The Keystone XL Illusion

The New York Times    January 17, 2015    JOE NOCERA

Greg Rickford, Canada's minister of natural resources, was in the United States most of this past week, on a trip that didn't get much attention in the media with so much bigger news swirling about. So let me fill you in.

Rickford spent the first two days of his trip in Washington, where of course debate over the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is underway in earnest in the new Republican-led Senate. The Republican-led House, meanwhile, has already passed a bill giving the go-ahead to the pipeline, which, if it's ever built, will transport heavy crude from the tar sands of Alberta to American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. And of course President Obama has threatened to veto any such bill, should one land on his desk.

In Washington, Rickford met with his Obama administration counterpart, Ernest Moniz, the secretary of energy. Although the Keystone pipeline was not on the agenda, the two men talked about it anyway. Rickford paid a visit to Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, who strongly supports the Keystone pipeline. (In addition to the Alberta crude, the pipeline would transport shale oil from North Dakota.)

He met with State Department officials to get a Keystone update; because the pipeline would cross the U.S.-Canada border, the department has to do a review, which it has done several times, always coming down in favor of the project. In several speeches, Rickford talked up the close energy relationship between the United States and Canada, noting that Canada sends three million barrels per day to America -- more than Venezuela and Saudi Arabia combined. He mentioned Canada's new pipeline safety law. He said he thought the Keystone XL pipeline should be approved, which is essentially what Canadian officials have been saying for the past six years.

Then on Wednesday, Rickford went to Texas for two days. This is the part of his trip that really caught my attention. His main focus in Texas was on two new Canadian-controlled pipelines that became operational in mid-December. One is called the Flanagan South pipeline, which cost $2.8 billion. It covers nearly 600 miles, from Pontiac, Ill., to Cushing, Okla. The other pipeline, called the Seaway Twin, runs an additional 500 miles, from Cushing to Freeport, Tex., where the refineries are. It cost $1.2 billion. Guess where some of the oil that is going to run through those pipelines is coming from? Yep -- the tar sands of Alberta.

If you are wondering why the environmental community hasn't been chaining itself to the White House fence to protest these two new pipelines, the way it has with Keystone, the answer is that neither of these pipelines crosses the Canadian border, so they don't require the same complicated approval process that Keystone requires. (The Flanagan South line will connect with a pipeline that already crosses the border.) More to the point, perhaps, they were never the symbol that the high-profile Keystone XL became, so that even the approvals they did require never aroused the same attention from environmentalists.

Yet these new pipelines are going to be carrying some 200,000 barrels per day of the heavy crude mined from the tar sands. True, that is only a third of what the Keystone XL would be able to deliver, but it essentially helps double the amount of tar sands oil that can be exported to the United States. In addition, there will be expanded rail capacity for Alberta's oil, which is a far more dangerous way to move it than a state-of-the-art pipeline.

The point is: With or without Keystone, Canada's tar sands oil is coming to the United States. One of the stated reasons that environmental activists wanted to prevent Keystone from being built was that doing so would force Canada to stop mining the oil. Without Keystone, it was said, Canada would have no means to export it. But that has never been a particularly plausible argument. Even before the opening of these two new pipelines, tar sands oil was coming to the United States, primarily by rail. Indeed, the only thing that can slow it down now is the rapid drop in the price of oil, which is likely to make expensive tar sands crude unprofitable.

Even as the Keystone debate reaches its current crescendo, all that is left, really, is the symbolism. The Republican right claims that Keystone will create jobs. It won't, not to any significant degree. The Democratic left says that the oil Keystone will bring to the Gulf is so dirty, so carbon laden, that it will wreak havoc on the climate. It won't do that either. If the president ultimately decides not to approve Keystone, he will do so knowing full well that he has not stopped the tar sands oil in any meaningful way.

To expect another outcome is, well, a pipe dream. It always was.

The Scary Hidden Stressor - "The Arab Spring and Climate Change"

March 2, 2013

The Scary Hidden Stressor

By Thomas L. Friedman

IN her introduction to a compelling new study, “The Arab Spring and Climate Change,” released Thursday, the Princeton scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter notes that crime shows often rely on the concept of a “stressor.” A stressor, she explains, is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment that interacts with a complicated psychological profile in a way that leads a previously quiescent person to become violent.” The stressor is never the only explanation for the crime, but it is inevitably an important factor in a complex set of variables that lead to a disaster. “The Arab Spring and Climate Change” doesn’t claim that climate change caused the recent wave of Arab revolutions, but, taken together, the essays make a strong case that the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more difficult.

