Gristmill - Details

By David Roberts

It's worth closely reading this Avery Palmer piece inCQ Politics:"The price of being green." It puts the frame around American energy/environmental politics in particularly crystalline terms.

To wit: environmentalists want to raise the cost of energy while everyone else wants to lower it.

Or more specifically: in order to lower greenhouse gas emissions, environmentalists want to put a price on carbon via a cap-and-trade system, which would have the effect of raising gasoline and electricity prices. Meanwhile, gas and electricity prices are already high and rising, and everyone else -- including the vast majority of voters -- is keenly concerned to bring those pricesdown.

"The solutions almost go in opposite directions," said Henry Lee, lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Ergo:it's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get a major climate-change bill through Congress any time soon.

That is the conventional wisdom, and itdoomsclimate legislation, no matter what polls tell you about public concern over climate. People vote their wallets -- bet on it.

It's this very dynamic Shellenberger& Nordhaus address intheir latestL.A. Timesop-ed. Their conclusion is that public policy should not seek to raise (dirty) energy prices, but instead to lower (clean) energy prices. (ReadJoefor more on that op-ed.)

That's a reasonable conclusion to draw, if you accept the premises. But we should not accept the premises. They are as follows:

1. The best way to lower energy prices is to increase energy supply.
2. A price on carbon would primarily drive a switch from dirty to clean energy, raising energy prices.
3. Higher energy prices yield higher energy costs.

What's the missing ingredient that disrupts every one of those premises? The big fat hole in the middle of the argument. Anyone? Anyone?

That's right:efficiency.

The absence is glaring throughout the piece. A couple of examples:

It is also likely that the president will try to frame a climate change plan as part of a broader energy strategy, which could include both investments in alternative sources and increased production of fossil fuels.

Hm, if there were only someotherpart of a broader energy strategy ...

Energy legislation is notoriously difficult to pass because of regional differences that drive wedges inside both parties. Gulf Coast lawmakers tend to support increased oil drilling, for example, while politicians from Appalachia have an interest in protecting the coal industry.

Hm, if only there were some energy policy that could benefiteveryoneineveryregion of the country ...

"We have to do something, when we do it, that drives our economy, that adds to our GDP, that makes us more energy secure and deals with climate at the same time," said Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is considered one of the swing votes in the Senate on global warming legislation.

Hm, if only there were an energy policy that did all that at once!

And so on. I don't blame Palmer for this. For some reason, the centrality of efficiency to smart energy policy is only understood by a small community of enviros and wonks. In the broader culture, efficiency is marginal, a kind of add-on that will"soften the impact" slightly. Despite all the energy talk in the campaign so far, efficiency has played a tiny role at best (see:last night's debate).

I'm not sure how to go about rep this state of affairs. There are certain intrinsic difficulties in selling efficiency -- which is not so much a thing as an absence -- in a culture obsessed with exploration and energy supply. Thus far the wonks don't seem to be getting through.

But it's important. Efficiency is what allows us to meet emission targets at a net economic gain. Efficiency is the only effective response to the economic difficulties energy prices impose on the poor and middle-class.Efficiency is what prevents higher energy prices from becoming higher energy costs.

By Grist

This Guardian story was written by reporterHaroon Siddique. Grist is a member of theGuardian's Environment Network.

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A unique proposal to protect one of the world's most biodiverse places from oil drilling is facing a looming deadline without any funding in place.

The Ecuadorian government has said it is prepared to keep hundreds of millions of barrels of heavy crude oil in the ground, but in return it wants the international community to compensate it at the level of $350m (£202m) a year for a decade.

The deadline - already postponed twice - is in December. While there has been political support from Spain, Germany and Norway, as yet there has been little in the way of hard cash.

TheYasuni national park in Ecuadorlies at the intersection of the Amazon, the Andes and the equator and spans almost a million hectares of primary rainforest. It is home to indigenous tribes, who wish to be left in isolation, and an extraordinary array of wildlife and plants, much of it endangered. Avoiding the oil extraction would also prevent the release of an estimated 100m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Environmentalists believe the innovative proposal has the potential to be a model for how developing countries manage their environments and the global fight against climate change.

