirty energy industries. States, in other words, that worry that they'll have much to lose from cap and trade. Indeed, vote counting on carbon pricing is likely to break across regional lines as much as party affiliation.

Meanwhile, the letter itself is a good example of why both the reconciliation process and the filibuster should be scrapped. The filibuster is not the right to a 60-vote supermajority. It is the right to unlimited debate. And the reconciliation process is not the right to extinguish the filibuster. It is an expedited process for reconciling budgets that limits debate to 20 hours. Which allows senators to oppose the reconciliation process on procedural grounds that are actually pretty legitimate. "Enactment of a cap-and-trade regime is likely to influence nearly every feature of the economy," write the gang of eight. "Legislation so far-reaching should be fully-vetted and given appropriate time for debate, something the budget reconciliation process does not allow."

It's a fair objection. You'd want more than 20 hours to debate a cap and trade bill (or, for that matter, a health reform bill). But exceeding 20 hours means you have to find 10 more votes in the Senate. (Obviously, you could say here that the onus, then, is on the minority to vote for cloture and accept the eventual loss, but that's unlikely to happen). Which is why we should do away with both rules. Decide how many votes a bill should require for passage and then make that the limit. For both sides of every argument to constantly try and distort the majority requirements by invoking rules with all sorts of bizarre secondary effects is an insane way to run the business of government.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told reporters yesterday that he doesn't think the initial cap and trade bill will include 100 percent auctions of carbon permits. Kevin Drum is displeased:

There are loads of special interests who hate the idea of a 100% auction, of course. But once you start giving away permits, you'll never stop. It is, plain and simple, a massive giveaway to existing power plants, and as the Europeans learned, it makes a mockery of any serious cap-and-trade plan.

This all sounds very wonky, but it's a hill to die for if you care about reducing greenhouse gases. Without a 100% auction, cap-and-trade is a bad joke.

Details here. This is also one reason many environmental advocates prefer a carbon tax: You can do a lot of complicated things to cap and trade legislation that kill the impact of the bill. A carbon tax is harder -- though still not impossible -- to muck with.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If this post is anything to judge by, I don't think David Frum totally understands Obama's cap and trade proposal.

He says that the Obama administration plans to "use the revenues generated by cap and trade to pay for health care tax credits for lower-income people." That's not true. The revenues from cap and trade will be used to fund the $800 Making Work Pay tax cut, which is a refundable income-tax credit. It has nothing to do with the health care plan.

He says that cap and trade "only generates revenue if American utilities emit more carbon in future years than they have done in past years." Again, not accurate. Imagine I pass a law taxing potatoes at the rate of one dollar a potato. This year, Americans eat a billion potatoes and I make a billion dollars. Next year, they eat a half billion potatoes and I make a half billion dollars. A half billion dollars is still more than I made when I wasn't taxing potatoes.

He says that "taxes on carbon emissions do not fall on 'corporations.' They fall on users of electricity." Sort of. They fall on users of electricity if the corporation passes them on to the users of electricity. They will do this to some degree. Probably not 100 percent, as that would be a fairly sharp price increase. But it's important to remember that the tax only falls on users of electricity insofar as people use electricity. Electricity use isn't fixed. The intent of cap and trade is that it will push users of carbon-intensive energy sources towards cleaner energy sources that aren't taxed (which is why, in part, corporations won't pass on the whole tax; they want to blunt the impact of the policy, not accelerate it). Which brings us to our next point.

Frum says that "the only merit of cap and trade is that it enables the government to collect revenue without admitting that a new tax has been imposed." No, the merit of cap and trade is that it discourages the use of carbon-intensive energy sources by making them more expensive relative to less carbon-intensive energy sources. Right now, solar power is much pricier than oil. But the carbon burnt by oil usage imposes all sorts of long-term environmental costs that aren't built into its present price. Cap and trade prices the carbon in the oil, which makes oil relatively more expensive as compared to solar energy, which burns no oil. That's the point of cap and trade.

Update: Some in comments thing that Frum's final point was arguing that the only merit of cap and trade relative to a carbon tax is that it's sneakier. I disagree, but even so, it's still untrue. The two are very different policies.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

I look forward to the correction. "This column was wrong about the scientific consensus of the 1970s and wrong about the only climate fact in the article. The Washington Post regrets the errors."

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

For a good summary on the global cooling myth -- an idea that took root in the popular press but never in the scientific literature -- go sit in on the free lecture provided by the folks at Real Climate. Will makes a lot of the 1975 Newsweek cover on the subject, but the more telling document is a National Academy of Sciences report from the same year. The report argued that climate change is the product of many potential forces and the state of the science wasn't yet advanced enough to discern which would prove decisive. To put it in the NAS's own words, "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." As such, they recommended "a major new program of research designed to increase our understanding of climatic change and to lay the foundation for its prediction."

