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Tuesday, September 7, 2010
EPA: Hearing on GHG permitting rule set for next week
Robin Bravender – GreenWire – September 7, 2010
U.S. EPA will hold a public hearing next week on the agency's plans to take over permitting programs for states that can't or won't comply with greenhouse gas rules.
The hearing will take place Tuesday, Sept. 14, at EPA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, according to a Federal Register notice published last week. EPA had previously scheduled the hearing for last month but postponed it because the draft rule had not yet been formally published.
The draft rule is one of two EPA proposals issued last month aimed at ensuring state permitting programs can comply with the Obama administration's climate regulations for industrial sources.
The first seeks to allow states that are not prepared to regulate greenhouse gases to revise their programs. The second -- and the topic of next week's hearing -- outlines EPA's plan to take over permitting programs in states that do not meet the requirements by next January, when the agency's climate rules formally kick in (E&ENews PM, Aug. 12).
Both rules were published Thursday in the Federal Register, and EPA announced it will accept comments on the rules until Oct. 4.
Some states that oppose the Obama administration's climate policies have already expressed opposition to EPA's proposals.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan Shaw and Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) accused EPA last month of unlawfully attempting to force states to "pledge allegiance to its rules." Texas, they wrote in a letter to EPA officials, "has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions" (Greenwire, Aug. 4).
EPA has said it would prefer to leave permitting to state authorities but that federal intervention may be needed to bring states into alignment with new climate rules.
SENATE: Reid eyes lame duck for energy bill, RES
Robin Bravender – GreenWire – September 7, 2010
Senate Democrats may wait until after the November election to take up energy legislation, which could include a renewable electricity standard, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said today.
"We are only in for a few weeks when we reconvene next week, and while we are still mapping out the schedule energy legislation, including the possible inclusion of RES, may have to wait for a lame-duck session," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said.
Reid announced yesterday that small business legislation will top the Senate's agenda when the chamber returns from recess next week, leaving little time for the Senate to take up an energy bill this fall.
"When we return to the Senate this fall, Democrats' first order of business will be to pass bipartisan legislation that helps small businesses create more jobs," Reid said in a statement recognizing the Labor Day holiday. The contentious lending bill has drawn the ire of Senate Republicans and could eat into much of the chamber's abbreviated work period leading up to the November election.
Reid stripped controversial provisions, including an RES and carbon pricing, when he unveiled a scaled-back energy and oil spill-response bill in July, but said last month that the bill could be expanded. "There's a chance we're going to bring back a broader bill," he told Greenwire.
Reid told reporters on a conference call last Tuesday that two Republicans have expressed interest in an RES, although he declined to name them, according to The Hill newspaper.
Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas said last month that he would be willing to vote for a narrow oil spill-response and energy package that included a "modest" 15 percent RES target of which 4 percent can be met with energy efficiency (Greenwire, Aug. 4).
"If they have one that is just targeted on the oil spill; if it is just an RES; if it has natural gas [incentives], I am fine with that; electric vehicles, I am good with that," Brownback said. "But if they add a bunch of tax increases and load it with other things, I am not going to be able to do it."
A modest RES, he said, could find 60 supporters. But "it can't be a big one, or we will get nowhere close to 60 votes," Brownback said.
CALIFORNIA: Clock runs out on suite of environmental bills
Debra Kahn – GreenWire – September 7, 2010
Legislation raising California's renewable energy standard to 33 percent and bills banning plastic bags and controversial plastic additive bisphenol A died last week as the state legislative session ended.
Failure for the renewable-energy proposal was the fourth since 2007. Sen. Joe Simitian's (D) measure, S.B. 722, had Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) support, but the clock ran down on efforts to reconcile various positions, including that of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., which wanted a lower in-state power requirement and a higher ceiling on renewable energy credits (Greenwire, Aug. 16).
Schwarzenegger said he is committed to enshrining the renewable energy targets another way. The state Air Resources Board is scheduled to vote on its version of the renewables standard later this month; it had postponed a July vote at Schwarzenegger's request to give lawmakers time to work on their bill. A regulatory fix would leave the standard open to adjustment by future administrations.
