Iowa Global Warming

Washington, D.C. — The Senate’s chief architect of climate legislation accused MidAmerican Energy of trying to block reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

“Where I see you going is for the status quo,” Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told MidAmerican’s chief executive, William Fehrman, at a hearing Thursday. “The problem for you is that the status quo is about to change.”

Boxer leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which is taking the lead in developing the Senate’s version of legislation that would require utilities, refiners and other companies to reduce carbon emissions. MidAmerican said it is following up on Boxer’s request to “work with us,” and is trying to schedule a meeting with her.

MidAmerican has been leading opposition among coal-dependent Midwest utilities to a cap-and-trade approach approved by the House that would set limits on emissions and require power companies to buy allowances, or credits, for emissions that can’t be eliminated through changing fuels, efficiency or other means.

Read the rest of the story here.

In the month since the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the conversation about renewable energy and climate change has gotten more intense in Iowa. Letters to the editor and editorials fill the opinion pages on what should be done in the US Senate. Sometimes the Iowa Global Warming Campaign’s work can be frustrating, especially when huge companies like Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy runs a full scale media campaign designed to mislead Iowans about the costs of action, but the experience is rewarding nonetheless. In an unprecedented move, the Iowa Utility Board is accepting public comments on what the American Clean Energy and Security Act will mean for Iowa. I’m not sure that the Iowa Utilities Board should be making a statement on federal climate legislation, but we will be working to get the right answers incorporated in any recommendation the IUB makes.

We know that transitioning to a clean energy economy will create jobs and improve America’s economic security, but that’s not why I came to work here. What good are rock-bottom numbers on your utility bill if it’s not safe for your children to go outside because of scorching temperatures? What good is 7 cents per kilowatt hour coal electricity when our grandchildren will find half of the species on earth have gone extinct? What good is a small utility bill if millions of homeless climate refugees come to our shores? What good are low energy prices when food prices have tripled due to good farmland turning to desert? I realize that these things can be hard to imagine – climate change is a crisis in slow motion – but we have to realistically look at the costs of inaction. The business-as-usual scenario of burning ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels will assuredly doom future generations of Iowans with more climate-induced catastrophes.

I’m tempted to ask “will we let America lose the clean energy race?” but the stakes are higher than that. Delaying strong action on climate change dooms all of the world’s economies, constraining them with violent weather, useless farmland, disease outbreaks, lost natural resources, and rising oceans.

I decided to spend my summer in Iowa because I believe we can change the way we do things for the better. We are not helpless in stopping the effects of climate change. We can take action to reduce our emissions of dangerous greenhouse gases like CO2 and make a more durable energy and transportation infrastructure. The US Senate needs to pass robust energy and climate legislation this year, and I implore Senators Harkin and Grassley to be leaders in making laws that will effectively deal with the problem of climate change.

Drew

The House’s approval of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill earlier this month was a remarkable political achievement and an important beginning to the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But in all the last-minute wheeling and dealing, the House bill acquired two big loopholes that the Senate must close.

The first loophole involves coal-fired power plants. Coal is the world’s most abundant fossil fuel — producing more than half the electricity in the United States — and also its dirtiest, with twice the carbon content of natural gas.

The House bill would limit emissions from coal-fired power plants in two ways. It imposes a cap on emissions from all industrial facilities that tightens slowly over time. It also sets tough performance standards on new power plants permitted after 2009, requiring emissions reductions of 50 percent or more. The bill would help underwrite advanced technologies capable of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground.

Read the rest of the article here.

On July 21st, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart focused extensively on the American Clean Energy and Security Act and then Jon interviewed Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

Watch the episode on Hulu here.

Washington, D.C. – Rio Tinto, a mining giant that provides coal for utilities in the United States, is a major producer of the greenhouse gas emissions the Obama administration wants to cap.

But the Australian company is counting on farmers in Iowa and around the globe to help the business avoid making some costly changes in its operations.

