Tag: state

States' role in climate policy

Jack Dirmann passed along an interesting paper arguing for a bigger role for states in setting federal climate policy.

This article explains why states and localities need to be full partners in a national climate change effort based on federal legislation or the existing Clean Air Act. A large share of reductions with the lowest cost and the greatest co-benefits (e.g., job creation, technology development, reduction of other pollutants) are in areas that a federal cap-and-trade program or other purely federal measures will not easily reach. These are also areas where the states have traditionally exercised their powers – including land use, building construction, transportation, and recycling. The economic recovery and expansion will require direct state and local management of climate and energy actions to reach full potential and efficiency.

This article also describes in detail a proposed state climate action planning process that would help make the states full partners. This state planning process – based on a proven template from actions taken by many states – provides an opportunity to achieve cheaper, faster, and greater emissions reductions than federal legislation or regulation alone would achieve. It would also realize macroeconomic benefits and non-economic co-benefits, and would mean that the national program is more economically and environmentally sustainable.

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Tracking climate initiatives

The launch of Climate Interactive’s scoreboard widget has been a hit – 10,500 views and 259 installs on the first day. Be sure to check out the video.

It’s a lot of work to get your arms around the diverse data on country targets that lies beneath the widget. Sometimes commitments are hard to translate into hard numbers because they’re just vague, omit key data like reference years, or are expressed in terms (like a carbon price) that can’t be translated into quantities with certainty. CI’s data is here.

There are some other noteworthy efforts:

Update: one more from WRI

Update II: another from the UN

State Emissions Commitments

For the Pangaea model, colleagues have been compiling a useful table of international emissions commitments. That will let us test whether, if fulfilled, those commitments move the needle on global atmospheric GHG concentrations and temperatures (currently they don’t).

I’ve been looking for the equivalent for US states, and found it at Pew Climate. It’s hard to get a mental picture of the emissions trajectory implied by the various commitments in the table, so I combined them with emissions data from EPA (fossil fuel CO2 only) to reconcile all the variations in base years and growth patterns.

The history of emissions from 1990 to 2005, plus future commitments, looks like this:

State emissions commitments, vs. 1990, CO2 basis

Note that some states have committed to “long term” reductions, without a specific date, which are shown above just beyond 2050. There’s a remarkable amount of variation in 1990-2005 trends, ranging from Arizona (up 55%) to Massachusetts (nearly flat).

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Regional Climate Initiatives – Model Roll Call – Part II

Minnesota

The Minnesota Next Generation Energy Act establishes a goal of reducing GHG emissions by 15% by 2015, 30% by 2025, and 80% by 2050, relative to 2005 levels.

From ScienceDaily comes news of a new research report from University of Minnesota’s Center fro Transportation Studies. The study looks at options for reducing transport emissions. Interestingly, transport represents 24% of MN emissions, vs. more than 40% in CA. The study decomposes emissions according to a variant of the IPAT identity,

Emissions = (Fuel/VehicleMile) x (Carbon/Fuel) x (VehicleMilesTraveled)

Vehicle and fuel effects are then modeled with LEAP, an energy modeling platform with a fast-growing following. The VMT portion is tackled with a spreadsheet calculator from CCAP’s Guidebook. I haven’t had much time to examine the latter, but it considers a rich set of options and looks like at least a useful repository of data. However, it’s a static framework, and land use-transportation interactions are highly dynamic. I’d expect it to be a useful way to construct alternative transport system visions, but not much help determining how to get there from here.

Minnesota’s Climate Change Advisory Group TWG on land use and transportation has a draft inventory and forecast of emissions. The Energy Supply and Residential/Commercial/Industrial TWGs developed spreadsheet analyses of a number of options. Analysis and Assumptions memos describe the results, but the spreadsheets are not online.

British Columbia

OK, it’s not a US region, but maybe we could trade it for North Dakota. BC has a revenue-neutral carbon tax, supplemented by a number of other initiatives. The tax starts at $10/TonCO2 and rises $5/year to $30 by 2012. The tax is offset by low-income tax credits and 2 to 5% reductions in lower income tax brackets; business tax reductions match personal tax reductions in roughly a 1:2 ratio.