"Anything that was not accomplished I will try to get done before I leave office," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference last week to discuss the state's $20 billion budget deficit. "I will continue fighting on environmental issues."
California's bid to become the first state to ban plastic bags failed last week as the Senate voted against it, 14-21.
The bag ban, by Sen. Julia Brownley (D), would have mandated that grocers and liquor store and convenience store proprietors charge a nickel per reusable paper or plastic bag and stop offering free single-use plastic bags. A.B. 1998 died in committee after it was amended to give free bags to poor people and continue in-store bag recycling programs.
And S.B. 797 would have prohibited the use of bisphenol A (BPA) in children's food and drink containers. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had championed the measure as a stepping stone to a nationwide ban of the chemical, which advocates for the ban say is linked to fetal and developmental problems (E&ENews PM, Aug. 23).
Both of the bills' sponsors blamed intense lobbying by the American Chemistry Council and other manufacturing groups.
"Industry lobbyists used their scare tactics on voters by sending direct mail claiming that a BPA ban would be too costly for lower-income families and deprive consumers of access to canned goods," Sen. Fran Pavley (D) said in a release. "It's not true."
Brownley also pointed to the ACC, which ran ads in defense of manufacturing jobs and published surveys showing support for recycling programs over outright bans. "This is an environmental movement that won't be stopped, even by big-money interests like the American Chemistry Council," she said in a statement. "It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when consumers bring their own bags and become good stewards of the environment."
For his part, Tim Shestek, ACC's state affairs director, said, "Plastic bag makers look forward to working with grocers, legislators and environmental groups to develop workable, effective legislation that enables consumer choice, promotes recycling education and encourages a healthy environment and economy."
Bills that passed
Schwarzenegger did sign into law S.B. 535, which extends carpool lane privileges for hybrids with special stickers until July 2011 and creates a new exemption for up to 40,000 cars that meet the state's emissions standard for advanced technology vehicles, a category that includes plug-in hybrids, hydrogen fuel-cell cars and all-electric cars.
Still awaiting Schwarzenegger's signature:
S.B. 929, to ban cadmium in children's jewelry.
A.B. 2514, to require the California Public Utilities Commission to set energy storage targets for investor-owned utilities.
S.B. 1198, to delay by one year the California Energy Commission's energy efficiency standards for new televisions.
President Obama is right to back lawsuit of carbon emissions
Washington Post – September 7, 2010
ENVIRONMENTALISTS were unhappy with President Obama after climate legislation foundered in the Senate. A week and a half ago, their blood came to an even more vigorous boil after the administration sided with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal entity, in a lawsuit over power plant carbon emissions. This left enviros wondering aloud about what had happened to a president who made reversing the rising of the oceans a campaign promise.
Mr. Obama deserves some criticism for his handling of climate legislation. But his administration's decision on this case, Connecticut v. American Electric Power, is more than defensible.
In 2004, a group of states and New York City sued several large electric utilities, charging that the greenhouse emissions their power plants produce were a "public nuisance" because they contributed to global warming, which harmed those jurisdictions. A district court refused to hear the case, saying that it involved questions best left to the political branches of government. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit disagreed, arguing that the political branches hadn't developed a policy on carbon emissions; so the states could appeal to common law, which allows for nuisance claims. The Obama administration filed a brief on Aug. 26 with the Supreme Court, which might hear the case. The administration pointed out that since the Second Circuit's ruling, the Environmental Protection Agency has nearly completed preparations to regulate greenhouse emissions from utilities under the Clean Air Act. As long as it addresses the nuisance the states identified -- and the administration makes a good argument that it does -- that policy displaces common law, the legal basis of the suit.
Setting aside the legal technicalities, these sorts of cases are not the best way to reduce America's carbon emissions. Pursuing separate torts against different emitters will result in a patchwork of judicial mandates in lieu of comprehensive regulation, the nature, scale and expense of which will no doubt depend on which judge hears each case. EPA regulation, too, has deficiencies, including the possibility that different presidents will apply it inconsistently. But it's more predictable, and it's universal.
