Month: January 2015

Is a gasoline tax a carbon tax? Not quite, but more and more conservatives have been cracking the door to at least some kind of levy on fossil fuel usage.
There is, at least, a recognition that current gasoline taxes in the US have not kept up with the need for maintaining highway infrastructure. That much is undeniable.   Some are trying to thread the needle of raising a revenue without using the “T” word.

Reality check: In the absence of a formalized carbon tax, we will see more defacto “carbon taxes” in actions like popular resistance to the Keystone pipeline, and the new regulations on coal burning from the EPA.

NYTimes:

Gasoline prices have fallen more than 40 percent since the end of June thanks to the collapse of global oil prices. That makes this the perfect time for Congress to overcome its longstanding terror of offending the nation’s motorists and raise the tax on gasoline and diesel fuel. The results could only be beneficial: for the nation’s roads, bridges and transit systems, which badly need repair; for the budget; and, to the extent that higher taxes encourage greater fuel efficiency, for the climate.

The federal excise tax of 18.4 cents per gallon on gas and 24.4 cents on diesel has not been increased since 1993. That has severely shortchanged the Highway Trust Fund, which is expected to run out of money in May if Congress does not transfer more into it or raise fuel taxes. If the federal tax on gasoline had simply kept up with inflation, it would be 30 cents today.

There is little doubt that the nation’s road and transit systems could use more help. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave them a nearly failing grade of D in 2013; the state of bridges is somewhat better, earning a C-plus. The country’s inadequate road and transit systems cost it billions through increased delays, extra fuel costs and auto repair bills. Poor road conditions are also said to play a significant factor in about one-third of all traffic fatalities, or about 10,000 deaths a year.

Some lawmakers, including some Republicans, are concerned enough about these trends to discuss an increase in fuel taxes. Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, has proposed increasing the tax, and Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and a big supporter of the energy industry, has said he is willing to consider it. Some state leaders are also considering raising their own fuel taxes. Lawmakers in Michigan have put a gas tax increase on the ballot for a May election, and Iowa lawmakers are also talking about a higher tax.

Irwin Stelzer in the National Review, December 2014:

We have a unique opportunity to end the rancorous debate about climate change, a debate that is poisoning the air — the political air, that is — and inhibiting progress on two fronts: progress on addressing the possibility that we are on the road to a catastrophic warming of the globe, and progress on reforming our anti-growth tax structure, which is so inequitable that it is straining the public’s belief in the fairness of capitalism and what we like to call “the American Dream.” All we need do is stop pretending that the cost of carbon emissions is certainly zero, and that regulation provides a more efficient solution than the market.

Continue reading “Creeping Toward a Carbon Tax?”

Papal letter on climate change coming very soon.

Cruxnow:

ROME – Pope Francis leaves Monday for a week-long trip to Sri Lanka and the Philippines, the seventh foreign journey of his papacy and his second to Asia after visiting South Korea last August.

Like his recent appointment of 15 new voting-age cardinals, featuring 10 from outside the West, this trip cements Francis as the “Pope of a Global Village.”

Washington Post:

Ever since he was installed as the first pope named for the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi, Francis has called for greater attention to caring for God’s creation.Speculation has been mounting about how far Francis will take that call in his forthcoming encyclical on ecology: Environmentalists hope that the document, expected sometime this spring, will help jump-start stalled international efforts to curb climate change.

But those who reject scientific findings that climate change is man-made are already condemning the pope for taking up the issue at all.

Maureen Mullarkey of First Things, a conservative U.S. Catholic journal, wrote in a recent blog post that Francis is “imprudent” and “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.”

Reuters:

One theme of the Jan. 12-19 trip will be climate change. During his stay in the Philippines he will visit Tacloban, where Typhoon Haiyan killed 6,300 people in 2013.

Sri Lanka is among the Asian countries experts say will see sea level rises likely to displace people and adversely affect tourism and fisheries.

The Vatican says Francis, who is preparing an encyclical on the environment, will speak about the issue several times.

Continue reading “Pope to Bring Climate Message to Asia”

Little appreciated interactions between the biological world and the climatological world.

Elias Hinckley for The Energy Collective:

Saudi Arabia’s decision not to cut oil production, despite crashing prices, marks the beginning of an incredibly important change. There are near-term and obvious implications for oil markets and global economies. More important is the acknowledgement, demonstrated by the action of world’s most important oil producer, of the beginning of the end of the most prosperous period in human history – the age of oil.