Jointly produced by the Center for American Progress, the Stimson Center and the Center for Climate and Security, this collection of essays opens with the Oxford University geographer Troy Sternberg, who demonstrates how in 2010-11, in tandem with the Arab awakenings, “a once-in-a-century winter drought in China” — combined, at the same time, with record-breaking heat waves or floods in other key wheat-growing countries (Ukraine, Russia, Canada and Australia) — “contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices” in wheat-importing states, most of which are in the Arab world.

Only a small fraction — 6 percent to 18 percent — of annual global wheat production is traded across borders, explained Sternberg, “so any decrease in world supply contributes to a sharp rise in wheat prices and has a serious economic impact in countries such as Egypt, the largest wheat importer in the world.”

The numbers tell the story: “Bread provides one-third of the caloric intake in Egypt, a country where 38 percent of income is spent on food,” notes Sternberg. “The doubling of global wheat prices — from $157/metric ton in June 2010 to $326/metric ton in February 2011 — thus significantly impacted the country’s food supply and availability.” Global food prices peaked at an all-time high in March 2011, shortly after President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt.

Consider this: The world’s top nine wheat-importers are in the Middle East: “Seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011,” said Sternberg. “Households in the countries that experience political unrest spend, on average, more than 35 percent of their income on food supplies,” compared with less than 10 percent in developed countries.

Everything is linked: Chinese drought and Russian bushfires produced wheat shortages leading to higher bread prices fueling protests in Tahrir Square. Sternberg calls it the globalization of “hazard.”

Ditto in Syria and Libya. In their essay, the study’s co-editors, Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, note that from 2006 to 2011, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced the worst drought ever recorded there — at a time when Syria’s population was exploding and its corrupt and inefficient regime was proving incapable of managing the stress.

In 2009, they noted, the U.N. and other international agencies reported that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result of the great drought, which led to “a massive exodus of farmers, herders, and agriculturally dependent rural families from the Syrian countryside to the cities,” fueling unrest. The future does not look much brighter. “On a scale of wetness conditions,” Femia and Werrell note, “ ‘where a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought,’ a 2010 report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that Syria and its neighbors face projected readings of -8 to -15 as a result of climatic changes in the next 25 years.” Similar trends, they note, are true for Libya, whose “primary source of water is a finite cache of fossilized groundwater, which already has been severely stressed while coastal aquifers have been progressively invaded by seawater.”

Scientists like to say that, when it comes to climate change, we need to manage what is unavoidable and avoid what is unmanageable. That requires collective action globally to mitigate as much climate change as we can and the building of resilient states locally to adapt to what we can’t mitigate. The Arab world is doing the opposite. Arab states as a group are the biggest lobbyists against efforts to reduce oil and fuel subsidies. According to the International Monetary Fund, as much as one-fifth of some Arab state budgets go to subsidizing gasoline and cooking fuel — more than $200 billion a year in the Arab world as a whole — rather than into spending on health and education. Meanwhile, locally, Arab states are being made less resilient by the tribalism and sectarianism that are eating away at their democratic revolutions.

As Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo of the International Institute for Strategic Studies conclude in their essay, “fledgling democracies with weak institutions might find it even harder to deal with the root problems than the regimes they replace, and they may be more vulnerable to further unrest as a result.” Yikes.

Jeremy Rifkin: Creating a New Economic Paradigm (Ceres Conference 2012)

Dear Friends,

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote lecture at the Ceres Conference in Boston, MA. Please see the link below to view my talk: 

Jeremy Rifkin, author and president at the Foundation on Economic Trends delivered an insightful talk about our economic and environmental future and what he calls, the Third Industrial Revolution. Rifkin spoke at the annual Ceres Conference held April…

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Jeremy Rifkin: "The Third Industrial Revolution" - The Diane Rehm Show ; Paul Krugman

Jeremy Rifkin: "The Third Industrial Revolution"

Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - 11:06 a.m. The Diane Rehm Show 

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DO –

why the third industrial revolution ? See  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27krugman.html  Fuels on the Hill, PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/opinion/21krugman.html  Running Out of Planet to Exploit, PAUL KRUGMAN

why Germany is way ahead of other states, including the US, in this game plan ? See

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/opinion/19krugman.html Stranded in Suburbia, PAUL KRUGMAN

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MS. DIANE REHM

Jeremy Rifkin argues we're missing the real threat to the world economy. He's a best-selling author. He's advisor to the European Union on climate change, and energy security. In a new book titled "The Third Industrial Revolution," he says the global economy will face more meltdowns followed by shorter and weaker recoveries as long as it relies on fossil fuels. He joins me in the studio to describe a new economic development plan based on the merger of internet technology and renewable energy.  

