Obama admits cap and trade is dead

This week the President admitted what D.C. insiders have been saying for months about the Democratic plan to control greenhouse gas emissions.

ACES, The American Clean Energy and Security Bill passed by the House last fall, which is intended to control emissions by a cap-and-trade mechanism, is politically dead.

At a town hall meeting in Nashua, NH, Obama said:

The House passed an energy bill, and people complained about, well,
there's this cap and trade thing, and you just mentioned, you know,
let's do the fun stuff before we do the hard stuff," Obama told former
New Hampshire Rep. Dick Swett.

Obama went on to point out that cap and trade is a market-based approach to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, but obviously that fact failed to sway conservative Democrats, far less Republicans.

But is it possible that the failure of cap and trade is not a disaster, but a second chance to pass a better bill? Jonathan Zasloff, of Legal Planet, argues so, saying this will compel Dems to give up on the super-majority, and simply pass a carbon tax as part of a reconciliation deal between the two houses. 

A budget reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered: according to
the Budget Act of 1974, the Senate is limited to 20 hours of debate on
it.  It does not get rid of the filibuster because you cannot put
everything in a reconciliation bill: only those items whose
relationship with the budget is more than “merely incidental” qualify.

But one thing is clear: tax bills virtually always qualify, because by definition, they are centrally concerned with the budget.

Neither Waxman-Markey nor Kerry-Boxer would qualify.  But a refundable carbon tax, such as has been proposed by the Carbon Tax Center, clearly would. 

Hmmm. Well, if you listen to our leading climate scientists, cap-and-trade was a bad idea from the start. James Hansen, in his blunt new book Storms of My Grandchildren, argues at length in his book about it:

I almost forgot that I had agreed to provide a proof that the [cap-and-trade] approach pursued by governments today cannot conceivably yield their promise of an 80 percent emission reduction by 2050. It is an easy proof. An 80 percent reduction in 2050 is just what occurs if coal emissions are phased out between 2010 and 2030. This is based on the moderate oil and gas reserves estimated by the IPCC — implying also that we cannot go after the last drops of oil. First ask if the governments are building any new coal plants. The answer: "Lots of them." Then ask how they will persuade the major oil-producing nations to leave their oil in the ground. The answer: "Duh." Proof complete.

Hansen for years has been arguing against new coal plants, and the science argument, backed by the decades-old Clean Air Act and a threat of some sort of carbon tax, has been surprisingly effective at preventing the construction of new coal plants in this country.

Still, the death of the hopes of the best and brightest for legislation on this issue cannot be considered good news. Maybe it's not all bad, but…as Toles points out, it's not exactly a milestone. 

Capandtrade

Teens turn against blogging: more adults like it now

When I grow up, I want to work for the Pew Research Center. They study all the interesting questions, it seems, and all their centers have really long and impressive names, such as the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, and many others.

Their latest publication (unless a new one came out in the last five minutes) is a survey of attitudes towards the Internet, blogging, and cellphones, called Social Media and Young Adults. (This is not about sexting, by the way: That's a different report.) 

This one reveals that blogging is no longer very cool for teens, but is increasingly popular among grown-ups.

Bloggingstats
In other words, my brief flirtation with coolness (as an adult blogger) is now officially over.

Get ready: seven foot sea level rise this century

If there is one question about climate science that went unanswered in the 2007 IPCC report, it was sea level rise. As the EPA notes, the report estimates a two-foot rise this century…at the most. 

But that estimate did not include the possibility of degradation of the polar ice sheets, which in the last two years has been observed by NASA's astounding GRACE satellite:

We use monthly measurements of time-variable gravity from the GRACE
(Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite gravity mission to
determine the ice mass-loss for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets
during the period between April 2002 and February 2009. We find that
during this time period the mass loss of the ice sheets is not a
constant, but accelerating with time, i.e., that the GRACE observations
are better represented by a quadratic trend than by a linear one,
implying that the ice sheets contribution to sea level becomes larger
with time.

The IPCC could not estimate sea level rise, it said, because the unknowns were too great, so it assumed that warming would result in the same sort of sea level rise we saw in the 20th century. As authors Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey write on the Yale Environment 360:

In the 20th century, sea level rise was primarily due to thermal
expansion of ocean water. Contributions of melting mountain glaciers
and the large ice sheets were minor components. But most climate
scientists now believe that the main drivers of sea level rise in the
21st century will be the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (a
potential of a 16-foot rise if the entire sheet melts) and the
Greenland Ice Sheet (a potential rise of 20 feet if the entire ice cap
melts).

[edit]

Seeking to correct the IPCC’s failure to come up with a comprehensive
forecast for sea level increase, a number of state panels and
government committees have produced sea level rise predictions that include an
examination of melting ice sheets. For example, sea level rise panels
in Rhode Island and Miami-Dade County have concluded that a minimum of
a three- to five-foot sea level rise should be anticipated by 2100. A
California report assumes a possible 4.6-foot rise by 2100, while the
Dutch assume a 2.5-foot rise by 2050 in the design of their tidal gates.

The authors, professors at Duke and Western Carolina University, think that for the purposes of urban planning, a seven foot rise is a prudent estimate. 

