Thomas L. Friedman: Just Do It

I failed to note The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's reaction to the House's passage in June of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, a column he called "Just Do It." Sorry 'bout my omission. Better late than never.

I consider Friedman my mentor. His latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, is my bible. Yet I disagree with him about how bad he seems to think Waxman-Markey is — though he does say the Senate, after improving it, must pass it too.

Waxman-Markey sets up a cap-and-trade system for putting a price on the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So doing will force industries, businesses, and consumers to find ways to emit less. But Friedman holds his nose and indicates that a "simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption."

True, Waxman-Markey ended up being over 1,300 pages long, and it is certainly a Rube Goldberg contraption. Yet I think its beating heart, a cap-and-trade program, beats a carbon tax.

A carbon tax would collect money from greenhouse-gas emitters for each metric ton they emit of carbon dioxide or its climate-changing equivalents.

Cap-and-trade à la Waxman-Markey would likewise "price carbon." Below is a primer on how it would do so.

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What Is Cap-and-Trade?

In a cap-and-trade system, companies that emit greenhouse gases, or make products that do, are required to possess one allowance or permit for each metric ton of emissions they are responsible for.



For example, a company that generates electric power by burning coal might need allowances to cover all X tons of its CO2 emissions. So might a company that refines petroleum into gasoline that, when used in a car, causes the car to emit carbon dioxide through its tailpipe.



The government would issue only so many allowances each year. The number of allowances issued each year would equal the total number of tons of greenhouse gases permitted for the year. That number of tons of greenhouse gases is the cap for the year.



Companies that need allowances are called covered entities. Covered entities that need allowances in a quantity greater than they have on hand would buy them on an open market from entities that have more allowances than they need. This buying and selling of allowances in an open marketplace is the trade part of cap and trade.



Economic theory says that covered entities would prefer to sell some or all of their allowances, rather than use them to cover their greenhouse gas emissions, as long as what it costs them to institute efficiency measures and reduce their own greenhouse gas output is less than the market price of allowances.



Meanwhile, covered entities would prefer to buy allowances on the open market to the extent that their own cost of reducing their greenhouse gas output is greater than the market price of the allowances.



This trading — buying and selling — of allowances in a marketplace ensures that the cost of complying with the emissions cap is as low as possible. It does so by making it financially worthwhile for covered entities that can’t eliminate emissions cheaply to buy allowances from entities that are able to reduce their own emissions more cheaply.

The latter entities wind up reducing their greenhouse emissions more than the former entities do. The marketplace for allowances thus “finds” the most efficient ways for the economy to comply with the cap.

How Does Trading Minimize Costs?

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet a mandatory cap costs money. If every covered entity is simply told to reduce its emissions by (say) 30 percent, Plant A (see the left side of the illustration below, which is from Union of Concerned Scientists, Catalyst Magazine, Spring 2005) would eliminate 180 of its 600 tons of emissions, Plant B 120 of its 400 tons.



(Click on the above illustration to enlarge it.)

Suppose Plant B can reduce its emissions at lower cost than Plant A. It might cost Plant A an average of $50 per ton, or $9,000 total, and Plant B an average of $25 per ton, or $3,000, to meet the twin 30% reductions. The total cost would be $9,000 + $3,000 = $12,000. Would it reduce the total cost of complying with the overall 30% emissions reduction target for Plant B to eliminate more of its emissions than 120 tons, while Plant A eliminates less than 180 tons? Yes, it would.



This can happen with a cap-and-trade-system (see the right side of the illustration) if Plant A buys allowances (called permits in the illustration) from Plant B. Plant B sells 80 tons worth of allowances to Plant A. Now Plant A reduces its emissions by only 100 tons, rather than the original 180 tons. Plant B eliminates 200 tons of emissions, not 120 tons. The total reduction is the same: 300 tons.



But this time, Plant A is able to do its part at an average cost of (say) $34 per ton of reductions. This is less than Plant A’s original $50 per ton because, for any covered entity, the cost per ton goes up as the number of tons of reductions increases.



Likewise, Plant B is now able to do its part at an average cost of (say) $28 per ton of reductions. This is more than the earlier figure of $25 per ton because Plant B is now eliminating more emissions than before.



Plant A is now spending $3,400, which is $34 per ton of reductions times 100 tons. Plant B is now spending $5,600, which is $28 per ton of reductions times 200 tons. The total cost is $3,400 + $5,600 = $9,000. This is $3,000 less than the total cost was before, which was $12,000. Even though Plant B spends somewhat more money than before, Plant A spends so much less money than it did that the total cost of compliance shrinks.

What Determines the Price of Allowances?

The price of allowances turns out to be the cost to both Plant A and Plant B of the last ton of greenhouse gas emissions they eliminate.



Plant B in the example reduces its emissions, ton by ton, at an increasing cost per ton. So does Plant A. The average cost of reducing emissions is $28 per ton for Plant B (see above), but the cost of the last ton of reductions for Plant B might be, say, $60. This is called the marginal compliance cost for Plant B. The average compliance cost is $34 per ton for Plant B, while the marginal compliance cost for Plant B is $60.



Meanwhile, Plant A likewise reduces its emissions. Its average compliance cost is $34 per ton (see above). As it reduces emissions more and more, Plant A’s marginal compliance cost increases. When Plant A’s marginal compliance cost reaches $60, it pays for Plant A to cease reducing its emissions any further and buy allowances from Plant B at a price of $60 per ton.



That is, instead of continuing to seek further emissions reductions at a marginal cost of greater than $60 per ton of reduced emissions, Plant A buys allowances at a price of $60 per ton to cover the 500 tons of emissions it continues to produce.



