House Energy Bill

The House energy bill recently passed 249-183, and affects virtually every aspect of the economy, so it seems worth discussing its potential impacts. Summary articles from the LA Times and the NY Times are here and here. Plus, I am heartened to see that President Bush, in response to my blog entry yesterday, addressed the topic of rising energy prices, and will be holding a press conference tonight.

[Sure I'm joking, but I find it occasionally preposterous that I am writing about what's on his mind. Maybe because he's the most powerful man in the world. Sigh. Anyway.]

The energy bill, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, is supposed to be virtually the same bill as the one passed by the House in 2003, and which died in the Senate. For some reason, I was feeling very inquisitive yesterday, and decided to go to the sources. When I read the text of the remarks by the White House press secretary Scott McClellan, I noticed that he actually mentioned energy efficiency and renewable sources:

And the President, in his remarks, will highlight four essential steps that have really formed the foundation of his comprehensive plan to promote greater energy independence. We need to use new technology to increase domestic production, to create new sources of energy, to expand conservation and energy efficiency, and to work with other nations to make sure they are taking advantage of new technology to reduce their own demand.

Imagine my surprise! I couldn't quite tell what exactly he was spinning with this bold statement, so instead of automatically jumping to the conclusion that Scott McClellan is a slimy partisan hack, I decided to research exactly what these energy efficiency measures are, and how do they stack up?

Through the magic of the Internet, and the Thomas database, one can go to the energy bill text itself, aka H.R.6EH, including links to the Congressional Budget Office cost estimates for the energy bill (H.R. 1640). I quickly realized, however, that the 1,037-page bill is unfathomable and that the 26-page CBO analysis is merely impenetrable, if only because the line items never tell the whole story.

I did ask a good friend of mine, an energy analyst in DC, where to look for analyses, and he wrote:

as for the house bill, i don't think there's actually very much substantive on renewables in there... can't say too much about the house bill -- apart from that it is really lame.

So. If anyone has suggestions for more detailed analyses of the current House energy bill, I would welcome some pointers.

For more of other people's opinions, Knowledge Problem contains a link to a BusinessWeek summary of the energy bill, plus the Washington Post's editorial from April 21st. Also, here are the links for editorials from the New York Times, Boston Globe and the LA Times. The NRDC pans the bill. Even the right-wing Cato Institute, however, pans the bill.

As mentioned in previous posts, there are a number of broad, bipartisan coalitions emerging around the issue of energy independence, including SetAmericaFree; the Energy Future Coalition, which includes both former Clinton and Bush White House officials; and the National Commission on Energy Policy, which is getting some excellent attention from a range of newspapers.

In the end, though, I didn't feel so bad about my inconclusive primary research, when I remembered that Scott McClellan actually is indeed a slimy partisan hack.

Environmental Improvement Is Continuous. Is Economic Growth, Too?

I've just started reading Cool Companies by Joseph Romm (Island Press, 1999), a former deputy secretary at the Department of Energy. I'm only on page 12, but already the book rattles off an overwhelming number of both case and comprehensive studies. The point of the book is also very clear: to convince companies that it is to their financial benefit to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One sentence struck me in particular: Environmental improvement is continuous. This observation comes from Dow Chemical's sustained and successful track record in pollution prevention over the past 20 years, as well as his experiences at the Department of Energy in the 1990s. As Romm writes,

You may believe that your company "did energy conservation" in the late 1970s or early 1980s, or that you've captured all the "low-hanging fruit", the "obvious" energy-saving investments with the quickest payback or highest rate of return... the entire notion that low-hanging fruit is easily exhausted turns out to be a myth.

I really like this observation for three reasons:

First, "low-hanging fruit" is a stupid and over-used term in business, and deserves to be eradicated.

Second, discussing environmental improvement as a continuous, ongoing, and non-terminal processes questions assumptions about growth and goals. Herman Daly wrote Towards a Steady-State Economy in 1973 ridiculing "growthmania". More recently, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, has argued persuasively for the expansion of human capability -- including basic political, environmental and social rights -- that both integrate with, and enhance, economic growth and development. What is the point of economic growth, if it does not enhance our lives? Though we in the developed world clearly benefit from economic growth, in terms of longevity, material possessions, and relative freedom from catastrophe, now what? What are we growing towards?