For comparison, we can read the National Academy of Science's 2008 report "Understanding and Responding to Climate Change" (a very useful paper, incidentally, and available for free download). There we find that "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to begin taking steps to prepare for climate change and to slow it. Human actions over the next few decades will have a major influence on the magnitude and rate of future warming. Large, disruptive changes are much more likely if greenhouse gases are allowed to continue building up in the atmosphere at their present rate."

In other words, comparing apples to apples, the scientific community didn't believe in global cooling and does believe in global warming. Sadly, our political pundits have outsourced their scientific research to an intern charged with a superficial skim of Newsweek covers. Will has almost certainly not read either the 1975 NAS report or the 2008 version. He would probably take pride in that: The famously populist George Will doesn't need no expert consensus. "Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom," he writes. "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know." He does not explain why the credentialed experts admitted ignorance in 1975 but profess near-certainty in 2009. Will knows full well he's not competent to judge the science, and so he doesn't.

Which is all the more galling given the good Will did his reputation as an "intellectual conservative" by attacking Sarah Palin during the general elecction. "America's gentle populists and other sentimental egalitarians postulate that wisdom is easily acquired and hence broadly diffused; therefore anyone with a good heart can deliver good government, which is whatever the public desires," he mocked. And yet here Will is, postulating that the scientific consensus should be dismissed because of a popular science article from the same year that Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC. This is Sarah Palin's argument wrapped in better word choice and made with a more graceful pen. If anything, that's more dangerous, not less.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)

David writes:

I'm interested in your thoughts regarding the wisdom and political viability of "Cap-and-Dividend." Obama is going to have to spend political capital to get both the stimulus and health care through Congress. He is also going to have to spend political capital on trying to get the most optimal Cap-and-Trade bill through (one with 100% auctions, with the proceeds going to fund alternative energy, etc.), which would require a lot of debate and eventually get watered down and include some giveaways to industry. Would it be more prudent to try instead to get a large amount of alternative energy spending as part of the stimulus bill and then pass a very simple Cap-and-Dividend bill, with 100% auction but the funds going to a lump sum rebate to all citizens? This would have an advantage in that it is much simpler both in legislative form (less likely to get watered down) and easier to understand by the general public (greater public support in passage, resulting in spending less political capital that could be used for the stimulus and health care). Would this be both good policy and good politics?

The cap-and-dividend idea may not solve these problems. But it's a step in the right direction. First, it's simple. Every dollar the government receives for taxing dirty energy is funneled right back to taxpayers. Intuitively, most voters will realize that this can't make their lives more expensive (obviously, if you're a long-haul trucker, this is untrue). Second, the clean elegance of the transfer would make it harder for congressfolk to lard the policy with extras, as doing so would harm its central premise. Would it still be a tough sell? Sure. But not as tough as cap-and-trade. Cap-and-trade, after all, requires you to not only defend the tax, but defend what you're spending the revenues on. Cap-and-dividend requires only that you defend a transfer, and a transfer that comes with a tangible yearly check, at that. It's hard to believe that that wouldn't prove easier.

*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry. Sometimes I just slay myself. Drill baby drill!

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

In the Summer of 2007, frustrated that John Dingell's control of the Energy and Commerce Committee was blocking efforts at reform, Pelosi tried to do an end run. She created the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and chose Congressman Ed Markey, a strong advocate of climate change legislation, to chair it. But she lost the fight that mattered. Dingell and his allies successfully neutered the new committee. "The select committee is not a committee with legislative authority and that its authority will expire October 30, 2008," read a letter laying out its mandate.

Dingell won that battle. A year later, he lost a bigger one. Waxman ran against him for chairmanship of Energy and Commerce, arguing that global warming was too important of an issue to sacrifice beneath Detroit parochialism. Waxman won. And this week, the extent of his -- and Pelosi's -- victory came clear when Waxman took Energy and Commerce's two environmental subcommittees -- the Energy & Air Quality panel and the Environment & Hazardous Materials panel — and merged them into the new Energy and Environment subcommittee. The chair? Ed Markey. And he keeps his select committee. As Dave Roberts comments, this means that the levers of Congress are fully aligned in service of climate change legislation:

This gives Markey a one-two punch: he can craft and help pass climate/energy legislation through the Subcommittee while using the Select Committee to educate other committee chairs about how the issue affects their jurisdictions. I can’t think of another committee chair who has the same kind of megaphone with which to drum up support for his own legislation, in the House and among the public.

With this move, Pelosi’s House further cements itself as the likely force for boldness on climate/energy issues in coming years. The Speaker is by all accounts a sincere and committed greenie. She has Waxman at the helm of the relevant committee. She has Markey running the relevant subcommittee and doing education/advocacy. Dingell and his allies — the go-slow lobby — have been cleared away. All systems are go.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It's hard to say how a global recession will play out on climate change. On the one hand, it's making countries much more nervous about any measures that could have a short-term economic cost. Poland, for instance, does not feel like giving up on coal just yet. And since fossil fuel prices have plummeted -- I saw gas for $1.99 yesterday -- renewable energy options suddenly look less profitable, and thus renewable energy projects that were near completion have been put on hold. T. Boone Pickens has even tabled his vaunted wind farm. Meanwhile, as credit dried up, a lot of nascent initiatives can't get funding.

