Virescent

I was going to post on this last night, but trying to make sense of it destroyed all my logic circuits. I had to reboot. I watched the Office finale instead, which was pretty awesome.

This morning I switched from the logic processor to the zen processor, so I’m going to try and just go with the flow about it.

Wednesday the polar bear was listed as a threatened species by the US government, entitling it to protection from that-which-threatens-it under the US Endangered Species Act. Not as much protection as an endangered species, more more protection than a hunky-dory species. Cool, good on them, because while there are lots of polar bears out there, their habitats are vanishing with alarming rapidity, and we can’t keep them all in German zoos.

So far, so good. Now, turn off your logic hats- I don’t want any heads to explode.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne presented the decision with these remarks:

“While the legal standards under the Endangered Species Act compel me to list the polar bear as threatened, I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting,” he said at a briefing.

“Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective,” Kempthorne said. He also noted he was taking administrative and regulatory action to ensure this decision was not “abused to make global warming policies.”

So, the science is strong enough to conclude that global warming is the danger, but we shouldn’t make that an excuse to act on the science showing the danger, because it’s ok that the danger stays. Right. Ok. I’m flowing with that.

I have some theories that attempt to logically explain this, actually: First, Dirk Kempthorne is not a real person, but a character from a thrilling novel (doesn’t he have a great name for it?), perhaps written by Stephen Johnson, who is being bribed by a secret, powerful organization to destroy the word by obfuscating government responses to climate change, causing mass confusion, panic, and fatal delays. Rehearsals for the movie version were accidentally leaked as the actual policy statements.

Second, maybe they just had two different people write the yes-protected and no-not-protected speeches, and pasted them together as one speech instead of just deleting the “no” speech?

Let me know your theories about what happened.

Actually, I bet we could get this all cleared up if the Interior Department were forced to explain their decision to this guy (link found via climateprogress).

Ok, I spent Saturday at the Eco-City Summit for Alexandria. And I came to many conclusions, and had some small experiences, but I’ll stick to the big picture.

First, Alexandria City government seems serious about changing our course to one of sustainable development. The Mayor, Vice Mayor, and a few of the council members were there. The Vice Mayor, Del Pepper, and Rob Krupicka, one of the council members, are the ones spearheading this effort to define “eco-city” and get a plan together, so good on them.

Second, when the attendees of the Summit were polled (using a pretty sweet remote-control thing, all high tech and such) we realized, awkwardly, that of the 130 attendees, over 70% were white, 90% had a college degree (60% had a graduate degree as well), and 60% were active in other city council activities. This is not representative of Alexandria at large at all: if the City coucil is going to put together a sustainability plan, it will require the participation of the entire city. Alexandria needs to do better in including the diverse citizenry in putting together these ideas.

Third, activism is rather daunting. Now I know what the mayor looks like, but I’m still just learning what I need to know to get involved in all this governance mess. Toe in the water, and it’s cold in there…

Over the course of the morning, we got a chance to comment on the broad principles outlined in the Eco-City Chater the Environmental Policy Comission had drawn up, and then later to give ideas for more specific plans the city could use to implement those principles, once the EPC revises them and presents them to the council and they get approved and everything. Discussion moderators from the Virginia Tech Urban Planning program and a few other places wrote what we said down in notepads and on post-its, so we all felt good about being heard. Plus we got to hear Mayor Bob of Waitakare talk about his city’s 15 years of eco-progress. He’s a pretty neat guy, and if I hadn’t had to be in West Virginia that evening, I would totally have followed up on one moderator’s suggestion that Mayor Bob might be at a pub somewhere on King Street later that night. Also, all the plates and forks were compostable, and compost bins were available throughout the school where the event was held (though eco-samurai raises some good questions about composting plastic in the first place). Credible attention to detail.

The next step in the eco-city charter process is May 19th, when the Environmental Policy Comission will be holding their regular meeting to go over our suggestions from the Summit. It’s open to the public, and it will be held at City Hall (Sister Cities Conference Room 1101, 301 King Street) at 7:45. There’s still time to comment on the Charter- the text and a survey are linked here.