Plant B (which in this simple example starts out with all 700 tons worth of available allowances) is willing to sell 500 tons worth of allowances to Plant A at a price of $60 per ton because the 200 tons by which Plant B is reducing its own emissions each cost Plant B less than $60 to achieve. But the next ton of Plant B’s reductions would cost it more than $60 to achieve, so Plant B is not willing to sell Plant A any more than 500 tons worth of allowances at a price of $60 per ton.



For Plant B to sell any more allowances to Plant A, the price of the allowances would have to be higher than $60 per ton. But if the allowance price were higher, Plant A would prefer to reduce its emissions even further on its own and buy fewer allowances from Plant B.



Accordingly, the allowances wind up selling at a price which makes the marginal cost of compliance the same for both Plant A and Plant B: $60 per ton. It is when all covered entities in a cap-and-trade system have an equal marginal cost of compliance — which turns out to be equal to the price of the allowances bought and sold on the open market — that the total cost of compliance (here, $9,000) is at its lowest.

If allowances were auctioned (as some but not all would be under Waxman-Markey) the price-per-ton of winning bids at auction could well be something other than (in this example) $60 per ton of emissions. Having auction prices that are different from the eventual market prices of allowances somewhat complicates the economics of a cap-and-trade system, but it does not change the fact that the eventual market prices of allowances will reflect the (identical) marginal compliance cost arrived at independently by all covered entities.

What About a Carbon Tax?

Instead of a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax could be used to cause a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the government could charge emitters $60 per ton of emissions. Extending the above example, Plant A and Plant B would again voluntarily reduce their emissions, as long as the cost per ton of doing so were less than $60. Once the marginal cost of further emissions reductions reached $60 per ton, each plant would simply pay the tax on its remaining emissions.



The result would be just the same as with the cap-and-trade scenario cited above. Total emissions for the year would be reduced from 1,000 tons to 700 tons. Plant A would emit 500 tons, and Plant B would emit 200 tons.



The reason that the outcome would be the same is that the $60 rate at which carbon is being taxed happens to be the one that causes Plants A and B to voluntarily reduce their emissions by 100 tons and 200 tons, respectively, in the cap-and-trade scenario. If the tax rate were set at, say, $55 or $65 per ton, the two plants would arrive independently at other levels of reduction. A $55 rate would achieve lower emissions reductions overall. A $65 rate would achieve higher reductions. Both alternative tax rates would fail to strike an optimal balance between the two plants’ reduction levels: the ones at which the average cost per ton of making the reductions is as low as possible across the system as a whole.



Only when the tax rate happens to match the allowance price in the cap-and-trade scenario — the one that would match the two plants’ marginal costs of making reductions — would the carbon tax achieve the lowest possible total price of emissions reductions. A carbon tax puts the burden on policymakers to set the right tax rate or lose control over both the overall amount of emissions and the total cost of making reductions.


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Thus, my primer on the advantages of cap-and-trade. To repeat: a cap-and-trade system beats a carbon tax because it sets a firm cap on greenhouse gases that can be emitted and lets a marketplace in emissions allowances find the lowest-cost way to comply with the cap. In so doing, the market puts the lowest possible price on carbon emissions, so the cost to the economy of a given size of cap is at a minimum.

A carbon tax puts a tax of a known rate on carbon emissions, but if policymakers set the rate wrong, greenhouse-gas emissions might not be reduced as much as hoped, or the costs of making the reductions might be unnecessarily high — or both.

Point/Counterpoint on Climate Change

Recently columnist George F. Will once again wrote about what he insists on seeing as the illusion of climate change. In "Climate Fixers' Hard Sell", in The Washington Post, he said:

The costs of weaning the U.S. economy off much of its reliance on carbon are uncertain, but certainly large. The climatic benefits of doing so are uncertain but, given the behavior of those pesky 5 billion [people in developing nations like India that currently resist a binding agreement to address global warming — see here], almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule, even immeasurable. Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative,

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

In today's Post, in this letter to the editor, climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists responded:

George F. Will once again ignored scientific evidence when he claimed that there has been no global warming over the past decade ...

Earth's average temperature rises and falls in large part because of multiyear ocean cycles, such as El Niño and La Niña. At the same time, human-induced global warming has been steadily pushing average temperatures higher. Because of the natural ocean cycles, 1998 was a warm year. Global warming made it even hotter. Conversely, 2008 was a cooler year, but global warming made it less cool.

That said, there are plenty of obvious signs of global warming over the past decade, including shrinking Arctic summer sea ice. In 2007, the region's sea ice was at an all-time low since satellite observations began. Last year marked the second-lowest year.

All corners of America are already experiencing the effects of climate change. Mr. Will should take a look at the federal government's recent report "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" to find out the facts.

See How Climate Is Expected to Change

Below is a snapshot from a moving graphic that shows how the temperatures in various spots on the earth changed from 1880 to the present, and how they are expected to change between now and 2100. To see it move, and also to see a moving graphic of how global warming is expected to affect the extent of sea ice, click on the image.


The projections underlying the two graphics come from a computer model run by Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which is their equivalent of our National Weather Service.

The Hadley Centre's projections are among the most dire that scientists have come up with, as far as the degree of global warming that we can expect is concerned. Below is a graph showing Hadley's predicted rises in global surface air temperatures, measured at 1.5 meters above the ground, a typical height for standard meteorological measurements, in degrees Celsius. Separately shown are the changes expected in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.


By 2100, according to the model used for this particular graph, global surface temperature is expected to be at least 2.7 degrees Celsius hotter than in 2000, which is a gain of over 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Other Hadley models apparently (see Cloud Cover and Climate Change) predict a temperature rise of up to 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Cloud Cover and Climate Change

Cloud Cover and Climate Change is a short article in today's The Washington Post (scroll down to the second piece in this "Science Digest") that suggests global warming may wind up taking temperatures to the very top of the range predicted by various climate models.