BC’s Climate Action Plan includes a quantitative analysis of proposed policies, based on the CIMS model. CIMS is a detailed energy model coupled to a macroeconomic module that generates energy service demands. CIMS sounds a lot like DOE’s NEMS, which means that it could be useful for determining near-term effects of policies with some detail. However, it’s probably way too big to modify quickly to try out-of-the-box ideas, estimate parameters by calibration against history, or perform Monte Carlo simulations to appreciate the uncertainty around an answer.

The BC tax demonstrates a huge advantage of a carbon tax over cap & trade: it can be implemented quickly. The tax was introduced in the Feb. 19 budget, and switched on July 1st. By contrast, the WCI and California cap & trade systems have been underway much longer, and still are no where near going live. The EU ETS was authorized in 2003, turned on in 2005, and still isn’t dialed in (plus it has narrower sector coverage). Why so fast? It’s simple – there’s no trading infrastructure to design, no price uncertainty to worry about, and no wrangling over allowance allocations (though the flip side of the last point is that there’s also no transient compensation for carbon-intensive industries).

Bizarrely, BC wants to mess everything up by layering cap & trade on top of the carbon tax, coordinated with the WCI (in which BC is a partner).

US Regional Climate Initiatives – Model Roll Call

The Pew Climate Center has a roster of international, US federal, and US state & regional climate initiatives. Wikipedia has a list of climate initiatives. The EPA maintains a database of state and regional initiatives, which they’ve summarized on cool maps. The Center for Climate Strategies also has a map of links. All of these give some idea as to what regions are doing, but not always why. I’m more interested in the why, so this post takes a look at the models used in the analyses that back up various proposals.

EPA State Climate Initiatives Map

In a perfect world, the why would start with analysis targeted at identifying options and tradeoffs for society. That analysis would inevitably involve models, due to the complexity of the problem. Then it would fall to politics to determine the what, by choosing among conflicting stakeholder values and benefits, subject to constraints identified by analysis. In practice, the process seems to run backwards: some idea about what to do bubbles up in the political sphere, which then mandates that various agencies implement something, subject to constraints from enabling legislation and other legacies that do not necessarily facilitate the best outcome. As a result, analysis and modeling jumps right to a detailed design phase, without pausing to consider the big picture from the top down. This tendency is somewhat reinforced by the fact that most models available to support analysis are fairly detailed and tactical; that makes them too narrow or too cumbersome to redirect at the broadest questions facing society. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the models; they just aren’t suited to the task at hand.

My fear is that the analysis of GHG initiatives will ultimately prove overconstrained and underpowered, and that as a result implementation will ultimately crumble when called upon to make real changes (like California’s ambitious executive order targeting 2050 emissions 80% below 1990 levels). California’s electric power market restructuring debacle jumps to mind. I think underpowered analysis is partly a function of history. Other programs, like emissions markets for SOx, energy efficiency programs, and local regulation of criteria air pollutants have all worked OK in the past. However, these activities have all been marginal, in the sense that they affect only a small fraction of energy costs and a tinier fraction of GDP. Thus they had limited potential to create noticeable unwanted side effects that might lead to damaging economic ripple effects or the undoing of the policy. Given that, it was feasible to proceed by cautious experimentation. Greenhouse gas regulation, if it is to meet ambitious goals, will not be marginal; it will be pervasive and obvious. Analysis budgets of a few million dollars (much less in most regions) seem out of proportion with the multibillion $/year scale of the problem.

One result of the omission of a true top-down design process is that there has been no serious comparison of proposed emissions trading schemes with carbon taxes, though there are many strong substantive arguments in favor of the latter. In California, for example, the CPUC Interim Opinion on Greenhouse Gas Regulatory Strategies states, “We did not seriously consider the carbon tax option in the course of this proceeding, due to the fact that, if such a policy were implemented, it would most likely be imposed on the economy as a whole by ARB.” It’s hard for CARB to consider a tax, because legislation does not authorize it. It’s hard for legislators to enable a tax, because a supermajority is required and it’s generally considered poor form to say the word “tax” out loud. Thus, for better or for worse, a major option is foreclosed at the outset.

With that little rant aside, here’s a survey of some of the modeling activity I’m familiar with:

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