Third, continuous improvement is a fundamentally optimistic message, and gives technologically-minded environmentalists (including myself) a reason to get up in the morning. Environmentalists discuss often whether we have sufficiently large imaginations to envision catastrophic environmental failure -- Bill McKibben, as always, argues well for our need to envision global warming in its enormity here -- at the same time, I would argue that we lack imagination at the opposite end of the spectrum, as well. Though we can all visualize what a utopian, self-contained, agricultural community looks like, I would also settle for something short of that and closer to the reality in which we live: being able to imagine multinational companies like Dow Chemical adopting a mantra of continuous environmental improvement (who would've thunk it?).

Jonathan Rose, of the Rose Companies, refers to building livelihoods, rather than jobs. Similarly, I've never liked the term "sustainability", because it is implies a kind of static, frozen goal. Sustainability as a continuous activity, however, I can understand, or at least start doing something.

Global Warming and Nothing Else

This week, the New Yorker begins running a series of articles by Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming, which fits in nicely with the fact that I have been recently re-examining my priorities among environmental issues. Given the amount of scientific evidence supporting the likely catastrophic effects of global warming -- including changes to the earth's temperature, climate, and biosphere -- can one say that global warming is the one, only and over-riding issue of importance?

The natural question, I suppose, is whether one must actually choose or prioritize global warming over other environmental issues. This presumption, in my mind, is among the underlying flaws of the so-called Copenhagen Consensus, which seeks to establish the relative economic value of particular environmental projects. First, as much as I agree with the need for the reduction of diseases and malnutrition (#1 and #2) and improvements in governance and corruption (#9), the assumption of the fungibility of environmental problems and economic solutions ignores the potentially catastrophic effects of environmental change. Even if climate mitigation measures are relatively expensive, this says nothing about the absolute or critical changes that will be wrought in society and nature if the earth's climate changes. Second, many of the problems identified by the Consensus are linked, particularly in the developing world, such as disease, malnutrition, and sanitation. Furthermore, in both the developing and developed world, the Consensus fails to address the fundamental question of the limits to consumption and growth. Higher levels of population, consumption, and wealth all lead to higher energy use -- and if we are indeed approaching a critical limit in the earth's ability to support our use of energy -- then we must learn how to control our voracious appetite for just about everything, and in particular, energy.

At first glance, the thorny questions include:

Nuclear power
Use of petroleum products in agriculture
Further development of the developing world

At this point, it is also worthwhile to consider how energy could be simultaneously a front-burner topic -- revel in the pun! -- yet curiously, for there to be so little public debate about our collective energy needs as a nation or society. It is also necessary to question our complacency, or acceptance, of the Bush administration's unwillingness, and implicit failure, to address the problem in any meaningful way. The energy bill passed by the House last week was passed in the name of lower energy prices. As Thomas Friedman has recently pointed out in a series of editorials in the New York Times, there is rising support for doing something about our profligate energy consumption, which could unite those concerned about national security and global warming: that is, virtually everyone.

Ecological Economics in the Economist

As much as specific blogs and particular websites have started to shape our collective intake of news, events and perspectives, it is always gratifying to notice when the mainstream media writes an article precisely about one's interests. The leader and the feature article provide an excellent overview of the potential of market-based forces for environmental change.

It is good to see the Economist put its best foot forward -- I assume for Earth Day -- and to advocate "free-market environmentalism". One obvious problem with an absolute definition of sustainability is its all-encompassing nature, and different sectors of the environment, economy and society will certainly all require different solutions.

Sustainability: the Journal & the Journey

WorldChanging.com has a comprehensive post today on the new open journal titled "Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy", a much-needed forum for discussing exactly what sustainability is, and might become. The first issue features a lead editorial by E.O. Wilson, plus an article on the "Role of Local Ecological Knowledge in Sustainable Urban Planning: Perspectives from Finland".

