California has been reluctantly going it alone with cap-and-trade, ever since the proposed federal version died in the early days of the Obama Administration. While the state has done a good job (in my view) of developing rules that limit market manipulation and failure, the program is not without its flaws.
As state leaders consider extending the program beyond 2020, Severin Bornstein at the Energy Institute at Haas, UC Berkeley, argues, based on a paper he co-wrote, that the program suffers from lack of effectiveness:
Before committing to a post-2020 plan, however, policymakers must understand why the cap-and-trade program thus far has been a disappointment, yielding allowance prices at the administrative price floor and having little impact on total state GHG emissions. California’s price is a little below $13/ton, which translates to about 13 cents per gallon at the gas pump and raises electricity prices by less than one cent per kilowatt-hour.
While policy makers have argued that the low allowance prices just mean that other carbon-fighting programs must be successful, Bornstein begs to differ and offers some important recommendations:
So, can California’s cap-and-trade program be saved? Yes. But it will require moderating the view that there is one single emissions target that the state must hit. Instead, the program should be revised to have a price floor that is substantially higher than the current level, which is so low that it does not significantly change the behavior of emitters. And the program should have a credible price ceiling at a level that won’t trigger a political crisis. The current program has a small buffer of allowances that can be released at high prices, but would have still risked skyrocketing prices if California’s economy had experienced more robust growth.
The program is complicated and not nearly as elegant as a straightforward carbon tax would be. But it’s worth trying to get the details right, in case cap-and-trade can function as a viable alternative for tax-averse jurisdictions who want to decarbonize their economy. In that spirit, I hope Bornstein and his colleagues’ advice is well-taken by state leaders, as they work to improve the program.
In my continuing quest to understand how to communicate better on climate change, I came across an article [pay-walled from E&E News] with some recent scientific research on the subject:
To trigger the right emotions, [behavioral psychologist Renee] Lertzman and her colleagues developed a script where they circled around environmentalism without explicitly labeling it as such.
The script discussed nature and the merits of the outdoors. It gave a nod to “creation care,” an idea in Christianity that humans are responsible for this planet. It acknowledged that people might dislike former Vice President Al Gore and policies that seek to expand government. It is possible to address the challenge on “our own terms” through sustainable energy solutions, the script stated.
To judge whether the message resonated with conservatives, Lertzman and her colleagues gave a test audience a dial that they could turn up high if they liked what they were hearing. As the scientists went through the script, both moderate and staunch conservatives cranked up the dial.
The testing proved the script was successful, Lertzman said. She and her colleagues have shared the dial test results with select audiences, including to pro-climate GOP members of Congress who would like to discuss climate with their conservative constituencies.
I’m not going to be comfortable labeling climate mitigation efforts “creation care,” but I do like the idea of discussing climate action as something that local communities can and should do “on their own terms.”
This type of message can resonate in two ways: one, it can address conservatives’ fears that belief in climate science will trigger massive government overreach in regulating our economy. Two, it underscores the need for decentralized action on climate change, which I believe will be a necessity even with a strong federal role in supporting clean technology and putting a price on carbon.
Why local action? Well, two more reasons there. First, the impacts of climate change will be unique to each community. Federal and state government can help with the process, but it will ultimately be a local issue. Coastal cities will have to deal with sea level rise and figure out how to pay for sea walls or abandon some development, while inland areas will have to deal with droughts, fires, twisters, hurricanes, and the litany of other cataclysmic weather that scientists tell us will get worse.
Second, to reduce emissions, each community will need to determine the right mix of strategies and harness the energy generation potential of their geographical area. That means local solutions to reduce driving and encourage walking and biking and more localized energy production, depending on local resources. Those resources could be wave/tidal, geothermal, wind, sun or who knows what else we may invent and harness in the coming years.
I also like the idea of local innovation, to create and test ideas and policies that can spread throughout the world. So unlocking this kind of experimentation is also good for broader policy development.
Hopefully this phrase “our on our terms” can be useful for other climate researchers looking to have more productive discussions about policy options with climate science doubters. It’s going to take much more than just one phrase, but maybe it can get us started on a more productive path. Meanwhile, I look forward to learning more about what scientists can tell us — both on climate change and how to communicate about it.
A grid based largely on renewable energy will be tough to manage, given the intermittency of solar and wind power. That’s why it’s in California’s interest to expand its grid to cover the greater western United States. With a western market, California can sell cheap surplus renewables to other states and import their renewables when we don’t have enough.
