Articles by Joseph Romm

Global warming solution studies overestimate costs, underestimate benefits

Dan Weiss, the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, has written an excellent piece on why we can expect a series of flawed economic analyses of the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) in the coming months:

Many of these studies will likely predict that the reductions of greenhouse gases required by the cap-and-trade system will lead to huge hikes in electric rates, reductions in jobs, and all sorts of other economic havoc.

But these studies also have one other common element: They will eventually be proven wrong once the program is underway.

These studies base their cost assumptions on existing technologies and practices, which means that they do not account for the vast potential for innovation once binding reductions and deadlines are set. The Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act anticipates the need for innovation and creates economic incentives to spur engineers and managers to devise technologies and methods to meet the greenhouse gas reduction requirements more cheaply.

This isn't the first time that pollution control studies have produced inaccurate predictions about the future. Remember what analysts predicted about acid rain controls from 1989 to 1990?

And the article continues on to review that history and then look at the important reports of McKinsey & Co and Nicholas Stern, which makes clear the cost of action is far, far lower than the cost of inaction.

If you're interested in the IPCC's take on this -- they explain why the literature is clear that action is not costly -- this post summarizes what they report.

Sustainable, carbon-neutral community built in Oregon

Last week the Center for American Progress began a series called "It's Easy Being Green," meant to recognize the steps communities, individuals, and organizations are taking to transform our country's energy use. Last week's column featured a new kind of neighborhood:

The Washington Post lamely attacks Obama’s climate ideas

Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, in an absurdly titled column, "Obama's Missing Ideas," proves once again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Obama's ideas about climate solutions are probably the very last place one can find something missing.

Obama has a terrific climate plan, full of winning ideas, as I have blogged many times. Yet Mallaby claims that "good ideas are actually quite scarce. Just take a look at climate change."

Mallaby's "case" is based on two climate ideas many people have always thought were lame (which he never actually bothers to link to Obama), one climate problem that is pretty straightforward to solve, and one idea Mallaby thinks is new that is in fact quite old, is not really a climate idea, and as such has limited climate benefits.

First he says, "A couple of years back, ethanol was touted as a good answer to global warming." Uh, no. Corn ethanol, which is what he attacks, was not considered a "good answer to global warming" by any energy or climate expert I have ever met. To the extent climate advocates even tolerated the fuel, it was strictly as a bridge to cellulosic ethanol. To the extent that corn ethanol was supported on policy grounds by politicians [as opposed to support for the farmers or a desire not to offend Iowans], it is primarily from people who are concerned about our dependence on imported oil, not global warming.

Does Mallaby even know that Obama supports "a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard," which would block any fuel that increases greenhouse-gas emissions -- or that he supports accelerating the development of cellulosic (i.e., low-carbon) ethanol? These are good ideas.

Next Mallaby complains about "carbon trading with developing countries":

Conventional energy vs. renewable energy

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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As all eyes turn toward Texas this week in advance of the Democratic primary, we will see a state that is beginning its transition to a new energy economy. Texas is grappling with a shift the entire nation faces -- and as usual, it's doing it on a big scale.

When it comes to energy and to carbon emissions, Texas is a place of superlatives and contrasts. It has more solar, wind, and biomass resources that any other state; but it's also No. 1 in total carbon emissions.

It is the ancestral home of Big Oil, but it also hosts the world's largest wind farms. It has a very successful renewable energy portfolio standard, but it also has two nuclear power plants in the pipeline to provide power to its rapidly growing population.

A year ago in a watershed deal, a private equity firm working with environmentalists arranged a $45 billion buyout of the state's largest power producer, TXU. As part of the deal, eight of 11 planned new coal-fired power plants were cancelled. However, as many as nine new coal plants remain in the pipeline.

In Texas, we see a contest between conventional and renewable energy resources, and between the past and the future.