Climate policies are under political attack, both in California and nationally. The common argument is that these policies hurt the economy and destroy jobs, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
To assess those claims, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley Law and UC Berkeley’s Donald Vial Center on Employment in the Green Economy, working with the nonpartisan nonprofit Next 10, released today the first comprehensive cost/benefit study of climate policies in the San Joaquin Valley, one of California and the nation’s most economically and environmentally vulnerable regions.
The Economic Impacts of California’s Major Climate Programs On The San Joaquin Valley specifically looked at the impact of cap-and-trade, renewable energy, and energy efficiency programs in the eight-county region.
Why the Valley? Simply put, if climate policies can work in this region, they can work anywhere. In addition, the region’s elected leaders have asked questions about the impact of climate policies on their constituents, raising their concerns both in the state legislature and now nationally in the congress.
After examining the data and using advanced modeling software, we found that these three programs (among the most important in California’s suite of climate policies) brought over $13 billion in economic benefits to the Valley, mostly in renewable energy, and created over 31,000 jobs just in the renewable energy sector alone.
With the relatively new cap-and-trade program, we found that despite the compliance costs in the heavily industrial Valley, the benefits from state spending of the allowance auction proceeds outweighed those costs, particularly due to construction of high speed rail, which is funded in part with these funds. Furthermore, once the state disburses proceeds already collected from the auction, those benefits will increase greatly.
The overall benefits to the Valley are likely to continue and grow through 2030, as the state strives to meet its newly legislated climate goals for that year, via last year’s SB 32 (Pavley) and SB 350 (De Leon, 2015). Those efforts will require at least 50% renewables by 2030, a doubling of energy efficiency in existing buildings, and a more robust cap-and-trade program.
However, the benefits of cap-and-trade may cease if litigation over the auction mechanism (described by Ann Carlson at UCLA Law) is successful, as that mechanism allows the state to spend the proceeds that provide the benefits. Furthermore, federal action to undercut renewables and energy efficiency could also slow the gains.
Ultimately though, California is committed to its path and these programs through bipartisan legislation and regulations. Given the economic data we see in this study, its a path that the state should continue — and it can hopefully now inform federal debates about environmental policy and the need for job-producing programs.
You can access the full report via CLEE or Next 10’s websites, and check out partial media coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Central Valley Business Times, and Capitol Public Radio.
I’d like to think that most human brains can accept data and facts that may not comport with their individual, subjective experience. But that would probably require denying reality, in its own ironic way.
And so it is with climate science, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, as reported by E&E News [paywall]:
People who live in areas where high temperature records are broken are more likely to believe in global warming than those who do not. In areas that experienced record lows, people were less inclined to believe in the mainstream climate science that shows human activity is warming the Earth.
And hence we have a U.S. Senator throwing a snowball on the senate floor as evidence that global warming is a hoax.
Right before the November election, the Real News Network released a 30-minute documentary called “The Doubt Machine: Inside the Koch Brothers’ War on Climate Science.” You can watch it above. It describes how Big Oil, and in particular the billionaire oil tycoons Charles and David Koch, have used their vast wealth and clout to undermine efforts to combat climate change.
The documentary is narrated by Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson and directed by investigative journalist Bruce Livesey. It includes interviews with Jane Mayer, reporter with The New Yorker magazine and author of the book Dark Money; Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University science historian and co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University; and Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center, among others.
You can learn more about the document and The Real News Global Climate Change Bureau at this site. If you have time, it’s well worth watching the film.
Messaging on climate change can make all the difference. Conservatives tend to shut down mentally when it comes to discussing the science, mostly out of fear that it will be used as an excuse to over-regulate the economy.
But a new study suggests a method to getting the science across. Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany found that “phrasing pro-environmental messages in past-focused ways” worked better with self-described conservatives than messages that warned of future problems:
Their idea is that conservatives tend to take a brighter view of the past than other groups; thus, they might be receptive to arguments regarding global warming couched in more pro-past oriented ways, e.g., “Times were better when you could count on snow for Christmas in northern towns,” or “We planted bulbs in the garden on the same spring day every year.”
Yet another approach to reach this demographic, as I’ve chronicled before. Even thought support for climate action appears to be increasing, per a new poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, we’ll need all the help we can get from conservatives on this issue.