Still, environmentalists rightly worry that the White House won't ever allow the EPA's prepared rules to come into force, given high political opposition to EPA carbon regulation. Congress may also try to strip the EPA of its ability to regulate. If the administration declines to regulate, after all -- or if Congress forces the EPA to desist -- the plaintiffs will have better grounds and better reason to sue than they do now.
Bay Area energy leaders discuss the key role green policies play in economic growth
Special to the Mercury News
Posted: 09/05/2010 12:01:00 AM PDT
Marshman: Mary, the Global Warming Solutions Act -- AB 32 -- passed in 2006 requires the state to reduce global-warming pollution to 1990 levels by 2020. How will it accomplish that?
Nichols: Probably the most important thing we needed to do was come up with the data to tell us what pollution we are emitting, who's emitting it, and then to try to design an array of solutions to meet the goal. So the plan that we adopted at the end of 2008 is a mixture of measures. Some of them are things that were already being done, like the state's existing appliance standards, but ratchets them up a little bit, or like the new auto-emission standards that the Obama administration has taken to the national level. The new measures include a low-carbon-fuel standard, really the first of its kind, and then a cap on emissions that covers about 85 percent of the economy. And a renewable energy standard for the utility industry to deal with emissions from power plants, and then a cap on overall emissions that covers about 85 percent of the economy. It's designed to put a price on carbon wherever it exists, and to find ways to reduce it. Most of this has been adopted but won't take effect until 2012.
Marshman: Bill, the federal government spends less than $3 billion a year on clean-energy research, compared with $30 billion on health research, and $80 billion on defense research. What should the nation be spending on this?
Weihl: I'd hesitate to put a single number on that, but $3 billion is almost certainly far too low. Many people have suggested numbers in the range of $15 billion to $30 billion. But in addition to money, we need certainty about the funding. It's not enough to have big bullets of funding in the system, and then it goes away. You need funding you can count on for, say, 10 years. Industry should also be investing more in energy R&D. The energy companies, by and large, don't invest very much of their revenue in R&D -- much less than high-tech companies, and I think that's something that both the government and industry should do more of.
Marshman: Last year, China outspent the U.S. almost 2 to 1 in clean energy -- $34.6 billion compared with our $18.6 billion. Vinod, is China winning the clean-energy race? Can we keep up?
Khosla: I wouldn't say China is "winning" the clean-energy race, but they're clearly paying a lot more attention to the race. That's in China's interest, and they're doing the right things for China. We have an advantage. We are the center of innovation. We have the R&D. But what China is creating is markets, which is what California and the United States need to do. So when we say California has to be at a 15 percent lower carbon-emissions level, and we create a market (for carbon credits) -- that's what AB 32 did. Then guess what? Innovation starts happening here because the market is here.
Marshman: Tom, you're from a company that knows a thing or two about regulation. Do you think California is doing a good job in crafting its regulations to create the right incentives? Or is it getting in the way of innovation?
Bottorff: I think they've done a good job. One example is the California Solar Initiative, which was passed in 2007. It's a program to provide rebates to installers or owners of solar systems. We're in the third year of that program that includes 10 steps over 10 years. We're already at the seventh step. So the program is a great success. The most important program is the renewable-portfolio energy standard: Utilities are required to meet 20 percent of their energy needs with renewable energy by the end of this year. Now we may not make it precisely, but there is flexible compliance in the program, and I think we will get there within the next year or two. Requiring us to purchase renewable energy goes a long way toward stimulating markets.
Marshman: Mary, in California, 20 percent of the emission reductions called for in AB 32 will be attributed to a state cap-and-trade program, which is a market for credits. How does that reduce pollution?
Nichols: Basically, the government will issue allowances to businesses and others affected by the law for their current amount of carbon dioxide emissions. But, unlike the kind of market where you want to grow, this is a market where you shrink the amount of allowances. So, every year, there will be fewer allowances available as we ratchet the cap down in the direction of meeting our overall carbon reduction targets. What makes it attractive is that a company has a choice. If it does not use all of its allowances, it can sell them to those who need them because they can't reduce their emissions as quickly. The key to all of this is that it be accountable, that it be measurable, and that these advances be in excess of regulatory obligations that already exist. There are a lot of refinements needed to make it work. That's why it's taken a couple of years to develop our proposed design for the program. We're about ready to unveil it, and we're hoping to get it adopted by the end of this year. But to get the kind of leverage you really need to make this program succeed, the United States has got to step in -- not only to work with us and all the other states, but to take the leadership role at the international level as well.