Beyond just following the progress of the Charter, I was advised by an active local to join a civic association or something- like the Old Town Civic Association. So I’ll look into that, at least to see who movers and shakers in local agitation are. I want to focus on environmental and sustainability issues, though, and so I don’t want to get bogged down in lots of other local issues. I need to learn more, and enough to pick and choose.

I’m trying to fight my metal image of local politics as dirty fights over “tiny” issues. These probably stem from watching grainy old movies involving local politics. I have visions of Huey-Long-types in smoky back rooms, complaining about the Potomac Yard development plans. I hope familiarity with the inner workings of Alexandria will correct all my groundless prejudices.

Speaking of relay races… last year about this time, the courts pointed out that the EPA had a duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, since they’re pollution, and hurt the environment, and allegedly the EPA is all about environmental protection or whatever.

The EPA promised to get back to the American people on that by the end of 2007, but we got nothing. Last week, a coagulation of groups and places (including Baltimore City, the state of Maryland, and Washington DC) filed a lawsuit against the EPA, seeking their proposed emissions limits, or really just any indication that the EPA is doing it’s job.

Meanwhile, some members of the House said it’d be silly to let the EPA write the laws, since they’d just get sued by anti-regulations types if they did. Instead, they think that legislators should pass some emissions laws, post-haste.

And today, rumors surfaced of a White House plan to control greenhouse gas emissions- maybe to be presented to the legislature by the end of the week (maybe take some people’s minds off that Colombia FTA, oof).

Well well.  Let’s start with the White House.  It’s not April Fool’s (I checked), and I don’t think it’s opposite day, so they might actually be serious.  Conventional wisdom has it (see resigned comments in other articles) that as long as Bush was in office, greenhouse gases would roll freely along.  Bush has proven himself to lack all sorts of foresight- has he just now caught up with the rest of the world?

Then the legislature.  After the biofuels silliness, will we really be so strapped as to ask our more posturing politicians to make coherent and helpful rules based on good science and a basic understanding of the economy?  Sends chills down my spine, that’s what.

But the bureaucrats, the ones who have the experience in drafting regulations, and the capacity to understand the research, and who had a great reputation for cleaning up America, will they even pay attention?

So, I can’t fathom that the president really has a plan (and even so it might go through the legislature), I don’t trust the legislature to get this right, and the bureaucrats are no-shows.

Regulation of greenhouse gases is the first, most basic step in tying pollution to a cost in the market.  If we assign pollution no cost, the market will never “correct itself” to stop destroying the ecosystem we know how to live in.  If we assign it the wrong cost, free marketeers will get to whine about interventionism, and the market will do insane things and freak everybody else out (see biofuels and food, rising costs of).

With these bozos vying (or not) for the chance at the prize, I don’t see a way for anyone to win.  They’re just thrashing around on the field, trying to figure out how to stand up.

NYC’s congestion pricing plan veered into the ditch of the state legislature yesterday. They’ve missed the April 7th deadline for approval, and lost the over $350 million dollars in federal financing that was a big part of getting the changes underway. And the revenue from the new tax was supposed to be diverted toward improvements to the Subway and other forms of public transportation, so now those need to draw money from something else, or continue to rot.

According to reports form the NYTimes, legislators mostly didn’t like the plan because they thought it was unfair to poor people, and because they thought Bloomberg was a total jerk about it. Most of the opposition appeared to come from people who didn’t live in Manhattan, and from Democrats. I’d be interested to see the numbers on people from these boroughs who actually drive to Manhattan everyday, and numbers on who the drivers in the proposed area actually were- rich, poor, local? I simply don’t buy the argument that the least affluent object to congestion pricing because it’s “elitist”. Not only did the legislation include breaks for low income people, but seriously- that’s what’s going to prevent them from driving their vehicles to the hippie, arts, shopping, and finance districts of Manhattan, where parking is already over $30 dollars a day, and traffic eats up your gas fast at $3.40 a gallon?

Grist offers a list of reasons Bloomberg’s plan failed, mostly originating with Bloomberg himself, and the way the plan was presented to the legislature. He gets some good ones in, including “ignoring the lessons of Machiavelli” and “Manhattanites didn’t care enough to support it (because only 25% of them own cars, so what’s the big deal about car taxes?)”.

