March of the Elites: Why Grassroots Organizing Can't Save the Climate

Originally published at Breakthrough Generation.

The campaign to avert cataclysmic climate change soldiers on. Despite an aggressive global economic crisis that unequivocally stole some wind from the sails of climate action, the movement lingers, organizing marches and rallies for the coming climate revolution. But action on the climate-energy front will not occur at the grassroots level. Instead, advocates should focus on identifying the appropriate elites, whose influence and inclinations offer a potential pathway to progress on energy and climate change.

The notion of eschewing grassroots organizing is unfamiliar to "causie" political movements, especially progressive ones. Progressive politics looks back with pride and conviction on its accomplishments in union organizing, suffrage and civil rights, and contemporary environmental victories like the creation of the EPA and the passing of the Clean Water and Air Acts. These achievements relied on building a critical mass of devoted and vocal support whose growing magnitude would reliably overwhelm public opinion and entrenched political opposition.

The movement to save the climate is unlikely to win with these tactics. In attempting to change the fact that the public doesn't care about climate change, the movement routinely forgets one important thing: the public doesn't care about climate change. Opinion polls indicate subsiding public concern over the future effects of climate change. A recent (and highly controversial) report by Matt Nisbett suggests that collective action and lobbying for the 2010 climate bill outgunned opponents from Big Coal and Big Oil, and the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act didn't even get a vote in the Senate. Gallup shows that the public concern about the environment ranks last in a field of fifteen different national issues, a metric that the economy unsurprisingly dominates. Even if more and more people were coming around to the opinion that climate change is a real and dangerous phenomenon (which they aren't), that increasing swath of the population still wouldn't care too much about it.

And the truth is, the public doesn't need to care that much about it. Energy and climate policy is primarily institutional, technical, and scientific. It is much less socio-cultural. This makes sense, too: energy is a largely invisible and homogeneous commodity that competes on price alone. The public will use energy in the most cost-effective way possible, so the most logistically simple way to mitigate climate change is to make clean energy cheaper than carbon fuels. This goal will be achieved by policymakers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

The solution to the climate-energy crisis is akin to the Manhattan and Apollo Projects and the creation of the Internet. None of these made use of mass public support or mobilization--indeed, the Manhattan Project was done in secret. Yet all were technical challenges with a national mission, accomplished by elites and contracted largely by the federal government, and with gargantuan social effects. No grand infrastructure projects are sexy products of some outpouring of public demand, yet the creation of the Interstate Highway System was perhaps one of the most significant achievements in the story of American commerce. These projects were accomplished by elite American patriots. Somewhere out in the masses of my generation, a team of elites is waiting to meet each other and make clean energy cheap and ubiquitous.

The people standing around that team of elites, far greater in number, are not powerless. Effective climate policy will not be an all-out favoring of technocracy over democracy, but grassroots advocates need to understand the difference. Timetables and targets are even weaker technical plans than they are political strategies. A growing and vocal contingent in the developed world, dedicated to fixing the climate problem, means very little when 90% of new energy demand will come developing economies over the next century. Lifestyle choices--like consuming less, cycling to work, and switching out that 100-watt bulb--are infinitesimal compared to the challenge of decarbonizing fourteen terawatts of power. There are policies that can accomplish these ends: boosting research and development, driving technological innovation, subsidizing early-stage deployment, and empowering the next generation of scientists and engineers through education. But the grassroots section in this relay-campaign pretty much ends at advocacy, left to watch as elites carry the baton across the finish line.

The campaign to mitigate carbon emissions and revolutionize our global energy infrastructure will not be accomplished by the masses. It will not be accomplished by marches and emotive global demonstrations, even less so by eco-terrorism and violent disobedience. We will see this challenge defeated instead by a select group of elites: technicians and practitioners, experts and politicians. That's not a bad thing. As Aaron Sorkin says, elite is not a bad word; it's an aspirational one. How fortunate we would be if we could identify that team of patriots and elites who could lead us to a clean energy future.

The more things change...

...the more they stay the same. In the year since I started this blog, we've witnessed many substantial changes, events, and progressions on the energy/climate frontier. And yet, on the whole, it seems American policy hasn't evolved much at all. Three examples illustrate this frustrating truth*.