Marshman: Proposition 23, on this fall's ballot, would suspend AB 32 until the state's unemployment rate gets down to 5.5 percent and stays there for four straight quarters, which the Legislative Analyst says has happened only three times since 1970. Vinod, if it passes, what happens to venture-capital investment in cleantech?
Khosla: AB 32 created markets. Proposition 23 will kill the markets and the single-largest source of job growth in California in the last two years. The cleantech industry is where job growth has been, and so we not only kill forward-looking regulation that helps us and our kids' future, we kill the source of job creation in this state. We also kill investment in the long term that could create the next 10 Googles. Today, the real race is about which state or country ends up with the 10 new -- and it could be 20 new -- great companies, the next Googles. Today, I would say, California is in the pole position to win that race.
Marshman: Proposition 23 supporters say the state can't afford to go it alone on climate change, and just the prospect of AB 32 is costing us jobs. Vinod, what do you think?
Khosla: You know, predictability is absolutely the key. If a regulation creates a market like I believe AB 32 has done, then, in fact, it is, in Michael Porter's terms, a good regulation. And it's a key part of what we look at because those markets make it very attractive to operate in California. I know solar manufacturers, solar-cell manufacturers, who could produce their solar cells for less in China, but are setting up factories in California. When I started in California in the '80s, it was semiconductors and computers. In the '90s, it was first telecommunications, the Ciscos and Junipers of the world, and then the Internet companies. Most people forget, Google only started in 1998 -- and then Facebook and others came along. The next big industry, and probably by an order of magnitude larger than all these things, is going to be cleantech. This is about how our economy will be growing in 2025, not just in 2011.
Marshman: Mary, how do you balance concerns about current jobs in a recession like this against the long-term goals of AB 32?
Nichols: We're trying to ease into regulation, and doing it in a way that is equitable and pragmatic. We've come up with this mixture of sector-specific rules that deal with transportation, for example. We're not making people choose between spending money on gasoline versus spending money on electricity. We're not going down that route. And one of the things that I think we've really absorbed in listening and observing what's going on in this state is that we've got to put some price limits on the whole program. If we're wrong about how this will work, there's the ultimate fail-safe that the program can be suspended for a period of time while we take corrective measures -- but within the broad context of keeping the goal in mind.
Marshman: Bill, as Google's energy czar, what drives Google and other companies to get into the energy area when it isn't your core business?
Weihl: We use a lot of energy to run our business. We have big data centers around the world that are full of computers, so we depend on the same electrical grid that everyone else depends on. We feel that it's our responsibility to make the energy we use as clean as possible, to use as little as possible. And we believe that we can't just sit around and wait for other people to solve the problem. So we build our own data centers and our own servers. And the energy-efficiency work we've done in designing those systems means that we use about half the energy we would be using if we were following industry-standard best practices. That's huge in terms of our "Missions" profile, and it's huge in terms of our financials, because we're buying a lot less energy. We also have invested in renewable energy, both equity investments in companies, and on-site renewables, like the solar panels here in Mountain View, one of the largest corporate installations in the U.S., as well as buying renewable energy. We signed recently a 20-year power-purchase agreement for wind energy to supply our Iowa data center. That 20-year commitment gives the developer certainty because they know what their revenue stream is for the next 20 years. They can take that to the bank, get debt financing for the project, and now go build another project. So we're looking for ways like that to reduce our current energy use, clean it up and have an impact on the markets.
Marshman: Vinod, what are the biggest areas of opportunity to reduce greenhouse gases through new products or businesses? What's the next big thing?
Khosla: No matter where I look, there are huge opportunities to do two things: create new technology and businesses, and save consumers money. We have a company trying to cut data-center one-rack energy consumption by 80 percent. We have a company trying to cut lighting electricity consumption by 80 percent. We have a company trying to cut air-conditioning costs and electricity usage by 75 percent. You take a couple of these and you say, "What impact does it have?" I'm an optimist, and I suspect that in 10 or 15 years, we will have an excess of electricity in this country. Having said that, we're doing things in agriculture that I would never have imagined a few years ago. We have two or three projects all related to cutting fertilizer greenhouse gases and nitrogen runoff. There's massive opportunity for technical innovation in surprising places. I could go on for hours about it.