Climate-change modeling has offered a range of possible temperature increases by the end of this century. In the aggregate, the predictions are that the earth will warm by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the 21st century.

Now a study (read its summary here) of the effects of changing cloud cover on climate change and vice versa, published in the July 24 issue of Science, indicates the heat may be turned up by global warming to the upper end of that range. The study finds that global warming does not, as hoped by some, increase low-level clouds in the atmosphere.

If that happened, the increase in cloudiness might reflect sunlight back out to space and help cool things back down. But instead, the study shows, global warming dissipates the cloud cover, lets in more (not less) sunlight, and makes things get even hotter. This is an example of what scientists call "positive feedback," though from the point of view of those worried about climate change, the news is not at all positive.

The study gives credence to Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research's model — "The only model that passed this test" — as the one most predictive of the results of the study ... and therefore the one most likely to be right about what's in store for us down the road. That model predicts direly that the earth will warm by about 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The Hadley Centre is an arm of the Met Office, which is the equivalent in Britain of our National Weather Service.

More about the study on cloud cover can be read in this article from Time.com.

How Much Rainforest Fits in a Coffee Cup?

How Much Rainforest Fits in a Coffee Cup? at thedailygreen.com gives a rundown on a way for coffee lovers like myself to have their morning cup while helping to preserve the rainforest.

I buy most of my coffee beans from a local café, the Old Mill Bakery Café, that sells coffee-bean blends in bulk. Next time I visit, I'll ask whether their coffees are shade-grown. I imagine the owner of the place may not know ... or, even more likely, some of their coffee beans are and some are not. I believe the owner buys his coffees from a fairly large local-to-Baltimore roaster-blender of beans, Baltimore Coffee & Tea. Some of their coffees are Fair Trade Certified and Certified Organic, which attests that growers get fair prices and their workers a decent wage, but you have to read the fine print here to see that those coffees are also shade-grown.

Alas, the coffees that are in fact shade-grown do not include those which I usually buy. In addition to two decafs (I don't typically buy decafs) there are a New Guinea, a Peruvian Andes Gold, a Sumatra Mandheling Gayo Mountain, an Ethiopian Yirgachef, and a Mexican Altura.

I'll make a point of asking for them.

Name That Tree!

Mostly this blog has been about climate policy. I admit to not being much of a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist ... until recently, that is. Now all that is changing. I'm actively trying to cultivate the tree-hugger in me these days.

When I hug a tree, though, I'd like to know its name.

Regretfully, I am pretty clueless about knowing how to look at a tree and tell you either its common name or its scientific appellation. So I got a book to help. It's by the Arbor Day Foundation, and it's called What Tree Is That?

This "guide to the more common trees found in North America" is turning me into a savant of silviculture. Yesterday I took it to a nearby arboretum — actually, a tree-labeled stretch of the walking path around Wilde Lake in Columbia, Maryland — in order to see whether it would guide me to the same tree designations as are posted on the signs in front of the trees. It did!

My biggest triumph had leaves like the one at right — a stalk with several leaflets — depicted above a seedpod, which I will talk more about anon.

You have to play a game to identify a tree.

First — after you turn to the proper section of the book, for either the Eastern U.S. or the Western U.S. — you are asked to answer whether the tree has needles, or scale-like leaves that hug the twig, or leaves that are flat and thin. The first two are types of conifer or evergreen, while the latter represents broadleaf, deciduous trees. I chose the latter, and was directed to the next question.

It asked me to distinguish between trees whose leaves have just one single blade attached to each stalk or petiole, in which case the leaf is simple; more than one blade per petiole, in which case the leaf is compound; or fan-shaped leaves multiply attached to short, spur-like branches, in which case the tree is a ginkgo. I chose option two.

The next question wanted me to say whether the compound leaves were opposite or alternate. If the former, each pair of blades or leaflets on either side of the stalk or axis (except for the end leaflet, that is) attach to the stalk at the same exact point. If the latter, unpaired leaflets appear on alternate sides of the stalk. My quarry's compound leaves were of the alternate variety.

The next question was, in effect, did the leaflets themselves have leaflets? If so, the leaf would be not just pinnately compound, but twice pinnately compound, a.k.a. bipinnate. At left, we see both options, though in compound leaves that are opposite, not alternate.

(I seem to not have needed to answer whether my tree's compound leaves were palmate, as in the image at right, meaning that leaflets are arranged to form an outline like the palm of a hand with fingers splayed apart.)

My leaves were just pinnately compound.

Next, were the side buds (which, I imagine, are the places where new twigs can emerge from existing twigs) hidden by the leaf base, or exposed? If hidden, that would mean the tree's fruit (none of which was actually in evidence) was a pod or legume. Best I could tell, there were no side buds in evidence.

(Had they been, a quick look ahead in the book told me I was en route to identifying a tree-of-heaven, an American mountain-ash, a European mountain-ash, a black walnut, or a butternut. I decided to press ahead along the no-exposed-buds logic path and come back if it left me high and dry — which, as it turns out, it didn't.)

Per the next question, large, 2-4" blades/leaflets would have ID'ed my tree as a yellowwood ... but I was looking at small leaflets of less than 2" in length.

Next, the book wanted me to say whether the tree's fruit was in a long, brown, leathery pod. I saw no fruit to judge by, but the book also suggested that "native trees" of this same type have "long, branched thorns." I saw no thorns, either, so I took a chance and said the tree was not a honeylocust.

That meant its identity depended on answering just one final question. If the leaflet blades' tips were not angled or pointed, but rounded, the tree would have been a black locust, and presumably its twigs would have borne spines or prickles. But, no, the blades were rounded, and there were no spines or prickles .... which made the tree, supposedly, a Japanese pagodatree.