MR. JEREMY RIFKIN11:08:23

Nice to be here, Diane, thank you.

You're talking about the democratization of energy. What do you mean?

We have been living under two industrial revolutions, the first in the 19th century, the second in the 20th century. And, you know, the great economic changes in history as you said leading into the show occur when new energy revolutions converge with communication revolutions. When they come together, it changes the whole way we live.

In the 19th century, print technology became very cheap. We introduced public schools. We created a mass workforce with the literacy skills to organize the complexities of a coal and steam-powered revolution. In the 20th century, the telephone was absolutely essential, and radio and television later to become the communication medium to organize a very complex auto oil and suburban age.

Those two industrial revolutions provide us a little bit of a framework of the problem we face now, and if I may, let me just spend a little moment on the crisis.

We've missed the real crisis here. The real economic crisis occurred in July 2008. When oil hit $147 a barrel that July, you remember what happened.

Prices went through the roof for every other product, pesticides, fertilizers, construction materials, pharmaceutical products, synthetic fiber, power, transport, heat and light, because our whole civilization is either made out of and/or moved by fossil fuel. So when the price of oil starts to go over 80 a barrel, all the other prices go up on the supply chain, and at 147 a barrel in July 2008, people stopped buying.

The prices were through the roof, and the whole engine of the global economy shut down. What I'm suggesting, that was the economic earthquake.  The collapse of the financial market 60 days later, that was the aftershock.

We're not going to the crisis. And the reason this is happening, Diane, and it's really peaked globalization.  At least in the business communication, we now know the outer limits of how far we can actually globalize this economy based on fossil fuels.  It's about 150 a barrel and we'll hit the wall. The reason is something called peak oil per capita, which is related to global peak oil production, but a little bit different.

Peak oil per capita occurred in 1979, and there's no controversy about this.  If we had distributed all the crude oil that we had at that point to everyone alive on the earth, that's the most each person could have if we shared it.  Of course, we found more oil since then, but population rose quicker. So if we distributed all the oil we have to 6.8 billion people, there's simply less to go around.

So when China and India made a bid in the 1990s that at any 10, 12 percent growth rate to bring a third of the human race into the game, the demand pressure against the supply of crude oil was overwhelming, and we bottomed out at 150 a barrel, and here's the proof this morning. You remember after the crisis in 2008, the economy stopped and oil went down to $30 a barrel because there was no economic activity.

In 2010, we started to replenish inventory around the world. We started to grow again. We tried to turn back the engine on and what happened? Oil shot from 30 up to 100 a barrel.

It's 106, crude oil today, and what's happening? Once again, all the prices are going up for everything else and purchasing power is plummeting and the engine is shutting off again. So here's the message.

Every time we try to regrow the economy at the same rate we were growing before July 2008, we will see this terrible, terrible attempt to rejuvenate it, and within three-year cycles, every time we try to rejuvenate it, oil prices go up, all the other prices go up, purchasing power goes down, we collapse.

So we're in a very dangerous period over the next 30 years of growth and collapse, growth and collapse. This is an end game, so we really need to address this and figure out how we move to a new energy regime and new economic paradigm.

Again, it's based on the premise that the great revolutions occur when communication revolutions emerge to actually organize the complexity of new energy regimes. You know we've had this very powerful Internet communication revolution, Diane, in the last 15 years. And what's so interesting for me as an older person, is I grew up on centralized electricity communication top down.

What's interesting about the Internet is it's distributed and collaborative in nature, and the power is lateral, which sounds like an oxymoron, lateral power, but -- because we think of power as pyramidical. But a later power suggests side by side power.  What we're beginning to see in Europe in the last 24 months is emerging of this very powerful communication medium, the Internet, which is distributed in collaborative with a new energy regime, renewable energies, which by nature are distributed in collaborative.