Marshman: Let's turn back to solar for a moment. Several large-scale solar projects are hung up because of the environmental-review process that's required for using public lands. Tom, how is this affecting what you want to do at PG&E?
Bottorff: I think when we first entered into contracts with a number of suppliers, we thought that was the major step. Now we'll just watch them get built. Well, that didn't happen, and there are a variety of reasons. If the project is in the desert, the electricity still has to get from that source to the market, so transmission is a key driver. Permitting is another problem. Multiple agencies have objectives that they need to address. But if one of them finds a problem with a particular project, that could delay it for a month, a year, or longer. I think we'll get there, but that's why we're not moving as quickly as many would like.
Marshman: Now for some audience questions. What's your opinion of Stewart Brand's assertion that, to get off fossil fuels, we must rely on nuclear power as we transition to renewables?
Nichols: The debate about whether you're pro- or anti-nuclear is kind of passé, in my judgment. The issue is really to put a full life-cycle carbon cost on the whole process, and let the chips fall where they may.
Marshman: Here's a big-picture question. How can we help reframe the discussion about climate change? What can concerned citizens do?
Khosla: We are treating climate change as this moralistic thing, and some of us may believe it, but it's the wrong framing for business. To me, climate change is a risk, and we should treat it like any other risk. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on terrorism. We spend money on flood insurance. Climate change is just another risk, and if we treat it as a cost, as an insurance cost for our future, it's a much better framing for business.
Marshman: Do you think cleantech needs a Netscape moment to revolutionize the industry?
Khosla: I do think it will help to have a Netscape moment where you can appeal to people's greed and say, "You can make a lot of money at this. Go work on the problem," because when we have the best minds working on the problem, we'll find solutions. So that will help. There was an earlier question about what subsidies, what support, what incentives we need. All those will be dwarfed by the investment power of the markets.
Marshman: Mary, with regard to Prop. 23, what will be the national reverberations if Californians pass this and puts AB 32 on ice?
Nichols: I think the implications of that would be profound. I think it would immediately be taken up as -- "Look. Even the people in California, those crazy environmentalists, aren't willing to do this stuff. Why should we possibly consider doing it?" And I think it would hurt not just the cause, or the environmental advocates, but also the investments that people have been quietly making all over the country in anticipation of these kinds of policies. It would just make it that much harder to get it moving again.
CO2 Target Debate Is Irrelevant, Former UN Climate Chief Says
By Alex Morales
Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The greenhouse gas targets pledged by nations after the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December won’t change much before 2020, and there’s little point in debating them, the man who stewarded the summit said.
The international negotiations are “painstakingly slow,” and non-binding cuts pledged by the U.S., Japan, China and European nations are “basically what we’ve got to work with for 2020,” said former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, now an adviser for the global accounting firm KPMG International.
The targets aren’t enough to restrict global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since industrialization, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has said. Even so, countries should focus on achieving what they’ve promised and making the investments needed to spur low-carbon technologies such as wind and solar power, de Boer said in an interview today in London.
“Discussions about targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome,” de Boer said. “I don’t think that we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition.”
Business has a “big contribution” to make in achieving the needed reductions, with the International Energy Agency estimating $20 trillion needs to be spent on energy infrastructure between now and 2030, according to de Boer. Developed nations are “very likely indeed” to slash emissions by 80 percent by 2050, he said.
Tipping Points
“It’ll be slower in taking off and more extreme in subsequent reductions,” de Boer said. “In a number of areas, there really are tipping points. There is a certain electricity price which does not make wind energy viable, but go up by 2 cents, and it does. When you reach tipping points like that on wind, on solar, on battery technology, on hybrid cars, then the change will be very dramatic.”
Greenhouse-gas emissions reductions pledged so far would lead to total warming of 3 degrees to 3.9 degrees Celsius, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has said. That’s more than the 2-degree maximum sought by the U.S. and European Union and the 1.5 degrees proposed by an alliance of 43 low-lying and island nations.