Say what?

I'd never heard of a Japanese pagodatree. Was I on the wrong continent? It was time to inspect the arboretum's signage for the tree.

Oops!

The sign said it was a Chinese scholartree!

Had I been led down the garden path?

Luckily, I noticed that the Latin name on the sign was Sophora japonica ... and then I noticed that that name was printed in the book below Styphnolobium japonicum, which the book says is the current name of the tree formerly known as Sophora japonica!

The Chinese scholartree and the Japanese pagodatree are the same tree!

And my experience thus far with What Tree Is That? is an unqualified success! Highly recommended.

* * *

What Tree Is That? does not pretend to tell all: all the info, that is, that you might want to find out about the tree you have just ID'ed. For that, I can turn to the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees (Eastern Region). It is a true field guide to far more tree species — my edition has 364 kinds of trees — than the "more than 250" that What Tree Is That? covers.

But it is also hard to use (or so I personally find it). It has too much information and no handy-dandy sequence of questions to lead you, step by step, to the right identification.

Yet looking up Sophora japonica in its index points me to a photo — not a drawing — showing the tree's leaves and bark. That's a mixed blessing, by the way, because I find the drawings of What Tree Is That? more definitive. All the photos on any given page of the National Audubon Society Field Guide tend to look alike to my unpracticed eye.

Looking up Sophora japonica in the field guide's index also points me to a page giving the full lowdown on the Japanese pagodatree/Chinese scholartree. From it I learn such things as that this is a member of the legume family, Leguminosae.

As such, it will have leaves that are alternate, not simple; usually compound, most often pinnately so, though sometimes bipinnately so, and sometimes with just three leaflets (which I assume is a sub-category of being pinnately compound). It's fruit, as a legume, will be constituted by a pod (see the seedpod in the illustration above).

"This street tree," says the field guide of the Japanese pagodatree, "is unusual in having abundant late summer blossoms. Hardy under city conditions but slow-growing. In the Orient, where it is often grown around temples, a yellow dye is extracted from the flower buds; the bark and other parts reportedly have medicinal properties."

And You Think Health Care Reform Is Hard ...

Two articles which appeared in The Washington Post of Monday, July 20, 2009, taken side by side, show why addressing climate change is so hard. Chemicals That Eased One Woe Worsen Another and Clinton, Indian Minister Clash Over Emissions Reduction Pact were on adjoining pages of the newspaper's "A" Section. The first article included this graphic (click to enlarge) ...


... which pretty much tells you what the article was about. It seems that some greenhouse gases are actually "super" gases because they trap more of the sun's heat than carbon dioxide does, stay in the atmosphere longer, or both. Among the extra-troublesome gases are chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

CFCs used to be used as refrigerants in air conditioners and refrigerators. When they found their way into the air, they punched a hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer, so they had to be banned. Their replacements were HFCs.

Trouble is, HFCs are potent greenhouse gases ... as are CFCs. Some HFCs have "a heat-trapping power that can be 4,470 times that of carbon dioxide."

Between now and 2050, it looks as if developing countries will contribute a whopping amount of HFCs to the atmosphere (see graphic above). Developed countries, not so much.

One developing country whose economy is burgeoning is India, the subject of the second article, which was accompanied by this photo:


The Indian Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, complained in public to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about U.S. pressure to cut a worldwide deal on climate change. According to Clinton, the Obama administration's push for a binding agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions targets would not sacrifice India's economic growth. But the Indians apparently resist such binding commitments, if only for domestic political reasons.

Open Letter to Senator Boxer

This is an open letter to Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and the members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, of which Sen. Boxer is the chair:


To Senator Boxer and her colleagues:

You will soon begin crafting historic legislation to combat global climate change, shrink our country's emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs), and reduce our reliance on coal, petroleum, and other "dirty" contributors to our nation's extremely large carbon footprint, which today amounts to fully one-quarter of the world's.

The House of Representatives recently passed its climate bill, called Waxman-Markey after its principal sponsors. Groundbreaking as Waxman-Markey is, I personally don't think it's good enough. I would like to tell you why I believe the Senate needs to do better.

Waxman-Markey as passed by the House would shrink U.S. GHG emissions by 17 percent in 2020, from a 2005 baseline. In part, presumably, since other countries' emissions will continue to rise between now and 2020, the Department of Energy says Waxman-Markey would reduce worldwide emissions in 2020 by just 3 percent. In my opinion, that's not enough. Our country needs more stringent climate legislation than Waxman-Markey.


Waxman-Markey, to its credit, creates a cap-and-trade system for U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHGs. Cap and trade is, say many experts, the right way to go. Unlike a "carbon tax," it sets a definite target for GHG emissions. Unlike outright command-and-control limits on GHG emissions, it achieves reductions at the lowest possible cost.

The "cap" in "cap and trade" designates how many tons of carbon dioxide and other GHGs can be emitted by covered U.S. companies each year. Each ton of GHG emissions would require a covered entity that is responsible for engendering or emitting it to surrender one so-called "allowance" that has previously been issued by the U.S. government.

Allowances would be either given away or auctioned to the firms that are covered by the cap-and-trade legislation, or to other, non-covered entities. Entities possessing allowances might use them to cover their carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions, or they might optionally sell their excess allowances on the open market. This is the "trade" part of "cap and trade." It would minimize the economic cost to society of complying with the "cap" by triggering market forces, i.e., supply and demand. The market would insure that covered sectors of the economy attain a lowest-possible-cost solution to lowering U.S. GHG emissions by the intended amount.


