Policy & Legislation
Mainstream Press Falling for Spin on Greenhouse Gas Policy?
Published May 12, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT
The Obama administration is almost definitely not being riven from within by disagreements over how to handle global warming. But you wouldn't know that from how major news outlets broke a story today about the Environmental Protection Agency's endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.
David Roberts at Grist does a great job summarizing the situation, so I turn the baton over to him:
Today, Republican senators released a memo that had been submitted to the EPA’s docket by the Office of Management and Budget (the EPA is accepting comments on its “endangerment finding”). The memo is blisteringly critical of the EPA’s process, its science, and its proposed use of the Clean Air Act.
Republicans trumpeted this as official OMB—i.e., “Obama White House”—feedback.
But it’s not. When the EPA released its draft finding, the OMB undertook a standard process called Interagency Review. It sent the finding to every government department and agency (dozens), asking for feedback. It then collected all the comments it received and submitted them to the EPA, as required by law.
So the comments in the memo (and the other memos submitted today) could have come from anywhere within the federal bureaucracy.
And there’s more: typically during this process, the comments of various people within a dept. or agency are filtered up through the political appointee running the dept./agency. That appointee filters them, reconciles them, and sends them back to the reviewing agency. But this review process happened within Obama’s first 100 days. In many cases there is no political appointee running things yet; in other cases there’s an appointee frantically trying to get his or her sea legs, not paying much attention to things like interagency reviews.
Which means these comments could have come from just about any careerist in any of these agencies. In some cases—and having reviewed some of the crazy, old-school denier stuff in these memos, I strongly suspect this is true—career bureaucrats at the agency/dept. could have just dug up comments from the Bush administration era and forwarded them along.
AP, The New York Times., the Chicago Tribune, and ABC News, among others, also run variations on this story.
I don't tend to go for the media critique -- daily news reporting is hard work, and it's all too easy to miss the nuances or even get something wrong in the rush to make a series of daily deadlines. (Happily, AP already seems to be updating its reporting.) As Dave puts it, "This is one of those cases where it’s entirely possible to be semantically correct and leave a misleading impression."
But my profession needs to be careful that we've really left behind the bad old days of opting for a false balance over fair and accurate reporting -- when those seeking to protect fossil fuel interests successfully spun the press with misinformation about global warming.
Activists Stage Impromptu Polar Bear Drowning in DC
Published May 11, 2009 @ 04:45PM PT
Last Friday, after Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that he was going to leave the Bush Administration's "polar bear special rule" intact, an impromptu protest broke out outside of the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC.
Because the special rule exempts global warming from the threats that must be considered as part of Endangered Species Act protections for the polar bear, Salazar has in effect decided to let polar bears drown.
Global warming is melting the Arctic ice habitat that the bears need to survive. So to highlight the likely fate of the polar bear given Salazar's decision, several Greenpeace activists put a drowned mock polar bear in the pond outside of the DOI.
The police eventually showed up and hauled the polar bear out of the water. But not in time to save its life.
Only Ken Salazar has that power. If you want to help, you can call Salazar up right now and tell him that letting polar bears drown is the wrong decision.
Obama Sides with Bush on Polar Bears and Climate
Published May 08, 2009 @ 12:24PM PT
The Obama administration announced today that it is embracing a last-minute "midnight rule" created by President Bush that eviscerates protections for the imperiled polar bear.
This rule, celebrated by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and now adopted by Obama, bars the government from using the polar bear's protected status to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as an extinction threat if those emissions originate outside the animal's Arctic habitat. It is known as the "4(d) rule" after the section of the Endangered Species Act that it amends.
However, as the official listing of the polar bear acknowledged, it is exactly those remote emissions -- and the climate change they cause -- that are destroying the polar bear's sea-ice habitat, driving the creatures into extinction. The rule not only violates the intent of the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have argued, but also dooms the polar bear as a wild species.