So when distributed Internet communication starts to organize distributed energies, we have a very powerful third industrial revolution that could change everything, and here are the five pillars as we've laid them out. This is the formal plan of the European Union. I was privileged to develop the plan, it was endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007, Germany is leading by far in this plan, the leading exporting power in the world, and here are the five pillars quickly.

Pillar one - the EU is committed to 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. That's a mandate. Every one of the 27 states has to fulfill that.  That's a third of the electricity of Europe has to be green by 2020.  Pillar two, and this is an interesting one, how do we collect these distributed renewable energies, because the sun and the wind and the geothermal heat and the garbage and the ocean tides and forestry waste, they're found everywhere.

You can find some renewable energy in every square inch of the world. So how do we collect them? This got us to pillar two, and our first idea in Europe was okay, let's go to the Mediterranean, they've got a lot of sun. The Irish have the wind, the Norwegians have the hydro, centralize it and put it in a high voltage line and ship it out. Now, we're smiling now because we were thinking 20th century energies which are centralized because they're only found in a few places like coal, oil, gas, and uranium. Old ways of thinking

And we began to ask a question two years -- no, four years ago, that seems ridiculously simply now. If renewable energies are found in every square inch of the world in some frequency or proportion, why would we only collect them in a few central points?

Big solar parks, big wind parks, geothermal parks. We don't oppose that. They're essential, but not sufficient, and they're a small part of this third industrial revolution. So pillar two lead us to buildings. The number one user of energy in the world is buildings. The number one cause of climate change is buildings. By the way, I should say, Diane, I always feel I need to, the number two cause of climate change is beef production and consumption, and related animal husbandry. Nobody mentions it. Number three is transport. So in EU, we have 191 million buildings there. The goal is to convert every (building) single office, home, and factory into your own micro power plant over the next 30 years so that you collect the sun on the roof, the wind off the side walls, the heat under the ground, et cetera.

But who's going to pay for that?

Germany has an interesting plan, because Germany is way ahead of the game here, and pillar one they just reached last month, 20 percent renewable energy.  Ten years ahead of time, and they're heading to 35 percent renewable for electricity in nine more years.

Here's the way they did it. They put in feed in tariff, which means you get premium -- if you convert your facility to renewable energy, and you want to sell your energy back to the grid, you get a higher price than the normal energy.  It's paid for in this way.

The electricity bill is raised just slightly, so small you don't even notice it, but then the money that's available is used for early adopters to put solar on their roof or winds next to the building, et cetera.

And so all over Germany, and now across Europe, buildings are being converted. The new buildings, Diane, are actually positive power. They create so much energy that they can use it and surplus back to the grid. Olivia (word?) Construction has a beautiful office complex in Paris, just went up next to the OECD headquarters. It's positive power.

Pillar two jump starts the European economy, that's the idea. Millions and millions and millions of jobs. Thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises have to convert 190 million buildings to power plants over the next 40 years. So I think, Diane, the best way for the listeners to think of it is, think mainframe computers 1970s, now you have your own desktop.  Think centralized power in the 20th century, now you have your own power.

Pillar three, that's the tough one, storage. The sun isn't always shining in Germany, or in Europe, or here, and the wind isn't always blowing when you need the electricity. These are intermittent energies, so we have to store them. So the EU has committed to all the storage technologies, batteries, flywheels, capacitors, water pumping, but we're putting the big Euros into hydrogen.

Eight billion Euro commitment of public/private funds in the next few years, because, you know, hydrogen is the basic element of the universe. It's the stuff of the stars. It carries other energy. It's modular so you can use it for small homes and big factories. So here's how it works. You put photovoltaic solar panels on your roof, you generate electricity.

If you have some electricity you don't need for the moment, you put the electricity in the water. Hydrogen bubbles out of the water into a tank. It's real simple. When the sun isn't shining on your roof, you turn it and the hydrogen goes from the tank back to electricity. A very small thermodynamic loss.

All right. Pillar one, renewable energy. Pillar two, your buildings become your own power plants. Pillar three, you have to store it with hydrogen.  And then Pillar four, that's the most interesting. This is where the internet communication revolution completely merges with new distributing energies to create a nervous system, an infrastructure for a new economic paradigm.

We actually use off-the-shelf internet technology and convert the power lines of the United States, Europe and the world, the transmissions lines into an energy internet that acts exactly like the internet. So when millions and millions of buildings are collecting their own green energy on site, storing it in hydrogen like you store digital in media, if you don't need some of that electricity, the software can connect you and you can share it across entire continents. Just like we now produce our own information, store it in digital and share it online.