In 2000, Sheikh Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:

“Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”

Fourteen years later, while Americans were eating or sleeping off their Thanksgiving meals, the twelve members of the Organization of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) failed to reach an agreement to cut production below the 30 million barrel per day target that was set in 2011.  This followed strenuous lobbying efforts by some of largest oil producing non-OPEC nations in the weeks leading up to the meeting.  This group even went so far as to make the highly unusual offer of agreeing to their own production cuts.

The ramifications of this decision across the globe, not just in energy markets, but politically, are already having consequences for the global landscape.  Lost in the effort to understand the vast implications is an even more important signal sent by Saudi Arabia, the owner of more than 16% of the world’s proved oil reserves, about its view of the future of fossil fuels.

Since its formal creation in 1960 the members of OPEC, and specifically Saudi Arabia (and in reality the Kingdom’s control over global oil markets is much larger than that 16% of reserves implies as its more than 260 billion barrels are among the easiest and cheapest to extract and before enhanced recovery techniques accounted for a much larger share of global reserves) have used excess oil production capacity to influence crude prices.  The primary role of OPEC has been to support price stability.  There are notable exceptions – like the 1973-1974 oil embargo and a period of excess supply that undermined prices and crippled the Soviet Union in the 1980s (though whether this was a defined strategy or serendipity remains in some question), but at its core the role of OPEC has been to control oil prices. As recent events show, OPEC’s role as the controller of crude oil pricing is coming to an abrupt end.

In acting as global swing producer, OPEC relied has heavily on Saudi Arabia, which can influence global prices by increasing or decreasing production to expand or reduce available global supply.  Saudi Arabia can do this not only because it controls an enormous portion of global reserves and production capacity, but does so with crude oil that is stunningly inexpensive to produce compared to the current global market.  A change, however, has occurred in Saudi Arabia’s fundamental strategic approach to the global oil market. And this new approach – to refuse to curtail production to support global prices – not only undermines OPECs pricing power, but also removes a vital subsidy for global oil producers provided by the Saudi’s longtime commitment to price support.

Understanding Why

The widely held conventional theory is that the Saudis want to shake the weak production out of the market.  This strategy would undermine the economic viability of a meaningful amount of global production.  The theory assumes that this can be done in some kind of orderly bring-down of prices where the Saudis can find an ideal price below the production cost of this marginal oil production but still high enough to maintain significant profits for the Kingdom while this market correction plays out. The assumption is that following the correction there will be a return to business as usual along with higher prices, but with Saudi Arabia commanding a relatively larger share of that market.   An alternative rationale is that Saudi Arabia is fighting an economic war with oil; a strategy designed to economically and in turn politically cripple rival producers Iran and Russia because the governments of these countries that depend on oil exports cannot withstand sustained low prices and will be significantly weakened.

While there may be some truth to both of these theories, the real motivation lies somewhere closer to Sheikh Yamani’s 2000 prediction.  Saudi Arabia has embarked on an absolute quest for dominant market share in the global oil market.  The near-term cost of grabbing that market share is immense, with the Saudis sacrificing potentially hundreds of billions of dollars if low prices persist.  In a world of endless consumption, this risk would be hard to justify merely in exchange for a temporary expansion of global market share – the current lost revenue would take years to recover with a marginally higher share of global supply.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: The Saudis, Stones, and the End of the Age of Oil”

Good discussion of the developing split in the US right wing on solar and renewable energy.

Physicist Richard Muller became a hero to the climate denial community a few years ago, after saying some pretty harsh things about climate science, and scientists.
He started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project to double check estimates of global warming and, in his mind, answer the criticisms of existing temperature reconstructions.  Not surprisingly to the mainstream community, he came up with the same answer as all other groups over the last 40 years. The planet is warming, and the only plausible explanation is increased greenhouse gases.

My friend Collin Maessen, author of the blog Real Skeptic, invited Dr. Muller to an interview at last month’s American Geophysical Union meeting, and I sat in.
Below, my piece explaining the kerfuffle.

Continue reading “Richard Muller: I Was Wrong on Global Warming”

Nothing, kinda.

Note the distribution of anomalous cold, and warmth. From the University of Maine Climate Re-analyzer.
A now-familiar pattern, – Eastern North America in deep freeze – unusually warm in the Arctic.

Accuweather:

As the latest blast of arctic air settles southward, many areas in the East will have their coldest day of the winter so far on Thursday.

