Here was Grist enviro-blogger David Roberts’ summarizing tweet about last night’s debate:
By the way from a clean-energy/climate perspective, that debate was a f’ing horror show. We are all doomed.
Yeah, it sucked. Candy Crowley had a question on climate in the hopper “for all you climate people”, but gosh, they just couldn’t get to it because some dude needed to ask a hardball question about, like, “What’s it like to be you?” or some crap.
It even got to the point where Obama was criticizing Mitt for being against a crappy, dirty, deadly Salem Harbor coal plant while he was Governor of MA. Listen to my man Mitt — he’s pretty damned good!
Now, has Romney changed his position? The question answers itself, I think. But lest you imagine that Obama was criticizing Mitt for his current position, rather than his former opposition, check out Obama’s history on coal. It sucks. It was a straight-up pander from the President, and unfortunately nothing new for him.
Now, it is true that new regs and the low price of natural gas have made it very difficult to build new traditional coal plants. And indeed, there is a big substantive difference between the two men on climate, which I don’t mean to diminish. But that wasn’t Obama’s line last night.
The way Obama and the Dems generally talk about a clean energy conversion, it’s still on the level of fairies and pixie dust. “Energy of the future”? In fact, they drastically understate the real potential and economic power of the industry right now. Our motto should be, as Joe Romm says, Deploy, deploy, deploy, research and development, deploy, deploy, deploy.
How can the President or any other politician give any urgency whatsoever to the fight for clean energy sources, without mentioning the proximate reason for developing them? We are in deep @$% right now — we’re losing a race against the clock.
jconway says
As you know Charley I agree withy man Mitt in that video too, especially about that plant which my family viewed as yet another broken promise from our old Governor, but Mitt gained traction in Southern Ohio at rallies for coal, and for parochial reasons Obama was in favor of oxymoronic clean coal in Illinois as well during his brief Senate tenure. I think both of their pandering shows that King Coal still has entire congressional delegations in its pocket and has won the rhetorical war. It’s a dirty, inefficient energy source that can only be competitive in the market place with massive subsidization. But no politician dare criticize the King as the corporate welfare queen it really is. We need to have a grassroots effort to shut these plants down and get the clean energy we deserve.
fenway49 says
Ohio and, to some extent, Pennsylvania. This system (electoral college) is screwy. It’s a big reason Obama’s been nowhere on guns and the question last night seemed to be calling for both of them to take a much harsher stand on assault weapons. Colorado, Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin = plenty of gun enthusiasts. And it’s not the rank-and-file coal workers’ fault their job is in an industry with bad consequences.
This kind of thing, unfortunately, happens all the time. Chris Dodd did a lot for Wall Street, Lieberman for insurance, Biden for credit cards. They all feel the need to work for big moneyed industry in their state. We need leadership on these issues and we’re not getting it. But I’m so concerned about a Romney presidency that I was a little upset to see MSNBC go down this path last night.
stomv says
There really aren’t very many, but they tend to (a) be clustered, and (b) lend themselves to the sympathy Americans also reserve for farmers and fishermen.
Still, if Obama and the Dems can hold the line on preventing the expansion of coal *exporting*, the number of coal jobs will certainly be reduced by 2016. About 20% of the capacity to generate electricity by coal will be retired by 2016 as compared to 2011. It’s being replaced with natural gas generation, energy efficiency, and yes Martha, renewables. With fewer coal plants, America will be burning less coal. If exports don’t increase, that means we’ll be mining less coal each year. Mining less coal? The industry will necessarily contract, meaning both fewer/weaker coal influence in Washington, and fewer coal miners to be used in media soundbites, and fewer states for which those miners wield significant influence on their legislators for parochial interests.
Now, before anybody jumps up and down about jobs, keep in mind that, per kWh, coal generation doesn’t entail very many jobs. Much of the mining and transport is mechanized now, and there are lots of new jobs being created in the natural gas, renewables, and energy efficiency sectors.
In the mean time, the extremely low natural gas prices which are pushing coal out of the marketplace won’t stay low forever. In the near term, if we allow more gas exports, domestic prices will come up. In the longer term, they’re bound to come up. I only hope that between now and then we install as many renewable projects as possible, because while coal might gain ground on natural gas generation in a future where gas prices increase, coal can’t ever displace existing wind turbines and solar panels. The more wind and solar we build, the more certain we are that coal won’t make a comeback.