The problem with Waxman-Markey is not that it uses a cap-and-trade approach. It is that deeper cuts in GHG emissions are needed. Instead of cuts in U.S. emissions that would amount to reducing the world's GHG output by 3 percent, the goal ought to be for the U.S. to provide at least a 4.25 percent reduction in the world's GHG emissions by 2020, based on 2005 levels of emissions.

The U.S. emits 25 percent, or one quarter, of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs). If we cut our 2005-level GHG emissions by 17 percent as of 2020, as Waxman-Markey envisions, the world as a whole ought to see (one would think) a 4.25 percent reduction, since 4.25 percent is one quarter of 17 percent. If the the world's total GHG emissions are in fact reduced by only 3 percent by the Waxman-Markey reductions, as the Department of Energy says, the reason must be that other countries' emissions are expected to rise between now and 2020, thus counteracting some of our reductions.

A 4.25 percent reduction in 2020 levels of world GHG emissions, if undertaken by the U.S. at this time, would be aimed in part at offsetting increased GHG emissions elsewhere, in places like China and Indonesia. If we wanted to provide a 4.25 percent cut to the world's GHG emissions, we'd need a 24 percent cut in U.S. emissions, by my calculations, by 2020.

Better still, how about having this country assert its world leadership by undertaking fully a 5 percent reduction in world greenhouse gas emissions by 2020? For a 5 percent worldwide reduction, a reduction of a bit more than 28 percent here at home would be needed.

I am hoping that you, the members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, will agree with my assessment: Waxman-Markey, though a big step in the right direction, needs to be beefed up by your chamber.


The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has the following members:

Democrats:

• Barbara Boxer - California (Chairman)
• Max Baucus - Montana
  
• Thomas R. Carper - Delaware
  
• Frank R. Lautenberg - New Jersey
  
• Benjamin L. Cardin - Maryland
  
• Bernard Sanders - Vermont
  
• Amy Klobuchar - Minnesota
  
• Sheldon Whitehouse - Rhode Island
  
• Tom Udall - New Mexico
  
• Jeff Merkley - Oregon
  
• Kirsten Gillibrand - New York
  
• Arlen Specter - Pennsylvania
  

Republicans:

• James M. Inhofe - Oklahoma (Ranking Member)
• George V. Voinovich - Ohio
  
• David Vitter - Louisiana
  
• John Barrasso - Wyoming
  
• Mike Crapo - Idaho
  
• Christopher S. ("Kit") Bond - Missouri
  
• Lamar Alexander - Tennessee
  

They need to hear from Americans concerned to reduce our "carbon footprint" and stabilize the climate and the economic and geopolitical environment that our children will inherit.

Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People

Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People was an eye-opener for me. The four-part TV series recently shown on PBS and available here on DVD introduces us to earth’s oldest mountains — bet you didn't know that — in a new way.

It also introduced me to Chris Bolgiano, a woman who is one of the show's talking heads and author of The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal, a book I am now eagerly reading.

According to Bolgiano (pp. 3-5), the Appalachian Mountains were raised in a series of three "upthrusts." Beginning 480 million years ago, land masses that included today's North America and Europe were "heavy-footed partners in a slow dance." As the land masses borne atop continental plates kept "coalescing, then coming apart," they pushed up the Appalachians like a rug getting bunched up when you try to slide a piece of heavy furniture over its edge.

There were three periods of coalescing: 480-440 mya (million years ago), 400-350 mya, and 290-240 mya. The first two "raised mountains from Pennsylvania to Newfoundland," and even "across Greenland to Ireland and northern Great Britain before finally ending in Norway." In the third period, "mountains erupted from Pennsylvania to Alabama," in what is called the Appalachian Revolution. Geologically, the mountains to the north are but distant cousins to the mountains to the south, which is why today's Adirondack State Park "is not considered to be geologically Appalachian." Nonetheless, we consider the Adirondacks and other northern mountains to be part of Appalachia.

At some point, for a speck of geologic time measuring a mere 70 million years, a shallow inland sea existed in what was becoming today's Appalachia. "That," writes Bolgiano, "was around four hundred million to three hundred million years ago, in the interval between the second and third of the three geologic upheavals that formed the Appalachian Mountains." It was then that "club mosses and horsetails grew a hundred feet tall" in the area around the inland sea. Though there were as yet no actual trees on earth — they hadn't yet evolved — these plants were "dense and prolific enough to die in vast mats, which were slowly compacted into thick seams of carbon." The Appalachian Revolution raised these seams high up to become subsurface coal, the mining of which in the mountains of Appalachia today fuels up to one half of America's electric power generation.

Time has long since worn down what plate tectonics thrust up. "Although the peaks of the Appalachians today are all below seven thousand feet," says Bolgiano, "they may originally have reached fourteen thousand like the Rockies or even twenty thousand feet like the Himalayas." The size-really-matters crowd can console themselves, however, with knowing that the Great Forest once occupying so much land east of the Mississippi "that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without ever touching ground" (p. 22) — the untouched parts of the Appalachians are pretty much all that's left of its vastness — is the primeval ecosystem of perhaps the greatest diversity on the planet:

Here, time has had enough time to grind rocks into a filigreed foundation of soil and stability enough to raise an elaborate structure of biodiversity.

About a million and a half years ago, glaciers began to push southward in pulses of climate. They scoured the forests of the northern Appalachians but stopped about twelve thousand years ago, in central Pennsylvania. To the south, forests moved up and down the mountains in response to flows of cold from the north. Southern plant life was able to evolve fairly steadily, without catastrophic setback, for more than two hundred million years.

