Category: The Dish

Obama climate efforts finally begin. This is what happens when people organize, push, demand. See you in NYC in Sept http://t.co/U9ecrDv9BW

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) June 2, 2014

Yglesias calls today “the most important day of Obama’s second term”:

It’s important not only because climate change is an issue of enormous significance, but because the text of the Clean Air Act really does give the executive branch power that matters. The White House can’t unilaterally change the wage structure of the United States or create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, but it really can revolutionize the environmental practices of the electricity sector — a sector that, as seen [here], is responsible for about 38.4 percent of America’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

Ryan Koronowski declares that this is “the most significant move any U.S. president has made to curtail carbon pollution in history”:

There are many opinions of what method is best to lower emissions: carbon tax, cap-and-trade, clean energy incentives, direct regulation. All that matters for those concerned about climate change, in the end, is whether emissions drop, and how quickly. The Council of Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi points to EIA analysis of the likely impact of a carbon tax and other climate bills on power plant emissions. A $25-per-ton carbon tax would be far more effective, dropping emissions 47 percent by 2020 and 66 percent by 2030 — and the cap-and-trade bill passed by the House would have lowered emissions 56 percent by 2030 according to the EIA. The EPA’s proposed target, however, achieves reductions comparable to a far lower carbon tax, the Senate’s 2010 American Power Act, and 2012′s Clean Energy Standard Act. Levi suggests that the 2030 could be seen as a moving target — it could be ratcheted down through additional legislation or new regulation.

Indeed, the EPA could finalize this rule next year with a stronger target, especially if it receives a great deal of feedback from the public. Many environmental groups will be pushing for more ambitious targets later in the decade, even as they nearly unanimously applauded the regulations.

Ben Adler is hearing complaints from environmentalists. He also wonders about the international reaction:

The big question on the minds of many environmentalists is whether this will be enough to encourage other major polluting countries to make significant climate commitments. While the CO2 reduction will be significant by historical U.S. standards, it won’t get emissions down anywhere close to what’s needed to avert catastrophic global warming, nor even get the U.S. to the goal it agreed to at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009: a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020. The hope is that it will signal enough progress to get the rest of the world to agree to binding emissions reductions in the next round of U.N. climate talks, which is supposed to culminate in a new climate treaty signed in Paris in December 2015. Will these proposed rules be good enough?

Plumer has a full explainer on the new EPA regulations. On whether the rules will survive legal scrutiny:

[T]he regulations could get knocked down in court. Industry groups and conservative states are sure to challenge the power-plant rule as soon as humanly possible. Environmentalists, for their part, have argue that the EPA’s flexible approach to regulation is defensible. Other legal experts think it’s a closer call. But it would all come down to whatever the DC Circuit Court or the Supreme Court decided.

If the EPA’s power-plant rule did get struck down in court, the agency might have to start all over again — raising the possibility that it wouldn’t be able to craft a new rule until Obama left office in 2017.

Jason Mark labels the EPA move “Obamacare for the air”:

If the “job-killing EPA regs” and “Obama overreach” soundbites seems to echo the political script from the Obamacare battle, there are some key differences. For starters, Republican-controlled states won’t have the ability to opt out of the system, as many have with the Affordable Care Act’s extension of Medicaid. If a state fails to submit a plan for lowering emissions from its power plants, the EPA has the authority to impose one—a scenario most states will choose to avoid.

More importantly, corporate opposition to the new rules isn’t as unanimous as it may appear. Several major electric utilities —including Dynergy, American Electric Power, and First Energy — have expressed cautious optimism about being able to thrive within the new regulations. Electricity generation is a capital-intensive industry that works on planning horizons of 30 to 50 years, and the utilities would prefer certainty and clarity as opposed to the policy purgatory they’ve been in the for the last decade.

Michael Grunwald sees the regulations as part of Obama’s war on coal:

It’s filthy stuff. When Obama said Saturday that his carbon rules will prevent 100,000 asthma attacks in Year One, he wasn’t describing the health benefits of emitting less carbon dioxide; he was describing the health benefits of burning less coal.