On the other hand, cheap fossil fuels should make it easier to price carbon, as consumers will be feeling a bit less squeezed. And a recession will naturally lower global emissions simply because there will be less demand for industry. The bigger question is whether countries will simply use the slump as an excuse for not doing things they never wanted to do anyway. That seems to be happening, and it's a worrying trend.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I want to quickly weigh in against my esteemed boss Bob Kuttner on the whole Gore-as-veep idea: BK asks, "What better post to be sustainability czar than vice president?" I'd reply that there would be no worse post for a sustainability czar than vice president.

If you're serious about global warming, the last thing you want to do is shackle the highest profile climate action advocate beneath political realities and, for that matter, the greater glory and success of Barack Obama. As VP, Gore's primary concern will have to be the fortunes of his boss, the president. His secondary concern, inevitably, will be his own chances to eventually succeed Obama as president. That's rather different than the current situation, when Gore's primary concern is global warming, and he can leverage the full force of his national profile and moral authority to raise hundreds of millions for game-changing advocacy campaigns and hold out the continued threat of attracting A1 newspaper coverage by attacking an insufficiently concerned Democratic president from the left. Sometimes, the most effective way to quiet an activist is to give him just enough power to be invested, but not enough power to force change. My hope -- and hunch -- is that Gore knows that.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sounds like the talks in Bali to create an international framework for controlling carbon emissions were, to put it lightly, dramatic. The US proved so intransigent, apparently, that our European allies abandoned us, our Asian allies stepped back, and every time our representative stepped onto the stage, the assembled delegates booed and hissed. By the edn of it, the international opprobrium had grown so intense that we caved.

Problem is, I can't seem to figure out what we caved on. The current administration wanted the agreement to allow every country to set their own voluntary emissions targets, which is laughable, a bit like letting an alcoholic set what he thinks is a reasonable amount of drinking. But while global goals are included in the document, they're merely referenced in the preamble, and have been basically tabled till the next meeting, when the hope is that a more globally minded U.S president will support serious emissions control. The fight on the floor stemmed from India's proposal to add language requiring developed nations to provide technological help to poorer nations. Seems sensible enough, but we opposed the language and then, in the face of unanimous condemnation, reversed. That's good, but it's not clear to me exactly what was won, or whether the language actually forces a substantive commitment or adds in a useful enforcement mechanism.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over at Grist, Dave Roberts lays out what to look for in any climate bill, and makes a pretty strong case for prioritizing short term targets over long term goals. Worth a read if you, like me, find this stuff a bit confusing.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't agree with everything Jim Manzi says here, but his discussion of the political difficulties facing a carbon tax strikes me as spot-on. So much as such a levy -- particularly combined with some income tax rebate to offset regressivity -- might be a good, or even necessary, idea, I can't figure out the constituency for it. Intellectuals? Economists? Urban residents interested in the subsidy? Which one of these groups brings you to 60 in the Senate? Which one gets Congressmen to vote for higher gas prices?

For these reasons, I'm a huge global warming pessimist. I don't think we will do nearly enough, nearly quickly enough. My hunch is that the best chance would be for some President to try and evade the political process by creating an actually bipartisan coalition whose recommendations a critical mass of Senators agree, preemptively, to support. If both parties made the case that this was world historic enough to require drastic action, there'd be no one for voters to blame. So long as one party or the other is willing to seek electoral advantage from the coming climatological catastrophe, however, short term political interests will continually trump the continuing health of the planet.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ross may well be right that in Jim Manzi's manifesto on a sensible rightwing strategy on global warming, "conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue."  But he should be more specific: Manzi's approach may help the right kick political ass on the issue -- it's global warming as little more than a political football.  And that's a damn irresponsible way of approaching climate change.

Manzi's strategy is, basically, let's do very, very little.  Under Manzi's set of assumptions, that's perfectly fine, as under Manzi's set of assumptions, global warming isn't very bad, and we don't need to do much.  Under most other sets of assumptions, global warming is very bad, and the costs of a carbon tax, or cap-and-trade program, are very slight in comparison to the damage they'll forestall.  But the change from "it doesn't exist" to "it's not very bad, and can be fixed with no pain," is not a change from "the denialist fringe' to "the political mainstream" in anything but rhetoric.  It's a kinder, gentler denialism, based on exactly the same dispute over severity, with exactly the same effects.  Namely, if Manzi's wrong, hundreds of millions of people are fucked.  Nice gamble, that.  On the bright side, it's possible that Manzi's strategy will, in the short-term, help the Republican Party do marginally better in American politics.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)