And it's interesting, in Germany, they have six test sites that have been set up by the federal government and they are actually testing the most interesting things. They're connecting every appliance -- every appliance to the transmission central grid -- to the distributed grid. So we will know what every washing machine is doing across an entire region, every thermostat, every air conditioner. So if there's too much demand for energy and the price is going up, the software can direct a million washing machines to say, forget the extra rinse. If you, the consumer, bought that particular program you'll get a credit and a check from the utility company.

They're even testing weather conditions on the software so each homeowner or business will know moment to moment the change in weather conditions and how that would affect how they use their energy.  And you'll have a dial that will tell you the price of electricity moment to moment so that your software can tell you when to get off the grid, sell back to the grid, et cetera. It's just beginning, just beginning.

Pillar five is electric plug-in transport.  The electric vehicles came out this year. Fuel cell hydrogen vehicles are coming out -- this is a done deal -- in mass production by Daimler, General Motors and the other car companies in 2014.  So you'll be able to plug your vehicles in anywhere on the grid, get green electricity. Then anywhere you travel, you can connect up to a plug, parking garages, whatever, and either get green electricity from the grid or if your computer says sell 'cause the price is right, you can sell yours back.

So Diane, these five pillars together is a -- they are a new technology platform. They're the infrastructure we keep talking about in America. We keep saying we need infrastructure, infrastructure. But the key is not to mend the old 20th Century infrastructure alone because those energies and technologies are pretty well exhausted, but to create the new infrastructure for a 21st Century third industrial revolution.

What happens to nuclear power in all of this?

I've been advising the EU for a long time and the chancellor of Germany -- after Fukushima, I got a call from the chancellor's office saying would I join Chancellor Merkel in September to talk about how we grow a sustainable economy in the 21st Century. And Germany is certainly leading in all these five pillars.

I think nuclear's -- it's really over.  I think Fukushima was just the last point of departure. I notice that this week Siemens, the great German company, announced they're out of nuclear power.

Let me give you the business reason why it's over. And people can argue about the ideological reasons. Nuclear was dead until the 19 -- in the 1980s because of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It's come back in the 1990s, was at -- least nuclear is clean. It doesn't emit CO2.  It can play a role in averting climate change. That was the whole rationale for its comeback.

(1), The problem is this. There's about 400 nuclear power plants in the world. They're very old. They only make up 6 percent of our energy mix, that's all. But our scientific community says to have a minimum impact on climate change, minimum, you'd have to have 20 percent nuclear in the mix of energy. That means you'd have to have 4,000 nuclear power plants. That means you have to replace the existing 400 and build three nuclear power plants every 30 days for the next 60 years. That's not going to happen.

(2),  the second problem is we simply don't know how to get rid of the nuclear waste.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but we spent $8 billion to build that failsafe vault at Yuka Mountain to put the nuclear material in. We can't open it up because it's already leaking.  

(3),  Number three, uranium costs go up right now with the existing power plants. We could recycle the uranium to plutonium like the French want to do, but then we've got problems with security issues around the world.

(4),  And here's the final thing your listeners should know. We don't have the water.  Forty percent of all the water consumed in France last year went to cooling nuclear reactors.  And when it comes back, the water's heated and it's dehydrating eco systems for agriculture.  So from a business point of view, I'd be surprised if we build more than 50 nuclear power plants. I think the old ones are going to go. I just don't think it's part of the equation.

All right. So in the midst of all this planning for the future you have oil companies and gas companies pushing for new exploration. What do you say to them?

It's kind of sad. In the opening chapter of the "Third Industrial Revolution" I quote a petroleum institute study because, you know, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and others are saying drill, drill, drill as if that's going to get us out of the crisis.

the petroleum institute did a study and showed that if we opened up every potential oil reservoir that we have, the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, the east and west coast to complete drilling, and this is the petroleum institute that represents the industry, we might be able to get 10 percent more oil out of the ground. That's infinitesimal in 20 years from now in a global aggregated market. So...

And what about gas fracking?

Gas fracking is problematic, too. Of course, remember, there's CO2 emissions there.  Secondly, there is a lot of potential gas, but the environmental consequences are potentially enormous.  That's why France, which is very, very fastidious about its power, has outlawed fracking already. And there's a big global discussion going with it.

