Democracy for Utah - Environment

We could drill in ANWR, or we could fully inflate our tires

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:50:44 -0600

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.

But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right. [...]

Poll: Western voters want to end U.S. dependence on oil

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:53:42 -0600

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

An overwhelming majority of voters in seven Western states are concerned that gas prices will continue to rise unless urgent action is taken to reduce oil consumption and global warming emissions, according to a survey released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) presented today at the last public stakeholder meeting of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) in San Diego, CA. [...]

Even if the price of gasoline drops in the short term, 95 percent of voters surveyed in Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington say that immediate action is needed to avoid a future crisis, and 91 percent say it is critical to end U.S. dependence on oil. Meanwhile, 83 percent of the respondents say that gas prices are going to rise over the long run unless we take action to make our cars and trucks run on less gas, alternative fuels or electricity.

"Voters are demanding that their state leaders move further and faster to reduce our dependence on oil and the global warming emissions that dependency produces," said Patricia Monahan, deputy director for UCS' Clean Vehicles, who will present the poll results and urge policymakers to include transportation solutions under the region's pending plan to reduce global warming pollution. "Our survey found that Westerners astutely understand the need to transition from oil to clean, renewable fuels to avoid a future crisis triggered by escalating gas prices."

Eco-friendly stimulus: cash for clunkers

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:29:04 -0600

A proposal from economist Alan Blinder (NYTimes):

Economists and members of Congress are now on the prowl for new ways to stimulate spending in our dreary economy. Here's my humble suggestion: "Cash for Clunkers," the best stimulus idea you’ve never heard of.

Cash for Clunkers is a generic name for a variety of programs under which the government buys up some of the oldest, most polluting vehicles and scraps them. If done successfully, it holds the promise of performing a remarkable public policy trifecta — stimulating the economy, improving the environment and reducing income inequality all at the same time.

Does U.S. auto industry regret opposing CAFE standards, universal healthcare?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:03:04 -0600

Kos:

As Ford posts yet another crazy-ass quarterly loss ($8.7 billion), it makes one wonder how much better the US auto industry (and its unions) would be doing if they had let the government raise CAFE standards, huh? The government could've bailed them out of this mess.

And it makes one wonder how much better that industry would be doing if they hadn't so viciously opposed Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 health care initiative. In 2004, GM spent over $5 billion in health care costs — a number that is likely significantly larger today. That's billions that would be off its balance sheet had they not opposed universal healthcare.

Lots of industries may shoot themselves in the foot, but none more so than the auto industry. It truly deserves the comeuppance it is getting (and it has gotten a healthy assist from its unions). The people who don't deserve it — of course — are its workers, who are getting screwed.

Teamsters withdraws from ANWR coalition, demands long-term energy solutions

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:57:50 -0600

Unlike the Republican Party with its many ideological schisms (neocons vs. isolationists, corporate cons vs. nativists, theocons vs. corporate cons, etc.), there are few ideological divides within the Democratic Party. Mostly, what's good for one Democratic constituency is good for the rest too.

However, there is one area of friction in the Democratic coalition — environmentalists vs. union workers in industries like logging and coal mining. (Remember the spotted owl?) That's why it's great to see the Teamsters union "go green" (teamster.org):

"We are not going to drill our way out of the energy problems we are facing — not here and not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge," [Teamsters President Jim] Hoffa told labor and environmental activists at an Oakland, Calif., summit on good jobs and clean air. "We must find a long-term approach that breaks our dependence on foreign oil by investing in the development of alternate energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal power."

Hoffa then announced the union's withdrawal from the ANWR coalition, citing the need to build a green economy that fosters the development of alternative energy sources and creates good union jobs — instead of lining the pockets of big oil tycoons.

Hoffa also said that by investing in green energy solutions, the nation will reap the benefits of curbing its dependence on oil through a revitalized economy with the creation of millions of new jobs in a rapidly growing industry.

Al Gore on Meet the Press

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:26:08 -0600

Al Gore on Meet the Press with host Tom Brokaw:

MR. BROKAW: This is how The Boston Globe described your audacious plan to change the way that we get electricity in this country: "Gore challenged Americans to switch all of the nation's electricity production to wind, solar, and other carbon-free sources within 10 years, a goal that he said would solve global warming as well as economic and natural security crises caused by dependence on fossil fuels."

The reaction was pretty quick and not all of it was favorable, even from those who are aligned with you in thinking that we have to do something about climate change. [...] What you have outlined, in fact, is a goal that may not be achievable.

VICE PRES. GORE: I think it is achievable, and I think it's important that we achieve it, Tom. There were also many other reactions from people who said this is the right goal because we need to reset the bar and change the debate. Our current course is completely unsustainable. We are being told by scientists around the world, particularly the international group that is charged with studying this and reporting to world leaders, that we may have less than 10 years in order to make dramatic changes lest we lose the chance to, to avoid catastrophic results from the climate crisis. We're building up CO₂ so rapidly

WALL-E for president

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:43:18 -0600

NYTimes columnist Frank Rich from last Sunday:

As it happened, "Wall-E" opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) "Wall-E," a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I'd stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls. [...]

Mr. McCain should be required to see "Wall-E" to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner's complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America's patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

Krugman: All the GOP offers is deregulation and tax cuts

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:54:10 -0600

Paul Krugman:

Rather than admit that pollution is a problem the government has to solve — even as the consequences of acid rain became ever more alarming, not to mention as America's failure to act provoked a near-crisis in relations with Canada, which was suffering the effects of U.S.-generated sulfur dioxide — the Reaganites insisted that there was no problem at all. They denied the evidence, questioned the science, called for more research and did nothing. Sound familiar?

And that, surely, is the line the Democrats should be pushing in this election: Republicans have become the party of denial. If a problem can't be solved with deregulation and tax cuts, they pretend it doesn't exist. [...]

The health care situation, in case you haven't noticed, is going from bad to worse. [...]

The Democrats have been offering real plans in response; they're not perfect, but they are serious.

The GOP, by contrast — and this goes as much for McCain as for the Bush administration — hasn't even tried to address concerns about coverage. Instead, it has all been about costs, which Republicans insist (wrongly) can be dramatically reduced by a policy of, you guessed it, deregulation and tax cuts.

Utah's famous 'Spiral Jetty' at risk from oil development

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:31:20 -0600

Kriston Capps at The American Prospect:

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson rejected the gleaming white gallery spaces and "canonical" minimalism of the New York art scene in search of an entirely different setting for his sculpture. After several exploratory trips, he selected a spot more than 2,000 miles from the Big Apple: Utah's Great Salt Lake. Rozel Point, on the northeast end of the lake's Gunnison Bay, would become the home of his most important piece of sculpture: Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide, 6,650-ton coil of black basalt rock and mounded earth extending counterclockwise into the pinkish water of the lake. The site was remote but not virgin territory. Oil seeped from the ground, and scattered around the lake were the derelict instruments from prior efforts to extract that oil. [...]

[Nancy] Holt, Smithson's widow, first got word that Spiral Jetty was in danger from Lynn DeFreitas, executive director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, an organization primarily charged with safeguarding the lake's watershed. On Jan. 7, 2008, Pearl Exploration and Production Ltd., a Canadian oil and gas company, applied for permission to establish two exploratory wells on its land leases in Gunnison Bay, some five miles southwest from Rozel Point's shore.

[...] Smithson's writings, even when he was at his most mercurial, don't suggest that

Coal plant pollution in Nevada will affect Utahns

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:55:05 -0700

Nevada is making plans to build three large coal plants that, when operating, will emit pollution affecting Utah since we will be directly down wind of the sulfur dioxide and carbon emissions.

You can do something to help stop their production. Email Utah Governor John Huntsman and let him know that you’re concerned about the effects the plants will have on our environment. It only takes a few voices to have our concerns heard.

Email bbruso@utah.gov and let Governor Huntsman know that we agree with U.S. Senator Harry Reid: these plants are not the answer for Nevada’s energy needs.

Want to learn more about coal plants, the pollution they emit and energy alternatives?

Read articles from the:

New York Times

Las Vegas Sun

Save the Ronald Reagan spotted owl

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:08:04 -0700

Hunter at Daily Kos has a brilliant idea for getting conservatives to care about the environment:

Currently, [no conservative] gives two twigs over the fate of the endangered northern spotted owl. It has the unfortunate habit of nesting in some prime timberlands (of which there is increasingly little, these days); that is enough to declare it an excess species, one of those nagging, irrelevant categories of animals that nobody would really miss, at least not as long as they were getting Pacific coast lumber at the lowest possible clearcut price. But would it be so easy, if it were named the Ronald Reagan spotted owl? Somehow, I think finding one of those dead in the chimney would cause a conservative far more sorrow, and the notion of wiping the Ronald Reagan owl from the face of the earth — now, that would require much more thought.

