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Big Coal's new campaign: choose us, not jobs and health

It was not so long ago that the coal industry could just issue propaganda without reference to coal's problems. Coal was "reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean" and it powered green, useful things like Washington, D.C.'s Metro system.

So imagine my glee when I woke up this morning and pulled the latest Southern Company insert from my morning newspaper. Here it is:

I think the androgynous yuppie happily contemplating the radioactive turd is supposed to convince us that said turd is actually a piece of coal that has been magically "greened."

I was smiling, of course, not because this insert represented a new, revolting low in graphic arts, but because Southern Company now feels compelled to fight not so much for the ability to build new coal-fired power plants, but for survival.

Investors will figure out that coal is growing scarce and too expensive

The following is a guest essay by Tom Konrad, a financial analyst specializing in renewable energy and energy efficiency companies, a freelance writer, and a contributor to AltEnergyStocks.com.

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A couple years ago, I began to see reports that coal supplies might not last the 200-plus years we've all been lead to believe, so I wrote an article about what you could do to prepare your portfolio for Peak Coal.

Now two years have passed, and peak coal is undeniably two years closer. (Ever wonder why people who have been saying that we have 200 years of coal for 20 years aren't now talking about 180 years of coal?) But more than being two years closer, the evidence continues to mount. Caltech Professor David Rutledge has been spreading the peak coal word for most of the time since. I recommend the video of his 2007 lecture on the subject.

It's great that the New York Times is asking "Is America Ready to Quit Coal?" but the real question may be "Will we have any choice?"

On February 12, Clean Energy Action released a report on Powder River Basin coal supplies, based in part on a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report. The Powder River Basin matters because Western coal has been the only source of new coal production in the U.S. for the last two decades. Appalachian and interior coal production has been declining, despite mostly increasing prices and uniformly increasing prices since 2003. Northern Appalachian coal production peaked in the middle of the last century, while interior coal production peaked at the start of this decade. When production declines in the face of rising prices, constraints other than economics must be coming into play. Future increases in production in these regions seems unlikely.

A price signal in the vehicle market is best applied to the vehicle

Proponents of raising the gas tax -- and the chattering class is littered with them these days -- have a simple, central argument: gas taxes create a market signal that pushes all vehicle consumers in the direction of fuel efficiency.

Indeed, some conservatives (and car companies) go further: they say that CAFE standards are bad policy because they force automakers to create products for which there's no demand. It's no good making fuel-efficient cars if nobody wants to buy them! (Americans love big, powerful cars. "Everybody knows" that.) Higher gas taxes should replace CAFE, because they create create demand instead of forcing supply.

A moment's thought reveals a serious flaw in these arguments. Fuel costs are a relatively low portion of total vehicle costs -- maybe 10-20 percent. There's maintenance, insurance, parking, but most of all, the price of the car.

And when the time comes to buy a car, people don't behave like the rational interest maximizers of economic myth. They rarely calculate out future costs like fuel. They consider the number on the price tag in front of them: the price of the car.

It follows that if you want a market signal, you should put it where it will have the most effect: on the price of the car.

As it happens, we have a policy like that! Let's hand the mic to John Heywood, who has headed the Sloan Automotive Laboratory since 1972:

I think we need a purchase tax, a feebate system, like the French have instituted fairly recently. Fees for high-consuming vehicles and rebates for low-consuming vehicles. That will help reinforce consumer response to CAFE requirements by providing a market incentive.

There you go. A clear price signal, applied at the point of maximum effect, supplementing rather than replacing fuel efficiency standards. CAFE standards push automakers to make fuel-efficient cars; feebates push consumers to buy them. (Oh, and unlike gas taxes, feebates aren't regressive.)

How is this not a preferable policy, both economically and politically? What am I missing?

Attack of the zombies: global cooling!

John Fleck comments on George Will's latest zombie attack: in the 1970s, scientists said the Earth was cooling!

What's amazing is not that George Will is selectively quoting to mislead the reader, but that he continues to do so after John sent him a copy of the article in question:

When George Will last wrote about this subject, last May, I sent him a copy of the Science News article he misleadingly quoted in the example I used above. I got a nice note back from him thanking me for sharing it.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what this reveals about George Will's journalistic integrity.

I can sense some frustration from Fleck that this argument lives on despite the publication of his nice BAMS article that lays out the actual history of the argument, and which clearly shows it to be false.

All I can say is: Welcome to the club, John.

Freaky

World carbon dioxide levels jump 2.3 ppm in 2008 to highest in 650,000 years

NOAA's Global Monitoring Division reports that global concentrations of the primary heat-trapping greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, jumped 2.28 ppm in 2008.

A study in Science from the Global Carbon Project (see "More on soaring carbon concentrations") noted:

Conservative columnist lies to millions of people, again, ho hum

George Will is supposedly one of the reality-based conservatives, who eschews the willful know-nothingism of some of his ideological co-travelers. Yet today, as he has many times before, he uses his perch on the Washington Post editorial page to lie to readers and reduce their knowledge of the facts.