To that end, California’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has proposed expanding to acquire PacifiCorp, a grid operator with transmission assets in five additional western states.
As I’ve discussed before, this expansion is not without controversy. PacifiCorp states are worried about losing sovereignty to a California-heavy expanded grid operator, while environmentalists are worried that the expansion will throw a lifeline to some coal-fired power plants in the PacifiCorp territory.
California officials are also worried that grid expansion could open up avenues for legal challenges and loss of sovereignty over the state’s domestic climate policies, particularly on renewable energy procurement. Specifically, would expansion increase the federal government’s ability to preempt state authority over domestic policies and energy contracts through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)? And would expansion open up California to legal challenges that claim that state policies in an expanded grid violate the commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution?
To evaluate these concerns, CAISO commissioned a legal analysis by UCLA Law’s Ann Carlson and University of Colorado Law’s William Boyd, in consultation with me and my Berkeley Law colleague Dan Farber. That analysis was released publicly yesterday afternoon, and you can read it here [PDF].
Here is what we found, in a nutshell:
The straightforward answers to each of these questions are that the inclusion of PacifiCorp assets in CAISO:
1) would not alter FERC’s jurisdiction and would not displace any existing state authority over environmental matters. CAISO is already subject to FERC jurisdiction and the inclusion of PacifiCorp in CAISO does not change this. FERC does not have jurisdiction over California’s energy and environmental policies and this would not change because of the inclusion of PacifiCorp in CAISO;
2) would not alter the constitutionality of California’s environmental and clean energy laws under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution because the policies are already subject to Commerce Clause scrutiny.
To be clear, this memo doesn’t address other potentially thorny issues, such as how the governance structures will be arranged in this future entity and how specific issues like the coal-fired power plant fleet might be treated. But it does provide assurance that expansion will not call into question California’s sovereignty over its clean energy policies, in terms of its constitutionality and ability to operate under federal jurisdiction.
Two more miracles and he’ll be a saint
Climate change has become one of the most ideological issues of the day, with beliefs hardened according to political attitudes. But Pope Francis appears to be pulling off the miracle of actually changing people’s minds, per the Christian Science Monitor:
In 2015, on the eve of the release of Pope Francis’s encyclical [on climate change], research showed that Catholics in the United States were divided over global warming. Their differences mirrored the partisan divide found among much of the population, with around 80 percent of Catholic Democrats claiming there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming, and only half of Catholic Republicans claiming the same. Meanwhile, around 60 percent of Catholic Democrats said that global warming is a serious, man-made problem, while just a quarter of Catholic Republicans agreed.
But over the past year, perceptions began to shift. Just 6 months after the release of Laudato Si, the percentage of American Catholics who thought climate change is a moral issue jumped from 34 percent to 42 percent, according to a study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Meanwhile, a study released by the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America found that Catholic Republicans who read Laudato Si were 10 percent more likely to agree that human activities are responsible for climate change.
So we can add that to the arsenal of strategies for overcoming resistance to the science: get more religious authorities to speak out on climate change.
The issue is rightly framed as a moral one, given how vulnerable communities will be most likely to face the worst impacts of extreme weather wrought by a warming planet.
The 2016 Nissan LEAF
While Tesla and General Motors have already made public strides towards the seemingly magic 200-mile range electric vehicle for under $40,000, Nissan has been quiet. The bug-like LEAF, the leading electric vehicle on the road, has been out for five years, yet has had no redesign and little improvement, other than the option to buy a slightly bigger battery pack to get 105-mile range.
Per Green Car Reports, now a Nissan engineer has finally come forward to confirm that the next generation LEAF will have a 60 kwh battery pack — enough to achieve a 200-mile plus range. Of course there’s no timetable for when it will be released, but one would hope that it will happen by 2018.
While the delay is frustrating, in a few years there will be at least three EVs that can go 200 miles for less than $40,000: the Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt, and new Nissan. By 2030, we could see a dramatically different market for these vehicles, with significant effects on gas consumption, as Forbes reports on a new Wood Mackenzie study:
The U.S. currently uses more than nine million barrels of gasoline a day. According to the report, if electric cars gain more than 35% market shares by 2035, the U.S. could see a cut from nine million to two million barrels used a day.
This outcome is hardly out of the question, and it underscores how critical electric vehicles are to our environmental future. If Nissan can get its 200-mile act together, it will be a major part of the solution.
As California and other states zoom toward getting 50% of their energy from renewable resources like solar and wind, there’s no question that we’ll need a bigger geographic grid footprint to balance these sources. We can’t rely solely on these in-state, intermittent resources without driving up rates and firing up backup fossil plants to compensate for their variable production.
An expanded grid addresses that problem (along with energy storage and demand response) and provides economic benefits to boot. It means, for example, that California can sell its excess surplus power in the spring and fall to other states, while we can import solar from Arizona in the morning or wind from Wyoming at other times.
The dark orange over Wyoming means great wind resources to import to California
That’s why California’s grid operator — the Independent System Operator (CAISO) — is so gung ho on purchasing the neighboring PacifiCorp, which operates in six western states. As Utility Dive reports, CAISO’s CEO is bullish about the opportunities, both to save ratepayers money and to clean the grid.
But the politics are messy. Here in California, as E&E reports [subscription required] the Sierra Club in particular is concerned that the merger of these two grid operators will give a bunch of coal plants in the PacifiCorp portfolio a new market to access and therefore a longer lease on life. NRDC counters that any bump in emissions will be short-term and that the merger will ultimately greatly reduce emissions.
Meanwhile, in the states subject to the merger, the opposition is not from environmental groups but from the in-state generators that risk being displaced by cheap out-of-state renewables. After all, it’s hard for them to compete with surplus solar power from California that is coming to the state for cheap, displacing coal and gas-fired power in the process. These states also fear a loss of control over the grid operators, as the governing boards are likely to be dominated by California appointees.
All in all, it’s a tough political situation but one that shouldn’t be insurmountable, with the right compromises — particularly given how much ratepayers can benefit from the merger and how crucial an expanded grid footprint is to deep decarbonization of the electricity supply.
Governor Brown’s proposal in his new budget to make certain housing developments eligible to be approved by the state “by right” has riled up not just local governments — who stand to lose discretionary approval over these projects — but some labor and environmental groups as well.
It’s pretty obvious why these groups are upset: the by-right state approval means they lose their leverage over projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which can trigger lengthy local environmental review for discretionary approvals. And the governor’s proposal, as currently written, lacks safeguards to ensure that only environmentally beneficial projects are eligible for state approval.
Yet local resistance to new housing is a problem well beyond CEQA, and its cumulative effect — through restrictive local zoning, discretionary rejection of new housing, and citizen petitions and lobbying — has created a massive housing shortage in the state’s big cities. The inevitable result is high housing costs squeezing middle-income earners, with displacement and gentrification pushing out low-income earners. It’s becoming a national drag on our economy, while pushing new development out to the exurbs and over open space and farmland.
So in principle, state approval of certain housing projects is justified. But it needs to be the right kind of housing development, consistent with existing local plans. A relatively straightforward condition on these projects to be eligible is that they are located within a half-mile of a major transit stop and meet certain vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and greenhouse gas emission profiles. That would ensure environmental performance and that the projects do not contribute to sprawl.
The basic formula would be: 1/2 mile + VMT + GHG = by-right approval.
Of course, you’d probably have to layer in an affordable housing requirement as well to achieve political consensus. But increasing supply today will go a long way to stabilizing prices and therefore minimizing displacement, as well as creating the housing stock that will one day be affordable to low-income earners. And in the meantime, we can ensure that these new projects contain affordable units.
And for the labor groups, these multi-unit housing developments typically require higher-paying, high-skilled jobs that pay better than sprawl construction.
It would be a win-win, if our political leaders and advocates can arrive at compromise.
Trump has made no secret of his rejection of climate science. Instead, he counter-punches by saying the real threat is global warming caused by a nuclear bomb (video above), as Politico reports:
The seemingly far-fetched threat of nuclear-induced climate change has been on Trump’s mind since at least June, when he warned of “nuclear warming” during a visit to The Chicago Tribune. His concern: The environmental impact of a potential nuclear blast gets far less attention than the greenhouse gas emissions that are already raising sea levels and temperatures worldwide.
What’s his solution? Trump’s underlying policy goal here is actually dismissing calls for federal action to cut U.S. emissions by raising the profile at a presidential level of both national security and nuclear containment. It’s a counter-argument as well to both Obama and Clinton, who have described climate change as a threat on par with terrorism.
