What happens with a new president?

by Eric de Place

This is the eigth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system. (Much to readers' delight, this is the last installment I'm planning to write.)

You can't talk about regional cap and trade very long before someone brings up the subject of pre-emption. What happens if the federal government creates a national cap and trade program? Would the regional programs disappear? And if so, why bother working on them?

First, let's get one thing straight: no one knows what will happen.

Seriously. No one has any idea -- and that includes me.

No matter how confidently anybody expresses an opinion on pre-emption, you can rest assured that the person is just speculating. And that uncertainty is precisely why it's so important to work on regional programs like WCI: regional cap and trade is what we've got -- and there's simply no guarantee we'll have a federal alternative soon.

Sure, we know that a new president will be elected in November. But while both McCain and Obama have proposals for a national cap and trade program, it is hardly a foregone conclusion that a serious policy will emerge intact in the near future. Here are a few ways that things could play out:

• Let's say John McCain is elected. There's growing reason to worry that McCain may not make cap and trade a high priority -- see here, here, and here -- and even if he did, his current proposal leaves a lot to be desired. So it's entirely possible that a McCain presidency would mean no comprehensive climate policy or a very watered-down version.

• What if Obama is elected? Even though, generally speaking, democrats have been more amenable to good climate legislation, there's absolutely no guarantee Obama's current (and excellent) proposal would see the light of day. Obama would have dozens of competing high priorities, including the wars, the economy, high energy prices, health care, and so on. So even with Obama as president, there's a high probability that comprehensive climate policy would be delayed, perhaps substantially so.

• Congress will have a lot to say about whether legislation moves and what it looks like no matter who's elected president. It's really anybody's guess how the next Congress will treat energy policy. Certainly, there have been promising proposals, but none have garnered majority support in either house. And there are, of course, some powerful opponents who know a thing or two about killing legislation.

If a federal cap and trade program is delayed or sub-optimal, it may be critically important for large regions to pursue genuine climate leadership without guidance from Washington DC.

Is this too depressing? Fine, then let's be a more optimistic for a moment. Say that decent legislation gets approved by Congress and signed into law by the president. Even then the fate of regional cap and trade is an open question. A lot depends on how the legislative process plays out.

• States could be given a choice about where to play in the cap and trade sandbox(much as with California tailpipe standards in which states can join the federal or California rules). It's easy to imagine that states could choose opt into a new federal system or remain with some other fed-approved regional system such as WCI. (State might be encouraged, but not required, to join a federal program, as the Boxer Ammendment to the recently deceased Lieberman-Warner bill would have done.)

• Regional systems might stay intact while a new federal system would simply roll up the non-participating states into a new program. (Alternatively, the feds might just authorize one, or several, interstate compacts but decline to create a new federal program.) As I pointed out, with 'linking,' it's perfectly possible to create new federal, regional, or state programs without undoing what's already been done. Linking means that states don't have to agree about all the details of cap and trade in order to get along.

• States might simply get pre-empted by federal policy. A new national cap and trade program could make the regional efforts illegal. (I think this is somewhat unlikely, but it is a surprisingly popular belief.) I should note too, that even if this were to happen, it's still important to work on regional efforts because they will inform the national debate, and help to set the standards by which future policy is judged.

I've been ignoring Canada so far, but Canadian and US policies interact in fascinating ways. Already, in the Western Climate Initiative, we've seen the beginnings of a genuinely bilateral system with nearly 59 million Americans and 26 million Canadians live in WCI jurisdictions. Any number of interesting things could happen in the next few years.

Ottowa could suddenly start displaying some leadership and initiate a national program for Canada. It's even conceivable that some US states might participate, or at least link with such a program. Just so, a US federal cap and trade program could be open to participation or linking from Canadian provinces.

