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Truckers Rally to Protest High Costs for Fuel
Paul Schwartzman, Washington Post
Drivers, Feeling the Pinch as Diesel Tops $4 a Gallon, Demand Congressional Action
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A caravan of horn-honking truck drivers rolled their rigs through Washington yesterday, protesting rising gasoline costs and demanding that Congress impose caps on prices at the pump.

The truckers, who formed a long column, circled the Mall about noon and blared their horns. Some spectators waved while others covered their ears.

"The high price for oil is hurting our economy," said Mark Kirsch, a trucker from Myerstown, Pa., who helped organize the rally. "It's hurting middle-class people."

A spokesman for Truckers and Citizens United, which sponsored the demonstration, said 200 to 250 trucks showed up, about half of what the group had predicted.

The District Department of Transportation, which said 100 to 125 trucks participated, reported no traffic problems.
(29 April 2008)

The fossil bloc makes its play
David Roberts, Gristmill
New Senate alternatives to Lieberman-Warner would take climate policy backwards -- way backwards
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There's an important story in yesterday's edition of E&E (as always, $ub. req'd) about two alternatives to Lieberman-Warner that have recently been floated in the Senate. One comes from Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and the other -- not so much a bill as a "set of principles" -- from a coalition of the nation's biggest and dirtiest coal companies. Together they serve as an excellent primer on the conservative movement's latest approach to climate change.

What do they want?

1. No mandatory caps or a safety valve. Voinovich's bill ditches cap-and-trade entirely, at least for a three-year evaluation period. He and the coal companies would both institute a "safety valve," which would prevent the price of carbon from exceeding a specific threshold. (Policy-wise, that's about as bad as no cap at all.)
2. Incentives. When conservatives don't like incentives, they call them "pork." When they don't like the recipients of the incentives, they call them "welfare." On global warming, though, fossil interests see an historical chance to attach themselves more securely to the public teat, so "incentives" it is. Voinovich's bill is called the "Incentives-Based Alternative Climate Policy Act," and it amounts to a laundry list of handouts and tax breaks for individual industries and technologies (think nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration). This is "green conservatism" of the Gingrich variety: all carrots, no sticks.
3. Preemption of state efforts. Many state governments are not as sclerotic, polarized, and compromised as the feds. They present the real danger to Republicans' corporate sponsors. Remember states as "laboratories of democracy"? That's a notion conservative federalists love when they aren't in power. In power, they need control consolidated at the federal level, so fossil interests can do more targeted lobbying. If passed this would, at a stroke, eliminate the majority of good climate policy that's been passed in the U.S., in deference to much weaker policy.
4. Inaction pending Chinese and Indian policies. Conservatives claim that carbon caps in the U.S. will drive jobs and capital to developing countries unless those countries also implement caps. The practical effect of this would be to deprive us of our one truly powerful means of persuading China and India to act.

What's wrong with it?

1. It's horrendously inefficient. A system in which carbon pollution is free, while government regulators pass out public money to favored industries until carbon-free alternatives come down in price below the carbon-subsidized status quo ... I hardly think you could consciously devise a more inefficient way of reducing GHG emissions. It's probably literally worse than nothing.
2. The industry tail wags the policy dog. Government climate policy should take as its aim a level of atmospheric GHG concentrations that reasonably vouchsafe public safety and welfare. The targets should be based on the best science. But conservative policy does the reverse. Voinovich's bill is explicit about it, in the "findings": "greenhouse gas reduction policies must be linked to the actual pace of technological development." Or if that wasn't clear enough: "the timing of innovation must be the basis for any timetable regarding the implementation of regulatory policies designed to address global greenhouse gas emissions." In other words: GHG reduction targets must be based on the ability of particular industries to provide those reductions with technologies that are cost-effective based on current business models. We reduce emissions when Big Coal is ready.

It appears that the fossil industry and the legislators it employs believe there's still time to alter the course of climate policy debate -- if nothing else, that Lieberman-Warner can be moved backwards.

It's incumbent on the forces of Good & Right to get in this game -- to give Boxer and other good actors alternatives that move Lieberman-Warner further forward. If the acceptable boundaries of the debate are still being set, now's the time to define those boundaries as boldly as possible.
(29 April 2008)
I wish there were a different set of terms to describe the relationship of U.S. politics to environment. The term "conservative" covers a widly disparate number of political tendencies. For that matter, Democrats aren't necessarily good on the environment either. -BA

Maryland, my Maryland - Lacrimosa
Joe Neri, Green United States (blog)
... The key to our national security and rational foreign policy, the key to a strong, well-balanced economy, and the key to a resilient and just social fabric is a sound energy policy. And frankly, it doesn't much matter what the rest of the World does; if the US doesn't get its act together sooner rather than later, then Mother Earth is going to have one helluva time with planetary menopause.

... Rational people will naturally respond to this quickly emerging catastrophe [global warming] with calls to develop clean sources of energy and do it fast. The Europeons are doing something. The Germans are even going so far as to install more and more solar paneling systems in a country where it rains everyday. The globe-trotting Saudis and nuclear armed Israelis are cooperating on solar energy plants, just as the Israelis and Turks cooperate in sharing water resources. But what are we doing? What are the Russians doing? What are the Chinese doing?

This is where rationality breaks its head against a brick wall.

Let's start with our 'enemies' and rivals, first, so we can feel better about allocating blame before too much of it lands on US. Well, the Chinese are building coal plants faster than they can have babies. Why are they doing that? Could it be because our invasion of Iraq has cut down a supply of light, sweet crude Oil from the world's markets, thereby forcing the Chinese to look elsewhere to power their economic expansion, that, by the by, we encourage through the selling of so many US Treasury bonds to them to finance our own debt-laden economic expansion? But I can hear some people now: "Good, let the Chinese choke on their own soot; it's no concern of mine." That might be a wise policy were it not for the fact that one of the ancient powers of Mother Earth - Gaea*, to those on speaking terms with her - is called the Wind. And the Wind is blowing that soot through the prevailing trade winds to guess where? US. Maybe, if we hadn't been so intent upon controlling the second largest oil reserves in the World, the Chinese would be burning Oil instead of Coal. But who knows? People may yearn for the days of the London Fogs and Tuberculosis and other forms of lung disease, which gave rise to stories we all love from Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Suffering, after all, is a reliable source of great literature.

Fine. The Chinese won't change because they can't change because we won't let them change because we need them to hold our spare change before we spend that change on Changes that might save US.
(10 April 2008)
Quite a riff on energy and climate. More at the blog. -BA