Steven Weissman

The electricity grid is one big machine. Transmisssion must be centrally coordinated. Generating units must all be in sync. Voltage levels have to be maintained. There must constantly be an even match between demand and supply. But you would hardly know it from the way we look at energy policy at the states and on the national level.

Each good policy option has its champions, and each debate occupies its own silo. Distributed solar? Check. Energy efficiency? Check. Transmission expansion? Renewable Portfolio Standard? Smart meters? Check, check, check.

All of these important issues offer complicated choices. Proper analysis takes a lot of time, and there are dozens of interested stakeholders. As a result, regulators and lawmakers tend to look at each option as it if stands alone. What can we do to promote energy efficiency? What kind of incentives will adequately encourage the use of photovoltaics? What kinds of power plants should people be building? Continue reading…

Eric Biber

(Also posted on Legal Planet.)

The federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a vitally important bulwark in the legal protections for our environment in the United States. The ESA provides essential life support to a wide range of species on the edge of extinction, species such as our native salmon, grizzly bears, and California condors. The Act has helped to bring back species such as our national symbol, the bald eagle.

Of course, there are costs to the ESA. We might lose out on economic development opportunities because of concerns about habitat destruction. The resources we spend on restoring endangered species might be worth spending on other goals. And the ESA regulatory program has its share of paperwork and administrative costs. But when Congress passed the ESA in 1973, it concluded that species protection was generally speaking worth these costs. And Congress hasn’t changed its mind since then.

One of the key provisions of the ESA is what lawyers generally call “Section 7” – it’s the part of the Act that requires federal agencies, when they undertake activities such as development projects, to consult with the agency that implements the Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The point of that consultation process is to help both the agency proposing to undertake a development activity and FWS to work together to determine what the impacts of that action might be on endangered species. If the proposed action might cause serious harm to the species – what the Act calls “jeopardy” – it is prohibited unless it is changed to reduce or eliminate that harm. Continue reading…

T. N. Narasimhan

In 1976, a group of thoughtful scientists of the International Union of Geological Sciences expressed a vision of earth resources, time, and man thus:

Mankind is on the threshold of a transition from a brief interlude of exponential growth to a much longer period characterized by rates of change so slow as to be regarded essentially as a period of non-growth. Although the impending period of transition to very low growth rates poses no insuperable physical or biological difficulties, those aspects of our current economic and social thinking which are based on the premise that current rates of growth can be sustained indefinitely must be revised. Failing to respond promptly and rationally to these impending changes could lead to a global ecological crisis in which human beings will be the main victims.

In 1976, global-warming and climate-change were yet to engage the attention of scientists as threats to human habitat.

This vision admonishes President Obama’s team of economic advisers to identify the magnitude of economic growth that can be sustained in the long-term, given a finite, delicately interconnected earth subject unpredictable forces of Nature. The need for revising current economic and social thinking entails a balancing of individual rights to private property and economic prosperity against public guardianship of vital resources common to all. For Obama, the legal scholar, this poses the challenge of modernizing the two traditional models of law: the jus civile, the private law of individuals; and the jus gentium,  the public law of peoples and nations. Continue reading…

Michael Pollan

(originally printed in the New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2008)

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. Continue reading…

Michelle Wilde Anderson & Steve Weissman

(Originally published in the San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 6, 2009)

“The time for delay is over,” President-elect Barack Obama said recently following a meeting about energy and climate policy with former Vice President Al Gore and Vice President-elect Joe Biden. “We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country in all 50 states to repower America, to redesign how we use energy and think about how we are increasing efficiency to make our economy stronger.”

To that end, the incoming administration has announced plans to fund capital projects like mass transit, electrical grids, sewer systems and public utilities. It will invest in jobs to design alternative fuels, build windmills and solar panels, and install fuel-efficient heating and cooling systems.