Oh well, heavy sigh. Way to waste your state’s potential, NY politicians. I hope they try something like this in DC. It wouldn’t make as much sense as NYC- the Metro is not as useful as their Subway, and we’d have to make a huge leap in available public transport before it would be feasible. But somebody’s got to do it.

Well, lots of people. NYC is walkable. And Subwayable. And busable. But it’s always jammed with cars and trucks and limos and taxis. Where do those people come from (probably not Manhattan)? Where are they going? They’re certainly not getting there too fast. Yesterday the NY City Council, at the urging of Mayor Bloomburg, sent a “home rule message” on to the state government in Albany- they want to start charging cars that drive below 60th street in Manhattan. 8$ a trip, and 21$ for trucks. They’re going to use the money to improve public transport in the city.

The new Dem Governor Paterson and the old Rep Senate Majority Leader Bruno both are in favor of the measure, which has to be passed by the state government by April 7th in order to receive a bucketful of federal funds for the project. The Dem Speaker Silver doesn’t seem too pleased with the bill, and it will probably need his support to get through.

While the politicians wrangle, the people complain. They complain of already-crowded subways, of pollution from the traffic, about being charged to move around in their own city, about all the taxis with only one passenger, about higher and higher taxes, about limited access for the poor, about just wanting some time on their own on the drive to work: they complain about everything, really.

The probable pros of the plan include reduced emissions in the city, fewer accidents, more carpooling, time (and gas, thus money) saved for everyone who continues to drive, revenue for the city, and improvements to the bus and Subway systems that would be greatly appreciated. Cons include possible loss of income for businesses, and um. Doubts that it will work? That seems to be most of the practical argument against it- the public transit won’t get better, the state will be a jerk and do something else with the money, whatever. London experienced similar complaints and obstacles when it implemented its congestion pricing plan, but has seen success in trip reduction, pollution reduction, and trip time reduction- and only a very small loss of business revenue attributable to the congesting pricing. That doesn’t mean that people in London love the idea and think it’s working well, though.

The argument comes down to one of ideology. There’s little doubt that the measure would clear the air and the roadways, and favor more efficient (better) systems of transport. That’s good for the city. For the citizens though? Does a tax or toll on where one drives represent an unacceptable limitation on human freedom?

Nope, unless you can point me to the section in the constitution where “driving whenever and wherever I feel like for free” is listed. Roads are public areas, sure- except they’re owned and maintained by the public, the government, and the government has a right to limit access to them. Plus, they’re not limiting access to the roads- you can still take a Subway or bus or bike or walk below 60th as usual- you can even still drive or taxi, you’ll just be paying for the privilege. Even limited-government libertarians like user fees, right?

I’m sure the plan could be better than it is. I’d like to see it include more bike lanes and safe bike racks. I’d like to see them put a concerted effort into fixing up the public transport before they institute the charge, to give people an attractive alternative (and put to rest many of the complaints about the plan in the first place). But I think congestion pricing is a good thing for NYC.

Of course, I never intended to drive there anyway.

Tomorrow: monthly goal update!

One of the most popular arguments against government “intervention” in alternative energies and the green economy is that government regulations are always inefficient, they slow the natural progress of the economy, markets work best when they’re totally unfettered, etc. Stuff like that. The jatropha-in-Myanmar post a couple of days ago might even lend that argument some support.

But the capitalism-loving, -touching, and -squeezing heads of huge companies like BP, GE, and Dow Chemical disagree- they’re urging the government to come up with a coherent energy policy that favors energy efficiency, clean fuels, and even carbon taxes. They contend that the piecemeal regulations the Bush administration half-heartedly doles out are costing America jobs, and US companies the chance to compete internationally. Apparently, since European countries tend to take alternative energies like nuclear and wind seriously, their governments have created favorable investment climates around those technologies- and the clean tech money is settling abroad.

GE’s Chief Executive Jeff Immelt makes a case for government subsidies, carbon trading, and investments in clean technology from a purely business standpoint- and to the free-market crowd, he has a response. From the WSJ’s “Environmental Capitol” blog:

And government largess helps drive progress—like in GE’s aircraft engine division half a century ago. That admission riled free-market types in the audience (and on stage) who took him to task for subsidy-hunting and accused him of—gasp—betraying his capitalist credentials.

“Don’t worship false idols,” he countered. “The government has its hand in every industry. If we have to have them, I’d prefer they were productive rather than destructive.”

Defending the “free” market is quixotic in the most literary sense, as the pure market is the pure Dulcinea: entirely a product of fevered imaginations. I’ve ranted about it here before, but observe that very successful capitalists realize this, and gamely play the market (and government) by the existing rules. There’s money to be made in clean technology (even capitalists who think global warming is a fraud know this and invest accordingly), and there would be even more of it if the US government stopped noodling around.

Last month, BusinessWeek reported on how the Bush Administration’s failure to lead on clean energy policies has left it to the states to invent their own. The magazine pointed out that a sustained federal push was essential for bringing the US up to speed in a clean tech economy already dominated by foreign companies- but not to hope for that push from Mr. Bush.

Maybe next year your dreams will come true, practical capitalists.

The leaders of Myanmar’s Junta have formed a plan to reduce their country’s $600 million dependence on oil imports- reductions in oil subsidies sparked the popular uprising last fall- with biodiesel. They’re relying on hearty, drought-resistant jatropha, which produces nuts that may be processed into a vegetable oil, and which displaces no food crops. Since requiring farmers to plant them in unused spaces in 2006, much of the country has got jatropha growing wherever they can fit it, even in window boxes in the sometime-capital, Yangon. So far, so good, right? Energy security, no loss of food supplies, widespread public participation…

Except, with their busy schedule of oppressing their own people and making meaningless gestures toward democratic change, the Junta hasn’t actually gotten around to building the refineries necessary to turn the jatropha nuts into fuel. Whoops! What with having a centrally planned economy and all, you’d think they’d have remembered to actually plan.

The American government messed up biofuel by putting all its eggs into corn. The Myanmar Junta messed up by blustering their way into the project and not funding the necessary infrastructure. There are plenty of ways to do biofuel wrong- how many such predictable failures will we see before a government gets it right?

I can take a deep breathe and come back to post regularly now, since I finally only have one apartment again, and most of my boxes are empty and their contents distributed. It’s been a long move, and I’m very glad it’s over. I’ll give you a summary along with the six-month review and March monthly goal I owe you, but not yet.

Tonight, you get a few links to stories from the past week I’ve been itching to put up for days. Guiding theme is legislative.

The EPA released their actual reason for denying a waiver to California and about 16 (or maybe 18, depending on which article you read) other states so that they may pass their own emissions laws, the same week as memos from the EPA’s staff opposing the decision were made public. The agency said in December that they’d deny the waiver, for reasons that would be forthcoming. After over two months, they’ve come up with

“While I find that the conditions related to global climate change in California are substantial, they are not sufficiently different from conditions in the nation as a whole to justify separate state standards,” Johnson [the EPA head] wrote.

The policy director for the National Resources Defense Council called that statement “both factually and legally wrong”. Johnson’s own EPA agrees with the NRDC.

“It is obvious to me that there is no legal or technical justification for denying this,” Margo Oge, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, warned in talking points prepared for a meeting with Johnson in October 2007.

While the EPA is taking their bold, defenseless move, the House has passed a bill with a much less certain future. A plan to shift funding to renewable energy resources, paid for by removing tax breaks given to oil and gas companies, passed the House Wednesday. No idea on when the Senate will get to it, but Bush has of course threatened a veto. After all, American oil companies (who are hitting year after year of record profits- not just records for them, but records for any American business ever- and record profits, not just record income, straight-up profits) are suffering badly, and may not survive much longer without those tax breaks. Limping along, suspended by a thread, suffocating under the weight of their own cash, etc. You know how it is. The NYT article on the House bill highlights Republican reasons for opposing it (besides the poor, poor oil companies) (ok, “poor” is a bad word choice), and what doesn’t boil down to “taxes==evil” goes along the lines of “energy prices are high enough, and this will increase our dependence on foreign energy supplies”. I’ll go ahead and call that laughable, considering how dependent on foreign oil resources we already are, and considering that the main gist of the bill is to shift energy production to sources that Americans control, on US soil. Let’s see how the Senate takes the idea before we get all excited, though.