SomervilleTom says
Yes, it sucked. The very premise of “clean coal” is a lie. The strongest advances in energy independence during the President Obama’s first term have been in natural gas production, and that is the result of fracking — with its profound environmental and economic implications. “Fairies and pixie dust” is apt, and it applies to both candidates.
Having said all that, the reason why President Obama is talking about clean coal is that the political consequences cannot be solved between now and the election. Like it or not, if Barack Obama speaks the truth about coal specifically and clean energy in general he will lose the election.
Politics is a trailing, not leading, indicator. The changes we must make have to start as changes in our culture, so that politicians who want to win elections must respond to them.
Electing Mitt Romney will be far far worse for climate change and the environment than re-electing Barack Obama in spite of Mr. Obama’s dishonest pandering to coal workers and those who depend on them.
lynne says
It once was. This Frontline looks like a must-see.
liveandletlive says
as well as a sound economic message, I am going to vote for Jill Stein for President. Since Massachusetts is pretty strong for President Obama, this would be the state to show electoral support for the green energy message. If Jill Stein can pull in a good showing of support, it will strike the fear of God in Democrats, who continue their weak actions toward ending reliance on fossil fuels. It’s the vote that matters, and if we don’t show our voice in our vote, then nothing will ever change.
WhiskeyRebellion says
Not only do they prevent third parties to be involved in the debates, but they don’t even allow the candidates to enter the room to watch. This is how the “One Party — Two Wings” system keeps non-approved ideas from entering the public discussion.
As somervilletom says ” Mitt Romney will be far far worse ” — agreed. But both these guys are horrible on climate and energy. Frackers will not even tell congress what they are pumping into the US underground aquifers. The entire US water supply will be poisened before someone makes them disclose. And by then the Cape Cod beaches will be blackened with oil tar from some Macondo-style oil well accident.
liveandletlive says
candidates out of the debates. It narrows the conversation way too much, and prevents a real discussion about the issues.
Trickle up says
Climate change is having serious economic effects that will hit farmers and consumers hard.
The shortage of feed corn will boost the price of meat next year.
Massachusetts lost 20% of its apple crop due to early bloom followed by frost; New York lost 40%, and Michigan 80%.
It makes me sick that the price of gas has any credibility as a metric for the efficacy of energy policy.
SomervilleTom says
For me, that was the low point of the evening.
The lie (because that’s what it is) that low gas prices correspond to effective energy policy is breathtakingly flagrant. I am disgusted and Mitt Romney said it, and equally disgusted that Barack Obama ignored it.
SomervilleTom says
“I am disgusted THAT Mitt Romney said it…”
fenway49 says
with that idea. If energy policy could control this, why did prices go from a buck a gallon to 4, then back down below 2, under Bush? It’s largely beyond the control of a president.
But you all raise the more important point. Cheap gas, for more cars and more inefficient cars, should not be a paramount goal of energy policy. Our environmental devastation is real and growing. We need to figure out real solutions. Fast.
I used to travel to Europe a lot for work. One guy over there told me he things the U.S. will be in some real trouble in the next century. The climate situation, at some point, will be beyond the capacity of even Coburn-ites to ignore. But we’ve built this sprawling suburban infrastructure that’s tied to cars. Europe is far ahead on trains, etc., as well as small cars.
Maybe we can fix it by making real progress on energy-efficient cars or alternative fuels. My personal take is that car-dependency in general has caused aesthetic despoliation of our landscape, and a politically and social cancerous breakdown in community as people have moved to suburbs where nobody has roots and live most of their lives in a protective automotive bubble, with minimal contact with fellow citizens.
But it may not be possible to put that genie back in the bottle.
SomervilleTom says
The most effective way to stimulate a consumer economy to provide affordable and plentiful renewable energy is to have a FLOOR on non-renewable energy — a floor that is WELL ABOVE $4.00/gallon.
Each of the things you mention gets worse while gas is cheap. Expensive gas moves us back towards sustainability along many or most of those dimensions. A huge number of today’s workers drive an hour or more per day commuting to a workplace where they sit at a monitor and keyboard communicating with servers that are already far removed. That monitor and keyboard could just as easily be in a workplace shared with other businesses that is a walk or bike ride away. Absurdities like this persist because cheap gas encourages them.
The alternatives to putting that genie back into its bottle are so much worse that we will either do so or perish.
Here’s another lie that both candidates are telling us: “Iran will NOT acquire nuclear weapons”. Horse feathers. It will happen. The only way that will be prevented is if somebody else destroys Iran first, probably with a preemptive nuclear strike. I am reasonably confident that the superpowers will be able to limit such a nuclear exchange to the parties involved. I also think it’s highly likely that most of the ME will end up, in that scenario, being reduced to an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland in an eyeblink.