So let’s face it: When Obama talks up his “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, he really means all-of-the-above-except-the-black-rocks-below. In the 21st century, any national leader that takes environmental protection and the fate of the planet seriously will need to launch a war on coal, and Obama takes it very seriously. He hasn’t advertised his war on coal—it would be questionable politics in swing states like Ohio or Virginia, and even his home state of Illinois—but he’s fought it with vigor.

Tom Zeller Jr. thinks the plan may boost the economy:

While some jobs will almost certainly be lost if companies decide that it’s not worth it to outfit their aging coal plants with new pollution-control technologies, those losses will almost certainly be offset by the creation of new jobs elsewhere, as the new regulations drive investment in cleaner technologies, efficiency upgrades and other areas. A recent analysis from the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated that new greenhouse gas limits on power plants could reduce electric bills for U.S. households and businesses by as much as $37.4 billion by 2020, and create more than 274,000 jobs.

Sure, the NRDC isn’t exactly an impartial observer, but then neither is the API or the U.S. Chamber. The larger point is that most regulations have upsides and downsides, and short-term pain is often offset to some degree by long-term benefits that industry likes to ignore.

McArdle has low expectations:

As with any new Environmental Protection Agency rule, a lengthy comment period will ensue. After the comment period, the EPA presumably has discretion about the deadlines they set. With a big election coming in 2016, and some nice, big, coal-consuming swing states on the line, I would wager cash money that those deadlines are set no earlier than Dec. 31, 2016.

Whenever the deadlines do kick in, the new president will be besieged with desperate legislators and governors pleading to keep electricity prices from rising in these hard economic times. I can imagine a steadfast Democratic president standing up for the environment against utility lobbyists, coal-mining districts and electricity users, telling them that we need to do what’s best for the planet, not some narrow economic interest. But I can also imagine a beautiful world where everyone rides around in carriages driven by unicorns, angels sing in the trees, and purple raspberry pie grows on bushes outside your backdoor.

Ann Carlson reminds everyone that Obama is following the law:

Obama’s proposed rules are not a power grab. Nor are they an end run around Congress. Rather, the rules are reactive, a legally-required response to a petition filed when Bill Clinton was still president. I hope this part of the story — that Obama is following, not skirting or flouting, the law — gets highlighted in what is already a big press story.

Here’s the backdrop for those who don’t know it. In 1999, the International Center for Technology Assessment and a number of other non-profit organizations filed a petition with the Clinton EPA arguing that EPA should regulate greenhouse gases from automobiles under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act. In 2003, after George W. Bush became President, EPA denied the petition. A coalition of states and environmental groups then challenged the denial of the petition in the case that resulted in the landmark decision Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court held in Mass v. EPA that the agency erroneously denied the petition. The Court also ruled — and this is key — that greenhouse gases are an “air pollutant” as defined in the Clean Air Act and that EPA must decide whether, under Section 202 of the Act, greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The Court’s ruling triggered a cascade of regulatory actions by EPA, all required by the Court’s substantive holdings.

And Ezra Klein points out that the new regulations “are far less ambitious than the proposal McCain offered in Oregon in 2008”:

They’re less ambitious than the proposals Newt Gingrich championed through the Aughts. They’re far less than what’s required to keep the rise in temperatures to two degrees Celsius.

But they’re probably at the outer limit of what can be done so long as the Republican Party refuses to even believe in climate change, much less work with the Obama administration on a bill. The good news, if there is any, is that the Republican Party hasn’t always refused to believe in climate change. There was even a time when its key national leaders were committed to doing something about it. Those leaders are still around today. They could still do something about it today.

(Photo: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy’s signature is shown on new regulations for power plants June 2, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Bouie thinks it’s possible, if not likely:

[W]hen it comes to analyzing black voters, conservatives need to stop treating them as irrational or stuck on some kind of “Democratic plantation.” Like any coherent group of citizens, black Americans have a strong sense of their individual and collective interests. And in their correct view, they do better under Democratic presidents, which contributes to their overwhelming support for Democratic politicians. Put another way, if conservatives want to make inroads with black Americans and other minorities, they have to show them they’ll succeed under Republican governance and have to deliver when the opportunity comes.