You know, Diane, there's lots of other fossil fuels.  We have tar sands from Canada. And the government here in Washington has to decide whether that pipeline should send that tar sand down to Houston. We have heavy oil in Venezuela.  We have coal deposits around the world, but they're dirtier. They emit more CO2. They bring us into climate change even quicker. So we're trapped.

On the one hand, we have a dying fossil fuel second industrial revolution. And every time we try to re-grow it, it's going to collapse because of the price of oil.  On the other hand, we have the entropy bill for the industrial aid, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere, which is now affecting agriculture and infrastructure.  So we're stuck with this, but we have to find a way to make sure the old system doesn't collapse, keep it on life support. But we have to vest our funds, our knowhow, our talent into laying down this five-pillar infrastructure for a third industrial revolution to grow millions of jobs, create a new business model and make it sustainable.

But you've got lobbyists, members of congress all locked in to that second industrial revolution with fossil fuels as its basis.

That's true and the energy industry's a very powerful lobby in Washington. They received, even today in their sunset period, they're receiving tens of billions of dollars of subsidies every year. But you know what? I think we have a more powerful lobby here, not in the traditional sense.  But when you take a look at these five pillars the industries that are represented are pretty impressive. It's the renewable energy industry. But the construction industry, the real estate industry, the IT industry, the logistics and transport industries.

And so when we begin to look at the possibilities of taking a stagnant American economy and laying down this new infrastructure, we're talking about thousands of new businesses and millions of new jobs to lay down the infrastructure itself. And it starts immediately. As soon as you commit yourself to this revolution in each city, in each state and begin to create public private partnerships to do this, the jobs start right away at day one.

So we hear President Obama talking about the prospect of a green economy and how it could create new business and jobs. So why are you critical of his efforts?

we looked at him as a transitional president to a new generation, the internet president. And he said the worst thing is losing his Blackberry. So I assumed when he came into office that he would understand the potential of joining internet communication to organize distributed renewable energy.

The problem with the Obama Administration is not the will. They do want to have a green economy. And to be fair, this administration has spent billions and billions of dollars in introducing various technologies and initiatives. But he doesn't have a narrative. He doesn't have a game plan. There isn't a coherent cohesive roadmap on how you do this.

So when he introduces his green economy, it's all a hodgepodge of individual projects that seemingly don't tie in, a battery factory over here, an electric car over here, a solar factory over there. And what he hasn't done is put these disparate parts into a comprehensive story that tells us about a third industrial revolution. He doesn't have these five pillars. And if you don't put them together, Diane, you can't create the new economic paradigm we're talking about.

If you've been meeting with Angela Merkel, why haven't you met with President Obama?

Well, that's a good question. In the book, there's a little chapter there in my discussions early on with some members of the congress over the years. And certainly they're aware of what we're doing in the European Union. But it hasn't blown back here in any significant way. But I think it's going to open up really in a major way in the next 24 months. You're going to see developments in Texas, California's already moving along, and northeast and other parts of the country.

Let me give you one example. When we first introduced this into Europe, the power and utility companies weren't very thrilled because they're kind of attached to the big energy companies. And they're saying, well, wait a minute. We're going to have to give up controlling energy and sell less electrons? This doesn't make sense. Then we began to introduce a new business model to the power and utility companies on how they make more money in shifting to this third industrial revolution.

I said, get used to it. In the future, millions of people in homes, offices and factories are going to produce their own energy. The new technology, solar, wind, geothermal, they're getting cheaper and cheaper. And they're going to follow the same line that the cell phones and computers did, going from very expensive to so cheap you can give them away. And once that technology becomes cheaper and cheaper to collect the energies -- the energies themselves are free, Diane. It's the wind, the sun, the heat under your ground, the garbage you collect, so in the future, millions of people are going to really provide their own energy.

What's the role of the utility companies? They'll be able to run the energy internets, 'cause that's technical. And the way they're going to make money is they're going to do the IBM shuffle.  You remember IBM was in trouble in the '90s. They were making no money selling computers.  So they decided that they had to rethink their business. And they came up with the idea that their real business is managing information.  So now every company in the world has a chief information officer.

The power and utility companies' new business is to set up relationships with thousands of corporate clients and homeowners to manage their energy flows, to keep their energy costs down and their productivity up. And here's the key for anyone in the business community listening to this. The key to survival in the next 30 years is not labor costs, it's energy costs to the extent that any business can keep its energy costs low, its productivity high and its margins there it survives. And the utility company can share those savings with the companies.