Another intriguing possibility is that the Western Climate Initiative could morph or divide -- and that WCI would essentially become US or Canadian policy. It may sound far-fetched, but consider that nearly 80 percent of Canada's population is already within WCI. It wouldn't be a big leap to just make a new Canadian policy conform to WCI.

It's even theoretically possible for the same thing to happen in the US. While WCI only represents about 19 percent of the US population, there are rumors that Florida may soon join, boosting the share to 26 percent. And that's nothing compared to the potential addition of the Midwest Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, which is reportedly following WCI's footsteps in many respects. The Midwest would raise the share to 39 percent of the US population. If the Northeastern states (which are politically inclined to treat climate policy seriously), expand their current RGGI system beyond electricity generators, they might follow WCI too. All told, that would mean 55 percent of the US would be participating in a non-federal system that would either be WCI, or at least be heavily influenced by WCI.

I'm not even counting WCI's 'observer' states that include Alaska, Colorda, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, and Wyoming; nor the Midwest's observers of Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota; nor Pennsylvania and DC, which are observers to RGGI. And I'm not counting the six Mexican states that are also observers to WCI; they'd lend yet more weight.

The point is: no one knows what will happen. Federal pre-emption could obviate regional cap and trade or pre-emption could be completely irrelevant. Or federal policy could be important but not over-riding. No one knows. And until we can predict the future, developing sound regional climate policy is of paramount importance for North America.

This piece originally appeared on The Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

Photo Credit: Flicker User D80-Newbie, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Politics at 1:11 PM)

Our right to know about fuel-efficient tires.

by Eric de Place

I'm always fascinated by the '1 percent solutions' to energy. It seems to me that in order to address both climate change and fossil fuel dependence, we'll need a few big structural changes, but we'll also need a lot of 1 percent solutions -- and maybe a bunch of quarter-percent solutions too. And the advantage of the 1 percent solutions is that they're often exceedingly easy; and so cheap that they actually put money in your pocket.

So I enjoyed Cindy Skrzycki's column this morning on low rolling resistance tires:

A study by the National Academies of Science in 2006 concluded it was feasible to reduce rolling resistance by 10 percent. This would increase the fuel economy of vehicles by 1 percent to 2 percent, saving up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually. Michelin said that over the past 15 years its energy-saving tires have reduced fuel consumption worldwide by about 2.38 billion gallons, compared with conventional tires.

Easy, right? The problem is, there's very little opportunity for consumers to evaluate the fuel-efficiency of tires (as Clark once discovered). Not only is there no rating system in place, but a national standard has actually been banned by Congress since 1996.

No kidding:

The congressional ban, first passed in 1996, said there could be no federal rule adding to existing grading standards that would require a certain level of fuel efficiency.

A 1998 Senate report explained that the prohibition covered 'any rulemaking which would require that passenger car tires be labeled to indicate their low rolling resistance, or fuel-economy characteristics.'

That's very helpful. Thanks, Congress.

Luckily, there's good news just around the corner. Congress has shifted gears and is now demanding a consumer-information program in place by next year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should have a rule in place by the end of 2009, though it's not clear when consumers will actually see the information in a standardized way.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 11:57 AM)

A shipment of forest timber traveled around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean before it arrived at the Hong Kong dockyards two years ago. During a routine X-ray examination, customs officials discovered an even more lucrative cargo hidden behind a false wall: 605 elephant tusks.

The $8 million seizure was the largest ivory catch in Hong Kong since a 1989 agreement banned the international ivory trade. Ivory seizures are on the rise, particularly in Southeast Asia; the Hong Kong catch was only about half the size of the largest in recent years. At least 68 tons of ivory have been confiscated over the past decade. The cause: illegal ivory has quadrupled in value since 2004, and anti-poaching resources are typically stretched thin.

Law enforcement officials investigating the source of the Hong Kong ivory had no clue where the stash originated before leaving Douala, a port city in the west African nation of Cameroon. DNA technology, however, was able to verify that many of the tusks once belonged to forest elephants that lived in southern Gabon, near the Republic of Congo border.