• As you may have heard, this week is the one-year anniversary of the blowout at the BP's Macando well in the Gulf of Mexico. Described (accurately) as the worst environmental disaster in American history, the months-long fiasco spilled tens of millions of gallons, endangered local enterprise, public health, and demonstrated the terrifying and disproportionate disaster potential of our fossil fuel addiction. However, a year later, and Congress has yet to react to the Gulf catastrophe with any kind of legislation. Not only did we fail to come close to passing a cap-and-trade bill, but we couldn't even pass policy changes increasing the liability of oil companies in damages caused by accidents from $75 million to a more reasonable figure or widening the purview of regulators to oversee offshore oil drilling. For perhaps the most-reported non-nuclear energy accident in history, its legacy in American policy will apparently be shockingly empty.

• Last April, energy and environmental advocates cheered the Interior Department's approval of Cape Wind, the nation's first offshore wind farm. The victory came after a decade-long battle (the project was first proposed in 2001) against NIMBYism and obstructionist tactics to block construction. This past week, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement approved the project's construction plans. While technically good news, the Cape Wind saga demonstrates the unacceptable time frames with which we measure success in the Energy Quest, and as Alexis Madrigal pointed out, it is unclear how we will overcome these infrastructural challenges.
  

• Finally, we return to cap-and-trade. As I mentioned, last summer witnessed the upsetting (but not super surprising) failure of the American Power Act, which was originally Senators Kerry and Lieberman's cap-and-trade legislation. Californians, on the other hand, celebrated the defeat of Proposition 23 in November, whose backers sought to block AB 32, the state's own cap-and-trade policy ... until a coalition of environmental groups, the Association of Irritated Residents, blocked AB 32 in court. Keep in mind that these environmental groups were instrumental in campaigning against Prop 23, and proceeded with an about-face to reject the environmental policy on the grounds that it would concentrate non-uniformly mixed pollutants like NOx and sulfur dioxides in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Dave Roberts explains why this probably isn't true. From a big picture perspective, this example illustrates the difficulty of advancing energy and climate policy, even in California, "America's laboratory."
  

These and other distressing stalls and defeats show plainly that standard operating procedure in American energy policy is not working quickly enough. Tackling the problems of our fossil fuel addiction, national recession, increasingly violent resource wars, and climate change will require a change in dynamics. The sooner we transition to a policy agenda based on technological innovation, workforce and STEM education, and cohesive infrastructural progress, the better.
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*Yes, I'm cherry-picking. Please, PLEASE give me examples of why I'm wrong!

Clean Energy Financing: First Steps Towards Post-Partisan Effort

Originally published at Americans for Energy Leadership.

Energy reform is headed quickly towards a hyper-partisan stalemate. As the Republican party takes control of the U.S. House, some advocates of a progressive energy agenda are calling for Congressional Democrats to regroup and “conduct guerrilla warfare” against the status quo. A consortium of climate scientists has recently rallied together to “to challenge disinformation and misinformation deployed in the policy wars over global warming.” All signs point to an intensifying battle between “climate hawks” and “climate zombies,” but little progress will be made if advocates continue to reinforce this hyper-partisan environment. Despite rampant cynicism, opportunities for bipartisanship exist, and the greatest potential for aisle-crossing probably lies in financing mechanisms for clean technology innovation.

Public funding and financing for technology-focused clean energy projects present unique political opportunities that other government efforts lack. Unlike pollution regulations and top-down industrial mandates, financing for business has long enjoyed broad support from both ends of the political spectrum. Various policy tools aimed at ramping up federal dollar flow towards clean energy projects include feed-in tariffs, loan guarantees, credit enhancement, direct grants and tax credits. Many of these policies carry the potential for bipartisan support in Congress.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) installed probably the greatest federal support for clean technology investment in history. However, as stimulus projects expire, clean technology innovation is approaching a funding cliff that will need to be replenished if Congress is serious about decarbonization. Hypothetical broad-based subsidies and renewable electricity standards will be insufficient in targeting the specific projects required for technological innovation. Vestigial targeting elements of the 2009 stimulus bill have received support from both sides of the aisle. Sec. 1603 of ARRA, for instance, has provided grants for specific clean energy projects in lieu of tax credits. Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) recently co-sponsored a bill (S. 3935) that would extend the tax code calibrations established by the stimulus act. The grants established by this legislation are diverse, but not broad; instead of blanketing industry with blank-check subsidies, they target projects in storage, solar, wind, fuel cell, and other clean energy technologies.