Unfortunately for the GOP, research suggests that African Americans have good reason to vote Democratic:

According to a recent paper from Zoltan L. Hajnal and Jeremy D. Horowitz – both political scientists at the University of California–San Diego – there’s clear evidence that when the nation is governed by Democrats, black well-being “improves dramatically” across multiple dimensions. Specifically, looking at data from 1948 to 2010, Hajnal and Horowitz found that “African Americans tend to experience substantial gains under Democratic presidents whereas they tend to incur significant losses or remain stagnant under Republicans.” On average, under Democratic presidents, blacks gained $895 in annual income, saw a 2.41 point drop in their poverty rate, and a 0.36 point drop in their unemployment rate. By contrast, under Republicans, blacks gained $142 a year, along with a 0.15-point increase in poverty and a 0.39-point increase in unemployment.

OpenWorm, an informal collaborative group of biologists and computer scientists from several countries, aims to create a complete digital model of a simple organism:

On May 19th this group managed to raise $121,076 on Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website. The money will be put towards the creation of the world’s most detailed virtual life form—an accurate, open-source, digital clone of a critter called Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1mm-long nematode that lives in the soils of the world’s temperate regions. … The idea, says Stephen Larson, a neuro- and computer scientist, who is the project’s co-ordinator, is to model the biochemical behaviour of every one of the worm’s cells, and how they interact with each other. If that can be done, then movement—and all the beast’s other behaviour patterns—should emerge by themselves from that mass of interactions.

George Dvorsky reviews the brief history of virtual organisms and why scientists are eager to create more of them:

To be fair, scientists have already created a computational model of an actual organism, namely the exceptionally small free-living bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalia. It’s an amazing accomplishment, but the pathogen — with its 525 genes — is one of the world’s simplest organisms. Contrast that with E. coli, which has 4,288 genes, and humans, who have anywhere from 35,000 to 57,000 genes. Scientists have also created synthetic DNA that can self-replicate and an artificial chromosome from scratch. Breakthroughs like these suggest it won’t be much longer before we start creating synthetic animals for the real world. Such endeavors could result in designer organisms to help in the manufacturing of vaccines, medicines, sustainable fuels, and with toxic clean-ups.

There’s a very good chance that many of these organisms, including drugs, will be designed and tested in computers first. Eventually, our machines will be powerful enough and our understanding of biology deep enough to allow us to start simulating some of the most complex biological functions — from entire microbes right through to the human mind itself (what will be known as whole brain emulations).

Simon Lewsen traces “our whale fixation [to] the fraught, shifting relationship between humans and the non-human world”:

Anthropologist Arne Kalland explains that, with the rise of the green movement, cetaceans became icons of environmental utopianism. They epitomized the complexity of the natural world: a realm that could teach us a thing or two, if we didn’t destroy it first. Whales were imagined as highly sensitive creatures swimming peacefully through rarified water. Many whale behaviours jibe with human notions of compassion: they sing to each other, nurture their infants into maturity, and care for their wounded and elderly. Given their longevity (they predate humanity by at least 25 million years) and brain size (larger than that of any other creature), it is possible to envision them as sage-like and profound—a species that has outgrown our territorial and violent impulses. Their ability to communicate across hundred-mile expanses seemed to indicate an otherworldly, near-telepathic sensitivity.

As Kalland makes clear, this eco-utopian “super whale” is actually a mash-up of different species-specific traits:

the grey whale’s friendliness, the sperm whale’s braininess, and the humpback’s phenomenal ability to project sound across large ocean basins. In ecological terms, this hybrid creature is every bit as mythical as the unicorn.

Lewsen adds that a global whaling moratorium in 1982 shifted the real threat from human hunters to more complex problems, such as industrial pollution:

Some whales, like the humpback and blues, really do need our protections; other species, like the minke, could probably sustain a limited harvest. Of course, the thought of an intelligent mammal being brutalized with harpoons is obscene, but from a conservation perspective, there’s little to be gained from scapegoating small-time hunters for global problems. The super whale became the sacred cow of the green movement, and after the 1980s moratorium, many pods regenerated briskly; meanwhile, carbon emissions continued to rise.

(Photo of breaching humpback whale by Gregory “Greg” Smith)