Similarly, gray wolves reintroduced around Yellowstone (where they had been extinct for a half century) are having a difficult time, at the moment. Few ranchers or farmers like the thought of wolves strolling across their property, possibly laying primal-but-illegal claim to wayward animals. But what if they were not gray wolves, but Freedom wolves? Would it be so easy to shoot a Freedom wolf in the face, or poison a Freedom wolf with tainted bait? I think not. It would be practically unpatriotic: it would be something al Qaeda would do to our wolves, not a fine, upstanding conservative. [...]

Kudzu, an invasive vine, has changed the very landscape of the southern United States. It has seemed undefeatable for decades, and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year. I propose we change the balance of power by renaming it Aztlan, and sending the Minutemen after it.

My own county, in northern California, is well and truly overwhelmed by invasive starthistle. It has sharp spines and spreads like wildfire: if we rename it Muslimweed, we may be able to enlist federal support in battling it. Hitlerbeetles; the Woolly Ahmadinejad; partialbirthabortovine... with a little inventiveness, the list could go on and on.

Who says Republicans don't have any ideas?

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:31:56 -0700

Here's their brilliant idea for dealing with the water shortage crisis in Atlanta (Atlanta Journal Constitution):

[Republican] Gov. Sonny Perdue wasn't the least bit discouraged Tuesday after his hourlong state Capitol prayer vigil for rain ended with the sun shining through what had been a somewhat cloudy morning.

"God can make it rain tomorrow, he can make it rain next week or next month," Perdue told reporters who asked him if a miracle was on the way. [...]

The Rev. Gil Watson, pastor of Northside United Methodist Church, urged those in attendance to "pray believing we should have all brought umbrellas.

"We have not been good stewards of our land. We have not been good stewards of our water," he said. "Lord, have mercy on your people, have mercy on us and grant us rain. Oh God, let rain fall on this land of Georgia."

It didn't rain.

NYTimes: Salt Lake City profits from conservation

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:55:38 -0700

Rocky Anderson's Director of Communications tipped us off to this article in the New York Times from November 7:

Residents of [Salt Lake City] and its suburbs, with a combined 1.2 million people, have come to view the ties between economic development and environmental conservation in a new way. They are scrubbing the air and water, building energy-efficient homes and offices closer together, constructing regional rapid transit systems, limiting new highway construction and conserving open spaces and natural resources.

Authorities on urban policy say that Salt Lake and other cities in the West, big Eastern ones like Boston and New York and smaller ones, too, like Grand Rapids, Mich., and Charleston, S.C., have become incubators of environmental ideas and programs, with tangible results. Jobs and income are increasing. Central city populations are stabilizing or growing. Businesses are cropping up.

"Environmental policy has emerged as a central organizing principle of economic growth at the metropolitan level in America," said Robert Puentes, a researcher in Washington at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. "It's a very new development, and it's logical. Being more energy efficient and more environmentally sensitive lowers costs and makes metropolitan regions better places."

More on regulation, markets, and climate change

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:25:00 -0600

This is a followup to yesterday's post in which I said there was no free-market solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Ezra Klein says that's not entirely accurate — markets can and should have a secondary role:

Even if we were all fairly committed environmentalists, there'd really be no way to effectively evaluate the amount of carbon our various activities generate. And more to the point, we don't want to. [...] Carbon consumption should be in the price of my goods, and then I can do what I often do as a consumer and make decisions based on price signals. The government needs to fix the market failure wherein the price of carbon is not assessed in the cost of products, but we actually do need a high-functioning market to accurately translate carbon information into a form we can easily and quickly work with.

So I guess it's more accurate to say that regulation is a necessary part of any plan to lower the emission of greenhouse gases. But the effect on conservatives is still the same: Problem X can be solved only with new regulations; therefore, Problem X isn't happening.

Why conservatives are threatened by climate change

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:52:18 -0600

Why does do conservatives continue to deny the science behind climate change? Partly because there's no free-market solution to reducing carbon emissions (as we pointed out in this post from February). Paul Krugman in the New York Times says:

[T]he truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said F.D.R. "We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply perfectly to climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

There are only two viable ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions — a tax on emissions or emission permits — and both of them involve more of that Government Regulation. And, to conservatives, Government Regulation is bad. Therefore, climate change must not be happening.