New programs based on tax credits and incentives could also attract Republican co-signers. Sander Levins, the Chairman of House Ways and Means, introduced alternative legislation to cap-and-trade that includes roughly $6.5 billion in tax credits for manufacturing of clean technologies, in addition to extending credits for other alternative fuels. Like S. 3935, Levin’s Domestic Manufacturing and Energy Jobs Act of 2010 would include extensions of stimulus programs, in this case Sec. 48C, another tax credit provision of ARRA. As Daniel J. Weiss reported recently, “the 48C programs is also included in S. 2857, co-sponsored by Bingaman, Hatch, Lugar, and Debbie Stabenow”--two Democrats and two Republicans. Unlike past efforts by Democrats like health care, in which they crafted legislation and then courted Republicans, programs like S. 3935 and S. 2857 can trace bipartisan support to their original authorship.

These initiatives are certainly smaller-scale than the original and subsequent drafts of the American Power Act, this summer’s climate/energy effort spearheaded by Senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman. Despite its “tri-partisan” coalition of authors, APA was a stark demonstration of the political intractability of cap-and-trade. Even with a high-profile Republican working on the bill for six months and concessions by Democrats on nuclear and clean coal technology, conservatives in the Senate dropped the bill before picking it up. Instead of pursuing an agenda built around cap-and-trade with ornaments for conservatives, advocates must encourage their lawmakers to draft innovation-focused legislation from the ground up, with across-the-board political support for various traditionally conservative and progressive financing mechanisms.

Americans for Energy Leadership has already publicized an op-ed in Politico by Senators Stabenow (D-MI), Hagan (D-NH), and Udall (D-CO) calling for a new strategy on energy reform. Citing a report by Third Way, they note that “energy innovation is not a partisan issue--it’s an American imperative.” The path to a decarbonized economy cannot find success if either party adopts energy reform as a partisan agenda, used to re-elect their own members and wedge the ranks of the opposing party. Economic growth, energy security and the protection of our soliders are not partisan issues--they are core American goals.

Chunks: A(nother) New Approach to Energy Policy?

Cross-posted at WattHead - Energy News and Commentary and the Americans for Energy Leadership Blog.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, President Obama addressed the failed climate/energy attempt of this summer, promising to move forward with a reinvigorated agenda in 2011. However, any such action will likely bear little resemblance to previous attempts. Mr. Obama conceded that "we may have to end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive legislation." If this is indeed going to be the form of a new course of action on climate/energy for Mr. Obama, commentators are beginning to wonder exactly what those "chunks" will be.

Never mind the fact that the most recent attempts at energy reform have been piece-meal to begin with--that's more or less inevitable with so many regulations, markets, fuels, interest groups and players at stake. Before its total dismantling, the American Power Act (formerly Kerry-Graham-Lieberman) was a hodge-podge of cap-and-trade, tax incentives and subsidies for renewables and clean coal technology, loan guarantees for next-generation nuclear power production, and a slew of regulatory reforms to preempt state action of GHGs and promote energy efficiency. Of course that bill never came close to a floor vote in the Senate, but my point stands: a "comprehensive" bill would have to be built one brick at a time anyway, so maybe Obama's explicit "chunks" approach will get the job done.

So what's on the table this time around? And, more importantly, what can pass a divided Congress?

Glenn Hurowitz at Grist proposes his favorite chunks in his "Peanut Butter Plan." He advocates a combination of tax credits for carbon capture; regulations to reduce black carbon pollution; intensifying regulations banning HFCs; and international finance to help LDCs adapt to climate change. Hurowitz refers to these four as "low-hanging fruit" solutions, and believes that if combined properly they could achieve greater emissions reductions than more comprehensive legislation.

Andrew Revkin kick-started a similar discussion over at DotEarth, putting forward a couple of his favorite policy chunks to replace a larger bill. He credits Hurowitz's list, and adds making the R&D tax credit permanent and the RE-ENERGYSE program to the list. If anything, Mr. Revkin's recommendations are more comprehensive than "chunky," as he puts it. Rather than approaching certain piece-meal aspects of climate/energy one at a time, Revkin's suggestions create policy infrastructure for energy innovation and energy education at large. Instead of writing different legislation for solar, wind, CCS, nuclear, EE, carbon finance, and emissions regulations (to name a few), funding for innovation and education create the foundations of a workable and flexible industrial policy on energy.

I'm a fan of piece-meal, and I'm a fan of big picture. But the problems will arise, as usual, with the politics. As Senator Jay Rockefeller said, "We [the Senate] tend not to be very good at chunks, but then you could argue that we tend not to be very good at big things either." Bonus points for honesty. However, a recent piece in Politico might forecast some political leeway for the President as he moves forward with a chunks approach. The article cites Senators Brown (R-MA), Alexander (R-TN), and Snowe (R-ME) as potential allies on a chunky approach, in addition to Democrats like Rockefeller, John Kerry and Dick Durbin.

