Wind turbines at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base — thanks to the DOE office I once ran

My recent blog post -- Jack Bauer becomes first-ever carbon-neutral torturer as Murdoch says "Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats" -- led one reader to email me that Gitmo has wind turbines. I googled, and indeed they do.

What is doubly interesting is that this project is the direct result of the Federal Energy Management Program, part of DOE's office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy that I helped run in the mid-1990s. Since the Gingrich Congress blocked all efforts to ramp up funding for this "no brainer" program that helps reduce the deficit -- by lowering the energy bill of federal agencies -- while saving energy and reducing pollution, we launched a huge effort to leverage private money to pay for the retrofits.

That effort had a classic bureaucratic name -- Indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity Super Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPCs) -- you can read about here. The ESPCs avoid the need for any upfront capital by the federal government. Even though Bush has grossly underfunded all such EERE deployment programs, the program continued and Gitmo made use of it (see here [PDF]):

The Department of the Navy partnered with NORESCO to construct a $12 million wind turbine project at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using an energy savings performance contract. Four wind turbines will generate 3,800 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to supply about a quarter of the peak power needed for base operations. The project will not only save taxpayers $1.2 million in annual energy costs, but will also save 650,000 gallons of diesel fuel and reduce air pollution by 26 tons of SO2 and 15 tons of NOX, demonstrating the Navy's commitment to energy conservation and environmental stewardship.

So, no, Gitmo is not carbon neutral.

The Pentagon's news story on this back in 2005 explains how the ESPC made this possible:

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The president's budget hints at a coming battle over one kind of ag subsidy

When President Barack Obama said during his recent address to Congress that "in this budget, we will... end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," he set off a firestorm of speculation. Now that the budget outline has been published, we finally have an understanding of what he meant. Yes, as we suspected, he was indeed referring to a specific subsidy program called "direct payments." Jill Richardson explains:

Direct payments are a result of the 1996 farm bill. Prior to that, subsidies were given based on need. If you couldn't sell your crops at a price the government thought was fair, you got a subsidy to make up the difference...

If you own land where commodities were grown (by you or someone else) in the past, you get a direct payment whether you grow anything or not. You could do nothing, potentially, and still receive a direct payment. Does that sound stupid? I think so too.

Your direct payment is calculated on your "base acres." They keep a running average of how much you grew on your land (or how much somebody grew on your land if it wasn't you), and that yield determines how much you get in government cash. During the past farm bill debate, grain prices were high and farmers were doing well, but the direct payments kept flowing in.

Meanwhile, the budget language looks like this [PDF]:

As part of an effort to transition large farms from direct payments provided to owners of base acres to increased income from revenue derived from emerging markets for environmental services, the President's Budget phases out direct payments over three years to farmers with sales revenue of more than $500,000 annually... Large farmers are well positioned to replace those payments with alternate sources of income from emerging markets for environmental services, such as carbon sequestration, renewable energy production, and providing clean air, clean water, and wildlife habitat.

Time for new thinking — and new blood? — in the White House economics team

In 2005, Henry Paulson stepped down as chief of Goldman Sachs to become President George W. Bush's Treasury secretary. The Wall Street-to-Treasury story is a bit dog-bites-man; Robert Rubin had taken the exact same path a decade before under Clinton.

Yet Paulson's appointment generated excitement in green circles, of all places. The new secretary had sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy and collaborated on projects with Conservation International. An article by Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little summed up the mood. She quoted Conservation International Chair and CEO Peter Seligmann:

My hope is that Paulson will raise the level of understanding around these issues [i.e., climate] within this inner circle, and rally a critical mass that will push the administration to make substantive moves in the right direction.

Since then, of course, Bush has done approximately nothing on climate. And Paulson has evidently been a less-than-constructive presence, as David Roberts recently pointed out.

So the Wall Street-friendly finance minister, despite his Big Green cred, ended up caving on climate. What does this tell us, as the Obama administration prepares to install its own Wall Street-friendly economics team?

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Your choice vs. the 'expert' choice in video contest

The following guest post was written by Keith Gaby, communications director for the Environmental Defense Fund's national climate campaign. This was originally posted on Climate 411.

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Who is right when a national environmental group holds a video competition and the public and the "experts" disagree on who should win?

At the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, the jury of film experts chose Forty Shades of Blue as the best dramatic film. The Audience Award went to Hustle & Flow. I don't know which was a better film, but I do know Hustle & Flow went on to earn $20 million in wide release in the U.S., while Forty Shades of Blue topped out at $75,000. I'm sure it doesn't always happen that way, but it goes to show that the experts don't always know what will succeed in the marketplace of ideas.

We at Environmental Defense Fund just finished something a bit like a film festival -- a competition that challenged participants to make a 30-second ad that explains how capping greenhouse gas pollution will help cure our national addition to oil. This week we announced two winners, one selected by our staff and another chosen by thousands of voters online. Like at Sundance, the voters and the judges chose different winners ... in fact, the video chosen by us "experts" came in dead last in the online voting.

I thought it might be interesting to explain our decision and see what others think.