The sooner we get that genie back in its bottle, the less devastating this ME nuclear exchange will be.
fenway49 says
But as you saw last night, it’s not at all clear we have the political willpower to fix this. As things deteriorate on the climate front and people become more aware of what’s really happening, perhaps our country will put its act together. But right now most people out there just want low gas prices for their car-based lifestyles. Americans don’t do scaling back well.
liveandletlive says
It is ridiculously expensive, and so is heating oil. If there is no-one on this earth who feels compelled to create affordable and accessible green energy products when gas is $4. a gallon, it’s not going to happen when gas is $8. gal either. The only thing it will promote is more people investing in oil on Wall Street. Why build a wind mill factory when you can sit on your a$$ and watch your money grow in the commodities markets. That’s where all the “job creators” are making their money right now.
Trickle up says
Most of the price of gas is not paid at the pump at all. It is paid from the lungs of the kids growing up next to the freeways, the blood of U.S. troops and foreign natives overseas, and the losses to individuals of time, health, and nature (bye by polar bears) from our car-centric infrastructure.
In that sense, gas is not cheap. Ironically, adding those costs in at the pump would cut those external costs by reducing consumption.
Eventually (and it will take decades) higher gas prices will bend our infrastructure into something more sustainable.
As for the pump price, though, I wonder what your basis is for asserting that the price per gallon, already heavily subsidized, is “ridiculously expensive.” In our economic system, markets, not personal preference, determine what things are worth. What do you know that is different from that?
liveandletlive says
Whatever the actual value, it is ridiculously expensive not only to my household budget, but to the household budgets of most of the people I know. I appreciate your point of view trickle-up, but I just can’t go back and forth again about the cost of fuel and the impact it has on the economy and the cost of living.
stomv says
Serious question. Given that the price has gone up quite a bit in percentage terms, what is your household doing to mitigate the impact on your budget?
liveandletlive says
and that’s about it. I drive a small car, too small for my teenage son and his friends actually, but we make do with it. I run errands, and try to fit all of them into one trip. We live in a rural area, which is part of the reason the expense is so high for us. The reason we live here is because we were raised here. Our family is here. I know it’s popular to slam people for sprawling away from the fuel efficiency of the city, but we did not choose to live here because we selfishly want to consume gas. We live here because it is where our roots are, our family, and our friends.
We also invested in a wood stove about 4 years ago. We haven’t bought No. 2 heating oil in 4 years. But many I know do still heat with oil, and they don’t have the money to invest in alternatives. It’s very expensive to change heating systems.
I grow a garden every summer.I am having fresh vegetable withdrawals right now. Grocery store “fresh” vegetables just don’t even compare, and they are expensive. Even with all of that, the cost of fuel and the impact of high fuel prices on other goods and services, including food, still has a fully felt negative impact on our lives, and on the lives of people all around us.
How about you? You live in the city, don’t you? I know you are into bikes and I’ll bet you probably have a little local economy around you, where you don’t have to travel far for your groceries and/or your favorite pizza shop. That is one of the cool things about cities -they are filled with little local economies, all within walking or biking distance. Here in Western/Central MA, there are some of us working toward the local economy thing too. Trying to bring the mom and pop thing back to each town. It’s hard though. You need money to do that. No-one has any money, and too many store fronts are still empty. Speaking of that, it would be nice if the owners of the buildings who house these small business store fronts would participate in the economic crash recovery by lowering there rents. It’s easy to see how a small business’ profits can get eaten almost entirely by overhead.
stomv says
which you may or may not be doing, but they can help
1. Clean out the trunk. Every 100 lbs is about 1% in fuel economy. Don’t ditch the spare tire or tire iron, but if you’ve got some junk kicking around there, clean it out.
2. Fill the tires to the correct pressure. Do this when they are “cold” — that is, before you’ve driven very much. Proper air pressure can be worth 5%.
3. Don’t speed. And I’m not just talking about going less than 10 over. Don’t go over the speed limit.
4. Easy on the gas, easy on the brake. Anticipate. You know your local roads, your local intersections. Learn to love coasting… coast to red lights from farther away, coast through curves, that sort of thing.
All of those things help. Being mindful of them can get you another 20 miles out of the tank.
As for me, yeah, I live in an urban area. My housing costs are astronomical, but I make up for it by not having automobile expenses save the occasional car rental or taxi ride. Not having ties to a specific town, I moved to a place with really good transit and a high walkability score. Then I worked (and continue to work) with my town to install better bicycle infrastructure.