Developed countries that pledged a range of reductions dependent on actions by other nations, including Australia and the 27-nation European Union, may still move up from the lower end of those pledges, de Boer said.
One of the stalling points is the absence of federal legislation in the U.S. to fight climate change, said de Boer. A climate bill stalled last year in the U.S. Senate, and such laws are unlikely to be passed in President Barack Obama’s first term of office, he said.
“I think it’s inconceivable that that legislation is considered before the midterm election, and I would be quite surprised to see that legislation get on the agenda in the current first term,” De Boer said.
NYSE Joins With APX for Environmental-Trade Venture (Update1)
By Mathew Carr and Lars Paulsson
Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- NYSE Euronext, the biggest operator of U.S. stock exchanges, agreed to form a venture with APX Inc. for a global expansion of its environment-focused trading.
The New York-based company will be majority owner of a new entity called NYSE Blue after contributing its 60 percent stake in Paris-based BlueNext, the largest exchange for spot trading of European Union carbon dioxide allowances, NYSE said today in an e-mailed statement. APX, with offices in New York and San Jose, handles transactions and settlements in power and environmental markets.
APX, with shareholders including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., MissionPoint Capital Partners and ONSET Venture, will put up their shares in return for a minority stake in NYSE Blue. APX Chairman Brian Storms will be chief executive officer for the venture, which aims to manage “new types of business risks” related to trading energy, renewables, CO2 allowances and water, NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer said in the statement. Financial terms of the venture weren’t disclosed.
“Our listed companies and markets customers increasingly need innovative tools and trading instruments,” he said.
NYSE Euronext, formed with the 2007 takeover of Euronext, will be challenging market leaders Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and CME Group Inc.’s New York Mercantile Exchange for a bigger share of energy trading.
BlueNext volumes of spot EU carbon dioxide allowances dropped 30 percent in the six months through June this year to 194 million metric tons, compared with the six months through December 2009, as the London-based European Climate Exchange, acquired for 395 million pounds ($606 million) in July by Intercontinental Exchange, boosted its share of the spot market.
Main Rival
Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., NYSE’s main rival in U.S. equity trading, completed its purchase of Nord Pool ASA, Europe’s biggest power exchange, in May. Exchanges had 18 percent of the region’s power trading in 2009, down from 29 percent a year earlier, according to London-based Prospex Research Ltd.
Carbon trading volumes jumped 80 percent to a record last year, according to World Bank figures published in May. Still, the value of transactions rose 6.4 percent to $143.7 billion as the recession depressed prices. The European Union runs the world’s largest cap-and-trade program for emissions allowances, followed by the United Nations offset system. U.S. lawmakers are struggling to pass climate-protection legislation after the House called for a cap-and-trade system last year.
Failure in Copenhagen
While more than 190 envoys failed at last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen to agree on a climate change treaty, governments around the world are considering climate-protection measures from renewable energy standards through cap-and-trade programs, Neiderauer said.
NYSE Euronext handled 1.81 million commodities contracts in August, more than twice the amount a year earlier, the bourse said in an e-mailed statement earlier today. Daily volumes averaged 82,000 contracts, compared with 43,000 a year earlier. Total commodity volume in the first eight months of the year reached almost 10.44 million contracts, 33 percent more than a year earlier.
APX helps create and trade renewable-energy certificates in North America. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2010, the statement said. Goldman Sachs advised APX, it said.
London Should Be Clearinghouse for Green Investing, Barker Says
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- London should be the clearinghouse as private investors provide at least half the funding needed to fight global warming in developing nations, U.K. Climate Change Minister Greg Barker said.
"It's likely that at least half, if not considerably more" of the $100 billion dollars a year that will be required to fund new infrastructure and cleaner sources of energy will come from private financing, Barker said today in an interview before his speech at the London Stock Exchange.
While more than 190 envoys failed at last year's climate talks in Copenhagen to agree on a climate change treaty, developed countries committed to pay as much as $100 million a year by 2020 in aid to poorer countries to help tackle the global warming. Representatives of Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank AG are scheduled to speak at the London Stock Exchange today on obstacles to cleaner energy.