Since time began, the highest and best use of the Appalachian Mountains has been to grow trees. In Appalachia lives the richest temperate forest on the planet, rivaled only by its close relatives in a few sections of Asia, all of them remnants of the mother forest. In the coves of southern Appalachia are fifteen hundred species of flowering plants, including more kinds of trees than in all of northern Europe. Here are bewildering nuances of biodiversity, with mosses, fungi, spiders, salamanders, mussels, fish, birds, and peoples like none other on earth. (pp. 4-5)

As the TV series shows — and, I presume, as Bolgiano tells about in parts of the book I have yet to read — the Native American denizens of this magnificent wilderness, mainly Cherokees, managed to live in harmony with it for millennia, disturbing it little. Then came the Europeans, the first of whom kicked off a pattern of subjugating its inhabitants and despoiling its beauty with the expeditions of the Spaniard Hernando de Soto in 1540, in search of the luster of gold.

The Atlantic-seaboard English settlements which became the United States date from the following century. By the 1700s, the English speakers — many of them of my ancestral stock, the Scots-Irish — were pushing westward and speculatively buying up the land of the Piedmont and the Appalachians, in search of a fast buck.

Those who couldn't afford to actually buy the land were squatting on it anyway, taking cues as to how to extract a living from it from the Cherokees ... in between fighting them to secure the land for white settlers in general.

When the Cherokees weren't scuffling with whites, they were learning white ways and adapting to a cash economy in which whites would pay Indians handsomely for, among other things, animal pelts and hides, mainly of bison and deer. Result: animal populations that once renewed themselves seemingly endlessly began to die out, or nearly so.

Meanwhile, the English king wanted every tall tree in the Great Forest to make ships out of. If there was to be a worldwide British Empire one day, ships were a necessity.

Our Revolutionary War took away King George III's rights to the timber here. But if, in post-Civil War America, there was to be an Industrial Revolution, then coal was needed in abundance. Result: the Appalachians were plundered mercilessly for their carbon-rich coal.

As time has gone on, our greed for coal has turned uglier and uglier — see A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia. Coal greed has long served the interests of outsider fat cats who are today's versions of the original absentee speculators in Appalachian land. They live elsewhere and don't participate in the poverty of those they hire to dig the coal out of the ground. Those who are like me and are far removed from the miners' hardscrabble lives can view the films Matewan and Harlan County USA if we want to learn how difficult it was to get mine owners to recognize miners' unions in the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, chestnut blight was accidentally introduced to North America in the early twentieth century, possibly through imported chestnut trees or imported lumber. The Appalachians had been rich in magnificent chestnut trees, but the killer fungus spread and spread and all but wiped them out.

Chestnuts had been an important source of food, for humans in the Appalachians as well as for animals. Maybe someday soon they will be again. Plant breeders are today creating an American chestnut that is resistant to blight. Go figure: what kills the land — civilization and its values — also, eventually, heals the land.

Letter to My Senators

Today I sent the following e-mail letter to each of my U.S. Senators from Maryland, Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin L. Cardin:

I think the Waxman-Markey climate bill that the House recently passed needs to be beefed up in the Senate version, not watered down.

In a recent article in The Washington Post, "Q and A on the Climate Bill," David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson write that "Even if the United States meets the legislation's goals for 2020, the world's total [greenhouse gas] emissions would be reduced by [only] about 3 percent, according to Energy Department projections."

The U.S. emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs). If we cut our 2005-level GHG emissions by 17 percent as of 2020, as Waxman-Markey envisions, the world as a whole ought to see (one would think) a 4.25 percent reduction. If the the world's total GHG emissions are in fact reduced by only 3 percent, very likely the reason is that other countries' emissions can be expected to rise between now and 2020, thus offsetting some of our reduction.

"[So] scientists say," continue the Post reporters, "that far deeper cuts are needed to head off disaster from warming temperatures, rising sea levels and other climate changes."

I think the "far deeper cuts" ought to be included right now, today, in the Senate's version of Waxman-Markey. The goal ought to be for the U.S. to provide at least a 4.25 percent reduction in the world's GHG emissions by 2020, based on 2005 levels of emissions.

Better still, how about having this country assert its world leadership by undertaking fully a 5 percent reduction in world greenhouse gas emissions by 2020?

If we wanted to provide a 4.25 percent cut to the world, we'd need a 24 percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2020, by my calculations. For 5 percent worldwide, a bit more than 28 percent here at home.

I am hoping that, as a U.S. Senator from Maryland, you will help lead the Senate in the direction of passing a stronger climate bill, not a weaker one.

If you are from Maryland and feel strongly about the upcoming debate in the U.S. Senate about climate-change legislation, I urge you to click on the two hotlinks above and tell Senators Mikulski and Cardin about your concerns.

Q and A on the Climate Bill

Q and A on the Climate Bill appeared in a recent edition of The Washington Post and gave Post readers some much-needed background on the Waxman-Markey climate legislation which squeaked by in the House last month and now awaits Senate action in the fall.

Waxman-Markey as passed by the House would be responsible for, as David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson write in their Post article, "delivering a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 2005 levels." This blogger thinks Waxman-Markey needs to be beefed up in the Senate version, since Messrs. Fahrenthold and Mufson write, "Even if the United States meets the legislation's goals for 2020, the world's total emissions would be reduced by [only] about 3 percent, according to Energy Department projections."

According to this online article, the U.S. emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs). If we cut our 2005-level GHG emissions by 17 percent as of 2020, the world as a whole ought to see (one would think) a 4.25 percent reduction. If the the world's total GHG emissions are in fact reduced by only 3 percent, very likely the reason is that other countries' emissions are expected to rise between now and 2020, thus offsetting some of our reduction.

The Post article does say, "Usually emissions grow as the economy grows, so a 17 percent cut would be a huge feat for the energy industry."