I am glad that WorldChanging is such a sharp-eyed resource, and posted this; I am glad that the journal exists; and I am even glad that there is some sustainable urban planning going on in Finland!

At the same time, being a relatively goal-oriented person -- OK, let's admit it, absolutely goal-oriented person -- I am easily frustrated by hard-to-define problems, and achieving sustainability is probably the mother-of-all-definitional problems. It is hard not to succumb to a general feeling of panic about the state of the environment, but to maintain a useful sense of urgency, and therefore agency. Occasionally I have the fanciful wish that we could be (already) collectively engaged in the implementation of sustainability -- whatever it might be.

A Peak in Peak Oil Titles

The meteoric rise in oil prices over the past year has led to renewed discussion of "peak oil", or as it is known among geologists, "Hubbert's Peak".

What many of the books written this year on the subject certainly share is a common desire for the least mysterious titles possible, including The End of Oil and Hubbert's Peak, with the literal yet ominous subtitles, "On the Edge of a Perilous New World" and "The Impending World Oil Shortage", respectively. The title of another book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil mixes a dim metaphor with a historical yet redundant assertion. At least James Howard Kunstler went through the trouble to give his new book an actual title, though he tries a bit too hard to coin a catchphrase for the impending peak oil era: he names the era, and his book, The Long Emergency, a title which evokes something between the highly contrived television series "24", Clan of the Cave Bear, and an after-school special. You can also read excerpts in the recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Of course, the blogosphere has its own notable contributions to the peak oil discussion. One of the few titles I actually like is Rob McMillan's Peak Oil Optimist. An article purportedly by an "anonymous oil industry insider" in Energy Bulletin in February spread like wildfire across the web across various environmental expert blogs, in part because of its mix of unverifiable facts and the ranting tone of one seriously unhappy oil dude at the bar.

I generally prefer the less alarming titles put out by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), including the plain but clear document titled "Long Term World Oil Supply Scenarios". The subtitle -- "The Future is Neither as Bleak or Rosy as Some Assert" -- manages to take issue with everybody else, while promising real factual analysis. That's my kind of title!

Why are titles important? Isn't this, I am sure the various authors would respond, a truly frivolous point to be making when this could be the end of civilization as we know it?.

Well, without rehashing the whole debate about the "Death of Environmentalism" (ably summarized by Grist), there is something to be said about the attitude of these doom-reinforcing, gloom-peddling titles. Oil is a finite resource, to be certain, and therefore there will come a day when we reach a point of peak production capability, followed by an inexorable decline. However, what titles like this don't do is to add anything to the actual debate about how to control our consumption of oil, or even what it means for us, as a society, to be unable to control our use of resources.

Though I suspect I agree with the overall intention of the authors, at the same time, the various alarm- (and hackle-) raising titles of their books are as much as function of the market as our appetite for oil. I question whether the year's past rise in oil prices is actually connected to any growing widespread appreciation of peak oil, or whether the opposite is true: the rise in oil prices has spawned numerous books on peak oil. The OPEC embargo and recession of the Seventies kicked off a decade of high energy consciousness, which were immediately followed by the Eighties and Nineties, and when oil prices went low, so did our consciousness about energy issues.

There is a larger debate to be had about what kind of society, or market, allows the unfettered consumption of resources without any consideration of the future. The true essence of sustainability, I think, concerns a presently absent comprehension of the earth and the resources that sustain our existence on this planet. The authors have all chosen oil as their subject because it is connected to our daily lives, but does this make global warming, losses in biodiversity, or substantial modification of the earth any less important?

These are also precisely the issues that we may feel able to ignore because they occur beyond lifetimes, or because we implicitly envision an earth that is framed entirely by the needs of humans. It is either almost quaint -- or else downright alarming, where we started -- to think that Bill McKibben wrote about this a full ten (!) years ago in The End of Nature. I think his point then, as now, is still valid: we certainly will have lost something when we have eliminated nature, or what it means to be wild, or that which is outside of humanity for its own sake. The question is, how do we start this discussion?