It’s an odd way to deflect on the science and attempt instead to muddle the issue. But who knows — in this election year, it may actually work well enough to confuse people. And of course the other challenge for climate advocates is that climate change doesn’t rank high on the list of voter concerns.
It certainly doesn’t help when a major party nominee tosses out strange, deflecting rhetoric like this, but it’s a line of argument that advocates should be ready to refute.
A campaign to sue the oil giant for deceiving the public on climate change is gaining steam (no pun intended), as Politico reports:
Interviews with advocates on both sides of the feud reveal how quickly the anti-Exxon movement has sprouted, to the point that it’s now consuming op-ed pages, airwaves and courtrooms across the country. Once merely intent on shaming the oil giant into better behavior, environmentalists are pursuing a strategy to discredit the company, weaken it politically and perhaps make it pay the kinds of multibillion-dollar legal settlements that began hitting the tobacco industry in the 1990s.
The campaign — led by some of the same climate activists who defied Beltway wisdom by killing the Keystone XL oil pipeline — has mushroomed into far more than a greens-versus-Exxon feud.
Just last week, a leaked subpoena from the attorney general in the U.S. Virgin Islands revealed a vast probe that demanded Exxon’s communications with more than 100 free-market think tanks, conservative consulting firms and climate-skeptic scientists — proof, the company’s supporters say, that environmentalists are using the legal system to launch a broad attack on their political opponents. The subpoena targets Exxon’s dealings with parties including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Hoover Institution, George Mason University and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Alabama and the University of Delaware.
Perhaps that’s why the company is now investing in some pretty interesting clean technologies, including one that could help our zero-emission transportation future, as Green Car Reports describes:
ExxonMobil is backing a new process that would capture carbon dioxide from power plants, and use it to feed fuel cells.
The oil giant announced Thursday that it is expanding a partnership with Connecticut-based FuelCell Energy to develop the smaller company’s fuel-cell technology.
FuelCell hopes to combine carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which captures carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants, with carbonate fuel cells.
So maybe in the end, the climate punishment will be that ExxonMobil transitions to technologies that boost zero emission vehicles. While it shouldn’t be the only remedy for this kind of corporate malfeasance, assuming they lose in court, it would be a just one.
There’s been a low-grade battle for the future of zero-emission vehicles in California. On one side are the well-known battery electric models, with companies like Tesla capturing the global imagination and state residents buying hundreds of thousands of vehicles to date.
Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle.
On the other side are hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, capturing the imagination of…well, maybe a hundred buyers and a few state officials.
The problem is that the state is spending millions of dollars to subsidize both technologies, when many experts feel that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will have very little role in the state’s transportation future.
Now Fred Lambert at Electrek observes that even the fuel-cell automakers are changing their tune:
I think we are witnessing the start of a new (but long overdue) trend this year. The few established automakers still pushing fuel cell hydrogen vehicles appear to be warming up to battery-powered electric vehicles instead. Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, arguably the automakers most stuck on hydrogen, all announced new electric vehicle programs in the past few weeks.
Toyota is working on a plug-in version of the Corolla. Hyundai is bringing its Ioniq electric platform to market by the end of the year and this morning, we reported on the Korea-based automaker developing a next generation battery-powered electric SUV.
Those two automakers are arguably the most entrenched in fuel cell technology with the Toyota Mirai, the Hyundai Tuscon Fuel Cell, and billions spent in investments between the two of them, but the most telling news is that Honda, another fuel cell believer, is planning to launch a battery-powered version of the Clarity, a car it actually developed for its fuel cell program.
Lambert notes the gaping inefficiencies of fuel-cell vehicles compared to battery electrics (which are almost three times more efficient, when accounting for the energy in versus the energy out), plus the greater complexity of the manufacturing/fuel supply process with fuel cells.
The only advantage hydrogen offers over battery electrics is refueling time. But as batteries eventually move to up to the 600-mile range in the coming decades, and as fast-charging technology improves, this benefit will diminish. Meanwhile, battery electrics have the contrary advantage of being able to fuel in your home and anywhere with an outlet, versus the need for the gas station model of hydrogen fueling.
To my mind, the only true benefit of hydrogen is for long-haul trucking (although biodiesel and other biofuels may be just as well-suited), and possibly as a form of energy storage, assuming the hydrogen is made from surplus renewables.
But I’m skeptical that automakers will truly abandon their fuel cell plans so quickly. My guess is it will be another five years or more before they truly get the message from the market.