"But scientists say," continue the Post reporters, "that far deeper cuts are needed to head off disaster from warming temperatures, rising sea levels and other climate changes."

This blogger thinks the "far deeper cuts" ought to be included right now, today, in the Senate's version of Waxman-Markey. The goal ought to be for the U.S. to provide at least a 4.25 percent reduction in the world's GHG emissions by 2020, based on 2005 levels of emissions.

Better still, how about having this country assert its world leadership by undertaking fully a 5 percent reduction in world greenhouse gas emissions by 2020?

If we wanted to provide a 4.25 percent cut to the world, we'd need a 24 percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2020, by my calculations. For 5 percent worldwide, a bit more than 28 percent here at home.

What Will Waxman-Markey Cost?

Cost Estimate: H.R. 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is a report to Congress by the Congressional Budget Office that estimates how much the climate-change bill recently passed by the House of Representatives — it would limit the amount of and put a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions — would cost.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as Waxman-Markey, would "cap" the emissions by U.S. firms of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) during the period 2012-2050. These manmade gases that linger in the atmosphere are responsible for global warming; they trap the sun's heat. The resulting climate change imperils the whole globe in the very near future. Not only might it cause droughts, ravage ecosystems, and unleash dangerous human-disease vectors, but it would bring economic disaster for many in the developed and developing worlds. The solution, most scientists agree, is to stop polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Waxman-Markey is a down payment on that.

Waxman-Markey would have the U.S. government give away or sell "allowances" to regulated economic entities such as coal-mining operations, oil companies, or electric utilities that are directly or indirectly the fathers or grandfathers of GHG emissions. GHG emissions that they and other companies engender would have to be covered, metric ton by metric ton, by allowances. These allowances, once issued by Uncle Sam, would be bought and sold — "traded" — in a national marketplace. The price of the allowances being traded would become the price of carbon (and like) emissions.

Never before have these GHG emissions had a price in the U.S.. Now they will, if Waxman-Markey or the version the U.S. Senate intends to take up in the fall becomes law.

"Cap and trade" under Waxman-Markey — the primary and most controversial of its provisions — is designed to become more and more stringent as the years roll on, between 2012 and 2050, in that the size of the carbon "cap" would shrink over time. Hence, the cost of emitting GHGs, reflected in the price of the allowances, would rise. Regulated firms would buy the allowances on the open market and presumably pass along the allowance costs in the form of higher prices that they charge their customers (and, indirectly, their customers' customers).

Regulated firms would have two options besides allowances. One option would be to find more carbon-efficient ways to do what they do. An electric utility might stop burning coal and start burning natural gas, which puts less carbon in the atmosphere. Though burning natural gas might inherently be more expensive than burning coal, it would require fewer allowances, and the net cost could be lower.

Or, a regulated firm would have the ability under Waxman-Markey to acquire "offset credits" to cover their emissions. The bill would impose limits on these offsets, but within the limits an electric utility, say, might choose to bankroll changes in agricultural and forestry practices on the part of companies and enterprises that are not directly regulated by Waxman-Markey. Greenhouse gases, especially CO2, are effectively "locked up" in trees, plants, and soil. When ill-advised practices such as clearing forests for farmland are engaged in, CO2 can be released. The right sorts of counter-investments can forestall that. When entities regulated by Waxman-Markey make such investments, they can receive offset credits that stand in lieu of carbon allowances.

Buying allowances and making investments will come at a price, and the CBO, in this report, has tired to pinpoint how much the cost of complying with Waxman-Markey would burden the U.S. economy.

A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes in an op-ed piece in today's The Washington Post, A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia, that the president needs to step up and insist on enforcing existing laws that protect the Appalachian Mountains from the ever-increasing depredations of coal-mining operations.

The image at left, by Jeff Gentner of the Associated Press, is of a mountaintop coal mining site at Kayford Mountain in West Virginia. Kennedy, who is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, writes of such ugliness: "Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water."

If you blow the top off a mountain in the Appalachians, you can expect to expose seams of coal for relatively easy — and cheap — removal. You might think the hard-hatted miners would love it, as a way of guaranteeing jobs. Not necessarily. "In 1966," Kennedy writes, "46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street."

Coal is presently crucial to electricity generation in the U.S. — click on the chart at right to enlarge it — as 48.9 percent of our electric power comes from coal. (The chart is from this Wikipedia article.)

Other sources say coal accounts for fully 50 percent of our electric power.

Coal is also much "dirtier" than other fossil fuels, in terms of how much carbon the burning of it puts in the atmosphere. According to this web article:

Coal is responsible for nearly 40% of America’s CO2 emissions. (Here it’s interesting to remember that the U.S. emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases). That’s because over 50% of our electricity comes from coal. Over half! And because — joule for joule — coal emits the most carbon of any fossil fuel.

We hear so much about our dependence on foreign oil that the fact that, in the chart above, petroleum accounts for just 1.6 percent of U.S. electricity generation may come as a jolt. To be sure, oil as the source of gasoline and diesel fuel is a huge part of our transportation budget. As the source of home heating oil, it looms large in many household budgets. But if we stopped worrying so much about oil and replaced the burning of coal, as a way of generating electricity, with wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass, nuclear, and other non-polluting sources of renewable energy, our greenhouse gas emissions would drop by some 27 percent (see Coal and Climate Change Facts from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change), and the entire world's greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 25 percent of that.

25 percent of 27 percent equals 6 3/4 percent, which is roughly equal to 1/15. We could lower world greenhouse gas emissions by one-fifteenth — and save untold mountaintops — if America just stopped burning coal!

