in the trenches/climate
5. New in the Literature
2 April 1998
Contents: Electricity deregulation... Is the Cold War Really Over?... Now Please Line Up on the Left... Meanwhile, the Temperatures Continue to Rise...
Electricity deregulation and other energy developments: is the glass half empty or half full?
As part of its electricity restructuring plan, the Clinton administration just proposed a $3 billion matching fund to aid states in the research and development of renewable and efficient energy technologies. The funds would be raised by a small surtax on electricity customers. The proposal would also require utilities to obtain 5.5% of their power by 2010 from renewable, non-hydro sources. Yet most environmentalists were disappointed that the plan did not also include a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.
Electric utilities now account for about a third of the carbon dioxide produced domestically. The administration argues that the bill would address global warming through competition, reducing by two-thirds the amount of energy currently wasted by the fossil-fuel generation of electricity. Yet without some sort of cap, deregulation may also generate more greenhouse gas emissions, since it may lead to more coal-burning, at least in the short run, since coal remains the cheapest fossil fuel as well as most profligate in terms of producing carbon dioxide.
According to numerous sources, the EPA had wanted a impose a 'cap-and-trade' system on carbon dioxide emissions, but the President's economic advisers and the Energy Department vetoed the provision on the grounds that it would destroy any chance that the proposal would pass Congress. (AP and Dow Jones, March 25,1998) According to the Department of Energy's own estimate, the administration's proposal would reduce greenhouse emissions by only about 2 percent from where they otherwise would be by the year 2010 which, as an editorial in the Washington Post pointed out, is "a far cry from the promised 37 percent" business-as-usual reduction promised at Kyoto. (Washington Post, March 26.) In any event, informed observers predict there will be no Congressional action on this proposal or any other deregulation legislation any time soon.
Meanwhile, many states are going forward with their own deregulation efforts, called "retail wheeling". (A recent NY Times ad supplement includes a useful list of states that are currently phasing in competition.) One of the most hopeful aspects of this process is the increased ability of consumers in some states to choose the companies that will supply them with electricity, based upon the sources of that power. Whether this option will lead to an increased push towards investments in renewables is still uncertain; nevertheless, most polls show that many consumers express a willingness to pay extra for "green" power.
As so often seems to be true, the test case may will be California, and how the residents of that state react to the new array of complicated choices that confront them, each with a name that sounds like a New Age music group: "Earthsource," "Ecopower," "Green Power," "Greenergy," and my personal favorite, "Wind for the Future." Some environmental groups are moving to fill the information gap by suggesting favored options. For example, NRDC offers an Environmentally Preferred Product list for California residents on its website. The Center for Resource Solutions also offers recommendations, through its "Green-E" program.
One of the most progressive of states in terms of its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been Oregon, and next winter, Portland hopes to have its first fuel cell on line at its municipal wastewater treatment plant. The fuel cell will be powered by some of the surplus waste methane gas given off by the sewage, which is now simply flared, leading to additional greenhouse emissions. The funds to purchase the plant's fuel cell came from federal and state grants, as well as PG&E, which agreed in 1996 to set aside part of its revenues to help promote renewable energy projects. (The Oregonian, March 13, 1998) For more on the tremendous potential of fuel cells, and how the automobile manufacturers seem finally to be embracing the technology with enthusiasm, see Fortune magazine's March 30 issue, "The Automakers' Big-Time Bet on Fuel Cells").
Meanwhile, oil prices have been dropping worldwide, and have reached their lowest level in decades, further imperiling the drive towards efficiency and renewables. Last week, oil-exporting countries agreed to try to raise prices by restricting production. So far, they have already cut about 1.17 million barrels a day, enough to raise the price of a barrel of crude from about $12.80 to about $16.51, and the price could reach another dollar or two higher if these exporters achieve their goal of reducing supplies by another 1.8 million barrels a day. Yet the average price per barrel will most probably still remain lower than last year's $20.65, and economists are generally sanguine that the move will have little effect on U.S. inflation, consumer spending or industrial output. (Wall Street Journal, March 24). As well as, it goes without saying, our economy's prodigious production of greenhouse gases.
In a recent article in the NY Times, John Markoff points out another disturbing trend: the US government is now procuring supercomputers for weapons research at a level that dwarfs its efforts to provide this indispensable technology to its civilian scientific researchers. Climatologists, meteorologists and other atmospheric scientists are becoming squeezed out of access to the super-fast calculating technology they need to make predictions in their fields, predictions on which the world's policymakers increasingly rely to anticipate what changes global warming may bring. According to Markoff, the situation is now even worse than it was during the Cold War, when civilian and military researchers were given roughly equal time with supercomputers. "But the parity became a 2-to-1 ratio in favor of the military in 1996, and it will tilt to a 5-to-1 ratio by 1999."(NY Times, March 23) As a result, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the US has now fallen into sixth place behind Germany, Canada, Britain, France and Australia in climate research capability. What happened to Al Gore's idea that with the fall of communism, the environment would become the organizing principle of the world?
Now Please Line Up on the Left...
The Kyoto climate treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations on March 16. The first countries to sign on were Argentina, Switzerland, Maldives, Samoa, and Antigua and Barbuda. Yet the treaty will not enter into force until it is ratified by at least 55 countries, and the Republicans in Congress continue to vow to kill any effort to obtain U.S. ratification. (Dow Jones, March 16)
Earlier, in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat reiterated the administration's intention to sign the Kyoto protocol within one year, adding, however, that they would not submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification "until we get the kind of participation from key developing countries that we want" (Wall Street Journal, March 5 ).
Meanwhile, the Temperatures Continue to Rise...
As I write, it is the end of March, March 30 to be exact, and the temperature is expected to hit 85 degrees F. in New York City, which is about thirty degrees above the normal high for this date. On Friday, it hit 83 F, breaking the previous record by a full 8 degrees. As those of you who have been following the issue are probably aware, 1997 was, by whisker, the warmest year ever globally speaking, according to more than a hundred years of detailed temperature statistics. Moreover, as Tom Karl of NOAA recently pointed out, last year was only one of a string: nine of the hottest years have all occurred in the last eleven years, and the warmest five have all occurred since 1990. (see January's New in the Literature).
Now, after a pause of a couple of months, the monthly average temperature data is being posted once again on the Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) website, so we have resumed our monthly and annual comparisons in our Real Time feature. January and February have emerged as the warmest globally on record. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/warmest.html#INTRO] , January and February were also the warmest and wettest domestically, at least in the contiguous 48 states, which some government experts attribute to a combination of El Nino and global warming. (NY Times, March 30). Even more strikingly, February 1998 showed "the largest positive anomaly of any month in our record," according to James Hansen, director of GISS. In other words, this means that in February, temperatures were the most unusually warm that the world has seen, for any month, for any year, in the historical record. What does this mean for 1998?
Hansen, who last spring predicted that one of the next three years would set a new temperature record, now expects that the record will be broken again by a much larger amount over the next few years as a result of global warming. Will 1998 be the year? We hope to resuming Liberty Tree's annual Real Time temperature feature soon. Stay tuned right here to find out.
For more on all of these topics read the New in the Literature archives.
More on Climate:
Table of Contents | Twelve Hundred Words or Less... | Web Resources
Activist Groups | Voices | New in the Literature | Hotspots
History of Climate Negotiations | Glossary of Negotiator Terms | On the Other Hand...
Policy Options | Technological Breakthroughs? | Want to Get Involved?
Real Time