Extracting elephant DNA from confiscated ivory could be an important tool to take wildlife investigations a step farther and to stop poaching at its source. Such expensive forensic work may become necessary to protect dwindling elephant populations and curb the illegal ivory market before it grows completely out of control.

'In big seizures, there's a very strong tendency to ship ivory out of a different country than where it's poached... It's a bit of a red herring,' said Samuel Wasser, director of the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology and the lead author of the study, published in this month's issue of Conservation Biology. 'The methods we developed are very important in that regard because it focuses where the poaching is ongoing.'

Wasser's team tested ivory from the Hong Kong sting and from a 6.5 ton ivory seizure in Singapore in 2002. After analyzing the samples' genes and comparing them against a complex elephant DNA map that covers much of Africa, the researchers were able to trace the Hong Kong samples to elephant populations in Gabon. The Singapore samples were linked to populations in southern Africa, mostly in Zambia.

Although some DNA source locations were scattered, the findings point to much more specific origins of illegal poaching than were previously available. The findings also contradict previous assumptions that ivory dealers would purchase tusks from throughout Africa as they become available. Instead, Wasser's paper suggests that 'crime syndicates were targeting specific populations for intense exploitation, hitting them hard and fast to satisfy the demands of a particular consignment.'

After it was revealed that most of the ivory seized in Singapore came from elephants in Zambia, that country's director of wildlife was replaced and its courts began to impose harsher sentences for ivory smugglers. 'At the time of the analyses, authorities thought the ivory came from Tanzania andhttp://feeds.feedburner.com/or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our analyses refocused the investigation, allowed authorities to point the finger at Zambia and get them to do something,' Wasser said.

Despite the benefits of forensic testing for future investigations, funding for wildlife enforcement is limited. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the international body that oversees the ivory ban, received $7.5 million in support this year. This is about $2.5 million more than a decade ago, but it is not enough to support DNA investigations in developing nations.

The international police organization INTERPOL has developed an agency to facilitate global wildlife crime investigations, but it too lacks sufficient funding. 'We're not in a position, given we have 186 countries [to oversee], to start to pay for their evidence handling on a case-by-case basis. We're certainly not a bank,' said Peter Younger, the INTERPOL wildlife crime program manager.

A few laboratories across the world - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's forensic lab in Oregon and Wasser's Center for Conservation Biology, for instance - have agreed to pay for DNA testing of stolen ivory and other wildlife evidence, such as illegally shipped old-growth trees. Wasser's lab paid $300 per sample to analyze the seized African ivory and construct its DNA map. In the 10 years it took to create the map, the lab processed more than 1,000 samples.

The limited funding for enforcement is costing elephants their lives. Before the ivory trade ban, poachers were killing about 7.4 percent of the global elephant population each year for tusks and other body parts. Now the rate is 8 percent, and populations are only getting smaller. Wasser's team estimates that elephants in sub-Saharan Africa could be 'virtually extinct' across their range by 2020.

'Even though the number of elephants left is a third of what it was prior to the ban, and a higher proportion are being killed than before, you'd think the alarm bell should be going off,' Wasser said. 'As long as the public is so clueless about the situation, there is no incentive for governments with money to pay for it.'

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in New Science at 11:42 AM)

The REACTIVATE!! exhibition at the at the Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia (Spain), being an almost endless source of wonders i tried to cover last week (see REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention and REACTIVATE!! Part 2, Instant urbanism), i still have a last story in my magic bag to share with you:

I first came across the name of this extraordinary place in one of the BBC's Imagine-documentaries about German director Werner Herzog, who asked to be met in what he called one of his favorite places in Los Angeles, The Museum of Jurassic Technology. After locating it in Culver City, BBC's Alan Yentob remarks: 'I begin to understand why Herzog likes it here. The exhibits in the museum cross the line between fact and fiction, between reality and imagination.'