Rio Tinto, together with utilities and other polluters, wants to reduce the cost of complying with proposed emission controls by being allowed to purchase “offsets” from farmers and other landowners who have undertaken carbon-saving practices, such as planting trees on their property or reducing their tillage of crop land.

Those credits are a key issue as Congress shapes legislation to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The House passed a bill in June; the Senate is working on similar legislation.

The polluters are pushing lawmakers to make the terms of the credit-earning programs as liberal as possible, to keep the value of the credits relatively low.

But some environmentalists say that will let the polluters off the hook for making real reductions in their own emissions.

Read the rest of the Des Moines Register article here.

The Iowa Utilities Board has opened an inquiry into the federal climate change bill.

Critics say it will significantly boost electricity costs.

Supporters say it will curb global warming and only have a moderate impact on household budgets.

In a notice of inquiry Thursday, the board said it has had discussions with utilities, the state’s consumer advocate office and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, among others.

“It appears that Iowa utilities generally support the concept of a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions. However, they have a number of concerns with how allowances are allocated in the bill,” the notice says.

Allowances, essentially permits to emit carbon, are at the center of a trading market the legislation creates.

The House approved the bill last month on a 219-212 vote.

Rob Hillesland, a spokesman for the board, said an inquiry into a congressional proposal “is not typical.” But he said the idea is “to learn as much as possible, to gather information and know what the impacts might be in Iowa.”

Read the rest of the QC Times story here.

When our children, and our children’s children, learn about this period of U.S. history, let us hope the extramarital travails of South Carolina’s governor will be no more than a footnote. Let us hope they are taught that this year, the U.S. Congress passed a new kind of law, one that not only reduced harmful greenhouse-gas emissions but set the United States on a new trajectory to a more just, healthy and sustainable future.

The U.S. House of Representatives did just that late last month when it passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The bill in its current form does not go nearly far enough in reducing emissions and is overladen with giveaways to powerful business lobbies, but it aims in the right direction. If our children are to have a world in which they have the luxury to study history, this bill (or a stronger version) must become law.

Some have balked at the price tag on this legislation, but that amount is trivial when compared with the price of inaction. In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency team of scientists, published a “game changing” report laying out the consequences of climate change to the United States if we do not act now. Among its findings: a rise in mean temperatures of 7.5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit (turning Iowa’s climate into Mississippi’s by 2095), dramatic loss of coastal areas to sea-level rise and erosion, and a breakdown in the water cycle that will leave the southern half of the country in perpetual drought while subjecting the northern half – including Iowa – to torrential downpours and flooding. We are already beginning to feel these impacts: Temperatures have risen 2 degrees over the last half-century, and over the past century, the heaviest 1 percent of downpours increased 20 percent. The damage these trends will have on the economy is measured in trillions of dollars.

Read the rest of the Des Moines Register article here.

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Read the rest of Paul Krugman’s article here.

In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in an era of cleaner, yet more costly energy.

The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening consumers with a new tax in the form of higher energy costs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the bill will cost households an additional $175 in energy costs in 2020.

The House’s action sent the measure to a highly uncertain fate in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was “hopeful that the Senate will be able to debate and pass bipartisan and comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this fall.”

Read the rest of the story here.

As a nation, we have the choice of a variety of energy futures. For example, there is a future where we essentially do nothing and continue to rely on fossil fuels. Or there is a future where we transition and rely instead on clean energy.

We can put some basic prices on getting to those future scenarios, realizing that no scenario comes free. By doing some comparison shopping, it is clear that the best bargain in town is a clean-energy future, where we use resources such as wind, solar and energy efficiency and avoid the worst effects and costs of climate change. But this bargain is not available forever. We need to put the right energy and climate policies in place now to take advantage of it.

Moving to this clean-energy economy will require significant investments. These include an infrastructure of new technology, such as wind turbines, solar panels, new or retrofitted green buildings and passenger rail, as well as research, training and education. But these investments will generate real benefits, including new jobs, and avoid substantial costs associated with unabated climate change.

Please read the rest of the article here.