Transitioning as a culture is never going to be a positive direction for everyone. Some folks will struggle as part of the transition. That’s true on social issues as much as on infrastructure issues. The fact is that we consume too much oil. Our planet just can’t handle it, and neither can our national security. We’ve got to consume less oil. We can do it through rationing, or we can do it through pricing. Either way, folks will suffer. I think that doing it through pricing (and good government regulation like CAFE and good government spending on mass transit and mass communication) will cause far less harm than through rationing.
I suspect that you too prefer pricing signals to rationing.
The price of oil isn’t going to come down, not in any appreciable way and not for more than months at a time — not for a long time if ever. The number of automobiles outside of first world countries is growing and growing. Oil is a global commodity, and no amount of drilling in Alaska or the Gulf or North Dakota could possibly have a substantial impact on the price of oil. The reality is that you’ve just got to try to consume less of it [and you are!], and maybe stretch the budget in other ways too. We’ve all got to.
Trickle up says
Certainly energy takes a big bite out of most household budgets here in New England. It will be worse next year as climate change affects the price of food. I thought you were saying something else.
Does not seem as though the presidential election is going to do much about either climate change or price at the pump. My advice is visualize $15/gallon–not right away, but eventually–and plan accordingly.
SomervilleTom says
You assert that ” If there is no-one on this earth who feels compelled to create affordable and accessible green energy products when gas is $4. a gallon, it’s not going to happen when gas is $8. gal either. ”
I think you’re mistaken about this. Let’s use something like hydrogen-fueled autos as an example. When the infrastructure is in place (facilities to convert solar energy to hydrogen, a network of places to obtain or refill hydrogen containers, vehicles that run on hydrogen, etc.), then this technology can be far less expensive than gas. It’s renewable, it burns cleanly (producing water vapor), and domestic supplies are essentially unlimited (assuming we, as opposed to the Chinese, own and control the infrastructure).
The cost of creating that infrastructure is staggering. Once in place, it can displace gasoline — the challenge is how to create an economic incentive to put it in place. This is where (apparently) cheap gasoline kills alternatives. Suppose that gas costs $4.00/gallon, and that a vehicle gets 20 miles out of that gallon (I’m making these numbers up). That’s $0.20/mile. In order to create an incentive to replace that vehicle with a hydrogen-fueled alternative, the alternative has to cost less than $0.20/mile. Now suppose that gas costs $8.00/gallon. The threshold for attractiveness just climbed to $0.40/mile.
By doubling the cost per mile of gasoline, the task of replacing that gasoline with hydrogen just got easier. We know, from long experience, that the cost of new technology plummets as the infrastructure to create it expands — just look at the costs of computers, color televisions, CD/DVD players, etc. So once the new technology gets a foothold in the market, economies of scale will drive its price down — and drive the old technology into obsolescence.
The best way to make clean renewable energy affordable is to raise the price of dirty non-renewable energy. That’s basic economics.
liveandletlive says
and it’s debatable whether it will work in the corrupted economy we currently live in. It could be that the “job creators” and “risk takers” will sit on their a$$e$ and bask in the glory of their wise stock investments instead. It’s also true that the people who are hurt most by the high cost of fuel are the poor, the elderly, and middle income families. It’s appalling to me that this approach (overpricing fuel) to changing the culture of energy use in America is the most highly praised and promoted one offered by the Democrats. You need to stop and think about how cruel it is.
SomervilleTom says
Are you seriously arguing that gas at $8.00/gallon won’t create significant market pressure to provide renewable alternatives? What do you propose instead? The plain fact is that we are addicted to a deadly substance, and making that substance less expensive only makes the withdrawal worse.
I get that expensive gas hurts. I invite you to suggest a way of reducing (or even stabilizing) the price of gas that doesn’t ultimately cause more suffering in more people than by setting a floor high enough to kick-start renewable energy alternatives.
gmoke says
A climate change question will probably result in the Punch and Judy show of “anthropogenic climate change is real” and “no, it’s not” tit for tat. We spend 90% of our time debating that issue rather than 100% of our time instituting measures that will save energy and money whether or not you believe climate change is real.
What do you want to do? Be right or do something?
Christopher says
If we seriously want to ease out industries that are harmful to the environment, why can’t we simultaneously invest in job retraining so that people that make an honest living in those industries aren’t hung out to dry?
stomv says
Christopher says
If it is happening then we should here more about it and a more forceful defense of it, at least compared to what I have noticed.