Diane, I think there's a generational problem here. The old guard in the business community, they think centralize, they think top down. The young generation in the business community and in the public thinks distributive and collaborative and lateral.  The music companies, they didn't understand distributed file sharing of music. They didn't understand it and then they went down in five years. They just tumbled. And the newspapers didn't understand the distributed computing power of a blogosphere. And now newspapers are hurriedly trying to create blogs.

But when the internet connects with energies and we create a democratization of energy, it's 100 times more powerful. Because then it means we begin to create all sorts of new business models and new ways of relating to each other.

The key is, how you get the loans. How do you finance getting a $30,000 photovoltaic on your roof? The way they do it in Europe is green loans. It's now starting in Italy and Germany. Now Italy has its problems with bureaucracy, so listen to this one, Diane. There are companies in Italy who have lined up the big national banks. You, a homeowner, can go and get a green loan. You sign a paper.

Sixty days later, the photovoltaic power plant's on your roof. Sixty days later. And the reason the banks are willing to finance this, because of the feed-in tariff, they know you're gonna save electricity on your bill and you're going to be able to pay as you say. And so they automatically know you're a good risk. In Germany they're starting green loans. In North America, only Ontario has the feed-in tariff.

Supreme Court Skeptical About Climate Change Suit

by NINA TOTENBERG

April 19, 2011

The politics of climate change hit the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday, illustrating the powerful and unpredictable role the court can play in protecting the health and safety of the nation.

Just four years ago, the justices repudiated the Bush administration and ruled 5-4 that the federal government has a duty to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But on Tuesday, the justices gave a chilly reception to state governments that are suing electric utilities over emissions that contribute to global warming.

Tuesday's case was first brought in 2004 by a coalition of states and environmental groups. They sued the nation's five largest public utilities — companies that together produce 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions annually. The states were seeking a court order to cap emissions. But for a variety of reasons, the lawsuit languished for five years. In the meantime, the Supreme Court ruled in a different case that the federal Environmental Protection Agency is required to regulate such emissions.

What's more, President Obama took office, and under his lead, the EPA announced plans to regulate where the Bush-era EPA had not. The states' case, however, trudged on in the lower courts, and in 2009, a federal appeals court in New York ruled it could go forward to trial.

At the time, in light of the Obama administration's effort to regulate greenhouse gases, the lower court ruling seemed little more than a footnote. But the utilities appealed to the Supreme Court, where, joined by the Obama administration, they contended that the states have no right to bring a lawsuit like this to enforce public health and safety.

'Everything Has Changed Again'

By Tuesday, when the case was finally argued in the Supreme Court, the political situation had once again flip-flopped. Now, experts like Richard Lazarus, director of the Georgetown University Supreme Court Institute, say the case looks like it could be a good deal more than a footnote.

"Everything has changed again," Lazarus says. "You have a Congress which is trying to undo everything. They're trying to rewind back to 2004."

Indeed, the newly Republican House of Representatives voted this year to strip the EPA of its rule-making authority on greenhouse gases. And while the recent budget compromise did not include that provision, Republicans and some Democrats are widely expected to push again for its enactment.

For this reason, New York Solicitor General Barbara Underwood pleaded with the Supreme Court justices Tuesday not to "close the courthouse doors" to the states.

She acknowledged that the states' lawsuit has reached the court at a "peculiar moment in time." The administration says it has already proposed regulating the same power plant emissions at issue in this case by May 2012. But Underwood (states (P)) maintained that it would be wrong to throw out the states' case on the basis of a (federal) regulatory regime "that is said to be imminent, not something that actually exists."

Until the EPA actually enacts a set of federal regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions, she said, the status quo is that the five utilities in this case are using old and dirty technology to emit 650 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year and that these emissions cause an increase in respiratory illness, a reduction in usable drinking water, a rise in sea levels, beach erosion and flooding.

The federal common law gives the states a remedy for pollution, she said, and it "cannot be" that the mere "promise" of a regulation from the federal government is enough to prevent the states from acting in court.

Justices Skeptical

Her argument met with deep skepticism from the justices across the ideological spectrum — from liberal to conservative.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Underwood that "Congress set up the EPA to promulgate standards for emissions," and "the relief you're seeking seems to me to set up a district judge ... as a kind of super-EPA."