Los Angeles just overwhelmingly passed a transportation sales tax with over 70% support, yet policies that encourage automobile usage may undermine the transit and congestion relief goals of the measure. Chief among these driving incentives is the over-supply of parking.
Juan Matute of UCLA and Andrew M. Fraser and Mikhail Chester of Arizona State University make the case in the Los Angeles Times that the region should stop providing plentiful, cheap parking:
Decades of car-centric development in Los Angeles have resulted in more than three and a half parking spaces for every car in the county — nearly 19 million in total. These spaces — in residential garages and driveways, commercial parking structures and surface lots, and along streets — account for 200 square miles of real estate, much of it concentrated in dense, transit-friendly areas.
It is not a coincidence that where there’s the greatest concentration of parking spaces —the downtown core, Hollywood and the Wilshire corridor — traffic can be particularly bad. The abundance of cheap or free parking spaces encourages Angelenos to choose cars over other transportation options and creates localized congestion, which makes driving more painful for everyone.
Only by making parking more scarce will we give drivers a reason to switch to buses or subways — and achieve Measure M’s promise of reducing traffic.
There’s no question that policies that require abundant parking are counter-productive when it comes to discouraging driving and reducing infill opportunities, and this op-ed sums up the situation nicely. My only quibble is that it frames parking reform in the negative. The average Angeleno reading this will probably think: they’re going to make it harder and more expensive for me to park my car in order to force me onto a slow-moving bus.
But there are many positive benefits for Angelenos from reforming parking policies. First, it will (as the authors argue) decrease congestion for those times you need to drive. Second, it will allow more walkable, thriving neighborhoods to develop in all the space that otherwise would go to house cars in a parking spot. Three, it will save residents money on their homes and rents from not having to subsidize excessive parking. Fourth, it will encourage the development of much better, faster, and more reliable transit service as an alternative to being stuck in traffic.
The authors hint at these benefits in the end:
Angelenos like to think they have a right to cheap and easy mobility in the form of car ownership. We suggest that cheap and easy accessibility — to work, stores and fun — is the right we should strive to promote.
They also counter the usual argument that reduced parking spots will lead to parking nightmares in surrounding neighborhoods (residential parking permits can handle that issue).
Given the intense opposition to parking reform, advocates should focus on the positives for residents, rather than making the policy sound punitive to those who have few viable options other than driving. Because ultimately, the weight of the evidence is on the side of parking reform. And as this piece makes clear, advocates need to make the case that it’s the right thing to do.
I finally had a chance to watch actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood” documentary on climate change, and it’s a well-done and gripping look at what’s in store for our planet if we don’t act. The actor has made addressing the issue a top personal crusade, and it shows in this film.
The visuals are stunning and alarming, and he spends most of the film meeting with climate scientists, activists, and political and business leaders, from President Obama to Elon Musk to the Pope. His questions to Obama in particular seem even more poignant now that Trump, a climate science denier, is set to be the next president.
You won’t learn a lot about climate science as with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” but Before the Flood touches on the big picture science points and describes the most pressing impacts, including sea level rise, drought and crop failures, and a shutdown of the North Atlantic ocean current with continued ice melt.
In terms of solutions, the big ones preached by the film include eating less meat, buying fewer foods with palm oil, and supporting a carbon tax. Musk also has screen time discussing his battery factory and the need for energy storage. Other solutions are mentioned at the end, such as supporting renewables and keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
DiCaprio is an effective messenger on climate, despite the risk of another Hollywood actor taking on a cause: he’s pessimistic but honest about the situation and aware of his hypocrisy on the issue as a global jet-setter. He also narrates the film effectively, putting climate change in a near-biblical context without explicitly saying so.
The movie is free to watch on National Geographic television, Amazon, and other outlets, and it’s well worth your time.
California’s transportation infrastructure has been steadily declining for years, a victim of neglect from dwindling gas tax revenue. As a result, local governments have been raising their own taxes to fund needed repair and expansion. But these efforts can undermine environmental goals by encouraging driving and more sprawl.