Nelson Torres, the Ecuadorian deputy ambassador to the UK, described it as a "third way of management of climate change" and said that it would "lay the groundwork for energy transformation globally". Anita Rivas, the indigenous mayor of Orellana, where Yasuni is located said: "It's a brave proposal, a unique proposal."

TheIshpingo Tambococha Tiputini(ITT) field block lies in the south of Yasuni park, within an area officially designated in 1999 as an "untouchable zone" - a safe haven for those indigenous people who have chosen to live in isolation. The compensation package the Ecuadorian government is demanding is designed to deliver half the income that would accrue if the oil was extracted, over a period equating to the likely lifetime of the field.

The government has shown a greater will than previous administrations to protect indigenous people and the environment. Last week, the nation overwhelmingly passed a constitution that granted Ecuador's tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. But the president,Rafael Correa, is faced with the harsh economic reality that 70 percent of the country's income comes from oil and 38 percent of people in the South American republic live below the poverty line.

In recent years, drilling has been allowed up to the boundaries of the "untouchable zone" but the region has seen little of the economic benefits, with a poverty rate in Orellana far higher than the national average.

A statement from Penti Baihua, a member of the Huaorani tribe, said oil companies had contaminated water, soil and air, scared away animals, and brought diseases that had made members of their families ill and even killed them.

"The oil must stay in the ground in the ITT and the [untouchable] zone because it is our home. If the oil companies destroy all of the Yasuni, where will we live?" he said.

There is widespread support for drilling to be blocked in the ITT but not everyone agrees with the government's method. The meeting in London was organised by theYasuni Green Gold campaignto launch its book of the same name which highlights the park's vast array of plants and animals, believed to have resulted because the area did not freeze over during the last ice age.

The campaign director and joint author of the book, Ginés Haro Pastor, emphasised that while he supported financial help for Ecuador's development he felt it should be separated from the issue of the Yasuni.

Yasuni Green Gold wants an unconditional commitment from the government not to drill oil in the untouchable zone regardless of financial pledges and wants it to scrap the idea of a deadline altogether.

Environmental campaigner Tony Juniper, formerly executive director of Friends of the Earth, is enthusiastic about the concept of developing countries being compensated for protecting the environment. He believes taxes, including a small duty on foreign currency trades, could raise the tens of billions of pounds needed to replicate the Ecuadorian scheme around the world.

But, he added, there were issues that needed to be ironed out, including whether countries should be able to seek compensation in respect of rainforest they had previously designated as protected, and whether wealthy nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia should be able to claim cash for not extracting oil.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

By Sarah van Schagen

This is a guest post by my travel partner, Todd Dwyer, head blogger for Dell's ReGeneration.org.

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Four times a day, without fail, New York City's East River will change directions. It's been doing that for ages and will continue to do so long after we are gone. The tides are a constant, powerful force, and the folks atVerdant Powerare on Roosevelt Island experimenting with a way to draw energy from them without impeding their flow or harming the local wildlife.

The Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project gives Verdant Power the rare opportunity to test turbines that were developed byDean Corren, their director of technology. Submerged beneath the surface of the river, these turbines turn passively to face the tides the same way a weather vane would. What makes these turbines special is that unlike dams and barrages, they will employ akinetic hydropowermethod will have little to no effect on the local ecosystem.

So far, the tests have been very promising. They are drawing power successfully, and in the two years they have been monitoring the project, there has been no evidence of any harm to local fish or birds. While the flow of the tides are strongest and the turbines are getting the bulk of their work done, the fish aren't even around. They prefer to save their energy for when the tide is weaker. Of course, during that time, the turbines are not turning. Also, the fish there tend to spend their time near the banks of the river, and the turbines are in the depths near the center. In fact, Verdant Power has gathered so muchnewdata about local fish and bird populations that biologists have benefited from the project.

I must admit, a lot of this stuff is over my head, but Jonathan Colby, Verdant Power's hydrodynamic engineer, knows more than a thing or two about going with the flow. Sarah and I caught up with him on a beautiful afternoon on Roosevelt Island: