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!

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

• Dave Roberts gets hopeful over the Senate Democrats' caucus yesterday, thinking carbon pricing may be back in the mix.
• Michael Levi discusses the inherent problem in the climate science/climate skeptics debate, as illustrated by the latest poll of climate researchers.
• In a similar vein, Roger Pielke Jr. asks: Do climate back lists matter?
• Weeks after Obama lifted the moratorium on deep-water drilling, he put the cap back on, so to speak. Now a judge has lifted his replaced moratorium.
• Bryan Walsh at TIME thinks the oil spill might be good for environmentalism as a whole.
• Andy Revkin gives us a much-needed reminder of the energy innovation gap (with help from my Professor at Cal, Dan Kammen).
• SciAm interviews Jon Wellinghoff, FERC chairman, on his predictions for the US electrical grid.
• Researchers at MIT continue their quest to use America's vast domestic resources of natural gas as a platform towards renewable energy.

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.

Too Big to Fail

There has been a lot of commentary over the last few days on the causes and effects of the undersea volcano of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The Obama Administration has been criticized for not reacting quickly enough to the disaster (Katrina, anyone?); the Alabama AG is warning citizens not to rush into a settlement with BP; and still, no one knows how or why this happened in the first place. It is an environmental, political and civil catastrophe, and we are in the thick of Week 1. So we can expect a lot more coverage, anger, and political hedging in the coming weeks. But so far, as much as I can tell, there has been relatively little discussion of the systemic societal conditions that backed us into this corner. If this "spill" (it is far more than that) indicates anything, it is the deep and unfortunately requisite entanglement of energy companies with the federal government. BP is contracted, insured and aided by the government, yet the oil company raked in $6 billion in profits in Q1 2010.

Now, to turn a profit is no societal sin. Indeed, a competitive, entrepreneurial spirit is a key element of the American condition. And the main problem, as I see it, is not runaway capitalism either; this is less a case of unregulated institutional chaos than the banking crash of 2008. No, the problem here isn't too little government involvement--it's too much. Bill Maher put it best over the weekend:

Maher: Oil companies are worse than banks. They're also too big to fail. And their cost to society is also, just like the banks, too great for society to sustain it.

Despite the fact that BP finds itself on the hook for the billions in cleanup and remediation costs, the disaster is still being attended to by the Coast Guard, Homeland Security, Interior, and the President himself. Our national resources are being deployed to respond to a disaster caused by a for-profit company. All of a sudden, we start to notice that energy, the literal lifeblood of our American capitalist economic infrastructure, is helpless without the Invisible Hand of the Government. Here's Vaclav Smil on the subject:

But it would be naive to see these and virtually any other twentieth-century prices either as outcomes of free market competition--or as values closely reflecting the real cost of energy. Long history of governments manipulating energy prices has brought not only unnecessarily higher but also patently lower prices due to subsidies and special regulations affecting distribution, processing, and conversion of fossil fuels, and generating electricity. During the twentieth century governments provided direct financing, research funds, tax credits, and guarantees to advance and subsidize particular development and production activities, thus favoring one form of supply over other forms of energy (Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, 86).

Smil was specifically addressing price controls on energy conversion and extraction, but his point is applied with equal efficacy to global operations in the energy industry. If the heartbeat of the world economy remains linked to the availability of carbon fuels, we will see a rise in government protection, remediation and even acquisition of energy assets. Imagine the current Deepwater Rig explosion, followed by a continuous flood of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but now add in an armed fight over the reservoir between the US and Venezuela, with Russia and Brazil on the sidelines. As they did in the Unocal affair, the US government will increasingly interrupt international private bidding contests for extraction contracts; as we have seen in the Middle East for half a century, armed conflicts over energy will increasingly exacerbate geopolitical tensions already fueled by poverty and religious zealotry. No matter the exact year of global peak oil production, the addition of 2 billion people to this planet by mid-century will precipitate a huge outstripping of demand over supply if we remain addicted to fossil fuels. This addiction will carry the cost of countless lives, as it already has.

We need an energy infrastructure fueled by clean technology, for which the failure of a single link in the chain does not precipitate a disaster like the one we're currently navigating through. We need technological innovation that fuels capitalist competition, not too-big-to-fail institutions like oil companies. We need energy production run by civilians, not armed soliders in the most culturally turbulent region of the world. Reduced terrestrial pollution; decentralized power production; an end to armed conflicts over energy--the greenhouse gas problem doesn't even have to be a variable in the equation to make this a no-brainer.

If we put our hearts into it...

The following is an excerpt from a spectacular history of offshore drilling in The Economist:

To give an idea of the difficulty of deepwater drilling, Mr. Walker uses an analogy. "Imagine a large offshore oil rig as a match box," he says. Next, imagine the matchbox on top of a two-storey building, with the upper floor filled with water and the lower floor filled with rock, sand and, in some cases, salt. Striking an oil reservoir with a drill pipe is then like hitting a coin at the base of the building with a strange of human hair. The penalties for getting it wrong are enormous. An industry rule of thumb puts the cost of drilling a deepwater "dry hole--a well that does not strike oil--at around $100m; BP says it can be as high as $200m.

What's my point? That we are capable of tremendous engineering achievements. The tragic loss of life, environmental devastation and economic disturbance caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf are reminders of our need to refocus our efforts to similar engineering challenges in clean technology. The above analogy is a conceptually accurate metaphor that describes the degree of the challenge we face in decarbonizing the economy. The coin represents a civilization constructed on clean infrastructure and technology, and the human hair represents the human effort and skill required to achieve a clean energy future.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: KGL meltdown and the oilacalypse.

• Check out this Daily Kos post on the bailout of BP.
• Steven Chu at the White House blog on ARPA-E and energy breakthroughs.
• Tom Friedman's latest contribution to his perennial push for a price on carbon.
• Businesses in Michigan are lobbying for legislation to restore competition to electricity markets.
• A decade later, Jerry Brown announces $400 million in rebates for Californians who suffered during the 2000-2001 energy crisis.
• The Economist discusses the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and why the size of the spill isn't as important as where the oil ends up.
• Europe's emissions trading system is in an uproar amid a mounting scandal over 'recycled' carbon permits.
• Ah, remember these guys? Rep. Waxman is requesting info on Halliburton's involvement in the Gulf oil spill.