And in a Wired piece, recycling at the Obama campaign! Not speeches (har-dee-har), no, but campaign materials themselves. For those of us who’ve been hankering after a teeshirt, you know that the Obama campaign is trying to fill such a huge demand for their merch that their orders are being delayed by weeks, and the ObamaCycle site is emerging as the most effective way to get posters where they’re needed fast. Considering the political litter all over our corner of Alexandria, I hope more campaigns pick up the idea. Of course, since total inundation seems to be the general goal of the posters, perhaps the best I can hope for is that all those signs end up in a recycling pile by November.

Except for the multicolored mold colony growing on my abandoned compost- they’re making great progress. It appears they’re about to progress from the agricultural age to the industrial age, though, so I should get all deus ex cleaning soon (wonder if they’ve invented literary traditions yet?).

So, when I said last week or so that all I needed to do was find some “live” dirt, I a) realized that here in DC, I have no dirt that I’m technically allowed to dig in, and b) started putting my life into boxes, limiting my time and energy to dress up like a ninja and dig a few handfuls out near the parking lot. Though actually, if I really wanted to be subtle about that, I should probably dress as a gardener.

I’m going to go ahead and declare this Compost Failure February. The stuff is gross enough that I just need to dump it, clean out the bin, and move it this weekend, then start over again.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had much time to put up some stuff, but here are a few quick links so I can get my blog on before I go set more things in more boxes.

1)The governor of Maryland is sponsoring a bill that would limit the state’s carbon emissions to 90% of something by 2050. That sounds nice, in the vaguest sense of nice. I heart lowering carbon emissions and all, but a bill that just says they should be lowered? All that is, is a bunch of dead trees and hot air. More concrete plans, please, MD legislature? I do wish to be impressed.

2)You know how those fashion industry types are all concerned about the planet and stuff, in between when they’re telling us to buy new clothing every 2-3 months? A show at the London Fashion week highlighted designers making ethically produced clothes- based on the principles of fair trade, sustainable fabrics and dyes, “timelessness”, and recycling fabrics. Estethica had hits and misses, (misses! har!), but most of their clothes were much more tastefully nice than the vast majority of fashion week freakiness. At their website you can look through the different designers and collections (I’ll highlight the ‘colouring changing knickers‘- my my. not exactly my ‘favourites’, but they have a certain cachet). It’s not exactly as sustainable as the Salvation Army, or making it yourself (with stuff from the Salvation Army!), but it’s better than fashion types usually do.

(get my blog on? argh. long day.)

It should probably tell me something that my most popular post so far has been about Valentine’s day and looooove, but I’m going to ponder that later and talk about biofuels now. A new study by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy adds up the total life cycle impact of crop biofuels- like corn and whatever else is grown specifically on converted or agricultural land to make fuel, not food- is actually worse than fossil fuels in terms of carbon production. Yup, apparently ethanol is bad (please remove corn subsidies already, Washington?).

So if biofuels- or at least the ones we’re growing now- are such a bad idea, how come we didn’t notice before? Partly it was due to a failure to predict the effect of converting huge areas of land from food production to fuel production- drives up food prices worldwide, and invokes deforestation and land clearing to create new agricultural land to grow more of the displaced food crops or the new fuel crops- which tend to be heavily subsidized, thus very profitable.

The NYT article on the studies doesn’t heavily emphasize the different types of biofuels used as energy resources, so it’s easy to come away with the impression that all biofuels are bad.  Not so! The Nature Conservency interviews an author on the paper, Joe Fargione:

Although there is no silver bullet to solve climate change, there are many silver BBs. Biofuels can be a silver BB if produced without requiring additional land to be converted from native habitats to agriculture. For example, biofuels can be made from waste from agriculture and forests, and from native grasses and woody biomass grown on marginal lands unsuitable for crop production.

We not only have to consider how we produce biomass, but how we convert it to energy. Producing liquid transportation fuels may not be the most efficient way to use the energy contained in biomass.

I’ve added my emphasis. Europe is trying to fix the newly-discovered ill effects of their plans to increase biofuel use by maintaining that it must not come from former rainforests, and no word on how the US will change it’s recently passed ethanol provisions in the 2007 Energy Bill. Energy policy should go back to the drawing board, to maximize research funding for waste biofuels, and seriously, no more corn ethanol subsidies, not even if you call it a tax cut! Pretty please?