Modelling Cities

Interesting videos via WorldChanging.com, showing a computerized system developed in Germany, with the rather tortuous acronym of ARTHUR (standing for Augmented Round Table for ArcHitecture and URban planning -- yuck). Though the acronym is wretched, the idea of developing real-time visualization models for cities is compelling.

The immediate question, of course, is whether or not these visualization models are connected to formal models that predict any of the flows out of actual land-uses, such as pedestrian or traffic behavior, or pollution flows. Though there is numerous evidence regarding the influence of physical form on human behavior, I am inherently skeptical of any "grand-unified theory" that can predict human behavior within an environment as complex as the city.

I've written before about space syntax, a theory that tries to explain too much. There is also a rich tradition in computer modeling of urban environments. The history of SimCity is detailed in my friend Daniel's paper "A city is not a toy", published by the London School of Economics. Other contemporary urban modeling efforts include UrbanSim, which is being developed at the University of Washington.

More academic reviews of models of urban growth can be found in a number of papers, including:

Allen, P. and Sanglier, M., 1978, "Dynamic models of urban growth". Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 1:265-280.

Berling-Wolff, S., and Wu, J., 2004, "Urban growth models: a historical review". Ecological Research, 19:119-129.

I also found an excellent list of annotated links about agent-based modeling.

Urban Universities

Lots of articles yesterday on the positive impacts that urban universities have on their surroundings, including an award for the University of North Carolina and Otis White's April 1st column titled "City Planning 101".

Longer articles have been appearing in the big newspapers as well, particularly for major urban universities like Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. After years of poor town-gown relations between Yale University and New Haven, the university out of necessity was one of the firsdt to embark on a series of direct and indirect programs to revitalize its immediate surroundings, titled the "Yale-New Haven Initiative". Though the effectiveness, and intent of the initiative have been questioned, New Haven is finally benefitting from population influx and rising real estate prices.

This impact of Harvard University on Boston is also an ongoing topic in the Boston Globe, given the university's major plans for expansion into the Allston neighborhood in Boston. There is also a terrific article in the Gotham Gazette about the overall impact and state of universities in New York.

Columbia's Manhattanville expansion is particularly controversial given their desire to use New York City's powers of eminent domain to acquire properties for the university, a private entity. Articles have been appearing over the past year or so, including in the New York Times, with the seemingly ubiquitous Norman Siegel representing another New York neighborhood against the use of eminent domain.

The University of California at Berkeley, a hotbed of Sixties-protest, has recently found itself (again) on the defensive, this time against the City of Berkeley's opposition to their long-range expansion plan. A summary of the history of their plans for expansion by a Berkeley faculty member, and Oakland resident, appears here.

These university expansion plans also illuminate the particular role of universities within cities. As one of the oldest and most persistent institutions in Western society, urban universities physically concentrate the intellectual activity and institutionalized knowledge associated with the growth (and rationale) for cities.

Many universities and cities also highlight the role of the academic sector in local economic development. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges has a survey of economic impacts here, eight universities have documented their economic impact to Boston here, impact of the University of Texas system on Texas is reported here and here, and the celebrated University of California system is analyzed here.

(Unfortunately, I haven't found any economic impact studies not released by the public affairs offices of universities. However, before we get all excited about research bias, we have to ask ourselves who would actually be able study this issue if not for higher education).

The impact of universities to economic development can be broken down geographically and socially. At first glance, the benefits of research universities would appear to be their ability to attract national and private sector research funding to targeted local areas, and the spin-off benefits of these funds. Of course, the primary mission of universities has always been to produce highly educated individuals, and this is thought again to be a highly desirable feature to attract more young, highly educated professionals.

Universities themselves also exert significant impacts on the growth and development of cities. Columbia and NYU are among the largest landowners and employers in New York City, and have always been controversial neighbors, either recently or in the past.

Another interesting question would be the impact of universities to ex-urban or rural areas. I suspect that one could examine the development of areas like Davis, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; flourishing small cities all.