The Post-Normal Times

When McCain, and then Clinton, started to call for a summer holiday on the gas tax, my first thought was, if it was actually suspended for the summer, good luck to whoever tries to reinstate it in the fall. That is because prices hover around the breaking point and therefore would just rise to fill the gap. Krugman has a concise textbook explanation, worth searing into the brain:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers….

…The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

Kudos to Obama for not pandering on this one, and for turning it into a teachable moment. If he sticks to it and still manages to get the nomination, he will have demonstrated his ability to not just tell voters what they want to hear. Still probably easy compared to any attempt to reinstate it later. I know this is pushing it but, by that logic, it is conceivable that the price would stay the same even if the tax were raised….

Last night Stephen Colbert explained the “efficiency” of corn ethanol, which has presumably “solved” the climate crisis – or at least provided a good introduction. You can fly across the Atlantic and wipe out an amount of land equivalent to 30 soccer fields! What he didn’t say is that conversion of land to soccer fields also emits carbon stored in vegetation and soil. And that it isn’t just the Brits raining on the petro parade. Last week I attended the AMS seminar on Biofuels, Land Conversion and Climate Change, in which several of our own American scientists – Joseph Fargione, Timothy Searchinger, David Tilman, and Daniel Kammen, provided a good overview of this topic (powerpoints here; podcast and vidcasts expected to be up shortly). A few highlights from my notes:

Previous research findings that corn ethanol reduces emissions by 13% did not consider land use change.

Use of land to grow corn for ethanol raises crop prices, not only for corn. So it is creating pressure to take land out of the Conservation Reserve Program – the amount of acreage in the program was reduced by 2.3 million acres in 2007, and >4.5 million are set to expire in 2010, but they could leave sooner if the farm lobby is successful in getting penalties waived for breaking their contracts.

It also creates pressure to convert native prairie grass to corn fields – native prairie grass fields store 286 tons per hectare of carbon, which is 160 more tons/ha than cornfields. From 2002-2007, >500,000 acres were converted in Montana and the Dakotas. The amount of carbon released is 93 times the amount “saved” by using ethanol.

But most new corn crops come from the displacement of soybean crops. This raises the price of soybeans, which leads to deforestation in the Amazon rather than here. The Amazon stores even more carbon than prairies (927 tons/ha), which is 815 tons/ha more than a soybean field. The amount of carbon released is then 319 times the amount “saved” by using biodiesel from soy. The worst case scenarios is palm oil from peatlands….

Then there is the issue of forgone ongoing carbon sequestration services that soils and vegetation would have continued to provide, and the indirect effects, which can be even more significant (e.g., food prices, algal blooms, biodiversity loss, water consumption….), not to mention the land that will be needed to double food production to feed the expected population of 9 billion.

Land use change overall is estimated to account for 1/5th of global emissions of greenhouse gases but my guess is that that estimate has yet to include increased pressure on land from biofuels.

The good news is, that not all biofuels fuels are alike and we shouldn’t be lumping them into a single category. Obtained instead from waste biomass, from switchgrass, and from other perennial crops grown on degraded lands, use of biofuels can be efficient and even carbon negative, and can provide an economic incentive to restore those degraded lands. Prices and markets alone won’t bring about the needed transition. As Kammen said in the final presentation, “there is no peak dirty energy.”

Apparently Joe Romm was also there and blogged it here.

I caught a few snips of Sen. Obama being interviewed on Fox News this morning (transcript here) and am disappointed to say that both of our leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are still falling into the trap of reinforcing caricatures of Democrats that are inherent in the talking points of what has become the mainstream lunatic fringe. Sen. Clinton fell into that trap most notably and recently when she felt compelled to “disagree” with MoveOn, on a position they never took. So lets just say they are both allowing themselves to get framed, but since I try to stick to environmental science and policy here, for now I’ll just respond to Obama’s remarks about regulations vs markets.

If Obama wants to transcend partisanship, instead proliferating the image of Democrats as advocates of top down regulation vs Republicans as advocates of market solutions for environmental problems, when asked set up with the question about where he might have differences with his own party, he could have, instead, taken the opportunity to say something more interesting, which is that the markets vs regulations debate is just an old tape that keeps getting replayed, and that there are legitimate debates, even among Democrats, over how best to confront complex environmental problems for which regulations alone are clearly inadequate. And that many Republicans, less bound by caricatures and ideological convictions, are already part of that conversation.