In making the announcement, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised continued, vigorous action to rescue the polar bear. But he said the Bush rule made sense, as the Obama administration intends to use different methods of combatting global warming.
"We must do all we can to help the polar bear recover, recognizing that the greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change," Salazar said. "However, the Endangered Species Act is not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation's carbon emissions."
This was the same argument the Bush administration employed, asserting that it would be wrong to use the Endangered Species Act as a "back door" method of regulating greenhouse gas pollution. But environmentalists have argued that the broad intent of the Endangered Species Act unequivocally requires a response to all human-caused extinction threats, including global warming. They've advocated that the powerful law should be viewed as a valuable tool and opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.
House Democrats Choke on Cutting Greenhouse Gas Pollution
Published May 08, 2009 @ 08:15AM PT
It's starting to look like the best shot we have at passing meaningful global warming legislation this year may be doomed.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), a bill co-sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), is the most comprehensive global warming legislation ever introduced in either house of Congress.
When it was first revealed, many environmental groups, including Greenpeace (where I work), cautiously deemed it a "good first step," but warned that it had many fatal shortcomings. But given how it's been attacked by shady fossil fuel industry front groups and held hostage by alternative proposals, the bill's problems may never be solved.
For one thing, the legislation is stuck in subcommittee. According to E&E Daily (subscription required, sorry), there is still some deep-seated unease among some Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee about implementing solutions to global warming:
So far, the committee's Democrats have struggled to reach consensus as about a dozen moderate and conservative lawmakers from the South, Rust Belt and Intermountain West resist the aggressive path that Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, set out in a 648-page draft proposal.
President Obama met with House Democrats on Monday. Not many details have been made public about the meeting, but it's been reported that Obama asked them to reach consensus and bring the bill out of committee by Memorial Day, so that they could turn their attention to health care. [Which I covered in this blog post earlier in the week. - Emily]
But the Democrats are so far from getting this bill right that I, for one, hope they spend as much time as they need to make sure it is actually an effective piece of legislation before it hits President Obama's desk.
House Dems in Disarray on Energy-Climate Bill?
Published May 06, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT
If you want to speak your mind on energy and climate legislation, the Union of Concerned Scientists is sponsoring an letter-writing drive to Tell Congress to Pass a Strong Climate Bill.
President Obama and Vice President Biden held a closed-door meeting yesterday with House Democrats, leaning on them to move on climate and energy legislation.
"The president asked a group of 34 House Democrats for quick action on a bill written by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and energy and environment subcommittee chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.)," wrote the Washington Post yesterday, "to cap greenhouse-gas emissions by distributing carbon permits to polluting companies. Maximum emission rates would decline over time under the Waxman-Markey plan, forcing companies to adopt alternative energy sources or cut consumption."
But the legislation is foundering in subcommittee as a faction of right-of-center Dems seeks changes that would sharply cut the bill's targets for cutting greenhouse gas pollution, and give away scads of emissions permits instead of auctioning them all off to the relevant industries.
President Obama's left the legislation to Congress so far; why get involved now? "Obama has two reasons to lean hard on Waxman's committee," notes the Post. "He wants to show progress on a major campaign pledge to address global warming, and he wants to clear Waxman's agenda for the health-care reform bill that is the panel's next order of business. The fiscal 2010 budget sets an Oct. 15 deadline for the health-care legislation to clear the House and Senate under special budget rules that would protect it from a Senate filibuster."
Kate Sheppard, who's posting regular updates on the legislation's progress or lack thereof, has a great breakdown of the "wild-card members of the subcommittee" at Grist -- such as coal-rich Virginia's Rick Boucher; longtime Big Auto friend John Dingell; and Charlie Gonzalez of Texas, who appears to have close ties to the oil, gas, and electric utility sectors.
Late breaking news today is that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) may fast-track the bill to a full Energy and Commerce Committee vote, to free it from the subcommittee morass. Even later breaking news is that conservative House Dems are urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to table the bill entirely.