Selling the Public on Cap and Trade

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, recently passed the House of Representatives by a razor thin margin of 219-212, with 44 Democrats voting against and eight Republicans voting for (see In Close Vote, House Passes Climate Bill: Measure Aims to Change Energy Use). The bill for the first time would limit U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and put a price tag on the ever-shrinking amounts of CO2, etc., that would continue to be emitted. If not for the eight GOP defectors who crossed the aisle to vote for it, the bill would have been doomed to fail.

Now it's up to the Senate to take up its version later this year. Pundits say it will be hard to find the necessary 60 senators to break a GOP filibuster and allow a cap-and-trade bill to come to a floor vote. With yesterday's belated certification of Al Franken as U.S. Senator from Minnesota, the Democrats now have a nominal head count of 60, including two independents who caucus with them. But, says The Washington Post's article:

Efforts to maintain party unity are also hampered by the presence of a clutch of centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), who have said they oppose the public option in health-care reform legislation that would seek to create a government program to compete with private insurers. A number of Senate Democrats representing states that rely heavily on manufacturing jobs have also expressed concern about the climate-change bill, another Obama priority, that passed the House last week.

In other words, there are a handful of Senate Democrats who, as 44 of their House colleagues did on Waxman-Markey, are apt to stray off the reservation on hot-button issues like health care and clean energy.


With respect to energy in particular, why are so many Americans — especially in states that produce coal, depend heavily on agriculture, and/or are parts of the so-called Rust Belt — so averse to shifting to clean energy?

Sure, at first glance it seems as if clean energy endangers their livelihoods — and to a certain extent, some livelihoods are impacted. But clearly, say some of its supporters, "cap and trade" hasn't been sold properly.

Greenwire, a part of the Scientific American web site, has it that (see How To Sell Cap and Trade):

The American public is eager for dramatic change in U.S. energy policy, but Democratic efforts to sell their agenda on energy and climate change aren't reaching voters ... while few voters expect a national energy overhaul to be inexpensive, Democrats are susceptible to Republican arguments that energy proposals will be overly burdensome.

A strategy memo from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the think tank Third Way that the Greenwire story refers to (PDF here) wants the slogan "Get America running on clean energy" to replace talk about "green jobs" and "cap and trade" as the mantra of the clean-energy movement.

The "cap and trade" lingo — "cap" in particular — is "a problem since voters are focusing on policies that promote economic expansion, not limit it":

• "By focusing on capping something, rather than creating something," the memo warns, "we steer the debate down a dead end."
• Global warming, says the memo, is too distant and abstruse a threat to compel voter concern in this time of deep recession.
• Reducing dependence on foreign energy sources is fine, per the memo, but full-scale "energy independence" is seen as a vain hope by the voters and should be jettisoned as a talking point by politicians and policy wonks.

Also:

The [Republican] charge that Democrats' energy plans will cost families an average of $3,000 a year — a number commonly circulated by opponents of the climate legislation — has "resonance and is memorable," the memo warns. Thus the best way to counter that claim is to provide voters with another dollar figure, especially because they have shown willingness to support some cost increases.

And:

"While knowledge about energy is low, the public is convinced there are better ways to make and use energy than those we use currently," says the memo. "And they believe that moving to clean energy will help our economy — and that while change could be difficult, we should act now regardless of the recession."

The memo goes on to recommend changes in the rhetoric used to promote clean energy. That's good, as far as it goes ... but I believe the bigger problem runs deeper than tactics and rhetoric.

The bigger problem transcends our "knowledge about energy," or lack thereof. It involves more than cold calculations, as in "[Republicans claim] Democrats' energy plans will cost families an average of $3,000 a year" — which, as I said in Climate Bill to Cost Average Consumer $175 a Year, isn't even true.

Tactics, rhetoric, abstract knowledge, the so-called facts, mere calculations: they all appeal to the left brain. We've got to get the right brain involved.

The right side of the brain is the seat of intuition, as opposed to linear reasoning; responding to prosody and intonation, as opposed to literal language; holistic, as opposed to analytical, thought; believing in back-of-the-envelope computations, as opposed to exact calculations. Popular usage has it that "right-brained people" are more responsive to poetic and even mythological forms of expression than "left-brained people" are. And so on.

Though scientists tell us that such ideas are exaggerated and we all use both sides of the brain, all the time, the popular caricature is useful. I'd say we need a more right-brained approach to green advocacy.

It's not just about Waxman-Markey as a "jobs bill" — or its sending American jobs to China, depending on who you ask.

It's not just about "jumpstarting a clean-energy economy" — or, say its opponents, deepening the recession.

It's not just about redistributing the money that polluters will pay to get their carbon-emission rights, so that the pain of cap and trade is equitably shared — or, say opponents, imposing a "light-switch tax" that will drain our pocketbooks to no good end.


It's really about protecting Mother Earth from insult and harm, about saving the planet and all its wonders, about who we are and how we see ourselves — about how we re-sacralize the earth.

It's all about the myths we live by. We think we have enlightened ourselves by killing off myth, but myth guru Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth that we still need a mythos to ground us in what is or ought to be sacred.

Ancient myths welded people together into a community, but at the same time placed boundaries between rival communities. Today, the world is a global village. "The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet — and we don't have such a mythology," said Campbell. Today, we need to realize the deep truth of the image of "the whole planet as an organism."

Our early ancestors didn't know they lived on a big sphere orbiting the sun, but they knew they depended totally on the earth as they understood it; their myths and their hero narratives told them of this. When we moderns killed myths and denatured heroes, we may have set up the very planet that sustains us for a death sentence.

The way to get people to buy into cap and trade and other such policy-wonkery is to give them new myths, hero stories, and other such conveyors of sacred truth to their "right brains" — how about using science fiction, children's literature, and comic books for this? — thus to convince them that bills like Waxman-Markey are a needed down payment on unplugging our mother (planet)'s electric chair.