Although it doesn’t fit so neatly into soundbites, most of those engaged in environmental issues have, for quite some time now, known and acknowledged that end-of-the-pipe command-and-control regulatory solutions were only useful for going after the low-hanging fruit. From non-point source pollution such as stormwater and agricultural runoff, to global warming, we have had had to contend with a more complex breed of problems that requires a wide range of complementary approaches, including but not limited to market-based incentives. Secondly, regulations and markets are not an either or proposition – for example, for a cap and trade policy to work, you need regulations or policies to set a cap, and also to determine how permits are allocated and how revenues are used – which is the actual crux of the debate. Without that, markets will just stay the course that is inherent in the status quo and in existing policies.

Presidential candidates aren’t the only ones guilty of this of course. Given that the MSM feeds on it, disagreeing with one’s own side, while a pitfall for political candidates, is becoming a well worn path to fame and fortune for others. Another notable example being Nordhaus and Shellenberger who are making similar arguments in which they paint environmentalists with a similar broad brush. There is an interview of Michael Shellenberger by John Horgan over on bloggingheads.tv, much of which had me thinking “well duh” – to the extent I listened to it. More interesting commentary is this op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards, noting the shallowness of general news coverage of the presidential campaigns, in which “issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template” which is, of course, why the PNT aims to cover at least some of the news that doesn’t fit.

The use of science as a masquerade for what is really a political debate really should be old news – when I worked at the NAS in the late ’80s, I recall hearing that an agency request for a study that would say what the standards, or acceptable levels should be for toxic substances, probably under the Clean Air Act, was turned down because it was not considered a scientific question. To their credit, the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel is also clear on this in advice regarding the secondary standard for allowable concentrations of ground level ozone, necessary to control smog. But the tape continues to be replayed in assertions on blogs and elsewhere about “what science tells us we need.” Yet another prominent example of this is commented on in this Nature article (sub req’d) by David Goldston, in response to criticism of the intervention by Bush to weaken regulations to control smog, and a statement by Carol Browner regarding the Clean Air Act, which she says “creates a moral and ethical commitment that we are going to let the science tell us what to do.” Since the article is behind a pay wall, I’m just going to paste some snips here:

But does it? The conceit that science alone should and can dictate clean-air standards is propagated by political figures of all stripes and often by scientists themselves. Politicians always want to argue that any regulatory measure they are supporting is the only one justified by science because doing so makes their position sound objective and above the political fray. That’s especially true in today’s polarized environment, when claiming to have science on your side may be the only line of argument that can reach someone who doesn’t share your ideological persuasion.

In reality, though, regulatory decisions involve policy judgements as well as scientific determinations, and the science is often uncertain. The Clean Air Act explicitly leaves decisions to the “judgment of the administrator” of the EPA (a presidential appointee), who is advised by, among others, a scientific panel. Contending that standards are based solely on science conflates policy and science questions, muddying the debate and putting scientists needlessly in the line of fire….

Concluding:

…The debate over the new ozone standards is just beginning, but the detrimental impact of confusing science with policy can be seen by looking back at what happened in 1997, when the EPA last changed the ozone rules. The fight then was over the primary ozone standard, the one designed to protect public health. The EPA proposed tightening the standard, and Browner (then EPA’s chief) repeatedly argued that the decision was dictated by the science.

As a congressional staffer, I fought for the EPA proposal and I still support it. But what the science actually demonstrated was that for a given level of ozone, there are a predictable number of excess hospital admissions from aggravated respiratory conditions. At the time, there was little indication that ozone caused chronic health problems or deaths. Therefore the policy issue was: “How many hospital admissions are acceptable?” Needless to say, no politician was interested in engaging in that debate. The members of the EPA’s science advisory panel at the time were split over what standard to suggest, but agreed that the number was a “policy call”, not a scientific question. The science in no way told Browner exactly what to do.

All this quickly got lost in what became a prolonged and highly acrimonious debate between supporters and opponents of the new rule, in which each side accused the other of using poor science. This was bad for policy because the question of how to decide on an acceptable level of protection never got raised, never mind discussed. And it was bad for science because accusations of poor science conducted in the service of political goals can only raise distrust and confusion about the scientific enterprise.

The 1997 ozone fight, even more clearly than the 2008 rerun, was a case of a policy debate masquerading as a science debate. In such instances, scientists ought to be busy ripping off the policymakers’ masks, not donning them.

This frame works because of the perception that science provides certainty and therefore, can be called on as the ultimate authority. So it should be no mystery why the uncertainty argument works as a way to avoid policy decisions. But the idea that “we” are the ultimate authority, via the messy process of politics, remains a scary one.

[Hat tip: Inscights.]