The carrot they're dangling? Moving on that health care reform legislation, of course.
But Reps. Pelosi, Markey and Waxman have all been telling the press that they're determined to move the climate legislation through the House during this session of Congress.
Is Obama Administration Failing an Early Climate Test?
Published May 04, 2009 @ 06:38PM PT
A climate policy disagreement within the Obama administration may be extending the era of US inaction on greenhouse gas pollution. Worse, the delay -- seemingly involving a rift between the White House and the State Department -- involves a group of gases many thousands of times more destructive than carbon dioxide.
The White House and the State Department are sparring to control both the substance and the narrative on US plans to slash emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), called "super-greenhouse gases" (GHGs) because they are many thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat.
The State Department wants to see use of HFCs phased out under 1987's Montreal Protocol, the very effective international agreement to ramp down use of substances that deplete the atmosphere's ozone layer. This makes a certain sense because the super-GHGs were promoted under that agreement as replacements for ozone-harming chlorofluorocarbons.
Perhaps more importantly, the process to amend the Montreal Protocol is already in progress -- today was the deadline for State to submit its proposal within that framework -- while the US has no laws whatsoever on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
So curbs on HFCs would likely come about faster both here and abroad if they were included in the Montreal agreement's group of gases.
Over many months, State's been leading an effort to bring this about, gathering the support of the Pentagon, the White House Office of Environmental Quality, and Congressional climate action leaders. But as SolveClimate's excellent ongoing reporting of this story has revealed, a White House economist threw up a barrier to the department's plan last week. At an interagency meeting, this still-unnamed economist argued that HFCs would be needed to trade against other greenhouse gases in a US carbon market -- and thus that the US should support controlling them under the Kyoto climate change agreement and its successor treaty.
"In other words," writes SolveClimate's David Sassoon,
a utility company or cement manufacturer on the hook to reduce CO2 emissions under a federal climate law could opt to find sources of HFCs and have them destroyed instead. Since HFCs are as much as 11,990 times more potent than CO2, small amounts could substitute for large amounts of CO2 emissions and offer a cheaper alternative to emissions reductions, lubricating the economy to a more gradual embrace of a price on carbon. It also means CO2 emissions would ratchet down more slowly.
The difference of opinion within the administration on one of its signature issues was an unexpected development.
Come Monday, the two sides apparently are still at odds. Here's the start of a press release from State:
On May 4, 2009, the State Department wrote to the Secretariat of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, expressing interest in a proposal that calls for amending the Montreal Protocol to phase down consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). HFCs pose no threat to the stratospheric ozone layer but pose a significant threat to the climate system because they are potent greenhouse gases. As countries phase out consumption and production of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) under an agreement reached in 2007, they are likely to increase their use of HFCs unless suitable alternatives are found.
Meanwhile, an unnamed Obama administration official spun the White House's version of the situation to New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin:
...the Obama administration has decided not to seek an immediate phase-out of hydrofluorocarbons (HFC’s), a potent group of climate-warming gases, under a treaty aimed at protecting the ozone layer ... [the] White House official said that the climate and energy bill now before the House of Representatives provides for a phase-out of HFC’s. In addition, the chemical is among the six greenhouse gases that the E.P.A. is proposing to regulate under its recent finding that carbon dioxide and other substances pose a risk to human health and the environment.
So is the Obama administration ducking its first opportunity to embrace some solid action on stopping climate change -- which the president himself has called a crisis? Or can the world withstand a few extra years of growing HFC emissions while we get the kinks sorted out on an effective carbon cap and trade strategy?
Some vulnerable nations don't have the luxury of being so tactical. "In the absence of U.S. action today," writes David Sassoon at SolveClimate, "two of the tiniest island nations on the planet – the Federated States of Micronesia and Mauritius – have filed for an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, leaving the door open for decisive U.S. support."