The private sector will drive in investments in clean- energy technologies, while there will be a "stronger role of public sector finance for adaptation measures such as flood defenses and related projects, said Barker, a member of the Conservative Party. He previously worked in financial public relations, including a role as head of international investor relations at Sibneft, Russia's fifth largest oil producer.
"We need to make sure that we get the policy framework right in order to unlock large-scale private investment for clean technologies," said Justine Greening, economic secretary to the U.K. government's treasury.
Strong Governance, Transparency
About $1 trillion a year will be needed by 2030 to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.K. has committed to cut its carbon-dioxide emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. CO2 is a greenhouse gas blamed for causing climate change.
Investments in the clean-energy sector more than doubled to $162 billion in the four years through to 2009, according to the U.K. government.
"We need to encourage greater dialog between policy makers in governments of developing nations and key capital market players," Barker said. Developing nations need to show "strong governance and transparency" to help attract investment from the private sector, he said.
Climate Change Is a Failed Political Movement
By: George Will – Washington Post – September 7, 2010
The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages?
Its implosion has continued since "the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held." So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.
That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that "the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson," but the environmentalists' legislation foundered because they got "on the wrong side of doubt."
Environmentalists, Mead argues, have forgotten their origins, which were in skeptical "reaction against Big Science, Big Government and Experts."
Environmentalists once were intellectual cousins of economic libertarians who heed the arguments of Friedrich Hayek and other students of spontaneous order — in society or nature.
Such libertarians caution against trying to impose big, simple plans on complex systems. They warn that governmental interventions in such systems inevitably have large unintended, because unforeseeable, consequences.
In the middle of the 20th century, Americans, impressed by the government's mobilization of society for victory in World War II, were, Mead says, "intoxicated with social and environmental engineering of all kinds." They had, for example, serene confidence that "urban renewal" would produce "model cities." Back then, environmentalism was skepticism.
It was akin to the dissent of Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She argued that ambitious social engineers such as New York's Robert Moses were, by their ten-thumbed interventions in complex organisms such as cities, disrupting social ecosystems.
The apotheosis of technocratic experts such as McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara gave us "nation-building" in conjunction with a war of attrition — the crucial metric supposedly was body counts — in a Southeast Asian peasant society.
Over time, Mead says, "experts lost their mystique": "An increasingly skeptical public started to notice that 'experts' weren't angels descending immaculately from heaven bearing infallible revelations from God. They were fallible human beings with mortgages to pay and funds to raise. They disagreed with one another and they colluded with their friends and supporters like everyone else."
And expertise was annoyingly changeable. Experts said margarine was the healthy alternative to butter — until they said its trans fats made it harmful.
Environmentalism began as Bambi doing battle with Godzillas, such as the Army Corps of Engineers. Then, says Mead, environmentalism became Godzilla, an advocate of "a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix."
Mead continues: "Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190-plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree and we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey."
The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington, and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough "experts" in that branch.
Hence the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to do what the elected representatives of the rubes refuse to do in limiting greenhouse gases.
Mead says of today's environmental movement: "It proposes big economic and social interventions and denies that unintended consequences and new information could vitiate the power of its recommendations. It knows what is good for us, and its knowledge is backed up by the awesome power and majesty of the peer review process.
"The political, cultural, business and scientific establishments stand firmly behind global warming today — just as they once stood firmly behind Robert Moses, urban renewal and big dams. They tell us it's a sin to question the consensus, the sign of bad moral character to doubt. Bambi, look in the mirror. You will see Godzilla looking back."
Mead, who says he is a skeptic about climate policy rather than climate science, says the environmental movement has "become the voice of the establishment, of the tenured, of the technocrats."
This is the wrong thing to be in "Recovery Summer" while the nation wonders about the whereabouts of the robust recovery the experts forecast.
Greenspace
Garbage-to-energy? California has second thoughts
Los Angeles Times Blog -- September 6, 2010
Government officials from around the world used to come to Long Beach, Southern California's industrial port city, to catch a glimpse of the future: Two-story piles of trash would disappear into a furnace and eventually be transformed into electricity to power thousands of homes.
