Work Actions

The climate bill is dead. Long live the climate bill!

Months after the Waxman-Markey/Kerry-Lieberman bill died, Harry Reid and environmentalists have finally admitted it is dead, and may even be ready to remove its rotting corpse from the living room and give it a decent burial.Though the death was clearly murder by Republicans and “centrist” Democrats, malpractice from mainstream environmental groups helped kill a chance for the climate that a different treatment might have saved. The fundamental error was to try and pass a bill via deal-making rather than grass-roots pressure, partially on the assumption that the Obama administration shared environmentalist priorities, and would spend political capital to pressure reluctant Senators and Congress members to support the bill.

The way forward after the Senate’s climate failure

Here’s President Obama in April 2009:

Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.

As of yesterday, it looks like we’re gonna go with decline. Prosperity was over-rated anyhow. That’s what seems to be the message, anyway, from DC, where “pragmatism” from leaders has resulted in a complete capitulation on any subsantive climate and energy bill.

As energy use goes, so goes the economy

It’s fairly well-known that economic activity tends to track energy use. It follows that we can learn some interesting things about the economy by examining trends in energy use.

For example: the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks electricity sales, and its data holds intriguing—and troubling—clues on the prospects for growth in the U.S. economy.

In the U.S., electricity sales grow at a steady 1-2 percent rate per year, with occasional troughs mapping to slowdowns in economic activity.

Why did the climate bill fail?

With the climate bill officially dead, there’s already a trickle of “who’s to blame and what they should have done differently” pieces. I expect it will soon become a flood.

Most of these pieces will focus in the wrong places. Take Lee Wasserman’s new op-ed, “Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill,” an instant classic of the genre. Wasserman doesn’t like the way Dems talked about the issue and he doesn’t like the policy framework they put forward, which is of course his right.

U.S. faces climate-driven water shortages

As global warming accelerates, the world will become not only hotter, flatter, and more crowded but also thirsty, according to a new study that finds 70 percent of counties in the United States may face climate change-related risks to their water supplies by 2050.

One-third of U.S. counties may find themselves at “high or extreme risk,” according to the report prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council by Tetra Tech, a California environmental consulting firm.

“It appears highly likely that climate change could have major impacts on the available precipitation and the sustainability of water withdrawals in future years under the business-as-usual scenario,” the study’s authors conclude.

Can the renewable electricity standard be saved?

At his keynote address to Netroots Nation last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was asked a question I had submitted (thanks, mcjoan!) about a key piece of energy policy: the renewable electricity standard. It’s right at the 30-minute mark in this video:

At 33:00, Reid gets to the point: “Right now, I don’t think I have 60 votes to get that done.” But what he says before that is something I’ve heard from several senators at the conference: it’s about time.

Businesses & Consumers Just Beginning to Recognize Economic Cost of Biodiversity Loss

The latest report from the UN-supported The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project has been released, this time examining how businesses need to start addressing biodiversity loss and better appreciate the value of ecosystem services--those natural planetary functions, such as pollinating insects, that would otherwise have to be paid for directly.