As the state’s just-released 2030 draft scoping plan for greenhouse gas reduction makes clear [PDF], reducing vehicles miles traveled (VMT) is essential to achieve sustainable growth and emissions in California:
While the majority of the GHG reductions from the transportation sector in this Discussion Draft will come from technologies and low carbon fuels, a reduction in the growth of VMT is also needed. VMT reductions are necessary to achieve the 2030 target and must be part of any strategy evaluated in this plan. Stronger SB 375 GHG reduction targets will enable the State to make significant progress towards this goal, but alone will not provide all of the VMT growth reductions that will be needed. There is a gap between what SB 375 can provide and what is needed to meet the State’s 2030 and 2050 goals. More needs to be done through continued land use changes, synergies with emerging mobility solutions like ridesourcing, and changes in travel behavior, especially among millennials.
Transportation investments can either encourage or reduce VMTs, if they go to automobile infrastructure instead of walking, biking and transit projects.
Now that Democrats have a super-majority in both houses of the legislature, they should prioritize new transportation spending in VMT-reducing investments. The best way would be to replace the gas tax with a mileage-based fee, with the revenue going only to maintenance of existing infrastructure and new VMT-reducing projects. The necessary two-thirds vote for that revenue is now possible, at least in theory.
In the long run, it could be the most important environmental legislation for the state to come out of this session of the legislature.
Si’u Point Trail, Ta’u Island, National Park of American Samoa
I’m a big believer that islands will lead the way in decarbonizing the economy. Many of them have ample renewables resources, such as geothermal on Hawaii’s Big Island and Iceland, wind and hydro on Kodiak Island, and solar energy on other Hawaiian islands.
Now, on the heels of the big Tesla-SolarCity merger, the American Samoa island of Ta’u used the companies’ products to go 100% renewable. As the Washington Post reported, the island’s leaders wanted to stop depending on expensive, imported diesel fuel to generate electricity:
“[They] basically just put out a solicitation to see if anybody could provide an alternative to diesel, and that’s something that we responded to,” said Peter Rive, co-founder and chief technology officer of solar provider SolarCity, which was recently acquired by Tesla.
The result is a system composed of more than 5,000 SolarCity solar panels and 60 Tesla Powerpack battery storage systems. The new microgrid could save the island nearly 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year, which amounts to about 2.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The microgrid is already up and operating, according to Rive, and covering about 99 percent of the island’s power needs. The battery system can provide three full days of power to the island without sun, he added. And it can fully recharge in seven hours of sunlight.
It may have been easier for this island to go 100% renewable compared to other places, given its ample sunshine and small population. I’m assuming the island lacks energy-intensive industries as well. But the lessons can be applicable to other islands and economies, particularly when you factor in other generation technologies, like wind and hydropower.
Now if Ta’u just switches to all battery-electric vehicles, they’ll pull off the full eco-paradise.
It’s been a guessing game since Election Day about what Trump will do on climate change and renewable energy. Some renewable advocates believe the bipartisan support for solar and wind will inoculate current federal tax credits from getting rolled back. Others believe that the tax credits will be vulnerable in the event of a big congressional overhaul of the tax code. Meanwhile, Trump has surrounded himself with climate science deniers and oil-and-gas tycoons.
But one “clean” energy technology might get favored treatment: nuclear fusion.
Why? One of Trump’s most ardent backers, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, is a big proponent and investor, as Bloomberg News reports:
Nuclear fusion, which would harness the power of the sun without all the nasty byproducts, is a long-shot—politically, financially, and technologically. Despite relative ambivalence toward fusion by the Obama administration, research has continued apace internationally, and in the American public and private sector. At the head of this pack are venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and is said to be working on the Trump transition team. He has funded a fusion start-up called Helion Energy through his Mithril Capital Management to pursue the ultimate dream of environmentalists the world over.
Fusion has sounded interesting on paper but has never materialized as a practical option. Of course, solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive and impractical until government incentives and pro-manufacturing policies spurred the necessary investment to bring costs down. Thiel’s company is hoping for the same dynamic with fusion:
Helion hopes to make a fusion generator that’s 1,000 times smaller, 500 times cheaper, and 10 times faster than more conventional, massive projects, according to its website. The company is building a “magneto-inertial fusion” generator. It produces power by injecting heated hydrogen and helium at high speed (a million miles an hour) into a “burn chamber,” where a strong magnetic field compresses the plasma to a temperature high enough to initiate fusion. Energy from the reaction is used to generate electricity.