A quick aside on the politics. Much has been said that, if Republicans have been so unwilling to cooperate thusfar with the Obama Administration, what makes us think that the chances for climate/energy legislation will be higher in 2011, when Republicans will certainly have more seats in both Houses? To the naysayers, I offer my cautious optimism that Republicans will accept their increased share in political power as an opportunity to shake off the still trenchant "Party of No" vision that many voters have adopted for them. Beating Democrats in Midterms is one thing; beating a still reasonably popular President in 2012 without a legitimate Republican frontrunner will take more than straight obstruction. Time will tell.

But I digress. What would I add to the chunky climate agenda? Well, I appreciate the efforts of individual members of Congress to promote clean coal, nuclear, renewables, energy efficiency, biofuels and other fuel-focused policies. However, I would add my name Mr. Revkin's endorsement of research and innovation before partitioning climate/energy policy into too many segments. In addition to increasing cleantech R&D funding to at least $15 billion annually and re-investing in science and engineering education, we should expand the scope of DoE's ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, and create public private partnerships with similar goals of targeting and funding specific energy technology projects for demonstration and deployment.

Like extending the research tax credit and RE-ENERGYSE, these proposals are less chunky and have received proportionately lower attention in Congress. However, policy and business leaders from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation to the American Energy Innovation Council and the Breakthrough Institute have all advocated similar approaches to our energy challenges. I've consistently added my voice to these calls to actions here and with Americans for Energy Leadership, who have done excellent work on the RE-ENERGYSE proposal in particular.

At the end of the day, we need a strong energy agenda, one way or another. But looking past the chunks, we must keep pushing for a policy infrastructure built on education, research and innovation, without which such piece-meal approaches may not be able to form an effective climate/energy agenda.

Cap-and-FAIL Roundup

A lot of smart people were less than thrilled following yesterday's slow and brutal bludgeoning of anything resembling good energy policy. Here are a few choice reactions:

• Andrew Revkin (NYTimes Dot Earth blog): "Obama has failed to challenge fossilized foes of meaningful action on energy and climate change, from Senator James Inhofe to the many conservative columnists - along with some liberals - who've distorted the American discourse on climate into an either-or debate over beliefs little different than that on abortion or gun rights."
• Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey (Huffington Post): "Cap and trade has repeatedly failed because it doesn't address the main barrier to the widespread deployment of clean energy technologies: the technology-based price gap between new clean energy and mature fossil fuels."
• Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones): "Obviously, there's no carbon cap, that much we already knew. But there's also no other major energy efficiency standards, and, perhaps most importantly, no renewable electricity standard - not even the weak one included in the energy bill last year.
• Michael Noble (Fresh Energy blog): "The President must do more than talk about energy. He needs to force action in the Senate by convening the kind of public conversation only the President can drive."
• David Roberts (Grist): "Big Coal is in trouble. Sooner or later, the industry will realize that the funding it can get from cap-and-trade, to support carbon capture and sequestration, is the only path to survival... By 2012, certainly by 2015 when many of the [EPA CO2 regulations] kick in, the industry will be forced to acknowledge this basic truth."
• Joe Klein (TIME): "Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin regulating the hell out of CO2. The business community won't like that, nor will many Republicans."

On "Inception" and the climate bill

A tweet of mine from earlier today:

@atrembath: Starting to wonder if the #climate bill is in limbo within a dream within a dream... #Inception.

It was a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes a kind of vague, existential sense. Look at the many levels of climate/energy bills we've had in the past year (ignoring, for convenience's sake, the attempts made prior to them). We've gone from ACES to CLEAR to ACELA to KGL to K[G]L to APA, all which are some amalgam or response or "stone soup" of each other. Some have carbon pricing, some do not; some increase subsidies for fossil fuels, some eliminate them; some are politically feasible and at least decent policy constructions, others are not. At this point, it would be a circuitous and functionally pointless operation to trace back the current legislation to its counterparts in previous bills, drafts of bills, etc.

As in the film "Inception," the levels of climate/energy bills have pushed us deep into a strange, surreally litigious version of reality, and the hope is that whatever we construct in Congress so deep within the depths of the legislative process will make some kind of difference in the real world. This is especially true for cap-and-trade, the very definition of a "green dream," or carbon offsets, whose desired and planned effects - drafted deep in the layers of my shaky metaphor - will likely come up against bureaucratic and corporate nightmares in reality. Or, if the legislation has become so entangled in the deep layers of Congress that it becomes stuck in limbo, unable to free itself from a prison of its own making.