We need such efforts urgently. Yet if past is prologue, there is a great deal of work to be done to ensure that the federal government carefully weighs the distribution of its investments. Who will benefit, who will not? Who may be harmed inadvertently? Continue reading…

Daniel M. Kammen

(originally published as “An American Voice for the Clean Energy Century: The Innovation Agenda,” in Our Planet, Dec. 2008)

Retooling the global economy for a low-carbon and environmentally responsible future must begin immediately - and a major new United States initiative in this area is vital.  The recent downturn in the economy makes this change all the more necessary: energy efficiency and renewable energy can be an engine of dramatic new economic growth and job creation.  It will be up to the incoming president to marshal public and industry sentiment behind such a reinvestment in our future.

We are at last seeing a global explosion of financial and political interest in energy, focused largely – but, ominously, not exclusively - on clean energy.  In addition, to solar, wind and other low-carbon sources, investments in some of the most CO₂-intensive sources are also on the rise.   Innovation is the life-blood of economic growth and renewal.  It has been known for decades that the bulk of new growth results from the invention, and re-invention, of new scientific and technological opportunities. Over 50 years ago Economics Nobel Laureate Robert Solow concluded that over 90% of new economic growth results from public and private sector investments in innovation. Continue reading…

Daniel M. Kammen

(Originally published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan. 16, 2009)

The United States must begin immediately retooling its economy to build a low-carbon, environmentally sustainable future, which in turn can strongly influence the global economy and geopolitics. With the production and consumption of energy the largest component of the U. S. economy in terms of both the flow of money and the movement of goods, this task will require a well-coordinated, interdisciplinary focus across federal and local governments and the private sector. Our current reliance on fossil fuels–the annual U.S. imported fuel bill is on the scale of the recent $700 billion financial sector bailout–means we start out each year already in the hole.

The recent economic downturn makes it even more politically challenging to launch significant new programs. Yet, a U.S. energy agenda focused on innovation and sustainability could result in significant job creation and stabilized energy costs, and could reposition the United States as a global leader. The focus of the recent congressional economic stimulus package on energy research and the need for expanded investment in the electric grid to enable a low-carbon mix of power options is a strong, positive signal that Capitol Hill is taking the opportunities and needs of the energy sector to heart. This is good news for the economy and the environment. Continue reading…

Holly Doremus

The outgoing Bush administration leaves in its wake a systemic problem at key federal environmental agencies. Career scientists are thoroughly demoralized. The morale problem will be helped by case-by-case reversal of some of the most extreme Bush-era anti-environmental actions, but morale will not be fully restored until institutional systems are in place to make better use of scientific evidence and scientific personnel. That sounds easy, but it will take more than simply declaring a commitment to scientific integrity. The Obama Administration should draft an executive order on scientific integrity that highlights the roles of science and politics in policy decisions and provides mechanisms for separating the two. Continue reading…

A Proposal for the Design of the Successor to the Kyoto Protocol

Larry Karp and Jinhua Zhao

We recommend that the successor to the Kyoto Protocol (”Kyoto II”) impose mandatory ceilings on rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions and that it promote the participation of developing countries. Our proposal requires two major changes to the current Protocol: the use of an escape clause and the potential use of trade restrictions. The agreement must be seen as fair to developing nations. These countries will be subject to disciplines preventing them from undermining the agreement in the short run, and they will be required to accept the principle of mandatory emissions reductions in the longer run. International trade in emissions permits plays a modest role in our proposal. The agreement should not attempt to prescribe the national policies (e.g. cap and trade or taxes) used to achieve reductions. Continue reading…

Daniel Farber

Given past and current emission levels, the planet is already on the path of significant climate change. Strong efforts to restrict emissions can limit the harm but cannot prevent some serious impacts, particularly in vulnerable areas such as the arid western United States. Other concerns nationally include heat wave deaths, flood damage from intensified storm systems, and ecosystem harm. Adaptation planning requires an assessment of how the climate will affect human activities and how to respond to those changes. These assessments flip current practices in environmental law around: instead of asking how human activities impact the environment, we instead begin by asking how environmental change will impact humans. Continue reading…