Throughout the day Thursday, temperatures are forecast to remain below the freezing mark (32 degrees Fahrenheit) from Hatteras, North Carolina, to Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Little Rock, Arkansas. The cold will persist despite sunshine.

See today’s Jet Stream.

Flashback a year – I interviewed Jeff Masters and Jennifer Francis on the implications of Jet stream weirdness on wild winter weather – the Video that the National Journal called The One Video to Shut Down All Climate Change Deniers.

Meanwhile, as power generators struggle in brutal conditions, wind energy shines during these cold blustery times, keeping prices much lower than they would otherwise be.

American Wind Energy Association– January 7, 2015

As the Midwest faces extreme cold this week, wind energy is once again helping to save consumers money.

During the “polar vortex” deep freeze that occurred one year ago today, wind energy saved electricity users in the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes states at least $1 billion in just two days. That’s according to new analysis that the American Wind Energy Association released today.

Wind energy saved consumers money during this time because it is stably priced. During the polar vortex event, natural gas power plants had to buy fuel at prices dozens of times higher than normal, translating directly into dozens of times higher electricity prices. In contrast, wind energy’s “fuel” was stable at what it always costs: zero.

Continue reading “This Week’s Big Chill, Like Last Year, Softened by Wind Power”

If you have not viewed my video on the US/China climate deal, now is a good time.

Responding to Climate Change:

Coal demand in China dropped by around 2.3% in the first eleven months of 2014 compared to the same period in 2013, government figures show.

Production of coal in China declined by 2.1% and imports fell 9.0%. Meanwhile, China’s economy and production of electricity continued to grow.

The latest figures reinforce analysis by Greenpeace last October suggesting that Chinese coal consumption was going down.

This reflects “a rapid loss of market share for coal in 2014,” says Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

It has been edged out by alternative sources of electricity generation across China: wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass and natural gas.

IEEFA predicts that global coal demand will peak in 2016, mirroring China’s reduced reliance on the fuel.

Between 2000 and 2010, China’s demand for coal grew at an average of 9% per year. In 2013, the country was responsible for 47% of global consumption.

That has driven rising greenhouse gas emissions. China’s emissions per person are now greater than in the EU, although remain less than half than the US.

China is also investing heavily in renewable energy. In 2013, China installed 12GW of solar power, more than any other country.

Renew-Economy, Australia:

Chinese authorities are considering banning any new coal-to-gas projects in a move that could save emissions equivalent to Australia’s annual output.

Continue reading “China Pumps the Carbon Brakes”

I’ve posted on the recurring  commonality between racism, homophobia, misogyny, and climate denial.

It wasn’t too long ago that no less a Republican than Colin Powell warned his party to knock off the racism – which he referred to as “..a dark vein of intolerance”, and by-the-way, the climate denial as well. (you can skip ahead to 10 minutes to hear the warning about climate in the video above)

Following the recent revelations of Congressman Steve Scalise’ connections to white supremacists, and his boast that he is “David Duke without the baggage”, I poked around looking into his record on climate.  Actually, not much available, since neither “Climate’, nor even “Environment” make the cut as “Issues” on his website.

He does hate carbon taxes, though.

Is anyone surprised?

Congressman Steve Scalise website:

Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise’s anti-carbon tax amendment passed the House today by a vote of xxx to xxx.(sic)  Passage of the amendment marks the first time the House has gone on record opposing a carbon tax.

“President Obama’s plan to impose a tax on carbon would cause household electricity rates to skyrocket while destroying millions of American jobs,” Scalise said.  “The House sent a strong bipartisan message to President Obama that a tax on carbon would devastate our economy and he needs to drop any idea of imposing this kind of radical regulation.  The Obama Administration has used every trick in the book to implement its radical agenda through back door regulations.  This amendment is necessary to prohibit a carbon tax from being imposed by unelected bureaucrats on behalf of the President without legislative action and oversight.  We need to restore common-sense to Washington, and put an end to the liberal tax, regulate, and spend agenda that is destroying our middle class economy and reducing opportunities for the poor.”

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), a strong supporter of the Scalise amendment, noted that the amendment prevents the President and the EPA from bypassing Congress and imposing a devastating national energy tax that would affect every American.

“Struggling Americans who have been unable to find a job or have not seen their paychecks grow would be hit with this national energy tax every time they pay their utility bills or fill up their gas tanks or go to the grocery store,” Camp said.  “It would also be another tax on manufacturers and another increased cost of doing business imposed on middle-class families by the Obama administration.”