After seeing "Inception" last night, I told my friend that my own personal hell might be if my memory of the movie were erased and I was given all the pages of drafts of the script - out of order and unnumbered - and told to assemble them correctly. Ditto that for the climate legislation.

Obama continues to avoid specifics on energy legislation

Here's a video update from President Obama to members of Organizing for America (OFA) on the BP Deepwater oil spill:

Some may be excited by the President's rhetoric, like Dave Roberts at Grist, who tweeted earlier today: "@drgrist: In a direct message to supporters, Obama gets behind a comprehensive energy/climate bill...Yes, CLIMATE."

But I wouldn't break out the champagne yet. In the above video, President Obama essentially regurgitated his message from his Oval Office address last week: the time for a clean energy future is now. He just left out the part about how we get there. Cap-and-trade? Subsidies for clean tech? Transportation policy? Technology policy? Education policy? People usually seem to think that a "comprehensive" energy policy must by definition embrace all forms of currently available energy, but what it should mean is a complete package of clean energy policies, one that has the potential to decarbonize the economy and create clean, cheap, renewable and abundant energy for the future. Such a mixture of policies will require massive investment in infrastructure, technological R&D and deployment, transportation and commerce reform, and pollution controls to name just a few.

In a nervous throwback to his early behavior during the health care debate last year, President Obama has yet to endorse (or even mention) his preferred policies for achieving his goal of a clean energy future. For now, he has the Joe Barton fiasco to distract the public into believing that Democrats have a better plan than Republicans; he'll have to act fast if he wants to put together a decent bill.

Advancing in Another Direction

Well, last night President Obama gave his first Oval Office address to the nation. The topic: the oil spill and America's long-term energy (and climate) policy. To say the least, the coverage for his speech has not been great. The Huffington Post called it a "junk shot," and Kate Sheppard lamented that Obama "only uttered the word 'climate' once" while scolding the President for not detailing his Gulf "battle plan" or demanding specific reparations from BP. Ezra Klein wrote that the president "shied away from clearly describing the problem, did not endorse specific legislation, did not set benchmarks, and chose poll-tested language that might persuade skeptics."

So, following a speech which many (myself included) had hoped would mark the political turning point in America's addiction to oil, we have three main criticisms:

1. Not enough climate rhetoric.
2. Not enough specifics in the "make BP pay" rhetoric.
3. Overly broad, glossy language that failed to amount to any kind of strategy.

On the second point: AP is reporting that BP, in a meeting with President Obama, has agreed to finance a $20 billion fund to pay claims of people whose lives and livelihoods have been damaged by the Gulf spill. This far exceeds the $75 million liability cap established by the 1990 law, so it's a start. Raising the cap, or eliminating one altogether, could be an important next step, but this is good news.

On the first point: a failure to mention cap-and-trade or a price on carbon anywhere in his speech has led many to the conclusion that cap-and-trade is dead (where have we heard that before?). Many will say that Obama is retreating on a climate policy he once endorsed, if unenthusiastically. But as the saying goes, I believe he's advancing in another direction. Perhaps the President, having observed the Gulf Spill has his top priority for two months, has come to acknowledge what Senator Kerry said just this past week: there aren't sixty votes for his APA bill, or any energy bill currently on the table. It seems to me that the President has picked cap-and-trade as a loser, and will not pursue it any further. That does not mean, however, that he's given up on an effective energy policy. Notably, the carbon price established in APA would do little to advance clean energy solutions that we desperately need. As Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins described in their analysis of APA, "this program is unlikely to result in significant deployment levels, particularly in the near-term, due to the cost containment mechanisms that will keep carbon prices relatively modest, as well as the persistence of many non-price-related barriers to clean energy adoption" (pdf).

Basically, the politically possible version of cap-and-trade was never that effective anyway, so retreating from it as a policy mechanism may not only be good politics, but good leadership. The question remains, however, of what will take its place. I have advocated for effective and comprehensive technology and competitiveness policy, which could garner bipartisan support in Congress and the approval of the American public. Unfortunately, this is where President Obama did disappoint me last night. As the third criticism I outlined above observes, his speech did not provide any specific strategy for fixing America's energy policy.

Many are upset at the President's tacit retreat on cap-and-trade. I'm upset because he doesn't seem to know which direction to advance in now.