Miami tops the list of most endangered cities in the world, as measured
by the value of property that would be threatened by a three-foot rise.
This would flood all of Miami Beach and leave downtown Miami sitting as
an island of water, disconnected from the rest of Florida. Other
threatened U.S. cities include New York/Newark, New Orleans, Boston,
Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa-St Petersburg, and San Francisco.

They're just saying…that pictures like this one, of the sea hitting St. Ives in Cornwall last September, will become a lot more common in years to come.

St. Ives_D8278 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!_1265173939166

I’m a member of an endangered species — a journalist

It's a small story, as mine often are, but I'm not going to apologize for making a living reporting and writing. Here's a heartwarming local story, thanks to the Star, with nice pics by Joe Garcia. 

MariaPollack

A quote from Maria: “Oh man, I wish I could hug all the people who helped me that aren’t here today.” 

How bad for the environment could one plastic bottle be?

WASHINGTON—Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and
failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million
Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle
of water could really be.

"It's fine, it's fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing
the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent
Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner
Brian
McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an
awaiting trash can. "It's just one bottle. And I'm usually pretty good
about this sort of thing."

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation's population.

How-bad-for-environment-map-R-4603
From The Onion, of course. For the rest of the all-too-hilarious story, click here.

Let Poetry Die (and be reborn again, outside academia)

So argues a New England poet:

I love poetry.

But as far as the public is concerned, poetry died with the modernists.

No poets ever filled their shoes. And though there remain a number
of minor masters and one hit wonders, few passing pedestrians could
name a poet from the last 50 to 60 years – let alone the same
poet, let alone the title of a poem, let alone a first line. Even
though I’ve never watched a single game of ice hockey from beginning to
end, I know who Wayne Gretzky is. And even though I’ve never watched
more than two holes of golf, I know  that Tiger Woods is not just a
gifted philanderer, but a great golfer.

Ask anyone to name a novelist of the last half century and names will come tumbling.

How about JK Rowling?

Ask anyone to name a contemporary poet and you will be lucky to
scrape by with John Ashbery, notwithstanding his much ballyhooed publication in  Library of America.  I know because I’ve asked friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers. Try it yourself.

Patrick Gillespie is right. I encourage you to read his whole essay, which has not a whiff of pretension to it, just plain good sense, but here (below) is another example of a non-academic poet, a Russian named Vera Pavlova, recently published in Poetry magazine. (Which is relevant because the magazine and foundation are at the center of Gillespie's argument.)

Poetry is a terrific publication, but every year, I swear to God, the best issue is the spring translation issue…probably because foreign poets are not supported by the academia industry, so they must be heard and appreciated by the public, if they are to be heard at all. 

Heck, Pavlova has even been known to put out poetry by text, or so the rumor goes. And my God, does she write sexily. When was the last time you heard that from an academic?

Here's an example, from her If There Is Something to Desire:

Tenderly on a tender surface
the best of my lines are written
with the tip of my tongue on your palate,
on your chest in tiny letters
on your belly…
but darling, I wrote them
pianissimo!
may I erase with my lips
your exclamation mark?

Pavlova

(translation by Steven Seymour)

Some good rain…and a “blown forecast”

Ventura County is now at about 200% of normal rainfall for this time of year, twenty inches in our immediate area, which is wonderful, but, as Emily Green and others have pointed out, comes nowhere near the 1 to 1.5 inches of rain an hour predicted for Wednesday of last week. 

In Green's post, forecaster extraordinaire Bill Patzert calls it a "blown forecast," but sympathizes with the National Weather Service. As Yogi Berra famously said:

It's not easy to make predictions, especially about the future.

But the funny thing is, although these storms came in nowhere near what the NWS warned, and were nothing like the "war" mentioned in posts below, no one seems to care. We're all too grateful.

Thank God for the rain. It's lovely to see the streams running again, to hear a few frogs beginning to croak at night, to feel the softness of the ground beneath our feet, and smell the richness of the earth. 

I'll leave it at that…with a picture, for those who might miss the often-soft winters of SoCal….

IMG_4465

Matt the Electrican mocks weather weenies of Phoenix

Went to see a gifted Austin folkie named Matt the Electrician at a "house concert" last night. (He got his name because he took up a building trade to support his music habit, which fortunately has developed well enough to support him and his family, now.) But he's still wry and funny, with a rasky on-key voice to support his unique songs. With one exception none of the ones he played show up on the LaLa, so I went with his story about the streaking "Valedictorian," which gives an idea of his warm, memorable style.

But first! He played Phoenix on Thursday night, and had a little story about the "weather weenies" out there, who sound possibly even more wussy than the Californians. 

Matt said that he and his guitar wiz partner Scrappy were heading for the gig at a coffee house, listening to a classic rock station on the radio. He said:

It's drizzling outside, barely raining, and there's not even a lot of water collected on the ground. And the classic rock DJ comes on the air, and she says the Governor just declared a state of emergency. She says it's really bad out there, and tells everybody just stay home!

Fortunately he said a number of Phoenicians ignored the "emergency" and came out and had a good time at the gig. The house party, for forty so folks in a friends' living room, turned out to be plenty fun for us too.  Who needs cover charges, Ticketmaster, crowds, etc. Just visit with great musicians at home…

Here's Matt:

Matttheelectrian

http://www.lala.com/external/flash/SingleSongWidget.swf