Nowadays, it's U.S. officials going to Canada, Japan and parts of Western Europe to see the latest advances.
The Long Beach plant, for all its promise when it began operations roughly 20 years ago, still churns out megawatts. But it is a relic, a symbol of how California, one of America's greenest states, fell behind other countries in the development of trash-to-energy technology.
"I am having a hard time explaining why California is so far behind," said Eugene Tseng Tseng, a UCLA law professor who spent the last three months leading delegations on overseas tours.
While so-called biorefineries have blossomed abroad, concerns that the technique would undermine recycling efforts and worsen air pollution stalled efforts in California. With space for garbage dumps dwindling, proponents of a new breed of the technology hope to win over detractors.
Los Angeles County officials want to build three plants at a total cost of $200 million to demonstrate how far the technology has come as they scramble for alternatives to closing the world's largest landfill and shipping trash four hours by rail to an abandoned gold mine near the Mexican border.
If they prove successful at reducing waste and producing power, there's no guarantee they'll usher in a new wave of garbage-gobbling technology. Efforts to pass legislation that would have given waste-to-energy plants credit toward recycling and renewable energy goals so that cities could meet state mandates hit a snag this year when some environmentalists argued that such facilities are no different from incinerators, which do not receive credits.
"We have the most aggressive goals for recycling and renewable energies but we've also got groups fighting us on solar, wind and now this," said Coby Skye with the county's Environmental Programs Division. "There are no other options if we can't get these technologies moving forward."
Part of the reason that Europe and Asia are now ahead of the United States on such technology is that they had to grapple with the lack of dump space years earlier. Many are also signatories to the Kyoto Protocol and must reduce greenhouse gases that are produced as waste decomposes in landfills.
The county plan, which still needs financing and permitting, is to build three demonstration plants in Riverside and Orange counties. They would either use heat to turn trash to energy or use microorganisms, which would eat organic material and create methane to produce power. The byproduct can also be used as compost.
Each plant would be a little smaller than a typical biorefinery and would convert as much as 300 tons of trash per day, accepting trash from all over. Los Angeles County alone produces about 33,000 tons of garbage a day.
The plant in Long Beach, which was completed in 1988, consumes about 1,550 tons of trash per day. Unrecyclable garbage is fed into a furnace and the steam generated from burning the trash is used to drive a turbine generator, producing enough electricity to power 35,000 homes. The resulting ash is also used to pave roads at the county's dump.
Scott Smithline with Californians Against Waste, an opposition group, said he has toured such facilities around the world. To build a clean-burning plant in an area synonymous with smog, he said, garbage costs would soar. He also fears that efforts to increase the mandate that cities recycle half of their garbage will fail if communities have contracted to send that waste to a biorefinery.
"What Californians care about is, 'Is the air going to be clean?'" he said. "What I don't want to see is this done on the cheap." Critics call the technology experimental and say building such refineries would be a step back to the 1970s and '80s, when incinerators were a top producer of toxic air contaminants.
But Bill Welch, an emissions experts at UC Riverside said new biorefineries produce about the same amount of pollution as refineries, chemical plants, dry cleaners and auto body shops. "Incinerators got a horrible reputation and deservedly so, but since then, the air pollution technology is so sophisticated," said Welch, who was contracted by the Bioenergy Producers Assn. to study facilities around the world.
"As an environmental scientist, I think the biggest threat we face is global warming. That's going to make many more people sick than any of the emissions from these plants will," he said.
Striking a balance between fresh air and fewer greenhouse gases remains a challenge, and has some environmentalists saying it's time to look at alternatives. "The current situation with our trash, both because of our over-consumption and over-reliance on landfills, is not sustainable," said Martin Schlageter, who heads the Coalition for Clean Air. "All options have to be on the table."
The Navy has partnered with UCLA to study biorefineries in an effort to meet a national renewable energy plan that includes half of the agency's energy usage coming from alternative sources by 2020.
Leslie L. McLaughlin, the solid waste program manager for the Navy Region Southwest in San Diego, said she wants to make sure they proceed carefully. "My focus on this is to make sure we don't create one environmental problem by trying to solve another," she said.
-- Associated Press