Meanwhile, a potential ally, pro-nuclear environmentalist Ted Nordhaus, is causing a stir with a post arguing that the clean energy industry shouldn’t rush to deal with the Trump Administration given its authoritarian leanings, even if it pursues policies in their interests:
Trump campaigned and won the election fair and square. He has every right to pursue his agenda and vision for the country. When and if it becomes clear that democratic norms will prevail in the new Administration, that Trump does not intend to prosecute his political opponents, squelch dissent, and harass the free press, I will happily praise the Administration when it takes actions that I believe to be consistent with health, prosperity, equity, and environmental protection, and criticize it when it does not.
But the signals have thus far been mixed and that presents complicated decisions for those of us in think tanks, advocacy organizations, and the media. Most of our professional incentives are to act as if some version of normal democratic discourse and policy-making will prevail. There is not much for us to do, at least in the normal way that advocates advocate and analysts analyze, in the event that those norms do not prevail. The risk for all of us is that in our haste to get back to normal politics and advocacy, we normalize a dangerous turn toward authoritarianism.
Lots to chew on for an industry (one of many) now facing complicated and challenging times.
Michael Barnard at Clean Technica is bullish on global climate action, despite the Trump electoral college win last week:
There are multiple reasons for this, but it comes down to inertia and isolationism. International and internal US agreements are hard to unwind, often bipartisan, and won’t be focus areas. The economics of wind and solar are transforming generation globally. Electric vehicles have multiple value propositions besides climate change. The rest of the world and especially China aren’t going to stop, they’ll just pull ahead of the USA. And a military that stays home doesn’t burn nearly as much diesel and aviation fuel. There’s no reason to cheer for a Trump presidency if you care about the climate and the global economic impacts of climate change, but there’s less reason for gloom than most would think.
He also makes a similar argument that I made last week, that a likely economic downturn caused by Trump policies could slow emissions.
I’m less optimistic than Barnard about what Trump will do to the Paris accord, but his point about clean technologies is an important one. Have these technologies, like renewables and electric vehicles, reached the economic tipping point to be viable even without federal tax credits and other support?
I’m reading mixed things. Utility Dive reports on the optimistic case:
“Our industry will be fine,” Sunnova CEO John Berger told Utility Dive. Sunnova is one of the leading national rooftop solar providers. “Business models will change and the companies that can’t deliver a better service at a better price won’t make it.”
Losing its 30% federal investment tax credit (ITC) might even provoke constructive change, Berger said. “But with or without the ITC, this industry will thrive and that is because we are quickly driving down the cost of solar and solar components and now the cost of batteries is coming down as fast.”
And yet Greentech Media forecasts some major retrenching in the renewable industry, if Trump and his congressional allies kill federal support:
The tax credit was expected to support 25 gigawatts of additional solar installations — a 54 percent increase that amounted to $40 billion in new investment through 2020. By the time the ITC falls to 10 percent in 2020, GTM Research expects the industry to be adding 20 gigawatts of new capacity yearly. By comparison, 6 gigawatts of natural-gas power plant capacity were added in 2015.
Reversing those figures provides a rough estimate of what might happen to solar if the tax credit is cut. Installations could fall by roughly half.
As for electric vehicles, the tax credits will help determine if new models like the 238-mile range Chevy Bolt, to be released next year, will sell for $37K or $29K — a very big difference for most consumers. But at some point they are scheduled to be phased out anyway, so it could just be a short-term setback to the industry, particularly with California’s strong policies on zero-emission vehicles.
And of course, we don’t really know what Trump and congress will do. We know many Republicans favor renewables, but we also know that a revision of the tax code in general could be in the works. And the last time that happened in 1986, renewable tax credits disappeared. They’ll need to save money somewhere to pay for their tax cuts for upper-income earners.
So it will be a wait-and-see situation, but it’s cause for states like California to start thinking immediately about backup support at the state level, such as through fees on polluters to cover clean tech support. As on many issues related to this election, it’s time to gear for the worst.