It's hard to believe, but he wheels out the "scientists said there would be global cooling" myth again. See it refuted here in our How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide. Or see Brad Plumer for yet another refutation.

But at this point it seems futile to refute it yet again. The question here is not about the facts, but about sociocultural norms. Why is Will permitted to lie to millions of readers every week? At what point do the editors of the Washington Post feel that it's their job to step in and stop him from misleading people? Is there any such point? Is there anything Will could say that would cross the line?

Addendum: Meanwhile, segregated over in the "green" section of the paper: "Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates." And so it goes.

Grid reliability statistics look good, if you don't consider the flaws

Refashioning our electric grid to move generation closer to load creates a host of benefits. (Two-hundred and seven, according to Amory Lovins.) Among them is an increase in grid reliability, since generation closer to load necessarily reduces the need for transmission to connect remote generators to that load. Carnegie-Mellon has estimated that we could free up something like 15 percent of our total grid capacity if we moved to a locally generated system.

But you wouldn't know that from the way some utilities calculate reliability statistics. The Columbus Dispatch reports that in spite of a wave of recent outages due to winds knocking out power lines, reliability statistics still look surprisingly good. Why?

The reliability statistics themselves are controversial. Major storms, such as the September wind storm that knocked out power to 700,000 AEP customers, are not included on the list. Utility officials contend, and regulators agree, that major storms would cause breakdowns in even the best systems, and are therefore not helpful in measuring overall reliability.

That means the September wind storm, the January ice storm, and this week's high winds will not be considered when the PUCO puts together reliability statistics for AEP.

"For analysis purposes, you've got to remove the anomalies," said Selwyn Dias, vice president for regulatory and finance at AEP Ohio.

So rather than build a more reliable grid, we will simply assume the grid we have -- and its innate exposure to weather-related outages -- is immutable.

Tomorrow: I'm favored to be the top pick in the upcoming NBA draft, once you remove the anomalies of my height, 30-percent shooting percentage, and lack of credible crossover move.

Superb NYT story captures both coal's peril and the barriers to its elimination

"Is America Ready to Quit Coal?"

So asks a must-read story by Melanie Warner in the Sunday New York Times.

And so, slowly, fitfully, that possibility -- the possibility not just of cleaning up coal or using less coal but eliminating coal -- creeps its way into the American public consciousness.

The headline isn't the only thing worth celebrating. I would quibble with some details, but overall this piece comes closer than anything I've ever seen in the national media to getting the big story right.

It starts off by describing what too few people understand: coal is in a perilous position. Already building new coal plants is extremely expensive; any new regulations -- on CO2, MTR mining, coal ash, you name it -- could put new plants permanently off the table.

But the more interesting parts, to me, are those that describe the barriers in the way of quitting coal. Here are the big three, in order of importance:

The fear that that there's no alternative.

"[W]hether renewables can keep the lights on and our iPods charged remains an open question."

Loss aversion is, in your author's humble opinion, at the core of the coal fight. If the American people can be convinced an alternative is possible, they will not accept dirty, unhealthy energy, any more than they accept tainted water or cars without seat belts. But the fear of letting go of the devil they know, the fear of jumping into the unknown, is incredibly potent.

"Charging iPods" trivializes it; electricity provides basic sustenance, shelter, and comfort for families. For children. This is primal lizard-brain stuff. You do not mess with it lightly. Those looking to dethrone coal in the public imagination would do well to focus most of their firepower not on coal itself but on establishing the credibility and reliability of the renewables/efficiency alternative. It can't be cutting edge and whizbang forever. It's got to be safe for soccer moms in suburban Atlanta.

The fear of rising prices.

Climate Central takes on Iowa corn

Climate Central bills itself as "a think tank with a production studio." This is what they do:

Using both staff experts and an extended blue ribbon network of scientists, Climate Central assesses and synthesizes the latest science, technology, and policy proposals. Our experienced communications team turns that information into creative, easily understood, and graphically rich pieces for print, television and the web.

They've got some serious names behind the project, including John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco before they were snapped up by the Obama administration. (Full disclosure: Grist board member Ben Strauss is a member of the CC team.)

CC just got up and running recently -- the full site doesn't debut until Spring -- but it's already turning out some great stuff. The latest is "Iowa: Corn and Climate," a video that recently aired on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Here it is (starts about a minute in):

The coolest thing, though, is that the video comes with an annotated transcript that takes virtually every sentence and substantiates it with a relevant bit of science, news report, or infographic. You get the public-friendly video and the wonk-friendly reference work, all in one package. Not bad.

CC aims to be an impeccably credible source of information on a highly contested set of subjects. It looks like they're off to a great start.