Chief Justice John Roberts sounded a similar note, wondering "what factors go into the cost-benefit analysis" for a court to determine appropriate emissions levels, and whether there are economically viable options to reduce carbon emissions without increasing the cost of electricity to customers.

Underwood answered that the states have "alleged that this can be done without increasing the cost to consumers," and that these are facts that "can be proven or not proven at trial."

But Justice Elena Kagan responded that determining the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions "sounds like the paradigmatic thing that administrative agencies do rather than courts."

Yes, Underwood replied, but if there were no agency regulation, and someone was "shooting poison into the air in a way that injured people in another state," the law should give states a remedy in federal court.

A decision in the case is expected by summer

Droughts, Floods And Food

Droughts, Floods And Food The New York Times February 7, 2011 Monday

BYLINE: By PAUL KRUGMAN

We're in the midst of a global food crisis -- the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they're having a brutal impact on the world's poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn't so much why they're happening as why they're happening now. And there's little question that sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for popular rage.

So what's behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is ''blood on Bernanke's hands.'' Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of ''extortion and pillaging.''

But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we'd expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate -- which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes don't have much effect on how much people eat.

It's true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It's also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops -- as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that's about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what's behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we're seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Nina -- a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Nina events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that's not the whole story. Don't let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Nina was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world's land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it's hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

As always, you can't attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we're seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you'd expect from climate change.

The usual suspects will, of course, go wild over suggestions that global warming has something to do with the food crisis; those who insist that Ben Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be more or less the same people who insist that the scientific consensus on climate reflects a vast leftist conspiracy.

But the evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we're getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we'll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come.


LOAD-DATE: February 7, 2011

Winning & losing (mostly losing) in Cancun

http://intlawgrrls.blogspot.com/2010/12/winning-losing-mostly-losing-in-cancun.html

There is good news and bad news from theUN Climate Change Conference that just ended in Cancun, Mexico.

First the good news.
The conference produced some important steps forward:
► With one lone dissent, by Bolivia, the other 193 participants overwhelmingly endorsed the final agreement, which formalized the status of the Copenhagen Accord. That accord, about which IntLawGrrls posted here and here, thus has been officially integrated into the United Nations process.

► There was an agreement on preserving tropical forests (REDD+) that provides for compensation payments to tropical countries that reduce deforestation.

► There was also an agreement setting up a Green Climate Fund to provide financial assistance to help developing countries restrain their emissions and cope with the impacts of climate change.
These are important steps.

Given last year's failed Copenhagen meeting, expectations were very low for the Cancun meeting. So, the conference’s modest success was encouraging in that it restored faith in the possibilities of the multilateral United Nations process as a forum where climate progress can be made. Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa (right) earned wide praise for her transparent and deft handling of the negotiations.

Now for the bad news. . . .
The talks failed to produce any agreement ensuring reduced carbon emissions. Without drastic cuts in carbon emissions, the world will soon run out of time to avert catastrophic climate change.

The scientific evidence is clear — human activities linked to burning fossil fuel are increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The resultant buildup of carbon dioxide is likely to warm the planet by several degrees Centigrade in the next half-century. International efforts have identified keeping that warming below 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as the goal.
The effects of global warming are already clearly visible in the Arctic, wheredrastically reduced summer sea ice threatens the continued existence of ice-dependent animals like Pacific walrus and polar bears, whilemelting permafrost jeopardizes the safety and livelihoods of Arctic residents. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying at an alarming rate.
Extreme weather events around the world, including floods and droughts are a harbinger of things to come. As the planet warms and the climate changes, we can expect disease, species extinction, water shortages, rising sea levels, and the disappearance of small island states.

In short, climate change is likely to cause conflict and dislocations around the globe.

In the face of this looming catastrophe, we need bold action. What we got is at most a modest step forward.

The Cancun Agreement calls on countries to take “urgent action” to keep global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. It does not, however, specify what those actions should be. States have made no binding commitments to do anything. The Agreement does nothing to about the gaping chasm between the current voluntary emissions-reduction commitments that states have set for themselves under the Copenhagen Accord, and the kinds of reductions needed to meet this goal.

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists said it best:

World leaders must significantly raise their game if we're to meet the challenge of climate change. Time is running out, and the atmosphere doesn't negotiate with politicians.